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Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

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Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#91

Post by brazzy »

jordanpg wrote: post #75
highwaylights wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is nothing. They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what they might find, and have established some evidence against others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.

This. This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the only "success" is a new discovery. This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded. What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and public support for additional funding. That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western g…

> This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded.

The probem is, as far as I know, that there is an effectively infinite space of supersymmetry hypotheses. Ruling one of those out is pretty worthless success.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#92

Post by brnaftr361 »

hobs wrote: post #32
brnaftr361 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the pattern Kuhn shows in The Structure of a Scientific Revolution holds, one might presume at some time a crisis will emerge which will influence the development of higher resolution tools and techniques and with them more evidence. The "nightmare" seems like exactly what is outlined as a predictable error in the model - it'll be interesting to see what happens.

I don't think that's what the book says, just that solving problems with the new framework is what makes it popular enough with the next generation. More specificity or higher resolution is not implied, though it can happen after the paradigm has shifted as a new set of niches are waiting to be explored and filled.

I do believe that's precisely what it says: science adopts a new paradigm with a comprehensive view which predicts most cases, at some point the threshold is reached through normal science where a model falls apart, failing to predict given effects, and probity for answers surrounding that requires new tools (or techniques), which are developed to study the "unpredicted" effects mentioned above and a more comprehensive understanding is developed. At this point there may be a challenge to the paradigm, which yes, may be overturned upon favorable comportment.

See phlogiston. If we fairly assume that measurements are multidimensional and thus techniques to observe new dimensions can be conferred to have increased resolution...

But I'd absolutely concede that I may have misread. But I do believe Kuhn was fairly explicit in detailing this process. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#93

Post by forgotpwd16 »

survirtual wrote: post #82
Certhas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the problem we face though. Consider the following: For all terrestrial phenomena that we have observe so far we have a theory of everything. In order to put matter into a state where it behaves in such a way that you can tell the difference between two competing theories that describe the world, you have to build the LHC. Anything less than that and the theories all are perfectly good at describing what w…

Let’s build a particle accelerator on the moon. Make it go around the circumference of the entire moon.

It won't be surprising if we eventually do. A particle accelerator beyond Earth has been often discussed, and recently a paper[0] even sketched such a project for Moon.

[0]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/ac4921/...

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#95

Post by Certhas »

jordanpg wrote: post #75
highwaylights wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is nothing. They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what they might find, and have established some evidence against others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.

This. This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the only "success" is a new discovery. This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded. What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and public support for additional funding. That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western g…

The author correctly reports a scientific debate inside of science amongst scientists.

Particle Physicists can pretend this is just a political problem all they want, but if more and more other physicists are convinced the field is entering a desert there will be no new accelerator. Maybe even more importantly, if students learn about the true state of the field they will chose more interesting things to study.

Human time and effort is limited, and scientists don't go around and devote hundreds of thousands of person years to rule out random hypothesis. Effort at LHC level is only devoted because there is a very very good reason to band together to get this done that convinced many other scientists (who in turn helped convince funding bodies). LHC has been a huge success on its own terms, but its results are simultaneously a massive problem for particle physics as it stands right now.

Not a problem for science, just a problem for the field of particle physics, which will need to adjust to the current reality rather than holding out for more data.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#96

Post by osigurdson »

jordanpg wrote: post #75
highwaylights wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is nothing. They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what they might find, and have established some evidence against others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.

This. This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the only "success" is a new discovery. This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded. What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and public support for additional funding. That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western g…

A new discovery over some time period is a reasonable expectation. For example, if we discover nothing in the next 1000 years we would have to conclude that there is no longer any point in trying.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#97

Post by robertlagrant »

tejohnso wrote: post #17
adtac wrote: post #6

I only have an amateur interest in physics, so I'm sorry if this sounds dumb, but I often think about what if we've reached as far as we can go within the current framework of physics? This is more meta-science than actual science, but what if we made some decisions very early in the development of physics and mathematics and we need to revisit those?

Perhaps one such decision is that matter is fundamental. There are increasingly substantial cases being made that this is now holding us back in physics, and that we need to consider that consciousness is fundamental, and matter is only a consequence of it. See, for example Hoffman's The Case Against Reality.

How do you define "increasingly substantial"?

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#98

Post by gus_massa »

dlsa wrote: post #27

At least they are finding nothing and confirming they are finding nothing. Less scrupulous operators might be always finding something even if its not there. So that's a sign of good science. Maybe there's something they haven't found because there's so much data? Mix things up and look again? Change assumptions? Or as someone I know likes to say to various smaller humans: have you looked around the couch? Really? Ar…

> Have you had a good look?

It's difficult to explain, but they[1] tried very hard.

For example the electron has an electric charge but it's also like a small magnet. In an ideal elementary particle, the value of the magnet is 2 * something. In a real elementary particle the value is almost-2 * something, so they are measuring the almost-2, and it's call g [2].

For an electron, the measured value of g is

  2.00231930436256(35)
, there are is an uncertainty of 0.000000000002%. The problem is that it agree with the current theoretical prediction.

The muon is very similar to an electron, but the experimental g is [3]

  2.0023318416(13)

 and the current theoretical prediction is 

  2.00233183620(86)
It's a difference of 0.000000001%. Most people will be happy with that disagreement and forget about it. But They are happy because there is a disagreement and perhaps they can use that to discover a new particle. It still may be a long lived statistical fluke, but it already survived many years. Other team claimed that there is a small error in one of the experimental numbers used in the theoretical calculation, but I'm not sure if they are genius or crackpots or something in between.

And there are many other experiments. I like for example the IceCube [4] that is just a giant chunk of ice in the Antarctica. They try to detect neutrinos from stars. It has many experiments, but in particular some experiments are useful to measure the difference of mass of the neutrinos that is a not very clear part of the Standard Model.

[1] Not my area of research. They live in the next corridor.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_g-2

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#99

Post by BurningFrog »

Certhas wrote: post #64
sdfhdhjdw3 wrote: post #28

Oh jesus christ, the constant whining! This is science. This is how it works. Maybe there's nothing else to discover, maybe it will take us 100 years, we don't know, that's why it's called research.

You are mischaracterize what's happening entirely. The article is not whining and it's not claiming that this is somehow shaking the foundations of science. But we are potentially in the middle (or even at the end) of a monumental shift inside physics. Particle physics produced fantastic discoveries over the second half of the twentieth century and it might just have hit a major major wall (or in the lingo of the fie…

It would make sense to more resources to other fields.

But institutions don't tend to dismantle themselves, so I expect a few decades of "we might find something soon!" until the leaders have retired.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#100

Post by BurningFrog »

highwaylights wrote: post #35
Grimburger wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe there's nothing else to discover, maybe it will take us 100 years, we don't know, that's why it's called research. At what price?

Less than it cost to research, develop and manufacture all of the components in the device you typed this on.

Sure, but that effort is providing enormous benefits to all of humanity.
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