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

Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

backreaction.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 204 posts

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#161

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

orbifold wrote: post #129
srtjstjsj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I asked this elsewhere, but does anyone use ROOT outside of physics? It reads to me as "this development is useful to society at large!" while society at large has its own data stacks that are pretty much completely independent. Likewise for most of your other items.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#162

Post by sgt101 »

gus_massa wrote: post #119
sgt101 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

> Will understanding dark matter prevent the collapse of our planet and the deaths of our children? It's difficult to know. General relativity is useful for GPS. Superconductivity is useful for NMR that actually sometimes saves children from cancer. Neither of the applications were clear at the discovery time. (My favorite was Magnetoresistance. You start to explain it as a weird quantum boring effect of the spin of…

GR-> GPS ~50 years?

Superconductivity -> NMR ~60 years?

Do we have that long?

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#163

Post by raziel2701 »

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #78
srtjstjsj wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you highlighting? That article is a generic press releases saying they want $30B to look at particles.

I am afraid that, no matter how well thought out a strategy or plan for the future really is, there is always a ranting blogger who will get more attention. And in that tradition I guess I should have expected a dismissive reply using 'generic press release' to describe the Comment that introduces an entire section of Nature Physics.

I think it's very interesting to see publicly a back and forth dialogue of two sides discussing the merits and demerits of a scientific proposal.

It's a rare sight, and the contrarian view is necessary, we need red teams so that things don't become too one-sided and people can overcome their biases. I think the inherent structure in academia and in institutions like CERN make it difficult for dissenting voices to be heard, so I'm glad that the view that's going against the grain is getting more attention. In this era of censorship and punishing of whistleblowers I'm surprised she's freely critiquing their core arguments. Although I do see a lot of ad hominem attacks.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#164

Post by btilly »

jrumbut wrote: post #127
pmontra wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then read http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/what-quantum-gravity-needs-i... linked to from point 18.

In summary, the reason for quantum gravity experiments is that investigating contradictions in our theory has always been the best source of progress in science, and experiment has to lead theory. We know that QM and GR contradict each other, and therefore we should research that.

She gives a variety of experiments that can research that. The equipment for which is of use in a variety of other sciences. (Particularly astronomy.)

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#165

Post by dnautics »

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…

and I don't think she's even saying we shouldn't ever fund the next collider. I think she's suggesting that maybe we should wait until at least:

- many interesting falsifiable theories emerge that are resolvable at the accessible energy scale.

- technology catches up to make the engineering of such a thing cheaper.

It's not a terrible idea to wait. An important part of why the LHC was more effective than the hole in texas is that chemists using NMRs and doctors using MRIs drove technical and production improvements that brought down the cost of superconducting magnets.

There is this narrative that theoretical physics drives investments in technical innovation that improves other scientists, but I'm not sure that narrative is entirely true. It's often the other way.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#166

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

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…

> Generally speaking developing a new [HUGE PROJECT] leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack.

It's true for accelerators and a huge number of other things too. If this isn't unique to accelerators, it's not really a case for accelerators specifically.

> Isn’t it nice that a fraction of the smartest people on the world are not working on getting you to click Ads and are using machine learning to advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature?

This isn't a good faith argument. What if we got our smartest people working in hospitals or schools or orphanages instead of getting you to click ads? Maybe that's where the money should go. Think of the children.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#167

Post by orbifold »

criddell wrote: post #148
orbifold wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not really bad news, is it? It doesn't seem unreasonable to redirect all the money being spent on HEP projects into climate science. That high energy physicists have great employment options is a good thing. It makes it much easier to close down those projects. The HEP problems aren't going anywhere. Lets deal with more pressing concerns now and come back to HEP problems later.

It is really hard to organise 6000+ people to do anything. HEP won’t come back if you do. There isn’t much to figure out on climate change on a fundamental level anyways. It is a political and technological problem, not something you need a ton of scientists working on.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#168

Post by tsimionescu »

mnl wrote: post #111
sgt101 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you can spend a lump of money to check things out in that way, and fine - especially when you have the Higgs to confirm as well. But if you want to double down you need to have better evidence and a better argument. This is the logic that applies in any lab; sure take a punt look at x or y, if you're right then you'll get a grant and your career will thrive. If you're wrong you're out. That's happen…

The thing is we didn't know whether the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking involved the Higgs or something else. But we knew that there would be particles associated to electroweak symmetry breaking at TeV scale because of a unitarity bound, among other reasons (as happens with this particular kind of dark matter at 100 TeV that Sabine dishonestly calls "weasel words"). Something had to happen at that scale,…

Were there other theories that explained why the elementary particles have mass except for the Higgs?

Regardless, the point stands: we knew that something is missing from the Standard model, and we knew that it must exist in a very precise range of energy. If it didn't exist there, it could have called into question the whole SM.

In contrast, we don't know that there must be some kind of dark matter at the 100TeV scale. We know that one particular type that we have thought about could exist, but we have other candidates as well, and there are ways that the 100TeV prediction could also be moved to higher energy levels.

Meanwhile, we don't even know if dark matter is a kind of matter or a modification of the force of gravity or a problem with approximations of Einstein's equations used in practice etc.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#169

Post by andi999 »

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.

I am not conviced. I mean, you wouldnt want/know what to do with 5 Billion (just looked up the LHC value, I am not sure what the amount of the new proposed accelerators would be) for these kinds of experiments, probably 100 Million would be plenty. If you think that Iter is 15 Billion then 5 Billion doesnt sound so much. (Also in the grand Scheme of things like 50 Billion is not much)

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#170

Post by dodobirdlord »

tsimionescu wrote: post #155
orbifold wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but if the money were redirected to climate science, then the climate science people would be the well-payed ones, wouldn't they? 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.

To be fair it’s not like HEP pays well. And redirecting the resources that currently flow to HEP to climate science wouldn’t make much difference, as it’s not a particularly large amount of resources in the grand scheme of things. HEP has a lot of people who work there for a lot less than they could make elsewhere because they like being physicists. If the field is gutted in favor of some other discipline they will move to finance or industry, not other scientific fields. We can approximate where they would end up be looking at where PhD graduates who don’t go into physics research end up.
Post reply on HN