[HN Gopher] Did the W-boson just "break the standard model"?
___________________________________________________________________
Did the W-boson just "break the standard model"?
Author : IdealeZahlen
Score : 204 points
Date : 2022-04-30 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (backreaction.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (backreaction.blogspot.com)
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| space time covered this well a few days back--
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Q4UAiKacw&ab_channel=PBSSp...
| tizio13 wrote:
| Yep, good video for anyone interested. The visuals in this one
| are particularly good.
| k2xl wrote:
| I just started watching (and enjoying) Sabine's YouTube channel
| after one of her posts were shared on HN the other week.
|
| I am surprised to find so many people here have negative opinions
| on Sabine. I've probably seen a dozen videos about the double
| slit experiment but her explanation about it (and why the other
| videos were not precise/accurate) was really eye opening for me
| as a layman. Also her explanations about delayed observer not
| being as "weird" as people claim was also very helpful in
| demystifying quantum weirdnesses.
|
| She seems like a competent physicist with strong opinions that
| are grounded in some basis - can someone elaborate why they don't
| like her points of view? Are they problematic scientifically or
| do they just not like her style of rhetoric?
| ravi-delia wrote:
| She's a contrarian physicist. Every good physicist has one
| weird opinion, but she's collected every one of them and used
| them to beat anyone in hearing range over the head. No single
| take is far from the norm, but in terms of layman's content
| it's easy to get a really warped idea of the dominant paradigm.
|
| Honestly I think fewer people would have an issue with her if
| she was like 80% less abrasive, no matter how out there her
| ideas are. So keep watching, but be aware that there are
| conflicting viewpoints with more significant backing.
| kristianp wrote:
| This is the tldr for me:
|
| "the mean value of the new measurement isn't so different from
| earlier data analyses. The striking thing about this new analysis
| is the small error bar. That the error bar is so small is the
| reason why this result has such a high statistical significance.
| They quote a disagreement with the standard model at 6.9 sigma.
| That's well above the discovery threshold in particle physics
| which is often somewhat arbitrarily put at 5 sigma."
|
| "What did they do to get the error bar so small? Well for one
| thing they have a lot of data. But they also did a lot of
| calibration cross-checks with other measurements, which basically
| means they know very precisely how to extract the physical
| parameters from the raw data, or at least they think they do. Is
| this reasonable? Yes. Is it correct? I don't know. It could be.
| But in all honesty, I am very skeptical that this result will
| hold up. More likely, they have underestimated the error and
| their result is actually compatible with the other measurements."
|
| I think it's great that someone can tell me about the nature of
| the difference in the mass and whether it's likely to hold up
| under more scrutiny (no). I believe Sabine's judgement here as
| other small discrepancies have disappeared in the past.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| What implications would this discovery have if the evidence for
| it was overwhelming? The article talks about super-symmetry, but
| couldn't it be also possible that we get out of it just some
| small revisions to the standard model?
| msarchet wrote:
| My understanding is that the mass relates to particles that the
| w boson would have to interact with during collisions for it to
| have the mass that was measure. Our known model doesn't predict
| this which means there might be particles that we haven't found
| in our current model. Which is where the super symmetry comes
| from
| thayne wrote:
| Historically, that is usually what happens. This wouldn't be
| the first time the standard model was adjusted to fit observed
| phenomena, and it probably won't be the last.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Supersymmetry is simple in the context of string theory, which is
| where it came from.
|
| Write it down for particles and it is as godawful mess.
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm a physicist, but was never smart enough to grok particle
| physics. Today I work on measurement instruments.
|
| Still, I think breaking the standard model is a good thing. It
| means there's more physics to be discovered.
|
| Like Tolstoy said about happy families, successful physics
| theories are boring. In fact, if a fundamental theory is too
| successful, physicists start to get restless. The people who have
| a problem with breaking the standard model are those who were
| looking for a perfect final theory, or who wasted their time
| looking for its philosophical implications.
| rob_c wrote:
| No. Particle physics has shown a clear need for a clean next gen
| e/p collider. The author unfortunately got caught up in the grind
| of the field and not the context or big picture. And frankly this
| is exemplified by the US having an even stronger publish or
| perish attitude. Almost nobody ever in the field has used the
| phrase "god particle", at least in Europe. Thats yet another
| american contribution I'm sorry.
|
| Fine, leave the field, thats your prerogative, and do whats best
| for you. But please get back down off a soapbox and stop
| attacking the field that trained, educated and gave you the
| knowledge you have.
| 8note wrote:
| Has it shown a clear need? What's the required energy needed to
| show the new thing, and what what need does it fill?
|
| Will the next collider solve climate change?
| edgyquant wrote:
| > Will the next collider solve climate change?
|
| This is an irrelevant appeal to emotion, try to engage
| faithfully
| rob_c wrote:
| Higgs energy, discrepencies, and the need for precision
| higgs-science which we can only really do with a precision
| e/p collider rather than the dual-barral shotgun that is the
| LHC. The need it fills is to answer open questions about the
| standard model not explaining all known particle (the stuff
| you're made from) interactions or behaviours.
|
| Asking if it solved climate change is like me asking if your
| netflix subscription does. I'll ask nicely please don't be
| facetious.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| However pressing you may feel climate change is, it shouldn't
| be the sole focus of mankind for around trillion reason, give
| or take. We need progress on all fronts, hard science as much
| as more societal-oriented ones and everything around and in
| between. Just look at current world...
| acim wrote:
| Yes, it did. We know nothing.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| It is not my field, but the post, the video, has all the markings
| I see of outrage influencers on youtube: acting like they know
| better than everyone else, making broad swipes and claims,
| posting monetized videos with exaggerated eye popping photo
| covers, and the whole "I used to be them but saw the light and
| left schtick.", claims of scientists lying, without the honesty
| of naming names. Well, I'd rather get this kind of review from a
| review article in a solid journal than this tabloid.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Don't respond to tone rather than content, _especially_ if you
| 're in no position to evaluate the content. Otherwise you'll
| fall for horseshit spoken in a tone you like.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| There are numerous problems with approach you mention, ie
| strong push for emotions to sway opinion. If one resorts to
| attacking primitive emotions, hard facts clearly are not most
| important in the discussion anymore. In proper science, that
| should never be the case.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Judging a book by its cover is actually not the worst
| strategy for picking a book. And I WAS responding to the
| content; content like accusing scientists of lying, content
| like silly photos designed to get you to click.
|
| edit: To sum in Bayesian terms, the prior probability of
| reading a good book is greater if the publisher had sunk
| money into a high quality cover, because they believe in its
| content, while a trashy cover might be the only thing a trash
| book could obtain. Likewise, the prior probability of
| bullshit is greater if the tone is shrill, accusatory, and
| exaggerated, while the prior probability of quality content
| is greater if the scientific commentary is academic, serious,
| and professional.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Bayesian reasoning has its limits. If one is lazy and don't
| think to reconsider when warranted, it's often accidentally
| used as a crutch. Works in most cases I grant you that,
| just user beware.
|
| > "The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its
| life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more
| refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have
| been useful to the chicken" - Bertrand Russel
| cwillu wrote:
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-
| almost...
| stevenhuang wrote:
| I liked that article very much when it was shared,
| perhaps time for a rereading! Cheers.
| cwillu wrote:
| I will tolerate an abrasive tone in an emotionally charged
| discussion where people's lives are affected. I will do so
| carefully, because it's incredibly easy to be mislead by
| emotional content, but I will put in the effort, because
| important viewpoints can't be usefully distinguished from
| manipulation by their tone in those arenas.
