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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?

#301

Post by ImHereToVote »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #64
Paracompact wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you imagine the universe is made of random real fundamental constants rather than random integer fundamental constants, then indeed there's no reason to expect such collisions. But if our universe starts from discrete foundations, then there may be no more satisfying explanation to this than there is to the question of, say, why the survival threshold and the reproduction threshold in Conway's Game of Life both in…

Why do you assume the two have to be small integers? There is nothing currently in physics which would disallow the electron to be -1 and the proton to be +1234567891011213141516171819. The fact they are both of magnitude 1 is a huge coincidence.

And why does this hole fit my shape perfectly? Asked the puddle.

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

#302

Post by amanaplanacanal »

api wrote: post #246
ForgotIdAgain wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that engineering progress made while building those machines are maybe more relevant for practical technical development than the discovery they make.

Better superconductors here. Would you like a $20 MRI down at your local drug store to detect cancer at early stage 1?

The problem isn't the cheaper MRI. The problem is the expert that needs to interpret the results. Detecting millions of cancers that don't actually exist doesn't help anybody.

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

#303

Post by andrewflnr »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #154
andrewflnr wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You imply your view "matches REALITY", then fall back to "Either way this is also opinion based." Nicely played. But the actual reality is that scientific discovery is proceeding at least as fast as it ever has. These things take time. 20 years is a laughably short time in which to declare defeat, even ignoring the fact that genetic and other biological tech has advanced leaps and bounds in that time. There's importa…

[flagged]

No, your opinions bias toward negativity, and we can see it in this comment by the way you shift the goalposts for every achievement until you can poo-poo it. Oh, except for the ones you just omitted from your quote, maybe because even you can't rationalize why CRISPR isn't a step change.

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

#304

Post by drdeca »

squeefers wrote: post #206
WantonQuantum wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find quite a lot of it very satisfying. For example, the deep mathematical symmetries of gauge theory and how they relate to the observed forces of the universe is truly amazing. The excellent Arvin Ash has a very accessible video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paQLJKtiAEE

maybe thats the problem. satisfaction isnt understanding. string theory is exciting maths, but fits nothing in reality. maybe scientists should go back to explaining reality instead of whatever this current paradigm is

Your conception of an “explanation of reality” is deeply flawed.

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

#305

Post by threethirtytwo »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #216
threethirtytwo wrote: post #102

All of science is getting harder as the easiest discoveries are all pretty much behind us. LLMs were a breakthrough I didn't expect and it's likely the last one we'll see in our lifetime.

The additional irony here is that LLMs are a tool that is likely forever damned to regurgitate knowledge of the past, with the inability to derive new information.

This is not true at all. Just query any LLM and ask it for new information. Literally ask it to create something that doesn't exist.

It will give it to you.

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

#306

Post by pixl97 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #293
pixl97 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean obviously this statement is false as we live in a finite section of the visible universe.

This said beyond the marketing there is a reality that if cold fusion did show up that there is a singularity event that occurs that making predictions past that point will almost always fail as the world would change very rapidly.

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

#307

Post by auntienomen »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #288
auntienomen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There does appear to be a deeper reason, but it's really not well understood. Consistent quantum field theories involving chiral fermions (such as the Standard Model) are relatively rare: the charges have to satisfy a set of polynomial relationships with the inspiring name "gauge anomaly cancellation conditions". If these conditions aren't satisfied, the mathematical model will fail pretty spectacularly. It won't be…

So they have to cancel, or we don't have a universe? ("Have to" not because we need electrical neutrality for large-scale matter - though we do need that - but because you can't build a quantum field that doesn't explode in various ways without it.)

There's always some risk of confusing the model with the reality, but yeah, if you have chiral fermions interacting through gauge fields and gravity, the charges have to say satisfy all of the anomaly cancellation conditions (there's about half a dozen) or the model will be inconsistent.

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

#308

Post by WarmWash »

snowwrestler wrote: post #267
sashank_1509 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the cost of the “next machine” be? Is it going to be tens of billions or can we make progress with lesser money. If it is going to be tens of billions, then maybe we need to invest in engineering to reduce this cost, because it’s not sustainable to suspend thirty years, tens of billions for every incremental improvement.

In the scope of international cooperation, tens of billions of dollars is not very much money. For context, the U.S. economy generates $10 billion every ~3 hours. One private company, Google, spends $10 billion in about 2 weeks. So look at it this way. Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money, and they’ll spend 30 years advancing engineering to probe t…

Takes like this are an optical illusion meant to create the idea that there is an insane amount of money freely floating around that is just being hoarded.

But just like that money is generated, it's also all spent.

So the actual hard part is deciding what not to spend money on so we can build some crazy physics machines with a blurry ROI instead.

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

#309

Post by gsf_emergency_6 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #294
gsf_emergency_6 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Sup…

Carmack is the Midwestern middle middle-class (culturally) dropout amongst them. Classic

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

#310

Post by kubanczyk »

fatbird wrote: post #147
benreesman wrote: post #141

It is almost always the case that when progress stops for some meaningful period of time that a parochial taboo would need violating to move forwards. The best known example is the pre- and post-Copernican conceptions of our relationship to the sun. But long before and ever since: if you show me physics with its wheels slipping in mud I'll show you a culture not yet ready for a new frame. We are so very attached to t…

This is a common framing of the Copernican revolution, and it's wrong. Copernicus was proposing circular orbits with the sun at the center instead of the earth. The Copernican model required more epicycles for accurate predictions than the considerably well-proven Ptolemaic model did, with the earth at the centre. It wasn't until Kepler came along and proposed elliptical orbits that a heliocentric solar system was ob…

> The thinkers of the day rightfully saw a conceptual shift with no apparent advantage and several additional costs.

I'm holding a big fat Citation Needed banner. Seemingly none of these "thinkers of the day" took it far enough to write down the thoughts.

While at it, were the "thinkers of the day" fond of the idea of Ptolemy's equant?

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