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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”?

#131

Post by nine_k »

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…

An easy, direct link, for example:

Careful observation of the orbit of Mercury —> Special Relativity —> General Relativity —> GPS satellites able to keep exact time —> the map app on your mobile phone.

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

#132

Post by spekcular »

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…

"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."

This is extremely false. The new engineering science required to make the incredibly strong magnets for each collider (newer colliders requiring stronger magnets) is one obvious counterexample.

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

#133

Post by stevenhuang »

cwillu wrote: post #112
stevenhuang wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bayesian reasoning has its limits. If one is lazy and don't think to reconsider when warranted, it's often accidentally used as a crutch. Works in most cases I grant you that, just user beware. > "The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken" - Bertrand Russel

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost...

I liked that article very much when it was shared, perhaps time for a rereading! Cheers.

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

#134

Post by joshcryer »

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…

That paper unfairly jabs at "Schwinger's numerology" because he chose the fine-structure constant in the equation (probably a guess, because he never published the theory behind it). It turns out the magnetic moment of the electron is one of the if not the most accurately measured thing in all of physics, and it fits perfectly with it. So the basis of the entire article, that the g-factor "was obtained using illegitimate mathematical traps" is just misleading.

You have to do the experiment to get the number, if the number doesn't fit with the experiment you have to figure out how to arrange the equation to fit with the experiment. I find this truly the basis for scientific progress. Even if we don't understand yet why it works the way it does. Why is the fine-structure constant everywhere in physics? It's not a hack it's experimentally derivable and has been reproduced over and over again.

I don't see anything inherently wrong with what those scientists "did" with their fudging and playing with numbers. Experimentalists are not infallible. That's why we need reproduction and for others to think up other experiments and to do them. That's what science is about. Nice history paper though.

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

#135

Post by davrosthedalek »

photochemsyn wrote: post #28
katmannthree wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way. It is disappointing, and more unfortunately pretty much her personal brand now. There are, as she seems to have discovered, a lot of eyeballs to be had when you bash things that are poorly understood and already looked down upon for it. She's a fine physicist and her points have merit, but she's smart enough to be per…

There is a limited pool of resources available to do basic fundamental science and it's fair to argue that things like LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources, without a whole lot to show for it. Since it's the general public that ultimately funds these projects (unless the LHC can attract its own Jeff Bezos), I think it is OK to have a public discussion about it.

Is it fair to argue that though? What's the metric for that? $ per Nobel prize? If you look at $ per scientist, LHC is actually quite cheap. $ per "theory tested", LHCb has disproved so many theory papers it's not even funny.

If you compare how much money is spend on fundamental research (or research in general), the pool of funds for a given direction is not limited because of other research. It's limited by all the other things we spend money on. If society wants to fund more DM, astro, whatever research, it would be much easier to find that money for example in the military spending. A minimal haircut there and you could double the research funding.

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

#136

Post by sva_ »

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.

I wonder if this is a consequence of people demanding more "rigor" nowadays?

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

#137

Post by davrosthedalek »

JackFr wrote: post #63
XorNot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources As opposed to? This sentiment was bandied around a lot before the LHC went online, but no one ever had a proposition of what the alternative was is the goal was to advance fundamental particle physics. You've got exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic interactions: (1) particle accelerator measurement and (2) incidental measurements of high-energy space…

Maybe the physicists are looking for their car keys under the streetlight. Unable to find, them the only solution they can conceive of is a bigger streetlight.

Which might be the right approach in a world without torches?

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

#138

Post by FollowingTheDao »

jll29 wrote: post #95
FollowingTheDao wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you met me and saw how I lived you would probably think I was close enough.

Modulo Internet access? Out of (off-topic) curiosity, what is the reason for that choice of life style? Just minimalism?

Homelessness. Not really much of a choice.

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

#139

Post by patrick451 »

XorNot wrote: post #46
photochemsyn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a limited pool of resources available to do basic fundamental science and it's fair to argue that things like LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources, without a whole lot to show for it. Since it's the general public that ultimately funds these projects (unless the LHC can attract its own Jeff Bezos), I think it is OK to have a public discussion about it.

> LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources As opposed to? This sentiment was bandied around a lot before the LHC went online, but no one ever had a proposition of what the alternative was is the goal was to advance fundamental particle physics. You've got exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic interactions: (1) particle accelerator measurement and (2) incidental measurements of high-energy space…

As opposed to funding things that are not particle physics at all. As far as I can tell, knowing that bosons exist has had approximately zero impact on our ability to engineer new stuff. Personally, I'm tired of footing the bill for a field that requires the one of the largest, most expensive experimental systems ever conceived yet seems unable to produce more than useless factoids.

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

#140

Post by thechao »

ianai wrote: post #103
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.

I’m just generally increasingly off put by the internets incessant “quibbling”. This seemingly endless juxtaposition of antithesis to follow any thesis. At some point that becomes just more noise, and that can be used by an agenda. I still found her point valid and interesting and not at all noise. My takeaway is more that new physics might well be out of our energetic grasps until we build some much larger accelerat…

The HN-centric term for this is "middlebrow"; a good middlebrow filter is definitely required to navigate HN.
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