|
| Physics is not one of those arenas. I am not even remotely
| worried that selecting explorations of QM interpretations
| based on tone might result in giving me a skewed perception
| of the topic due to my ignoring the views of those being
| harmed by them.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Speaking as someone who works with people on the math side of
| things, the author is a contrarian but not super far outside
| the norm. This is far from a "tabloid", this is real criticism
| from within the field. The tone is abrasive, but every
| technical field has people like that. I definitely dislike the
| layman audience she has built up, since just reading criticism
| without understanding what's being criticized is a recipe for
| truly stupid takes, but all of these are opinions plenty of
| people support, even in particle physics.
| joseluis wrote:
| I really think this paper should be more widely known, because
| it's eye opening: https://physicsdetective.com/something-is-
| rotten-in-the-stat...
|
| It made me realize QED is the equivalent of a million lines
| spaghetti codebase that's been continually built upon, fudge
| after fudge since the 40s, while being sold as the best thing
| ever, the ultimate model of reality, etc. While it really started
| as a temporary solution like a bash script that should've been
| replaced by something more elegant... many decades ago. And now
| we are in this mess.
| joshcryer wrote:
| That paper unfairly jabs at "Schwinger's numerology" because he
| chose the fine-structure constant in the equation (probably a
| guess, because he never published the theory behind it). It
| turns out the magnetic moment of the electron is one of the if
| not the most accurately measured thing in all of physics, and
| it fits _perfectly_ with it. So the basis of the entire
| article, that the g-factor "was obtained using illegitimate
| mathematical traps" is just misleading.
|
| You have to do the experiment to get the number, if the number
| doesn't fit with the experiment you have to figure out how to
| arrange the equation to fit with the experiment. I find this
| truly the basis for scientific progress. Even if we don't
| understand yet why it works the way it does. Why is the fine-
| structure constant everywhere in physics? It's not a hack it's
| experimentally derivable and has been reproduced over and over
| again.
|
| I don't see anything inherently wrong with what those
| scientists "did" with their fudging and playing with numbers.
| Experimentalists are not infallible. That's why we need
| reproduction and for others to think up other experiments and
| to do them. That's what science is about. Nice history paper
| though.
| peteradio wrote:
| Newton didn't predict the exact constant of acceleration, he
| predicted the form of the equation and experiment fills in the
| rest. There is no conspiracy of "fitting the equations", that's
| the whole point of experimental physics.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Oh wow, that's quite a crackpot-y web page.
| jfengel wrote:
| Every physicist knows about renormalization. It's not a secret.
|
| An "independent researcher" might consider that a discovery,
| but you could learn a lot more just by picking up any textbook.
|
| It's not "rotten". It's an open research question. One that
| every physicist already knew about.
| spekcular wrote:
| The person who wrote that paper doesn't understand the basics
| of the field that he's talking about.
|
| For example (from the blog post): "Consa gives an analogy
| wherein Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan has claimed
| that the sum of all positive integers is not infinite, but is
| instead -1/12. It's wrong, it's absurd, but renormalization has
| now been accepted, and is even sold as a virtue."
|
| One when performs zeta function regularization, one gets -1/12.
| This isn't some mystery; it's a perfectly reasonable thing to
| do. Analytic continuation has been understood since the 1800s.
|
| Reference:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_function_regularization
|
| Edit: I read more of the linked paper. The claim that Karplus
| and Kroll committed "fraud" is basically libel, as can be seen
| by reading the complete account. The worst one can say is that
| people didn't publish full details of calculations due to page
| limitations or laziness, but this is hardly a special feature
| of QED. For instance, Onsager famously solved the 2-d Ising
| model exactly in 1944 but never provided details in print, just
| the final solution.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Onsager was a bastard with omitting details. He has a 1949
| paper on packing of hard rods (and other anisometric
| particles), which is 4 pages long, but a colleague who went
| through the details of the derivation spent half a year and
| filled a ring binder with intermediate calculations.
| sva_ wrote:
| I wonder if this is a consequence of people demanding more
| "rigor" nowadays?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Well with electronic form it is now quite trivial to
| include the derivation, so no real reason not to publish
| it or at least a detail set of steps so demanding more
| rigor seems fair.
| spekcular wrote:
| Damn.
|
| I never actually learned this stuff. Is there a good
| textbook account of this isotropic-to-nematic transition
| that includes full details? Or is there still a gaping hole
| in the published literature?
|
| In other words, did your colleague do this as a kind of
| history project, or because the details weren't available
| anywhere else?
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| I don't think there are textbooks on this stuff, it is
| too much of a niche, you probably need to read journal
| papers. A place to start might be the classic "What is
| liquid?" review paper by Barker and Henderson:
|
| https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.48.587?casa_t
| oke...
|
| ... and then the classic review paper on liquid crystals
| by Stephen and Straley:
|
| https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.46.617?casa_t
| oke...
|
| But I believe the "gaping hole" as you call it has been
| mostly filled by the recent work. You probably still need
| to spend some weeks to follow along though.
|
| The motivation for my colleague was to develop the
| Onsager theory further, since Onsager only went to the
| second virial coefficient. They were able to go to
| higher-body contributions and get nice algebraic results
| for the equation of state, IIRC. I can probably dig up
| the DOI if you want to read it.
| spekcular wrote:
| Yes, I'd love to read it, if you have time to find the
| DOI. Thanks!
| Mo3 wrote:
| > but to borrow a German idiom, don't eat the headlines as hot as
| they're cooked.
|
| I'm German and I have never heard this before, but I like it.
| jhgb wrote:
| It's definitely a Czech idiom - "nic se neji tak horke, jak se
| to uvari". But apparently German has this, too:
| https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/es_wird_nichts_so_hei%C3%9F_g...
| Mo3 wrote:
| That reminds me, I saw something similar on this Ukrainian
| music video about Bayraktar drones too.
|
| Timestamp 0:25
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXVu_DeB4wo
| selimthegrim wrote:
| It appears the Russians are getting their soup warmed even
| hotter than the cooking temperature.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Is that like the German Christmas Pickle tradition that no
| Germans have heard of?
|
| https://youtu.be/Sb0qu_RjQ6I
| Mo3 wrote:
| That was excruciating.
|
| Just like the "Oktoberfests" that take place in America. It's
| a shit-show.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| They also tend to be in the wrong month.
| Mo3 wrote:
| Depends, when are they? The real Oktoberfest starts mid
| September. (Don't ask.)
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Well, they often start in October instead of ending just
| at the start of it.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| Dutch has something similar: " de soep wordt nooit zo heet
| gegeten, als zij wordt opgediend" (The soup is never eaten as
| hot as it was served).
| kalimanzaro wrote:
| "the headlines never get as hot on the plate as they did in the
| pan."
|
| --English speaker trying to make sense of it
| mikub wrote:
| I think it's reffering to "Nichts wird so heiss gegessen wie es
| gekocht wird", which translates to "Nothing get's eaten as hot
| as it get's cooked.".
| Mo3 wrote:
| Ahhhh, that. I only ever heard it being used in relation to
| imagining bad future events that turn out far better than
| expected.
| samstave wrote:
| German is an interesting tongue...
|
| Einsturzende Neubauten - the band, but the word means "a
| new building thats always in disrepair" (or so I was told)
| Mo3 wrote:
| Nah, it means "collapsing newly constructed buildings",
| lol.
|
| Einsturzend = collapsing
|
| Neubauten = made of "Neu"=new and "bauten"=buildings
| LegitShady wrote:
| Except overnight oats
| qsi wrote:
| Similarly in Dutch, de soep wordt niet zo heet gegeten als ze
| wordt opgediend. In this case it's soup that's not eaten as
| hot as it is served.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Is soup popular in Dutch cuisine? Honestly asking.
| Etymologies of aphorisms (especially multiple cultural
| ones) fascinate me.
| dtech wrote:
| Not particularly popular, especially nowadays. "Snert", a
| thick pea soup with pork, is a classic winter dish
| though.
