November 30th:

Ludwigstr. 31 /II room 225

Time: 12 to 2 p.m.                          Talk: Richard Dawid/Vienna

Evidence for the Higgs Particle and the Look Elsewhere Effect

Last summer CERN reported the observation of a scalar particle that is strongly believed to be the long expected Higgs particle. One specific aspect of the process of data collection and analysis that led up to this discovery is of specific philosophical interest. In the early months of 2012, when the collected data was already significant but technically did not yet amount to an observation of a new particle (i. e. did not yet constitute a 5 sigma effect), an interesting debate on the most adequate characterisation of the status of the available data arose among particle physicists. That debate circled around the role of the so called ‘look elsewhere effect’ and provided an interesting perspective on the relation between theoretical and empirical arguments in high energy physics. The talk will analyse this debate and draw some conclusions regarding the epistemic status of claims in high energy physics.

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Karim Thébault, MCMP