What I'm Reading

I just finished The End of Oil, which is a slightly-depressing, if extremely well-written, book examining the possibility of the end of the hydrocarbon era, and what the future may hold. It's a good book if you're interested in energy economy types of questions, including some very optimistic suggestions as to how the power grid may develop to enable functional usage of renewable energy sources (especially the concept of microgrids, using efficient generation of hydrogen via electrolysis as a very efficient battery, to be released during periods of low sun, wind, etc.)

Now I am clunking my way through Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos, which is a physics-for-interested-laymen walkthrough of 20th century particle physics and cosmology, written by one of the pre-eminent minds in the field. Here is a good, critical review of it in Slate.

I have long had lots of problems with modern cosmological physics. In particular, the fact that the edifice on which the biggest thoughts rest, the M Theory variant of String Theory, is entirely unscientific. What I mean by this is that, given our current technological level of development, it is not possible to experimentally verify any of string theory's predictions (for much more on this idea, see Gregg Easterbrook's excellent review of another book here)

Then, I see today's article about a potential discovery of the Higgs boson at the Tevatron today in Slate. One would think that the field of particle physicists would be thrilled about the potential discovery of the particle whose existence would fill out the Standard Model of Cosmology, and even fit the properties predicted by the theory. But no:

That's why particle physicists, and the EU member states that have spent Nepal's annual GDP to build this accelerator, are hoping that no one, in Chicago or Switzerland, finds the Higgs. The future of high-energy physics lies with the small chance that the standard model is wrong, and something exotic happens at LHC energies.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, insane. It makes no sense to design an experiment to prove your predictions wrong. The essence of the scientific method is to

-Predict a result
-Design an experiment to test it
-Build and execute the experiment
-Measure and analyze the data
-Adjust your theory
-Come up with a new prediction
-Repeat

It is literally not science if you are trying to disprove something, not to prove something. You have to know what you are looking for before you go looking.

To say nothing of the fact that we are spending billions upon billions of dollars (okay, Euros) in order to hopefully find-what? Something, but not actually what we're looking for?

You know I am a science geek. And a big one. I'm completely in favor of way out-there studies, and looking for answers to questions that we're not even totally equipped to ask yet. But it does seem to me to be, just maybe, possible that we could find slightly more useful ways of spending out money, in ways that would be a bit more helpful to people, than this.