Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CERN experiment discovers five new particles

stfc.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 127 posts

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#71

Post by lngnmn »

whyever wrote: post #50
M_Grey wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth remembering that the Higgs particle was also predicted by the standard model, and no one underestimates the importance of that confirmation.

The Higgs is an elementary particle, so its discovery was much more exciting. There are a lot of particles made up of quarks, like the five mentioned in the article: http://pdg.lbl.gov/2016/tables/rpp2016-qtab-mesons.pdf http://pdg.lbl.gov/2016/tables/rpp2016-qtab-baryons.pdf

What is at least one single scientific (replicated) evidence that these tables does not contain merely a socially constructed crap, modern day alchemy deduced from flawed models and/or instruments?

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#72

Post by jamesdwilson »

nananonymous wrote: post #65
jamesdwilson wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

good points, thank you

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#73

Post by jamesdwilson »

sidlls wrote: post #63
jamesdwilson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that is not an argument that it is needed

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#74

Post by jamesdwilson »

krylon wrote: post #66
jamesdwilson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

not helping the argument

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#75

Post by dkural »

marcosdumay wrote: post #70
dkural wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet, that was precisely one of the stated goals of LHC. Observing things is not a bad way to find new physics: Radiation was observed before there was a theory for it. Electrons were also generated as a "ray" before people had any concept of electrons. We've observed the microwave background without knowing about the big bang, or cosmic expansion.

Most new physics starts out as experimental observations. Einstein's theory of relativity is one of the amazing (partial) exceptions.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#76

Post by [deleted] »

marcosdumay wrote: post #70
dkural wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#77

Post by UweSchmidt »

sidlls wrote: post #38
jamesdwilson wrote: post #35

you forgot to beg for more funding

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…

Good comment.

Just curious, just how much funding should basic science and theoretical research get, exactly?

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#78

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#79

Post by greglindahl »

brutuscat wrote: post #8
jessaustin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please take more care in quoting. What you've quoted does not describe the current work, but rather something they haven't demonstrated yet called "doubly heavy baryons". That sentence was immediately preceded by this one: Professor Tim Gershon, Professor of Physics at University of Warwick and UK spokesperson for the LHCb experiment, explained what will come next for the LHCb experiment: “After the LHCb experiment i…

Yes, you are right, I miss read those paragraphs...

Please mark when you make a significant edit of a comment that had a problem. Right now it looks like jessaustin's complaint is nonsensical.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#80

Post by contravariant »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #67
nananonymous wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

It did.
Post reply on HN