241–250 of 316 posts
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…
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literally my sentiments exactly. Next thing you know, someone will be clamoring to make the LHC a profit center and complain about its solvency! edit: I have no dog in the fight, but I do appreciate the concept of "Art for Art's sake." To me, the LHC embodies the physics equiv of that statement.
You do realize that most of the money for LHC end up in industry, not academia?
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…
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My feeling is that a big part of the physics field is trying to see patterns in noise and equipement artifacts.
Very large efforts are made to predict noise floors within data, prevent it, account for it, average over it with multiple tests, etc.
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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…
Caveat-- I work in astronomy but have a PhD in physics and have taken graduate QFT.
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Hey, can you please not fulminate on HN? It sounds like you might know quite a bit about the field (or some of it), but commenting like this degrades discussion and evokes worse from others. If you would make your substantive points thoughtfully, and share some of what you know, that would be much better. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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?
I think this is correct. My sense is that the assumption of _individuation_ is at the core of logic, which then infects all rational thinking. (We add the predicates to "things", and then forget that we added them!) If there are no individual things, as quantum field theory seems to suggest, what are numbers counting? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVQfWC_evg http://www.katabane.com/mt/ontology.html
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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…
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…
They also had quite solid experimental anomalies they were trying to explain.
Black body radiation was an anomaly. Radioactivity was an anomaly. Photelectric effect was an anomaly. Mercury's orbit and rotation were anomalies.
Particle physics isn't done, but colliders probably are. Terrestrial particle physics is effectively rudderless since there are no anomalies left for them to probe.
It looks like it's going to be LIGO and the Webb to point to our new headings.