No particle physicist received a phone call from Stockholm today. There had been some expectations for an award honoring the Higgs discovery. Well, it was maybe naive but not completely unrealistic to think that the Nobel committee might want to reestablish some connection with the original Nobel's will (which, anecdotally, awarded prizes for discoveries made during the preceding year). To ease my disappointment, let me write about a purely probabilistic but potentially gruesome aspect of today's decision. Warning: the discussion below is a really bad taste; don't even start reading unless Borat is among your favorite movies!
Peter Higgs is 83, and François Englert is almost 80. Taking the US data on lifetime expectancy as the reference, they have respectively 9% and 6% probability to pass away within a year from now. Thus, the probability of at least one of them being gone by the time of the next announcement is approximately 14%! To give an everyday analogy, it's only a tad safer than playing Russian Roulette with 1 bullet in a 6-shot colt revolver. The probability grows to stunning 27% if one includes Philip Anderson among the potential recipients (nearly 89, 15%). Obviously, the probability curve is steeply rising as a function of t, and approaches 100% for the typical Nobel recognition time lag.
Well, the Nobel for the Higgs discovery will be awarded sooner or later. Even if one of the crucial actors does not make it, the prestige of the physics Nobel prize won't be hurt too much (it has survived far more serious embarrassments). But, that would be just sad and unjust, even more so than the Cabibbo story. So why not make it rather sooner than later?
Here's is more on the dangers of playing Russian Roulette:
Particle Physics Blog
I understand not giving it to Higgs et. al. this year because the new boson hasn't had spin and such measured yet, but I was really hoping for Nick Holonyak and Shuji Nakamura to get it. Nick is not going to be around much longer and his discoveries especially have totally transformed the modern world.
ReplyDeleteI think that it is ATLAS, CMS and the CERN leadership who is playing russian roulette. They have never called their discovery by its name and
ReplyDeleteinsist to check other incomplete hypotheses (spin-2?) which are already in clear disagreement with global HEP data.
Imagine you are in a Nobel committee...how can you award a prize for the discovery of the Higgs boson if the discoverers believe that this may not be it?
This I completely agree with. By Ockham's razor this is a Higgs boson, unless there appear serious reasons to think otherwise.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that Nobel nominations are due in January. As you'll recall, in January there was only evidence, not a discovery.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that Higgs et al. were nominated in January this year, and probably in the years before as well.
ReplyDeleteRe January etc, I'd also like to point out that the decision is made by September. Which means no published journal paper with any new discovery yet.
ReplyDeleteCome ON! What's the hype with this year's prize? So if it turns out to not be _the_ higgs would the academy have to retract the prize?
Like I said, come on. I personally congratulate them on continuing being scientific. If they awarded this unfunded prize this year, string theory would be next.
Come on :-) What are the odds it's not a Higgs (I don't mean the SM Higgs, I mean a scalar particle coupled to WW and ZZ, so as to take part in EW symmetry breaking). Any other interpretation of the data would require incredible coincidences. Note that the CKM mechanism is not 100% confirmed either, e.g. there could be the 4th generation, but they did give the Nobel to KM.
ReplyDeleteThe shortest recorded time-lag I know of is two years; W/Z discovered late 1982, Rubbia and van der Meer prize in 1984. Five months is unheard of and possibly even against some rule.
ReplyDelete@tulpeoid
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that it is ok for the committee to wait with awarding the Nobel prize for the higgs in order to avoid having to retract it later.
But your last scornful sentence is completely over the top and off topic to the issue of Chester's article ...
You better go home to where you have come from instead of looking for strife here. I well remember having seen your name over there ... ;-)
Cheers
Dilaton
... ahm sorry Jester for misspelling your name :-(
ReplyDeleteDilaton
Englert is the one most likely to lose out: not only does he have to stay healthy but he also has to worry about Higgs (the man, not the reality of the particle). Were Peter Higgs to pass away, it's quite possible the committee would pass on a theory award entirely.
ReplyDeleteEnglert also has to worry the committee places emphasis on the boson (none in the Brout-Englert paper). Agre that if Higgs dies they probabaly pass on a theory Nobel.
ReplyDeleteNot inlcuding GHK will still cause a fuss given most consider it the most complete paper and had it done in April of '64 but waited to publish. The youngest in that group is 75.
Sorry for a really late comment,
ReplyDeletebut, Dilaton, wtf are you talking about?
Where is "there"? My last sentence was the most accurate and important one in my comment, and I still don't get yours. You might have seen my nickname under comments in several blogs including praise for this one, but the original post and statements like "By Ockham's razor this is a Higgs boson" or a similar one in the latest post would make it obvious even to an outsider that Jester is a theorist :p