[HN Gopher] Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the night...
___________________________________________________________________
Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding
nothing else
Author : pseudolus
Score : 356 points
Date : 2022-06-15 10:52 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| lemursage wrote:
| This feels like that Futurama episode where Farnsworth discovers
| the last particle and descends into panic, realising he has
| nothing else to do. However, in my opinion, asking why there's
| nothing else is also a valid question to consider, even if we
| suspect there's something more to what we've seen so far.
|
| Also, perhaps it'd be a tad bit more accurate to rephrase it
| `particle physicists`, not `physicists` -- even though it's
| totally exaggerated anyways.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Science has had countless cycles of believing we had
| discovered, more or less, all that was to be discovered and the
| remainder would come in sorting out things to another decimal
| place. Then a revolution, sometimes in short order, sometimes
| centuries later, comes around and emphasizes our ignorance and
| arrogance.
|
| So at any given point you have two options: that we've finally
| reached "the end" - this is it and we can go no further. Or
| that we're at yet the latest cliff-face searching for that
| ever-elusive path through. I would always bet, hard, on the
| latter. At least if I could live forever, because even if I am
| right there's every possibility, if not probability, that none
| of us living today will be around to see it shown.
|
| The notion of being able to discern all the fundamental laws of
| the universe while living on a single isolated grain of sand in
| a beach of ever more bizarre discoveries stretching out
| endlessly in all directions just seems improbable to me, at
| best.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| At some point that becomes philosophy more than physics.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Experiments need good hypotheses to be useful.
|
| Sometimes hypotheses can be generated incrementally and this is
| what 99.9% of the scientists are capable of doing.
|
| It seems that probably we have hit that wall in particle physics
| and we need a Giant to smash it and take us to the next level.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| I believe they got a lot of good data about the proton, it helped
| with that...it's just a good instrument in general. There's other
| virtues. And you think a particle isn't good enough? Realize how
| important the electron was to you eg reading this? There's still
| time for more work.
|
| But like the age of discovering new continents is passed, now
| it's subtler things. Like the time when the center of Africa was
| unknown, but the Americas and Australia and Antartica were known.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I really thought I'd see meaningful progress on harmonizing
| quantum mechanics and relativity or some of these other "big"
| problems in fundamental physics but now I'm not so sure.
|
| This by the way is a good reason not to dump tens of billions
| into a successor to the LHC. We simply don't know what we're
| looking for. Despite a number of significant upgrades we still
| haven't found anything that breaks the Standard Model. I mean
| we've disproven a lot and that means something but we should
| still have an idea what we're looking for.
|
| I'd love to know what making new space (ie what makes the
| universe expand) actually means. At one point I thought space
| might be discreet (eg at the Planck length) but that's not how
| that works.
|
| What is time? What is space? What really is mass? What is a
| force? These are things we can describe the effects of but not
| really what they _are_. It would be deeply disappointing if there
| was a fundamental limit to our understanding that would prohibit
| a deeper explanation, which actually seems like a possibility.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| > What is time? What is space? What really is mass? What is a
| force? These are things we can describe the effects of but not
| really what they are.
|
| That's how models work. Even a unifying theory would not
| satisfyingly answer those questions.
| otikik wrote:
| Physicists are facing the nightmare that tomorrow is Thursday and
| nothing else.
| fifticon wrote:
| Then get to work figuring out dark matter..
| syngrog66 wrote:
| unfortunate they included the word "nightmare" in the title.
| hardly a nightware in the overall scale of nightmare-worthy
| things
| trentnix wrote:
| Wasn't there an article a week ago about a new particle found "on
| a tabletop"?
|
| Feels like I'm being hustled.
| Hellion wrote:
| Stop reading pop science articles
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Probably a food particle
| ww520 wrote:
| Haven't all the particles in the Standard Model been found? LHC
| is not strong enough to look into gravity or dark matter. What
| else can be found?
| maxclark wrote:
| I hate this headline
| piokoch wrote:
| This is bollocks. Typical clickbait title. There is still a lot
| of unsolved problems in physics, both experimental and
| theoretical. Particle physics is just one branch of science (and
| rather boring, if you ask me), popularized by CERN marketing, so
| people think new physics equals finding some new particle.
|
| There is a lot of interesting problems waiting for exploration. I
| will not even try to list them "unsolved physics problems"
| googling shows enough.
| Certhas wrote:
| That's a very uncharitable reading of the headline. I think
| it's pretty clear that it's talking about particle physics, not
| physics as a whole. At any rate the article makes this clear in
| the first line:
|
| > Unless Europe's Large Hadron Collider coughs up a surprise,
| the field of particle physics may wheeze to its end
| ssorallen wrote:
| This is clickbait to someone in particle physics?
|
| It describes the standard model, what the LHC was able to find,
| what it hasn't been able to find, and why there is skepticism
| about further discoveries. This is some high quality clickbait.
| anticristi wrote:
| Fascinating! The victims of their own success. I would love for
| Sabine to cover this
| (https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder).
| Brometheus wrote:
| She surely will...
| dav_Oz wrote:
| "Science" doesn't care about individual careers or generations
| (in that case of physicists) who are left with "nothing else" to
| discover (fundamentally) and are simply "condemned" to pass the
| torch (determining values and uncertainties as best as possible).
| It's a brutal selection process if viewed from an individual lens
| which can consciously participate for say at best only 3
| generations.
|
| The institutionalized systems - which themselves carry an often
| underappreciated (in the field itself) or overexaggareted
| (outside the field) intertia - we now have in place to best
| approximate "science" are still left with a lot of headroom for
| optimization.
|
| One of the many corners overlooked handwavingly imhv are for
| example the attempts to raise scientific literacy (critical
| thinking, formulating (theoretical) and testing (practical)
| hypotheses) in the societies overall, the fertile humus, so to
| speak. Because of the massive shifts/societal changes actually
| the reverse seems to be happening in the last decades in an
| accelerating speed. Decentralizing science could help here and is
| a legitimate concern in the case of the LHC as an example of a
| highly centralized research model. I find the struggle for a
| sweet spot appropriate, here.
|
| That being said, it is still possible that we just find ourselves
| at a local low (at the current level of the LHC) with some
| arising anomalies but by just pushing the energies a little
| farther this let's us get out of the hole, again. So, nobody is
| arguing to shut the LHC altogether, but depending on what we
| find, the next "Future Circular Collider" to be built on top of
| it might simply not be "worth" it in the foreseeable future.
| fartsucker69 wrote:
| There are more fundamental considerations to be made. For
| example, the small scale structures of the universe might just
| be too small to be observable by experimental means. As in, not
| just practically too small (too difficult to build experiments
| for it), but fundamentally not possible to observe due to their
| mathematical structure.
|
| There are already a lot of things in quantum physics
| particularly that we can't observe directly. For example,
| there's no such thing as observing separate quarks - if you
| separate two quarks too much the binding energy between them
| pops another set of quarks into existence. But you can infer
| their existence indirectly "via math" basically.
|
| However it's easily possible that the more fundamental
| structures of the universe are bound in such a way that you
| can't even observe them indirectly, even if you had access to
| machines that could produce the energies required.
| jcroll wrote:
| This nytimes article has a very different take. The field is
| excited at the prospect of new physics:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/science/cern-hadron-colli...
| lokimedes wrote:
| These articles will be gold in 100 years. We found the bottom of
| reality, guys, no need to look further!
| danaris wrote:
| That's not really what's being said. We _know_ there 's more to
| find; we _know_ there 's problems with our current
| understanding; we _know_ we haven 't found "the bottom".
|
| The problem is, we've found what _looks_ like a bottom, and all
| the looking we do for cracks in it, or knocking on it to find
| hollow spots, or hitting it really hard to try and bust
| through, just keeps coming back with everything being unbroken,
| solid, and unyielding.
|
| It's not self-congratulation; it's frustration.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| No. The nightmare here is physicists knowing the Standard Model
| can't possibly be the bottom, but lacking clues about where to
| find stairs.
| typon wrote:
| This comment itself might be the "real" gold, if in a 100
| years, we actually make no material advances in experimental
| physics and the state of the art remains. I would bet that it's
| quite likely, unless somehow we achieve communist utopia and
| the world economies combine to fund a solar system size
| accelerator.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Why would this be a nightmare, isn't this good? They know they're
| going down the wrong path and can probably correct?
| nemo44x wrote:
| True but you'd hate to be the physicist that spent their career
| going down the wrong path only to see tomorrows physicists
| discover the big breakthroughs and the realization that your
| contribution will be sent to the dustbin of history.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Yah. Well, for most of us, the prospect of making a
| significant contribution to the sum of human knowledge is a
| faint prospect.
|
| They say all political careers end in failure. Very few
| politicians die in the saddle, or simply retire. Most of them
| are destroyed. My guess is that most careers in science
| research end similarly; lots of career-length research
| projects fail to achieve their goals, and very few scientists
| get Nobels for world-changing discoveries.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _for most of us, the prospect of making a significant
| contribution to the sum of human knowledge is a faint
| prospect_
|
| Physicists are bright people with other options. They
| forewent those other options to have an increased chance at
| contributing to human understanding. I can empathize with
| the greater tragedy of their failure than that of _e.g._ a
| millionaire adtech founder.
| lmm wrote:
| The prospect of actually "finishing" physics could be a
| nightmare for those working in it.
|
| I had a friend who was a brilliant pure mathematician, his
| teachers and friends agreed he fully deserved to do a PhD in
| complex analysis - but complex analysis was essentially done in
| the 19th century, there's just not a lot of research
| opportunities there.
| prmph wrote:
| I can't really believe that this is the case, although I'm
| nowhere near being a mathematician. The very nature of
| knowledge is that every new understanding or discovery raises
| even more questions.
|
| So complex analysis is pretty much done? Well, could the
| methods of complex analysis suggest analogical methods in
| other analytic fields? What work could be done at the
| intersection of complex analysis and X, when X is any other
| mathematical field? Also, I hear it is frequently useful in
| the solution of physical problems. There are many unsolved
| physical problems that could benefit from being reviewed from
| a complex analysis perspective.
|
| > There's just not a lot of research opportunities
|
| Maybe this is the crux of the matter; it is not that there is
| any lack f work still to be done in complex analysis, but
| there are few research areas in the field that can or are
| able to attract funding.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| ?? maths creates new problems to solve. Pick another field
| within it.
| Rerarom wrote:
| I have a friend who is a professor with a PhD in complex
| analysis. Multivariable complex analysis (along with the
| theories of complex manifolds and analytic spaces) is very
| far from over.
|
| Heck, one of the Millennium Problems (the Hodge conjecture)
| is in complex geometry (granted, in the more algebraically
| flavoured part of it).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This NYT article from 2 days ago
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/science/cern-hadron-colli...
|
| spins it the other way. Personally I am amused by this old
| scandal
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...
|
| because there is some precedent for superluminal neutrinos (I saw
| an experiment at Los Alamos National Labs that was trying to
| measure the neutrino mass by observing tritium decay and their
| best fit estimate for the mass was imaginary, although consistent
| with zero.) Also if "SERN" was like it is in
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate_(TV_series)
|
| superluminal neutrinos would be something they'd definitely cover
| up.
| labrador wrote:
| Good. Now maybe physicists can start solving the riddle of
| consciousness.
| yt-sdb wrote:
| A few years ago, I went to a public interview/chat with Rainer
| Weiss in NYC. He described years of work in which the LIGO team
| found inventive ways to make their systems more precise. They
| just kept knocking down orders-of-magnitude. Still, after taking
| new measurements, they found nothing. No gravitational waves.
| Then the interviewer asked him if he was discouraged at this
| point in his career. I loved his response. He said, "No, it was a
| more meaningful zero."
