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CERN experiment discovers five new particles

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Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#61

Post by braymundo »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #56
nananonymous wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem. They can't answer that question and neither can the market. The market is great at assigning value to things based on scarcity and demand, but there will never be scarcity of the Navier-Stokes equations because they can just be copied and shared so the market is useless for saying what they're worth. And before a discovery is made literally nobody knows how it might change the world. I somehow dou…

good answer. thank you for taking me on. does it justify theft though?

This should be interesting for the "tax is theft" crowd: http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#62

Post by sidlls »

zerebubuth wrote: post #46
sidlls wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is being downvoted for a number of reasons. I'd like to use it as soapbox for a moment. One reason I left academia was the constant cycle of grant funding proposals followed by a flurry of publication followed by more proposals. These proposals often carried some requirement for language that, in my view, was a direct response to a certain kind of taxpayer, in order to justify on some tangible level the…

How much of that attitude do you think is due to a cultural shared failure to value basic science and theoretical research, and how much is due to a failure to communicate the benefits of such activities? I think it's quite possible that when people hear "it's complicated" or "we won't see practical applications for a decade", they wonder whether it's money well-spent. Especially if funding for things which have an i…

I can't disagree that there is a failure​ of communication as you note. Or at least a deficiency.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#63

Post by sidlls »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #53
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the market value of General Relativity and the Standard Model? Where can I buy shares in them? What's the ROI this week?

Ask SpaceX, General Electric, and the thousands of other companies that rely heavily on science.

These companies rely heavily on science that has in some part, usually some large part, been funded by government funded research programs.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#64

Post by dkural »

bpicolo wrote: post #16
grabcocque wrote: post #12

I have to admit, I rather admire their putting a brave face on things, with their mildly-too-insistent claim that the LHC is vital for finding new physics despite the increasing likelihood it's not going to find any. In that sense the LHC is a political failure, because it has failed at its primary political job, which is to make the argument for an even bigger collider.

How'd it fail at it's primary task? Wasn't the Higgs a big part of that? Or is the argument that is hasn't found anything outside of the standard model?

The physics community does not consider finding the Higgs new physics. Not finding Higgs would've been more exciting, or a more massive / lighter Higgs, etc. The Higgs showed up exactly as predicted with the predicted mass, so we're stuck with the Standard Model - i.e. no "new physics".

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#65

Post by nananonymous »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #57
nananonymous wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem. They can't answer that question and neither can the market. The market is great at assigning value to things based on scarcity and demand, but there will never be scarcity of the Navier-Stokes equations because they can just be copied and shared so the market is useless for saying what they're worth. And before a discovery is made literally nobody knows how it might change the world. I somehow dou…

but companies such as cocacola, and well, many many others, are researching things all the time for discoveries that benefit their company.

That's great for solving known problems, like maybe Coke could estimate that reducing turbulence in their pipes in Warehouse ABC would save them a half million dollars a year. Then they can set aside money, maybe insure the project against failure, the insurance company has some idea what to charge them for such a policy, and so on.

But when Einstein was working on Relativity nobody could have foreseen what it would make possible. In that case the discovery was made and then eventually the business sector found a way to sell it, decades afterwards. Today we know what GPS makes possible so we know what it's worth, but in 1905 there was basically no market value for it.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#66

Post by krylon »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #48
M_Grey wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who just want funding don't work on things like the LHC. If you want to solve a problem while someone is throwing money at you, then you work in defense. You shouldn't be so quick to harshly judge people who are making the choice to explore the edges of what we can achieve rather than make a quick buck developing the best new way to kill someone.

right right. i am just totally making up this thing where research and results are forged, driven by state grants.

Thank God that never happens in the free market. /s

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#67

Post by jamesdwilson »

nananonymous wrote: post #59
jamesdwilson wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good answer. thank you for taking me on. does it justify theft though?

I have a hard time seeing taxation as always theft. In a democratic society the public either is or was part of the decision on whether or not to fund things like the LHC. If society agrees to pay for it then by definition there's no coercion. I think the LHC has over a dozen participating countries, each of which volunteered to be part of it. Ideally there should be checks and balances making sure a project of this…

if tax isn't theft, then the free market will decide to do the same thing..

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#68

Post by krylon »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #55
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you are. Do you really think no one would have noticed if the Standard Model was - as you call it - a forgery?

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-repl... http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-f... http://www.nature.com/news/science-journalism-can-be-evidenc... 40,000 scientific papers invalidated. - https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/scandal-mri-br... http://nautil.us/blog/we-should-not-accept-scientific-result... http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-re…

I hope you do not need to have the difference between psychology and physics explained to you.

Also, does any of this refer to the Standard Model specifically?

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#69

Post by dkural »

Just to give a bit more context:

* These are not elementary particles. * It was predicted for a long time that these composite particles should exist. So it is not "new" in the sense that it was unexpected, but we finally have the resolution (energy, luminosity etc.) to detect these with statistical significance. * These belong to the same class as protons and neutrons - these are hadrons made with multiple quarks.

Here's a super simple overview of Quantum Field Theory & Particle Physics:

Everything is made of force fields and matter fields.

* We discovered that force fields (i.e. electromagnetism) is quantized, giving rise to quantum mechanics etc.

* Matter fields are also quantized, hence their excitations behave like discrete particles - the ones we observe at the atomic scale, for instance.

* In hindsight, we should've been able to predict this after E = mc^2 telling us energy matter, thus if energy is quantized so should matter.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#70

Post by marcosdumay »

dkural wrote: post #64
bpicolo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How'd it fail at it's primary task? Wasn't the Higgs a big part of that? Or is the argument that is hasn't found anything outside of the standard model?

The physics community does not consider finding the Higgs new physics. Not finding Higgs would've been more exciting, or a more massive / lighter Higgs, etc. The Higgs showed up exactly as predicted with the predicted mass, so we're stuck with the Standard Model - i.e. no "new physics".

You don't go into an experiment with the goal to find new physics.
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