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Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#251

Post by layer8 »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #106
iterance wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific fields may not advance for decades at a time, but we are hardly in a scientific drought. There have been dramatic advances in countless fields over the last 20 years alone and there is no good reason to expect such advances to abruptly cease. Frankly this is far too pessimistic.

I don't understand what is wrong with pessimism. That's not a valid critique. If someone is pessimistic but his description of the world matches REALITY, then there's nothing wrong with his view point. Either way this is also opinion based. There hasn't been a revolutionary change in technology in the last 20 years. I don't consider smart phones to be revolutionary. I consider going to the moon revolutionary and catc…

> If someone is pessimistic but his description of the world matches REALITY, then there's nothing wrong with his view point.

A description that matches reality is realist, not pessimist.

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#252

Post by davrosthedalek »

gosub100 wrote: post #244
sigmoid10 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips that ultimately enabled you to type this comment on your phone/computer. The return on that investment is obvious. But it is not just about making money: The entire field of radiation therapy for cancer exists and continues to improve because people figured out ways to control particle beams with…

Why can't some of these trillion dollar companies invest back in the quantum tech that got them there, if it's so certain there will be benefits? Why not Apple and Nvidia fund the next particle collider, and give something back to society instead of letting tax payers fund it so billionaires can privatize the profits?

Do you want the results of the research be open and available to all, or should it become IP of nvidia or apple?

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#253

Post by brazzy »

hugh-avherald wrote: post #218
brazzy wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as funny as armchair science enthusiasts not being able to fathom that research budgets are limited and it makes sense to redirect them into other, more promising fields when a particular avenue of research is both extremely expensive and has shown diminishing returns for decades.

Does targeting research towards 'more promising' fields actually produce greater economic returns?

Given that you can do a lot more research in different fields at the same time for the amount of money the next bigger particle accellerator would cost, the answer is very likely yes.

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#254

Post by brazzy »

bl0rg wrote: post #199
brazzy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but we had hopes that it would lead to more. And had lead to more, something only known to be false in hindsight, who knows where that would have ended us up? What if it upended the standard model instead of reinforcing it? Sure, but it didn't. Which is knowledge that really should factor into the decision to build the next, bigger one. > What are we supposed to do then? As humans, I mean. Invest the money and…

> Which is knowledge that really should factor into the decision to build the next, bigger one. It was always factored in, and of course it would be in any next iteration. > Invest the money and effort elsewhere, for now. There are many other fields of scientific exploration that are very likely to yield greater return (in knowledge and utility) for less. You could fund a hundred smaller but still substantial intiati…

I'm not against them in principle either. Just at this time, at this cost, at this state of development in the field.

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#255

Post by kdavis »

layer8 wrote: post #250
kachapopopow wrote: post #242

None of the comments seem to mention that it's also really really really really really expensive.

That depends on what you compare it to.

Almost anything, i.e. the next generation accelerator[1] at CERN is about 15B CHF which is about 20B USD.

[1] https://home.cern/science/accelerators/future-circular-colli...

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#256

Post by franktankbank »

empath75 wrote: post #232
andyferris wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hint from quantum field theory (and things like lattice gauge theory) is that charge emerges from interesting topological states/defects of the underlying field (by "interesting topological shapes" I mean - imagine a vortex in the shape of a ring/doughnut). It's kind of a topological property of a state of the photonic field, if you will - something like a winding number (which has to be an integer). Electric cha…

> something like a winding number (which has to be an integer). Electric charge is a kind of "defect" or "kink" in the photonic field, while color charge (quarks) are defects in the strong-force field, etc. Quark's don't have integer charge

Redefine the down quark charge as the fundamental unit and you lose nothing.

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#257

Post by skeptic_ai »

varjag wrote: post #219
sigmoid10 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Microchips were an incremental improvement where the individual increments yielded utility far greater than the investment. You should look up how modern EUV lithography was commercialised. This was essentially a big plasma physics puzzle. If ASML hadn't taken on a ridiculous gamble (financially on the same order of magnitude as a new collider, esp. for a single colpany) with the research, Moore's law would have die…

EUV lith would have absolutely been achieved if LHC wasn't ever built.

Lhc mastered high vacuum, high precision lens from zeiss, precision lasers, specialized magnets which are needed by euv lith.

So would have been delayed.

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#258

Post by boringg »

gosub100 wrote: post #244
sigmoid10 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips that ultimately enabled you to type this comment on your phone/computer. The return on that investment is obvious. But it is not just about making money: The entire field of radiation therapy for cancer exists and continues to improve because people figured out ways to control particle beams with…

Why can't some of these trillion dollar companies invest back in the quantum tech that got them there, if it's so certain there will be benefits? Why not Apple and Nvidia fund the next particle collider, and give something back to society instead of letting tax payers fund it so billionaires can privatize the profits?

I think your starting premise is obviously false and where are you getting that billionaires are privatizing the profits from the particle collider (sounds like a talking point). No one can guarantee that there are benefits - we can surmise that there are but there are still massive risks associated with large form science experiments.

Government has always been the backbone of basic science research - no one else can reasonably bear the risk and the advances are public domain.

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#259

Post by franktankbank »

alt227 wrote: post #236
pjmlp wrote: post #159

As CERN Alumni, this isn't easy, the data is endless, processing it takes take, usually everything is new technology, and also needs to be validated before being put into use. Thousands of people have worked on bringing LHC up during a few decades before, Higgs came to be, across all engineering branches. This stuff is hard, and there is no roadmap on how to get there.

> Higgs came to be Did it? I thought the whole point was that the data that came from LHC showed that it was inconclusive and needed a bigger more powerful machine to prove it. Happy to be proved wrong.

Is this some mandella effect going on? No, they discovered the Higgs and did rough measurements.

Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

#260

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

brazzy wrote: post #253
hugh-avherald wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does targeting research towards 'more promising' fields actually produce greater economic returns?

Given that you can do a lot more research in different fields at the same time for the amount of money the next bigger particle accellerator would cost, the answer is very likely yes.

Not a physicist, but I think building state of the art particle accelerators probably requires doing a lot of research in many different fields
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