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 0.000 > 0.00
|
| Love it.
| evanb wrote:
| You have the inequality backwards!
| timdiggerm wrote:
| Mathematically, yes. But in terms of value, no.
| nerdponx wrote:
| An economist might notate this as "0.000 [?] 0.00".
|
| Curly comparison operators like "[?]" (U+227B SUCCEEDS)
| are often used specifically to avoid ambiguity with
| traditional comparison operators like ">". See:
| https://www.oeconomist.com/blogs/daniel/wp-
| content/uploads/2...
| w-j-w wrote:
| pinko wrote:
| I know Ray and this is an accurate retelling of this line, but
| it's comparing apples to oranges in the context of this thread.
| He knew LIGO was rapidly approaching the necessary sensitivity
| to make great discoveries -- a threshold. The LHC experiments
| may already have the sensitivity necessary to make their great
| discoveries, and may just be chasing diminishing returns at
| this point. Big difference.
| adverbly wrote:
| It is interesting that you bring up LIGO. I actually had a
| formative experience in my career around a decade ago related
| to this. I worked on the project for a summer. During that
| period, I realized that the process of discovery in the dark is
| one where the seekers have no control over the treasures. I
| decided not to pursue a career in the field. My lotus of
| control could not handle dedicating my life's work to chance.
|
| Rainer demonstrated a dedication and passion in that interview
| that not everyone can meet. I learned that I'm more passionate
| about effective/real world problem solving than I am about
| physics.
|
| Those who have a true passion for physics have my complete
| support and admiration. You're doing great - keep at it :)
| tablespoon wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me or sadden me if particle physicists don't
| make any new fundamental discoveries or real theoretical
| breakthroughs for the next millennium.
|
| They also probably only have 20-30 years to show something if
| they ever want to build another, bigger and more expensive
| particle accelerator.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It would surprise me greatly, because I'd go "hey! I'm over
| 1000 years old!"
| mkl95 wrote:
| A nightmare as in "my job will likely be boring until the day I
| retire". A nightmare many dream of.
| alienozi wrote:
| dlsa wrote:
| At least they are finding nothing and confirming they are finding
| nothing. Less scrupulous operators might be always finding
| something even if its not there. So that's a sign of good
| science.
|
| Maybe there's something they haven't found because there's so
| much data? Mix things up and look again? Change assumptions?
|
| Or as someone I know likes to say to various smaller humans: have
| you looked around the couch? Really? Are you sure? Have you had a
| good look? _this is how the tv remote usually subsequently
| reappears_ as there is a difference between _just_ looking and
| having a _good_ look.
|
| The best science also happens when you've looked, not found it
| but now know where not to look. Even better science happens when
| you know exactly why it shouldn't have been there at all.
| Surprising science happens when you find the errors in your
| assumptions and discover it can sometimes be where it previously
| was not expected to be.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Just based on my experience in academia, there are probably
| plenty of people with good hunches about where to go next.
| Unfortunately, the system (grants system especially) is
| actively discouraging them from trying anything too new that
| would undermine the status of the incumbent experts.
|
| If you banned every single influential scientist who hasn't
| contributed a major discovery in the last 10 years from
| participating in academia, we'd have colonised the galaxy
| decades ago.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Hey, can you please not fulminate on HN? It sounds like you
| might know quite a bit about the field (or some of it), but
| commenting like this degrades discussion and evokes worse
| from others. If you would make your substantive points
| thoughtfully, and share some of what you know, that would be
| much better.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| hamsand wrote:
| the more posts are banned and shadowbanned the more like
| reddit this website becomes, aka a boring place for boring
| people to say boring things. interesting people don't like
| censorship
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _Have you had a good look?_
|
| It's difficult to explain, but they[1] tried very hard.
|
| For example the electron has an electric charge but it's also
| like a small magnet. In an ideal elementary particle, the value
| of the magnet is 2 * something. In a real elementary particle
| the value is almost-2 * something, so they are measuring the
| almost-2, and it's call g [2].
|
| For an electron, the measured value of g is
| 2.00231930436256(35)
|
| , there are is an uncertainty of 0.000000000002%. The problem
| is that it agree with the current theoretical prediction.
|
| The muon is very similar to an electron, but the experimental g
| is [3] 2.0023318416(13) and the
| current theoretical prediction is 2.00233183620(86)
|
| It's a difference of 0.000000001%. Most people will be happy
| with that disagreement and forget about it. But They are happy
| because there is a disagreement and perhaps they can use that
| to discover a new particle. It still may be a long lived
| statistical fluke, but it already survived many years. Other
| team claimed that there is a small error in one of the
| experimental numbers used in the theoretical calculation, but
| I'm not sure if they are genius or crackpots or something in
| between.
|
| And there are many other experiments. I like for example the
| IceCube [4] that is just a giant chunk of ice in the
| Antarctica. They try to detect neutrinos from stars. It has
| many experiments, but in particular some experiments are useful
| to measure the difference of mass of the neutrinos that is a
| not very clear part of the Standard Model.
|
| [1] Not my area of research. They live in the next corridor.
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics)
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_g-2
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
| abhv wrote:
| gus_massa: Since you are likely an expert, could you
| recommend a resource that explains how you use the Lagrangian
| equation for the standard model [1] to actually compute a
| predicted value for the electron's g ?
|
| An elementary resource that goes through basic steps for a
| computer scientist (non expert in QFT) would be a great. A
| simpler particle than electron is also ok, but I'd love to
| understand how you mess with that equation.
|
| [1] http://nuclear.ucdavis.edu/~tgutierr/files/stmL1.html
| gaze wrote:
| You mess with it by doing diagrammatic perturbation theory,
| that is, calculating Feynman diagrams. Zee or Weinberg
| could be good references. There's also lattice QFT but you
| generally want to learn the perturbative methods first
| gus_massa wrote:
| Sadly not an expert in that area. I only took a course of
| Nuclear Physics for a Major in Physics [1]. So I can read
| and understand that stuff, but the fine details pass over
| my head.
|
| Looking at a recent page of that course, the recomended
| books are
|
| * F. Halzen, A. Martin, "Quarks and Leptons: An
| introductory course in modern particle physics" (Wiley
| 1984)
|
| * D. Griffiths, "Introduction to elementary particles"
| (Wiley 1987)
|
| (and a few more)
|
| The calculation for g=2 is quite easy (for an advanced
| Physics student). I remember the general idea, but not the
| details. I think I can reconstruct the details if
| necessary. It may be explainable in a blog post skipping
| some details.
|
| The first correction g=2+1/137.036 is also humanly
| compresible, and can also be explained with some graphics.
| It would be very hard for me, but if I have a week to seach
| and rehearsal it is possible.
|
| As the sibling comment says, the following corrections
| g=2+1/137.036+g=2+?/137.036^2 get harder and harder. And
| there are too many technical details and problems. I can
| only see the graphics and get a shallow understanding, but
| how they are transformed to integral and how to calculate
| all of them efficiently is too much for my knowledge.
|
| [1] I never finished my Major in Physics, but I finished
| the one in Math.
| lr1970 wrote:
| > Looking at a recent page of that course, the recomended
| books are * F. Halzen, A. Martin, "Quarks and Leptons: An
| introductory course in modern particle physics" (Wiley
| 1984) * D. Griffiths, "Introduction to elementary
| particles" (Wiley 1987)
|
| It is telling that for a recent course the recommended
| books are over 35 years old. Consistent with the OP
| proposition.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Rather like Jackson is still a standard electrodynamics
| text after 60 years. Classical EM is finished. But,
| quantum field theory is not.
| orbifold wrote:
| You can look at "QFT in a nutshell" by Zee, a highly
| recommended and pretty accessible book (to the degree a
| book on QFT can be accessible), for the computation of g
| for the electron to one loop order. That calculation can
| also be found in "Quantum field theory and the Standard
| Model" by Schwartz in Chapter 17 (p. 321). I'm not aware of
| a textbook exposition of the calculations relevant for the
| muon g.
| l33tman wrote:
| The paper describing the theoretical steps necessary to
| compute g for the muon is hundreds of pages of condensed
| math, theorems and approximations etc.
|
| The SM Lagrangian is not computable, so a big part of
| theoretical physics is about finding tricks to actually
| compute it.
|
| Incidentally this is why there is disagreement on the muon
| g-2 discrepancy, at least two theory groups have calculated
| different values using different approximations.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| It should be noted that the anomalous electron g-2 is
| computable _analytically_ (at least to very good
| approximation) which makes the theoretical value much
| less controversial. The anomalous muon g-2 however
| depends more heavily on interactions of quantum
| chromodynamics, which can only be computed using
| numerical lattice QCD simulations. This is notoriously
| hard and has only become practical in recent years, hence
| why theorists don 't yet fully agree on the value.
|
| Also, computing even just one part of this value is
| basically on the level of a theoretical particle physics
| dissertation. Don't expect to be able to do this without
| several years of research experience in this specific
| field.
| kkylin wrote:
| It may be worth first understanding why g=2 (if you haven't
| before). This can be done on the basis of special
| relativity + quantum mechanics, i.e., the Dirac equation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation
|
| The "g" is the Lande g factor:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land%C3%A9_g-factor
|
| (As I recall nonrelativistic QM gives g=1.)
|
| PS Not a physicist, but learned some of this at some point.
| Only ever learned about electrons, though; don't know how
| any of this translates to other particles.
| jwuphysics wrote:
| I have two recommendations you might find useful. The first
| is QED, a series of lectures by Richard Feynman. This text
| covers the qualitative nature of the perturbation theory
| used for quantum electrodynamics. The second is Quantum
| Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur by Lancaster and
| Blundell. It's nicely written and accessible at the
| advanced undergrad level, building up QFT from the basics.
|
| Caveat-- I work in astronomy but have a PhD in physics and
| have taken graduate QFT.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _Have you had a good look?_
|
| Are you aware of how hilarious it is in the context of high
| energy physicists verifying the standard model to ask if they
| had "good look"? I don't think a collective effort to look any
| harder has ever existed in the history of humankind.
| ezconnect wrote:
| It's probably something they can't measure now that will be
| discovered next, that's why they need to keep looking.
| dlsa wrote:
| I've received feedback from some very smart people who
| laughed out loud and knew exactly what I meant by _having a
| good look_. Two of them are physicists and many more are
| engineers. They said they have found many metaphorical
| couches and there 's a lot of nothing. They've also found
| quite a few interesting metaphorical paperclips and other
| debris. But that there's so many more places to look. They
| also think there's a bunch of metaphorical couches they still
| haven't found. Its especially hard to look under something
| when you can't even recognise what it is to look under. Thats
| part of the difficulty.
|
| They've also assured me they'll let me know when they finally
| find another metaphorical tv remote.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Yeah I assumed your comment was in good faith, and as a
| physics drop-out I'm well aware of how most people have no
| idea of the sheer scope of these research projects, so I
| didn't mean it as a jab against you.
| dlsa wrote:
| I didn't take it as a jab. I also received a bunch of
| messages from people poking fun at me elsewhere for my
| comment. In the past several physicists have been a
| source of fine wine when I've won a bet.
|
| There will probably be photos of couches in my office
| next week when I get back.
| not_kurt_godel wrote:
| Ok, then where should they look if you're so smart? You
| think people who have dedicated their lives to studying
| this subject haven't considered the concept of looking
| everywhere possible, and that you're adding something to
| the discussion by trotting out this 'clever' metaphor?
