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The variety of explanations in the Higgs sector

  • S.I.: Evidence for the Higgs Particle
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Abstract

This paper argues that there is no single universal conception of scientific explanation that is consistently employed throughout the whole domain of Higgs physics—ranging from the successful experimental search for a standard model (SM) Higgs particle and the hitherto unsuccessful searches for any particles beyond the standard model (BSM), to phenomenological model builders in the Higgs sector and theoretical physicists interested in how the core principles of quantum field theory apply to spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs mechanism. Yet the coexistence of deductive-statistical, unificationist, model-based, and statistical-relevance explanations does not amount to a fragmentation of the discipline, but allows elementary particle physicists to simultaneously pursue a plurality of research strategies and keep the field together by joint convictions about the SM and shared explanatory ideals. These convictions include that the SM both represents a successful explanation of the available particle data and contains aspects in need of further explanation. Especially in the domain of BSM physics, explanatory ideals typically appear as stories (in Hartmann’s sense) motivating the different models and linking them to the whole of the discipline.

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Notes

  1. This assessment about what the community thinks are based on many discussions with physicists in our Wuppertal based research group and a series of expert interviews and a questionnaire sent out to 15,000 particle physicists; cf. Borrelli (2016) and her presentation at the CERN seminar available under https://indico.cern.ch/event/232108/.

  2. More on this aspect in Hon and Rakover (2001), esp. ch1. See also Cousins (2014) who offers elaborated reflections as to when the experimental data support the claim of a Higgs discovery, that is, when the existence of a Higgs particle explains the observed signatures and what data—e.g., which decay channels—are relevant in such an explanation. For an alternative to the Bayesian approach, see Staley (2004).

  3. See Wüthrich (2016).

  4. Stöltzner (1999) tried to link Salmon’s conception of explanation to an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics, but his characteristically modest answer was that we might not be able to explain everything in the domain of atomic physics.

  5. See Sect. 3 and the references cited there. For a somewhat different view on renormalization, see Morrison (2014).

  6. This already begins at the level of atomic physics (the physics at energies of a couple of eV), nuclear physics (in the keV range), and subnuclear physics (in the MeV range).

  7. Cf. Hartmann (1999, p. 327).

  8. Studying the various models of a modern particle detector, Karaca (2016a, (2016b) has critically discussed the assumption of a clear-cut hierarchy of models. For a historical analysis of the models relevant in the detection and analysis of elementary particles, see Falkenburg (2007).

  9. See also Sect. 5.

  10. This is not the only goal of the two universal detectors ATLAS and CMS. Another one is to enrich our knowledge about the top quark and the strong force in general; cf. the recent results about the pentaquark.

  11. This class has been analyzed in more detail in Borrelli (2012).

  12. To be sure, string theory or its competitors are not sufficiently developed to provide any physical prediction apart from the SM serving as its low energy limit.

  13. This does not mean that the SM would, in a strictly formal sense, already contain a limit of validity, or that it breaks down at a specific point long before the Planck scale. Rather, it becomes more and more unnatural if there is no level of new physics before the Planck scale such that physicists expect the SM not to be valid on all energy scales.

  14. At least no models in the sense of the present paper. Any rigorous mathematical description of the Higgs mechanism is of course a logical model of the axioms. Yet the point of the present debates on models in science was precisely to overcome this restrictive logical notion of model.

  15. Alisa Bokulich (2014) identifies three originally Bohrian versions of the correspondence principle that have their roots already in the first quantum theory. They involve the behavior at large quantum numbers and the allowed transitions between quantum states.

  16. Cf. Wells (2014) and Williams (2015).

  17. For a broader assessment, see Staley (2004).

  18. See https://indico.cern.ch/event/197461/.

  19. There are also further considerations implicit in such a statistical judgment. For instance, the detectors do not measure a sharp energy of the Higgs particle at 125 GeV but across a larger spectrum, which creates the need to include the so-called ‘look-elsewhere’ effect (cf. Dawid 2014).

  20. There are manifold other possibilities to end up with what Franklin calls ‘bad data’.

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Acknowledgments

This paper has emerged from the research group “Epistemology of the LHC” funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG). I am grateful to all members of this group for a large number of informative and critical discussions. An early version has been presented at a workshop at the University of South Carolina in April 2014 that was organized by Richard Dawid and myself and supported by a USC Provost Grant, the USC Nanocenter, and the Department of Philosophy. Later versions were delivered while I was a visiting scholar at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP) and as a colloquium talk at the Bielefeld Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science (I2SOS). I am grateful for all the manifold feedback that I have received on those occasions. I am also indebted to the anonymous referees for their comments and helpful suggestions.

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    Michael Stöltzner

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Stöltzner, M. The variety of explanations in the Higgs sector. Synthese 194, 433–460 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1112-2

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