Higgs Boson did not Revolutionize Physics

David Berlinski wrote in a 2012 essay:

The discovery was announced; the story reported; and then there was silence. Physicists endeavoured, of course, to maintain the impression that they had discovered something of inestimable value. They were game. Writing in The Daily Beast, Sean Carroll predicted that the Higgs Boson would “revolutionize physics,” and if this is what physicists always say, then at least they seem never weary of saying it.

Lawrence Krauss, writing in The Daily Beast as well, gave it his best. Many years ago, Leon Lederman had designated the Higgs Boson as the God particle. No one can today remember why. The God particle? “Nothing could be further from the truth,” Krauss remarked. In this, of course, he was entirely correct: Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the end, Krauss, like Carroll before him, could do no better than an appeal to the revolution. The discovery of the Higgs Boson “validates an unprecedented revolution in our understanding of fundamental physics …” Readers of The Daily Beast are always pleased to uphold the revolution, no matter how revolting. Yet, the Standard Model was completed in the early 1970s,

From what I have found, calling everything a revolution stems from calling the Copernicus heliocentric model the Copernican Revolution, because the Earth revolved around the Sun. It was a weak pun. And then that was so important, it became the Scientific Revolution.

Finding the Higgs Boson just confirmed what people thought 50 years earlier. Not a revolution.

What would it have looked like?

Lawrence Krauss likes to tell this ancedote about the nature of science:

“Tell me,” the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, “why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went around the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?” His friend replied, “Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going around the Earth.” Wittgenstein responded, “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”

For example, he tells it in this interview, where he attributes it to a play, so it might be fiction. He tells it again here, plugging his latest book.

It is a good story. Just because your data fits your model, you cannot conclude that your model is right. There could be a completely different model that fits just as well.

I am not sure what point Krauss was making. He seems to be saying that the many-worlds theory would look just like the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is not a great example, because in our world we see more probable events as more likely. In many-worlds theory, there is no known reason for that happening. It is like saying the world is a simulation. It does not look like a simulation unless you also assume that the simulator has replicated natural laws very accurately.

If a Proton is just Bits, it must be a lot

Seth Lloyd argues that matter is made of information:

Does information work at the deep levels of physics, including quantum theory, undergirding the fundamental forces and particles? But what is the essence of information—describing how the world works or being how the world works. There is a huge difference. Could information be the most basic building block of reality?

Seth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He refers to himself as a “quantum mechanic”.

Okay, but he is challenged for a proton, and says that a proton is fully described by 50-60 bits for its location in the universe, and 1 bit for spin up or down.

What? The diameter of the observable universe is about 4x10²⁸ cm. So that is about 6x10⁸⁴ cm³ in volume, so it would take that many bits to specify location to the nearest cubic cm.

A cubic cm is a lot of space for a proton. We need at least 100 bits to specify a proton location to some small region. And the universe could be bigger than what is observable.

But that is not my issue here. The proton could have velocity. Need many more bits for that.

And spin is not just one bit. Spin could point in any direction, not just up or down.

None of these proton parameters can be specified precisely, because of Heisenberg Uncertainty. A proton can have a wave function, and not position and momentum at the same time. So how many bits are needed for a wave function?

But then the wave function is not even real, so I don't know if it makes sense to ask how many bits are needed for a wave function.

So if a proton is equivalent to some number of bits of information, I don't know how to calculate that number. Lloyd is underestimating them.

Remembering Voigt in the Relativity Priority Dispute

From a 2019 paper on the origin of special relativity:

Voigt transformations in retrospect: missed opportunities? ...

Nearly two decades before the vigorous development of special relativity has started, in 1887 Woldemar Voigt published an article on the Doppler effect in which some fundamental principles underlying the relativity theory were anticipated. Namely, he was the first who used Einstein’s second postulate (universal speed of light) and the restricted form of the first postulate (invariance of the wave equation when changing the inertial reference system) to show that the Doppler shift of frequency was incompatible with Newtonian absolute time and required a relative time identical with the Lorentz’s local time introduced later.

Voigt's paper was not appreciated. The paper moves on to "the pointless Einstein-Poincar´e priority dispute."

In particular we are interested in to find out why the role played by Poincar´e was not properly acknowledged at that time by his contemporaries. Our hypothesis is that this happened because Poincar´e’s approach required a higher level of mathematical education than the majority of physicists had at that time. Minkowski belonged to a few who were in a position to duly appreciate Poincar´e’s contribution.

Poincare and Minkowski died in the next several years, so that partially explains why they did not take part in a priority dispute with Einstein. The paper acknowledges that Einstein lied about his sources all his life.

