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."
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 :)
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.
Heh, I think a barely different glyph introduces more ambiguity than it solves. On my screen it’s effectively the same glyph but now with “oh, well it’s actually different.”
I noticed that they are pretty similar in some fonts at small sizes, but in traditional math fonts and handwritten, these operators tend to be very "curly" and easy to distinguish.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
My understanding is that we currently don't have enough data to be sure that the B meson anomaly is real, and not just a statistical fluctuation - it is only a few standard deviations away from what is expected. (A few more years of data should resolve the question of whether it is real, one way or the other.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes absolutely. I don't think anyone in this or any of the linked articles suggests otherwise. That said, particle physics has been a very prominent and successful branch of physics.
Only in a technical sense. Running experiments under unprecedented conditions that generate predictable results is trivial -- it happens literally every time you run any experiment, since conditions can never be perfectly replicated. The fact that nothing notable has popped up from recent LHC experiments is itself notable, but only just, and certainly not notable enough to justify the costs involved.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Now that you mention this, would an accelerator in space need walls? Could you make it from a series of big circles (maybe solenoids?) at distances of a million kilometers apart or so? Neptune's orbit is about 15 billion km long, so, you'd need about 15k of such loops. In free fall they would just go around the Sun, so you'd only need to maintain their perfect alignment with some minute adjustments.
Is there some reason to think that the only way to get higher energy collisions is by scaling the accelerators? Is there any possibility that we may be able to get to higher energies with earth-scale experiments?
The limiting factor is the strength of magnetic fields you can achieve. The more momentum the particles have, the stronger a field you need to bend them into a circular orbit. The attainbale strength is determined by material properties and there is nothing to suggest that we can get orders of magnitude improvement here. The improvements have been quite linear for decades, see the figure here:
And you eventually run into rather fundamental problems of tearing your atoms apart with the magnetic field you create. But I am not up to speed on how close we actually are to these limits.
Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are possible candidate. For example, Oh-My-God particle had energy of a baseball traveling at 100 km/h. 40 million times higher than particle energies of terrestrial accelerators.
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).
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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).
> ...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.
> I agree that it's "mystical" to postulate that consciousness is fundamental; but it's equally mystical to assume that matter is fundamental.
Sure using "matter" like this without defining it is equally mystical. That's why we'd take 'computation' to be "fundamental" or 'the wave function'. "Matter" is just a higher level emergent property of what we perceive.
> I happen to take the view that consciousness exists, and is not an emergent phenomenon
OK, now I see why my viewpoint would sound so "off" to you, we're probably on different extremes of the thinking spectrum :) I don't discard you're viewpoint, it's just so so so so far from mine:
I take most of what we label "reality" to be emergent properties from some kind of fundamental computation (and by "computation" I don't imply a "computer" like we know, just "math that `can run`") whose math is probably too complicated and strange for us to intuitively understand (we can just hope to get to calculate better approximations of it). I don't just see consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. I see matter as an emergent phenomenon. And also space-time itself as an emergent phenomena inside our emergent consciusnesses. The "fundamental" could just very well be something like the simplest celular automaton with non-periodict behavior or maybe something too strange for our ape-minds to ever be able to comprehend (or too simple to understand how it could be the basis - there could be enough complexity/structure in just 'the distribution of all the prime numbers' or 'the digits of pi' to contain our entire universe with its infinite past and future "inside of it").
And to clarify, "simulation" is also quite generalizable - a simulation is just something that runs as an informational phenomenon on top of some physical substrate, but is fully independent of that susbstrate to the extent that it could be "ported" from that substrate to another completely different substrate that just happens to also preserve the subset of mathematical laws required for the computation. Eg. "software" that can be "ported" so it's independent of the actual nature of the hardware. Digital/discrete (as opposed to analogical) computation gives you this magical "divorce" of computation from substrate. It doesn't have to be something like our current day software running on something like our computers - any kind of "portable discrete/digital computation" is "a simulation".
> a simulation is just something that runs as an informational phenomenon on top of some physical substrate
A simulation is a simulation of something; it's by definition not the reality being simulated. If you want to say you can have a simulation without simulating something, that "reality" is itself a simulation, then we're into turtle territory; this simulation models that simulation, which models another simulation, all the way down.
