Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're off by a factor of 1,000.
How about the Iraq War?
I fail to see the link between the budget of CERN and the cost of the Iraq war.
Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
261–270 of 282 posts
Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
and she knows how to market herself. It's more like everyone is doing the marketing for her The field of physics has gotten bigger overall, including experimental physics. It's not like physics is 100% theoretical , untestable stuff.
It's not like physics is 100% theoretical , untestable stuff. Unfortunately the untestable stuff gets the most press. If you talk to experimental physicists in university, they'll tell you all that stuff isn't treated seriously by them, but reading the press you may get the impression that things like string theory are widely-respectable and that there is only some disagreement, usual science stuff. The press really…
String theory is widely respected by people who actually understand it. Believed in? Not sure, but a lot of experimental physicists who mock it clearly are just following memes in their departments - which does not necessarily make them wrong.
Almost by definition people who are mildly interested in string theory don't talk about it unless asked.
String theory has the potential to work, and doesn't involve as much parameter-hacking as other models, whereas its main competitors don't even work "in theory".
It's also worth saying that a lot of "string theorists" are actually working on consequences of things like holography rather than banging their head against a book trying to work on the very essence of the theory.
Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
#263No. Particle physics has shown a clear need for a clean next gen e/p collider. The author unfortunately got caught up in the grind of the field and not the context or big picture. And frankly this is exemplified by the US having an even stronger publish or perish attitude. Almost nobody ever in the field has used the phrase "god particle", at least in Europe. Thats yet another american contribution I'm sorry. Fine, l…
> stop attacking… gave you…
I’d like to find a name for this old fallacy. Something like “motherland fallacy” maybe?
Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
While another poster rightly pointed that Copernicus still used epicycles, you are correct in implying that the greatest contribution of the theories created after 1920, e.g. quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, chromodynamics etc. has been in the enhancement of our qualitative understanding of the physics of the elementary particles and of their interactions. This qualitative understanding has been very helpful…
Funny argument when one realizes that QED, formulated well after 1920, is one of the most tested theories with the best quantitative results currently, with agreement between experiment and theory to better than 10^-12 relative precision (depending how you count) for g_e/2.
QED is very well tested for the handful of values that can be computed accurately (with great efforts).
These special values are too few to matter for practical applications and they apply only to exceedingly simple systems, e.g. a single free lepton or a single pair of interacting elementary particles.
The practical value of QED is null. By far the greatest success of QED is what you have mentioned, i.e. that it explains why g_e is not exactly 2, but it is slightly different. This fact could not be explained by the Dirac theory. However, we already knew the value of g_e through experiments. Having an explanation for our peace of mind is good, but this cannot help us design anything.
For example, it would have been enormously helpful if there would have existed any method to compute accurately the frequencies and various other properties of the spectral lines of the atoms and ions.
This would have allowed e.g. to find through computation optimal substances for applications like lasers and atomic clocks.
Because there exists no such method, the advances continue to be done only by discovering through experiments new better spectral transitions of certain atoms or ions.
Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Not a whole lot to show" from the LHC? We got the Higgs Boson, and piles of data providing more accurate measurements of fundamental constants in the Standard Model, along with a ton of progress in various "applied" areas related to developing the materials/tools for constructing the thing.
The possibility of Higgs appearing at LHC, but not any supersymetry partners, has a name among physicists: the nightmare scenario. The Higgs discovery (measuring its mass) wasn't unexpected, there were known symmetries and energy bounds that made it pretty much have to be there. Everything new LHC was supposed to discover has not appeared. That's not to say there's not good science happening there -- but many people…
> The purpose of building a collider that big and expensive is to find new particles.
This is not true! There's much more to particle physics than simply hunting for new particles. Our knowledge of even the particles we know to exist is massively incomplete. Several next-gen collider proposals are for "Higgs factories" to study the Higgs boson better, for example.
Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean the link you linked to is pretty terrible itself > There are many theories in theoretical physics where it is very difficult or impossible to come up with experiments to prove or disprove them, e.g. Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation or the String Theory. One might call these sorts of theories metaphysical, fine, but it doesn’t make them into disproven pseudoscience or religions. Like i'm really not sure how…
I don't see how the claim that our universe is simulated is related to metaphysics in the first place.
You don't understand how the simulation hypothesis is related to "the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space."?
Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue its important to meet such arguments head on. The reason people trust science is because it listens to skeptics and critics and refutes their arguments. Of course some people are cranks that cannot be reasoned with, but this person clearly does not fall into the category. Sweeping disenting voices under the rug is how people lose faith in institutions in the long term.
Yes, and the right arena for that are carefully formulated papers with formulas, instead of youtube videos and blog posts with large claims and no substance. Have a look at arxiv, and you will find that the community engages with her arguments there, at least for the stuff she actually wrote a paper about. (In recent times, I'm not so sure about her not being in that category, btw.)
She's making a philosophical argument, not a scientific one. Is arxiv really the right arena for that? What formulas would even be relavent?
At least from what i read - she's basically saying that there is such a derth of new data and plausible ways to get it in the near/medium term, that theoretical particle physicists have basically been creating abstract theories which while may or may not be true, are increasingly detached from the emperical world. To the point where they are no longer predictive theories and there are so many free parameters that you can post-hoc fit it to any data you might collect. Hence the real world applicability is akin to speculating how many angels could fit on a pin head.
Now this may or may not be true. I don't have the background to know. But this is not a science argument, it is a philosophical argument. Fundamentally its asking are theoretical particle physicists engaging in science or are they engaging in some combination of math and metaphysics. Is arxiv really the place to have such philosophical debates?
Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
What on earth is a "spinning object theory"???
Planets and sun in epicycles around the earth, planets and moons in cycles around the sun, planets in cycles around the sun and moons in cycles around planets, that sort of thing. I used it as an example because "supersymmetry" is more a descriptor, than a theory unto itself. If you make your "theory" big enough it's going to technically be unfalsifiable, but that's more because you drew too large a bound than any ma…
Ah. OK, in that case...
> When Kepler found a spinning object theory which worked, it wasn't overfitting.
Well, yeah, that's true, but the important thing about Kepler was not the fact that it was a "spinning object theory", it was the switch from a "circular theory" to an "elliptical theory". (Also the switch from geocentrism to heliocentrism, but that was Copernicus, not Kepler).
This is the sort of thing that the supersymmetrists are hoping to achieve, but have not yet achieved, most likely because nature is not supersymmetric in point of actual fact.
Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and the right arena for that are carefully formulated papers with formulas, instead of youtube videos and blog posts with large claims and no substance. Have a look at arxiv, and you will find that the community engages with her arguments there, at least for the stuff she actually wrote a paper about. (In recent times, I'm not so sure about her not being in that category, btw.)
She's making a philosophical argument, not a scientific one. Is arxiv really the right arena for that? What formulas would even be relavent? At least from what i read - she's basically saying that there is such a derth of new data and plausible ways to get it in the near/medium term, that theoretical particle physicists have basically been creating abstract theories which while may or may not be true, are increasingl…
You are right, maybe, for this argument, but that's not the only thing she talks about. Other topics clearly should go in a paper.
Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't say I know enough to say she's "challenging my world view" since i don't necessarily know enough about the subject to have a world view. But I still have a negative reaction to the way she (and others in other fields) does it. Because whether it's true or not, it doesn't tend to get results in changing how things are done.
> Because whether it's true or not, it doesn't tend to get results in changing how things are done. But at the same time, several comments on this post are talking about how they think her diatribes will have an undue influence on funding decisions, so i doubt that accounts for all the negativity.
So if her comments are having an effect on funding decisions she IS changing how things are done.