This is brilliant. Analyzing what it means to say that CERN “discovered the Higgs Boson” reveals the inherently questionable, inherently social and cultural nature of scientific processes. (The author, , is a professor in the UC Berkeley EECS department where he teaches primarily statistics; neither an ignorant troll, nor a pomo anti-science philosopher or sociologist.)
Nice name-drop of Peter Gallison, a member of the Stanford Disunity School (the only philosophical movement I respect), who “described the complex governance structures involved in experiments like the Large Hadron Collider. The CERN collaboration establishes parliamentary rules to decide upon scientific truth. Reality is validated by majority vote. Physicists love to talk a lot about how they are probing the very nature of the universe, but they do this by a lot of boring committee meetings.”
“The Higgs Discovery is a celebration of modern bureaucracy, not a revelation about material reality.”