Chapter 16: The CERN Metaphorical-Hypothetical-Particle Super-collider

“First we must clarify beyond doubt that the particle is the Higgs boson. Then the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] needs to find signs of new physics beyond the standard model. As for what comes after the LHC, I believe it is too early to develop a new machine. The LHC will operate for many years to come, and it is unclear that taxpayers want to invest in a huge new particle physics project.”[1]

In Chapter 14, the issues arising from the need for expensive machinery in order to investigate phenomena which increasingly depart from the realms of human experience was raised. The super-collider at CERN represents a super example of some of the points raised. Since 4th July 2012 was a red-letter day for this piece of equipment and for those working with it, the topic of the Higgs boson as reported in the press and in the media also comes to the fore.

A case study concerning events of 4th July 2012

The 4th July 2012 was the day when the God particle was found. The BBC television news announced “an historic day for science”, and then reported the story supported by the usual visual-audio fantasia. At the same time the science correspondent announced that the people at CERN had identified a particle that was ‘consistent with the Higgs boson’, and proclaimed a major leap forward for science. I was very taken with the careful phrase ‘consistent with’ because as chance would have it I picked my first tomatoes from the greenhouse on that very same day. This was a pleasing occurrence since they were taking far longer to ripen than usual, and their ripening was consistent with the fact that I had given them a good telling off just two weeks previously. Later that evening I watched a National Geographic programme about the Big Foot, or Sasquatch, which showed photographs of footprints and damage to trees consistent with its existence and with its hypothesised characteristics.

“Consistent with” is clearly an interesting phrase. Its use in this context implies a degree of uncertainty as to whether the Higgs boson itself had been found, or whether its possible existence was being inferred from traces that it, or something else, might have left behind. The reportage in the press at the time permitted either of these conclusions by asserting the truth of one or the other of these alternatives according to which account you chose to read. If the latter is the case, it would not be possible to conclude with any certainty that the thing in question had been unambiguously located, observed, and identified.

What was even more confusing was the fact that claims that it had been ‘found’ took place simultaneously with assertions from other sources that such particles did not exist as an external reality, but only as metaphors for some thing/process/force which remains un-describable in physical terms.[2] It is not by accident that Rosenblum and Kuttner gave to their book the subtitle Physics Meets Consciousness. None of this, however, was sufficient to give pause to the Daily Mail, which proclaimed in big letters on page 8 of the 5th July 2012 issue, “We’ve found it!”; followed somewhat lower down in small type by the words “…not all scientists believe in its existence”.

It appears that the CERN super-collider provides the opportunity for some physicists to create collisions between real-or-metaphorical subatomic particles in such a way as to create a new particle that other sections of the physics community believe is not actually there. The particles, it is suggested by the latter, exist only as conceptualisations of reality rather than reality itself. So if the latter group is correct, all that can ever be found at best is evidence that is consistent with those conceptions, because there is actually nothing real to find. The implication is that if we were to conceptualise things in a different way we would invent different machines for examining the new conceptualisation, and then in the fullness of time we would again be able to find evidence that was consistent with the new conceptualisation, and so on. We would inadvertently be using machinery to explore the workings of the human mind, without any clear knowledge of what is actually going on inside the machine, and an even less clear perspective on how our own minds work to make sense of things.

Meanwhile, in the press we were urged to accept the particle scientists’ word that the Higgs boson explains the birth of the universe by virtue of its assumed ability to give mass to a cluster of other (real according to some, or metaphorical according to others) fundamental particles. We can note once again that the idea that particles exist which have no mass at time 1 and get it from somewhere else at time 2 is easy to express in words but has no counterpart anywhere in observable reality or in terms of any physical process we can observe or even imagine. A massless particle is something we can talk about using words, and that is all.

