Mr Higgs’ Dubious “Mechanism”
Firstly, what has been discovered is an unstable Higgs-like boson resonance which could be a fairly boring repeat of the hundreds of other unstable boson resonances already found, or in this case: inferred.
Secondly, there are a number of anomalies within the existing data, especially diphoton rates that are too high, and there has been some questioning of whether its unique spin has been definitively determined yet.
Thirdly, the LHC results indicate differing boson resonance masses for different decay processes, which no one understands yet, and most hope will disappear somehow.
No doubt ad hoc fixes for these problems will be invented. But let’s consider a serious problem that is a fact, which cannot be fixed.
Before the LHC came on-line, the predictions for the Higgs mass ranged from about 100 GeV to 800 GeV!!! WTF! They can’t even come up with a decent prediction? And if you want to really get a sense of how lost particle physicists were, note that a serious and common prediction (see Butterworth below) was ~10^-5 GRAMS, i.e., the Planck mass.
After the fact of finding a little bump at 125 GeV, THEN they emphasized the predictions that conform to that result! That is not cricket in science.
Particle physicist Jon Butterworth commented in Nature:
“If one assembles the standard model without fine-tuning some parameters, quantum effects mean that the Higgs boson’s mass should grow and end up near the Planck scale. This is clearly wrong, and it hints at gaps in the theory.”
One could well get the impression that there is something seriously amiss in the current particle physics paradigm. The Higgs Mechanism for creating the mass of particles, which the Standard Model posits are massless, sounds like a corny just-so story and is completely untestable in any direct manner. Even if Mr. Higgs’ “god particle” does exist, and some of its properties were approximately predicted, that in no way justifies scientific confidence in the hokey Higgs Mechanism.
You can believe whatever you want, but I will reserve my confidence in a hypothesis until there are several definitive tests of that hypothesis that are based on predictions which are quantitative, unique, and not-adjustable.