ray j willings said:
Starstruck said:
Their was no "scientific method" to the Higgs Boson. It was only suspected because it fits the theory's of what we know and yet now we know it exists as we evolve our ability with technology to produce real results.
You just cannot dismiss ideas because you don't agree with the process of that idea.
Finding the Higgs was so full of "scientific method", it was leaking science all over the place. Science overflow. Seriously. Grab a mop - there's science all over the floors. One of the easiest ways to explain certain things in particle physics (some particles have mass, short range of the Weak force, etc) is if there exists a boson with zero spin, even parity, no charge, no colour, arises from a scalar field, etc. Higgs was first to describe this HIggs field and the particle it would create. So people went looking for it. It's hard to create and quick to decay, so it's difficult to find.
After many years the correct tool for the job was finally built and very soon afterwards, a particle was found right in the neighbourhood (of energies) that people thought it would be. Lots of work is being done to get more data and verify all the properties of the particle to make sure there's nothing to surprise us such as mixture of particles with the nearly the same properties or other cool things that would wreck our current understanding.
This has scientific method written all over it. Lots of observations were made by smashing atoms and after a lot of years and studying the data, nothing made sense unless this other thing was also true. That hypothesis was put to the test and it came back as correct! Yay, science.
But there were a whole bunch of people secretly hoping that the hypothesis was wrong because it would have opened up the door to some truly crazy new hypotheses to test out. But nope. the door is shut.
John Swanson