It remains unclear then whether the Higgs boson exists as a fact or as a concept created by the human mind. If the latter is the case then traces ‘consistent with its existence’ are all that will ever be found, and the particle is truly God-like in terms of epistemology. Furthermore, the search for particles with such an uncertain and ambiguous form of existence can go on forever, if the search by its very nature permits neither unambiguous identification or refutation; again, like the search for God.

The suggestion that the Higgs boson ‘explains’ the creation of the universe by giving mass to something that exists without having any existence is also as breathtakingly surreal as the suggestion that the universe came about when God breathed life into it. It is not possible to envisage any process which might underlie either. So why do so many of us express a preference for scientific nonsensibility rather than religious nonsensibility, when both are equally experientially bankrupt? The big question about how everything started, which may be unanswerable by human beings, remains completely impermeable to either approach and nothing sensible is suggested about how the universe came into being by either account.

Surely, the whole derived mental framework for such ideas is deserving of some scrutiny. At the moment is seems like an illustration of the shortcomings of our prevailing conceptions of how the world works more than anything else; and certainly not a description of the world per se—more a comment on just how feeble our attempts at understanding really are. So why do more of us not shout “Mumbo jumbo!” when presented with these ideas on the public stage?

The Hoggs bison

Suppose I postulate, as a result of a long period of thinking about things, that a strange animal must exist that has not so far been observed. I decide, before it has been seen, to give it a name, and I call it the Hoggs bison. Immediately there is a problem. By giving it a name before I’ve even seen it I’ve reified[3] it before I’ve verified its actual existence. Subsequently, suppose I find new traces that I have not seen before, such as footprints in the snow, or strange droppings, or hear a strange call. At that point there is a psychological tendency to ‘recognise’ these as coming from the Hoggs bison, though I have no clear picture of what it is like or what it does and have never even seen it. It is all too easy to assume that the new evidence ‘proves’ the existence of the animal I have postulated, although in fact the process is not one of discovery, but merely a way of confirming my own expectancies. It’s rather like the apocryphal story of the Himalayan mountaineer asking a local Sherpa what the Yeti looks like, and receiving the reply, “You will know it when you see it”—a mode of discovery that is somewhat problematic as a working model for a rigorous science. It also permits the possibility of two different people seeing two different things, and both concluding that it’s the Yeti.

The logic is almost too woolly to disentangle. The proposition “If I postulate ‘A’, and after the fact I find evidence ‘B’ that is consistent with ‘A’, then ‘A’ must exist” is simply too flawed to take seriously. The word ‘must’ has no validity in such a context, and has to be substituted with the word ‘could’ or ‘might’. The analogy with Professor Higgs’ particle should be clear. The existence of a new thus far unobserved particle with amazing properties is proposed. It is given a name, and thus psychologically it tends to take on an independent existence before its actual existence is demonstrated. Subsequently, new and previously unobserved traces are observed, and thus the existence of the particle is proved. Thankfully, not all physicists think in the same way, and that explains the contrasting reactions from different sources, again reported in the Daily Mail (op. cit.).

The defensible reaction was reported thus: “…two teams of scientists running independent experiments in secret from each other revealed that they had found ‘clear signs’ of a new particle… However, [they] stopped short of declaring it the Higgs boson.” Spot on! Logically, how could they do otherwise? The alternative reaction was characterised by Professor Jim Al-Khalili who was quoted as saying, “The Higgs really does exist. Nobel prizes all round please.” Or, if you prefer the grandiose but meaningless, Professor Themis Bowcock obliged with, “For physicists, this is the equivalent of Columbus discovering America.”[4]

Explaining the universe and everything

The CERN project has been described vividly by ‘rock star’ physicist Professor Brian Cox,[5] who tells us that CERN represents the biggest scientific experiment ever undertaken; although unless he is simply referring to the size of the machine, this is an opinion not a fact. In the talk cited in the footnote he describes what the machine is for and what is presumed to go on inside it in commendably understandable terms, also making the case as to how this kind of research explains the universe, you and me, and everything. One of Professor Cox’s remits is to help a lay public to obtain an intuitive grasp of certain physical ‘realities’ of the universe which at the level of detail are esoteric, but which at the level of conceptual thinking are far more accessible and communicable, and he certainly is an excellent communicator. But the problem is that a number of physicists are engaged in the same task (i.e. making science more accessible to the general public), and as a member of that public I can only conclude that their accounts are mutually contradictory. That being the case, I have to conclude that what we are being told is not a set of consensually validated physical facts, but personal conclusions derived from an a priori set of opinions and assumptions which are not universally shared.

