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posted ago by clemaneuverers ago by clemaneuverers +25 / -0

As in "Higgs Boson".

Just finished reading this short book, "The Higgs Fake", written by German physicist Prof Alexander Unzicker in 2013. You can find a pdf of it on Libgen if you're interested.

Unzicker puts forward the argument that particle physics since 1930 has gone down a dead end, and that the "standard model" which has developed is a convoluted mess of bullshit, assumptions and unknowns, which doesn't even begin to answer any of the unanswered fundamental questions and of which no one has any clear grasp or understanding.

...physics, after the groundbreaking findings at the beginning of the twentieth century, has undergone a paradigmatic change that has turned it into another science, or better, a high-tech sport, that has little to do with the laws of Nature.

Put crudely: Every time modern particle physicists meet an unexpected result in their particle collision experiments [CERN, Large Hadron Collider etc.], they invent a new particle to explain it. And they are proud of this:

There is hardly a figure that better represents the thoughtlessness in high energy physics than the British theorist John Ellis... In 1982, CERN had informally communicated its results to the British Prime Minister before the official release. (What science, if not corrupt, needs to stay so close to politics?) Ellis off-handedly told Margret Thatcher that CERN, in its future experiments, hoped to discover the unexpected. It’s a good thing that Thatcher's era is over, but she did have what you may call common sense, and she retorted, “Wouldn't it be better if you found what you expected?”

Unzicker points out that there is "an excessive use of arbitrary, unexplained numbers" and free parameters in particle physics, and that "None of the fundamental questions that bothered the founding fathers of the successful physics of the early twentieth century are solved today".

For example, the standard model doesn't provide even the beginning of insight into gravity or mass, and no attempt is made by particle physicists to explore them in relation to their field.

Of particle physics Unzicker says,

there is plenty of room to suspect that many of its results are instrumental artifacts due to extensive filtering or theoretical mis-modelling. However, even if one is confident of the analysis, it is easy to see that particle physicists continuously declare ever rarer, though banal, effects to be manifestations of their wishful theoretical thinking. By construction, it is a seemingly never-ending, epistemologically absurd process, supported by its slowness that hides the sociological nature of opinion creation by groupthink.

...the principal absurdities of particle physics [set between 1930 and 1960]...: nonsensically short lifetimes, postulation of a huge amount of neutral particles, lack of quantitative results, [and] the unlimited increase of free parameters.

The book is a really good read that provides insight into an impenetrable and intentionally obscured field. Unzicker himself, judging by his casual reference to the certainty of other questionable topics, is not a conspiracy theorist (he even directly says so). He says particle physics is like this because the people involved have no talent, are not real scientists but simply career "go-getters" who "speak" mathematics - the real scientists gravitate toward other fields and avoid particle physics, but keep quiet about the bullshit due to societal and political pressure. And yes, Unzicker is really hated.

Personally I believe the intentional aspect of all this absurdity should be explored.