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CERN experiment discovers five new particles

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Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#81

Post by krastanov »

lngnmn wrote: post #71
whyever wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Given that science is done with models and instruments I am confused what answer you expect. Those models and instruments are validated in thousands of different experiments, at different energy and length scales, from astronomical observations to man-made particle accelerators. Each of the experiments and observations testing slightly different part of the theory, all of them mostly in agreement. It is the rare disagreements that are actually most exciting, because they pave the way forward to pieces of the theory we do not understand yet.

Here are two independent examples that agree in their results: experimental measurements at the LHC; theoretical​ predictions from QFT.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#82

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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..

Neither theft nor markets exist without property rights. And to have property rights you need a legal system, you need democratic institutions, law makers, an executive branch that enforces your legal rights, etc.

That costs money. It requires the work and agreement of others. You are not entitled to that for free and without entering into any sort of negotiation that involves give and take.

Your demand for protection against that thing you call "theft" is essentially a demand for the existence of a system of government, and that requires taxes. Therefore the claim that taxes are theft contradicts itself.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#83

Post by TheGRS »

cestith wrote: post #58
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…

Oh, some of it does come down to almost begging. It shouldn't, because funding discovery is important. People doing long hours of hard work for the common good shouldn't have to beg for funding. Then again, we shouldn't have to beg for school lunches or housing for military vets either but look at social media right now.

I think on a philosophical level everyone should be able to justify their work at any time. But on a practical level this can be distracting to the people doing the work and it gets us into the begging/funding/publishing cycle we're stuck in now. Maybe the reward system just needs to be changed.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#84

Post by jessaustin »

greglindahl wrote: post #79
brutuscat wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haha like most of my complaints I think...

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#85

Post by TheGRS »

Waterluvian wrote: post #26
shepardrtc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It succeeded at its primary task, and the Higgs was a big part of it. Its still doing its job, so give it time. Finding nothing can often be just as important as finding something unexpected.

Mapping an open field fills in just as much paper as if you mapped a busy forest. I'm not sure what the best way is to convey this idea since people naturally want to find things that are exciting.

I think its a good analogy. Or just talk about the original periodic table. It was put together with many holes, but with the assumption that those elements would later be found and sure enough they were. I suppose scientists of the day could have openly accepted that model and decided there was no reason to prove silicon existed, but I think anyone would see that as silly. Its necessary to prove these things.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#86

Post by lngnmn »

krastanov wrote: post #81
lngnmn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Given that science is done with models and instruments I am confused what answer you expect. Those models and instruments are validated in thousands of different experiments, at different energy and length scales, from astronomical observations to man-made particle accelerators. Each of the experiments and observations testing slightly different part of the theory, all of them mostly in agreement. It is the rare disa…

Why, there are way too many well-documented instances of socially constructed and socially accepted bullshit in the history of mankind. Actually, it is much difficult task to find instances of accurate approximations to the truth.

There has been times when Hegelian "logic" has been accepted, published by Oxford University press, peer-reviewed, highly praised and successfully taught to students. I have read parts of Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. I have read it after The Principles of Mathematics and things like Haskell Prelude.

I have read peer-reviewed commentaries to The Highest Yoga Tantra and such crap like commentaries to Hatha Yoga Pradipika by some Australian lady with some funny Hindu nickname.

I have read even beautiful sufi texts in which they freely mix and match anthropomorphic qualities to produce a beautiful carpet of linguistic patterns which describe nothing that exist. Peer-reviewed and highly praised, of course.

Socially constructed nonsense is not something rare and uncommon. To the contrary, most of publicly available information is bullshit, or at least highly inaccurate, full of meaningless generalizations, flawed logic and amounts to nothing but mere compilation of current memes.

So, I am more or less familiar with how such things could emerge. My question is - what is a single falsifiable experiment which proves that this is not socially constructed, highly sophisticated sectarian set of beliefs supported by complex (but meaningless) simulations (instead of mere a book of dogma).

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#87

Post by TheGRS »

wolfgke wrote: post #20
shepardrtc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It succeeded at its primary task, and the Higgs was a big part of it. Its still doing its job, so give it time. Finding nothing can often be just as important as finding something unexpected.

> Finding nothing can often be just as important as finding something unexpected. From a scientific point you are right. From a political point or the point of securing further funding this statement is (unluckily) wrong.

I think its a fundamental problem with teaching science history. We tend to look at achievements in history as being inevitable, like of course we discovered flight after the locomotive was invented, that's just how it happened! But those discoveries were all a circumstances of chance. If we're going to continue to make progress in science we need to accept that new, groundbreaking discoveries don't happen inevitably, they happen from people doing a lot of the dirty work and from imaginative people putting the puzzle pieces together in new ways. There's no inevitability to discovery.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#88

Post by marcosdumay »

dkural wrote: post #75
marcosdumay wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can search for it at any time. But how can you state you will find it when you don't know if it's there?

I don't think LHC can be considered a failure on that basis.

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#89

Post by whyever »

lngnmn wrote: post #71
whyever wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

These tables are editorialized by the Particle Data Group, they summarize and distill the empirical evidence of thousands of high-energy physics experiments. Not every experiment is replicated, but some are, hence the different ratings of how sure the editors are the particles exist.

From their website:

"In the 2014 Review, the listings include 3,283 new measurements from 899 papers, in addition to 32,000 measurements from 9,000 papers that appeared in earlier editions. Evaluations of these properties are abstracted in summary tables."

http://pdg.lbl.gov/2016/html/what_is_pdg.html

Re: CERN experiment discovers five new particles

#90

Post by lngnmn »

whyever wrote: post #89
lngnmn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

These tables are editorialized by the Particle Data Group, they summarize and distill the empirical evidence of thousands of high-energy physics experiments. Not every experiment is replicated, but some are, hence the different ratings of how sure the editors are the particles exist. From their website: "In the 2014 Review, the listings include 3,283 new measurements from 899 papers, in addition to 32,000 measurement…

> probability, statistics, accelerators and detectors

Surely, there could not be any error here. Nothing socially constructed.

Isn't it already borders nonsense that in the universe which is sustained by a couple of fundamental conservation laws there supposed to be hundreds of elementary (presumably fundamental) particles which emerge and disintegrate in time, which is not even an intrinsic property of "more real" things like photons.

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