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

Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 408 posts

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

#311

Post by threethirtytwo »

andrewflnr wrote: post #303
threethirtytwo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

>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.

Not true at all. CRISPR isn't a step change because it only made genetic engineering more efficient and it didn't effect the lives of most people. It's still a research thing.

I didn't poo-poo AI did I? That's the favorite thing for everyone to poo-poo these days and ironically it's the one thing that effects everyones life and is causing paradigm shifting changes in society right now.

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

#312

Post by threethirtytwo »

layer8 wrote: post #251
threethirtytwo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Technically this is true. Practically speaking most realists are perceived to be pessimists. There are tons of scientific studies to back this up as well. People who are judged to be pessimistic experimentally have more accurate perceptions of the real world.

This means that most people who you would term as "realists" are likely optimists and not realists at all.

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

#313

Post by kubanczyk »

raincole wrote: post #153
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…

It's easy to give up existing concepts. It's called being a crackpot and you can find thousands of papers doing that online.

Yes. But crackpots are still vital.

Let me put it this way. Once upon a time people didn't know about solar eclipse. But then a day came when a certain somebody was instantly promoted to a Lead Staff Senior Astronomer, just because they predicted to the hour that the sun is going to disappear.

Well, but think about the field just one day before that:

- maybe 10 theories that said "it's just a reformulation/refactoring, nothing to see here, all business as usual, no new predictions, very safe for the author",

- maybe 100 crackpot theories. Undoubtedly, unashamedly crackpot, with wild predictions all over. Of which 99% were in fact pure trash, so, retrospectively, people were rightfully considering them trash. Yet 1 was the key to progress.

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

#314

Post by ajam1507 »

toast0 wrote: post #286
ajam1507 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same thing about the world wars or porn. Any human pursuit taken to an extreme can produce knock-on effects, that isn't an argument in a vacuum to continue to fund any one area.

Spending tens of billions every 30 yesrs on world wars would be pretty awesome. Much better than what we currently spend. Porn seems to be sustainably self funding; no need for government stimulus.

> Porn seems to be sustainably self funding; no need for government stimulus.

Only because you haven't seen the plans for the Large Hardon Collider

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

#315

Post by htx80nerd »

mattlangston wrote: post #71

Experimental particle physicist here. It's just hard. I measured the electron's vector coupling to the Z boson at SLAC in the late 1990s, and the answer from that measurement is: we don't know yet - and that's the point. Thirty years later, the discrepancy between my experiment and LEP's hasn't been resolved. It might be nothing. It might be the first whisper of dark matter or a new force. And the only way to find ou…

>"It might be the first whisper of dark matter"

Come now.

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

#316

Post by bigfudge »

parineum wrote: post #284
gosub100 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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? Where do you think that tax money comes from? Apple and Nvidia are creating the economies that produce tax revenue at every step of the way.

Yeah, except corporations don’t pay tax like they did in the 50s and 60s…

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

#317

Post by squeefers »

drdeca wrote: post #304
squeefers wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you can correctly predict reality whilst having absolutely know idea how it works (ie the path of a photon in the double slit experiment).

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

#318

Post by kingstnap »

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.

It depends on what you mean, specifically on your distance metric.

If you mean nearest neighbours search like autocorrect then LLMs are extrapolative.

You can easily generate combinations not seen before. I mean you can prove this with parametric prompting.

Like "Generate a poem about {noun} in {place} in {language}" or whatever. This is a simplistic example but it doesn't take much to come up with a space that has quadrillion of possibilities. Then if you randomly sample 10 and they all seem to be "right" then you have proven it's not pure neighbour recall.

Same is true of the image generators. You can prove its not memorizing because you can generate random varients and show that the number of images realizable is more than the training data possibly contains.

If you mean on the underlying manifold of language and ideas. Its definitely interpolation, which is fundamentally a limitation of what can be done using data alone. But I know this can be expanded over iteration (I have done experiments related to this). The trick to expanding it actually running experiments/simulation on values at the boundry of the manifold. You have to run experiments on the unknown.

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

#319

Post by anon84873628 »

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.

You seem to be contradicting yourself, having already said:

>I'm aware of the charge coming from quark

So it's not +huge_number because the number of quarks involved is small. Sure we still don't understand the exact reason, but it's hardly as surprising that, uh, charge is quantized...

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

#320

Post by awkwardleon »

parineum wrote: post #284
gosub100 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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? Where do you think that tax money comes from? Apple and Nvidia are creating the economies that produce tax revenue at every step of the way.

I believe the point was these companies benefited greatly and specifically from basic research funded by the government: they should therefore "give back" in kind (vs simply contributing to the tax base and relying on a government to figure out what to fund). The reality is these companies care only about shareholder value, and the current US administration has been terminating grants and cutting funding in basic research. I think it's fair to question, in this environment, what these companies' ethical responsibilities really should be.
Post reply on HN