Finding the Higgs boson will have no epistemic value whatsoever. A provocative statement. However, if you believe that science is defined by falsification, it is a true one. Can it really be true, or is the flaw in the idea of falsification? Should we thumb our noses at Karl Popper (1902 – 1994), the philosopher who introduced the idea of falsification?
The Higgs boson, the last remaining piece of the standard model, is the object of an enormous search involving scientists from around the world. The ATLAS collaboration alone has 3000 participants from 174 institutions in 38 different countries. Can only the failure of this search be significant? Should we send out condolence letters if the Higgs boson is found? Were the Nobel prizes for the W and Z bosons a mistake?
Imre Lakatos (1922 – 1974), a neo-falsificationist and follower of Popper, states it very cleanly and emphatically:
But, as many skeptics pointed out, rival theories are always indefinitely many and therefore the proving power of experiment vanishes. One cannot learn from experience about the truth of any scientific theory, only at best about it falsehood: confirming instances have no epistemic value whatsoever (emphasis in the original).
Yipes! What is going on? Can this actually be true? No! To see the flaw in Lakatos’s argument, let’s consider an avian metaphor—this time Cygnus not Corvus. Consider the statement: All swans are white. (Here we go again.) Before 1492, Europeans would have considered this a valid statement. All the swans they had seen were white. Then Europeans started exploring North America. Again, the swans were white. Then they went on to South America and found swans with black necks (Cygnus melancoryphus) and finally to Australia where the swans are black (Cygnus atratus). By the standards of the falsificationist, nothing was learned when white swans were found, but only when the black swans or partially black swans were found. With all due respect, or lack of same, that is nonsense. It is the same old problem: you ask a stupid question you get a stupid answer. Did we learn anything when white swans were found in North America? Yes. We learned that there were swans in North America and that they were white. Based on having white swans in Europe, we could not deduce the colour of swans in North America or even that they existed. In Australia, we learned that swans existed there and were black. Thus, we learned a similar amount of information in both cases—really nothing more or nothing less. The useful question is not, ‘Are all swans white?’ Rather, ‘On which continents do swans exist and what color are they on each continent?’
Moving on from birds to model cars (after all, the standard model of particle physics is a model). What can we learn about a model car? Certainly, not if it is correct. Models are never an exact reproduction of reality. But, we can ask, ‘Which part the car is correctly described by the model? Is it the color? Is it the shape of the head lights or bumper?’ The same type of question applies to models in science. The question is not, ‘Is the standard model of particle physics correct?’ We knew from its inception that it is not the answer to the ultimate question about life, the universe and everything. The answer to that is 42 (Deep Thought, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams). We also know that the standard model is incomplete because it does not include gravity. Thus, the question never was, ‘Is this model correct?’ Rather, ‘What range of phenomena does it usefully describe?’ It has long history of successful predictions and collates a lot of data. So, like the model car, it captures some aspect of reality, but not all.
Finding the Higgs boson helps define what part of reality the standard model describes. It tells us that the standard model still describes reality at the energy scale corresponding to the mass of the Higgs boson. But, it also tells us more: It tells us that the mechanism for electroweak symmetry break –a fundamental part of the model—is adequately described by the mechanism that Peter Higgs (and others) proposed and not some more complex and exotic mechanism.
The quote from Lakatos, given above, misses a very important aspect of science–parsimony. The ambiguity noted there is eliminated by the appeal to simplicity. The standard model of particle physics describes a wide range of experimental observations. Philosophers call this phenomenological adequacy. But a lot of other models are phenomenologically adequate. The literature is filled with extensions to the standard model that agree with the standard model where the standard model has been experimentally tested. They disagree elsewhere, usually at higher energy. Why do we prefer the standard model to these pretenders? Simplicity and only simplicity. And the standard model will reign supreme until one of the more complicated pretenders is demonstrated to be more phenomenolgically adequate. In the meantime, I will be a heretic and proclaim that finding the Higgs boson would indeed confirm the standard model. Popper, Lakatos, and the falsificationists be damned.
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Tags: falsification, Higgs boson, Lakatos, philosphy of science
Well-written article ! You phrased many aspects of my opinion about falsification, although I push the heresy further, to the limits of scientific realism: I hope that theories actually describe to some extent the actual nature of reality. Popper has it right by saying it might all be hand-waving rituals that happen to predict experimental curves nicely by pure luck, but I would not be a physicist if I believed that to be true !
One point of detail, though-or was it was intentional ?-the name of the computer was Deep Thought, not the other. Funny variation anyway, I had not thought of it before.
Thanks. Fixed, Deep throat wsa the code name of the person who supplied information on the Nixon wiretaps. I suspect Deep Thought was a play on that.
Gibberish… Understand the scientific method then let talk. Disappointed in this post.
It is easy to throw stones while making no positive contribution. I have laid out in a series of posts a view of the scientific method. From the comments, I gather that some agree with my position, some disagree and some make useful comments. If you have a different view of what the scientific method is, present it and then we can talk.
