Do we know the Higgs Boson exists? Some antagonistic replies here apparently misunderstood me, and/or , as asserting that we don’t really know, because the CERN results are dodgy and unreliable.
That wasn’t my point, and I don’t think it was his either (although I can’t speak for him).
The question is: what would it even mean to say that the CERN work counts as discovery of a thing? Does that work meet reasonable criteria for “discovery”? It was certainly very different from Leif Erikson “discovering” America; and from Gallileo “discovering” the moons of Jupiter; and both those were very different from each other. So what counts, and why?
“Discovering” new entities or phenomena is often supposed to be the most important part of science. (This is doubtful, by the way; finding new methods seems more important to me. And that may be relevant in this case, but it’s not the point I’m about to make!)
So, to make science work better, we should better understand what counts as “discovering,” and how it is done. We actually have shockingly little knowledge or understanding of that! The standard accounts in old-school philosophy of science are unambiguously wrong. The new (Stanford) school investigates specific cases in depth (e.g. Peter Gallison on the Higgs). In aggregate, those reveal some interesting broader patterns. Ideally, such understanding may help scientists do their science better; but probably much more work needs to be done before it provides much leverage.
So, specifically what does it mean to say that CERN “discovered” the Higgs—setting aside the questions of whether they “really” did, and whether the Higgs “really exists”? (I have zero opinion about that, for lack of adequate background; but am provisionally happy to accept the HEP community’s consensus that yes it does, and the CERN experiment was adequate evidence to believe it.)
What I find insightful in Recht’s analysis is in pointing out salient differences between “discovering the moons of Jupiter” and “discovering the Higgs boson.” Science has moved quite broadly from the former mode toward the latter, but the Higgs case is an extreme one.
Starting from the late ‘70s, social scientists started pointing out that scientific knowledge is “socially constructed.” That caused a lot of unnecessary confusion and antagonism due to differing interpretations of what “constructed” means. Some people took it as “just arbitrarily made up, and asserted as an expression of power-as-dominance, regardless of truth.” Most scientific knowledge is not that. It certainly happens, but it presumably shouldn’t count as “knowledge,” and it’s only a small fraction of what we do count as “scientific knowledge.”
But reliable scientific knowledge is, quite literally, constructed by social groups. In the Higgs case, thousands of people worked together for many years to construct the details of the theory that the apparatus worked according to; to physically construct the apparatus; and then to construct statistical methods and software for analyzing the results.
(Harold Garfinkel, founder of ethnomethodology, tried to solve the “social construction” misunderstanding by using the phrase “socially produced” for valid scientific knowledge that, as in the Higgs case, was produced through social processes. He contrasted that with “socially constructed,” meaning “just made up and imposed by a powerful interest group.” Unfortunately, this terminology didn’t stick.)
The quote from Recht’s post which probably set people off:
“The Higgs Discovery is a celebration of modern bureaucracy, not a revelation about material reality.”
I took this as making a point about how the knowledge was produced, and as such Recht’s statement is straightforwardly true and interesting.
It was not a revelation about material reality, because the result was long expected (not a revelation).
It was a celebration; when the thousands of person-years of work finally got finished, everyone could say “hooray! we managed to coordinate all these people, in an enormous bureaucratic structure, to do a lot of very difficult and boring work, and now we are done and can get our prizes for it.”
