Why The Higgs Boson Is like Pornography

I few years ago I wrote about my scepticism concerning the CERN Large Hadron Collider and the discoveries they are supposedly making. I pointed out that the OPERA group was getting results by fiddling with the equipment, so how do we know that CERN isn't generally doing the same thing? This is important since no one else can build their own LHC and replicate experiments. One would hope that CERN would announce that the maintenance of their equipment is done at arms length from the people who run experiments on it, but I haven't seen this.

It turns out, however, that the situation is a good deal worse than I thought. I had naively assumed that equipment fiddling was the only source of human subjectivity in these experiments. I imagined that the experiment to find the Higgs boson would work as follows. The experiment would involve two programs, both of which would have been vetted by physicists across the world. Program 1 would run the equipment, collecting certain data (it's impossible to keep ALL the data). Program 2 would then run on the collected data, concluding the presence or not (or perhaps a probability) of a Higgs boson. A more complicated version of this would have a single program running the experiment and collecting data in an interactive fashion. In any case, once the program(s) had been written (and the equipment certified), humans would be out of the loop: there would be no subjectivity.

Apparently, it turns out that humans have to be in the loop. Apparently, the Higgs Boson is much like pornography: you know it when you see it. The process of identifying the Higgs Boson is completely subjective, but physicists will know it when they see it. But instead of scrapping the whole project, they come up with an absurd, barely comprehensible type of "blinding" that supposedly stops experimenters from consciously or subconsciously cheating in some way. They don't know what the Boson is supposed to look like in the data, but they know that they can't get away with identifying just any old stuff in the data as the Boson, so they have a complicated way of making sure that experimenters agree on what looks Bosonish without cheating somehow.

This all reminds me a bit of "climate science" (not to be confused with climate science). Some very clever people are able to detect a "human signal" in just about any weather they don't like, as well as in any small amount of warming. They cannot reliably predict any such signal, but they know it when they see it.