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

backreaction.blogspot.com

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

#211

Post by robonerd »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #174
robonerd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> never about what should be funded instead. This isn't entirely true. In this blog post ( http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/04/does-world-need-lar... ) she recommends: > "One of the key motivations for building a larger particle collider that particle physicists like to bring up is that we still do not know what dark matter is made of. But we are not even sure that dark matter is made of particles. And if it’s a…

> better telescopes, better sky coverage, better redshift resolution, better frequency coverage And all of this is being built currently or already exists (ELT, ASSN, Vera Rubin, SKA, CTA), so it's not clear what she's advocating.

Presumably "more of that." Would cosmologists really turn away even more funding? I can't imagine so.

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

#214

Post by jacquesm »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #162
moonchrome wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a huge stretch. CERN might be a reason we have the web that looks like it looks today, but we would have something similar with or without CERN.

We might be stuck with compuserve and AOL.

We may well be stuck with the equivalent of those again, only we'll call them Google and Facebook.

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

#215

Post by Angostura »

nine_k wrote: post #131
robonerd wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress [...] But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics [...]" Can anybody explain the relevance of cosmology and astrophysics to societal progress? I'm sure these are very worthwhile fields of study in other respects.. but societal pr…

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.

Well, if we are going that far back, we might as well be talking about Rutherford and the development of transistors,

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

#216

Post by zone411 »

tambourine_man wrote: post #82
photochemsyn wrote: post #12

Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR: > "I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so…

Sabine went on full rant/iconoclastic/grudge mode IMO recently. It's a shame, as she a good communicator, but I just see myself skipping her content when it pops up. “I left the field because it's a paper production machine that adds no value to society” without substantiation is simply a frustration ridden meme.

Agree. I stopped watching her stuff after her really terrible video about the Simulation Hypothesis, which showed that she didn't even grasp the argument. Since she feels free to opine about things she clearly knows nothing about, I can't know if she's also talking about other topics without any real understanding (Gell-Mann Amnesia).

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

#217

Post by zone411 »

bawolff wrote: post #157
tambourine_man wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sabine went on full rant/iconoclastic/grudge mode IMO recently. It's a shame, as she a good communicator, but I just see myself skipping her content when it pops up. “I left the field because it's a paper production machine that adds no value to society” without substantiation is simply a frustration ridden meme.

I feel like everytime her name comes up, its always a bunch of comments like "i don't like her tone" or whatever, but never much in way of substantiated disagreement. I can't help but wonder if she is just speaking uncomfortable truths about things a lot of the hn audience like, where nobody can really come up with a counter per se but there is still a negative gut reaction of i-don't-like-people-challenging-my-world…

Her Simulation Theory video was absolutely awful (https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-s...), so it's not just a gut reaction.

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

#218

Post by zone411 »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #75
FollowingTheDao wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, she is the Trump of Science. And I do not say that be be demeaning of either. While I do not care for Trump, he knows what he is doing when it comes to showmanship, and so does she.

This comparison strikes me as much more unfavorable than you admit, because while Trump is categorically not an expert on what he purports to be (running a successful business) Sabine is clearly an expert in her field.

She makes videos about many topics on which she's not even close to an expert.

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

#220

Post by efitz »

jfengel wrote: post #118
spaetzleesser wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LHC computing infrastructure is also quite impressive.

And CERN is literally the reason we're here on th Web right now.

We had gopher and SGML before and independently of CERN. The internet was just starting to take off; dial-up modem BBS emigres were getting shell accounts at early ISPs around that time (I know; I had such an account and worked at such an ISP).

Just because TBL happened to work at CERN and have a need for hypermedia, doesn't mean that we wouldn't have the WWW in approximately the same shape in approximately the same time frame without CERN or TBL.

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