51–60 of 164 posts
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If thousands of people have careers in unicorn-hunting, that's what will happen.
While watching her complain I kept thinking, "publish or die".
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You do realize that was intended to be humorous, yes? It's true that one should not defer blindly to authority, but experts nonetheless know some things that non-experts don't. That's what makes them experts.
> but experts nonetheless know some things that non-experts don't Oh, yeah, engineering and all the other practices are rooted on this. Science is not.
Sabine Hossenfelder basically posted a rant about particle physicists on Youtube last week, about how they are doing science wrong. Basically she said you are supposed to change your theory based upon results that don't match the theory, and what they have been doing for decades is looking at gaps in the results, and imagining particle theories that don't alter the expected results in the currently explored energy le…
Things are more complicated than that. Something is there causing those phenomena. People have a theory that it may be unicorns, so they are out looking for unicorns. Those are supposed to be hard to find, and people are still searching on the hardest possible places that can hold them. It may also not be unicorns, on what case nobody has any idea what it may be. Some people are trying to make such theories, but none…
That is part of the argument. Those dollars could go other places than these giant particle accelerators that haven't shown anything much since the Higgs Boson, and no theories are more than guessing that we will.
Cargo cult tech: visit Silicon Valley, copy some striking behavioral traits not practiced in your little corner of the planet and hope that you will "eat the world" somehow.
Oh, the classic we're going to create Europe's SV in ___ you know.
But it keeps a lot of bureaucrats busy, and (very) gainfully employed.
Cargo cult tech: visit Silicon Valley, copy some striking behavioral traits not practiced in your little corner of the planet and hope that you will "eat the world" somehow.
Cargo cults work if you have enough money. Throw it to the wall with adequate speed for large enough amount of time and some very few will stick. Then you can rest on the laurels that Fortuna gave you. This is why Silicon Valley cannot be replicated elsewhere, except perhaps Switzerland or some filthy-rich Petrocountry.
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the thing is that this pattern of pushing to unexplored energy levels did work before. Unicorns were found in the unexplored forests of Congo. In fact an entire zoo of unicorns of all shapes and forms was found, an incredible achievement that stands among the most important stuff our gray-tinted gel has managed to internalize about the universe. You can't blame modern day particle physicists for being born late for t…
The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? That's 40 years. edit: her complaint is that once funding sources realize that 'particle physicists shill ridiculous ideas for research grants', all of the money dries up and won't return for at least a generation or two. That's an existential threat to the field. That sounds like a legitimate complaint to me. Unfortunately…
The Higgs Boson was found in 2012 by the LHC and was predicted by the standard model.
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the thing is that this pattern of pushing to unexplored energy levels did work before. Unicorns were found in the unexplored forests of Congo. In fact an entire zoo of unicorns of all shapes and forms was found, an incredible achievement that stands among the most important stuff our gray-tinted gel has managed to internalize about the universe. You can't blame modern day particle physicists for being born late for t…
The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? That's 40 years. edit: her complaint is that once funding sources realize that 'particle physicists shill ridiculous ideas for research grants', all of the money dries up and won't return for at least a generation or two. That's an existential threat to the field. That sounds like a legitimate complaint to me. Unfortunately…
IANAPhysicist so correct me if I'm wrong but the last time we found something predicted [1] by the Standard Model was the Higgs Boson in 2012. Before that it was the Tau neutrino and the quark-gluon plasma in 2000, the top quark in 1995, and then (the discovery I think you're referring to) the W and Z bosons in 1983
[1] we mean experimental confirmation, right?
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Oh, the classic we're going to create Europe's SV in ___ you know.
But those only copy the cultural aspects that favor those doing the copying, and since it’s conventional-minded people that copy and the “secret” SV ingredient is putting independent-minded people in charge the whole process is forever doomed to failure… But it keeps a lot of bureaucrats busy, and (very) gainfully employed.
https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
Unfortunately some people tends to cherry pick their favourite details. In my country there's a politician that says that the iPhone development was paid by US government.
Sabine Hossenfelder basically posted a rant about particle physicists on Youtube last week, about how they are doing science wrong. Basically she said you are supposed to change your theory based upon results that don't match the theory, and what they have been doing for decades is looking at gaps in the results, and imagining particle theories that don't alter the expected results in the currently explored energy le…
To make your analogy close to physics -- imagine you found a unicorn horn and can tell from the biological makeup that it is indeed a horn grown from some sort of horse-like mammal. If you searched 99.9999% of the earth for animals that might have grown that horn and found nothing then the best thing to do would be to continue looking within that 0.00001%.
We can't figure out what comes after the standard model of particle physics. But we know it's wrong. e.g. we know black holes exist and something has to happen within them. But we don't have a theory that can predict what that is. e.g. we found a unicorn horn. So we have to desperately search for it.
Hossenfelder is right that it's shitty to have to keep pushing the energy boundaries in which we hope we'll see some interesting behavior. But there's literally nothing else to do. We've searched 99.99999% of earth and there's no unicorn. Do we start denying the existence of the unicorn horn that we're holding?
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If thousands of people have careers in unicorn-hunting, that's what will happen.
While watching her complain I kept thinking, "publish or die".