Earlier quoted context omitted.
My feeling is that a big part of the physics field is trying to see patterns in noise and equipement artifacts.
This is untrue.
I think the idea here is that it happens unintentionally, unknowingly.
Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
191–200 of 316 posts
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#192I 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.
There is no such thing as "consciousness".
There is, however, free will.
Information complexity is a real and measurable physical quantity, and unlike all others it doesn't obey conservation laws.
The sigularity that happens when information complexity is out of control is colloqually called "free will".
(Someday maybe we'll be able to map information complexity the same way we now map cosmic background radiation. Now that would be a sight to behold!)
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#193Earlier 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.
This "nothing" is valueable information nonetheless. Science is just as much (often more) about ruling out hypotheses as it is about confirming them. Sometimes that means ruling out all existing hypotheses, meaning new ones have to be formulated to be tested in turn.
The problem here is that the most favoured hypothesis currently is "there is nothing there that can be discovered with any accelerator that can be built using less than 80% of the world's GDP over the next 50 years." And all the valuable "nothing" we currently find just supports the hypothesis and that there is no point in formulating additional hypotheses.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#194Stagnation 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.
Really? Because the article seems to say the complete opposite in multiple instances.
"Oh hey this thing doesn't match what is expected according to the standard model but yeah the standard model is tots fine bro."
> For example, in 2017, physicists working with LHCb, one of four large particle detectors fed by the LHC, found that B mesons, particles that contain a heavy bottom quark, decay more often to an electron and a positron than to a particle called a muon and an antimuon. The standard model says the two rates should be the same, and the difference might be a hint of supersymmetric partners, Ellis says.
So why is the standard model not in the trashcan?
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#195I have so many problems with the physics status quo that it's hard to know where to begin. But here are a few code smells:
* The strong force probably doesn't exist. It's an empirical description of what happens in the nucleus around 10^-15 meters. But due to stuff like gluon self-interaction, it's difficult to analyze. I suspect that it's related to the curvature of space around mass and is probably connected to neutron star and black hole math. But as long as it's portrayed as unified with the electromagnetic and weak forces, I just don't see us gaining a better understanding of it anytime soon. Also the description of the force between quarks increasing with distance, enough to concentrate enough energy to create more quarks (like how a high-energy photon can split into a particle and antiparticle), feels more like epicycles than deep understanding.
* Physics right now seems more obsessed with mathematical elegance than application. Normally I prefer theory and abstraction over implementation, but what's the point of discovering a Higgs boson if we can't modulate it? It's nice to know it's there, but what are the chances of using energy to manipulate an object's inertia? I suspect that it's more of a clever mathematical construct than a force we will ever manipulate in our daily lives. Actually, re-reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism#Simple_explana... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_generation it sounds like the Higgs mechanism is more about explaining the masses of particles than how to manipulate mass. The problem might be in how long range and short range forces (carried by massless gauge bosons and massive gauge bosons respectively) are treated differently. That's almost certainly not the final model of reality, and writing this out, I bet it's one of the main reasons that string theory tries to add so many dimensions that maybe aren't there. But since I'm not literate in this, I can't dig into the code.
* Physics education is just.. bad. Understandably so, because so much of this is so fringe and so new that only a handful of people in the world actually understand it at a deep level. Which is why I think videos like this are so important: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b05IeSlMMDw . Notice how she skips over notation pedantry and calls the bracket notation vectors. She also isolates entanglement as the key mechanism of quantum computers (at the 4:21 mark). I've read countless articles on that for YEARS that never stated what's going on with such clarity. So if we can't simulate entanglement inside a classical computer, then we can't simulate reality in them, because we wouldn't be able to build a quantum computer within The Matrix. So are we living in a simulation? Probably not.
I bring this stuff up because the problem is probably in my own lack of understanding, not physics itself. So more budget needs to go to education and refactoring the existing physics "codebase" to use better notation and terms. Maybe you all have insights that invalidate my concerns. Those insights should be at the forefront of every Wikipedia article, not buried inside somewhere.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
It may be worth first understanding why g=2 (if you haven't before). This can be done on the basis of special relativity + quantum mechanics, i.e., the Dirac equation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation
The "g" is the Lande g factor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land%C3%A9_g-factor
(As I recall nonrelativistic QM gives g=1.)
PS Not a physicist, but learned some of this at some point. Only ever learned about electrons, though; don't know how any of this translates to other particles.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#197Earlier 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.
Wouldn't it be at a big risk of being destroyed by a meteorite ?
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#198Stagnation 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…
Fortunately, this new table-top Higgs discovery was not very expensive.
Anything requiring the resources of the LHC or more will be far from spontaneous.
https://www.livescience.com/magnetic-higgs-relative-discover...
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#199I sometimes ponder whether we fundamentally just went in the wrong direction from the very start with quantum physics, but we ended up so far down the road it was impossible to start again.
Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist and my understanding is superficial at best.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Only with a perfect procedural algorithm.
Which may not fit with any hypothetical Simulator's goals, anyway.
Most games don't feature an absolutely perfect Newtonian physics engine. The physics is just a means to an end, not the fundamental point of the whole endeavor.