Is Fine-Tuning Real or Explainable? and What Do Fruitless Higgs Searches Tell Us?

Join Jeff Zweerink and Mike Strauss as they discuss new discoveries taking place at the frontiers of science that have theological and philosophical implications, as well as new discoveries that point to the reality of God’s existence.

Mike Strauss’ presentation on fruitless Higgs searches suggests that the goal of basic science research is often to discover something yet unknown about the universe. Yet, many experiments either find nothing unusual or measure something to be in agreement with the expectation. Are these null results useful, and what can scientists learn from them? Here we investigate two papers from the ATLAS collaboration at CERN that have made measurements of the Higgs boson and looked for new Higgs bosons—neither finding anything unexpected—and discuss what insights we gain from such experiments.

Links and Resources: 

• A Third Way to Explain Fine Tuning
• Search for Heavy Resonances Decaying into WW in the eνμν Final State in pp Collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS Detector
• Measurements of Gluon–Gluon Fusion and Vector-Boson Fusion Higgs Boson Production Cross-Sections in the H→ W W ∗→ eνμν Decay Channel in pp Collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS Detector