Many credit Einstein for discovering clock synchronization and the relativity of simultaneity in 1905, but that is clearly false:

Already in 1898, “Poincar´e had presented exactly the same light signaling and clock synchronization thought experiment that would later be found in Einstein’s 1905 relativity paper” [19], although Poincar´e’s presentation is without any mention of the relativity principle and Lorentz’s local time. Two years later in his lecture “Lorentz’s theory and the principle of reaction” Poincar´e used his light signaling and clock synchronization thought experiment to explain the physical meaning of the Lorentz’s local time [19]. ...

In 1902 letter to the Nobel committee to nominate Lorentz for the Nobel prize in Physics, which he indeed was awarded, Poincar´e praises very highly Lorentz’s “most ingenious invention” of “local time” and writes: “Two phenomena happening in two different places can appear simultaneous even though they are not: everything happens as if the clock in one of these places were late with respect to that of the other, and as if no conceivable experiment could show evidence of this discordance” [19].

Minkowski was the much bigger influence on acceptance of relativity:

Minkowski’s September 21st, 1908, lecture “Space and Time” was a crucial event in the history of relativity 1. ...

The influence of the Cologne lecture was enormous. Its published version “sparked an explosion of publications in relativity theory, with the number of papers on relativity tripling between 1908 (32 papers) and 1910 (95 papers)” [31]. The response to the Minkowski’s lecture was overwhelmingly positive on the part of mathematicians, and more mixed on the part of physicists — only in the 1950s their attitude began to converge toward Minkowski’s space-time view [31]. ...

However, in our opinion, to make the decision to exclude Poincar´e’s name from the Cologne lecture Minkowski needed some serious reason to psychologically justify such an unfair omission.

The geometry of special relativity was only appreciated by mathematicians:

A surprising fact about Minkowski’s “Raum und Zeit” lecture is that it never mentions Klein’s Erlangen program of defining a geometry by its symmetry group [27]. A link between Minkowski’s presentation of special relativity and Erlangen program was immediately recognized by Felix Klein himself [116] who remarked: “What the modern physicists call the theory of relativity is the theory of invariants of the 4-dimensional space-time region x, y, z, t (the Minkowski ’world’) under a certain group of collineations, namely, the ’Lorentz group’ ”. Untimely death of Minkowski presumably hindered the appreciation of this important fact by physicists.

It concludes:

In parallel to the advance in modern physics, in the middle of the twentieth century it became increasingly evident that Poincar´e’s contribution to relativity was unjustly downplayed. As a result, some attempts to restore the justice followed. ...

Most succinctly this difference was expressed by Lorentz himself: ‘the chief difference being that Einstein simply postulates what we have deduced, with some difficulty, and not altogether satisfactorily, from the fundamental equations of the electromagnetic field” [133].

Poincar´e’s objective was much more ambitious than Einstein’s as he wanted to derive special relativity as an emergent phenomenon. It is quite possible therefore that Poincar´e simply considered Einstein’s contribution as being too trivial in light of this bigger goal. “To Poincar´e, Einstein’s theory must have been seen as a poor attempt to explain a small part of the phenomena embraced by the Lorentz theory” [135].

There is still another aspect which makes Einstein-Poincar´e priority dispute pointless. Modern understanding of relativity is significantly different from the one that was cultivated at the beginning of the twentieth century. Two examples are the notions of æther and relativity of simultaneity which are often used in the priority dispute. ...

Usually this stubbornness of Poincar´e with respect to the æther is considered as his weak point, as an evidence that he didn’t really understand relativity. It is historically true that the abolishment of the æther by Einstein played a crucial role and revolutionized physics. However, frankly speaking, in retrospect, when this revolution came to its logical end in modern physics, we can equally well consider Poincar´e’s attitude as prophetical.

As modern physics has progressed in the twentieth century, it became increasingly evident that the vacuum, the basic state of quantum field theory, is anything but empty space. In fact, at present an æther, “renamed and thinly disguised, dominates the accepted laws of physics” [141]. It is clear that only “intellectual inertia” [142] prevents us from using historically venerable word “æther” instead of “vacuum state” when referring to the states with such complex physical properties as vacuum states of modern quantum theories.

Poincar´e proponents in the priority dispute argue that Einstein synchronization, which Einstein himself considered as the crucial element of special relativity, has in fact originated from Poincar´e’s work.

In light of this immense and still continuing progress of modern physics, attempts to retrospectively induce an artificial Poincar´e-Einstein priority dispute and rewrite the history seem minute. We will be happy if this arid and futile dispute will come to its end. There is nothing scientific in it and its presence only emphasizes hideous traits of human nature.

