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Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

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Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#171

Post by nitrogen »

orbifold wrote: post #167
criddell wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Organizations and cultures are kind of like living beings in this regard. The relationships and unspoken understandings between those 6000+ people are not things that could be replaced easily.

This is e.g. why the current rocket companies had to do a lot of reinvention and research instead of just switching the Saturn V production line back on.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#172

Post by outworlder »

orbifold wrote: post #25
JesseMReeves wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is pretty representative of the state of the academia. You should have left it in, if only as to serve as a reminder that science nowadays is all about status.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#173

Post by will4274 »

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.…

The insight that people care about outrage is not particularly novel. You yourself care about outrage - it's the reason you left the comment you left. If I care about outrage, on the other hand... What? I'm like you and most other people?

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#175

Post by criddell »

orbifold wrote: post #167
criddell wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It is really hard to organise 6000+ people to do anything.

For sure, but we know we can do it because we've already done it.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#176

Post by johncolanduoni »

tsimionescu wrote: post #157
mnl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you make the experiments to confirm the theory 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 hav…

> 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.

But this is the story of early to mid 20th century physics! General relativity, the initial quantum mechanical theories, Dirac’s equation and anti-particles, neutrinos were all the product of this process of adding mathematical conveniences and extrapolating to things that turned out to be real. You can argue that more recent efforts in this direction have been much less successful than those were, but I think you have to turn a completely blind eye to the history of modern physics to claim that method “has not really worked too often”.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#177

Post by robocat »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #166
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…

Agree.

> 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.

The exact same argument can be made for military spending. The internet was invented at...

It is always such a dishonest argument to talk about spin-off benefits.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#178

Post by codethief »

spotinsun wrote: post #79
JesseMReeves wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Would FIAS ( https://fias.institute/en/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Institute_for_Advanc... ) even be considered a second rate institution?

Ignoring the fact that this is another ad hominem attack, judging a researcher by her/his home institution won't get you anywhere. I know dozens of outstanding mathematicians and physicists who are very well known in their respective fields and reside at less-than-well-known institutions. (Often, because their family is from there and they took the chance to go back.)

Generally speaking, in Central and Western Europe it doesn't matter which institution a researcher is from. They're all good and those at top-tier institutions are only marginally better at best.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#179

Post by mnl »

tsimionescu wrote: post #168
mnl wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sca…

Sure, for instance EWSB by strong dynamics such as Technicolor. Here's a well known review from back in the day: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0203079

I'm not sure we're done with composite models. There are more exotic alternatives and then the fact remains that neutrino masses aren't in the SM.

I consider pretty hopeless to keep thinking that you can modify GR like plasticine in all the instances in which putting amounts of matter that doesn't radiate works (maybe it works because it's there and its effects on other stuff is how you "see" it). It has the appeal of making some people feel like they can call a whole profession or several a bunch of crooks, and that's pretty much what it has going for it outside of the scientists working in earnest on it.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#180

Post by pierrefermat1 »

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…

People really need to stop quoting tangentially invented technologies as the justification for CERN to exist, if I was to gather the same group of scientists to ask them to build the best Lego set possible with 50bil they would have also produced the same tangential technologies.
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