Then get to work figuring out dark matter..
Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
211–220 of 316 posts
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#212I 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.…
IMO it is a five-star disaster for this generation of particle physicists, not for physics.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ?
Hollywood has vastly overplayed the actual density of asteroid fields. It’s kind of disappointing.
If you build something in a vacuum then you don’t necessarily need a single continuous piece to create a vacuum. If you specced an accelerator a million miles in diameter, the diameter matters from a standpoint of whether we can accelerate the particle sideways fast enough to keep it in the track, but they are also saying they need 3.1 million miles of accelerator hardware. They are implying they can’t lay it out as a crazy straw, but is that because of the lateral acceleration, the interaction between the coils, or the limits of manufacturing?
What if you built a collider in a spherical arrangement, accelerating in three dimensions at once, but 1/3 the diameter? What if the accelerator were broken into sections to dodge asteroids, with a cumulative segment length that added up to the desired total? What if you laid it out like a Spirograph? What if you laid it out like a truncated Spirograph (just bits of the outer circumference)? What if you laid it out like a 3 dimensional truncated Spirograph?
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#214Earlier 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…
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…
(former PhD in Particle Physics in QCD here, far from an expert)
> While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks of the universe and it should therefore describe _everything_.
I think this is a misunderstanding of what the Standard Model is and the scientific process that went into it. It is a model for describing the interactions of electroweak and strong force interactions, and that's it. This is based of years of experimental data and coming up with a consistent theory that fits the data. No one went out to come up with a "theory of everything", missed and ended up with the standard model.
The Standard Model is clearly a low energy effective theory of something more, almost by definition. The problem is we have absolutely no data to drive predictions of higher order theories (which could also turn out to be low energy effective theories themselves). Without data, there is a very real chance that the standard model is the best model we're going to have for particle physics.
> the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing some key insight that is needed to fix it.
Ugly is a subjective term. A lot of people talk about stuff like 'naturalness' problems with the standard model, but is that really a problem? Who are we to say what numbers are the natural order of things. Gravity is orders upon orders of magnitude weaker than all the other forces, is that 'natural'?
I think comparing it to Lorentzian aether is a little harsh. If you compare special relativity to Lorentzian relatively, special relativity is just a simpler model (it doesn't need aether). I think it's extremely unlikely at this stage that given only the data we have right now, someone would be able come up with a theory that would be fully consistent with the Standard Model but is simpler and doesn't predict new stuff. It's not impossible, but it is very unlikely.
Actually I think the biggest problem with the Standard Model is how to go from the theory to real predictions. Formulating the lagriangian of QCD is the easy bit, converting that to real predictions (either on the lattice QCD end at large alpha_s or perturbative QCD at small alpha_s) is extremely difficult. It's almost laughably absurd where it is not unheard of for calculations of single processes to take a decade or more.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
You never trashcan a model. You replace a model. You replace it with something else that is better.
Currently, we don't have a "something else" that 1) explains everything the Standard Model does in the same places with the same results, 2) also explains whatever anomaly.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly not an expert in that area. I only took a course of Nuclear Physics for a Major in Physics [1]. So I can read and understand that stuff, but the fine details pass over my head. Looking at a recent page of that course, the recomended books are * F. Halzen, A. Martin, “Quarks and Leptons: An introductory course in modern particle physics” (Wiley 1984) * D. Griffiths, “Introduction to elementary particles” (Wiley…
> Looking at a recent page of that course, the recomended books are * F. Halzen, A. Martin, “Quarks and Leptons: An introductory course in modern particle physics” (Wiley 1984) * D. Griffiths, “Introduction to elementary particles” (Wiley 1987) It is telling that for a recent course the recommended books are over 35 years old. Consistent with the OP proposition.
Rather like Jackson is still a standard electrodynamics text after 60 years. Classical EM is finished. But, quantum field theory is not.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#217Earlier 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…
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…
I think these are two distinct things:
> The problem isn't that "finding nothing" isn't progress. The problem is that "finding nothing" is terrible progress-per-dollar.
> 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.
The first part is fine if by it you mean you think the physics-practitioner-theory of the collider advocates (a theory about what next research steps might be fruitful, not a theory of physics) is now implausible to you. On the other hand if you just think something like "We expect the future (of physics) to be 'like' the past (not making progress)", then that isn't an explanatory statement and is unrelated to whether we should fund a future collider. If you know what you're going to find in an experiment, you're not setting out to discover something new, so there is no such "future will be like the past" principle here.
The second really is an argument not to fund a future collider because it comes with an explanation: what good theory (of physics, this time) do we have that predicts we'll find new tests, or new problems? If there's no very good theory, new tests or new problems might come from other experiments instead, especially if they're a lot cheaper so we can do more of them. Personally I guess that it's a good argument you make here in this second part, but what do I know?
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#218the whole of western civilization built on materialism is in trouble.
On what are built others civilizations? I've yet to see a civilization that is not built on money and power.
all civilizations are now western civilisations (or in progress).
power though is not entirely material.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#219A nightmare as in "my job will likely be boring until the day I retire". A nightmare many dream of.
Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else
#220Kind of happy right now that I didn't decide to dedicate my life to this when I was in my 20s and went off and did something else. I would have been awfully frustrating to spend 30 years in a quest to find nothing new.
Hopefully at some point someone cracks open the desert, but I'm somewhat skeptical that it'll happen through the high energy frontier.
My bet is that quantum computation and decoherence is where it'll be.