That path leads to solipsism, which I think is a stultifying view. It's a view that I once entertained, but eventually rejected.
It’s not particularly exotic; it’s phenomenology aka continental philosophy.
(Many kinds of Buddhism known to the west are actually repackaged European philosophy; this was intentionally done in Asia so it’d be easier to sell back to us.)
> Many kinds of Buddhism known to the west are actually repackaged European philosophy
Schopenhauer was interested in eastern philosophy. There is certainly a thread of Buddhist thought in some European philosophy.
I don't think it's at all reasonable to suggest that Asian Buddhists (in Asia) deliberately produced a formulation of Buddhism to appeal to Western tastes. Rather, Buddhist teachers in the West tried to find a way of presenting Buddhism without the cultural baggage.
The kind of Buddhism that I learned was largely mediaeval or earlier in its origins. Even 19thC developments in (e.g.) Tibetan Buddhism had little impact at the time on European philosophy; those developments were largely concerned with points of doctrine that flew over the heads of European thinkers.
So I'm not sure what kinds of Buddhism "known to the West" are actually repackaged European philosophy. Nichiren? "Soft" vipassana? I don't really agree that there has been much pollination of Eastern Buddhist thought from European philosophy.
Thai Theravada and Japanese Zen (and State Shinto) were reinvented in the 1800s to look more European and incorporate Romanticism because they knew if Europeans showed up and you didn't have a European-style religion, they'd declare you savages and colonize you. It more or less worked.
That didn't happen in Tibet, although it modernized later with a marketing campaign resulting in everyone vaguely associating the Dalai Lama with "compassion" and "ethics".
Thanks for the link. I've read his first article; I will read on.
My training was entirely in a Tibetan tradition. In 19thC Tibet, there were significant changes happening; but they were largely to do with ecumenicalism and the endless sectarian conflicts over minute points of doctrine.
"Rockstar" Tibetan lamas were certainly a thing. I was told once that, if you ask your teacher whether it would be good to attend a talk by visiting lama X, the least-favourable response would be along the lines of "He has many followers".
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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This attitude ("nightmare") is backwards. What is this clinging to sunk costs of money and career time? The point is not for scientists to figure out how to extend the life of their big toy; the point is to delve into the many, many unexplained mysteries such as a the true nature of what we call "gravity", harmless methods to observe intercellular activity during diet or substance interventions (not with markers after biopsy or necropsy), how to convert ocean water to drinking water without getting the project cancelled by those who cannot bear to countenance the death of a single marine life form, and on and on.
Truly Max Plank wrote well, when he penned, "A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."[0]
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!
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?
> 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?
>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.
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.
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 :)
>Yet Musk was prepared to spend $42B on the twitter purchase
Musk wasn't donating $42B to Twitter. He raised capital to purchase Twitter with the aim of actually making a return on that money.
A better example is someone like Warren Buffet donating ~$50B dollars to charity instead of building another particle collider. If only Buffet was more interested in the universe's structure eh.
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?
I think we lack a "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach here. Just create a way to fund lots of individual researchers and teams with small grants to study whatever they find interesting, with no crazy deadlines, credential requirements, publish-or-perish demands, administrative overhead, etc. It doesn't matter if 999/1000 just produce garbage, if the one remaining hits something big. I suspect modern science is like a gold rush, with lots of people flocking around a few fad areas, and o lot of the search space uninhabited, because if you stray out of the fad-topics, you get no advisor, no funding, no lab, nothing.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Missiles advance rocketry, electronics, composite materials, fuel chemistry, and precision guidance, all technologies we'll need more of in the future.
> 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.
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.
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.
>What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?
Well, if we could find a way to keep the GNP growing by at least 3.5% yearly, then in about 200 years a trillion dollars will be just like a billion today.
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.
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.
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.
>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 × 10^10 GeV [!!!]; 99.999999999999999999973% the speed of light; 299,792,457.99999999999992 m/s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't it funny that the single particle that they 'found' happened to be the one governments and investors gave them billions in hopes of finding. Nothing else, just the single particle to validate the entire existence of the LHC. I wonder what it would do for future investments if they didn't find it?
