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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Higgs Boson with Colbert

Here is a bit on the Large Hadron Collider on the Colbert Report (it also mentions the crazy-sounding claim of two physicists about disruptions from the future):

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And here is a followup interview with Brian Cox:
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Oh and if you are interested in knowing more about the paper that Colbert mentions in the first sequence, check out this excellent explanation on Cosmic Variance. In the end, Sean Carroll finds the idea crazy but interesting:
At the end of the day: this theory is crazy. There’s no real reason to believe in an imaginary component to the action with dramatic apparently-nonlocal effects, and even if there were, the specific choice of action contemplated by NN seems rather contrived. But I’m happy to argue that it’s the good kind of crazy. The authors start with a speculative but well-defined idea, and carry it through to its logical conclusions. That’s what scientists are supposed to do. I think that the Bayesian prior probability on their model being right is less than one in a million, so I’m not going to take its predictions very seriously. But the process by which they work those predictions out has been perfectly scientific.

2 comments:

  1. Peter Woit wrote about the LHC-fate "theory" too http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=2373

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  2. Thanks for the link. Yes, he is less charitable than Sean Carroll.

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