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Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

science.org

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Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#311

Post by tga_d »

SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #298
blueplanet200 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new data is what we're after ... to make discoveries! It's not just new data for new data's sake. The LHC in that regard has fell short.

Discovering that there is nothing the be discovered is a discovery.

Only in a technical sense. Running experiments under unprecedented conditions that generate predictable results is trivial -- it happens literally every time you run any experiment, since conditions can never be perfectly replicated. The fact that nothing notable has popped up from recent LHC experiments is itself notable, but only just, and certainly not notable enough to justify the costs involved.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#312

Post by Certhas »

eightysixfour wrote: post #212
Certhas wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nightmare" was how physicists themselves characterize the situation we are in, and have done for at least 15 years. Look at the 2007 article linked in the article above: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.315.5819.1657 Jonathan Ellis is on the record there describing the scenario we find ourselves in now as "the real five-star disaster". (you can get the full article by putting the link into scholar.google.…

IMO it is a five-star disaster for this generation of particle physicists, not for physics.

Yes absolutely. I don't think anyone in this or any of the linked articles suggests otherwise. That said, particle physics has been a very prominent and successful branch of physics.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#313

Post by denton-scratch »

astrange wrote: post #304
denton-scratch wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many kinds of Buddhism known to the west are actually repackaged European philosophy Schopenhauer was interested in eastern philosophy. There is certainly a thread of Buddhist thought in some European philosophy. I don't think it's at all reasonable to suggest that Asian Buddhists (in Asia) deliberately produced a formulation of Buddhism to appeal to Western tastes. Rather, Buddhist teachers in the West tried to fi…

Thai Theravada and Japanese Zen (and State Shinto) were reinvented in the 1800s to look more European and incorporate Romanticism because they knew if Europeans showed up and you didn't have a European-style religion, they'd declare you savages and colonize you. It more or less worked. See "The Making of Buddhist Modernism", review here: https://vividness.live/the-making-of-buddhist-modernism That didn't happen in Ti…

Thanks for the link. I've read his first article; I will read on.

My training was entirely in a Tibetan tradition. In 19thC Tibet, there were significant changes happening; but they were largely to do with ecumenicalism and the endless sectarian conflicts over minute points of doctrine.

"Rockstar" Tibetan lamas were certainly a thing. I was told once that, if you ask your teacher whether it would be good to attend a talk by visiting lama X, the least-favourable response would be along the lines of "He has many followers".

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#314

Post by NateEag »

astrange wrote: post #290
NateEag wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think the Simulation Hypothesis has any merit whatsoever, you should consider the possibility that the Simulation does not have a fully-consistent engine, just one that was "close enough". Note, of course, that the same could be true in a coincidentally-generated universe, as well as a deistic or theistic one (the latter two being effectively indistinguishable from a Simulation).

It must have a pretty good physics engine since we don’t see any strange artifacts in the sky from the times pre-cosmic inflation. In particular, it can’t be very quantized or we’d see giant “upscaling” artifacts. It also appears to give us exactly enough computational power to build quantum computers, but not any more than that. That seems like a pretty inconvenient choice for us and the simulators.

These are good points. Thanks for sharing them!

I'm not personally all that convinced by the Simulation Hypothesis, but I recognize it's a legitimate possibility.

... right alongside the possibility that base reality doesn't have a fully consistent physics system. So far assuming reality works has panned out pretty well, but we can't be sure that will just always be true.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#315

Post by credit_guy »

Isinlor wrote: post #147
survirtual wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s build a particle accelerator on the moon. Make it go around the circumference of the entire moon.

Given current predictions we would need colliders the size of the Solar System. Something bigger than Neptune orbit. We are ~12 orders of magnitude away from the grand unification energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_unification_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(particle_physics)

Now that you mention this, would an accelerator in space need walls? Could you make it from a series of big circles (maybe solenoids?) at distances of a million kilometers apart or so? Neptune's orbit is about 15 billion km long, so, you'd need about 15k of such loops. In free fall they would just go around the Sun, so you'd only need to maintain their perfect alignment with some minute adjustments.

Re: Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

#316

Post by denton-scratch »

catchclose8919 wrote: post #281
denton-scratch wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...so you're just using "Brahma" to refer to the computer that is running the simulation that is the universe. That "Brahma" isn't a computer; the model doesn't suggest that the universe is a simulation. You seem to have wedged in an interpretation that is fundamentally materialist, which sort of misses the point; according to this model, consciousness is fundamental. That is what was being discussed. I agree that…

> I agree that it's "mystical" to postulate that consciousness is fundamental; but it's equally mystical to assume that matter is fundamental. Sure using "matter" like this without defining it is equally mystical. That's why we'd take 'computation' to be "fundamental" or 'the wave function'. "Matter" is just a higher level emergent property of what we perceive. > I happen to take the view that consciousness exists, a…

> a simulation is just something that runs as an informational phenomenon on top of some physical substrate

A simulation is a simulation of something; it's by definition not the reality being simulated. If you want to say you can have a simulation without simulating something, that "reality" is itself a simulation, then we're into turtle territory; this simulation models that simulation, which models another simulation, all the way down.

That path leads to solipsism, which I think is a stultifying view. It's a view that I once entertained, but eventually rejected.

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