Did the authors of this paper think that they were going to write the last word on the subject?

This paper is convincing that Lorentz and Poincare had all of relativity theory before Einstein, that Einstein lied about his sources to get more credit for himself, and that in retrospect the Poincare-Minkowski view was superior to Einstein's.

However the authors think that it is unfair to judge Einstein in retrospect, as no one could have known which ideas would be more important later. It took 50 years, the authors say, for the Physics community to come around to the Poincare-Minkowski geometric view. The paper puts a lot of weight on the opinion of Max Born, who was a friend of Einstein, and who was greatly influenced by Einstein's 1905 paper. But there is not much substance to Born's opinion. Many people are greatly influenced by a textbook, but that does not mean that the textbook is original. While Born was a relativity expert, it is not clear that he understood Poincare's papers.

I might agree that the priority dispute is tiresome and settled, except that the Physics community continues to idolize Einstein as the greatest genius ever, for how he discvoered relativity. For example, see this recent Discover magazine list of the ten greatest scientists of all time, where Einstein is number one, mainly for relativity work. (Three of the other nine are women, but that is another story.)

Nature has Fake Franklin Controversy

Nature magazine declared its favorite science stories of the year, and one of the top ones was What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure:

Rosalind Franklin was not a ‘wronged heroine’, she was an equal contributor to the discovery.

No, she was not an equal contributor. She had little contact with Crick and Watson.

I am all for crediting her for what she did. She did valuable work on DNA that got used by Crick and Watson. But this Nature article added nothing new. The story is well-known, and can be found on Wikipedia.

This story is politicized, because people hate Watson for saying that people have genetic difference, and love to put Franklin on lists of great XX century scientists, because she was a woman.

Free WIll is Indetermined Behavior

Philosopher Ned Block argues:

Determinism ... Indeterminism, though, is just as bad because if you do something by chance, that doesn't mean it is done by you freely. This is a point made many years ago. It looks like both determinism and indeterminism are incompatible with free will, which shows there is something wrong with the concept.

Yes, the argument has been made many times, and it is nonsense.

Saying that someone's choices are indetermined is essentially the same as saying that he is free to make a choice.

If you can predict my choice, then it is apparently determined by past events. But if I make a free choice, then you cannot predict it, and it seems like random chance.

His argument is like saying electrons do not exist. An electron is a charged particle, so its charge must be positive or negative. If the charge is positive, then it is not an electron. A negative charge is just as bad, because then it would be a negative charge carrier, instead of an electron.

The argument does not say anything.

It is amazing how many philosophers and other scholar swallow this nonsense argument.

History of General Relativity Development

Galina Weinstein writes in a new paper:

This analysis explores Einstein's evolving ideas and decisions regarding the mathematical framework of his theory of gravity during the critical period 1912-1916. My findings in this paper highlight that Einstein's brilliance did not exist in isolation but thrived within a vibrant scientific discourse. His work was significantly enriched through contributions and discussions with friends and colleagues, notably Michele Besso and Marcel Grossmann, illustrating the collaborative essence of scientific advancement.

Yes, I think that is correct. Einstein got most of the crucial ideas from others.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity is widely regarded as one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of physics. It challenged established notions and expanded the boundaries of our understanding, unveiling a new vision of spacetime and gravity.

Many intriguing questions surround Einstein’s groundbreaking achievements. Was the theory of general relativity solely the creation of Einstein, the solitary figure who would seclude himself in an office with his violin, pipe, and a stack of papers? Or was it the culmination of Einstein’s multifaceted collaborations and interactions with other scientists?

She has written a book to give a long answer.

As I see it, special relativity was the more significant breakthrough. After that, it was clear that we need a Lorentz-invariant gravity theory that locally looked like Minkowski space, and that approximated Newtonian gravity. The main obstacle was the development of Riemannian geometry.

The available covariant tensors were the Riemann tensor, Ricci tensor, metric tensor, and scalar curvature.

The field equations seem complex, but they really just say that the Ricci tensor is zero between stars and planets. It is not clear who had that idea.

There is a Wikipedia page on General relativity priority dispute.

Einstein once said:

Thanks to my fortunate idea of introducing the relativity principle into physics, you (and others) now enormously overrate my scientific abilities, to the point where this makes me quite uncomfortable.

He did not introduce the relativity principle. It was not his idea. He got it from Poincare. But yes, Einstein was greatly overrated because he was falsely credited with special relativity.