“Three sigma comes and goes, goes and comes”: Significance, uncertain...

A spectre of failure is haunting the high-energy physics (HEP) community. After the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, no major breakthrough has been achieved and the searches for the BSM (Beyond the Standard Model) physics are still found wanting. While preparing for the High-luminosity era which will maximally exploit the potential of the LHC collisions, and with the plans for future accelerators still underway, the field is at risk of entering the new, discovery-less regime. Historians of science and physicists themselves are making efforts to put this regime in perspective by unpacking the discovery patterns that were historically characteristic of high-energy physics, only to show that these patterns could well be exhausted, since new particles might not be discoverable by any available means. One prominent concern is that the particle era could indeed be over and that discovery in HEP could mean something different in the future than used to be the case in the past.

I would like to complement these efforts by looking into the way that high-energy physicists talk about the epistemic risks and uncertainties associated with HEP research in their hands-on, everyday practice. A family resemblance of failure-like phenomena occurs in their accounts, such as errors, systematic uncertainties, sigma levels ‘coming and going’, delays, problems, different instances of something ‘not working well’ in analysis, operations, testing, and commissioning. These phenomena are, however, only apparently failure-like since they seamlessly transition to their neutral or positive counterparts such as measurements, limits, parameter spaces, test results, status reports, and original scientific articles.

What is failure in high-energy physics ‘from within’? It might be a weak signal against a noisy background, a mislabeled optical fiber, or an overlook in an interface specification; a failure, for example, to test a material at a certain temperature, thereby causing a delay of the project delivery, a failure to reach a certain objective on time. How do such instances of everyday grapples with failure keep the research nonetheless successful in producing output and insight? What is the relation between failure and ordinary problem-solving? What is the relation between failure and error? I will try to give answers to these questions based on the analysis of qualitative interviews conducted with the practicing physicists in the field.