Pentaquark: Invented not Discovered
A quote:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” — Carl Sagan
Today, they announced the discovery of another particle: the pentaquark. The latest comes today with the headline: “New Particle Discovered At The Large Hadron Collider“.
Being a linguist and a scientist, I marvel at the use or “misuse” of words like “discovery”. Discovery is the act of “finding (something or someone) unexpectedly or in the course of a search.” To put it simply, you can’t “discover” something that is “predicted”. That sentence doesn’t make logical sense. It is wrong. You can say “discover an unknown particle” or “verify a predicted particle”, but not “discover a predicted particle”.
Ok, so the headline “New Particle Discovered at the Large Hadron Collider” means they found something unexpected. Unexpected means you did not know something was there. Yet in the article, you “discover” the following:
“This is no longer the case, as scientists now say that they have found the much sought-after pentaquark, first predicted to exist in the 1960s. After 50 years of searching, the particle has turned up at the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”
Ok, I’m not a linguist but… Oh, I AM a linguist. Again, we as beings have language and words in languages have definitions. But the magicians in the theoretical physics world and their theories, like to “violate” the laws of linguistics in order to hide their violations of the laws of physics and in this case, the scientific method.
If the particle was predicted, it cannot be discovered. It can be “verified”, but this doesn’t sound as grand, as intriguing – especially to Nobel Prize committees. After all, no one has ever won a Nobel Prize for verifying a predicted particle.
Oh, no, they have. In 2002, Raymond Davis Jr and Masatoshi Koshiba won the 2002 Nobel Prize in physics. But the Nobel Prize committee gets an “A” for their command of the English language even though they natively speak Swedish:
“for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos”
Side note: they should rename the “Nobel Prize” to the “No-balls Prize”. I digress…
Notice they use “detection” and not discovery. The pentaquark was “detected”. The theoreticians in physics just simply are too self-important to use banal language like “detected”. A “New Particle DETECTED at the Large Hadron Collider”.
Discovery = New = Exciting = Noballs Prize
Detected = Verified = Blog Entry on Accelerator Website
In fact, if you look back in history, the last particle discovered was in 1929. That was the positron. It was actually “seen” or “detected” before it was theorized. Imagine that, letting the universe tell us what it is instead of inventing something and pretending to find it.
I refuse to accept this misuse of language. It grandisosifies bad science. But there is another word that goes with “discovered”.
Predicted Versus Invented
Ok, another pet peeve of mine. When talking about the “discovery”, they talk about “predicted”. Same passage:
“This is no longer the case, as scientists now say that they have found the much sought-after pentaquark, first predicted to exist in the 1960s. After 50 years of searching, the particle has turned up at the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”
Ok, they “predicted” it. This is different from “invented”. In their minds, their theories are all-powerful. Equations accepted as true in mainstream science are treated as if the gods themselves built the universe using these equations and man is discovering the truths of the gods.
Predicted means you have a logical theory, the theory predicts that there should be a particle that has not been detected. Yet, if you look at many of these particles, they were invented for reasons “other than” theories predicted them.
Invented Particles
So, let’s list the particles that were invented:
Neutrino
Invented in the 1930s by Wolfgang Pauli to save special relativity from violating the laws of conservation in decay or radioactivity.
If you read about neutrino properties or “neutrino science”, you will cringe. Just to give you an idea how invented this particle is, take a look at the photo on the wikipedia neutrino page and read what the captions says. No other words are needed to describe it’s unicorn existence:
If you still believe in the neutrino, then read Dr. Ricardo Carezani’s work and if you really really read and study his work, you will no longer “believe”.
Quarks
“The quark model was independently proposed by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964. The proposal came shortly after Gell-Mann’s 1961 formulation of a particle classification system known as the Eightfold Way—or, in more technical terms, SU(3) flavor symmetry. Physicist Yuval Ne’eman had independently developed a scheme similar to the Eightfold Way in the same year.
Ok folks, this is for real. This is not Harry Potter physics: “…system known as the Eightfold Way – or, in more technical terms, SU(c) flavor symmetry.” Yes, particle physicists talk about “flavor symmetry”. They give particles properties with bizarre names not because they “discovered” them, but are trying to invent them and then find them.
That is not the scientific method. “Quark Flavor Properties”. Not discovered: invented.
