Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Readers may recall that I've been writing of late about Deborah Mayo, a professor at Virginia Tech.  To restate, Mayo has written Statistical Inference as Severe Testing ; a book discussing statistics, induction, and the philosophy of science. Much of the book is obscure to me, though I skim through what I have to in order to get to stuff where I can gain something. To move forward nonetheless: near the middle of the book she has a discussion of the Higgs boson. Allow me to talk about that today.  Back in 1964 Peter Higgs predicted the eventual discovery of a certain particle that would be responsible for other particles having mass. This became known as the "Higgs boson" or, more grandly as the "God particle"! Over the following decades the Higgs boson came to be regarded as an important piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, and the fact that no one had experimentally confirmed its existence became something of a scandal.  Then came 2012, and CERN, ...

I don't know whether there is a "hierarchy problem" in contemporary subatomic physics or not. There seems to be some debate over whether the hierarchy issue is a problem. Let us call it the meta-hierarchy problem. The idea, though, is that the Higgs boson is very very small. Too small, some think, to be expected to do the job that theory assigns to it, that is, to explain why particles have mass. The point? Physicists believe that there should be some intermediary structuring, stuff larger than the Higgs boson, but smaller than Planck's constant.  Is this really a problem, then? Depend on to whom you listen. Some believe they are only pretending there is a problem so as to get the money for another supercollider, which they are pitching as the way to fill in the hierarchical blanks.

The Higgs boson was the end of the line. Or, at least, the end of one important line. Here's an argument from somebody who knows particle physics a heck of a lot better than I do.  https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/particle-physics-may-have-reached-end.html And although I do love science for its own sake, there is a political point here. In a number of countries, including the US, the UK, the Eurozone, and Switzerland, there is a Big Science lobby. Big Science sees the Manhattan Project and the cold war era Space Race as examples to be imitated. After all, if we (nation X) doesn't build the next big doohickey, then they (rival country Y) will build the doohickey with disastrous results. That is the pitch for public consumption, Within the industries that stand to gain (from academic institutions to the relevant industrial contractors) there is a simpler pitch: this is our gravy train. So it is worthwhile noting the article that goes with the above URL. No riv...