Abstract
I reconstruct the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS collaboration at CERN as the application of a series of inferences from effects to causes. I show to what extent such diagnostic causal inferences can be based on well established knowledge gained in previous experiments. To this extent, causal reasoning can be used to infer the existence of entities, rather than just causal relationships between them. The resulting account relies on the principle of causality, attributes only a heuristic role to the theory’s predictions, and shows how, and to what extent, data selection can be used to exclude alternative causes, even “unconceived” ones.
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Notes
Cf. Arabatzis (2012, Sect. 9.2) for the difficulty of choosing an adequate term.
Here and in the remainder of the article, I use statements about the probability of instantiations of event types given the instantiation of certain other event types, and statements about the probability of the former instantiations being caused by the latter as equivalent. I take it that the way regularity theories of causation deal with causal relations between token events (rather than between event types) justifies this equivalence (cf. Baumgartner 2013).
For a study of the case of the discovery and detection of the W boson, which includes some unpublished material and defends a similar thesis as the one proposed here, see Wüthrich (2012).
Often, “electron” (e) and “muon” (\(\mu \)) is used to refer to either the particle or the anti-particle, i.e. positron or anti-muon. They have the same “flavour” but opposite charge (see, for instance, ATLAS Collaboration 2012, p. 3).
“Electron [or positron] candidates must have a well-reconstructed [inner detector] track pointing to an electromagnetic calorimeter cluster and the cluster should satisfy a set of identification criteria [...]” (ATLAS Collaboration 2012, p. 3).
This point was brought to my attention by Markus Zinser.
For a virtual particle, the usual relation between the rest mass, the energy and the momentum of a particle is not satisfied.
It is custom among physicists to assume that interference effects in this kind of analysis are negligible (see, e.g., Sjöstrand et al. 2006, p. 10). The assumption seems to be warranted in the present case (see ATLAS Collaboration 2012, p. 5, and reference therein to the preprint of Kauer and Passarino 2012).
“This observation [...] is compatible with the production and decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson” (ATLAS Collaboration 2012, p. 1).
Note that the terminology I use here is different from the one often used in the context of quantum field theory where the term “causality” denotes versions of this latter “locality” assumption. Also, as indicated at the beginning of Sect. 2, I distinguish between “causality” and “determinism”.
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Acknowledgments
Work for this article has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 145409), and has been carried out at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science of the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and at my home institution, the Technical University Berlin. The central ideas presented here originated in discussions at the history and philosophy of science unit at the University of Bern, in particular within the “MetaATLAS” group consisting of Gerd Graßhoff, Basil Marti, Maya Schefer, and me. I also thank Hans Peter Beck for valuable discussions, and the two reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments.
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Wüthrich, A. The Higgs discovery as a diagnostic causal inference. Synthese 194, 461–476 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0941-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0941-8