| galgalesh wrote:
| In Dutch-speaking Belgium, soup used to be a staple of
| our diet. Every meal started with soup when I was young.
| Mo3 wrote:
| Een Nederlander zegt tegen zijn vrouw: "Johanna, giet een
| liter water bij de soep, we hebben gasten!"
|
| (I'm German, but I live in the Netherlands. I absolutely
| love these jokes between you)
| mellosouls wrote:
| Other recent discussions on the subject fwiw:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30955033
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977931
| paulpauper wrote:
| I dunno why this blog keeps be voted to the top. Yeah, current
| physics research is lacking in some areas .since when was it
| perfect?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Because she does a great job breaking it down for us mere
| mortals who only know basic calculus and linear algebra. I
| think it's great, and I like seeing stuff. I always take it
| with a bit of "this is one physicist's opinion" though.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Because Sabine is has the bona fides to know her stuff but also
| a contrarian and a bit of an outcast, and she knows how to
| market herself. All of this combined is perfect for hackernews.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Yeah, it's weird how she transitioned from being a fairly
| normal popsci blogger into being a sort of lubos light.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Populism is like gravity, to paraphrase the Joker in the
| dark Knight.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Yes, she is the Trump of Science. And I do not say that
| be be demeaning of either. While I do not care for Trump,
| he knows what he is doing when it comes to showmanship,
| and so does she.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| This comparison strikes me as much more unfavorable than
| you admit, because while Trump is categorically not an
| expert on what he purports to be (running a successful
| business) Sabine _is_ clearly an expert in her field.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yeah while not on the same order of magnitude it's like
| "You're a great orator, I mean your technique has a lot
| in common with Hitler's talents as an orator"
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Trump is successful with media, not his businesses.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Really all he's managed to do is hang on to the money his
| father left him. He is good at hiring lawyers &
| accountants that can put a wall between his personal
| fortune and corporate business that inevitably go
| bankrupt.
| paulpauper wrote:
| tbh, business success and understanding is much more
| subjective than physics understanding.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I think too much activity on social media does this to
| people.
| [deleted]
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| It seems publishing a lot on YouTube or Twitter is often very
| unhealthy for people. Over time it seems they all get sucked
| into the conflict machine that attracts viewers but is
| ultimately useless.
|
| I watched that with Sam Harris. He seemed to have interesting
| ideas but now he seems just to be good at debating. Same for
| Jordan Peterson.
| robonerd wrote:
| The author has a popular (and imho pretty good) youtube
| channel.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| I liked her content at first but now I'm tired of the way she
| implies that "scientists" are lying to us, stealing our
| money, and that she is here to reveal some truths that are
| kept hidden from us. After watching any of her video, I don't
| feel like I've gained any insights, except that I shouldn't
| trust "science".
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Can you point to any examples where she show distrust of
| science that was misguided? I felt her video about
| misleading PR for fusion was very eye opening.
| simulate-me wrote:
| I feel like this was too much a diatribe on why supersymmetry is
| not a good solution and didn't spend enough time on evaluating
| what the actual implications are of this result holding.
| gus_massa wrote:
| The problem is that (if confirmed) no one has any clue about
| how to fix the Standard Model to fix this. It will be a small
| fix, not a total rewrite like other alarmist articles claim.
| Anyway, no one know how exactly will be the fix.
|
| So each one propose her/his own pet theory. Supersymmetry? A
| second Higgs boson? Other ...????
|
| She doesn't like supersymmetry, and rants too much about the
| people that guess the fix will use supersymmetry.
|
| (I like supersymmetry, but this is not my research area, so she
| knows much more about this than me about this.)
| mannykannot wrote:
| On the one hand, it does not strike me as unreasonable to point
| out that experience suggests that this, too, will turn out to
| be an experimental or methodological error.
|
| Nor do I think it is unreasonable to point out that this
| result, if correct, would not validate supersymmetry (if that
| is, in fact, the case.)
|
| On the other hand, the fact that supersymmetry isn't a theory,
| but a property of a class of models that can be tweaked to fit
| a broad range of experimental results (again, if that is, in
| fact, the case) does not rule out the possibility that the LHC
| could have found evidence that strongly supported one specific
| theory that happens to be supersymmetric. Hossenfelder seems to
| be saying that the LHC definitively ruled out what was
| considered to be the most plausible candidate(s), which would
| imply there was at least one such falsifiable theory.
| Allegations of incompetence or mendacity should not be made
| lightly, and unless the promoters of the LHC routinely said
| supersymmetry in general might be disproved, the allegations
| seem unwarranted.
| lisper wrote:
| Falsifying supersymmetry is like falsifying Ptolemaic
| epicycles. You can never falsify it with data because
| epicycles can always be constructed to fit any data set [1].
| Likewise, a sypersymmetric theory can be constructed to fit
| any set of parameters. But fitting the data is not enough.
| You have to fit the data with substantially fewer parameters
| than data points. That's the challenge.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS4H6PEcCCA
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I feel like that example assumes the conclusion. A better
| analogy would be "spinning objects theories". It's a
| category so broad you could always find _something_ which
| works, but since it 's not really thought of as a
| particular solution, it isn't so vulnerable to overfitting.
| Epicycles were bad largely because they gave a false
| impression of closing in on reality; every new round of
| additions consisted of smaller and smaller tweaks. Spinning
| object theories are even more broad and adaptable, but
| since they aren't basically one solution you don't have the
| same issue. When Kepler found a spinning object theory
| which worked, it wasn't overfitting.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Indeed. Are you suggesting, perhaps, that the promoters of
| the LHC were making claims that they knew could not be
| satisfied by it - or, perhaps, that nothing they said could
| reasonably be interpreted as such a claim? The trouble is,
| I don't know which specific claims Hossenfelder is basing
| her allegations on.
| robonerd wrote:
| She explains that here
|
| http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-
| is-c...
|
| Quote:
|
| _Before the LHC's launch in 2008, many theorists
| expressed themselves confident the collider would produce
| new particles besides the Higgs boson. That hasn't
| happened. And the public isn't remotely as dumb as many
| academics wish. They'll remember next time we come ask
| for money.
|
| The big proclamations came almost exclusively from
| theoretical physicists; CERN didn't promise anything they
| didn't deliver. That is an important distinction, but I
| am afraid in the public perception the subtler
| differences won't matter. It's "physicists said." And
| what physicists said was wrong. Like hair, trust is hard
| to split. And like hair, trust is easier to lose than to
| grow.
|
| What the particle physicists got wrong was an argument
| based on a mathematical criterion called "naturalness".
| If the laws of nature were "natural" according to this
| definition, then the LHC should have seen something
| besides the Higgs. The data analysis isn't yet completed,
| but at this point it seems unlikely something more than
| statistical anomalies will show up.
|
| I must have sat through hundreds of seminars in which
| naturalness arguments were repeated. Let me just flash
| you a representative slide from a 2007 talk by
| Michelangelo L. Mangano (full pdf here), so you get the
| idea. The punchline is at the very top: "new particles
| must appear" in an energy range of about a TeV (ie
| accessible at the LHC) "to avoid finetuning."
|
| I don't mean to pick on Mangano in particular; his slides
| are just the first example that Google brought up. This
| was the argument why the LHC should see something new: To
| avoid finetuning and to preserve naturalness.
|
| I explained many times previously why the conclusions
| based on naturalness were not predictions, but merely
| pleas for the laws of nature to be pretty. Luckily I no
| longer have to repeat these warnings, because the data
| agree that naturalness isn't a good argument._
| mannykannot wrote:
| Thanks for this information. I agree with Dr.
| Hossenfelder about naturalness, but personally, I don't
| think that (or anything else here) justifies saying,
| about those who promoted the LHC with their expectations,
| that they were "either incompetent or lying or both."
