English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Our paper discusses the epistemic attitudes of particle physicists on thediscovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is based onquestionnaires and interviews made shortly before and shortly after thediscovery in 2012. We show, to begin with, that the discovery of a StandardModel (SM) Higgs boson was less expected than is sometimes assumed. Once thenew particle was shown to have properties consistent with SM expectations -albeit with significant experimental uncertainties -, there was a broadagreement that 'a' Higgs boson had been found. Physicists adopted a twoprongedstrategy. On the one hand, they treated the particle as a SM Higgs boson andtried to establish its properties with higher precision; on the other hand,they searched for any hints of physics beyond the SM. This motivates our firstphilosophical thesis: the Higgs discovery, being of fundamental importance andestablishing a new kind of particle, represented a crucial experiment if oneinterprets this notion in an appropriate sense. By embedding the LHC intothetradition of previous precision experiments and the experimental strategiesthus established, Duhemian underdetermination is kept at bay. Second, our casestudy suggests that criteria of theory (or model) preference should beunderstood as epistemic and pragmatic values that have to be weighed in factualresearch practice. The Higgs discovery led to a shift from pragmatic toepistemic values as regards the mechanisms of electroweak symmetry breaking.Complex criteria, such as naturalness, combine epistemic and pragmatic values,but are coherently applied by the community.

Model Choice and Crucial Tests. On the Empirical Epistemology of the Higgs Discovery