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Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#81

Post by gtowey »

dieselgate wrote: post #77
whatsThisBtn4 wrote: post #68

9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science. The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be. Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best…

> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.

The thing is we have a lot of models which make very accurate predictions most of the time, which are useful for doing some impressive science.

But we have no accepted theory of what is actually happening behind the math. What we have is that in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we have already uncovered the most fundamental structures of the universe and further investigation into how or why things are the way they are is fruitless. This view has dominated for the last 100 years. Physics has been focused only on modeling and testing, but nobody knows exactly what the models are telling us about the universe.

I agree with the above poster that this is wrong and we may yet learn that our models are only very close to reality, but the actual mechanics are different. At least I think more research should be pointed in this direction.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#82

Post by rbanffy »

Diogenesian wrote: post #10
pavel_lishin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled , not suicidal!

I believe the alien scientists were depressed by the guaranteed collapse of their civilization, not the difficulty of certain differential equations. So it's more like a doctor getting weird results while working on a cure for a pandemic. Edit: oops, see the reply below... and my grumpy response. I seriously forgot about that entire plot point.

I can’t imagine aliens better suited for space travel than the Trisolarans. For them, deep hibernation is a natural state and they could easily build space ships to explore other nearby systems and seed them. Even better - their metabolism made them perfect for deep space habitats.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#83

Post by root_axis »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #4
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #2

That's the best part about science.

I remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled , not suicidal!

[dead]

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#84

Post by rbanffy »

d0mine wrote: post #72
pavel_lishin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I was referring to the human scientists' reaction to the sophons' interference. But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet'…

The error grows exponentially. For example, for equal-mass triple with Earth sized orbit initially, the prediction limit is just a few hundreds years even if you know initial conditions up to the plank length (LLM estimate of ~135 Lyapunov times).

The uncertainty increases and predictions are reliable only up to a couple hundred years but those hundred years are good enough at any point in time, because you redo your predictions all the time.

This kind of iterative process might yield some insights on how uncertainty creeps into the system.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#85

Post by rbanffy »

worldthruword wrote: post #71
pavel_lishin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I was referring to the human scientists' reaction to the sophons' interference. But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet'…

Trisolarans had advanced technology which means they knew about probability. Probability immediately implies Lying and the two types of scientific error we have. ie false positives and false negatives

All we needed to do would be to introduce game theory to them. It doesn’t matter what we say. We deal with zero trust all the time.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#86

Post by rbanffy »

traes wrote: post #45
sigbottle wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked this up, and sure enough, Ernst Mach was the one who lead the charge (a self proclaimed positivist, which is a position that many scientists would gladly say they support). Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mean that some evil boogeyman named Hegel lead a worldwide charge against physics. (I doubt Hegel even understood physics, lol. But you get my point.) You mean that two physicists had a disagre…

Is it really wrong to blame this one on philosophy? The source of the disagreement was inherently philosophical, lead by a philosopher, backed up by other mainstream philosophers, and undeniably held back physics. I don't mean to imply that philosophy is fundamentally evil or useless even when applied to physics; most early physicists also considered themselves philosophers. I'm just pointing out a mildly interesting…

> He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs

What you accept or not is irrelevant. It’s the math that guides you. I too believe we only perceive randomness because we don’t see the complete picture, but that’s irrelevant until we have the means to explore what that whole picture could be.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#87

Post by jongjong »

The framing that there is some unknown particle affecting the results is probably an understatement. Probably there are a LOT of unknown 'forces' affecting the results. Look at the size of the machine, the aging components, the number of components involved, the amount of software required, surely all of that is affecting the results.

Are humans even capable of building perfectly reliable systems?

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#88

Post by fc417fc802 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #70
fc417fc802 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The original supposition was that it would be implausible for scientists at large to have an adverse reaction to results that defied their current worldview. Indeed that is highly implausible. I daresay that anyone stating otherwise fundamentally lacks an understanding of the sort of people that are attracted to and work in the sciences. Paradigm shifts are a form of progress and progress is the raison d'etre. Note…

> Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend. The listed cases are not outliers in the scientific community. The individuals were outliers, but the scientific community, in a mode of behaviour that was not outlier-ish, shunned them. This tendency of scientists is well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle At the end of the day, humans are largely egotistical, self-centred…

You're trying to shift the goalposts rather than concede the point. We weren't speaking of cliquish behavior or resistance to new ideas which are indeed (unfortunately) common enough even in the scientific world. Rather the point under dispute was individuals experiencing markedly adverse emotional reactions to the point of harm in direct response to results that challenge their understanding of how things work.

So there are two problems here. First, that the listed examples are social in nature as opposed to being directly due to scientific results thus they are irrelevant to the point being argued (but importantly not necessarily irrelevant to the plot point in the work of literature that led to this line of discussion). And second that they are very much outliers in that individuals came to direct physical harm which is not at all the expected outcome for the typical participant when a paradigm shift occurs in the sciences.

Despite the drama surrounding it, the way the discovery of quantum mechanics ultimately played out is a clear counterexample to the position you seem to be attempting to advance. Many participants expressed bitterness or frustration regarding some of their peers but there was not (at least in aggregate) a large scale negative reaction to the new results themselves. Physicists did not generally spiral into depression or develop drinking problems or whatever else upon being exposed to the new information. (Do note that disagreement and doubt are not a negative thing in the sciences but rather an essential part of the process.)

On a more personal note, your view of the sciences seems to me to be myopic and overly cynical. You are (to my eye) cherry picking only the worst behaviors you have witnessed and then painting the entire endeavor with those colors. No worthwhile scientist is overly bothered by being wrong because it is an almost daily occurrence when you are exploring topics at the edge of human understanding.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#89

Post by exmadscientist »

jongjong wrote: post #87

The framing that there is some unknown particle affecting the results is probably an understatement. Probably there are a LOT of unknown 'forces' affecting the results. Look at the size of the machine, the aging components, the number of components involved, the amount of software required, surely all of that is affecting the results. Are humans even capable of building perfectly reliable systems?

You would probably be very surprised about just how much work is put in to characterizing these things. My graduate work was on another experiment (though our postdoc worked on one of the earlier g−2 experiments mentioned here!), but we literally had man-years of work sunk into measuring one thing about the experiment, one number, as accurately as possible and with valid error bars.

That was not the only thing about the apparatus, just one of the most important, but the point is: we cared, we cared a lot, and we cared a lot about a lot of things.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#90

Post by blooalien »

jambalaya8 wrote: post #79
dieselgate wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.

Aye, but we only sorta kinda "know" what things like black holes might be. We have models that make sense to us based on our understanding of science, and we think our instruments can faithfully report on what they can be with measurements we believe we are making correctly, but we have no clue what we don't know, and no real way to prove it, just theorize, and sort of bundle up what we believe is data supporting it.

"The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know." — Aristotle
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