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Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

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Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

#121

Post by tambourine_man »

robonerd wrote: post #106
tambourine_man wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, I wasn't aware. I'll check it out. I think you mean this: “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray” https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/04... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1KFTPqc0nQ I still find the tone off putting, reminds me of the fox and the grapes fable, not sure if it's known to most cultures. Nevertheless, I'll watch the video and reexamine my opinion.

> fox and the grapes fable, not sure if it's known to most cultures. That's one of Aesop's fables. I believe it's widely known, at least in all western cultures. The fox can't reach the grapes he desires, so he concludes the grapes were sour and he didn't want them anyway.

That's the one, yes.

Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

#122

Post by adrian_b »

selimthegrim wrote: post #94
adrian_b wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the standard model does not work "extremely well". Even if we suppose that the standard model is completely correct, it does not allow the computation of the majority of the useful physical quantities. What is needed is a model that would be able to compute all the physical quantities that are important in practice, e.g. the masses of all hadrons and of all atomic nuclei, also their magnetic moments, th…

Would you be complaining about Copernicus not adding anything to equants and epicycles if you lived then?

While another poster rightly pointed that Copernicus still used epicycles, you are correct in implying that the greatest contribution of the theories created after 1920, e.g. quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, chromodynamics etc. has been in the enhancement of our qualitative understanding of the physics of the elementary particles and of their interactions.

This qualitative understanding has been very helpful as a guidance in the development of various approximate methods used for the modeling of the systems that are too complex to be computable ab initio, e.g. atomic nuclei, atoms with many electrons, molecules, semiconductors, superconductors and so on.

Nevertheless, while the qualitative understanding was improved by the more recent theories, they remain useless for obtaining quantitative results.

All physical systems that are interesting are too complex to be computable ab initio, so in order to predict anything about them, wild approximations must be used, which are different for every physical system. There are no universal rules about how to develop such approximations.

If an approximation method is found, which after measuring experimentally the values of various parameters allows a model to predict other experiments with sufficient precision, then good. If not, there is no way to know if some other acceptable method can be found, and how to search for it.

Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

#123

Post by davrosthedalek »

joseluis wrote: post #105

I really think this paper should be more widely known, because it's eye opening: https://physicsdetective.com/something-is-rotten-in-the-stat... It made me realize QED is the equivalent of a million lines spaghetti codebase that's been continually built upon, fudge after fudge since the 40s, while being sold as the best thing ever, the ultimate model of reality, etc. While it really started as a temporary solution li…

Oh wow, that's quite a crackpot-y web page.

Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

#124

Post by tshaddox »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #59
robonerd wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress [...] But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics [...]" Can anybody explain the relevance of cosmology and astrophysics to societal progress? I'm sure these are very worthwhile fields of study in other respects.. but societal pr…

Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology that benefits society? Well, it's the same principle for esoteric experimental science: unique requirements leads to new tech being developed and then you can turn around, and if you find some use for some bit of the new tech you can tout it as a "boon to society".

> Have you heard how the military makes a lot of technology that benefits society?

I’ve heard that, yes, as well as NASA inventing velcro and zippers and teflon, and all of it has a faint tinge of “not actually true at all” to it.

Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

#125

Post by semi-extrinsic »

spekcular wrote: post #120
joseluis wrote: post #105

I really think this paper should be more widely known, because it's eye opening: https://physicsdetective.com/something-is-rotten-in-the-stat... It made me realize QED is the equivalent of a million lines spaghetti codebase that's been continually built upon, fudge after fudge since the 40s, while being sold as the best thing ever, the ultimate model of reality, etc. While it really started as a temporary solution li…

The person who wrote that paper doesn't understand the basics of the field that he's talking about. For example (from the blog post): "Consa gives an analogy wherein Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan has claimed that the sum of all positive integers is not infinite, but is instead -1/12. It’s wrong, it’s absurd, but renormalization has now been accepted, and is even sold as a virtue." One when performs zeta fu…

Onsager was a bastard with omitting details. He has a 1949 paper on packing of hard rods (and other anisometric particles), which is 4 pages long, but a colleague who went through the details of the derivation spent half a year and filled a ring binder with intermediate calculations.

Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

#126

Post by 8note »

robonerd wrote: post #45
photochemsyn wrote: post #12

Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR: > "I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so…

> "Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress [...] But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics [...]" Can anybody explain the relevance of cosmology and astrophysics to societal progress? I'm sure these are very worthwhile fields of study in other respects.. but societal pr…

The black hole has become a culturally important concept, being the center of different media as well as a common metaphor, allowing us new descriptions of ideas

Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

#127

Post by spekcular »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #125
spekcular wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who wrote that paper doesn't understand the basics of the field that he's talking about. For example (from the blog post): "Consa gives an analogy wherein Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan has claimed that the sum of all positive integers is not infinite, but is instead -1/12. It’s wrong, it’s absurd, but renormalization has now been accepted, and is even sold as a virtue." One when performs zeta fu…

Onsager was a bastard with omitting details. He has a 1949 paper on packing of hard rods (and other anisometric particles), which is 4 pages long, but a colleague who went through the details of the derivation spent half a year and filled a ring binder with intermediate calculations.

Damn.

I never actually learned this stuff. Is there a good textbook account of this isotropic-to-nematic transition that includes full details? Or is there still a gaping hole in the published literature?

In other words, did your colleague do this as a kind of history project, or because the details weren't available anywhere else?

Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

#128

Post by moonchrome »

jfengel wrote: post #118
spaetzleesser wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LHC computing infrastructure is also quite impressive.

And CERN is literally the reason we're here on th Web right now.

That's a huge stretch. CERN might be a reason we have the web that looks like it looks today, but we would have something similar with or without CERN.

Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

#129

Post by 8note »

rob_c wrote: post #98

No. Particle physics has shown a clear need for a clean next gen e/p collider. The author unfortunately got caught up in the grind of the field and not the context or big picture. And frankly this is exemplified by the US having an even stronger publish or perish attitude. Almost nobody ever in the field has used the phrase "god particle", at least in Europe. Thats yet another american contribution I'm sorry. Fine, l…

Has it shown a clear need? What's the required energy needed to show the new thing, and what what need does it fill?

Will the next collider solve climate change?

Re: Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?

#130

Post by welterde »

Barrin92 wrote: post #110
robonerd wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't the same be said for particle physics? The accelerators and detectors seem very high tech.

there's a lot of learning potential in building one or two but after that you're pretty much just making them bigger. There's a lot of engineering and construction involved but the new ones are really just very expensive and huge without netting necessarily much in terms of engineering science. In particular if you consider opportunity costs. With the 23 billion(!) it costs to build the new Large Hadron collider you…

The technology used in the accelerator and the detectors keeps changing though. Particle accelerators today are quite different to those in the 60ies.

Also not sure where you got the 23 billions from. Total budget for LHC is less than 8 billion euros. And that's over quite a long time frame. The whole CERN budget is only 1.1 billion a year (and they run quite a few different experiments apart from the LHC). That's within a factor of a few of a major sports club!

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