Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

home.cern

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 112 posts

Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

#81

Post by cauch »

anthk wrote: post #80
cauch wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also a former CERN scientist, and while I agree with the fact that recent papers are more and more a box-checking exercise with low value, I'm concerned on how Hossenfelder misrepresent the causes of that and the situation. You say yourself that this situation can be simply an effect due to the experiment lifetime, and I also think it's a reasonable hypothesis. What gives me pause with Hossenfelder is that she j…

What's your opinion on Beatriz VIllarroel and her experiments on transient traces in plates?

I don't know her.

But in general, I don't value "individual groundbreaking research". This is a very "Disney" view on how science work: a misunderstood genius that makes a discovery that the "scientific elite" refuses to acknowledge. Or very "Ayn Rand" or "Elon Musk" view, with all the teenage hedgelord energy associated to it. The myth of the "one-man-groundbreaking-discovery" makes for good entertainment, but even if it is 95% stupid and not 100% (yeah, individual contribution matters, yeah, inertia and misplaced skepticism exists, so what), that's a 12-year-old kid fantasy.

I'm not saying this person is not reliable, I don't know. But if her research is valuable, it will come out, and not because of one person. With Hossenfelder, the situation just turned into a media circus, which is just not useful at all. Such situations just feel like it is a "instagram gossip" deal rather than being about science.

Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

#82

Post by [deleted] »

g6pdh wrote: post #55
max-ch wrote: post #42

I was visiting CERN on one of their Open Days during the previous shutdown. This is one of the rare occasion where visitors can enter the LHC. I walked for about 500m along the beam which is remarkably small despite all its protection. Standing inside LHCb (one of the experiments where they track collisions) was one of my most awe-inspiring moments about science and technology. Photos don’t do it justice. It’s a mult…

I'm a former LHCb physicist and I worked for years in the cavern, fixing the cables you saw :) Thanks for your enthusiasm. Obviously, things seen from the inside aren't as ideal as a non-physicist person might think. There are the usual power dynamics you find in academia: PhD students and postdocs exploited to do service and technical work instead of independent research, careerism, researchers who have to worry mor…

[deleted]

Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

#83

Post by Angostura »

kashyapc wrote: post #70
g6pdh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a former LHCb physicist and I worked for years in the cavern, fixing the cables you saw :) Thanks for your enthusiasm. Obviously, things seen from the inside aren't as ideal as a non-physicist person might think. There are the usual power dynamics you find in academia: PhD students and postdocs exploited to do service and technical work instead of independent research, careerism, researchers who have to worry mor…

> felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact Your comment above makes me think of Sabine Hossenfelder[1]. I'm sure you must've heard of her. I know she's somewhat of a "polarizing" figure. As a former "insider", do you think her core point stands? (Which is, the particle physics field has lar…

Not a physicist, but isn’t the issue here that these are experiments? Failure to find a potential particle at a predicted energy shouldn’t be seen as ‘nothing to show’ or a failure. I presume it tells us something really valuable- if perhaps disappointing

Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

#84

Post by SiempreViernes »

p1mrx wrote: post #26
brokencode wrote: post #11

I feel like the title is a little overdramatic. They’re not saying goodbye to the LHC, they’re upgrading it to have 10x the power.

They're collecting 10X more data, at roughly the same energy per collision.

Yes, but nobody is seriously describing the beam "power" in Watts, they mean power in a statistical discovery sense.

Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

#85

Post by fg137 »

brokencode wrote: post #11

I feel like the title is a little overdramatic. They’re not saying goodbye to the LHC, they’re upgrading it to have 10x the power.

My reaction as well.

I was like, "They are abandoning LHC? How come I never heard of the big news?" Turns out the title is absolutely misleading.

Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

#86

Post by kashyapc »

Angostura wrote: post #83
kashyapc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact Your comment above makes me think of Sabine Hossenfelder[1]. I'm sure you must've heard of her. I know she's somewhat of a "polarizing" figure. As a former "insider", do you think her core point stands? (Which is, the particle physics field has lar…

Not a physicist, but isn’t the issue here that these are experiments ? Failure to find a potential particle at a predicted energy shouldn’t be seen as ‘nothing to show’ or a failure. I presume it tells us something really valuable- if perhaps disappointing

I know what you mean. I was recently at lunch at a (non-physics) tech conference and an ex-physicist (now a systems developer) sitting next to me responded the same.

I think (physicists in the room, please correct me if I'm making assumptions here) this is a classic "falsification" trap. Just because you can propose a hypothesis / prediction that is "falsiable" doesn't make it a worthwhile one to pursue. "Hypotheses" are dime a dozen. The art and wisdom is in choosing what to pursue.

Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

#87

Post by SiempreViernes »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #41
servo_sausage wrote: post #39

The LHC is such a crazy thing; kilometres of strange infrastructure, thousands of people, all for what seems like pure scientific curiosity. I think only surpassed by the SETI program in terms of doing it because many nerds think it's really cool.

Politicians think it's a moonshot project at finding another nuclear bomb type of thing. (None of this would ever be funded without the tenuous nuclear weapons connection.)

Please just stop typing this sort of nonsense.

Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

#88

Post by Xmd5a »

doodlebugging wrote: post #31
brokencode wrote: post #11

I feel like the title is a little overdramatic. They’re not saying goodbye to the LHC, they’re upgrading it to have 10x the power.

I had to chuckle a week or so ago when I was bumbling across the internet and landed on an article that had a link to a nutjob page where the title was something like: "CERN found something so disturbing they had to shut down immediately". The nutjob article (yes, I did read it, LOL) suggested that they had found some universal truth maybe about God or aliens or something, and it scared them so much they just noped o…

> It is truly no wonder that so much of society is so fundamentally fucking stupid

It's not. You got baited into thinking this is the case.

> are so full of obviously false bullshit.

Well, maybe what's less obvious is that there are a lot more people gawking at how stupid other people can be than fools falling for the bullshit you call out.

Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

#89

Post by elashri »

atemerev wrote: post #60
g6pdh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a former LHCb physicist and I worked for years in the cavern, fixing the cables you saw :) Thanks for your enthusiasm. Obviously, things seen from the inside aren't as ideal as a non-physicist person might think. There are the usual power dynamics you find in academia: PhD students and postdocs exploited to do service and technical work instead of independent research, careerism, researchers who have to worry mor…

I am in the industry too and I wish to get back to the academia sometimes. Sadly, CERN is not hiring Russians no matter what are their political convictions (I am pro-Ukraine, of course). But yes, as a Geneva resident, I was at the tunnels too (Alice), and I am always in awe every time I see this wonder of the modern world. Sometimes I wonder how actual humans could build this, much like people did for the pyramids.

CERN stopped hiring non member or associate member states citizens for some time now. Except in very rare circumstances, This applies to US citizens as much as Russians too.

You might disagree on that but we all know that it was political pressure.

Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3

#90

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #87
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politicians think it's a moonshot project at finding another nuclear bomb type of thing. (None of this would ever be funded without the tenuous nuclear weapons connection.)

Please just stop typing this sort of nonsense.

> nonsense

I'm intimately familiar with how high-energy physicists get hired and funded. The funding comes from the political and budget bucket labeled "nuke stuff".

E.g., Fermilab is under the U.S. Department of Energy. CERN is funded by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Etc., etc.

Politicians fund this stuff only because it triggers their wunderwaffen FOMO.

Post reply on HN