151–160 of 316 posts
This feels like that Futurama episode where Farnsworth discovers the last particle and descends into panic, realising he has nothing else to do. However, in my opinion, asking why there's nothing else is also a valid question to consider, even if we suspect there's something more to what we've seen so far. Also, perhaps it'd be a tad bit more accurate to rephrase it `particle physicists`, not `physicists` -- even tho…
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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…
It's technically more information, but it's not very much information.
eg, what did we learn from the underwater hunt for MH370? not a lot, millions were spent to still have no clue where the thing is. It's not just political to say that the hunt failed in an important way.
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The LHC cost was 2% of the yearly revenue of Apple I am fairly certain that we can "afford" it.
Apparently the next-gen LHC replacement will cost on the order of $100 billion. As a society (US, EU, or global), we can certainly 'afford it', but no-one is going to be writing that check anytime soon.
A few years ago, I went to a public interview/chat with Rainer Weiss in NYC. He described years of work in which the LIGO team found inventive ways to make their systems more precise. They just kept knocking down orders-of-magnitude. Still, after taking new measurements, they found nothing. No gravitational waves. Then the interviewer asked him if he was discouraged at this point in his career. I loved his response.…
Love it.
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> 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 2.0023193043…
gus_massa: Since you are likely an expert, could you recommend a resource that explains how you use the Lagrangian equation for the standard model [1] to actually compute a predicted value for the electron's g ? An elementary resource that goes through basic steps for a computer scientist (non expert in QFT) would be a great. A simpler particle than electron is also ok, but I'd love to understand how you mess with th…
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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 issue for particle physics specifically, is that they _hope_ to find something that breaks the theory. But so far, only find confirmations of the current Standard Model. Succesful experiments, yeah, but doing little for pushing our understanding of the universe unfortunately. The reason why they want to break the standard model is, simplified, two-fold: 1. While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we…
Edison’s “I found 100 things that didn’t work” is a nice parable but it doesn’t work across an entire field.
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gus_massa: Since you are likely an expert, could you recommend a resource that explains how you use the Lagrangian equation for the standard model [1] to actually compute a predicted value for the electron's g ? An elementary resource that goes through basic steps for a computer scientist (non expert in QFT) would be a great. A simpler particle than electron is also ok, but I'd love to understand how you mess with th…
The paper describing the theoretical steps necessary to compute g for the muon is hundreds of pages of condensed math, theorems and approximations etc. The SM Lagrangian is not computable, so a big part of theoretical physics is about finding tricks to actually compute it. Incidentally this is why there is disagreement on the muon g-2 discrepancy, at least two theory groups have calculated different values using diff…
Also, computing even just one part of this value is basically on the level of a theoretical particle physics dissertation. Don't expect to be able to do this without several years of research experience in this specific field.
Why would this be a nightmare, isn't this good? They know they're going down the wrong path and can probably correct?
The prospect of actually "finishing" physics could be a nightmare for those working in it. I had a friend who was a brilliant pure mathematician, his teachers and friends agreed he fully deserved to do a PhD in complex analysis - but complex analysis was essentially done in the 19th century, there's just not a lot of research opportunities there.
So complex analysis is pretty much done? Well, could the methods of complex analysis suggest analogical methods in other analytic fields? What work could be done at the intersection of complex analysis and X, when X is any other mathematical field? Also, I hear it is frequently useful in the solution of physical problems. There are many unsolved physical problems that could benefit from being reviewed from a complex analysis perspective.
> There's just not a lot of research opportunities
Maybe this is the crux of the matter; it is not that there is any lack f work still to be done in complex analysis, but there are few research areas in the field that can or are able to attract funding.