Description
A Letter to the Editor
Keywords: reliability, reproducibility, replication, particle physics
We thank Andrew Fowlie for his thoughtful comments on our article. Since our paper is primarily about reproducibility and replication, our explanation of the procedures used for making a discovery in particle physics are somewhat abbreviated. In particular, although the
We address his criticisms below:
A) The usual interpretation of choosing
B) Fowlie says that
C) We are accused of sometimes equating
D) We acknowledge that
E) Fowlie points out that there are several observations over the years of possible new effects at
F) We believe it is vital to preserve the data and software of our analyses. This will enable experimental data being available for further study and comparison with future data and theories, primarily to members of the collaboration originally responsible for the data, but also for other experimental and theoretical particle physicists, and for the general public. As Fowlie points out, it will be necessary to judge cautiously any anomalous effects uncovered by non-blind trawling through the data. Misunderstandings of systematic effects by downstream consumers of the data may be a bigger issue than the statistical ones, especially given the complexity of the experimental apparatus and the physics processes, and the associated systematic uncertainties.
G) Imposing a very high standard on the use of the word ‘discovery’ reduces the false-discovery rate but does not make it zero. High-significance ‘discoveries’ that have not been replicated almost always are caused by poorly-understood systematic effects, a consequence of the high statistical significance threshold. Systematic uncertainties are difficult to estimate properly, and we hope that our article explains some of the things particle physicists have learned over the years in dealing with their challenges.
H) The 750 GeV di-photon excess in the ATLAS and CMS data was ultimately explained as a statistical fluctuation, which was ascertained by collecting more data and by looking for systematic effects. It is not very satisfying, but it sometimes happens that a conflict between the results from different datasets from the same detector, or from different experiments, has no obvious systematic explanation and ‘statistical fluctuation’ becomes the only possibility.
We believe that effort expended on following up on possible hints of new physics is well spent. Many of the explanations proposed after the fact do resemble HARKing, though they are often proposed in the context of earlier models that have not been committed to a file drawer. They also serve to remind us that if a signal is seen for a new particle or interaction, many explanations may be possible and further experimental work must be done in order to distinguish among the possibilities.
This document was prepared by Thomas R. Junk and Louis Lyons using the resources of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, HEP User Facility. Fermilab is managed by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC (FRA), acting under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359.
Thomas Junk and Louis Lyons have no financial or non-financial disclosures to share for this article.
©2021 Thomas Junk and Louis Lyons. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) International license, except where otherwise indicated with respect to particular material included in the article.