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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

#271

Post by tresqotheq »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #268
Koshkin wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But philosophy is not knowledge, and it is in fact math that is the only form our knowledge can have in this area, whether we like it or not.

Physics is based on metaphor not math. We take common experiences like space, distance, speed, temperature, "energy", quantify them with other stable experiences we can use as reference units, then select the operations on them which happen to have predictive value. The operations have become more abstract over time, but they're still more complex variations on the same underlying concepts - for example generalising…

>Physics is based on metaphor not math. We take common experiences like space, distance, speed, temperature, "energy", quantify them with other stable experiences we can use as reference units, then select the operations on them which happen to have predictive value.

If you experience pushing this object that feels to weigh 1kg with a force that feels like 1 N, you are going to experience seeing it accelerate at 1m/s^2.

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

#273

Post by gus_massa »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #139
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…

There probably is a hard limit on how many elemental particles you can find in the first place. I don't know if there are further theories. Are there X or Y-Bosons? Lowfat quark anti-particles?

There are many enhancements of the Standard Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Mo... Some of them propose new particles, some of them make small changes to the particles we know.

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

#274

Post by dang »

hamsand wrote: post #247
dang wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

the more posts are banned and shadowbanned the more like reddit this website becomes, aka a boring place for boring people to say boring things. interesting people don’t like censorship

I think if the GP had written something relevant about their personal experience in a scientific field, that would have been much more interesting, as well as not breaking the site guidelines.

The trouble with your argument "interesting people don't like censorship" isn't that you're wrong—it's that there are also a lot of people (many more, actually) who post dreck. If you want a forum that doesn't get overrun with internet dreck, you have to have some strategy for countering it. HN's strategy is to have a clear organizing principle (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) and clear rules to support it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That barely works, but it's a lot better than nothing.

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

#275

Post by bpye »

fhars wrote: post #193
usrbinbash wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious, what are the experiments we could run if we had for example 80% of the world's GDP?

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

#276

Post by bpye »

Isinlor wrote: post #147
survirtual wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s build a particle accelerator on the moon. Make it go around the circumference of the entire moon.

Given current predictions we would need colliders the size of the Solar System. Something bigger than Neptune orbit. We are ~12 orders of magnitude away from the grand unification energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_unification_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(particle_physics)

Is there some reason to think that the only way to get higher energy collisions is by scaling the accelerators? Is there any possibility that we may be able to get to higher energies with earth-scale experiments?

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

#277

Post by gus_massa »

trentnix wrote: post #11

Wasn’t there an article a week ago about a new particle found “on a tabletop”? Feels like I'm being hustled.

I remember that report, it was a very confusing press article.

They used a tabletop device to make a "simulation" of a Higgs boson inside a semiconductor. It was not a new elementary particle like an electron or a photon.

Is solid state physics they don't call those thing a "simulation", they call a quasiparticle. They are not a single entity, but they behave almost like a single entity, so if yu are working in the are it's easier to make the calculation as if they are a single entity.

Moreover, most of the time they just call the particles, but everyone in the area and physicist in other areas understand that they are talking about quasiparticles. The problem is when the new reach the press and that implicit understanding is lost.

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

#278

Post by calsy »

Isn't it funny that the single particle that they 'found' happened to be the one governments and investors gave them billions in hopes of finding. Nothing else, just the single particle to validate the entire existence of the LHC. I wonder what it would do for future investments if they didn't find it?

But hey, I probably don't understand the science like 99.999999% of people. It's so technical that you just have to take their word for it. I do understand humans though.

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

#279

Post by qsdf38100 »

jug wrote: post #261
highwaylights wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is nothing. They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what they might find, and have established some evidence against others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.

This is indeed progress but as I understand the situation, it is progress in the shape of taking another step on the ladder but only to realize it looks like it was the final step, after having searched for billions of dollars during decades. Maybe, scary thought, the theory of general relativity and the standard model is pretty much entirely self-contained and cannot per their design extend to encompass the quantum…

Note that colors we can perceive aren’t all in the rainbow. There’s no pink in the rainbow. That’s because pink is what is left when you take white light and remove the green part. It’s minus green. There’s no wavelength that corresponds to pink.

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

#280

Post by eterevsky »

calsy wrote: post #278

Isn't it funny that the single particle that they 'found' happened to be the one governments and investors gave them billions in hopes of finding. Nothing else, just the single particle to validate the entire existence of the LHC. I wonder what it would do for future investments if they didn't find it? But hey, I probably don't understand the science like 99.999999% of people. It's so technical that you just have to…

What exactly are you implying?

That if they were given money to discover supersymmetry, they would've discovered it instead of Higgs? Well, discovery of supersymmetrical particles _was_ one of the main goals alongside discovering Higgs, and none were discovered so far.

Or maybe you think that Higgs discovery was a hoax?

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