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Bike shedding for the senses
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| There probably is a hard limit on how many elemental particles
| you can find in the first place. I don't know if there are
| further theories. Are there X or Y-Bosons? Lowfat quark anti-
| particles?
| Melatonic wrote:
| I've always thought that a huge limiting factor is that we can
| only really observe from our current point in time. We are time
| limited which is a big hindrance just as it would be to only
| observe things form a single physical position (which is also
| sort of true - but at least we can send probes and whatnot out
| there).
| elorant wrote:
| One thing to notice is that during the experiments they keep
| only a small percentage of the total data they could record due
| to limitations in storage and processing capabilities. There's
| a lot of fuss inside the scientific community about what to
| keep and what to disregard.
| analog31 wrote:
| That's happening. I have a friend who did a physics + data
| science PhD for analyzing existing data in a new way.
| z3t4 wrote:
| The best science is found by accident.
| highwaylights wrote:
| They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is
| nothing.
|
| They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what
| they might find, and have established some evidence against
| others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| The problem IS that they have found nothing. We know the
| Standard Model, as good as it is, is either incomplete or
| incorrect and without new physics somewhere we have no
| indication of how to fix it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _without new physics somewhere we have no indication of
| how to fix it_
|
| This is a bit harsh. We have loads of unexplained, well
| measured phenomena. More clues helps. But it's not
| conclusively necessary.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Idk, theres been no major progress since the 60s-70s
| after QCD, String Theory is a complete dead end and there
| aren't any great candidate theories out there. So the
| lack of findings certainly hasn't helped.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| This "nothing" is valueable information nonetheless.
|
| Science is just as much (often more) about ruling out
| hypotheses as it is about confirming them. Sometimes that
| means ruling out all existing hypotheses, meaning new ones
| have to be formulated to be tested in turn.
| fhars wrote:
| The problem here is that the most favoured hypothesis
| currently is "there is nothing there that can be
| discovered with any accelerator that can be built using
| less than 80% of the world's GDP over the next 50 years."
| And all the valuable "nothing" we currently find just
| supports the hypothesis and that there is no point in
| formulating additional hypotheses.
| jordanpg wrote:
| This.
|
| This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the
| only "success" is a new discovery.
|
| This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled
| out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater
| confidence, the experiment has succeeded.
|
| What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and
| public support for additional funding. That is a political
| problem and it is solvable. If Western governments can find
| the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I
| am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager
| budgets of the scientific establishment.
| Certhas wrote:
| The author correctly reports a scientific debate inside of
| science amongst scientists.
|
| Particle Physicists can pretend this is just a political
| problem all they want, but if more and more other
| physicists are convinced the field is entering a desert
| there will be no new accelerator. Maybe even more
| importantly, if students learn about the true state of the
| field they will chose more interesting things to study.
|
| Human time and effort is limited, and scientists don't go
| around and devote hundreds of thousands of person years to
| rule out random hypothesis. Effort at LHC level is only
| devoted because there is a very very good reason to band
| together to get this done that convinced many other
| scientists (who in turn helped convince funding bodies).
| LHC has been a huge success on its own terms, but its
| results are simultaneously a massive problem for particle
| physics as it stands right now.
|
| Not a problem for science, just a problem for the field of
| particle physics, which will need to adjust to the current
| reality rather than holding out for more data.
| osigurdson wrote:
| A new discovery over some time period is a reasonable
| expectation. For example, if we discover nothing in the
| next 1000 years we would have to conclude that there is no
| longer any point in trying.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western
| governments can find the public support for trillions in
| military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found
| for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific
| establishment.
|
| Is it solvable? Humans are notoriously bad at certain
| things and investing in things that aren't showing
| interesting results is one of them. How many companies will
| cut something that prevents problems because they don't see
| problems?
|
| If you want to solve this, you would need to do it the same
| way the MIC has solved military funding, by ensuring
| continued funding of science is necessary for politicians
| to be re-elected. But that borders close enough to
| corruption I'm not sure the scientists who need the funding
| will be agreeable to it, to say nothing of the difficulty
| engineering this.
| anticristi wrote:
| > If Western governments can find the public support for
| trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it
| can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the
| scientific establishment.
|
| Sadly, that achievement -- public support for trillions in
| military expenditures -- belongs to a not-so-Western
| government invading a wanna-be-Western government.
| Coding_Cat wrote:
| The issue for particle physics specifically, is that they
| _hope_ to find something that breaks the theory. But so
| far, only find confirmations of the current Standard Model.
| Succesful experiments, yeah, but doing little for pushing
| our understanding of the universe unfortunately.
|
| The reason why they want to break the standard model is,
| simplified, two-fold:
|
| 1. While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain,
| we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other
| theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed
| to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks
| of the universe and it should therefore describe
| _everything_.
|
| 2. the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and
| weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't
| like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of
| experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity
| electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was
| essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a
| mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian
| relativity, essentially correct but missing some key
| insight that is needed to fix it.
|
| Finding something that breaks the standard model could go a
| huge way to solving both these issues. But the standard
| model just keeps getting confirmed at higher and higher
| resolution.
|
| In software terms: it's like you know there's a 1/1000'000
| bug _somewhere_ in the software but every single test you
| write to try and find it passes.
| gaze wrote:
| There's a huge mismatch between people who are science
| fans and people who are doing physics anywhere near
| particle physics. It's quite hard to explain how the
| field is spinning it's wheels squared against what people
| consider scientific progress.
|
| Edison's "I found 100 things that didn't work" is a nice
| parable but it doesn't work across an entire field.
| morbia wrote:
| (former PhD in Particle Physics in QCD here, far from an
| expert)
|
| > While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain,
| we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other
| theories of matter. This is a problem because it's
| supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental
| building blocks of the universe and it should therefore
| describe _everything_.
|
| I think this is a misunderstanding of what the Standard
| Model is and the scientific process that went into it. It
| is a model for describing the interactions of electroweak
| and strong force interactions, and that's it. This is
| based of years of experimental data and coming up with a
| consistent theory that fits the data. No one went out to
| come up with a "theory of everything", missed and ended
| up with the standard model.
|
| The Standard Model is clearly a low energy effective
| theory of something more, almost by definition. The
| problem is we have absolutely no data to drive
| predictions of higher order theories (which could also
| turn out to be low energy effective theories themselves).
| Without data, there is a very real chance that the
| standard model is the best model we're going to have for
| particle physics.
|
| > the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters
| and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists
| don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also
| out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity
| electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was
| essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a
| mess. People fear the standard model is the new
| lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing
| some key insight that is needed to fix it.
|
| Ugly is a subjective term. A lot of people talk about
| stuff like 'naturalness' problems with the standard
| model, but is that really a problem? Who are we to say
| what numbers are the natural order of things. Gravity is
| orders upon orders of magnitude weaker than all the other
| forces, is that 'natural'?
|
| I think comparing it to Lorentzian aether is a little
| harsh. If you compare special relativity to Lorentzian
| relatively, special relativity is just a simpler model
| (it doesn't need aether). I think it's extremely unlikely
| at this stage that given only the data we have right now,
| someone would be able come up with a theory that would be
| fully consistent with the Standard Model but is simpler
| and doesn't predict new stuff. It's not impossible, but
| it is very unlikely.
|
| Actually I think the biggest problem with the Standard
| Model is how to go from the theory to real predictions.
| Formulating the lagriangian of QCD is the easy bit,
| converting that to real predictions (either on the
| lattice QCD end at large alpha_s or perturbative QCD at
| small alpha_s) is extremely difficult. It's almost
| laughably absurd where it is not unheard of for
| calculations of single processes to take a decade or
| more.
| jordanpg wrote:
| I think a lot of commentary on this thread is losing
| sight of what the world "model" really amounts to in a
| scientific context.
|
| It's an abstraction. A bunch of math that just-so-happens
| to result in accurate predictions. That's all it _really_
| is. How the universe _really_ works (putting Tegmark
| aside) is a separate, ultimately philosophical question.
|
| Much of particle physics is simply exploring the
| parameter space in which various models might be
| applicable. In the most exciting case, the model crumples
| in some new, unexplored region.
|
| The value of bigger accelerators comes down whether the
| higher energies, in which we have not yet explored, are
| worth exploring, relative to the cost of doing so. That
| is certainly debatable.
|
| But it's not a "desert." Nobody knows what higher
| energies will reveal.
| roywiggins wrote:
| It's like going treasure-hunting and demonstrating to
| everyone's satisfaction that there is definitely no
| treasure where you looked. It doesn't tell you very much
| about 1) if the treasure you're hunting really exists
| (there's many more places it could be), or 2) what exactly
| the treasure consists of.
|
| It's technically more information, but it's not very _much_
| information.
|
| eg, what did we learn from the underwater hunt for MH370?
| not a lot, millions were spent to still have no clue where
| the thing is. It's not just political to say that the hunt
| failed in an important way.
| atx42 wrote:
| My take is we were asking the wrong questions, and now we
| know that, so hopefully we can figure out the right
| questions.
| jerf wrote:
| The problem isn't that "finding nothing" isn't progress.
| The problem is that "finding nothing" is _terrible_
| progress-per-dollar.
