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

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

backreaction.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 282 posts

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

#241

Post by drran »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #111
robonerd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author has a popular (and imho pretty good) youtube channel.

I liked her content at first but now I’m tired of the way she implies that "scientists" are lying to us, stealing our money, and that she is here to reveal some truths that are kept hidden from us. After watching any of her video, I don’t feel like I’ve gained any insights, except that I shouldn’t trust "science".

IMHO, we should not put all our money into a single basket. Instead of overfunding few science projects and underfunding everything else, we should fund projects with potentially good ROI. For example, IMHO, we should fund research in LENR instead of HENR, because LENR will be much more useful. LENR reactor can be installed at home, or in a plane or spaceship, while HENR will require a separate town.

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

#242

Post by yakubin »

paulpauper wrote: post #226
mhh__ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Sabine is has the bona fides to know her stuff but also a contrarian and a bit of an outcast, and she knows how to market herself. All of this combined is perfect for hackernews.

and she knows how to market herself. It's more like everyone is doing the marketing for her The field of physics has gotten bigger overall, including experimental physics. It's not like physics is 100% theoretical , untestable stuff.

It's not like physics is 100% theoretical , untestable stuff.

Unfortunately the untestable stuff gets the most press. If you talk to experimental physicists in university, they'll tell you all that stuff isn't treated seriously by them, but reading the press you may get the impression that things like string theory are widely-respectable and that there is only some disagreement, usual science stuff. The press really distorts the picture of what most physicists think about these topics.

(Also, I wouldn't use the term "theoretical" for untestable stuff. I would use "speculative". "Theoretical physics" does not imply unfalsifiable speculation, it can actually be fruitful scientifically.)

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

#243

Post by cryptonector »

One of the things that should be mentioned in videos like this is just how much data these particle experiments produce nowadays, or how long it takes to analyze it all, and even to write the programs to do that analysis. These things produce so much data, so fast, that the high performance computing setups needed to run particle physics are extremely interesting of their own right.

Now, I'm not saying that Sabine Hossenfelder should go into detail about that, but that she should mention the gargantuan amounts of data involved because that alone should be enough to cause people to wonder just how solid these results are.

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

#245

Post by rendang »

bawolff wrote: post #233
zone411 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Her Simulation Theory video was absolutely awful ( https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-s... ), so it's not just a gut reaction.

I mean the link you linked to is pretty terrible itself > There are many theories in theoretical physics where it is very difficult or impossible to come up with experiments to prove or disprove them, e.g. Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation or the String Theory. One might call these sorts of theories metaphysical, fine, but it doesn’t make them into disproven pseudoscience or religions. Like i'm really not sure how…

I don't see how the claim that our universe is simulated is related to metaphysics in the first place.

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

#246

Post by ehvatum »

rapjr9 wrote: post #209
tambourine_man wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sabine went on full rant/iconoclastic/grudge mode IMO recently. It's a shame, as she a good communicator, but I just see myself skipping her content when it pops up. “I left the field because it's a paper production machine that adds no value to society” without substantiation is simply a frustration ridden meme.

I agree with her, I've been seeing the same problems with the physics community for decades. Everything kind of stopped after Einstein, and in particular I think nuclear weapons scared the heck out of everyone. I have long suspected that physics research since that time has been intentionally limited to "safe" areas like semiconductors, cosmology, and string theory. The old guard essentially decided that having physi…

> Everything kind of stopped after Einstein

Einstein passed away in 1955. Quarks were theorized in 1964 and experimentally confirmed in 1968. Quarks are necessary to explain how a neutron can become a proton, how an atom with more than one proton can possibly be stable, what pions and kaons from cosmic ray impacts even are, and many other everyday things.

Less has happened since Feynman passed; I would say it was Feynman dying and glam metal taking over the music scene that finally made the world realize technology had gone too far. Indeed, grunge was the next wave.

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

#247

Post by throwawaymaths »

gizmo686 wrote: post #141
nine_k wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was the orbit of Mercury (or any other astronomical observations) important for the discover of Relativity. My understanding was that experimental impetus for relativity was the Michelson–Morley experiment, which was an in-lab experiment, not an astronomical observation. General relativity was then developed on a purely theoretical basis. That it was able to explain Mercury's orbit was a nice bit of empirical confirm…

> Having such evidence probably helped get the theory accepted faster

I mean the original context is societal contribution, so getting something import understood faster I think counts, no?

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

#248

Post by Dylan16807 »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #244
jacquesm wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're off by a factor of 1,000.

How about the Iraq War?

Is not a science project. If you're trying to make a weird point you need to be more direct, and if you're trying to make a political point you're just wasting everyone's time.

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

#249

Post by nyc111 »

> Those physicists who said otherwise were either incompetent or lying or both, the rest knew it but kept their mouth shut, and now they hope you’ll forget about this and give them money for a bigger collider.

This, coming from a physicist, shows how corrupt aademic physics has become. Academic physics is nothing more than old school scholasticism.

> 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.

Another sign of scholasticism. You just write commentary on commentary to earn academic points.

> They never admitted to having made false statements, accidentally or deliberately, and they never gave us any reason to think it wouldn’t happen again. I quite simply don’t trust them.

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

#250

Post by vidarh »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #186
vidarh wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had the internet before the web, and we had gopher. So we had an open network, the client server model and links. What the web brought was a more flexible protocol and document format. That was important, but there's no way we'd have been stuck with compuserve or AOL.

Do you remember the time when messenger services were open to third party clients? You could actually talk to all your friends using only one app! Those days have ended .

I could not talk to all my friends on only one app, as the vast majority of people were not online. If anything, a far larger number of people are still on open services today than were back then; there are just even more people on locked down services.

But why you brought this up in a discussion about the invention of the web, I have no idea.

Post reply on HN