'A bunch of big egos' are strangling science

[fas42]

With apologies to abraxalito, who posted this link in another forum, this is an interesting take on one aspect of the 'big picture': Chip daddy Mead: 'A bunch of big egos' are strangling science ? The Register ...

Frank

 

[jcx]

my reading is that more data than any other scientific field has ever generated and analyzed was matched to the predictions of the The Standard Model in the search for the Higgs

who are these physicists walking away from potential Noble Prizes because they are "required" by other "massive egos" to misinterpret this data?

To find the Higgs boson a powerful particle accelerator was needed, because Higgs bosons might not be seen in lower-energy experiments. The collider needed to have a high luminosity in order to ensure enough collisions were seen for conclusions to be drawn. Finally, advanced computing facilities were needed to process the vast amount of data (25 petabytes per year as at 2012) produced by the collisions.[87] For the announcement of 4 July 2012, a new collider known as the Large Hadron Collider was constructed at CERN with a planned eventual collision energy of 14 TeV—over seven times any previous collider—and over 300 trillion (3×1014) LHC proton–proton collisions were analysed by the LHC Computing Grid, the world's largest computing grid (as of 2012), comprising over 170 computing facilities in a worldwide network across 36 countries

Higgs boson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[DF96]

He may have a point, or it could just be 'maths envy'. I don't know.

Physicists are human (no, really they are!). However, they are probably more ready than the average human to have their favourite ideas trashed by reality. This may be because, perhaps more than the average human, their ideas have been informed by reality.

Science sometimes gets stuck for a while. It may be because people won't let go of old ideas. More often it is because nobody has a good new idea. We know the Standard Model can't be the whole story, but we don't yet know what to replace it with.

I don't see any strangling going on. Bandwagons yes (e.g. string theory), but people have always climbed on bandwagons because most hate being isolated even more than they hate being wrong.