Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 316 posts

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

#171

Post by Sharlin »

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?

We have found a set of (relatively simple) rules that match (a large part of) reality so well that no matter what we do, we don't seem to be able to get any results that would indicate the rules are wrong or even slightly inaccurate. However, we are almost certain they are wrong, or at least incomplete – but given how well they model reality it would be astonishing if it turned out that we're on a totally wrong track and the actual rules are completely different.

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

#172

Post by atx42 »

roywiggins wrote: post #153
jordanpg wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 like going treasure-hunting and demonstrating to everyone's satisfaction that there is definitely no treasure where you looked. It doesn't tell you very much about 1) if the treasure you're hunting really exists (there's many more places it could be), or 2) what exactly the treasure consists of. It's technically more information, but it's not very much information. eg, what did we learn from the underwater hunt…

My take is we were asking the wrong questions, and now we know that, so hopefully we can figure out the right questions.

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

#173

Post by adamsmith143 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #112
adamsmith143 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Idk, theres been no major progress since the 60s-70s after QCD, String Theory is a complete dead end and there aren't any great candidate theories out there. So the lack of findings certainly hasn't helped.

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

#174

Post by jerf »

SkyBelow wrote: post #124
jerf wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "ho…

What are the alternatives? Better weapons, better ad targeting systems, better gambling hidden behind a veneer of gaming on mobile? We can look at where our government and our society currently allocates money and find that the allocations looks bad enough that even building a bigger particle accelerator that might not find anything is an improvement overall. As a singular species, I think we would be better for goin…

Sorry, are you seriously proposing that either we fund new particle accelerators or we're just going to build weapons/ads/gambling systems, and there are no other choices?

I want to be clear that this is your claim before I spend any more time on it.

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

#175

Post by soheil »

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.

> I think "nightmare" is a bit sensational.

My thoughts exactly. So this journal is owned by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (cool acronym, that was close). Which according to wikipedia is a non-profit. What motivates an organization like that to produce clickbaity articles like this? I thought money was the primary motivation for such journalistic behavior.

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

#176

Post by adamsmith143 »

NateEag wrote: post #128
adamsmith143 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

If you think the Simulation Hypothesis has any merit whatsoever, you should consider the possibility that the Simulation does not have a fully-consistent engine, just one that was "close enough". Note, of course, that the same could be true in a coincidentally-generated universe, as well as a deistic or theistic one (the latter two being effectively indistinguishable from a Simulation).

Not sure it's worth thinking about. You would think that a sufficiently powerful simulation could procedurally generate an arbitrary level of detail so there wouldn't really be gaps.

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

#177

Post by evanb »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #156
yt-sdb wrote: post #152

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.…

0.000 > 0.00 Love it.

You have the inequality backwards!

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

#178

Post by nonrandomstring »

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…

And sometimes there just isn't anything there to find.

But we keep looking because the idea of nothing is simply too abhorrent.

There is a tremendously difficult and disturbing aspect to Peer Gynt (the original story, not the music on which it's based).

Searching for his "self" he peels off layer after layer like an onion, getting ever deeper seemingly towards a real self. But on the last layer he experiences the horror of finding nothing more. What he "is", is constituted by the sum of the layers.

After that, the entire nature of the "search for meaning" has to change.

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

#179

Post by whatever1 »

Experiments need good hypotheses to be useful.

Sometimes hypotheses can be generated incrementally and this is what 99.9% of the scientists are capable of doing.

It seems that probably we have hit that wall in particle physics and we need a Giant to smash it and take us to the next level.

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

#180

Post by chopin »

XorNot wrote: post #87
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…

Well that's not the case though: you can upend the field with data from the LHC - after all Einstein didn't do the Michelson-Mauley (how I spelt that right) experiment himself, but Special Relativity was developed out of that result existing.

Michelson-Morley experiment:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exp....

Post reply on HN