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

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

#231

Post by Melatonic »

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…

I've always thought that a huge limiting factor is that we can only really observe from our current point in time. We are time limited which is a big hindrance just as it would be to only observe things form a single physical position (which is also sort of true - but at least we can send probes and whatnot out there).

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

#232

Post by radicaldreamer »

macspoofing wrote: post #59
Victerius wrote: post #2

James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way. Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments? Wha…

>Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over There are plenty of theories generated by theoretical physicists using pen and paper. The problem is that we can't reach the energy scales necessary to test those theories. >What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress? That's the problem with colliders now. We don't actually know if there are any…

The same thing happened when the Texas Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled (after >$2 billion spent) but we eventually got LHC. There'll be a winter in high energy physics but eventually the tide will turn.

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

#234

Post by pfdietz »

tablespoon wrote: post #142

It wouldn't surprise me or sadden me if particle physicists don't make any new fundamental discoveries or real theoretical breakthroughs for the next millennium. They also probably only have 20-30 years to show something if they ever want to build another, bigger and more expensive particle accelerator.

It would surprise me greatly, because I'd go "hey! I'm over 1000 years old!"

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

#235

Post by dodobirdlord »

hinkley wrote: post #207
Certhas wrote: post #72

Earlier 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…

We used to make gasoline by heating oil very very hot and separating it. As long as you can keep it away from oxygen we don’t explode. But now we have catalysts that allow us to get more gas from the same oil, and with less heat. Less energy for a bigger gain. Big, hot, smashy, explodey things are good for a proof of concept, but for a practical application we want to make them smaller and lower energy (per unit) the…

At issue here is the fact that what physicists need to conduct experiments is not more data, but different data. To study higher energy levels, more energetic particles are needed. Generating more particles at similar energy levels and producing more data is not without value, and has been the work of the last few years at the LHC, but is considered unlikely to turn up surprises since it’s data about particles at a similar energy level to previous runs.

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

#236

Post by pfdietz »

raverbashing wrote: post #23
Victerius wrote: post #2

James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way. Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments? Wha…

> James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way. They had tabletop experiments (and telescope observations) that gave them the clues they needed A lot of XX century physics was done in tabletop conditions (in the 19xx) with danger to the experimentalists. Also climbing mountains and capturing cosmic rays with photographic…

If you need a machine the size of a small country to observe an effect, chances are that effect is not going to have many practical applications. If it did, it would have shown up at the much smaller scale of those applications.

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

#237

Post by not_kurt_godel »

dlsa wrote: post #85
vanderZwan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've received feedback from some very smart people who laughed out loud and knew exactly what I meant by having a good look . Two of them are physicists and many more are engineers. They said they have found many metaphorical couches and there's a lot of nothing. They've also found quite a few interesting metaphorical paperclips and other debris. But that there's so many more places to look. They also think there's a…

Ok, then where should they look if you're so smart? You think people who have dedicated their lives to studying this subject haven't considered the concept of looking everywhere possible, and that you're adding something to the discussion by trotting out this 'clever' metaphor?

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

#238

Post by dodobirdlord »

anm89 wrote: post #233

Why is having a better understanding of the laws of physics a nightmare for physicists?

Two points are important to consider.

1) It’s clear that the standard model is an incomplete model, due to some small discrepancies between theory and observation.

2) Large-scale particle physics experiments are very expensive and depend on government funding, and politicians must be persuaded to allocate funds.

The nightmare scenario for particle physicists is that funding bodies get bored of the lack of exciting new results before the known discrepancies in the standard model are resolved, cease funding particle physics experiments, and the discrepancies are never resolved.

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

#239

Post by somenameforme »

lemursage wrote: post #76

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…

Science has had countless cycles of believing we had discovered, more or less, all that was to be discovered and the remainder would come in sorting out things to another decimal place. Then a revolution, sometimes in short order, sometimes centuries later, comes around and emphasizes our ignorance and arrogance.

So at any given point you have two options: that we've finally reached "the end" - this is it and we can go no further. Or that we're at yet the latest cliff-face searching for that ever-elusive path through. I would always bet, hard, on the latter. At least if I could live forever, because even if I am right there's every possibility, if not probability, that none of us living today will be around to see it shown.

The notion of being able to discern all the fundamental laws of the universe while living on a single isolated grain of sand in a beach of ever more bizarre discoveries stretching out endlessly in all directions just seems improbable to me, at best.

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

#240

Post by jordanpg »

morbia wrote: post #214
Coding_Cat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think a lot of commentary on this thread is losing sight of what the world "model" really amounts to in a scientific context.

It's an abstraction. A bunch of math that just-so-happens to result in accurate predictions. That's all it really is. How the universe really works (putting Tegmark aside) is a separate, ultimately philosophical question.

Much of particle physics is simply exploring the parameter space in which various models might be applicable. In the most exciting case, the model crumples in some new, unexplored region.

The value of bigger accelerators comes down whether the higher energies, in which we have not yet explored, are worth exploring, relative to the cost of doing so. That is certainly debatable.

But it's not a "desert." Nobody knows what higher energies will reveal.

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