Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises • Hacker News Board

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#121

Post by SiempreViernes » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 2:17 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #110

SiempreViernes wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically: making charged particles change direction causes them to emit radiation, and the more they turn the more they radiate. This gets worse and worse at higher energies, so increasing the magnets but keeping the same angle means you waste more energy and your magnets get destroyed by the intense radiation.

My understanding is that is true of Electrons, but not Protons, which is why SLAC is a straight line, the only way to get electrons up to high energies. [Edit]Wrong! Turns out protons do emit energy as well... up to 6.7 KeV per turn. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation

Yeah, the effect scales with the inverse mass of the particle, so heavier things radiate less.

For this reason I've seen suggestions to do round electron-type accelerators but using the much heavier muons to get around the radiation problem.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#122

Post by tsimionescu » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

sega_sai wrote: post #28

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…

In my opinion the problem with her messaging is that while she says that we should not fund the next collider, I think the argument should be, what's the best allocation of money in physics? And there are legitimate reasons to have the next collider even if we have no guarantee that it will deliver GUT or whatever. We have to venture into the unknown. We just should not lie that it will prove supersymmetry or is guar…

She has specific proposals - climate science (the most pressing concern of our times, if organized human society is to survive the next century or so), and astronomical research.

I would also mention that things like the Voyager missions are still providing novel data ~50 years after their launch. Will the same be true of the LHC, or any other particle collider?

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#123

Post by tsimionescu » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

SiempreViernes wrote: post #117

tsimionescu wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professor Hossenfelder and others have written long books about why the probability of finding new physics based on not liking the aesthetics of the current maths (naturalness, supersimetry, grand unification) is extremely likely to fail, and has been constantly failing for ~50 years. If our way of generating new theories has given bad predictions for 50 years, at what time should we stop and try out other ways of ex…

They make qualitative arguments, nobody has any realistic prediction of what the probabilities are. And the problem has never been making new theories, the problem is always that we have a very good model, and no principled way for choosing between all the possible theories that gives rise to almost precisely that model. So people tried to invent reasons and so far nobody has had any luck. And Hossenfelder is correct…

The point is that there are known problems in the foundations of physics (the measurement problem, the reconciliation of general relativity and quantum mechanics to name the 2 best known ones) and that they should be by far the biggest focus for new research - not GUTs and solutions for un-naturalness.

If we have a theory that could solve the measurement problem (or detect quantum gravity etc.), and a plausible experiment for that theory, we should perform this experiment - it may well yield valuable data whatever result we get.

Conversely, if we have a theory that predicts that more particles may exist at higher levels of energy and nothing else, then there is no good reason to perform this experiment. Especially if the precise level of energy is a free parameter of the theory, so the theory won't change if the experiment fails.

> And Hossenfelder is correct that in hindsight naturalness wasn't a very good rule.

I believe that she is correct that naturalness wasn't a very good rule at all, not just in hindsight. It's as good a rule as it would have been to expect all numbers to be multiples of Pi.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#124

Post by orbifold » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

sgt101 wrote: post #95

orbifold wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a high energy collider is like building a larger telescope. The only things you can be sure of is that you will be able to understand whatever you have seen better than before. There is scientific consensus that we should be able to understand dark matter better by building one aswell. This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public. Attacking this communication t…

>>There is scientific consensus Really - I thought that we were debating an article by a scientist, who along with many other scientists disagrees with that position. >>This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public. And yet the general public is being asked to pay for it. Perhaps sorting out that gap and explaining how understanding dark matter will be as important as (f…

She is not a scientist active in this area. At this point she is for the most part paid to be a science communicator. A lot of money is spend on curing all these other things. Particle accelerators have been instrumental in developing the technology for hadron radiation therapy (there are now special purpose one just for cancer treatment) and superconducting magnets (useful for MRT medical devices). If you examine it closely a lot of advances in biology and medicine were thanks to technical advances made by physics. They have been a really solid bet so far and have created trillions of dollars in value. Why not let them have some fun and let them chase their McGuffin, which btw. might be totally real and interesting fundamental physics. The high energy particle physics community is doing ground breaking research on radiation hard imaging sensors, large scale super conducting power distribution (which might be useful for connecting solar power in a lossless manner to consumers).

