What else do they want to find?
Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
111–120 of 316 posts
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#112Earlier 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.
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.
> without new physics somewhere we have no indication of how to fix it
This is a bit harsh. We have loads of unexplained, well measured phenomena. More clues helps. But it's not conclusively necessary.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd put that amortised cost at about $1000 upfront in 2022 dollars for my high quality internet comment and many others like it. If you need high energy, pure vacuums and ultra low temps, surely space is where such experiments should be conducted on bigger scales in future to push it further?
Space won't work for the kind of physics the LHC does. The fundamental problem is that collider physics relies on being able to create collisions of exactly known quantity as your input (eg in the LHC's case, proton-proton collisions at a 14TeV centre of mass energy). If you don't control the input, you can't extract any information about the output you detect, in the same way that you can't create a simulation of sn…
> Space won't work for the kind of physics the LHC does.
https://home.cern/science/engineering/cryogenics-low-tempera...
> The LHC's cryogenic system requires 40,000 leak-tight pipe seals, 40 MW of electricity – 10 times more than is needed to power a locomotive – and 120 tonnes of helium to keep the magnets at 1.9 K.
Launch cost per kg aside for the detectors and basic framework, space is the best place for pushing the boundaries of high energy physics experiments in the future.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 comprehensi…
I think your reading is about right, though I'm not sure about your application of it to the current situation. The "crisis" being discussed today in physics is quite different from the ones Kuhn describes--in some ways it is the opposite situation. For Kuhn, as you note, the crisis comes when existing theoretical models prove completely inadequate to make sense of new data, so the old model has to be largely thrown out and a new paradigm built in its place.
Today's crisis in physics (if that's what it is) seems to be that, even though our existing model seems incomplete for theoretical reasons (lack of harmonization between models, for example), it continues to fit all the empirical data we have been able to generate. Really, we are hoping to stumble upon a new paradigm, but we can't seem to make it happen.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#115It says they were looking for particles with supersymmetry - I know on The Big Bang Theory they discovered Super Asymmetry - do you think the boffins at CERN have tried looking for that?
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
True but you’d hate to be the physicist that spent their career going down the wrong path only to see tomorrows physicists discover the big breakthroughs and the realization that your contribution will be sent to the dustbin of history.
Yah. Well, for most of us, the prospect of making a significant contribution to the sum of human knowledge is a faint prospect. They say all political careers end in failure. Very few politicians die in the saddle, or simply retire. Most of them are destroyed. My guess is that most careers in science research end similarly; lots of career-length research projects fail to achieve their goals, and very few scientists g…
> for most of us, the prospect of making a significant contribution to the sum of human knowledge is a faint prospect
Physicists are bright people with other options. They forewent those other options to have an increased chance at contributing to human understanding. I can empathize with the greater tragedy of their failure than that of e.g. a millionaire adtech founder.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#117Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#118I really thought I'd see meaningful progress on harmonizing quantum mechanics and relativity or some of these other "big" problems in fundamental physics but now I'm not so sure.
This by the way is a good reason not to dump tens of billions into a successor to the LHC. We simply don't know what we're looking for. Despite a number of significant upgrades we still haven't found anything that breaks the Standard Model. I mean we've disproven a lot and that means something but we should still have an idea what we're looking for.
I'd love to know what making new space (ie what makes the universe expand) actually means. At one point I thought space might be discreet (eg at the Planck length) but that's not how that works.
What is time? What is space? What really is mass? What is a force? These are things we can describe the effects of but not really what they are. It would be deeply disappointing if there was a fundamental limit to our understanding that would prohibit a deeper explanation, which actually seems like a possibility.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#119At 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? Are you aware of how hilarious it is in the context of high energy physicists verifying the standard model to ask if they had "good look"? I don't think a collective effort to look any harder has ever existed in the history of humankind.
It's probably something they can't measure now that will be discovered next, that's why they need to keep looking.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#120"Science" doesn't care about individual careers or generations (in that case of physicists) who are left with "nothing else" to discover (fundamentally) and are simply "condemned" to pass the torch (determining values and uncertainties as best as possible). It's a brutal selection process if viewed from an individual lens which can consciously participate for say at best only 3 generations.
The institutionalized systems - which themselves carry an often underappreciated (in the field itself) or overexaggareted (outside the field) intertia - we now have in place to best approximate "science" are still left with a lot of headroom for optimization.
One of the many corners overlooked handwavingly imhv are for example the attempts to raise scientific literacy (critical thinking, formulating (theoretical) and testing (practical) hypotheses) in the societies overall, the fertile humus, so to speak. Because of the massive shifts/societal changes actually the reverse seems to be happening in the last decades in an accelerating speed. Decentralizing science could help here and is a legitimate concern in the case of the LHC as an example of a highly centralized research model. I find the struggle for a sweet spot appropriate, here.
That being said, it is still possible that we just find ourselves at a local low (at the current level of the LHC) with some arising anomalies but by just pushing the energies a little farther this let's us get out of the hole, again. So, nobody is arguing to shut the LHC altogether, but depending on what we find, the next "Future Circular Collider" to be built on top of it might simply not be "worth" it in the foreseeable future.