| Irresponsible? maybe, depending on how influential their
| position was and how forcefully they made the claim.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR:
|
| > "I'm afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There's a
| reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated
| into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no
| relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other
| discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much
| about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so a lot of
| people still work on it, most of them don't like me. But the
| disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make
| progress are cosmology and astrophysics, and everything quantum,
| quantum information, quantum computing, quantum metrology, and so
| on, which is why that's what I mostly talk about these days."
|
| The popular science literature is also full of string theory this
| and god particle that, and it's really not very satisfying or
| illuminating. If people want to get into this general subject,
| I'd recommend instead Stephen Hawking's compendium of classic
| papers on quantum physics, with commentary, "The Dreams That
| Stuff is Made Of."
| gotaquestion wrote:
| > string theory this and god particle that, and it's really not
| very satisfying or illuminating
|
| I think what would be interesting would be a study of why
| researchers are drawn to string theory. I remember reading
| about it in OMNI magazine as a teen back in the 80's. During my
| studies at university, I learned about many proposals in
| physics that failed after people spend decades trying to hammer
| into reality (like the electrical ether, or planetary motion),
| only to have a genius show up and resolve the dilemmas with a
| completely different proposal. Going on its 5th decade, string
| theory feels like one of these ancient red herrings, but maybe
| it just needs a few more centuries?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Sabine went on full rant/iconoclastic/grudge mode IMO recently.
| It's a shame, as she a good communicator, but I just see myself
| skipping her content when it pops up.
|
| "I left the field because it's a paper production machine that
| adds no value to society" without substantiation is simply a
| frustration ridden meme.
| ralfn wrote:
| She wrote a book about this topic.
|
| So the claim that there is no substantiation is false. You
| just didn't bother to find out.
| elorant wrote:
| While I don't generally like her tone, I liked her book a
| lot. It has a lot of stuff for further research, and there
| are at least a dozen book suggestions in there. On the
| other hand she attacks the "beautification" of physics'
| theories without providing any alternative approach
| whatsoever.
| [deleted]
| bardworx wrote:
| How is attacking her character contributing to the
| conversation?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Fair enough, I wasn't aware. I'll check it out.
|
| I think you mean this: "Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads
| Physics Astray"
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-
| Astray/dp/04...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1KFTPqc0nQ
|
| I still find the tone off putting, reminds me of the fox
| and the grapes fable, not sure if it's known to most
| cultures.
|
| Nevertheless, I'll watch the video and reexamine my
| opinion.
| ianai wrote:
| I'm just generally increasingly off put by the internets
| incessant "quibbling". This seemingly endless
| juxtaposition of antithesis to follow any thesis. At some
| point that becomes just more noise, and that can be used
| by an agenda.
|
| I still found her point valid and interesting and not at
| all noise. My takeaway is more that new physics might
| well be out of our energetic grasps until we build some
| much larger accelerators. Little idea how to convince
| society of the worth of that expense. Maybe if it can
| produce useful substances for industrial use. I'd love
| more knowledge on expansions to the periodic table, for
| example.
| thechao wrote:
| The HN-centric term for this is "middlebrow"; a good
| middlebrow filter is definitely required to navigate HN.
| ianai wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| pegasus wrote:
| Searching HN for it brings up this explanation as the
| first hit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224
| gralx wrote:
| ya i aint never heard the term b4 neither. colorful.
| wonder if _middlebrow_ refers to furrowing between teh
| browz?? >
| edgyquant wrote:
| I am as well, because the internet isn't designed for
| people to reach an objective consensus about reality nor
| does it account for the way humans really engage one
| another naturally. We need a platform designed to
| encourage people to reach understanding but anyone,
| myself included, who wants to do this is looking for a
| profit motive when some things are more important than
| profit as much as I hate to say it.
| rad88 wrote:
| Adding more because I've read her book (not to quibble).
| I wouldn't say the point is that new physics is out of
| reach until we build more expensive accelerators. She
| herself is a theoretical physicist, has theories she'd
| like to see tested and proposes experiments that could do
| so. I think she's saying rather that particle physics
| involves enormous opportunity costs -- decades long /
| billion dollar experiments -- and that the research
| agenda is not scientifically justified, but is
| sociological and even aesthetic in origin.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _fox and the grapes fable, not sure if it 's known to
| most cultures._
|
| That's one of Aesop's fables. I believe it's widely
| known, at least in all western cultures. The fox can't
| reach the grapes he desires, so he concludes the grapes
| were sour and he didn't want them anyway.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| That's the one, yes.
| thechao wrote:
| The idiom "sour grapes" comes from that story!
| cwillu wrote:
| If it's what I think it is, it's usually (in english at
| least) succinctly referred to as "Sour grapes"
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I've read a few of these articles and they all have
| basically the same format, which is similar enough that
| they're not quite as interesting to read. First a headline
| "does the invention of Swiss Cheese mean that Cheddar
| Cheese is extinct?" Followed by a little bit of interesting
| and useful scientific summarization. Then onwards to a
| point about how we're dealing with lots of theories and not
| enough empirical data, so the whole field is useless and
| also not worth spending time on.
|
| I would point out that lots of other important scientific
| fields have been in this situation before. Maybe there's an
| interesting argument to the overfunding (but then again,
| developing theories is also pretty important!). But mostly
| it just feels like she's made the point and while it's an
| important point, getting a clear picture of the scientific
| results is more valuable than this particular opinion. (But
| I stress, it is her platform to do with as she wants.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| >without substantiation
|
| Really? Pretty much every article in this field is some click
| bait title similar to "did this recent discovery break
| science?" and is quite tiresome. But a more accurate title
| like "Results from new experiment are so far out of norm for
| prior understanding that much more scrutiny is needed"
| doesn't gain attraction.
| folkrav wrote:
| I wouldn't describe those pop-science articles as the
| scientific "papers" I assumed was talked about.
| bawolff wrote:
| I feel like everytime her name comes up, its always a bunch
| of comments like "i don't like her tone" or whatever, but
| never much in way of substantiated disagreement.
|
| I can't help but wonder if she is just speaking uncomfortable
| truths about things a lot of the hn audience like, where
| nobody can really come up with a counter per se but there is
| still a negative gut reaction of i-don't-like-people-
| challenging-my-world-view so the criticism comes out as, i
| dont mind your view i just hate the way you say it.
| johnny22 wrote:
| I can't say I know enough to say she's "challenging my
| world view" since i don't necessarily know enough about the
| subject to have a world view.
|
| But I still have a negative reaction to the way she (and
| others in other fields) does it.
|
| Because whether it's true or not, it doesn't tend to get
| results in changing how things are done.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Because whether it's true or not, it doesn't tend to
| get results in changing how things are done.
|
| But at the same time, several comments on this post are
| talking about how they think her diatribes will have an
| undue influence on funding decisions, so i doubt that
| accounts for all the negativity.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| I do think that her "the mainstream scientists are doing
| it wrong/lying/wasting money" shtick advances mistrust in
| science in general. That worries me.
| beezle wrote:
| There are a lot of other areas of physics, some even involving
| the use of colliders, that are in better position and value to
| make discoveries that either advance our understanding and/or
| have applied/commercial application.
|
| One example is the National Synchrotron Light Source II at
| Brookhaven. The money spent nationally and globally on these
| types of facilities are a fraction of what goes to LHC or, not
| long ago, the Tevatron at Fermilab.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Yes, those kind of projects have a lot more uses and deserve
| more funding and attention. Stanford's Linac Coherent Light
| Source is another example:
|
| > "The Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC takes X-ray
| snapshots of atoms and molecules at work, revealing
| fundamental processes in materials, technology and living
| things."
| octonion wrote:
| Contrarianism should never be confused with intelligence. When
| someone says "most of them don't like me", you can hear the
| underlying hisses of "because I am right and they are wrong"
| and "because I am smart and they are dumb". If most people
| don't like you, there's a very simple reason for it.