I’m a bit surprised than any science philosopher would be a pure “falsificationist” in the way you describe. I guess the more interesting question is how such people would translate their very abstract ideas of truth and falsification into practical strategies for doing and applying science. (Neither, I suppose, is their job as philosophers.)
Pure falsification is a bit of straw man. It is not clear that even Popper was a pure falsificastionist. But the quote from Lakatos is very telling. It is quite clear that even if he had problems with falsification he had greater problems with verifications. Lakatos was one of the more “reasonable” philosophers, compared for example with Feyerabend.
We know the theory of atoms is correct, because the theory is falsifiable. If somebody discovered an atom of carbon 12.2 or 12.6, or the equivalent for any other element, the theory would have been proved wrong. Atomic theory is a proper scientific theory, because it can be properly tested.
Quark theory is not a proper scientific theory, because it is not directly falsifiable. There is no chance that a troublesome particle could emerge from a collider to disprove quark theory, because quarks make no definitive predictions of particle masses. The Higgs is part of the same pseudoscientific standard model. For a falsifiable model of particle physics, click my name to visit my website.
the error always comes from asserting “truth”
asserting that all swans were white (which seems to have been used by various philosophers for various purposes) as an assertion of truth was the flaw
all assertions of truth can be exposed and revealed to be what they are – even those held to be most “true”
the scientific principle is valid and powerful simply because it recognizes this principle – that assertions in the guise of guesses about the nature of truth have value only if they can be revealed to be false
no “theory” is ever proved to be true – ever – no matter how much practical use we make of that theory and no matter how ingrained it becomes in our world view that it appears to be true
it can only be proved to be false though that might never occur and might never be possible with whatever technology we have at the time
or, it might simply be that we uncover shades of deeper “truths” that lead us to modify our “true” theories
the longer we are comfortable with these “white swans” the bigger the impact of a black one
Ptolemy’s system of planetary movement was pretty good and a lot of people truly believed it to be truth simply because of the accuracy of projections and that it had not been faulted
but it was not true
Kepler and Copernicus presented while swans
People like Newton created beautiful mathematical models of these swans and they were held in high regard until people like Einstein showed us a pink swan
it is only a matter of time before our current Ptolemaic beliefs (whatever they might be) are exposed as the false truths they are
i hope i’m around to see such days
that would be deep man
p
that should be “presented white swans”
p
Great post.I’m a little surprised by the Lakatos quote – I seem to recall that he was more aware of the simplicationist aspect of the falsification hypothesis than Popper, perhaps that came later.
He was one of the more reasonable philosphers. But what he ended up with was programs and that science was in the development of the programs. Individual models or theories he had trouble with.
Although Popper may deserve credit for introducing the term ‘falsification’, I doubt his sentiments were much different from Newton’s “I make no hypothesis” about the cause of gravity.
Since Newton felt that speculating about how the force of gravity was transferred through space “had no place in experimental philosophy”, I suspect he might have taken a dim view of much of recent physics, and the Higgs boson in particular.
During Newton’s time there are a, let us say, difference of opinion between those who believed in induction and those who believed in hypothesis testing. Newton was a firm member of the former camp. He would not have liked Popper’s idea at all.
I have not read Popper, but the point about Newton, is that his law of gravity makes testable predictions, indeed it could even be said that at high accuracy it is actually falsified by the precession of Mercury.
Newton also thought that the force of gravity had to be transmitted through space by some kind of material filling the vacuum. It was this hypothesis of a kind aether, that Newton felt had no place in experimental philosophy, because it makes no testable predictions. The Higgs-field is also an aether theory of sorts, and in the same way that I agree with Newton that gravity requires an aether, so too I agree with the concept that that the aether gives things mass. However the point about the Higgs field, is that it makes no prediction of particles masses, therefore it is not testable, and therefore not a proper scientific theory.
Hey! I can’t agree more with you Newtspeare! I also find Byron’s article which induced your comment to be quite unconventional and out-of-the-box bull-strike at the nature of human thinking and human conceptualization of theoretical science vs. human experimentation with reality of the unseen.
I agree, Higgs Field with all its beauties may on one day look like sea tide! 4 decades of high tidal research and experimentation may be followed by a sweeping low tide of picturesque wishes of what would have been reality!
I think it’s important to remember that there are two issues here: (1) the problem of demarcation between science and nonscience and (2) the question of how science proceeds or progresses. It seems to me that Popper’s contentions with respect to (2) are largely incorrect, though his discussion of (1) is (somewhat) accurate.
Your comments about inductive inference (e.g. All swans are white) as such aren’t entirely correct, unless we limit our discussion to (2). Popper’s point is that the proposition “All swans are white” is a scientific propositions precisely because it’s in principle empirically falsifiable. This is what renders the proposition scientific. However, we can retain this element of Popper’s approach, and still conclude that science progresses via confirmation as well, even if the distinctive aspect of scientific propositions is that they are in principle falsifiable.