|
| If you're still having trouble with that concept, peer into
| the alternate universe where the LHC actually provided
| enough data to nail down the Theory of Everything. Now that
| would be some progress-per-dollar to celebrate.
|
| There's a contingent of people who just don't want to think
| about "how much" progress something is making and want to
| live in a fantasy world where building a multi-billion
| dollar particle collider that finds nothing is exactly the
| same as a $50,000 experiment that finds nothing. I don't
| know that I'm terribly interested in trying to argue y'all
| out of that belief. But I can say with great confidence
| that no matter how good it may make you feel, if you go on
| to argue about how vital it is to spend another 5x times as
| much money to build another particle collider that we have
| _no_ reason to believe will find anything new, you will
| continue to be marginalized and find your influence waning
| to apparently no effect.
|
| But in the faint hope of maybe convincing you, consider
| that there is no infinite money fountain, and even if you
| just can't process that fact, there certainly aren't an
| infinite amount of physicists. What is so vital about
| another particle accelerator that we must dedicate
| thousands of professional careers to it despite the lack of
| solid reason to hope anything will come of it? Why not let
| them do something else? I submit it's all Availability
| Heuristic. You see and apprehend the particle accelerator,
| so it must be a good idea. You don't see the thousands upon
| thousands of other things you're trading away for it, so
| they don't factor in.
|
| But given the current big fat zero rational reason to build
| another, it is very easy to build a model in which those
| other experiments will actually be the ones that make the
| difference somehow. Probably by some long, convoluted chain
| we can't imagine now; I doubt there's a bench experiment
| that we just haven't done that will nail down quantum
| gravity. But there's a lot of other interesting paths.
| Quantum computers, for instance, just by their nature, tend
| to probe the limits of quantum theory in a way nothing else
| can. Something very interesting could come out of that.
| Dark matter detectors could produce something. Someone
| might actually work a theory down into something that can
| be tested.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| What are the alternatives? Better weapons, better ad
| targeting systems, better gambling hidden behind a veneer
| of gaming on mobile? We can look at where our government
| and our society currently allocates money and find that
| the allocations looks bad enough that even building a
| bigger particle accelerator that might not find anything
| is an improvement overall. As a singular species, I think
| we would be better for going down that route given the
| average of what would be given up.
|
| Problem is that humanity is not unified for our own
| betterment, so that ends up being a bad metric to judge
| actions upon. I think you are right in the outcome, it
| would mean losing influence, and even if we get funding
| it'll likely be diverted from the areas we least want it
| diverted from. You're probably right and I find that
| unsatisfactory.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Huge fleets of space telescopes
|
| Multiple gravity wave detectors
| jerf wrote:
| Sorry, are you seriously proposing that _either_ we fund
| new particle accelerators _or_ we 're just going to build
| weapons/ads/gambling systems, and there are no other
| choices?
|
| I want to be clear that this is your claim before I spend
| any more time on it.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| No. I'm pointing out that our current system is already
| spending money on far more wasteful things, thus it
| should be possible to fund accelerators by taking away
| from the things that are an outright detriment to
| humanity than the things that are, at worst, only
| useless.
|
| I even point out that the reality is likely if we fund
| particle accelerators, it will likely be diverted from
| places we don't want it to be diverted from, like other
| research spending.
|
| >even if we get funding it'll likely be diverted from the
| areas we least want it diverted from
|
| Note I even end by saying the poster is probably right,
| for as much as I don't like that they are (not meant as a
| negative to the poster, but to how humanity currently
| allocates our resources).
| arcticfox wrote:
| Unfortunately the "weapons are a waste" opinion has taken
| a severe hit since February.
| weego wrote:
| That feels like a false dichotomy.
|
| This is pushing forward research into theory, even with
| highly positive results it's completely unknown whether
| any of those results actually result in any progress for
| the human race other than knowledge, and at a _base_ cost
| of EUR21 billion that knowledge comes with a huge
| opportunity cost.
|
| We face so many tangible risks right now that EUR21
| billion invested elsewhere into things that will likely
| produce meaningful advances to our problems that the
| question of 'is spending this much money disproving
| philosophical arguments justifiable right now?' should
| rightly be being asked.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Isn't the false dichotomy that if we spend EUR21 billion
| on a particle accelerator then we must take it from other
| research into advancing humanity instead of taking it
| from other areas that don't provide benefit to humanity
| as a whole (though they do provide benefit to some groups
| at equal or greater cost to others).
|
| >'is spending this much money disproving philosophical
| arguments justifiable right now?' should rightly be being
| asked.
|
| In light of all the expenditures we are already making
| elsewhere, I don't see how many of those can be justified
| but this one not.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Well, if you spend the 21 billion on health research and
| life extension, you can live to see spending 21 billion
| on physics research.
| bluGill wrote:
| Okay, we need to take that money from somewhere. There is
| only so much labor on the planet, and that is what the
| money is buying in the end. (I'm including corruption in
| labor here) Some labor is more valuable than others, and
| we can debate how much we want to spend, but in the end
| if we have someone do X they could do Y instead.
| Sometimes Y is sit around doing nothing, sometimes it is
| valuable.
|
| The problem here is we don't know what will be discovered
| and if it will be useful. Cheap Science Fiction FTL
| without all the time dilation - very valuable. Add half a
| decimal point to our models - probably can't be used for
| anything and so less valuable than a game. I have no
| idea, I just picked unlikely two extremes.
| thingification wrote:
| I think these are two distinct things:
|
| > The problem isn't that "finding nothing" isn't
| progress. The problem is that "finding nothing" is
| terrible progress-per-dollar.
|
| > if you go on to argue about how vital it is to spend
| another 5x times as much money to build another particle
| collider that we have no reason to believe will find
| anything new, you will continue to be marginalized and
| find your influence waning to apparently no effect.
|
| The first part is fine if by it you mean you think the
| physics-practitioner-theory of the collider advocates (a
| theory about what next research steps might be fruitful,
| not a theory of physics) is now implausible to you. On
| the other hand if you just think something like "We
| expect the future (of physics) to be 'like' the past (not
| making progress)", then that isn't an explanatory
| statement and is unrelated to whether we should fund a
| future collider. If you know what you're going to find in
| an experiment, you're not setting out to discover
| something new, so there is no such "future will be like
| the past" principle here.
|
| The second really is an argument not to fund a future
| collider because it comes with an explanation: what good
| theory (of physics, this time) do we have that predicts
| we'll find new tests, or new problems? If there's no very
| good theory, new tests or new problems might come from
| other experiments instead, especially if they're a lot
| cheaper so we can do more of them. Personally I guess
| that it's a good argument you make here in this second
| part, but what do I know?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > If Western governments can find the public support for
| trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it
| can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the
| scientific establishment.
|
| We just need, occasionally, a belligerent something to do
| something to remind us of why experimental particle physics
| is needed in its equivalent of peace-time.
| brazzy wrote:
| > This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled
| out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater
| confidence, the experiment has succeeded.
|
| The probem is, as far as I know, that there is an
| effectively _infinite_ space of supersymmetry hypotheses.
| Ruling one of those out is pretty worthless success.
| strbean wrote:
| > Or as someone I know likes to say to various smaller humans:
| have you looked around the couch? Really? Are you sure? Have
| you had a good look? this is how the tv remote usually
| subsequently reappears as there is a difference between just
| looking and having a good look.
|
| Dealing with larger humans in a social setting - the only
| method I've found that works for finding the remote is
| addressing one of them on the couch and saying "The remote is
| UNDER YOU!"
|
| Then they *actually look*.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| And sometimes there just isn't anything there to find.
|
| But we keep looking because the idea of nothing is simply too
| abhorrent.
|
| There is a tremendously difficult and disturbing aspect to Peer
| Gynt (the original story, not the music on which it's based).
|
| Searching for his "self" he peels off layer after layer like an
| onion, getting ever deeper seemingly towards a _real_ self. But
| on the last layer he experiences the horror of finding nothing
| more. What he _" is"_, is constituted by the sum of the layers.
|
| After that, the entire nature of the "search for meaning" has
| to change.
| dynjo wrote:
| I sometimes ponder whether we fundamentally just went in the
| wrong direction from the very start with quantum physics, but we
| ended up so far down the road it was impossible to start again.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist and my understanding is
| superficial at best.
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| Oh jesus christ, the constant whining!
|
| This is science. This is how it works. Maybe there's nothing else
| to discover, maybe it will take us 100 years, we don't know,
| that's why it's called research.
| spicymaki wrote:
| > This is science. This is how it works. Maybe there's nothing
| else to discover, maybe it will take us 100 years, we don't
| know, that's why it's called research.
|
| I think the argument is not whether we invest in research or
| not, but are we putting our limited resources into viable
| research or not. Sabine Hossenfelder argues that many
| researchers are more interested in testing their pet theory
| based on mathematical beauty than actually working on more
| boring forms of fundamental research. This imbalance leads to
| poor returns on research investments.
| [deleted]
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >Maybe there's nothing else to discover
|
| This is fundamentally wrong. We know the Standard Model is not
| the final theory of Physics so there are still things to
| discover.
| NateEag wrote:
| If you think the Simulation Hypothesis has any merit
| whatsoever, you should consider the possibility that the
| Simulation does not have a fully-consistent engine, just one
| that was "close enough".
|
| Note, of course, that the same could be true in a
| coincidentally-generated universe, as well as a deistic or
| theistic one (the latter two being effectively
| indistinguishable from a Simulation).
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Not sure it's worth thinking about. You would think that a
| sufficiently powerful simulation could procedurally
| generate an arbitrary level of detail so there wouldn't
| really be gaps.
| NateEag wrote:
| Only with a perfect procedural algorithm.
|
| Which may not fit with any hypothetical Simulator's
| goals, anyway.
|
| Most games don't feature an absolutely perfect Newtonian
| physics engine. The physics is just a means to an end,
| not the fundamental point of the whole endeavor.
