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This past April, media outlets were abuzz over a memo leaked from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) administered by CERN in Switzerland. It concerned the detection of a decay pattern analogous to that of the previously undiscovered Higgs Boson. After all of the attendant hub-bub, CERN released a statement that the findings in the memo were “precipitate” and that the elusive boson remained in hiding. The event was over and generally forgotten as the search continued for physical evidence of the subatomic entity known to media hacks as “the God particle.” For the purposes of discussion, I’d like to examine the nature of this ongoing search.
Quantum Field Theory predicted, mathematically, the existence of a subset of particles which comprised the totality of subatomic reality, including that of our two favorite baryons, the proton and the neutron. The smaller components were given the overall designation “fermions” and included the self-contained leptons (the electron, the muon and the tau, along with their uncharged neutrinos) along with the quarks, which combined together (with the help of elementary bosons called gluons) to form larger particles, including our aforementioned nuclear neighbors. The theory itself evolved over the course of decades, impossible to prove (on a blackboard) until three separate papers were published independently in 1964, all describing a similar phenomenon of symmetry-breaking (which imparts theoretical mass to particles) through the absorption of infraparticles (bosons exhibiting slight mass through an excited energy state) by gauge bosons. While these three papers all dealt strictly with bosons, the ramifications of what came to be known as the Higgs Mechanism was not lost on particle physicists eager to tie up loose threads in the greater quantum models.
Are you still with me? God bless you for hanging in there. We’re almost done with this part. Applying the Higgs Mechanism to general quantum theory required an additional particle, named the Higgs Boson, of a theoretical category known as scalar bosons which exhibit spin 0, as opposed to vector bosons, such as the gluon and the photon, which have integer spin. Despite the fact that scalar bosons have never (to date) been found, the subsequent mathematical and physical confirmations of all other elements in the Standard Model of particle physics made a strong argument, bordering on necessity, for the existence of the Higgs Boson. Without this trigger, the equations describe a massless universe. While alternate “Higgsless” theories remain in play, the focus in the field of experimental particle physics currently remains fixed on Higgs, in an effort to sustain the status quo of quantum mechanics. This phase of the journey is a byproduct of Scientific Reductionism, in which the current state of knowledge is formed as a result of information previously known to be true.
There’s an old saw about a stranger traveling through the mountains of New England who loses his way. He stops his car next to a postal van and asks the letter carrier for help in getting his bearings straight. The mailman asks the stranger his destination and upon hearing it says, “Well, you can’t get there from here.”
This is the danger of Reductionism in any quest to further knowledge – it represents the expansion of previous facts, based entirely on such facts, with progress continuing along a singular, predetermined path towards a destination as yet unknown. This is acceptable in more mature fields of study, such as plant biology, which are not only long-examined and debated but also highly-accessible for the purposes of experimentation. In the area of experimental particle physics, a discipline still in infancy, work cannot proceed without access to a particle accelerator/collider. Physically dismantling a sub-atomic particle safely is not a casual affair, representing Deconstruction in its most minute form. Removing the electron from a hydrogen atom alone (colliders utilize free protons for observations) is daunting and merely supplies the ammunition. The entire process involves a huge investment in building and maintaining the facilities, along with a massive commitment of brainpower to the tasks of predicting, experimenting, analyzing and finally proving (or disproving) the existence of a single (albeit important) element in the universe. The mass of the Higgs Boson is uncertain, but mathematical models place it within the range of a mass-energy equivalent of 1.4 TeV (tetraelectronvolts) or less, with an atomic weight somewhere in the vicinity of one-millionth the size of a garden-variety proton. Without knowing exactly what they are looking for, particle physicists are engaged in searching for a needle on a continent until it is found, or collectively decided there was never any needle to begin with.
This specific example of smashing particles together to determine the nature of their component parts and using the resulting data to test mathematical assumptions involves Reductionism (both as a starting point and an end in itself) and Deconstruction (as a method of transport) together. An example of this union in literature that immediately comes to mind is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The good doctor utilized the body of then-current scientific and technological knowledge, along with the bodies of recently deceased neighbors, to reanimate a mélange of component parts into one being, all to a tragic end. “You can’t get there from here,” says the author, metaphorically. Which begs two questions: Is the Reductionist foundation being utilized to establish the nature of the Higgs Boson solid enough to withstand its continuing absence? And, is the Deconstruction of subatomic particles the proper method for determining the boson’s existence?
The subsequent (and confirmed) discovery of a Higgs event will make all of what follows moot, so I apologize in advance to all of you folks in white lab coats. Firstly, the all-or-nothing aspect in this search is troubling, because it places the legitimacy of prior, proven truths at risk, at least in the view of the general public. Particle physicists are convinced that, based on prior findings, if the Higgs Boson exists then it must be detectable under laboratory conditions, which in this case is the vacuum environment of a collider tube. What if the boson emits no energy of its own at the point of collision? What if, instead, it is absorbed by a nearby vector boson (bosons have the unique ability to share physical space with other bosons simultaneously) and effectively disappears without a trace? In this case, you can’t get there from here – no energy decay signature equals a negative proof, attached to an appreciable level of uncertainty.
Secondly, destroying enough protons in collisions presupposes that, statistically-speaking, we will eventually reveal enough possible results to establish a complete predictive subatomic model. Dissecting a frog, no matter the skill of the surgeon, never, ever results in an isolation of its croak. We can explain it mechanically, we can mimic it based on physiology, but we can never obtain the thing itself through deconstructive methods. In a way, the present conduct of the quantum physics community in deriving physical proofs for their theories reinforces Albert Einstein’s original arguments against Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Einstein claimed that the inability to accurately measure the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously was a product of local variance, rather than a universal truth as stated by Heisenberg. Einstein presented numerous thought exercises and was always defeated in some measure by the uncertain nature of Uncertainty, along with the lack of a comprehensive alternate explanation. In destroying a proton in order to reveal its nature, particle physics introduces local variance which must go through the smoothing process of high-volume sampling. If the result, after an infinite number of tests, is still uncertain, then the absence is, by definition, inconclusive … thereby eliminating all but two possibilities – either the boson doesn’t exist or Einstein’s mysterious localized force has hidden it from view. Either conclusion amounts to a dead-end for the Standard Model, even though alternative, unproven theories still abound.
The ending is yet to be written for the Higgs Boson. A possibility exists that the entire basis on which the search was undertaken suffers from some elemental flaw. If that is the case, then we can’t get there from here and we can’t go back to where we started (the primary paradox of Reductionism), even if such a retracing represents the only remaining hope. We know what we know and we can never unknow any of it. The frog lay in pieces before us; the life-force implied by its croak both a fond memory and a future uncertainty as we renegotiate our local surroundings.
