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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

#101

Post by denton-scratch »

karthikk wrote: post #83
denton-scratch wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a physicist; but the GP mentioned consciousness as an alternative to matter as the fundamental "substance". Well, I've come across that idea before; in certain kinds of Buddhism, consciousness is considered fundamental, the senses are created by consciousness, and the material world is projected by consciousness through the senses. Well, this was explained to me in the context of a particular type of tantric…

it is a reversal of "I think, therefore I am" -> "I am, therefore I think" (slight nitpick, the idea(consciousness is fundamental, creation is cyclical) goes back much earlier than buddhism and is part of advaita vedanta.)

> slight nitpick

I'm aware that the cyclical universe is from the vedas; a lot of what passes for Buddhist metaphysics is pre-Buddhist. The Buddha didn't care much for metaphysical pronouncements; he was more a meditation teacher than a cosmologist.

So I didn't mean to claim that these ideas were Buddhist in origin; I just learned of them from Buddhists.

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

#102

Post by jerf »

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 problem isn't that "finding nothing" isn't progress. The problem is that "finding nothing" is terrible progress-per-dollar.

If you're still having trouble with that concept, peer into the alternate universe where the LHC actually provided enough data to nail down the Theory of Everything. Now that would be some progress-per-dollar to celebrate.

There's a contingent of people who just don't want to think about "how much" progress something is making and want to live in a fantasy world where building a multi-billion dollar particle collider that finds nothing is exactly the same as a $50,000 experiment that finds nothing. I don't know that I'm terribly interested in trying to argue y'all out of that belief. But I can say with great confidence that no matter how good it may make you feel, if you go on to argue about how vital it is to spend another 5x times as much money to build another particle collider that we have no reason to believe will find anything new, you will continue to be marginalized and find your influence waning to apparently no effect.

But in the faint hope of maybe convincing you, consider that there is no infinite money fountain, and even if you just can't process that fact, there certainly aren't an infinite amount of physicists. What is so vital about another particle accelerator that we must dedicate thousands of professional careers to it despite the lack of solid reason to hope anything will come of it? Why not let them do something else? I submit it's all Availability Heuristic. You see and apprehend the particle accelerator, so it must be a good idea. You don't see the thousands upon thousands of other things you're trading away for it, so they don't factor in.

But given the current big fat zero rational reason to build another, it is very easy to build a model in which those other experiments will actually be the ones that make the difference somehow. Probably by some long, convoluted chain we can't imagine now; I doubt there's a bench experiment that we just haven't done that will nail down quantum gravity. But there's a lot of other interesting paths. Quantum computers, for instance, just by their nature, tend to probe the limits of quantum theory in a way nothing else can. Something very interesting could come out of that. Dark matter detectors could produce something. Someone might actually work a theory down into something that can be tested.

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

#103

Post by Certhas »

SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #4

I think "nightmare" is a bit sensational. The LHC's purpose is not to "find X" it is to take measurements over a novel range of conditions. The new data is what we're after.

"Nightmare" was how physicists themselves characterize the situation we are in, and have done for at least 15 years.

Look at the 2007 article linked in the article above:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.315.5819.1657

Jonathan Ellis is on the record there describing the scenario we find ourselves in now as "the real five-star disaster". (you can get the full article by putting the link into scholar.google.com). And I recall hearing and reading the "nightmare scenario" phrase before that 2007 article.

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

#104

Post by ced »

BurningFrog wrote: post #99
Certhas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In 1973, professor Sir James Lighthill was asked by the UK Parliament to evaluate the state of AI research in the United Kingdom. His report, now called the Lighthill report, criticized the utter failure of AI to achieve its "grandiose objectives." He concluded that nothing being done in AI couldn't be done in other sciences. He specifically mentioned the problem of "combinatorial explosion" or "intractability", which implied that many of AI's most successful algorithms would grind to a halt on real world problems and were only suitable for solving "toy" versions.[15]

> The report led to the complete dismantling of AI research in England.[15] AI research continued in only a few universities (Edinburgh, Essex and Sussex).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

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

#105

Post by have_faith »

rightbyte wrote: post #18
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?

My feeling is that a big part of the physics field is trying to see patterns in noise and equipement artifacts.

Very large efforts are made to predict noise floors within data, prevent it, account for it, average over it with multiple tests, etc.

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

#106

Post by adamsmith143 »

highwaylights wrote: post #41
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…

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.

The problem IS that they have found nothing. We know the Standard Model, as good as it is, is either incomplete or incorrect and without new physics somewhere we have no indication of how to fix it.

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

#107

Post by elorant »

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…

One thing to notice is that during the experiments they keep only a small percentage of the total data they could record due to limitations in storage and processing capabilities. There’s a lot of fuss inside the scientific community about what to keep and what to disregard.

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

#108

Post by adamsmith143 »

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.

>Maybe there's nothing else to discover

This is fundamentally wrong. We know the Standard Model is not the final theory of Physics so there are still things to discover.

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

#109

Post by adamsmith143 »

Barrera wrote: post #46

Stagnation of scientific fields is normal and can last many years. In that time, little anomalies pile up, are swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. To admit anomalies can ruin careers, after all. Eventually someone (often very young/inexperienced) comes along and upends the field by proposing a different model or doing the experiment whose weight breaks the camels back. What's new here is the scale of the work…

>Stagnation of scientific fields is normal and can last many years. In that time, little anomalies pile up, are swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. To admit anomalies can ruin careers, after all.

Could not be more wrong for Particle Physics. An Anomaly could define your career and herald a Nobel Prize. That's exactly what we're looking for. We desperately want to find anomalies, not hide them.

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

#110

Post by awhitby »

ced wrote: post #104
BurningFrog wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In 1973, professor Sir James Lighthill was asked by the UK Parliament to evaluate the state of AI research in the United Kingdom. His report, now called the Lighthill report, criticized the utter failure of AI to achieve its "grandiose objectives." He concluded that nothing being done in AI couldn't be done in other sciences. He specifically mentioned the problem of "combinatorial explosion" or "intractability", wh…

In retrospect it was at least arguably the right call, no? Suspend most research and resume when available processing power was orders of magnitude greater, a process that was independently driven by demands other than (and much greater than) AI research.

Playing devil's advocate only slightly, maybe particle physics should similarly pare down to a bare maintenance level of research (or even mostly teaching) for a few centuries until we can harness much higher energies.

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