“The aim of particle physics is to understand what everything’s made of, and how everything sticks together. By everything I mean me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything”, states Professor Cox (op. cit.).

This is not a revolutionary thought, as I am sure Professor Cox is well aware, since the Greek philosopher Democritus and certain of his colleagues entertained a roughly similar idea, that everything was made of small particles (atoms) stuck together, as long ago as 370 BC. Bear in mind that this original idea was not ‘proved’ or ‘tested’ at the time of its birth, there were no electron microscopes, no super-colliders. It was a philosophical inference, but one which has stood the test of time and led to a search for the ‘actual’ particles inferred, by way of a process that may or may not be entirely logical.

An inference made about particles many centuries ago has morphed, through a primarily cultural process called ‘science’, into a search for such particles on the assumption that they must be real. It will be no surprise, then, that a search for particles led to particles being, apparently, ‘found’, because generally we tend to find things we are looking for rather than things we are not looking for. This applies to particles as much as to safety pins and small change. But doubt is shed on the inference that these things are indeed ‘real particles’ by a variety of psychological phenomena involving convergence and expectancy confirmation, whereby people see what they expect to see, and impose ex post facto meaning on percepts that are actually random, ambiguous, incomplete, or meaningless.[6] Thus, people sensitised to certain things for whatever reason see more of the things they are sensitised to, and interpret a wider range of things as being ‘it’ than those who are not so sensitised. Thus people who are anti-semitic identify more people as ‘Jewish’,[7] safety officers interpret more situations as hazardous,[8] psychiatrists who specialise in schizophrenia diagnose more people as schizophrenic,[9] and so on. So given that particle physicists are members of the human race and work in much the same way as the rest of us, we can expect them to be subject to the same selective perceptual and cognitive biases. We can therefore expect particle physicists to be prone to identifying ambiguous percepts as ‘particles’ rather more often than the rest of us, and more phenomena as being due to particle-like processes, rather than due to something else. Furthermore, the more the concepts involved depart from the reality checks of the observable world, the more free rein is given to these cognitive biases. It is also pertinent to note that not all physicists are particle physicists.

It has been noted previously at several points that some physicists do tend to throw words around in a somewhat careless manner and in ignorance of any idea of what language actually does. Consider, then, that, with regard to the ‘Big Bang’ theory of the birth of the universe and its fundamental particulate derivation (which is the basic assumption behind the super-collider and the search for the Higgs boson), Professor Cox states in the reference already cited, “[it is] a wonderful narrative, a creation story.” One would not disagree. However, the Bible, too, is a wonderful narrative and a creation story, so Brian’s choice of words here is rather interesting and invites the question as to how we should distinguish between two alternative narratives or stories, and at the end of the day it might not be all that obvious as to where the differences lie.

Whatever the answer to that question, we have only to dip into the fascinating world of quantum theory as described by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner in their staggering book, Quantum Enigma,[10] to come across an equally well informed but strikingly different opinion (both authors of this text were personally acquainted with Albert Einstein). They argue convincingly that statements about the reality of subatomic particles, the Big Bang, its source in a point of zero volume and infinite mass, and the whole quantum-particle debate involve metaphorical, not veridical, language. The virtue of such language is that it leads to concepts and predictions which work wonderfully well and which have unquestionable predictive power, but which shed no light at all on the nature of the underlying reality. In terms of Heisenberg’s theory they assert that there is literally nothing visual to see, with subatomic particles having no actual existence as real objects. Along broadly similar lines, as noted previously, Roger S. Jones suggests in his book, Physics as Metaphor, that whilst the idea of the universe as deriving from a point of zero volume and infinite mass is highly useful as a mathematical construct, as a description of reality it is “a profound embarrassment”. The language of physics, it is argued, is and always was metaphorical to a degree and more so once we enter the world of subatomic particles which are themselves metaphorical. It appears that one physicist’s reality is another physicist’s embarrassment.

