This paper had its 15 minutes of fame (or infamy) a few weeks back. It’s quite the piece of work, claiming as it does to have made a high precision measurement of the mass of a W particle. The authors (there appear to be more authors than sentences in the paper) fail to explain, of course, how it is possible to measure the mass of a particle that has never been observed.

No explanation is necessary, of course, if you are a member of the peculiar cult of mathematicism that believes modern mathematical models determine the nature of physical reality. If you are of the more realistic opinion that physical reality should determine the nature of our mathematical models you will be considered hopelessly naive by the cult and quite possibly a crackpot. That the cult of mathematicism has made an incoherent and absurd mess of theoretical physics is as factually undeniable as it is flamboyantly denied.

For the record, there has never been a direct detection of a W particle. According to the standard model of particle physics (SM) the half-life of the W boson is 3×10^-25s, a time increment so small as to render the W particle’s existence (in physical reality) indistinguishable from its non-existence. In the fantasy realm of the mathematicist this is not a problem; the W particle exists in the model and therefore it must exist in physical reality even if it is undetectable.

So how then can the authors claim to have made a high precision measurement of an invisible particle? The claim is hyperbole; no high precision measurement of a nonexistent W boson has been made. What has transpired is simply a lot of data massaging of pre-exiting results of collider experiments run between 2002-2011 in which the actual observations of quotidian particles like electrons and muons are treated as by-products of the decay of the unobservable W within the context of the SM that assumes the W’s existence.

If you wade through the paper’s turgid account of all the data massaging that went into this bogus claim of a precision measurement you will encounter a single sentence that gives the game away:

The W boson mass is inferred from the kinematic distributions of the decay leptons.

And that is the bottom line here, a W boson mass inferred from the observation of electrons and muons (leptons) in the context of a model that assumes (against the evidence) the W boson’s existence, is not in any meaningful, scientific sense a high precision measurement. The claim that it is is simply, in the technical sense, high order bullshit.