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| > This is fundamentally wrong. We know the Standard Model is
| not the final theory of Physics so there are still things to
| discover.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning
| bmitc wrote:
| Funding is not infinite.
| Grimburger wrote:
| > Maybe there's nothing else to discover, maybe it will take us
| 100 years, we don't know, that's why it's called research.
|
| At what price?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Cheaper than not doing it
| highwaylights wrote:
| Less than it cost to research, develop and manufacture all of
| the components in the device you typed this on.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sure, but _that_ effort is providing enormous benefits to
| all of humanity.
| lucretian wrote:
| has it...?
| Grimburger wrote:
| I'd put that amortised cost at about $1000 upfront in 2022
| dollars for my high quality internet comment and many
| others like it.
|
| If you need high energy, pure vacuums and ultra low temps,
| surely space is where such experiments should be conducted
| on bigger scales in future to push it further?
| highwaylights wrote:
| I can't speak to whether it would cost less to do these
| experiments in space, I'm no expert on the colliding of
| particles and the implications thereof.
|
| In any case - how much of that $1000 is attributed to the
| research and development of the wheel in Ancient
| Mesopotamia?
|
| How much is attributed to the discovery of electricity,
| and to General Relativity?
|
| If we weren't attempting to get answers to fundamental
| questions we'd still be living in caves.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > I can't speak to whether it would cost less to do these
| experiments in space, I'm no expert on the colliding of
| particles and the implications thereof.
|
| I'm a nonexpert who has some vague idea of how these
| things work.
|
| There's two kinds of accelerator: circular and linear. In
| either case, you have a tube, often underground, a bunch
| of accelerator components along the tube, and a detector
| component. I believe but I am not sure that a key
| advantage of the circular one is that you can accelerate
| the particles in the beam as they take multiple loops
| around the tube. The disadvantage is that when charged
| particles turn they lose energy by emitting
| electromagnetic radiation, and the whole point of the
| accelerator is to stuff these particles full of energy to
| make interesting collisions. This is mitigated by having
| higher-radius accelerators, which is the key reason we
| build things like the Large Hadron Collider and make it
| so very large in the first place, instead of just trying
| to add stronger stuff at existing accelerators.
|
| So what do you intend to do in space?
|
| The quasi-achievable near term might see a linear
| accelerator that consists of two components orbiting and
| firing particle beams into a third (the detector) because
| we are obviously not orbiting the mass of the LHC in the
| near term, and we're not orbiting anything that's rigid
| and also substantially larger than a rocket payload. It
| will no doubt be tricky to align the beams, as the orbits
| are ellipses and the beams need to be approximately
| straight lines (or close enough, blah blah spacetime).
| But the fundamental problem is that you're going to need
| to do all your acceleration all at once, at the
| accelerators, which immediately negates any possible
| advantages you could possibly have from space.
|
| Perhaps you could do something very clever with an orbit-
| sized circular accelerator with accelerators spaced at
| intervals around the planet. You'd need a lot of launches
| of some intense equipment (I believe the Earth-based
| accelerator components are giant supercooled magnets).
| You'd also need an energy source, lots of engineering
| prowess to get everything in good working order (LHC
| bringup was very hands-on) except any adjustments will
| have to be done _in orbit_ , and then when it's running
| you'd face the problem of LOLmaintenance.
|
| I'm going to be honest, I'm more skeptical about this
| than about the Mars colony.
| Grimburger wrote:
| Fair chunk of the cost is people working for slave wages
| in Asia and has nothing to do with with ancient
| Mesopotamia, let's be honest and not disingenuous here.
|
| Are you actually interested in discussing the topic at
| hand?
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| Spoken like a true ignoramus.
| superluserdo wrote:
| Space won't work for the kind of physics the LHC does.
|
| The fundamental problem is that collider physics relies
| on being able to create collisions of exactly known
| quantity as your input (eg in the LHC's case, proton-
| proton collisions at a 14TeV centre of mass energy). If
| you don't control the input, you can't extract any
| information about the output you detect, in the same way
| that you can't create a simulation of snooker by looking
| at the balls on the table, without knowing how they were
| set up before being hit.
|
| The other problem is that to probe the frontier of
| particle physics, you need truly immense statistics to
| get enough of the incredibly rare collisions. Think
| bunches of hundreds of billions of protons colliding tens
| of millions of times per second. The upshot is that you'd
| not only need to build the detectors in space (which are
| thousands of tonnes with extremely precise electronics
| that need whole server farms plugged directly into them
| to process the terabits of data coming out each second),
| but you'd also need to build the entire collider in space
| too.
|
| Even then it's a rather pointless endeavour, since the
| colliders require a colder temperature and higher vacuum
| than even interstellar space, nevermind within the solar
| system.
| Grimburger wrote:
| > Space won't work for the kind of physics the LHC does.
|
| https://home.cern/science/engineering/cryogenics-low-
| tempera...
|
| > The LHC's cryogenic system requires 40,000 leak-tight
| pipe seals, 40 MW of electricity - 10 times more than is
| needed to power a locomotive - and 120 tonnes of helium
| to keep the magnets at 1.9 K.
|
| Launch cost per kg aside for the detectors and basic
| framework, space is the best place for pushing the
| boundaries of high energy physics experiments in the
| future.
| superluserdo wrote:
| All that stuff you're describing would still need to be
| sent to space, for no upside. That includes the 27km+
| long collider ring. I haven't even mentioned the fact
| that this stuff is built 100 metres underground precisely
| to avoid noise from cosmic radiation.
| Certhas wrote:
| You are mischaracterize what's happening entirely. The article
| is not whining and it's not claiming that this is somehow
| shaking the foundations of science. But we are potentially in
| the middle (or even at the end) of a monumental shift inside
| physics. Particle physics produced fantastic discoveries over
| the second half of the twentieth century and it might just have
| hit a major major wall (or in the lingo of the field,
| encountered a desert) where we can not expect new discoveries
| in the next decades or centuries.
|
| If that's so it will mean a major restructuring of the field of
| physics. It has vast implications for researchers that chose
| what to work on or whom to fund. Yes it's all part of research,
| but the flavor and type of research in one of the most
| prominent fields of science is undergoing a massive shift.
| That's news that's well suited for a publication called
| Science. And it reflects genuine scientific debate that's been
| going on for more than a decade on the inside.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It would make sense to more resources to other fields.
|
| But institutions don't tend to dismantle themselves, so I
| expect a few decades of "we might find something soon!" until
| the leaders have retired.
| ced wrote:
| > In 1973, professor Sir James Lighthill was asked by the
| UK Parliament to evaluate the state of AI research in the
| United Kingdom. His report, now called the Lighthill
| report, criticized the utter failure of AI to achieve its
| "grandiose objectives." He concluded that nothing being
| done in AI couldn't be done in other sciences. He
| specifically mentioned the problem of "combinatorial
| explosion" or "intractability", which implied that many of
| AI's most successful algorithms would grind to a halt on
| real world problems and were only suitable for solving
| "toy" versions.[15]
|
| > The report led to the complete dismantling of AI research
| in England.[15] AI research continued in only a few
| universities (Edinburgh, Essex and Sussex).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
| awhitby wrote:
| In retrospect it was at least arguably the right call,
| no? Suspend most research and resume when available
| processing power was orders of magnitude greater, a
| process that was independently driven by demands other
| than (and much greater than) AI research.
|
| Playing devil's advocate only slightly, maybe particle
| physics should similarly pare down to a bare maintenance
| level of research (or even mostly teaching) for a few
| centuries until we can harness much higher energies.
| pizzaknife wrote:
| literally my sentiments exactly. Next thing you know, someone
| will be clamoring to make the LHC a profit center and complain
| about its solvency!
|
| edit: I have no dog in the fight, but I do appreciate the
| concept of "Art for Art's sake." To me, the LHC embodies the
| physics equiv of that statement.
| japanuspus wrote:
| You do realize that most of the money for LHC end up in
| industry, not academia?
| pizzaknife wrote:
| could you rephrase this question?
| tokai wrote:
| Which whining? From the article:
|
| >It's too early to despair, many physicists say
|
| or
|
| >"I very much doubt that in 20 years, I will say, 'Oh, boy,
| after the Higgs discovery we learned nothing new.'"
|
| The whole article is about how the upgrade to the LHC will give
| more precision and more data. Even if it was whining,
| critiquing and bickering over the status quo very much a
| cornerstone of science. Your annoyance looks like something
| coming from a place of dogmatism..
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Are the folks who allocate funding unserstanding of this
| predicament, the possibility that it will take 100 years to
| discover anything else?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Maybe there's nothing else to discover
|
| AFAICS that is not one of the options; there are mysteries and
| contradictions whose explanations remain to be discovered. But
| maybe we can't discover more using the LHC (which I doubt).
| prionassembly wrote:
| There's the mythology of the heavens being held up by the
| titan Atlas, who rests on top of a cow, which rests on top of
| a turtle... the kiddy version continues on top of another
| turtle, on top of...
|
| I once had a vision -- yes, a vision, something deep came to
| me as I laid half-awake -- that after a few dozen turtles the
| actual ground was made of jackstraw[1]. It rested on a firm
| tangle.
|
| I've always felt since then that the world and the universe
| themselves are _made of contradictions_. That some
| contradictions are fundamental, and this is why since
| Socrates we 've always been so focused on finding
| contradictions. Because maybe we can find the ones we can't
| pick apart.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick-up_sticks
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > the world and the universe themselves are made of
| contradictions.
|
| In logic, it's said that from a contradiction you can
| validly deduce any proposition.
|
| The idea that contradictions are fundamental is horrifying;
| it implies that any attempt to reason about the world is
| doomed. I don't know how it would affect me if I believed
| that. I hope you have a good therapist!
| anm89 wrote:
| Why is having a better understanding of the laws of physics a
| nightmare for physicists?
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Two points are important to consider.
|
| 1) It's clear that the standard model is an incomplete model,
| due to some small discrepancies between theory and observation.
|
| 2) Large-scale particle physics experiments are very expensive
| and depend on government funding, and politicians must be
| persuaded to allocate funds.
|
| The nightmare scenario for particle physicists is that funding
| bodies get bored of the lack of exciting new results before the
| known discrepancies in the standard model are resolved, cease
| funding particle physics experiments, and the discrepancies are
| never resolved.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| What else do they want to find?
| danrocks wrote:
| A use for cryptocurrencies? /s
| krinchan wrote:
| This is such a CERN thing to say, lol.
|
| "Bluh bluh the ILC and muon colliders aren't real! Neutrinos are
| fake!! Low energy particle physics is a lie!"
|
| Also this article is weird because phase 2 for the LHC is under
| way. Currently run 3 is happening and just started but this
| article talks like the beam upgrade isn't happening.
|
| Also particle physics has gone far more than 10 years between
| major discoveries.
|
| I'm gonna guess this author is yet another person who needs to
| stop whining about supersymmetry not happening. Like the only
| point the article makes (but makes it obliquely) is that
| supersymmetry is no longer a good motivator of higher energy
| beams. However, all our theories still break down at that level.
| So there's still a crap ton of things to explore.
|
| I'm somewhat concerned that Science would go this click-bait with
| an article. The mood is hardly a nightmare.
| [deleted]
| uwagar wrote:
| the whole of western civilization built on materialism is in
| trouble.
| annyeonghada wrote:
| On what are built others civilizations? I've yet to see a
| civilization that is not built on money and power.
| uwagar wrote:
| all civilizations are now western civilisations (or in
| progress).
|
| power though is not entirely material.
| NateEag wrote:
| I think OP meant the philosophical standpoint of materialism:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| It was easy picking the low hanging fruit in the physics world
| decades if not hundreds of years ago, in some case's you merely
| had to pick up the fruit that had fallen off the tree!
| NoGravitas wrote:
| All I'm hoping for from the LHC is that they collapse the false
| vacuum.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Collapse your own false vacuum and please do it very far from
| Earth, I'd like to enjoy our particles a bit more.
| clerk_occam wrote:
| I'd prefer if they didn't
| Lapsa wrote:
| can they find socks? they just disappear!
