Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

Post by Barrin92 » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

welterde wrote: post #130

Barrin92 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a lot of learning potential in building one or two but after that you're pretty much just making them bigger. There's a lot of engineering and construction involved but the new ones are really just very expensive and huge without netting necessarily much in terms of engineering science. In particular if you consider opportunity costs. With the 23 billion(!) it costs to build the new Large Hadron collider you…

The technology used in the accelerator and the detectors keeps changing though. Particle accelerators today are quite different to those in the 60ies. Also not sure where you got the 23 billions from. Total budget for LHC is less than 8 billion euros. And that's over quite a long time frame. The whole CERN budget is only 1.1 billion a year (and they run quite a few different experiments apart from the LHC). That's wi…

Post by fhars » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 8:00 PM UTC

gizmo686 wrote: post #141

nine_k wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An easy, direct link, for example: Careful observation of the orbit of Mercury —> Special Relativity —> General Relativity —> GPS satellites able to keep exact time —> the map app on your mobile phone.

Was the orbit of Mercury (or any other astronomical observations) important for the discover of Relativity. My understanding was that experimental impetus for relativity was the Michelson–Morley experiment, which was an in-lab experiment, not an astronomical observation. General relativity was then developed on a purely theoretical basis. That it was able to explain Mercury's orbit was a nice bit of empirical confirm…

Post by spekcular » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 8:06 PM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #158

spekcular wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn. I never actually learned this stuff. Is there a good textbook account of this isotropic-to-nematic transition that includes full details? Or is there still a gaping hole in the published literature? In other words, did your colleague do this as a kind of history project, or because the details weren't available anywhere else?

I don't think there are textbooks on this stuff, it is too much of a niche, you probably need to read journal papers. A place to start might be the classic "What is liquid?" review paper by Barker and Henderson: https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.48.587?casa_toke... ... and then the classic review paper on liquid crystals by Stephen and Straley: https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.46.617?casa_toke...…

Post by robonerd » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 8:19 PM UTC

davrosthedalek wrote: post #148

robonerd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the contention here is whether she's right or wrong. Phrasing like 'undermine' and 'cast shade' seems to imply malicious intent, which is going too far. Being wrong isn't the same as being wrong with malicious intent.

The fact that she chooses to bring forward here doubts via youtube, books, and blogs (i.e. the things she earns money with) instead of/in addition to a well written paper on arxiv (i.e. like everyone else who wants to partake in a honest physics discussion*) lets me question her intent. (She has papers to some of the things she complains about, which normally get answered by rebuttals. This is normal scientific disco…

Post by stjohnswarts » Sat, Apr 30, 2022, 8:30 PM UTC

sva_ wrote: post #136

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Onsager was a bastard with omitting details. He has a 1949 paper on packing of hard rods (and other anisometric particles), which is 4 pages long, but a colleague who went through the details of the derivation spent half a year and filled a ring binder with intermediate calculations.

I wonder if this is a consequence of people demanding more "rigor" nowadays?