[HN Gopher] A deepening crisis forces physicists to rethink the ...
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A deepening crisis forces physicists to rethink the structure of
nature's laws
Author : theafh
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-03-01 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| brummm wrote:
| There is a slight mistake in the article. The standard model does
| not describe the neutrinos. In the standard model neutrinos are
| massless particles, but in reality they are not.
| [deleted]
| peter303 wrote:
| The muon was the first WhatTheF particle discovered from cosmic
| rays. It and its associated quarks and leptons do not appear to
| participate in any physics necessary for the observable universe
| functioning.
|
| And the muon vexes us again with an observed g2 moment the
| differs from its theoretical value greater than measurement
| error. This again suggests there is more unknown physics out
| there.
| lumost wrote:
| I strongly suspect that new high energy physics advances will
| come from investigating astronomically generated phenomenon.
|
| - Gravitational Waves for probing extremely large and small
| objects - Cosmic Rays for probing high energy particles. -
| Solar probes to detect particles made from stellar phenomena
| leashless wrote:
| I think these datasets also point the way to some new
| physics.
|
| https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/shane-harris-
| interview-...
| leashless wrote:
| Although to get anything useful out of them would require
| the _radar_ data, not just the optical data. Much more
| certain positioning than optical cameras on fast moving
| platforms.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by 'observable'. Proton mass (for
| example) depends in part on all 3 generations of quarks.
| oraphalous wrote:
| I wish they didn't use the term "crisis" for this. It's nothing
| like the problems other disciplines are having with respect to
| replication failure - where maybe the term is appropriate.
|
| Physics can still explain / predict a shit-load of phenomena.
| It's not a crisis - just more work to do.
| brummm wrote:
| I mean, replication failures are a result of bad science, bad
| analysis and a poor understanding of statistics in many cases.
| It's not so much a crisis in the state of human knowledge but
| the state of the education of the scientists in those other
| disciplines.
| naasking wrote:
| It's a crisis because it's so widespread and the denial that
| it's a problem is strong.
| ordu wrote:
| They refer to a crisis in a sense Thomas Kuhn used. The point
| where paradigm shift is needed. Physics has experience with it.
| General relativity theory was a paradigm shift following a
| crisis.
| ncmncm wrote:
| I have been as derisive as anybody about string theory's entire
| lack of experimentally realizable predictions. But some things
| give me pause. The first is its interpretation of black holes as
| existing entirely at the event horizon surface, with no actual
| space-time inside; and the black hole entropy exactly matching
| the set of states of strings living in the 2D horizon layer.
| Eliminating that singularity is a big delivery.
|
| This seems like another case where it can deliver something
| useful.
| akvadrako wrote:
| How does that depend on string theory? Also, what do you mean
| by "string theory"? Do you mean M-theory?
| Jerry2 wrote:
| Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder has a great article on the lack of
| progress in fundamentals of physics: " _The present phase of
| stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal_ " [1]
|
| Choice quotes:
|
| > _We know this both because dark matter is merely a placeholder
| for something we don't understand, and because the mathematical
| formulation of particle physics is incompatible with the math we
| use for gravity. Physicists knew about these two problems already
| in 1930s. And until the 1970s, they made great progress. But
| since then, theory development in the foundations of physics has
| stalled. If experiments find anything new now, that will be
| despite, not because of, some ten-thousands of wrong
| predictions._
|
| > _Ten-thousands of wrong predictions sounds dramatic, but it's
| actually an underestimate. I am merely summing up predictions
| that have been made for physics beyond the standard model which
| the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was supposed to find: All the
| extra dimensions in their multiple shapes and configurations, all
| the pretty symmetry groups, all the new particles with the fancy
| names. You can estimate the total number of such predictions by
| counting the papers, or, alternatively, the people working in the
| fields and their average productivity._
|
| According to her, and many other physicists, there hasn't been
| any major progress in phenomenology since 1970s when Higgs boson
| was postulated.
|
| [1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-
| phase-...
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