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| There is an existential angst amongst particle physicists because
| they all understand that they are the thoroughbred pets of the
| scientific world. Even if they find something, it doesn't matter,
| because they are working in energy regimes that are not reachable
| in the ordinary physics of the universe as it exists today. Even
| the discovery that the Higgs Boson as a lighter mass than
| predicted, while intellectually intriguing doesn't matter outside
| the very small circle of high energy and theoretical physicists.
| In many ways, their field is already dead - they just haven't
| acknowledged it yet.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Even if they find something, it doesn't matter
|
| Yeah, that's a general attitude. I highly doubt that it's true,
| but most people seem to believe it.
|
| Just because you found the problem on a very high energy
| setting, it doesn't mean that the changes in theory you will
| get only impact very high energies. It may also impact low
| energy events that are naturally rare or events that have some
| consequence you can take out of the accelerator.
|
| All that you know is that the immediate consequence of the
| finding won't matter. But new findings often have more
| consequences than the immediate ones.
|
| If a new accelerator had a good chance of determining something
| unknown, it could be a worthwhile investment.
| dav_Oz wrote:
| > _because they are working in energy regimes that are not
| reachable in the ordinary physics of the universe as it exists
| today._
|
| This isn't accurate. Actually because of the higher energies (>
| 10 orders of magnitude) naturally found throughout the universe
| one could argue to concentrate more on collecting data of those
| relatively ubiquitous events in the observable universe instead
| of going through the route in obtaining some little fractions
| of that energy on earth.
|
| Current "records" [0]
|
| > _Fastest Fermilab proton: 980 GeV; 99.999954% the speed of
| light; 299,792,320 m /s.
|
| Fastest LHC proton: 7 TeV; 99.999990% the speed of light;
| 299,792,455 m/s.
|
| Fastest LEP electron (fastest terrestrial accelerator
| particle): 105 GeV; 99.9999999988% the speed of light;
| 299,792,457.9964 m/s.
|
| Fastest cosmic ray proton: 5 x 10^10 GeV [!!!];
| 99.999999999999999999973% the speed of light;
| 299,792,457.99999999999992 m/s._
|
| [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/08/23/cosm
| ...
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| Yes, what you say is true. My argument was very poorly made.
| Victerius wrote:
| James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen
| and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in
| the same way.
|
| Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and
| paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue
| making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global
| economy's productive capacity to building larger and more
| expensive experiments?
|
| What if we build a $200 billion collider that finds nothing?
|
| What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making
| progress?
|
| That could be a line out of Asimov. "And so eventually the entire
| economy was exclusively focused on the construction of larger and
| larger particle accelerators. There was no room for anything
| else. Medical research was stopped. Movies stopped being
| made.Improving the lot of mortals was abandoned as a policy. The
| only thing that mattered to the 30 billion humans alive was to
| build and pay for the next accelerator."
|
| Obviously an extreme extrapolation. But what if? Should we just
| ... give up on particle physics?
| mr_mitm wrote:
| > James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a
| pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general
| relativity in the same way.
|
| > Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and
| paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to
| continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of
| the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and
| more expensive experiments?
|
| That's a bit disingenuous. At the time, GR was an unconfirmed
| theory not unlike, say, String Theory is today. Except it only
| took a couple of years to confirm by experiment.
|
| Particle theorists and cosmologists have plenty of theories.
| But deciding which one describes reality best can only be done
| by data, no two ways about it. And yes, since most low hanging
| fruits have been found, experiments become harder and harder.
| Not to say more and more expensive.
|
| Your conclusion is correct though, that at some point a society
| has to decide whether they can afford further progress.
|
| Perhaps we also haven't found a theory as convincing as
| Einstein's GR because the math isn't there yet. GR was
| discovered shortly after differential geometry was formulated,
| and without it it would have been impossible. Similarly with
| Newton's theory and calculus.
|
| So maybe what we need is the right breakthrough in math?
| throw457 wrote:
| The LHC cost was 2% of the yearly revenue of Apple I am
| fairly certain that we can "afford" it.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Apparently the next-gen LHC replacement will cost on the
| order of $100 billion. As a society (US, EU, or global), we
| can certainly 'afford it', but no-one is going to be
| writing that check anytime soon.
| l33tman wrote:
| Yet Musk was prepared to spend $42B on the twitter
| purchase which would almost have been a null-op for the
| world in comparison to funding basically any kind of
| venture or experiment with the same amount of money... If
| only Musk was more interested in the universe's structure
| :)
| [deleted]
| mjreacher wrote:
| >So maybe what we need is the right breakthrough in math?
|
| Funny you mention that, only recently I was reading a review
| paper on the state of constructive quantum field theory [0].
| In the outlook section the author writes
|
| >Why haven't these models of greatest physical interest been
| constructed yet (in any mathematically rigorous sense which
| preserves the basic principles constantly evoked in heuristic
| QFT and does not satisfy itself with an uncontrolled
| approximation)? Certainly, one can point to the practical
| fact that only a few dozen people have worked in CQFT. This
| should be compared with the many hundreds working in string
| theory and the thousands who have worked in elementary
| particle physics. Progress is necessarily slow if only a few
| are working on extremely difficult problems
|
| But they also say
|
| > It may also be the case that a completely new approach is
| required
|
| This kind of mathematical physics is generally considered a
| part of mathematics rather than physics, and this paper is
| talking about formulating a rigorous mathematical framework
| and elucidating conceptual ideas rather than about making new
| predictions, but the idea that new mathematics is required is
| certainly not a crazy one.
|
| [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3991
| im3w1l wrote:
| It's a question worth asking, but I think ultimately humanity
| needs a purpose. Something more than just survival and sensory
| pleasure. It's almost a given that we will have them both in
| abundance soon. And so increasingly the question we will face
| as immortal beings in eternal bliss is "well now what".
| Particle physics seems a reasonable way to pass time.
| dlsa wrote:
| Paperclips are important! We need to optimise paperclip
| production!
|
| _some time later_
|
| The entire universe is one giant paperclip constructor.
| redler wrote:
| You may find the Universal Paperclips game amusing.
|
| https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
| dlsa wrote:
| _I already did._
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This reminds me of a joke you recently told.
| throw93232 wrote:
| alienozi wrote:
| hamter wrote:
| weird conclusion
| dotnet00 wrote:
| What's being overlooked in that number is that the money
| doesn't just disappear, it's going towards production of better
| electronics and sensors, funding research labs and
| universities, feeding back into other fields. Plus, it pays for
| researchers and PhDs who also contribute back to the system,
| often working on tangetially related projects in the process
| (eg the internet being a result of a need to better share data
| from CERN to researchers). The question to be asked should be
| if all that is comparable to the investment, which I think it
| is.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a
| pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general
| relativity in the same way.
|
| They had tabletop experiments (and telescope observations) that
| gave them the clues they needed
|
| A lot of XX century physics was done in tabletop conditions (in
| the 19xx) with danger to the experimentalists. Also climbing
| mountains and capturing cosmic rays with photographic film
|
| We might still have something hidden but most of the low-
| hanging fruit was discovered already.
| pfdietz wrote:
| If you need a machine the size of a small country to observe
| an effect, chances are that effect is not going to have many
| practical applications. If it did, it would have shown up at
| the much smaller scale of those applications.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and
| paper discoveries are all but over
|
| There are plenty of theories generated by theoretical
| physicists using pen and paper. The problem is that we can't
| reach the energy scales necessary to test those theories.
|
| >What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making
| progress?
|
| That's the problem with colliders now. We don't actually know
| if there are any interesting physics happening at energy scales
| that are within human reach. Maybe the next 'interesting'
| threshold can only come about from a galaxy-size collider - so
| $1 trillion collider isn't going to do squat for you.
|
| >Should we just ... give up on particle physics?
|
| I think we did. There was an article recently about how a next-
| gen collider to replace the LHC will cost on the order of $100
| billion. No one is going to spend that kind of money, so we're
| done with collider physics for the next few decades.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| The same thing happened when the Texas Superconducting
| Supercollider was cancelled (after >$2 billion spent) but we
| eventually got LHC. There'll be a winter in high energy
| physics but eventually the tide will turn.
| bsder wrote:
| > James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a
| pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general
| relativity in the same way.
|
| They also had quite solid experimental anomalies they were
| trying to explain.
|
| Black body radiation was an anomaly. Radioactivity was an
| anomaly. Photelectric effect was an anomaly. Mercury's orbit
| and rotation were anomalies.
|
| Particle physics isn't done, but colliders probably are.
| Terrestrial particle physics is effectively rudderless since
| there are no anomalies left for them to probe.
|
| It looks like it's going to be LIGO and the Webb to point to
| our new headings.
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| > James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a
| pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general
| relativity in the same way.
|
| This is hilarious, because these days the criticism of physics
| is that it's all "theories and ideas".
|
| > But what if? Should we just ... give up on particle physics?
|
| Should we just give up on learning?
| yread wrote:
| Reminds me of an old joke about our uni:
|
| Physicists keep coming to the head of the university with new
| requests for buying expensive machines. At some point it's one
| too many and he exclaims:
|
| "Can't you be more like the mathematicians? They need just
| pens, paper and a paper bin! Or the philosophers?! They need
| just pens and paper."
| piokoch wrote:
| And how much time Maxwell or Einstein spent on their research
| and how much time on chasing grants and tenure positions? Were
| they required to publish X papers a year, target assigned by
| some university manager? Were they forced to amuse and be nice
| for their students, so they will look good on yearly teacher's
| assessment?
| burmanm wrote:
| Well, we also blow up billions in missiles that achieve
| nothing. So, why not smash some particles instead?
| Victerius wrote:
| Missiles advance rocketry, electronics, composite materials,
| fuel chemistry, and precision guidance, all technologies
| we'll need more of in the future.
| Beltiras wrote:
| We probably wouldn't have the LHC now if the results hadn't
| been applicable to blowing stuff up for previous incarnations
| of it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I would absolutely prefer smashing particles over smashing
| missiles.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| If building and paying for bigger and bigger accelerators would
| be the only things that matters for humanity, it wouldn't be
| that bad. First, servicing the accelerator is a major source of
| employment to the economy. I think it is a much better way to
| spend money than maintaining all the militaries in the world.
| Second, such a project will require a lot of highly educated
| personnel to run it, so it'll require a considerable investment
| in education.
| treyhuffine wrote:
| The Higgs itself was conceived on paper and proven in the LHC.