| stubish wrote:
| She never said 'most people don't like me'. She said 'most
| [particle physicists] don't like me'. It just means she has
| touched on a point of contention that particle physicists
| care a lot about.
| d0mine wrote:
| This part also stand out to me. It is unfortunate that a
| science communicator would express her research preference in
| such a way. It is true there were no breakthrough in ages in
| the particle physics (standard model works extremely well), it
| is true "paper production" has disproportionate influence on
| funding (applicable to academia in general), personally I'm
| excited about the recent deployment of Webb space telescope
| (new instruments are often good for scientific progress), and
| quantum computing is gobbledygook (theoretically there were
| some exciting algorithms, in practice I expect at best modest
| but nonetheless important [cryptography] applications--that we
| could duplicate in less elegant way in a classical way)
|
| but for people unfamiliar with science it may sound like
| "defund LHC" (that would be unfortunate)
| slibhb wrote:
| > It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express
| her research preference in such a way.
|
| Why is it a bad thing to have preferences?
|
| > but for people unfamiliar with science it may sound like
| "defund LHC" (that would be unfortunate)
|
| She's on the record against building bigger colliders. It
| follows from her views that we should fund other stuff and
| not colliders.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Then the Trisolarans will win without question
| adrian_b wrote:
| Unfortunately the standard model does not work "extremely
| well".
|
| Even if we suppose that the standard model is completely
| correct, it does not allow the computation of the majority of
| the useful physical quantities.
|
| What is needed is a model that would be able to compute all
| the physical quantities that are important in practice, e.g.
| the masses of all hadrons and of all atomic nuclei, also
| their magnetic moments, the energies of their excited states,
| the energies of the excited states of the atoms and of the
| ions, and so on, starting from the properties of the
| elementary particles and of their interactions.
|
| Despite the huge progresses which have happened in
| experimental physics, we are now no closer of having a useful
| theory able to compute what we need _ab initio_ , than we
| were exactly one hundred years ago, before the most
| influential work in quantum physics was published by de
| Broglie, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Born et al (from
| the point of view of the computable values, the Dirac theory
| of the hydrogen atom was only a minor improvement over what
| could be done using the Wilson-Sommerfeld quantization
| condition from 1915 and the more complex systems remained
| uncomputable; the quantum field theory improved a little the
| precision of some previously computable values, but only very
| few other additional quantities became computable _ab initio_
| ).
|
| All the useful applied physics, e.g. the theory of the
| semiconductor devices, or theory of the lasers, and any other
| theory used to design real devices, do not have any use for
| the standard model, but they use various empirical
| mathematical models, which contain lots of parameters that
| are determined experimentally, in order to match the
| predictions of those models with the experiments.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Would you be complaining about Copernicus not adding
| anything to equants and epicycles if you lived then?
| adrian_b wrote:
| While another poster rightly pointed that Copernicus
| still used epicycles, you are correct in implying that
| the greatest contribution of the theories created after
| 1920, e.g. quantum mechanics, quantum field theory,
| chromodynamics etc. has been in the enhancement of our
| _qualitative_ understanding of the physics of the
| elementary particles and of their interactions.
|
| This _qualitative_ understanding has been very helpful as
| a guidance in the development of various approximate
| methods used for the modeling of the systems that are too
| complex to be computable _ab initio_ , e.g. atomic
| nuclei, atoms with many electrons, molecules,
| semiconductors, superconductors and so on.
|
| Nevertheless, while the _qualitative_ understanding was
| improved by the more recent theories, they remain useless
| for obtaining _quantitative_ results.
|
| All physical systems that are interesting are too complex
| to be computable _ab initio_ , so in order to predict
| anything about them, wild approximations must be used,
| which are different for every physical system. There are
| no universal rules about how to develop such
| approximations.
|
| If an approximation method is found, which after
| measuring experimentally the values of various parameters
| allows a model to predict other experiments with
| sufficient precision, then good. If not, there is no way
| to know if some other acceptable method can be found, and
| how to search for it.
| robonerd wrote:
| Copernican heliocentrism still used epicycles, so fans of
| those would not have been completely disappointed.
| evanb wrote:
| I think your comment is far behind the times. Directly from
| QCD we have: computed the low-lying parts of hadronic
| spectrum, computed the proton-neutron mass splitting, made
| _pre_dictions about hadronic masses that were then found at
| the LHC, computed the nucleon axial coupling g_A, vacuum
| polarization and light-by-light, and so on. It requires
| supercomputers. But so what? Nobody promised that physics
| should be easy.
|
| We know how to match our effective field theory of protons
| and neutrons in nuclei to QCD observables. This project has
| been under way for 20 years. Expect major breakthroughs as
| the exascale machines mature. If we match our EFTs to QCD
| calculations then there would be no additional parameters
| fit to data, and our intellectual edifice will have
| quantitative predictivity from fundamental particles to
| neutron stars. It's hard. Nobody promised that physics
| should be easy.
| katmannthree wrote:
| > It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express
| her research preference in such a way.
|
| It is disappointing, and more unfortunately pretty much her
| personal brand now. There are, as she seems to have
| discovered, a lot of eyeballs to be had when you bash things
| that are poorly understood and already looked down upon for
| it.
|
| She's a fine physicist and her points have merit, but she's
| smart enough to be perfectly aware that rather than improving
| the field through discussions with peers what she's doing
| here is just capitalizing on that distaste people have for
| their work and doing what she can to undermine them.
| rout39574 wrote:
| I think her perspective is quite a bit more productive than
| just capitalizing on distaste. For example, in this
| discussion she's making concrete criticisms of specific
| communications patterns.
|
| I don't think it's too strong to call it "disinformation"
| out of the journals. They claimed that the next big toy
| will prove or disprove supersymmetry. They never
| acknowledged that their claim had been incorrect, or that
| it was misleading.
|
| Calling out that repeated pattern is, I think, on the
| respectful side of the public gadfly playbook.
|
| I think she wants to "improve the field" by incenting
| theoretical advances that actually lead to testable
| predictions. Unfortunately, that transition will put a lot
| of e.g. string theorists out of work.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Not really, in the sense that Hossenfelder only advocated
| for subtracting resources from particle physics, never
| about what should be funded instead.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _never about what should be funded instead._
|
| This isn't entirely true. In this blog post
| (http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/04/does-world-
| need-lar...) she recommends:
|
| > _" One of the key motivations for building a larger
| particle collider that particle physicists like to bring
| up is that we still do not know what dark matter is made
| of. But we are not even sure that dark matter is made of
| particles. And if it's a particle, we do not know what
| mass it has or how it interacts. If it's a light
| particle, you would not look for it with a bigger
| collider. So really it makes more sense to collect more
| information about the astrophysical situation first. That
| means concretely better telescopes, better sky coverage,
| better redshift resolution, better frequency coverage,
| and so on."_
|
| Though she goes on to say
|
| > _" But really my intention here is not to advocate a
| particular alternative. I merely think that physicists
| should have an honest debate about the evident lack of
| progress in the foundations of physics and what to do
| about it."_
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > better telescopes, better sky coverage, better redshift
| resolution, better frequency coverage
|
| And all of this is being built currently or already
| exists (ELT, ASSN, Vera Rubin, SKA, CTA), so it's not
| clear what she's advocating.
| brabel wrote:
| > doing what she can to undermine them.
|
| She's not trying to undermine anyone, just giving her
| opinion about where funding should go in order to actually
| advance our knowledge of the world.
| dekhn wrote:
| She definitely tried to undermine LIGO. This is a very
| carefully written article designed to cast shade:
| http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-
| ligo....