Higgs Boson
Known as the god particle, the Higgs Boson was invented in 1964 by François Englert and Peter W. Higgs as a particle that:
The entire Standard Model also rests on the existence of a special kind of particle: the Higgs particle. This particle originates from an invisible field that fills up all space. Even when the universe seems empty this field is there. Without it, we would not exist, because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass. The theory proposed by Englert and Higgs describes this process.
Actually, there may be some truth here in that empty space is filled with something. Not a field. A field is continuous, unbreakable but that is mathematically possible but physically impossible. But I digress…
The phrase that makes this completely bonkers both philosophically and physically is the phrase “Without it, we would not exist, because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass”.
Think about it: “particles acquire mass”. What are particles without the higgs, “not mass”? In the world of the CNPS (our group), there is only space, mass, and mass in movement. The idea that there is a particle that gives mass to particles must have dreamt up in the 1960s during a massive drug orgy.
The Last Particle Discovered: The Positron in 1929/1932
The last particle that is real, that was discovered, that was truly “seen” before it was invented, was the positron. Carl D. Anderson won the Nobel Prize for his methodical detection and description of something HE ACTUALLY SAW AND DIDN’T INVENT (predict).
Let us make something very clear: science must be based on observation, not inventing a particle because you THINK electrons, neutrons, and protons are made from one particle called the quark. You are INVENTING.
We must go back to those particles which were observed first, then named. We must go back to 1932 and back to electrons, neutrons, and protons. The rest, toss them unless they were found without being invented. We simply think our theories are gods and “if the facts don’t fit the theory, then change the facts” (quote from Albert Einstein).
Psychologically, it is cathartic to clense yourself from the tresspasses of 20th century physics where men were gods and invented god particles, built the biggest, most complex machines to find them, then claim to find them without the ability for anyone in the public to verify they are not completely crazy.
Thankfully, the thousands of scientists around the world (CNPS) who are not afraid of truth and the scientific method have gone back to the early 20th century and started a new branch of science where discovery is not “verification of invention”, but actual particles. Where there are no quarks, neutrinos, or higgs particles and where there is no imaginary anythings, not even “fields” but only mass in motion.
And along with the throwing away of “invention”, we will finally start using the correct words for real physical things that we actually observe in the world, and not traces of pieces of the world of which we have no idea.
Don’t believe me? What is the shape of an electron? What is the geometry of a proton? We don’t know. But somehow we know that they are made up of quarks which are made up of Higgs Bosons.
This is nuts. I has to end.
Hello, David!
1) LHC – Large Hadron Collider . Author of class of particle – hadrons is Lev Okun, and several tens of year attempt to prove that mass in relativity theory does not depends from velocity. In 2009 was published his collection works (30) into English. This contradiction of RT is enough to put on shelf of history RT and “result” of LHC.
2) Bunch of protons can be or nucleus of atom or atomic bomb. Any student can calculate forces between protons and its bunches. From the beginning of LHC, we still cannot strip hydrogen to protons, we cannot keep and accelerate atomic bomb – thus LHC is alphysics equipment.
3) We have to back to earlier time – before electron, because electron is abstract notion as combination of two other – atom and charge, “existing” of electron cannot explain even qualitatively electrical phenomenon.
More discussion in my book “The Search for Physics. Infinity”2014.
David, here is another example of abuse of language in physics. The phrase reverse the polarity of the neutron flow is obvious nonsense, but read this and see how they change the meaning of words. http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/the-dayside/reverse-the-polarity-of-the-neutron-flow-a-dayside-post?utm_source=Physics+Today&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=5938529_Physics+Today%3a+The+week+in+Physics+13-17+July&dm_i=1Y69,3JA75,E1NN7U,COC3U,1
The smashing of electrons in the LHC is akin to smashing two bricks at high speed. Just as the basic composition of bricks is clay protons are composed of photons. Although they break up into different sizes every time they are smashed together their basic composition always remain the same. Hence it is wrong to claim that exotic particles are formed by smashing protons in the LHC.
“In fact, if you look back in history, the last particle discovered was in 1929. That was the positron. It was actually “seen” or “detected” before it was theorized. Imagine that, letting the universe tell us what it is instead of inventing something and pretending to find it.”
You were on the right track up until that point, but then your cognitive dissonance got the best of you. Why assume that it’s a particle? The positron is just an ex-post facto invention to explain a misunderstood observation.