|
| Do we lack theories that can be conceived on pen and paper just
| the ability to test any of them?
| fithisux wrote:
| They could open projects in a git hosting site, publish their
| code in a polished form.
|
| They can even contribute to various projects related to their
| work.
|
| Or create a data hosting service for others to examine them.
| Shahar603 wrote:
| What if the people at CERN made a tool so they can communicate
| amongst themselves more easily, as well as everyone else in the
| world too.
| xoac wrote:
| Yeah also they could create a new javascript framework
| zackmorris wrote:
| I have so many problems with the physics status quo that it's
| hard to know where to begin. But here are a few code smells:
|
| * The strong force probably doesn't exist. It's an empirical
| description of what happens in the nucleus around 10^-15 meters.
| But due to stuff like gluon self-interaction, it's difficult to
| analyze. I suspect that it's related to the curvature of space
| around mass and is probably connected to neutron star and black
| hole math. But as long as it's portrayed as unified with the
| electromagnetic and weak forces, I just don't see us gaining a
| better understanding of it anytime soon. Also the description of
| the force between quarks increasing with distance, enough to
| concentrate enough energy to create more quarks (like how a high-
| energy photon can split into a particle and antiparticle), feels
| more like epicycles than deep understanding.
|
| * Physics right now seems more obsessed with mathematical
| elegance than application. Normally I prefer theory and
| abstraction over implementation, but what's the point of
| discovering a Higgs boson if we can't modulate it? It's nice to
| know it's there, but what are the chances of using energy to
| manipulate an object's inertia? I suspect that it's more of a
| clever mathematical construct than a force we will ever
| manipulate in our daily lives. Actually, re-reading
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism#Simple_explana...
| and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_generation it sounds like
| the Higgs mechanism is more about explaining the masses of
| particles than how to manipulate mass. The problem might be in
| how long range and short range forces (carried by massless gauge
| bosons and massive gauge bosons respectively) are treated
| differently. That's almost certainly not the final model of
| reality, and writing this out, I bet it's one of the main reasons
| that string theory tries to add so many dimensions that maybe
| aren't there. But since I'm not literate in this, I can't dig
| into the code.
|
| * Physics education is just.. bad. Understandably so, because so
| much of this is so fringe and so new that only a handful of
| people in the world actually understand it at a deep level. Which
| is why I think videos like this are so important:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b05IeSlMMDw . Notice how she
| skips over notation pedantry and calls the bracket notation
| vectors. She also isolates entanglement as the key mechanism of
| quantum computers (at the 4:21 mark). I've read countless
| articles on that for YEARS that never stated what's going on with
| such clarity. So if we can't simulate entanglement inside a
| classical computer, then we can't simulate reality in them,
| because we wouldn't be able to build a quantum computer within
| The Matrix. So are we living in a simulation? Probably not.
|
| I bring this stuff up because the problem is probably in my own
| lack of understanding, not physics itself. So more budget needs
| to go to education and refactoring the existing physics
| "codebase" to use better notation and terms. Maybe you all have
| insights that invalidate my concerns. Those insights should be at
| the forefront of every Wikipedia article, not buried inside
| somewhere.
| [deleted]
| SassyGrapefruit wrote:
| I think "nightmare" is a bit sensational. The LHC's purpose is
| not to "find X" it is to take measurements over a novel range of
| conditions. The new data is what we're after.
| soheil wrote:
| > I think "nightmare" is a bit sensational.
|
| My thoughts exactly. So this journal is owned by American
| Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (cool
| acronym, that was close). Which according to wikipedia is a
| non-profit. What motivates an organization like that to produce
| clickbaity articles like this? I thought money was the primary
| motivation for such journalistic behavior.
| blueplanet200 wrote:
| The new data is what we're after ... to make discoveries! It's
| not just new data for new data's sake.
|
| The LHC in that regard has fell short.
| Certhas wrote:
| "Nightmare" was how physicists themselves characterize the
| situation we are in, and have done for at least 15 years.
|
| Look at the 2007 article linked in the article above:
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.315.5819.1657
|
| Jonathan Ellis is on the record there describing the scenario
| we find ourselves in now as "the real five-star disaster". (you
| can get the full article by putting the link into
| scholar.google.com). And I recall hearing and reading the
| "nightmare scenario" phrase before that 2007 article.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| IMO it is a five-star disaster for this generation of
| particle physicists, not for physics.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think people here should imagine it like an infrastructure
| investment with an extremely bad ROI. People are using it and
| it's well-made, but the return on our investment would never
| have justified the cost in time or effort.
|
| The whole history of high energy physics is a back-and-forth
| between models and experiment. We get to a new energy level,
| try some things that the models are ambiguous about, and
| previously we've gotten new and interesting results that lead
| people to reshape models and make new predictions. That has
| not, generally, happened with the LHC. The frustrating
| limitations and inconsistencies of the standard model are the
| same as when we built it.
|
| The problem is we spent a lot of money and time and focus on
| building a tool that has not actually moved us forward much.
| This happens from time to time - but it's bad! We have not
| made our series of scientific advances by getting lucky on a
| bunch of coin flips - we've been able to use previous
| experiments to design the next set of tools in ways that
| productively open up parts of the science we could not
| observe before. The fact that we seem to have failed to
| accomplish this with one of the largest, most expensive tools
| ever built calls into question the methods that led us to
| choose to build this tool instead of other possible ones.
| Allower wrote:
| jakey_bakey wrote:
| It says they were looking for particles with supersymmetry - I
| know on The Big Bang Theory they discovered Super Asymmetry - do
| you think the boffins at CERN have tried looking for that?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Maybe we need a bigger collider. Earth would look cool with a
| ring around it.
| adtac wrote:
| I only have an amateur interest in physics, so I'm sorry if this
| sounds dumb, but I often think about what if we've reached as far
| as we can go within the current framework of physics? This is
| more meta-science than actual science, but what if we made some
| decisions very early in the development of physics and
| mathematics and we need to revisit those?
| tejohnso wrote:
| Perhaps one such decision is that matter is fundamental. There
| are increasingly substantial cases being made that this is now
| holding us back in physics, and that we need to consider that
| consciousness is fundamental, and matter is only a consequence
| of it. See, for example Hoffman's The Case Against Reality.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| How do you define "increasingly substantial"?
| onionisafruit wrote:
| What does fundamental mean in this case?
| alex_sf wrote:
| Nothing. It's pseudoscientific nonsense.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I'm not a physicist; but the GP mentioned consciousness as
| an alternative to matter as the fundamental "substance".
|
| Well, I've come across that idea before; in certain kinds
| of Buddhism, consciousness is considered fundamental, the
| senses are created by consciousness, and the material world
| is projected by consciousness through the senses.
|
| Well, this was explained to me in the context of a
| particular type of tantric Buddhism; but actually the basic
| idea is common across most mainstream Buddhism. Most
| schools teach that the universe is cyclical, and is
| completely destroyed at the end of an era, before being
| recreated ex-nihilo. The creation process is started with
| the appearance of Brahma, who then hallucinates the rest of
| the universe into existence.
|
| So in that model, it is consciousness, not matter that is
| fundamental, because the material world cannot come into
| existence without consciousness.
| karthikk wrote:
| it is a reversal of "I think, therefore I am" -> "I am,
| therefore I think"
|
| (slight nitpick, the idea(consciousness is fundamental,
| creation is cyclical) goes back much earlier than
| buddhism and is part of advaita vedanta.)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > slight nitpick
|
| I'm aware that the cyclical universe is from the vedas; a
| lot of what passes for Buddhist metaphysics is pre-
| Buddhist. The Buddha didn't care much for metaphysical
| pronouncements; he was more a meditation teacher than a
| cosmologist.
|
| So I didn't mean to claim that these ideas were Buddhist
| in origin; I just learned of them from Buddhists.
| catchclose8919 wrote:
| ...so you're just using "Brahma" to refer to the computer
| that is running the simulation that is the universe. And
| when the simulation becomes aware of its own condition,
| it becomes conscious?
|
| This is just rephrasing of the symulation hypothesis in
| mystical terms and is just as useless as the symulation
| hypothesis itself (regardless if it's "true" or not).
|
| There's some valuable deeper stuff in hindu and buddhist
| philosophies, but this set of ideas isn't it (neither
| valuable nor actually deep, just "exotic" sounding to an
| extent).
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > ...so you're just using "Brahma" to refer to the
| computer that is running the simulation that is the
| universe.
|
| That "Brahma" isn't a computer; the model doesn't suggest
| that the universe is a simulation. You seem to have
| wedged in an interpretation that is fundamentally
| materialist, which sort of misses the point; according to
| this model, consciousness is fundamental. That is what
| was being discussed.
|
| I agree that it's "mystical" to postulate that
| consciousness is fundamental; but it's equally mystical
| to assume that matter is fundamental.
|
| In the Buddhist tradition where I learned this, the
| Brahma story was just that - a myth. But they treated the
| "consciousness is fundamental" thing as a core teaching,
| they elaborated it, and the practices grew out of that
| view. The tradition was a practice tradition; they
| shunned metaphysical speculation, and "philosophy" was
| generally treated as another technique for breaking-down
| conceptual thought.
|
| This wasn't something you were supposed to believe, or
| reason about; it was presented as a way of seeing the
| world (a "view") that was useful in Buddhist practice. In
| the same tradition, we were taught that all views are
| provisional.
|
| I was just answering the OP's question about what
| "fundamental" means in this context. I am not advocating
| for the view that consciousness is fundamental. I happen
| to take the view that consciousness exists, and is not an
| emergent phenomenon; but I don't have a philosophical
| system built around that idea. It's just that I can't see
| how the subjective experience of consciousness can emerge
| from what amounts to a system of levers and gears.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| There is no such thing as "consciousness".
|
| There is, however, free will.
|
| Information complexity is a real and measurable physical
| quantity, and unlike all others it doesn't obey conservation
| laws.
|
| The sigularity that happens when information complexity is
| out of control is colloqually called "free will".
|
| (Someday maybe we'll be able to map information complexity
| the same way we now map cosmic background radiation. Now that
| would be a sight to behold!)
| rightbyte wrote:
| My feeling is that a big part of the physics field is trying to
| see patterns in noise and equipement artifacts.
| nl wrote:
| This is untrue.
| guynamedloren wrote:
| I think the idea here is that it happens unintentionally,
| unknowingly.
| have_faith wrote:
| Very large efforts are made to predict noise floors within
| data, prevent it, account for it, average over it with
| multiple tests, etc.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Indeed, AFAIK part of the progress, even while their are no
| discoveries being made, is in having a better-calibrated
| detector. In part, better statistics yield better
| calibration.