These projects are a way to train high skilled STEM people (competition to stay at CERN is brutal, but most go on to industry) in a structured way that then work on a lot of other societally relevant problems.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#125

Post by SiempreViernes » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 2:50 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #123

SiempreViernes wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make qualitative arguments, nobody has any realistic prediction of what the probabilities are. And the problem has never been making new theories, the problem is always that we have a very good model, and no principled way for choosing between all the possible theories that gives rise to almost precisely that model. So people tried to invent reasons and so far nobody has had any luck. And Hossenfelder is correct…

The point is that there are known problems in the foundations of physics (the measurement problem, the reconciliation of general relativity and quantum mechanics to name the 2 best known ones) and that they should be by far the biggest focus for new research - not GUTs and solutions for un-naturalness. If we have a theory that could solve the measurement problem (or detect quantum gravity etc.), and a plausible exper…

To claim that the standard model has nothing to do with the quantization of gravity is very strange, part of the motivation for a GUT is that it would be a huge help towards making a theory of everything. And a TOE is precisely a unified treatment of the standard model forces and gravity.

The measurement problem isn't a physics thing, just like naturalness that's more of a life-style choice. In fact, the only reason to have problems with wave-function collapse is precisely a naturalness reasoning, technically it makes very accurate predictions just fine.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#126

Post by orbifold » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

aaron695 wrote: post #87

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…

> Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. Poor people "shouldn’t" die from simple diseases. Is this the game, we are wishing away things we don't like? Science 100% is zero sum. Especially talking the figures we are here. How about we start with creating free science text books (that are not garbage) for the world then we'll let you blow multi-billions on your religion?

Pretty simple neither Hossfelder, nor politicians, nor you get to tell people what they would like to do. At this point it becomes a power struggle and so far mainstream physics has won that power struggle, because we have good arguments on our side. Investment in particle physics has had large net positive effects on society at large. Why kill the golden goose just because you aren't interested in whatever these people are interested in. Science doesn't enter this argument at all, purely from a technology and human capital level this is close to optimal use of their talents. You have a bunch of high y motivated, talented people working towards a common goal. Even if you don't perfectly understand why they would do that, their results alone are convincing enough to let them continue.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#127

Post by jrumbut » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #93

jrumbut wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hossenfelder proposes the stuff at point 18 of http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-... I have no idea of they are something particle scientists do or if they belong to another branch of physics.

Sure the base is covered, but I'm calling for "20 arguments for quantum gravity experiments" and #18 is "we've tried bigger and bigger particle colliders and the results are disappointing"

Everything's disappointing, I am (ironically given my tone here) only interested in hearing from those leading with solutions.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#128

Post by orbifold » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #122

sega_sai wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion the problem with her messaging is that while she says that we should not fund the next collider, I think the argument should be, what's the best allocation of money in physics? And there are legitimate reasons to have the next collider even if we have no guarantee that it will deliver GUT or whatever. We have to venture into the unknown. We just should not lie that it will prove supersymmetry or is guar…

She has specific proposals - climate science (the most pressing concern of our times, if organized human society is to survive the next century or so), and astronomical research. I would also mention that things like the Voyager missions are still providing novel data ~50 years after their launch. Will the same be true of the LHC, or any other particle collider?

I have bad news for you: Most high energy physicists I know go on to finance or "data science" before they would work on climate science. It is just not that interesting and doesn't pay well. HEP carriers prestige and is actually something aspiring physicists want to do.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#129

Post by orbifold » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

srtjstjsj wrote: post #63

pif wrote: post #50

I am a particle physicist and when I worked at CERN I helped building the data acquisition software of the ATLAS experiment. The empty promises she is talking about are the equivalent of the promises by politicians during a campaign: they are for the larger public, for the people who (rightfully!) don't want to get more informed than that. In the background, both in science and in politics, technical folks know what…

Which technological improvements?

Get a beer with a particle physicist some time, you will find most of them didn't actually work on "finding dark matter" but worked on a myriad of specific technical challenges.

- Superconducting magnets and power distribution

- Radiation hard ASICs and detectors

- CAD software like KICAD

- ROOT

- Grid computing infrastructure

- Analog circuit design (1024 channel low power ADCs, pixel sensors)

- FPGA design for data aggregation and communication

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#130

Post by gloftus » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 3:04 PM UTC

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #52

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.…

I think you are being down voted because you appear to have an ax to grind rather than a useful perspective on the issue.