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Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

economist.com

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Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#151

Post by eigenspace »

battery_cowboy wrote: post #150
eigenspace wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of it comes from the fact that they used to be the golden child of science, but the influence and prestige of HEP has been a victim of it's own success. HEP just doesn't hold the same importance it used to, and that stings for the people who dedicated their lives to it. As they pushed to higher and higher energies and events with lower and lower cross sections, they're solving problems that matter less…

> they're solving problems that matter less and less, and are increasingly less likely to be useful in any way Can you expand on why you think this? I'm not a physicist, but I feel like one shouldn't discount the possibility of useful discoveries. I'd love to hear if there are reasons that's not true.

The problem is that the effects they're looking at are confined to such high energy and small length scales that they're utterly invisible to things even on the scale of a single proton. It's very difficult to imagine how (or even why) one would ever build a device that takes advantage of a TeV scale effect to do something useful, given that these effects are meaningless to the sorts of matter we care about and interact with.

Is it possible that we might discover something revolutionary at 100TeV that will have gigantic consequences to our daily lives? Sure. But that's like saying that it's possible that there's a treasure chest full of gold buried in your backyard. Yes, if you dug up your back yard it is possible you'll find something amazing and life changing. But for right now, we don't really have any convincing reason to think that's the case, and you'd probably just be spending a lot of effort to dig a big hole in the ground.

Arguing that it'd have good effects like increasing your fitness and "who knows, you might strike gold!" isn't really a convincing argument for me to dig up my yard.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#152

Post by UweSchmidt »

canjobear wrote: post #120
djaque wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I post this every time someone links to Hossenfelder, but please take her opinions with a grain of salt. She seems more interested in attacking the "physics establishment" than in giving people a picture of the reality of our situation. Take a look at her articles on LIGO [1] for instance where she makes conspiracy theory level claims saying that the group is lying about their data and that "big physics" is in on it.…

For what it's worth, I usually find Sabine Hossenfelder to be insufferably critical and self-promoting, but I found that LIGO article fairly disturbing. As someone who has worked with complex analyses of large datasets, I know how easy it can be to fool yourself.

In a scientific sense, NOT finding something should be equally valid as finding something. Just do proper work and write it up and we have increased our understanding of the world. If there was nothing, not even the Higgs, so what? There is nothing to defend or to attack. Where is this discussion coming from?

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#154

Post by semi-extrinsic »

dylan604 wrote: post #149
hpcjoe wrote: post #108

As a (non-practicing) physicist, I've always disliked the penchant of some in the HEP community to say what this article says. They (the HEP community) tends to equate physics with HEP physics. It's not. When this is pointed out to the people espousing this odd viewpoint, they usually respond with some passive aggressive comment. I've seen/experienced much of this during my time in research. New physics not requiring…

So, what other types of physics is not well understood and requires funding to further research. We know F=ma, things in motion stay in motion, blah, and so on. We know a current flowing down a path will generate a magnetic field. We electrons moving to a lower energy path will release energy. We know light bends in a lens, and how to make that useful. Essentially, the funding for pure research and discovery is going…

One very simple way to answer this question is that the American Physical Society publishes journals called Physical Review {A,B,C,D,E}. Of these, Phys Rev D is the one focused on high-energy physics.

If there was no other interesting physics requiring further research, how could those other fields be generating enough papers to fill 4 journals?

And this isn't even counting more recent journals like Phys. Rev. Fluids.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#155

Post by SiempreViernes »

djaque wrote: post #70

My personal opinion (and I might be biased since I'm not a collider guy) is that it's time to take a break from the energy frontier and put our efforts into other kinds of physics. There's a whole world out there besides "fixing" the standard model. I'm having a hard time finding it, but there's a quote from a famous physicist along the lines of "we already have a theory of everything we encounter in daily life, it's…

The field of x-ray light sources seems to be pretty well developed, lightsource.org lists 30 of them world wide, so adding one more doesn't look like it's going to critically impact anything except maybe the local community getting the extra jobs.