There is thus a truly astonishing parallel here. People who believe in ‘Bible Truth’ (the idea that what is written in the Bible is literally true) contrast with those who see the Bible as a source of moral metaphors with the text requiring hermeneutical interpretation. And in physics we have the ‘Particle Truth’ movement who believe that particles exist and are really there; these contrasting with others mentioned above who see the particle story as a metaphor, still requiring interpretation. So when comparing science and religion, it is difficult to decide whether we are comparing different sets of facts, or facts with metaphor, or we are trying simply to decide whose metaphors we like best.

Viewed from the point of view of a lay person with nothing more than a basic understanding of simple physics, these two views of the universe (i.e. that it is made up of particles which exist and can be made to collide versus a view that sees it as made of probability distributions deriving from objects which themselves have no existence other than statistical/metaphorical) simply don’t add up. Furthermore, these contrasting views are offered by scientists whose assumed role is to make science accessible and comprehensible to a lay public. The lay public is entitled therefore to suggest that their understanding might be improved if scientists sang from the same hymn sheet, and perhaps communicated more clearly that they themselves do not know how, or whether, or in what form, the world exists. Least of all should any one scientist be entitled to speak with assumed authority about the ‘way it really is’, in full awareness of the fact that at least two mutually contradictory stories are available. We can also ask, therefore, whether the super-collider is a machine for smashing particles into each other, or an even cleverer machine that enables people to create collisions between metaphors.

Because you’re worth it… maybe

However, whether the CERN machine actually ‘collides’ particles, or does something that the idea of colliding particles is a metaphor for, is only one issue. The other issue concerns expectations about what the search for the Higgs boson is likely to bestow on the world by way of benefit, other than keeping an army of particle physicists in work. As observed elsewhere, unexpected benefits have from time to time emerged from purely theoretical research in the past; but this, it is argued, is on a scale of diminishing returns over time. So we are at least entitled to ask if there is anything about the CERN project to suggest that it is going to improve the lot of people on this planet, or a good current example of huge expense in the pursuit of the ephemeral and the unspecified, with few apparent applications.

The main claim in the media is that it will enable us to understand the Big Bang and the birth of the universe. It is sufficient to say, however, that given the philosophical mortmain that underlies certain branches of contemporary physics, and the disagreements about the veridical versus metaphorical status of that event, such a search looks increasingly like a search for something that lacks any agreed conceptual definition. In that sense, it might actually be an inadvertent attempt to research the limits of the human capacity to conceptualise reality. Indeed, the increasing penetration of human consciousness into the realms of particle physics and cosmology has already been commented on in this text and by other physicists.[11]

Perhaps the project at CERN is not so much a careful search for what is, as a speculative search for what might be. Or maybe it’s a more or less blinkered quest to verify a set of unverified assumptions at all costs, and by whatever means are necessary; or a search for the essentially unknowable; or for the nature of “an acute embarrassment”; or for a spectacular but merely apparent ‘giant step’ for all to see, that can be proclaimed to the world and justify the next round of funding. Whatever the case, right now the finding of the Higgs boson, or whatever it is that is either there or not there, doesn’t seem to add up to much in terms of improving the human condition, and the costs involved make it difficult to take on trust that something fundamentally useful will emerge. Meanwhile the machine exists, and is hugely expensive.

