Nonetheless, this realism does not diminish my excitement that the LHC is turning on! This year!

What I’m trying to talk people out of is the impression that the accelerator will start up and data will come pouring out. I’ve heard a lot from various theorists about the accelerator starting in 2007, and the fact that no data is coming with it immediately is usually a footnote at best. We’re already hearing jokes about the LHC being delayed; I’m hoping those don’t turn into complaints if it gets to May 2008 and we’re still waiting to make sense of the detectors before we publish.

Getting this stuff up and working takes time. How much, exactly, we have no way of knowing.

Before we will be able to say that we are seeing something new we will have to be able to see the “old” physics. Well, at 900 GeV it is pretty much guaranteed to be old. Thus the data that we will record at the end of this year will serve as a very good testbed. This should help the rapid analysis of the 14 TeV data in early 2008.

I am also very interested in following GLAST, Planck, Herschel, EUSO, MINIBOONE, MINOS, CNGS, IceCube, Antares, Anita, BOREXINO, LMT, 21cma, and the improved Hubbel.

This should be a lot of fun!

Garth

Whatever problems Ptolemy found in his model, he just added further correction factors by introducing new epicycles. Instead of calling these ad hoc modifications fiddles, they were regarded as real discoveries about nature. Every experimental disagreement with the existing theory was presented as part of the ‘learning curve’ about nature.

Nobody was allowed to throw out the theory, so they never did (until a replacement had been developed). Instead, everytime a discrepancy was found it was turned into a positive, constructive contribution by adding further ad hoc fiddles to the theory to compensate. There was no incentive to come up with a better theory, it was quite the opposite.

When a better theory did come along, it was first quite wrong in detail itself (Copernicus had circular orbits and twice as many epicycles as Ptolemy, 80 versus just 40 – contrary to many popular accounts which lie about the historical facts in order to justify Copernicus using false reasons). It took 187 years to sort out the main details properly (Copernicus, 1500 – Newton, 1687):

‘Scientists have thick skins. They do not abandon a theory merely because facts contradict it. … History of science, of course, is full of accounts of how crucial experiments allegedly killed theories. But such accounts are fabricated long after the theory had been abandoned. … What really count are dramatic, unexpected, stunning predictions: a few of them are enough to tilt the balance; where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes. Now, how do scientific revolutions come about? If we have two rival research programmes, and one is progressing while the other is degenerating, scientists tend to join the progressive programme. This is the rationale of scientific revolutions. … Criticism is not a Popperian quick kill, by refutation. Important criticism is always constructive: there is no refutation without a better theory. Kuhn is wrong in thinking that scientific revolutions are sudden, irrational changes in vision. The history of science refutes both Popper and Kuhn: on close inspection both Popperian crucial experiments and Kuhnian revolutions turn out to be myths: what normally happens is that progressive research programmes replace degenerating ones.’

— Imre Lakatos, Science and Pseudo-Science, pages 96-102 of Godfrey Vesey (editor), Philosophy in the Open, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1974.

Who’s to say they won’t get paid off by the supersymmetry mafia to put out simulated data with squarks and sleptons? Kind of like they did with the fake moon landings?