But hey, I probably don't understand the science like 99.999999% of people. It's so technical that you just have to take their word for it. I do understand humans though.
That if they were given money to discover supersymmetry, they would've discovered it instead of Higgs? Well, discovery of supersymmetrical particles _was_ one of the main goals alongside discovering Higgs, and none were discovered so far.
Or maybe you think that Higgs discovery was a hoax?
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.
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.
There have been various amazing "tabletop" experiments looking for effects that would imply new particles/forces. Electric dipole moment of the electron, electric dipole moment of the neutron, "fifth force" (deviations from 1/r^2 gravity at very short ranges), neutron oscillation. The cleverness of some of these experiments is astounding.
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.
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.
> 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.
* P.E. Hodgson, et al., “Introductory nuclear physics” (Oxford 1997).
* H. Frauenfelder, E.M. Henley, “Sub-atomic Physics” (Prentice Hall 1992)
IIRC the Sakurai book is more about generic quantum mechanics, but he has two books, I'm not sure if this has more about particle physics. The other two are more modern, but I don't remember them. I also tried to keep the list short, because usually the main book of the course cover most of the topics.
Anyway, it's a mandatory undergraduate course for everyone that want to be a Physics. If you want to learn cutting edge particle physics, you should take one or two optative course about the topic, then make a one year undergraduate thesis, then take a 5 years PhD, and then perhaps 2 years of a postdocs. So the cutting edge is like 8 years away.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
> 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.
But philosophy is not knowledge, and it is in fact math that is the only form our knowledge can have in this area, whether we like it or not.
Physics is based on metaphor not math. We take common experiences like space, distance, speed, temperature, "energy", quantify them with other stable experiences we can use as reference units, then select the operations on them which happen to have predictive value. The operations have become more abstract over time, but they're still more complex variations on the same underlying concepts - for example generalising 3D Euclidean space to the abstract ideal of a set of relationships in a mathematical space defined by some metric.
There's nothing absolute about either the math or the metaphor. Both get good answers in relatively limited domains.
One obvious problem is that reality may use a completely different set of mechanisms. Physics is really pattern recognition of our interpretation of our experience of those mechanisms. It's not a description of reality at all. It can't be.
And if our system of metaphors is incomplete - quite likely, because our experiences are limited physically and intellectually - we won't be able to progress past those limits in our imagination.
We'll experience exactly what we're experiencing now - gaps between different areas of knowledge where the metaphors are contradictory and fail to connect.
This is all wrong, unfortunately, and that’s because it is based on a wrong premise. Experience and knowledge are two different things, and whether we are capable of experiencing certain aspects of reality or not, math is how we know things. In the areas we cannot experience directly the ability to form mathematical images and ideas can even be thought of, if you will, as an extension of our ability to “see.”
>Physics is based on metaphor not math. We take common experiences like space, distance, speed, temperature, "energy", quantify them with other stable experiences we can use as reference units, then select the operations on them which happen to have predictive value.
If you experience pushing this object that feels to weigh 1kg with a force that feels like 1 N, you are going to experience seeing it accelerate at 1m/s^2.
I think we probably agree on the core issue, I just kept things a bit too brief.
There are people who feel like I described, and there are people who disagree to varying degrees (physicists, amitrite?). But I do think we all kind-of agree that we'd prefer to find experimental results that break the standard model vs proving it right now, but it seems unlikely we're going to find that smoking gun anytime soon. The model is an attempt at fitting data and like you said it works in the regime it was designed for, but it can't be _the_ theory of everything. It would be great if it broke somehow so we could investigate _why_ and drive new avenues of research based on that which might be more promising in resolving gravity and the other forces (or the anti-matter mystery, or shed some light on what dark-matter is)*
As the OP said, it's still good science if we prove that the current theory holds up, but no one is really happy with it at this point because everyone knows it's not going to be the final unified theory that we all want to see
----
* personaly I have a gut feeling those three are going to be resolved in rapid succesion if they're ever solved
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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).
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 €21 billion that knowledge comes with a huge opportunity cost.
We face so many tangible risks right now that €21 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.
Isn't the false dichotomy that if we spend €21 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.
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.
