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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

#291

Post by Koshkin »

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…

This is all wrong, unfortunately, and that’s because it is based on a wrong premise. Experience and knowledge are two different things, and whether we are capable of experiencing certain aspects of reality or not, math is how we know things. In the areas we cannot experience directly the ability to form mathematical images and ideas can even be thought of, if you will, as an extension of our ability to “see.”

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

#292

Post by headmelted »

Grimburger wrote: post #53
highwaylights wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to whether it would cost less to do these experiments in space, I'm no expert on the colliding of particles and the implications thereof. In any case - how much of that $1000 is attributed to the research and development of the wheel in Ancient Mesopotamia? How much is attributed to the discovery of electricity, and to General Relativity? If we weren't attempting to get answers to fundamental questions…

Fair chunk of the cost is people working for slave wages in Asia and has nothing to do with with ancient Mesopotamia, let's be honest and not disingenuous here. Are you actually interested in discussing the topic at hand?

Ok. Slave wages too.

My point is that all technology is built on prior discoveries and all matter of other factors that produce the civilisation, that produces doohickies, to look up cat memes.

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

#294

Post by ncmncm »

Certhas wrote: post #95
jordanpg wrote: post #75

Earlier 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 author correctly reports a scientific debate inside of science amongst scientists. Particle Physicists can pretend this is just a political problem all they want, but if more and more other physicists are convinced the field is entering a desert there will be no new accelerator. Maybe even more importantly, if students learn about the true state of the field they will chose more interesting things to study. Human…

Expectation is that a new collider 10x as powerful and expensive would not be anywhere near big enough to test current hypotheses.

There is plenty left to investigate in solid-state and superfluid physics. You don't need (much of) a collider for those.

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

#295

Post by Koshkin »

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…

Sure, GR may well be self-contained and cannot encompass the quantum world in the same sense as the Newtonian mechanics is and can't. But the Nature does not have such boundaries, especially at such a fundamental level, and it is "self-contained" as a whole. So, while it may be impractical to try an create a unified theory of some aspects of reality, say, quantum mechanics and linguistics or economy, theories concerning fundamental aspects of Nature naturally are, and have been, subject to unification.

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

#296

Post by Koshkin »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #279
jug wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So what? A mix of wavelengths is just as real as a single wavelength. More to the point, colors are merely perceptions (artifacts of consciousness) which can be caused by a variety of factors.

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

#297

Post by simne »

Koshkin wrote: post #263
supportengineer wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge fleets of space telescopes Multiple gravity wave detectors

These I'm afraid will only confirm what we already know.

Really? What about quark stars/planets, long bursts?

-Telescopes gives us lot of confirmations, but also they, especially largest, constantly feed us data about new, unknown things.

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

#298

Post by SassyGrapefruit »

blueplanet200 wrote: post #188
SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #4

I 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.

The new data is what we're after ... to make discoveries! It's not just new data for new data's sake. The LHC in that regard has fell short.

Discovering that there is nothing the be discovered is a discovery.

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

#299

Post by Qem »

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…

>What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?

Well, if we could find a way to keep the GNP growing by at least 3.5% yearly, then in about 200 years a trillion dollars will be just like a billion today.

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

#300

Post by denton-scratch »

astrange wrote: post #282
catchclose8919 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...so you're just using "Brahma" to refer to the computer that is running the simulation that is the universe. And when the simulation becomes aware of its own condition, it becomes conscious? This is just rephrasing of the symulation hypothesis in mystical terms and is just as useless as the symulation hypothesis itself (regardless if it's "true" or not). There's some valuable deeper stuff in hindu and buddhist phil…

It’s not particularly exotic; it’s phenomenology aka continental philosophy. (Many kinds of Buddhism known to the west are actually repackaged European philosophy; this was intentionally done in Asia so it’d be easier to sell back to us.)

> Many kinds of Buddhism known to the west are actually repackaged European philosophy

Schopenhauer was interested in eastern philosophy. There is certainly a thread of Buddhist thought in some European philosophy.

I don't think it's at all reasonable to suggest that Asian Buddhists (in Asia) deliberately produced a formulation of Buddhism to appeal to Western tastes. Rather, Buddhist teachers in the West tried to find a way of presenting Buddhism without the cultural baggage.

The kind of Buddhism that I learned was largely mediaeval or earlier in its origins. Even 19thC developments in (e.g.) Tibetan Buddhism had little impact at the time on European philosophy; those developments were largely concerned with points of doctrine that flew over the heads of European thinkers.

So I'm not sure what kinds of Buddhism "known to the West" are actually repackaged European philosophy. Nichiren? "Soft" vipassana? I don't really agree that there has been much pollination of Eastern Buddhist thought from European philosophy.

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