It should be noted that such pessimism as outlined above, or at least some aspects of it, is not without its adherents elsewhere, some of whom are in the most-front of front seats when it comes to talking about subatomic ‘things’. Thus, in a full page article of the Sunday Times of 17 June 2012 with the subtitle “Father of the Higgs boson says despite six-decade search, the particle may have no real use”, Professor Peter Higgs no less (subsequently Sir Peter) is reported as saying that the lifespan of the hypothetical (sic, but my italics) particle is so brief that it may ‘hold no practical value for humankind’ (reported speech, column 1, para 1, p. 7) and also (direct quote) “As far as the so-called Higgs boson is concerned, I haven’t the faintest idea of what the applications might be.”

It is one thing to search for something that you know empirically is actually there, and another thing to spend mountains of money on searching for something whose existence is openly described as hypothetical. Or to search for something which has never been found before although some people are personally convinced of its existence, in the same way that some people just know that God exists. For example, there are mountains of evidence consistent with the existence of the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Sasquatch, but no direct evidence that they actually do, and so the search for them can go on indefinitely, especially if they are not actually there. The big advantage for scientists, then, is that the search for something hypothetical can go on forever if the search involves something that does not really exist, because non-existence can never be demonstrated. The well-known mantra applies: “Absence of proof is not proof of absence.” Very true. However, the epithet has two immediate consequences. First it opens the door to a time-unlimited search for something that is in fact not there; second, if we believe the epithet applies to certain searches within physics, be aware that it also applies to the search for God.

The same Sunday Times article referred to above also illustrates something else, of equal importance. Namely the monumental incomprehensibility of the dialogue between physicists and the rest of us, in referring simultaneously to particles as the basic building blocks of nature, whilst at the same time suggesting that such particles may not exist qua particles at all. Within that broader argument, the specific question as to whether the Higgs boson actually exists in any form at all[12] as an explanation of how nature really works, or whether it is “just a clever piece of mathematics” (op. cit.), has already been posed. So which version of physical truth are we expected to believe? Are there particles or are there not? And if there are not, what exactly is colliding in the super-collider? And what exactly are we looking at when we see pictures of what’s happening inside the collider if there are no particles and there is nothing to see?

Finally, the question also occurs as to how a basically Newtonian cause-and-effect/action-reaction version of physics seems, arguably, to lie at the core of expectations that colliding particles will shatter into bits under their own impetus when the very theories being tested show Newtonian causality to be false at the subatomic level. Can you even have action-reaction type collisions at this level, without inextricably mixing up competing physical models? Or is this simply the ultimate mixed metaphor?

It sometimes appears as though physicists want to have their cake and eat it. As though there are particles when they want to explain things in terms of particles, and particle-less probability distributions when they want to explain something else. This, surely, is a siren call that they are looking at two aspects of something which meets neither description; something analogous to a mirror that reflects different aspects of reality according to what we place in front of it, but never reveals das ding an sich.[13] This indirect reference to Through the Looking Glass is not accidental. We remain like pet dogs looking at such a mirror, failing to realise what it actually is and what its properties are, and struggling in vain to enter the world reflected in the glass on our own terms. A world that is not actually there.

To be fair, obviously something or some essence or some concept is whizzing around the super-collider rather fast, bumping into another one coming the other way, and leaving some trace that something has happened. However, it is not at all clear what it is or whether it is even an ‘it’. Furthermore, whether anything will come of ‘it’ is uncertain, even in the minds of some of those most centrally involved. We should probably worry about this. We pay for it at a time when health provision and service provision of all kinds is deteriorating throughout Europe and entire countries are going bankrupt. Meanwhile, on good advice, we are all entitled to re-christen the big machine with the flashing lights at CERN the “Hypothetical-metaphorical-particle super-collider” until such time as physicists decide one way or the other whether the world exists or not.

