161–170 of 301 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure they can fit any experimental result that way, they can probably fit any 19 experimental results that way, but in general if you would freely adjust a constant to fit one experiment then it would stop fitting other experiments.
Do we need TDD for particle physics so CI could run tests on what experiments break when merging a theory
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's not good to cherry-pick paragraphs from the whole artile Isn't that exactly what you just did? There's nothing wrong with showing only small quotes, the problem would be cherry picking them in a way that leads people to draw incorrect conclusions about the whole.
Which is what I demonstrated the parent poster did.
I can't wait for PBS Spacetime to tell me what to think about this.
Am I the only one who barely understands anything from that show? Every episode I hear a dozen barely explained confusing terms with quantum this and higgs-field that. I feel like they care more about impressing me with how complicated this stuff is than they do about actually teaching me much. Maybe I'm just not the target audience :(
There is a nice video explanation from PBS at https://youtu.be/O4Ko7NW2yQo
Alexey Petrov, quoted in the article, subbed in to teach one day in my quantum mechanics class :) It was the first day we were being introduced to the theory of scattering, and I will never forget his intro. He asked the class, “what is scattering?”, waited a moment, and then threw a whiteboard marker against the wall, and answered his own question: “that’s scattering”. Lots of times, physics classes can be so heavy…
I have a theory about how well educated the mass of humans are, could be and should be. Bear with me. Roughly 2000 years ago, the number of people who could do arithmetic and writing was Now it is 95% of the world population, and 99.9% of 'Western' world. Lets say that Alexey Petrov is about as highly educated and trained as any human so far. (A Physics PhD represents pretty much 25 years of full-time full-on educati…
Alexey Petrov, quoted in the article, subbed in to teach one day in my quantum mechanics class :) It was the first day we were being introduced to the theory of scattering, and I will never forget his intro. He asked the class, “what is scattering?”, waited a moment, and then threw a whiteboard marker against the wall, and answered his own question: “that’s scattering”. Lots of times, physics classes can be so heavy…
I have a theory about how well educated the mass of humans are, could be and should be. Bear with me. Roughly 2000 years ago, the number of people who could do arithmetic and writing was Now it is 95% of the world population, and 99.9% of 'Western' world. Lets say that Alexey Petrov is about as highly educated and trained as any human so far. (A Physics PhD represents pretty much 25 years of full-time full-on educati…
It will make a huge difference, and no difference at all. It will probably help us solve all of our current problems. And then it will also introduce a whole new brand of problems which will be sources of crises that generation will deal with. What you read on news will change, but the human emotional response to those news will be very similar to today's.
As someone who has worked in fields that use lattice calculations (on the experimental side), the new calculation is interesting, but I would not say it’s particularly convincing yet. Lattice calculations are VERY difficult, and are not always stable. I am not questioning whether they did their work well or not, just pointing out that in high energy physics and high energy nuclear physics, many times our experimental…
I am not sure I follow the logic. The new computation aligns with the experiment. Why is it more likely for it to be wrong than the calculation that shows the theory deviating from experiment.
However, I’m an experimentalist who has worked close to a lot of this stuff, not an actual theorist, so I’d love to get a theorists interpretation as well.
Alexey Petrov, quoted in the article, subbed in to teach one day in my quantum mechanics class :) It was the first day we were being introduced to the theory of scattering, and I will never forget his intro. He asked the class, “what is scattering?”, waited a moment, and then threw a whiteboard marker against the wall, and answered his own question: “that’s scattering”. Lots of times, physics classes can be so heavy…
I have a theory about how well educated the mass of humans are, could be and should be. Bear with me. Roughly 2000 years ago, the number of people who could do arithmetic and writing was Now it is 95% of the world population, and 99.9% of 'Western' world. Lets say that Alexey Petrov is about as highly educated and trained as any human so far. (A Physics PhD represents pretty much 25 years of full-time full-on educati…
Alexey Petrov, quoted in the article, subbed in to teach one day in my quantum mechanics class :) It was the first day we were being introduced to the theory of scattering, and I will never forget his intro. He asked the class, “what is scattering?”, waited a moment, and then threw a whiteboard marker against the wall, and answered his own question: “that’s scattering”. Lots of times, physics classes can be so heavy…
(The comment was posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26726981 before we merged the threads.)
Can anyone explain in layman's terms why this is important?
If you are wondering, "why does this one single number matter so much, who cares if we didn't know it before," it is because it hints at a great new theory that could change everything. Nobody knows what theory, but in the past small discrepancies in fundamental measurements have been the seeds of great theories.