Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard? • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #280

alphawhisky wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion. The second we're able to understand and capture this energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective. I'll continually preach that we need to plan for this economically as a species because none of our current government or econ…

> The second we're able to understand and capture this energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy[.] Similar statements were already claimed about nuclear fission power plants in the 70s.

And your point is? Sometimes we make predictions that take hundreds of years to be turned into products.

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

#292

Post by adrian_b » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

davrosthedalek wrote: post #229

adrian_b wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existing theories are extremely far from being good enough for practical purposes. There exists a huge number of fundamental quantities that should be calculated from the parameters of the "standard model", but we cannot compute them, we can only measure them experimentally. For instance, the masses and magnetic moments of the proton, of the neutron and of all other hadrons, the masses and magnetic moments of the…

Lattice-QCD can, by now, actually calculate the masses of the proton, neutron from first principles pretty accurately. This is of course a brute-force approach. We currently lack, in all fields, theory for emergent properties. And the mass of the proton definitely is such.

There have been claims about this, starting with "Ab Initio Determination of Light Hadron Masses" (Science, 2008).

Nevertheless, until now I have not seen anything that qualifies as "computing the masses".

Research papers like that do not contain any information that would allow someone to verify their claims. Moreover, such papers are much more accurately described as "fitting the parameters of the Standard Model, such as quark masses, to approximately match the measured masses", and not as actually computing the masses.

The published results of hadron masses are not much more accurate than you could compute mentally, without using any QCD, much less Lattice QCD, by estimating approximate quark masses from the composition in quarks of the hadrons and summing them. What complicates the mass computations is that while the heavy quarks have masses that do not vary much, the effective masses of the light quarks (especially u and d, which compose the protons and neutrons) vary a lot between different particles. Because of this, there is a very long way between a vague estimate of the mass and an accurate value.

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

#293

Post by aleph_minus_one » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #291

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The second we're able to understand and capture this energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy[.] Similar statements were already claimed about nuclear fission power plants in the 70s.

And your point is? Sometimes we make predictions that take hundreds of years to be turned into products.

My point is that you shouldn't believe in marketing claims that are obviously too good to be true, like

> The second we're able to understand and capture this [cold fusion] energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective.

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

#294

Post by PaulHoule » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

gsf_emergency_6 wrote: post #85

PaulHoule wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note that the proton is not an elementary particle so it is really a question of "are the various quarks really 1/3, 2/3 of an electron charge". Crackpots have found thousands of formula that try to explain the ratio of the proton to electron mass but there is no expectation that there is a simple relationship between those masses since the proton mass is the sum of all sorts of terms.

Crackpots are downstream of the "physics community" awarding cultural cachet to certain types of questions -- those with affordances they don't necessarily "deserve"-- but not others. (I use quotes because those are emergent concepts) Same as "hacker community" deciding that AI is worth FOMO'ing about

Well, I'm not sure I believe that "hierarchy problems" in HEP are real, but I do think the nature of the neutrino mass is interesting (we know it has a mass so it is a something and not a nothing) as is the nature of dark matter, the matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the non-observation of proton decay. That article has nothing to say about non-accelerator "big science" in HEP such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande

which targets many of those questions.

As for the "hacker community" I think AI is really controversial. I think other people find the endless spam of slop articles about AI more offensive than I do. It's obvious that these are struggling to make it off the "new/" page. The ones that offend me are the wanna-be celebrity software managers [1] who think we care what they think about delivering software that almost works.

[1] sorry, I liked DHH's industry-changing vision behind Ruby-on-Rails, but his pronunciations about software management were always trash. You might make the case that Graham worked with a lot of startups so his essays might have had some transferable experience but they didn't. Atwood and Spolsky, likewise. Carmack is the one exception, he's a genius

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

#295

Post by PaulHoule » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 3:36 PM UTC

baggy_trough wrote: post #90

libraryofbabel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually true, if the charges differed at the 12th decimal place only? That’s non-obvious to me.

Yes because matter would have a residual charge that would massively overpower gravity even at that small a discrepancy.

To be devil's advocate maybe there is a surplus deficit of 1-part-in-10^12 in electrons relative to protons.

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

#296

Post by aleph_minus_one » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 3:36 PM UTC

samus wrote: post #221

hippich wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it hard as in: 1) we know what to do, but it is expensive 2) we don't know what to do exactly, but many more people involved can increase search speed, so just need more people 3) it is purely sequential problem, and therefore it takes a lot of time

A combination to some degree. Scientists yearn to stumble upon something hitherto unexplainable that requires a new theory or validates or definitely rules out some of the more fringe theories. While other natural sciences often suffer from an abundance of things that "merely" need to be documented, or where simulation capability is the limit, particle physics is mostly based on a theoretical framework from the middl…

> Scientists yearn to stumble upon something [that] definitely rules out some of the more fringe theories

The existing measurements at CERN ruled out a lot of the "more natural" variants of string theory. Until now this insight has not lead to a big scientific breakthrough.

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

#297

Post by verzali » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #234

hugh-avherald wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The field of Elon Musk has been promising shit for years, what do you think?

To be fair, he has delivered a lot of (bull)shit

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

#298

Post by aatd86 » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

aatd86 wrote: post #92

ecshafer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tensors are like 200 years old in mathematics. Gauss talked about Tensors.

What was new was not tensors. It was the representation in SU of mesons for photon-photon collisions. But even saying that is skimming the surface. I can't read beyond the knowledge gap.

SO(3)*, not SU

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

#299

Post by franktankbank » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #285

franktankbank wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, but then you have the questions of 1) why do leptons have (a multiple of) the same fundamental unit as quarks, and 2) why does that multiple equal the number of quarks in a baryon, so that protons have a charge of exactly the same magnitude as electrons? I mean, I guess you could say that charge comes from (or is ) the coupling of the quark/lepton field to the electromagnetic field, and therefore if it's somet…

> it's a long time since my physics degree...

me too, just addressing that a fraction might as well be an integer with some redefinition of the fundamental charge.

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

#300

Post by varjag » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 3:44 PM UTC

skeptic_ai wrote: post #257

varjag wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

High vacuum in enormous volumes maybe. Otherwise it was certainly a problem solved decades ago.

Not sure what role of EUV optics was in LHC. But Zeiss would develop you anything on the frontier of optics if you have deep enough pockets.

The rest I don't know enough to comment on, but as far as technology goes both LHC and EUV lithography are bespoke systems. Seriously doubt there is any path dependency. Huge part of LHC cost were earthworks and precision construction of complex machinery at enormous scale.