| pessimizer wrote:
| Characterizing all (or even just the most dismissive)
| criticisms as attacks or devious attempts to undermine
| keeps nice people from being truthful.
| dekhn wrote:
| I'm not sure what that means, but she definitely was
| outright wrong on that one, and she used all her skills
| to make what looked like a convincing argument for "there
| just isn't enough data there to conclude gravity waves".
| robonerd wrote:
| I don't think the contention here is whether she's right
| or wrong. Phrasing like _' undermine'_ and _' cast
| shade'_ seems to imply malicious intent, which is going
| too far. Being wrong isn't the same as being wrong with
| malicious intent.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| The fact that she chooses to bring forward here doubts
| via youtube, books, and blogs (i.e. the things she earns
| money with) instead of/in addition to a well written
| paper on arxiv (i.e. like everyone else who wants to
| partake in a honest physics discussion*) lets me question
| her intent. (She has papers to some of the things she
| complains about, which normally get answered by
| rebuttals. This is normal scientific discourse. A blog
| with locked comments is not.)
| robonerd wrote:
| Maybe she's in it for the fame and money, but I don't
| think that would make her intentions malicious.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| She abuses an information asymmetry and social
| conventions. Scientific discourse is usually conducted in
| academic papers, for better or worse this is how the
| community conducts itself. When she criticizes others
| work or the usefulness of the fields outside this channel
| she is addressing as a singular voice the general public.
| Which gives her voice an outsized presence with a public
| that is not prepared to engage on equal terms on that
| discourse or prepare any rebuttal. Meanwhile the rest of
| the physics community looks dumbfounded because she is
| escaping the typical means of discourse and ratting them
| out to the general public, that can't really make an
| informed judgement.
|
| Either she is socially clueless on how this can be seen
| negatively by the rest of the scientific community or she
| is malicious in her attempts to defund parts of science
| she believes shouldn't get funding.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| There is a limited pool of resources available to do basic
| fundamental science and it's fair to argue that things like
| LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare
| resources, without a whole lot to show for it. Since it's
| the general public that ultimately funds these projects
| (unless the LHC can attract its own Jeff Bezos), I think it
| is OK to have a public discussion about it.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Is it fair to argue that though? What's the metric for
| that? $ per Nobel prize? If you look at $ per scientist,
| LHC is actually quite cheap. $ per "theory tested", LHCb
| has disproved so many theory papers it's not even funny.
|
| If you compare how much money is spend on fundamental
| research (or research in general), the pool of funds for
| a given direction is not limited because of other
| research. It's limited by all the other things we spend
| money on. If society wants to fund more DM, astro,
| whatever research, it would be much easier to find that
| money for example in the military spending. A minimal
| haircut there and you could double the research funding.
| XorNot wrote:
| > LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these
| scare resources
|
| As opposed to? This sentiment was bandied around _a lot_
| before the LHC went online, but no one ever had a
| proposition of what the alternative was is the goal was
| to advance fundamental particle physics. You 've got
| exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic interactions: (1)
| particle accelerator measurement and (2) incidental
| measurements of high-energy spaceborne collisions.
|
| We're doing both. Theoreticians being unable to
| conclusively find a new measurement is a problem
| independent of the fact the LHC exists _to do those sorts
| of measurements that they 'd need_.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Proton decay experiments? Magnetic monopole searches?
|
| Providing better bounds on the (non-)existence of
| phenomena predicted by existing non-Standard Model
| particle physics theories sounds like a worthwhile
| endeavor rather than praying that particle accelerators
| will maybe uncover a particle if you give it just a
| little bit more juice.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| What's the difference to new particles predicted by BSM
| theories you might uncover if you give it just a little
| bit more juice? Especially if you measure a ton of other
| things at the same time?
| patrick451 wrote:
| As opposed to funding things that are not particle
| physics at all. As far as I can tell, knowing that bosons
| exist has had approximately zero impact on our ability to
| engineer new stuff. Personally, I'm tired of footing the
| bill for a field that requires the one of the largest,
| most expensive experimental systems ever conceived yet
| seems unable to produce more than useless factoids.
| JackFr wrote:
| Maybe the physicists are looking for their car keys under
| the streetlight. Unable to find, them the only solution
| they can conceive of is a bigger streetlight.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Which might be the right approach in a world without
| torches?
| robonerd wrote:
| > _no one ever had a proposition of what the alternative
| was is the goal was to advance fundamental particle
| physics. You 've got exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic
| interactions: (1) particle accelerator measurement and
| (2) incidental measurements of high-energy spaceborne
| collisions._
|
| Sabine has recommended funding more telescopes to learn
| more about dark matter.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| As opposed to open season on new theory - or even new
| kinds of theory.
|
| The Standard Model is a bit of a franken-theory of a
| thing, a kit of parts bolted together in awkward ways. It
| looks a lot like the pre-quantum ad-hoc theories that
| attempted to describe quantum effects before QM was
| invented.
|
| It's hard to believe that physics can't do better. But
| easy to believe that physics won't do better while most
| of the money and all of the mental space is owned by
| concepts that are more than a hundred years old now.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| That sounds like you are complaining about the amount of
| investment in experimental physics in general, rather
| than the LHC in particular. It is true that fundamental
| physics could use a major breakthrough from the
| theorists. However, the theorists we do have are
| desperate for more experimental evidence to help them.
|
| Add to that that experimental physics is simply far more
| expensive then theoretical physics, and it should come as
| no surprise that we spend more money on experiments then
| pure theory.
|
| The complaint about LHC is more about questioning weather
| spending $5 billion to smash protons together is the most
| effective way of getting more empirical evidence to the
| physicists.
| spekcular wrote:
| "Not a whole lot to show" from the LHC? We got the Higgs
| Boson, and piles of data providing more accurate
| measurements of fundamental constants in the Standard
| Model, along with a ton of progress in various "applied"
| areas related to developing the materials/tools for
| constructing the thing.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > But the disciplines where the foundations of physics
| currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics, and
| everything quantum, quantum information, quantum computing,
| quantum metrology, and so on
|
| Everybody ignores the condensed matter people!
| DrBazza wrote:
| Another reason many leave is that new ideas don't get funding.
| So physics, in particular becomes a monoculture. There is
| always merit in bad ideas even if the only conclusion is that
| it was wrong.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _" Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production
| enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal
| progress [...] But the disciplines where the foundations of
| physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics
| [...]"_
|
| Can anybody explain the relevance of cosmology and astrophysics
| to societal progress? I'm sure these are very worthwhile fields
| of study in other respects.. but societal progress?
| noobermin wrote:
| Cosmology and astro fundamentally can be tested. The models
| therein have implications on things like the Cosmic Microwave
| Background, so it fits "societal progress" in the sense it
| pushes humanity's knowledge of the universe forward.
|
| I do think particle theory probably does push knowledge
| forward, the problem is it is quite a bit further from
| something that can be tested, it is more akin to mathematics
| these days where they're not really trying to describe
| reality because as she says, susy and friends could be
| morphed to fit anything. In fact, and this might be a
| stretch, but I feel like there is a motivation not to have
| predictions sometimes because then you could be proven wrong.
| Perhaps this is still "pushing knowledge in general forward"
| as opposed to knowledge that actually describes reality,
| similar to mathematics perhaps.
|
| Not really related to societal progress, but the difference
| between particle theory with mathematics is mathematicians
| are actually rigorous while particle physicists get by with
| the usual lack of rigor (relatively) of physics in general.
| The argument usually employed by theorists in other physics
| fields is that this lack of rigor is okay because physics is
| science and you could always do an experiment afterwards to
| validate theory. Particle physics less and less has that, so,
| where does it sit? I feel like may be a valid path forward is
| for particle physicists to embrace that they are no longer
| really doing science and are rather doing mathematics, and
| probably to even adopt some of the rigor of mathematics, then
| particle theory could really bloom into a really valuable
| field of study on the "pushing general knowledge forward"
| side of things.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Well, Newton's laws of motion are a direct result of
| cosmology/astrophysics.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology
| that benefits society? Well, it's the same principle for
| esoteric experimental science: unique requirements leads to
| new tech being developed and then you can turn around, and if
| you find some use for some bit of the new tech you can tout
| it as a "boon to society".