You're talking about opportunity costs - it's not a false dichotomy at all. Spending trillions on financial assets mean they are not spent on other things.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
This is indeed progress but as I understand the situation, it is progress in the shape of taking another step on the ladder but only to realize it looks like it was the final step, after having searched for billions of dollars during decades.
Maybe, scary thought, the theory of general relativity and the standard model is pretty much entirely self-contained and cannot per their design extend to encompass the quantum world?
Other theories maybe can, but then we need to look at even what we have from a completely different angle?
Like how we have colors. By watching a rainbow we can see them all. There can be nothing more. Until you realize they are mere wavelengths in the optical spectrum and there is so much more. But that is a quantum leap in viewing things. However, maybe this is what is needed?
Maybe this is just philosophical garbage though. :D
Sure, GR may well be self-contained and cannot encompass the quantum world in the same sense as the Newtonian mechanics is and can't. But the Nature does not have such boundaries, especially at such a fundamental level, and it is "self-contained" as a whole. So, while it may be impractical to try an create a unified theory of some aspects of reality, say, quantum mechanics and linguistics or economy, theories concerning fundamental aspects of Nature naturally are, and have been, subject to unification.
Note that colors we can perceive aren’t all in the rainbow.
There’s no pink in the rainbow. That’s because pink is what is left when you take white light and remove the green part. It’s minus green. There’s no wavelength that corresponds to pink.
So what? A mix of wavelengths is just as real as a single wavelength. More to the point, colors are merely perceptions (artifacts of consciousness) which can be caused by a variety of factors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of Grand Unified Theory candidates become interesting at extremely high energy levels and many of them assume the various fundamental forces will merge. You can test these theories at sufficiently high energy levels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
> 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!"
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.
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
I think if the GP had written something relevant about their personal experience in a scientific field, that would have been much more interesting, as well as not breaking the site guidelines.
The trouble with your argument "interesting people don't like censorship" isn't that you're wrong—it's that there are also a lot of people (many more, actually) who post dreck. If you want a forum that doesn't get overrun with internet dreck, you have to have some strategy for countering it. HN's strategy is to have a clear organizing principle (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) and clear rules to support it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That barely works, but it's a lot better than nothing.
It's the opposite. The moderation is good, is very needed, and helps keeps discussion quality/signal-to-noise high, making this a site worth visiting. The thoughtless flamewars you can find everywhere else on the web are what bore me, personally. The rules of conduct on this site aren't even a high bar, and no one is preventing anyone from being jerks if they want to merely by keeping it outside of this forum.
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.
The problem of consciousness is outside the subject area of physics. Chemistry - maybe, but more likely cell biology and information theory. Even more likely it will remain an issue of philosophy rather than (positive) science.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I remember that report, it was a very confusing press article.
They used a tabletop device to make a "simulation" of a Higgs boson inside a semiconductor. It was not a new elementary particle like an electron or a photon.
Is solid state physics they don't call those thing a "simulation", they call a quasiparticle. They are not a single entity, but they behave almost like a single entity, so if yu are working in the are it's easier to make the calculation as if they are a single entity.
Moreover, most of the time they just call the particles, but everyone in the area and physicist in other areas understand that they are talking about quasiparticles. The problem is when the new reach the press and that implicit understanding is lost.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
They were right; modern ML doesn’t use any of the ideas the previous generation of AI people were pursuing. It turns out no expert system is a match for just doing a bunch of matrix multiplications.
> 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.
>“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..
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).
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.
> 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!
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
My point is that all technology is built on prior discoveries and all matter of other factors that produce the civilisation, that produces doohickies, to look up cat memes.
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).
It must have a pretty good physics engine since we don’t see any strange artifacts in the sky from the times pre-cosmic inflation. In particular, it can’t be very quantized or we’d see giant “upscaling” artifacts.
It also appears to give us exactly enough computational power to build quantum computers, but not any more than that. That seems like a pretty inconvenient choice for us and the simulators.
I'm not personally all that convinced by the Simulation Hypothesis, but I recognize it's a legitimate possibility.
... right alongside the possibility that base reality doesn't have a fully consistent physics system. So far assuming reality works has panned out pretty well, but we can't be sure that will just always be true.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