There was at one point truly a fight about the relative importance of the various fields, but the condensed matter people won that. Just look at lightsources.org again, that's 30 facilities worldwide, with 24000 users in Europe alone over the last five years. CERN has basically 1 facility for HEP, with maybe 9000 users worldwide.

At this point these call for shutting down particle physics for a few generations while the technology magically develops feel more like jealousy that protein structure isn't as sexy for the public as the search for beyond the standard model physics.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#156

Post by UweSchmidt »

Gatsky wrote: post #49
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #8

A counter point by Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/particle-physics-...

It will be impossible to get an extra 10 billion dollars invested into science without a project like this. In other words probably 10% or less of that money would end up going into other fields of research. Considering all the other things governments spend money on, that is a good enough reason to do it in my book.

What do you mean with "the other things governments spend money on"? That's infrastructure, education, welfare. The 10 billion is not free money but taken from taxes, so please make a good case for spending it! Surely any intent of not being honest about the cost/benefit will backfire and discredit future scientific projects.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#157

Post by Jabbles »

culturestate wrote: post #109
MiroF wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has a lot of STEM expertise, I'm confident they could probably figure it out.

There's a difference between theoretical and practical expertise. I don't know much about particle accelerators, but I do know a bit about advanced manufacturing and I think you might be surprised at the degree to which Chinese industry is still functionally dependent on foreign machinery and expertise. This is a country that, until about two years ago, couldn't successfully produce an entire ballpoint pen using full…

> an entire ballpoint pen using fully domestic processes

Which countries can?

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#158

Post by AnimalMuppet »

marcosdumay wrote: post #113
achillesheels wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found a Physics Stackexchange thread addressing this.[1] The science of quantum mechanics was not necessary for its invention. I’m still uncertain of its direct application other than “at [1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/112615/why-is-it...

Hum... That thread goes a long way about diodes, but I couldn't find any such claim about transistors. Yeah, somebody would probably invent them at some point. Somebody would probably even invent FETs, even if it took many decades more. MOSFETs are a completely different matter, I don't think anybody would invent them without understanding how they work. What everybody seems to forget is modern chemistry, material en…

But if you can figure out diodes, you can figure out PN junctions. Well, a bipolar transistor is just two PN junctions. So the same claim should at least somewhat apply to transistors.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#159

Post by knzhou »

canjobear wrote: post #120
djaque wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I post this every time someone links to Hossenfelder, but please take her opinions with a grain of salt. She seems more interested in attacking the "physics establishment" than in giving people a picture of the reality of our situation. Take a look at her articles on LIGO [1] for instance where she makes conspiracy theory level claims saying that the group is lying about their data and that "big physics" is in on it.…

For what it's worth, I usually find Sabine Hossenfelder to be insufferably critical and self-promoting, but I found that LIGO article fairly disturbing. As someone who has worked with complex analyses of large datasets, I know how easy it can be to fool yourself.

The actual timeline for this is that when the first critiques of LIGO's analysis came out, there was a good reply from LIGO and a productive scientific discussion, at the end of which Sabine indicated she was satisfied. That was months before. That was good.

Then she came out with the linked post, which pretends LIGO had no reply to the substantive issues even though she already had blogged positively about their reply earlier, and disingenuously throws in a few complete non-issues just to make a gish-gallop. That's not science popularization, that's spreading FUD for the sake of self-promotion. Any field can be "taken down" with enough dishonesty.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#160

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

EastLondonCoder wrote: post #48
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #8

A counter point by Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/particle-physics-...

In the late 19th century people that went into science where actively discourage to study physics since many believed there was nothing left to find out. Without quantum mechanics we would not have the transistor, there would be no computers. The immense economic value delivered by fundamental research makes a 10 billion usd investment look like a microscopic peanut crumb compared to the potential value it can give.…

No ,you are wrong. First of all we would still have vacuum tubes. Secondly, FETs (their physics is simple, and does not even need that much of quantum mechanics) were invented much earlier than BJTs (the quantum ones) and very possibly we would have been no more than 10-20 years behind from where we are now.
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