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology
| that benefits society?
|
| No, not since World War 2. Examples?
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| ARPANET and GPS come to mind. Both were developed with
| large military impetus.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology
| that benefits society?
|
| I've heard that, yes, as well as NASA inventing velcro and
| zippers and teflon, and all of it has a faint tinge of "not
| actually true at all" to it.
| [deleted]
| dwaltrip wrote:
| You don't see how NASA has pushed technology and science
| forward? The inspiration it provides for people becoming
| engineers and scientists is alone probably worth a non-
| trivial fraction of the US GDP.
| robonerd wrote:
| Couldn't the same be said for particle physics? The
| accelerators and detectors seem very high tech.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| The LHC computing infrastructure is also quite
| impressive.
| jfengel wrote:
| And CERN is literally the reason we're here on th Web
| right now.
| moonchrome wrote:
| That's a huge stretch. CERN might be a reason we have the
| web that looks like it looks today, but we would have
| something similar with or without CERN.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| We might be stuck with compuserve and AOL.
| vidarh wrote:
| We had the internet before the web, and we had gopher. So
| we had an open network, the client server model and
| links. What the web brought was a more flexible protocol
| and document format. That was important, but there's no
| way we'd have been stuck with compuserve or AOL.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Do you remember the time when messenger services were
| open to third party clients? You could actually talk to
| all your friends using only one app!
|
| Those days have _ended_.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| there's a lot of learning potential in building one or
| two but after that you're pretty much just making them
| bigger. There's a lot of engineering and construction
| involved but the new ones are really just very expensive
| and huge without netting necessarily much in terms of
| engineering science. In particular if you consider
| opportunity costs. With the 23 billion(!) it costs to
| build the new Large Hadron collider you could fund
| 230.000 100k grants to young scientists. That's enough
| money to fund entire disciplines.
|
| And that's important to keep in mind because money is a
| limited resource and what's relevant is where that money
| didn't go rather than just speaking idealistically about
| the potential benefits of a megaproject.
| spekcular wrote:
| "There's a lot of engineering and construction involved
| but the new ones are really just very expensive and huge
| without netting necessarily much in terms of engineering
| science."
|
| This is extremely false. The new engineering science
| required to make the incredibly strong magnets for each
| collider (newer colliders requiring stronger magnets) is
| one obvious counterexample.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| The world spends about 2 Trillion dollars on military per
| year. 23 billion over, say, 10 years as a lower bound, is
| a per mille of that. NASA has a _yearly_ budget of 20
| billion, ~1 /3 of which goes into science.
|
| (BTW, with 100k, in experimental physics, you can't even
| pay for a postdoc at an US institution for a year)
|
| That shouldn't mean NASA should get less money. But 23
| billion for a world-wide, multi-decade project isn't that
| much.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Your comment about skill transfer is about as accurate as
| if you had meant going from "toy boat" to "Ever Given
| (the ship)".
| welterde wrote:
| The technology used in the accelerator and the detectors
| keeps changing though. Particle accelerators today are
| quite different to those in the 60ies.
|
| Also not sure where you got the 23 billions from. Total
| budget for LHC is less than 8 billion euros. And that's
| over quite a long time frame. The whole CERN budget is
| only 1.1 billion a year (and they run quite a few
| different experiments apart from the LHC). That's within
| a factor of a few of a major sports club!
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I'm talking about the _new_ collider (FCC), the LHC is
| already finished so there 's not much point talking about
| its costs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Circular_Collider
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| No, not if take her at face value. She's saying particle
| physics has built a framework where the goalpost can keep
| moving.
|
| It's become a bottomless trap of sorts.
|
| Given that resources--money and bright minds--aren't
| infinite, she then proposes that there are other areas of
| research that received less attention and are ripe for
| discovery.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Every human society more or less has had a religion with a
| version of their cosmology, it seems universally relevant to
| human interests to have an actual set of answers. And what is
| "societal progress" anyway?
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| My view of societal progress would look retrograde to
| almost everyone.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Have you considered becoming Amish?
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| If you met me and saw how I lived you would probably
| think I was close enough.
| jll29 wrote:
| Modulo Internet access?
|
| Out of (off-topic) curiosity, what is the reason for that
| choice of life style? Just minimalism?
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Homelessness. Not really much of a choice.
| couchand wrote:
| Well, I'd argue that till now many of our most vibrant
| flowers of innovation ultimately grew out of basic research
| into how the universe works. A deeper understanding of the
| fabric of the universe seems enough to me to call it
| "societal progress" (with the OP saying particle physics no
| longer provides such new insight), but if you're looking for
| specific technologies that might come of it, perhaps consider
| the benefits that could accrue to human space travel.
| 8note wrote:
| The black hole has become a culturally important concept,
| being the center of different media as well as a common
| metaphor, allowing us new descriptions of ideas
| dEnigma wrote:
| I don't think she was trying to say that those disciplines
| contribute to the progress of society in any meaningful way.
| The point, in my opinion, was that particle physics has
| neither relevance for societal progress, nor currently makes
| progress in the foundations of physics (as opposed to the
| other two disciplines).
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >Can anybody explain the relevance of cosmology and
| astrophysics to societal progress?
|
| What is "societal progress" anyway? I'd argue that society is
| regressing, not progressing. I'd further argue that the worth
| of your pursuits and endeavors have no relation to the
| progression or regression of society at large.
| klyrs wrote:
| I dunno about "progress" per se but when smart physicists and
| mathematicians leave their fields, they often end up in
| finance and tech. Mostly doing the opposite of "societal
| progress," they're pulling levers to maximize profit from the
| destruction of society.
|
| What I'm saying here is essentially "idle hands are the
| devil's playground." Keeping wonks fascinated by the minutae
| of the nature of the universe is, in my mind, better for
| society than many alternatives I see.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Pale Blue Dot, the snapshot of Earth taken by Voyager I,
| comes to mind.
|
| https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-b.
| ..
|
| The effect is more psychological than technological, but it
| shows the foolishness of global warfare and resource
| exhaustion in the name of short-term profit, and encourages
| people to live together peacefully and work together to solve
| global-scale problems.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| > and encourages people to live together peacefully and
| work together to solve global-scale problems.
|
| Hey, guess what? It didn't work. Have you read the news
| lately?
|
| Besides, I know a few sociopaths that would look at that
| Pale Blue Dot and think "I want it all".
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| According to many metrics, it seems the world is indeed
| improving over time. The news is a poor source for
| evaluating the net sum of human suffering - the incentive
| model is all wrong.
|
| https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_gett
| ing...
