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Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

backreaction.blogspot.com

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Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#51

Post by cedilla »

6nf wrote: post #7
aroberge wrote: post #5

Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder is an opiniated physicist who gets a lot of flak for constantly commenting on this issue. Yet, I believe she does society a service in doing so. I have yet to see anyone contradict her basic premise with factual information. I wish she were wrong, as I would love to see a breakthrough towards an experimentally verified Grand Unified Theory, including an explanation for what we currently identi…

Her opinion is totally legitimate and I’m glad people like her are speaking up. Everyone should agree that we need to spend money pushing the limits of science. That’s not the issue here. The point of Sabine’s criticism is that these empty promises need more scrutiny based on the failures of the recent past.

I don't really understand that argument. What does a failed prediction about super-symmetry in 1996 have to do with the opportunities of the next collider? How does "we didn't find evidence for or against supersymmetry at LHC" connect to dark matter experiments in its successor?

I'm also not really convinced of what she categorizes as failure. She enumerates quite a few incorrect predictions, but is that sufficient to show that the experiments were a failure? There are literally thousands of papers published because of the LHC and CERN claims hundreds of results. Maybe you can show that they are mostly worthless (which is not the same as boring or not spectecular), but she doesn't really seem to even try to do that.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#52

Post by prof-dr-ir »

79 points as of now. And how many points would hacker news have given to the Nature comment by Giudice and Gianotti?

It is both curious and sad to see the outsize attention given to bitter polemicists (and not just in physics).

Please read https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 .

Edit: downvotes? let me rephrase: if you care about particle physics then there was no reason to ignore the original proposal. if you care about outrage, on the other hand...

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#53

Post by sampo »

lovemenot wrote: post #49
bnlpa wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is wrong to cherry pick the HTML example. It would have been invented outside (wasn't SGML already a thing?). Compared to open source in general the CERN stacks are horrible, typical sloppy academic software of no use to the general public. Tons of stuff like the cling C++ interpreter that look interesting but are never polished to be generally useful.

cling ? clang perhaps? Truth is, I did get your point. Perfect refinement is not necessary in every context. Your comment, like CERN's interpreter, though sloppy was fit for purpose.

https://github.com/root-project/cling

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#54

Post by lovemenot »

sampo wrote: post #53
lovemenot wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cling ? clang perhaps? Truth is, I did get your point. Perfect refinement is not necessary in every context. Your comment, like CERN's interpreter, though sloppy was fit for purpose.

https://github.com/root-project/cling

Thanks. I retract the specific objection.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#55

Post by ehvatum »

woah wrote: post #41
orbifold wrote: post #9

Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and t…

There are worthwhile undertakings other than particle physics

But we wouldn’t know what the things explored by those undertakings are made of.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#56

Post by PopeDotNinja »

orbifold wrote: post #9

Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and t…

One could argue that spending a lot of money on a hyper advanced anything would lead to a bunch of cool technologies, even if the primary objective yielded no results. Why spend many billions of euros on something speculative when one could spend the money on something much more likely to produce both primary and secondary benefits?

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#57

Post by jrumbut »

bnlpa wrote: post #34
orbifold wrote: post #9

Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and t…

I think it is wrong to cherry pick the HTML example. It would have been invented outside (wasn't SGML already a thing?). Compared to open source in general the CERN stacks are horrible, typical sloppy academic software of no use to the general public. Tons of stuff like the cling C++ interpreter that look interesting but are never polished to be generally useful.

There have been a lot of bad ideas in markup languages. Check out some of the ideas tossed around in the creation of HTML. Plenty of disasters averted by pragmatic thinkers and good luck.

The web browser enabled my whole very comfortable career so I'm willing to overlook a sloppy C++ interpreter here and there.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#58

Post by aroberge »

deepstack wrote: post #44
aroberge wrote: post #5

Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder is an opiniated physicist who gets a lot of flak for constantly commenting on this issue. Yet, I believe she does society a service in doing so. I have yet to see anyone contradict her basic premise with factual information. I wish she were wrong, as I would love to see a breakthrough towards an experimentally verified Grand Unified Theory, including an explanation for what we currently identi…

yeah more funding and focus should start to focus on stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory... Time to spend some money else well.

> yeah more funding and focus should start to focus on stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory...

This Wikipedia entry is 1) generically about the type of unproven theoretical model without experimental support that is used in an attempt to justify investment in the next big collider; 2) more specifically, about a theoretical model that has been shown to be wrong in terms of describing what we observe.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#59

Post by vikramkr »

orbifold wrote: post #9

Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and t…

Its not zero sum, but the sum isn't infinite, especially for research without direct commercial applications. It would be nice to fund everything, but scientists have to get lot more politically engages before that sort of political support is even on the table

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#60

Post by jrumbut »

pmontra wrote: post #33
aroberge wrote: post #5

Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder is an opiniated physicist who gets a lot of flak for constantly commenting on this issue. Yet, I believe she does society a service in doing so. I have yet to see anyone contradict her basic premise with factual information. I wish she were wrong, as I would love to see a breakthrough towards an experimentally verified Grand Unified Theory, including an explanation for what we currently identi…

It's hard to be loved when one wants to take money away from other people and their projects. A more promising line of action would be building another community of particle physicists with different goals than building a bigger collider, possibly aligned with Hossenfelder's suggestions. In this way they'll have something to gain and will fight for the budget that otherwise would go into the collider.

I'm not sure we're improving anything when we discover some public good is flawed, mediocre, or maybe even a little corrupt and respond by tearing it down and replacing it with nothing.

I think we've done enough of that. At this point I'm really only interested in positive proposals, what new stuff can we do? If we have a wave of new successes any old failures will fade out on their own.

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