151–160 of 204 posts
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Theory fitting also happened with epicycles. We got nothing from that. Everything looked progressively more correct until all of it was suddenly incorrect.
Well our most up-to-date understanding of the solar system's orbits is based on general relativity. That's how we explain Mercury's precession. Is that your failure case?
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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 t…
There are two criticisms she articulates very clearly:
1. SUSY is not a testable theory, as it can always "retreat" to higher energy levels, without any real limit.
2. There is no scientific reason to believe SUSY should be true - it doesn't solve any real problem with any of the known theories of the universe. There are infinitely many ways that the universe could be different wherever we haven't looked yet - we can't possibly test all of those theories.
The combination of both arguments leads to the following "law": until we have a theory that solves unsolved problems in physics AND that makes concrete predictions with bounded parameters (so that a failure will explicitly rule out this theory, instead of pushing it endlessly to "maybe at higher energy levels"), we shouldn't be paying huge amounts of money to test things blindly.
This is the fundamental difference between, say, the Higgs prediction and SUSY - we were looking for a concrete thing that it was necessary to exist for the rest of the Standard Model to make sense; and we knew a clear range of energies where the Higgs must exist; if we found it like we did, we know the theory was correct. If LHC didn't find the Higgs, then it would have definitively ruled it out, leading to an explicit need for a new SM.
By contrast, SUSY has not been confirmed, but it is also impossible to rule out entirely, and none of our models NEED SUSY to be right - so in the end, experiments for SUSY don't achieve anything. We might as well be launching space missions to look for Russel's teapot.
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Well our most up-to-date understanding of the solar system's orbits is based on general relativity. That's how we explain Mercury's precession. Is that your failure case?
Epicycles have nothing to do with orbits. They were state of the art science when Earth was at the center of the universe.
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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.
You mean like RHIC and JLAB? They had to compete mightily over comparative trump change for an upgrade to an electron-ion collider? (RHIC won but JLAB will contribute) There are plenty of other areas of real research that are still nominally 'particle' physics that are actually able to put to paper real goals for what they expect to achieve. There are also facilities like NSLS II that are heavily subscribed and doing…
Collider projects were much more interesting to a public who had remembered the sea change of reactors and the bomb. While I love the LHC, from a productivity standpoint there are other projects which have been bearing more fruit for ~50 billion.
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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.
Also, there are other avenues for particle physics that don't require 20 billion dollars to start with. The 20 billion isn't going to retaining particle physicists, it's mostly going to hardware, engineering construction etc. efforts.
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…
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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 t…
That's the Hossenfelder take on the scientific method for you: whereby you make the experiments to confirm the theory. Which is fantastic because if science had ever worked that way you would be done with all experiments as the sensible ones would give known results, so what's the point.
The scientific method has usually worked by either coming up with theories and testing them; or by measuring things we thought we knew and finding new explanations when those turn out to be false.
What has not really worked too often has been coming up with mathematical models out of thin air, fitting them to all of the current data, extrapolating them to things we haven't been able to observe yet, and then building those things to check if they also worked.
That is why research into astronomical objects to ever greater precision is a promising candidate: we know what we expect to find if our current theories are correct, we know of real problems with our theories, and we can come up with new theories that predict such and such structures that should be visible in precisely such and such conditions.
This is the exact same model of how physics advanced from Tycho Brahe to Newton - people had models of the motions of the stars, they collected data to confirm those models, and found problems that they couldn't explain. Then Newton came along and found a mathematical model that, for the first time, explained those observations, and even reconciled them with other observations on the ground. We then spent a lot of time testing Newton's theories and didn't find any holes for a few hundred years.
Along came electromagnetism, the study of its dynamics, and the discovery of the speed of light problem, which couldn't be explained - requiring a new model that could actually explain everything we knew + the new data, and so on.
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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.
Depends on who you ask I guess, present value of root has been estimated[1] at around 2.8 billion Euro. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zpeh9wuzMs&feature=youtu.be...
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> She didn’t cut it and now is in a non-tenured position at a second rate institution. What an awful reply to legitimate criticism. I infer that some of your friends at CERN talk about her (quite successful) book this way?
That was uncalled for, so I took it out.
We've all been there. Props for recognizing it, admitting it, and dealing with it.
I somewhat agree with the premise, but the real kicker is the opportunity cost: there is so much Europe could be doing with this money that would have actual, real-world impact. There is a critical need for independent European software infrastructure - for this kind of money, they could fund their own web browser or OS or social media platform, which would exist independently of US-controlled tech. Would I trade a E…
Would you trade a European collider for a failed commercial alternative like FirefoxOS or PalmOS? Because keep in mind that commercial failure is the overwhelmingly likely outcome of the project you’re proposing. I’d rather fail at finding dark matter and learn things along the way than having a state-backed organization make lousy software that nobody uses. Of course, the more fundamental point is that industry seem…