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| As the island of improvement grows, so grows the shores
| of suffering.
|
| But can a dataset really encapsulate human suffering? Is
| there a lower percent of people suffering but are they
| each suffering more individually? What is the quality of
| the suffering? Is it better to suffer 30 years with pain
| or to die after a month of it?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > But can a dataset really encapsulate human suffering?
|
| Yes
|
| > Is there a lower percent of people suffering but are
| they each suffering more individually?
|
| No
|
| > What is the quality of the suffering?
|
| Lower
|
| > Is it better to suffer 30 years with pain or to die
| after a month of it?
|
| Depends on quality of life.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| >> But can a dataset really encapsulate human suffering?
|
| > Yes
|
| Suffering its subjective so it is impossible. And you
| proved it with:
|
| > Depends on quality of life.
|
| because quality of life depends on how much suffering you
| can live with.
| nine_k wrote:
| An easy, direct link, for example:
|
| Careful observation of the orbit of Mercury --> Special
| Relativity --> General Relativity --> GPS satellites able to
| keep exact time --> the map app on your mobile phone.
| salty_biscuits wrote:
| This idea that you need to model GR to do GNSS is very over
| stated. You need to correct for a GR effect, but it is a
| small part of a residual in a least squares problem that
| gets regressed away. So it is important for understanding
| the error budget but it really is a small effect, compared
| to say ionospheric delay due to atmospheric charge or clock
| drift.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| Was the orbit of Mercury (or any other astronomical
| observations) important for the discover of Relativity. My
| understanding was that experimental impetus for relativity
| was the Michelson-Morley experiment, which was an in-lab
| experiment, not an astronomical observation. General
| relativity was then developed on a purely theoretical
| basis.
|
| That it was able to explain Mercury's orbit was a nice bit
| of empirical confirmation after the theory was developed.
| Having such evidence probably helped get the theory
| accepted faster; but probably wasn't necessary. Almost by
| definition, a theory that is ultimately useful can be
| confirmed without need of astronomy. If the theory is
| useful to do X, then we can try doing X as an experiment
| and see if it works how the theory predicts.
|
| As a secondary point, we could probably get GPS to work
| even without relativity. The core idea makes just as much
| sense under any theory of a finite speed of light. When we
| actually launched a GPS constellation and try it, the
| engineers would notice that the clocks were drifting for
| some unknown reason. Some ad-hoc corrections later and the
| engineers could account for the drift based on empirical
| evidence, likely with regular re synchronization and
| recalibration of the fudge factors.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Was the orbit of Mercury (or any other astronomical
| observations) important for the discover of Relativity._
|
| For _general_ relativity, yes.
|
| _> My understanding was that experimental impetus for
| relativity was the Michelson-Morley experiment_
|
| This was one of the results that pointed the way to
| _special_ relativity. It had nothing to do with general
| relativity.
|
| _> General relativity was then developed on a purely
| theoretical basis._
|
| No, it wasn't. There was a huge body of experimental
| evidence already about gravity. It was true that all of
| that evidence, _except_ for the anomalous precession of
| Mercury 's perihelion, could be explained by Newtonian
| gravity; but general relativity, as a proposed new theory
| of gravity, had to also account for all of that
| experimental evidence. In other words, in the appropriate
| limiting case (weak fields and low speeds compared to the
| speed of light), general relativity had to reproduce all
| of the correct predictions of Newtonian gravity. That was
| a huge, and very important, experimental constraint.
|
| _> Almost by definition, a theory that is ultimately
| useful can be confirmed without need of astronomy._
|
| Not if the differences between its predictions and the
| predictions of the previous theory (in this case
| Newtonian gravity) are only measurable in astronomical
| observations at the time the new theory is proposed. That
| was true of general relativity in 1915 and for at least a
| couple of decades afterwards. The differences between GR
| and Newtonian gravity for earthbound experiments were
| simply too small for the technology of the time to
| measure. So astronomical observations were the only way
| to test GR when it was proposed.
|
| _> we could probably get GPS to work even without
| relativity_
|
| Technology can of course be developed on a purely
| empirical basis, if you're prepared to make a lot of
| mistakes along the way that you wouldn't make without a
| good theoretical foundation. If it hadn't been for the
| knowledge of relativity on the part of the scientists
| involved, the GPS satellites probably would have been
| launched without _any_ capability for adjusting their
| clock rates. Which would have meant that, once clock rate
| drift due to relativistic effects was seen, there would
| have been no way to adjust for it. So those satellites
| would have become expensive but useless toys, and a new
| constellation of satellites would have had to be built
| and launched.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| > No, it wasn't. There was a huge body of experimental
| evidence already about gravity. It was true that all of
| that evidence, except for the anomalous precession of
| Mercury's perihelion, could be explained by Newtonian
| gravity; but general relativity, as a proposed new theory
| of gravity, had to also account for all of that
| experimental evidence. In other words, in the appropriate
| limiting case (weak fields and low speeds compared to the
| speed of light), general relativity had to reproduce all
| of the correct predictions of Newtonian gravity. That was
| a huge, and very important, experimental constraint.
|
| Yes. I assumed that reproducing Newtonian gravity in the
| classical limit would be considered theoretical, as we
| had a solid theoretical understanding of Newtonian
| physics. Implicit in that would be a bunch of empirical
| evidence; but Einstein wouldn't need to explicitly think
| about the details of what evidence supported Newtonian
| mechanics (beyond the general understanding that it was
| all in the classical limit).
|
| > Not if the differences between its predictions and the
| predictions of the previous theory (in this case
| Newtonian gravity) are only measurable in astronomical
| observations at the time the new theory is proposed.
|
| Such a theory is not "useful", for many definitions of
| useful. Astronomical observations allowed us to verify
| Relativity earlier than we otherwise would be able to;
| but eventually technology advanced to the point where we
| could conduct satellite based experiments to directly
| confirm it. The theory was not practically useful until
| we had this technology.
|
| > Technology can of course be developed on a purely
| empirical basis, if you're prepared to make a lot of
| mistakes along the way that you wouldn't make without a
| good theoretical foundation. If it hadn't been for the
| knowledge of relativity on the part of the scientists
| involved, the GPS satellites probably would have been
| launched without any capability for adjusting their clock
| rates.
|
| Its not like we launched the entire GPS constellation
| then just hoped it would work. Before launching the GPS
| constellation, we launched the experimental Timation
| satellites to act as a proof of concept. Difficulties
| with maintaining accurate clocks in orbit would have been
| noticed then (if not sooner).
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Good luck finding a $1Tr project without real world
| evidence - just theoretical models.
| flaburgan wrote:
| You mean like we do at CERN?
| fhars wrote:
| No, there was basically no empirical input into the
| development of special relativity either, Michelson-
| Morley was already perfectly explained by Lorentz
| contraction caused by movement of matter through the
| ether.
|
| What special relativity did was solve the purely
| theoretical contradictions between Newtonian mechanics
| and Maxwell's electrodynamics (hence the title of
| Einstein's paper "On the electrodynamics of moving
| bodies"), reinterpreting Lorentz' math for the
| description of movement through the ether as
| transformations of spacetime itself and doing away with
| the ether.
| robonerd wrote:
| True, but if we graft this argument onto Sabine's argument,
| it doesn't seem very fair. Those astronomical observations
| and the development of General Relativity were done a
| century ago and have relevance today. But if particle
| physics is being judged against astronomy, then shouldn't
| the modern societal benefits of century old of particle
| physics count as well, contradicting the claim that
| particle physics lacks societal benefits?
| noobermin wrote:
| While she makes the rounds on HN, it is really worth noting
| that as she says, Sabine Hossenfelder is more or less a pariah
| amongst particle physicists, as was Lee Smolin before her. It's
| disappointing though because I largely agree with her
| assessment, too much of particle physics has left what I would
| consider science and is now a paper generation exercise (not
| that that isn't throughout science, but particle theory is even
| more so in that direction).
|
| This is one of those places where peer-review fails, if you
| study or proclaim something against the prevailing norms. There
| is a slight hope for you if you're a well known name already,
| like Hossenfelder, but it's pretty much a death sentence for
| you if you're at a no-name university somewhere. There really
| is no motivation to pierce the wall vs. just silently doing
| little incremental work that continues the current established
| theory even when on a whole that theory is leading the field
| nowhere.
|
| Usually, at some point the funding dries up but they're lucky
| all the big famous names are sympathetic to particle physics
| and it continues to command a large amount of funding amongst
| those studying fundamental physics. So things march on.
| olaf wrote:
| to paraphrase a german ...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-04-30 23:00 UTC)