Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Standard Model Physics

A dialogue with Kyle Cranmer

Kyle Cranmer wrote a thorough, detailed response to my Higgs polemic, and I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing. I agree with almost every point he raises.¹

Kyle is far more gracious in his post than he needed to be. My post was over the top. If you are a regular reader, you know I try to be playful and polemical in my writing. Part of what makes my writing fun for me and the people who engage with me is my habitual line stepping. Sometimes, playful writing leads to imprecision, and I’m fine with that. There is a delicate trade-off between reach and precision in scientific writing that all science writers balance.

My main point was that the Higgs discovery doesn’t provide a good defense of statistical testing. Kyle and I disagree here, and that’s fine. But note that I was not pulling my critique out of thin air. There was disagreement among the physics community at the time and the previous post links to some of the relevant debate on the subject. However, I definitely have a tendency to go overboard. There are two parts I’d change if I were allowed a revision. 

First, the term “Majority vote.” When I wrote that the participatory decision making in the CERN collaboration was done by majority voting, I didn’t mean this literally. However, there is nothing in the text around the phrase to see that I was exaggerating for emphasis. I apologize for taking poetic license here, as this is a place where I should have been precise. As Kyle points out, the governance structures at CERN are consensus-based and very intricate. The point I was hoping to raise with this passage is that science through complex governance systems is itself kind of weird! These large collaborations are a late 20th century phenomenon and are aberrational in the extended history of modern science. I am deeply interested in the structures you put in place to build deliberative governance structures to make proclamations about scientific results. 

The statistical rules were set, as Kyle says, by consensus. They were part of the governance structure. The fact that these rules, which people not named me can debate the validity of, helped 3000+ people reach a consensus is striking. The compelling evidence of the Higgs is the consensus, not the statistics.

The second part that I would delete not because I disagree with it but because it completely detracts from the argument. In describing how the Higgs Boson fails Ian Hacking’s sprayability criterion, I wrote

“The Higgs field has no bearing on any physics at any scale anyone would ever care about. So I don’t care either way if physicists think they found a Higgs. It has zero bearing on my existence.“

I mean, I agree with this, but why should anyone care whether I care? This isn’t a good argument. What I should have said is that it’s not enough to keep banging the same protons together to get further confirmation beyond 20 or 30 𝜎 or whatever. At some point, the confirmation need come from other experimental evidence. For instance, a lot of people raised objections to the statistics used in LIGO’s gravitational wave interferometry. However, their GW170817 event provided auxiliary confirmation. The LIGO interferometer detected a gravitational wave event, triangulated a region in the sky where they thought it came from, and international telescopes confirmed colliding neutron stars in that location. At some point I’m sure we’ll get a similar new means of seeing the Higgs, but we don’t have it yet.

I’d recommend a couple of other rejoinders to the debate. I agree with all of what David Chapman says in this note about the complexity of discovery. Rex Douglass, who tends to be even spicier than me, raises more points about why frequentist tests are not good summaries of experiments with any degree of complexity.

OK, but what about the title? I always overestimate the accessibility of the cutesy references I make in titling posts.² This one referred to an over-the-top but deeply prescient polemic by Jean Baudrillard “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.” Baudrillard’s point was never to deny that the violence and death didn’t happen but to describe the multiple levels of mediation on the battlefield and in news propaganda that created a baffling hyperreality where it was impossible to distinguish a presented war from a human rights atrocity. It’s heavy French postmodern stuff, but Baudriallardian hyperreality is evermore present in our social media-driven world. It’s interesting that, despite spending the majority of their lives in a hellish online hyperreality, the number of twitter users who are aware of Baudriallard’s work is near zero.

I don’t think the title is a perfect fit for the Higgs discovery, but what makes contemporary fundamental physics so baffling to everyone (as Kyle admits, physicists included!) is how mediated the highly subatomic is from actionable reality. We’re probing things that we can only know exist through the most complicated, expensive, and specific experiments we’ve ever devised. Kyle’s point, which again I fumbled in an attempt to be provocative and literary, is that establishing that something is happening at such scales requires excessive amounts of deeply human regulatory structures. When you call it bureaucracy, it touches a nerve. No one wants to admit they like bureaucracy. But we could chalk up the Higgs as evidence that bureaucracy is necessary for certain endeavors.

In any event, I use irreverence (i.e., shitposting) to engage with tricky philosophical questions. I know that people unfamiliar with my schtick might read me as just being an asshole.³ That’s fair. One good thing that came out of this post is many readers’ thoughtful and generous engagement with an argument I’m still workshopping. I don’t consider this blog to be the last word on anything, and the conversation is part of what I value about it. Another good thing that came out of the twitter hate was science writer Dan Garisto calling me “a smugly incurious Latour for tech bros.” I need to add that line to my bio. 

1. I don’t want to spend this post quibbling over the parts I don’t agree with, but I’ll highlight a quick two. First, I strongly disagree that we need to understand the Higgs mechanism to understand atoms in any functional way. Quantum Field Theory does not predict the periodic table. I’m strongly Cartwrightian, and fascinated by the locality of physical law despite its professed universality.

Secondly, I’m not willing to give the World Wide Web to high-energy physics. YMMV there. But maybe Tim Berners Lee will get a Physics Nobel next year.

2. I always overestimate the accessibility of my goofy references. I’m guessing there at most three people who caught that “The Shape of Stats to Come” was simultaneously a shout out to John Tukey and The Refused. You can google the title of this one to catch the reference to the sciencey cold war I find myself reigniting.

3. To be fair, many people familiar with my schtick also think I’m an asshole.