The end is nigh—or at least nigher than it was… probably

Today (5th June 2012) an eminent German physicist, whose name I failed to record, was on the television news, and gave a rather different interpretation of what might come out of the CERN experiment. He stated fairly bluntly that ‘we’ (i.e. physicists) do not know in fact what is going on, or exactly what ‘we’ are dealing with inside the collider, and intimated that the possibility exists that black holes might be created which could apparently reverse creation itself and set in motion an accelerating process by which the universe will devour itself. Whether this is a cause for concern, of course, depends on whether the idea of black holes is itself metaphorical, or whether it represents a reality.

Most of us are not in a position to have a worthwhile opinion on the matter, though given the indeterminate state of the game it is not clear who is. Nonetheless, it is the case that some informed sources openly acknowledge the paucity of knowing in this area, and suggest that we might be in the business of inadvertently destroying the whole shooting match; making the human race a prime candidate for one of the Darwin Awards, possibly the last one (see www.darwinawards.com). Some of the responses to this suggestion are not reassuring, ranging from the flat denial typical of playground arguments (“Yes it will/No it won’t”) to statements that the probability of such an event is extremely small. Bearing in mind that probability is not a statement about things that can’t happen, but a statement about how often they will, and other assertions that we don’t actually know much about the reality of what we are talking about, neither response is particularly reassuring.

Disagreements between experts are usually no bad thing, often give the spur to the development of new testable theories, are commonplace throughout the histories of all disciplines, and can lead to progress. However, it does matter what exactly the experts are disagreeing about. For example, disagreement about the role of ‘sprung-rhythm’ in the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins is a different cup of tea from disagreement about whether a particular experiment by some physicists in Switzerland will, or will not, cause the Earth to eviscerate itself.

In a lighter vein, given that playing conkers is now a serious health risk requiring the use of gloves and goggles or has even been banned in some schools, maybe the Health and Safety Executive should consider issuing us with at least some minimal protection against the possibility that the planet might start disappearing at any moment. After all, the existence of black holes is consistent with the idea that they represent the remnants of once-vital planetary systems that hosted life with intelligence of sorts (a bit like ourselves), who invented the super-collider only to find that, whilst it worked extraordinarily well, it did have one or two unfortunate drawbacks.

1 Ohlsson, T., LHC Reality Check, letter to New Scientist,15 December, p. 36 (2012).

2 E.g. Rosenblum and Kuttner, Quantum Enigma (op. cit.); Roger Jones, Physics as Metaphor (op. cit.).

3 Collins Dictionary, Aylsbury: Harper Collins (1994); “To make an abstract idea real or concrete.”

4 Some years ago I supervised a Nigerian postgraduate student who was interested in Western egocentrism, which he claimed was a trait that could be found in both adults and small children. We were discussing the discovery of some spectacular waterfalls by a white man named Stanley. Kwame said there was no ‘discovery’ as such, as some thousands of people knew the falls were there already. “He just came and visited for a while”, was his dismissive comment.

5 See the website http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider.html.

6 A fact brought home to me forcibly some years ago in a perception experiment. A computer generated a series of random shapes to be used in the experiment. Although statistically random, one of the figures was taken by most of the subjects in the study to look like a duck, a fact which completely invalidated the whole study. I had no inkling of this until one of the subjects referred to ‘the duck picture’.

7 Allport G.W. and Kramer, B.M., Some Roots of Prejudice, J. Psychol: Interdisciplinary and Applied, 22, 9 (1946).

8 Davies, J.B., Ross, A., Wallace, B. and Wright, L., Risk Management: A Qualitative Systems Approach, London: Taylor and Francis (2003).

9 Rosenhan, D.L., On Being Sane in Insane Places, Science, 179 (4070), pp. 250–258 (1973).

10 Rosenblum, B. and Kuttner, F., Quantum Enigma, London: Duckworth (2011).

11 Rosenblum and Kuttner (op. cit.). The subtitle of their text, Physics Meets Consciousness, makes the point very strongly.

12 That, is, whether it even exists as a form of non-existence!

13 From Emmanual Kant. The intrinsic or ‘real’ properties of an object independent of the mental capacity to conceive of it.