| Sharlin wrote:
| We have found a set of (relatively simple) rules that match (a
| large part of) reality so well that no matter what we do, we
| don't seem to be able to get any results that would indicate
| the rules are wrong or even slightly inaccurate. However, we
| are almost certain they _are_ wrong, or at least incomplete -
| but given how well they model reality it would be _astonishing_
| if it turned out that we 're on a totally wrong track and the
| actual rules are completely different.
| Agamus wrote:
| I think this is correct. My sense is that the assumption of
| _individuation_ is at the core of logic, which then infects all
| rational thinking. (We add the predicates to "things", and then
| forget that we added them!)
|
| If there are no individual things, as quantum field theory
| seems to suggest, what are numbers counting?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVQfWC_evg
|
| http://www.katabane.com/mt/ontology.html
| JieJie wrote:
| What a great video. Thanks! Professor Tong specifically talks
| about the subject of this article (LHC coming up with
| bupkis), but five years ago. Seems like he may be being
| vindicated a little here.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| If the pattern Kuhn shows in _The Structure of a Scientific
| Revolution_ holds, one might presume at some time a crisis will
| emerge which will influence the development of higher
| resolution tools and techniques and with them more evidence.
| The "nightmare" seems like exactly what is outlined as a
| predictable error in the model - it'll be interesting to see
| what happens.
| hobs wrote:
| I don't think that's what the book says, just that solving
| problems with the new framework is what makes it popular
| enough with the next generation.
|
| More specificity or higher resolution is not implied, though
| it can happen after the paradigm has shifted as a new set of
| niches are waiting to be explored and filled.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| I do believe that's precisely what it says: science adopts
| a new paradigm with a comprehensive view which predicts
| most cases, at some point the threshold is reached through
| normal science where a model falls apart, failing to
| predict given effects, and probity for answers surrounding
| that requires new tools (or techniques), which are
| developed to study the "unpredicted" effects mentioned
| above and a more comprehensive understanding is developed.
| At this point there may be a challenge to the paradigm,
| which yes, may be overturned upon favorable comportment.
|
| See phlogiston. If we fairly assume that measurements are
| multidimensional and thus techniques to observe new
| dimensions can be conferred to have increased resolution...
|
| But I'd absolutely concede that I may have misread. But I
| do believe Kuhn was fairly explicit in detailing this
| process. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| I think your reading is about right, though I'm not sure
| about your application of it to the current situation.
| The "crisis" being discussed today in physics is quite
| different from the ones Kuhn describes--in some ways it
| is the opposite situation. For Kuhn, as you note, the
| crisis comes when existing theoretical models prove
| completely inadequate to make sense of new data, so the
| old model has to be largely thrown out and a new paradigm
| built in its place.
|
| Today's crisis in physics (if that's what it is) seems to
| be that, even though our existing model seems incomplete
| for theoretical reasons (lack of harmonization between
| models, for example), it continues to fit all the
| empirical data we have been able to generate. Really, we
| are _hoping_ to stumble upon a new paradigm, but we can
| 't seem to make it happen.
| mhh__ wrote:
| There is still huge amounts of work to do in the less
| fundamental aspects of physics.
| Certhas wrote:
| That's not the problem we face though.
|
| Consider the following:
|
| For all terrestrial phenomena that we have observe so far we
| have a theory of everything.
|
| In order to put matter into a state where it behaves in such a
| way that you can tell the difference between two competing
| theories that describe the world, you have to build the LHC.
| Anything less than that and the theories all are perfectly good
| at describing what we see.
|
| I think there is a tendency to misunderstand LHC and it's high
| energies as somehow being "brute force". High energy really
| just means small structures. It's better to think of it as the
| worlds best microscope. LIGO is the worlds best ruler. So we're
| measuring the world and it's matter to an unfathomable
| precision and we do not see meaningful divergence between
| theory and experiment.
|
| We know there is more out there, but it's not stuff we can
| study on earth. That's the single biggest problem.
| survirtual wrote:
| Let's build a particle accelerator on the moon. Make it go
| around the circumference of the entire moon.
| XorNot wrote:
| For the effort it would be easier to build one around the
| Earth. Double it up as a driveable highway, rail and
| electrical infrastructure (and then you can use solar power
| sold on a global market where one side is always in
| daylight).
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Um... doesn't it produce synchrotron radiation while
| operating? I'm not sure that you want to be driving on
| that...
| hanniabu wrote:
| Good ol' corporate lobbying will make that a non-issue
| Isinlor wrote:
| Given current predictions we would need colliders the size
| of the Solar System.
|
| Something bigger than Neptune orbit.
|
| We are ~12 orders of magnitude away from the grand
| unification energy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_unification_energy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(particle_physics)
| mckravchyk wrote:
| Wouldn't it be at a big risk of being destroyed by a
| meteorite ?
| hinkley wrote:
| Hollywood has vastly overplayed the actual density of
| asteroid fields. It's kind of disappointing.
|
| If you build something in a vacuum then you don't
| necessarily need a single continuous piece to create a
| vacuum. If you specced an accelerator a million miles in
| diameter, the diameter matters from a standpoint of
| whether we can accelerate the particle sideways fast
| enough to keep it in the track, but they are also saying
| they need 3.1 million miles of accelerator hardware. They
| are _implying_ they can't lay it out as a crazy straw,
| but is that because of the lateral acceleration, the
| interaction between the coils, or the limits of
| manufacturing?
|
| What if you built a collider in a spherical arrangement,
| accelerating in three dimensions at once, but 1/3 the
| diameter? What if the accelerator were broken into
| sections to dodge asteroids, with a cumulative segment
| length that added up to the desired total? What if you
| laid it out like a Spirograph? What if you laid it out
| like a truncated Spirograph (just bits of the outer
| circumference)? What if you laid it out like a 3
| dimensional truncated Spirograph?
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| It won't be surprising if we eventually do. A particle
| accelerator beyond Earth has been often discussed, and
| recently a paper[0] even sketched such a project for Moon.
|
| [0]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/a
| c4921/...
| hinkley wrote:
| We used to make gasoline by heating oil very very hot and
| separating it. As long as you can keep it away from oxygen we
| don't explode.
|
| But now we have catalysts that allow us to get more gas from
| the same oil, and with less heat. Less energy for a bigger
| gain.
|
| Big, hot, smashy, explodey things are good for a proof of
| concept, but for a practical application we want to make them
| smaller and lower energy (per unit) then scale them up huge
| (more units) and keep the energy down (magnitude + per unit).
|
| Can you make these particles in a different environment? Can
| you move some of the embodied energy into a material? Can you
| reuse that material? All of these are good questions. If we
| answer them then the next LHC maybe doesn't have to be an
| order of magnitude bigger and power hungry in order to see
| over the next horizon. Maybe 2x would do it.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| At issue here is the fact that what physicists need to
| conduct experiments is not more data, but different data.
| To study higher energy levels, more energetic particles are
| needed. Generating more particles at similar energy levels
| and producing more data is not without value, and has been
| the work of the last few years at the LHC, but is
| considered unlikely to turn up surprises since it's data
| about particles at a similar energy level to previous runs.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| Barrera wrote:
| Stagnation of scientific fields is normal and can last many
| years. In that time, little anomalies pile up, are swept under
| the rug, and largely forgotten. To admit anomalies can ruin
| careers, after all.
|
| Eventually someone (often very young/inexperienced) comes along
| and upends the field by proposing a different model or doing the
| experiment whose weight breaks the camels back.
|
| What's new here is the scale of the work. It's not clear how you
| upend a field where the price of entry is measured in billions of
| dollars.
| chasil wrote:
| Fortunately, this new table-top Higgs discovery was not very
| expensive.
|
| Anything requiring the resources of the LHC or more will be far
| from spontaneous.
|
| https://www.livescience.com/magnetic-higgs-relative-discover...
| roywiggins wrote:
| The reporting on that one was pretty terrible.
|
| They discovered a quasi-particle, a behavior of some bulk
| matter that behaves like a Higgs. Not the same thing at all
| as the LHC's Higgs discovery.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle
| XorNot wrote:
| Well that's not the case though: you can upend the field with
| data from the LHC - after all Einstein didn't do the Michelson-
| Mauley (how I spelt that right) experiment himself, but Special
| Relativity was developed out of that result existing.
| chopin wrote:
| Michelson-Morley experiment:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exp.
| ...
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >Stagnation of scientific fields is normal and can last many
| years. In that time, little anomalies pile up, are swept under
| the rug, and largely forgotten. To admit anomalies can ruin
| careers, after all.
|
| Could not be more wrong for Particle Physics. An Anomaly could
| define your career and herald a Nobel Prize. That's exactly
| what we're looking for. We desperately want to find anomalies,
| not hide them.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Really? Because the article seems to say the complete
| opposite in multiple instances.
|
| "Oh hey this thing doesn't match what is expected according
| to the standard model but yeah the standard model is tots
| fine bro."
|
| > _For example, in 2017, physicists working with LHCb, one of
| four large particle detectors fed by the LHC, found that B
| mesons, particles that contain a heavy bottom quark, decay
| more often to an electron and a positron than to a particle
| called a muon and an antimuon. The standard model says the
| two rates should be the same, and the difference might be a
| hint of supersymmetric partners, Ellis says._
|
| So why is the standard model not in the trashcan?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| You never trashcan a model. You _replace_ a model. You
| replace it with something else that is better.
|
| Currently, we don't have a "something else" that 1)
| explains everything the Standard Model does in the same
| places with the same results, 2) also explains whatever
| anomaly.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >Really? Because the article seems to say the complete
| opposite in multiple instances.
|
| Where is it saying that Physicists are trying to avoid
| anomalous data?
|
| >"Oh hey this thing doesn't match what is expected
| according to the standard model but yeah the standard model
| is tots fine bro."
|
| No one in the Physics community thinks like this. As I said
| it's very nearly the complete opposite, that if major
| problems in the model were found via experiment the person
| who found it would be cheering because they just guaranteed
| themselves a Nobel Prize. The problems with the Standard
| Model are widely known and deeply studied.
|
| >So why is the standard model not in the trashcan?
|
| Because despite it's known shortcomings it can still
| calculate 99.99% of scenarios with arbitrary accuracy.
| There's a reason Newtonian Mechanics are still taught,
| because for the cast majority of cases it completely works.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So why is the standard model not in the trashcan?
|
| Because there's not a strictly superior replacement yet.
|
| All models are wrong, some are useful.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| How does finding an anomaly ruin a career? Any examples from
| particle physics?
| lamontcg wrote:
| Kind of happy right now that I didn't decide to dedicate my life
| to this when I was in my 20s and went off and did something else.
| I would have been awfully frustrating to spend 30 years in a
| quest to find nothing new.
|
| Hopefully at some point someone cracks open the desert, but I'm
| somewhat skeptical that it'll happen through the high energy
| frontier.
|
| My bet is that quantum computation and decoherence is where it'll
| be.
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