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.
famous last words before quantum physics hit
Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
341–350 of 408 posts
Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fundamental physics research has an extremely profitable returns ratio, but it takes decades to amortize. This does not work with capitalist corporations who only care about immediate profits. Even for governments this is a difficult sell, but at least they don't have to soothe shareholders every quarter. Generational projects take a different kind of economic thinking.
Is that just because there's shareholder anxiety with the unknown on if their investment will "be vested" by the time they need to pull it out for retirement? If that's the case it seems like it might be shrewd for younger investors to buy into physics research on a 15-20 year timeline?
Unfortunately, younger people usually have neither the money nor the foresight for this.
Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
this kind of distinction is quite stupid in general as plenty of things that we rely on for day-to-day activities such as our houses, desks, chairs, beds, shoes, clothes, etc are all based on Newtonian/classical mechanics. Basically everything that we use which existed pre-transistor strictly speaking only required classical physics.
I mean sure, but the transistor is pretty important to the way I live my life now!
I'd argue so is the bed you sleep in every night, and the roof over your head. Best not to take those for granted, as I don't think the transistor would last so long if it wasn't sheltered from the environment.
The argument is that these kind of distinctions between how "classical" and "quantum" physics affects our lives is just a pointless endeavor that even academics don't waste their time with.
Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
#344Earlier 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…
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild did not require tens of billions of dollars. Sherman Fairchild invested 1.3 million and the treacherous eight each put in $500. Fairchild did have the right to purchase the firm for $3 million, which of course he exercised. Similarly, Shockley's lab was funded by a $1 million grant in the 50s. There is a lot of handwaving going on here to justify the incre…
Duh. The first cyclotron was built for, like, a 1000 bucks. Many of the following colliders were also ridiculously cheap by comparison. But in the same way the semiconductor industry now spend billions on EUV research to keep making progress, particle physics spends billions on colliders. But when you account for real GDP growth, collider costs have actually been stagnating for decades.
Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 live…
CRISPR "only made genetic engineering more efficient" which is no big deal. Smartphones don't count though, despite both requiring scientific breakthroughs in multiple fields and turning society upside down, because... reasons. Your standards are incoherent.
BTW, for someone who claims not to poo-poo AI, I find it hilarious that you still don't think we're due for another breakthrough or two in that area in the next decade or so. I hate the current genAI craze and I still think that's coming.
Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
>GR and QFT are incompatible I did physics at uni and kind of dropped out when it got too hard. I've long guessed the incompatibility is because the maths is just too hard for human brains, though I'm probably biased there, and we'll get a breakthrough when AI can handle much more complex maths than us. Probably not so long till we find out on that one. I once tried to write a simplified explanation for why a spin-2…
The math is hard, but I don't think that's the problem. Hard math eventually succumbs. I think that even if AI were to find a good unification of GR and QM, we wouldn't be able to test it. We might accept it without additional confirmation if it were sufficiently natural-feeling (the way we accepted Newtonian gravity long before we could measure G), but there's no guarantee that we'd ever be able to meaningfully test…
It might explain some of the many physics observations that we don't have explanations for like why do we have the particles we have and why those properties.
Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money Unpopular opinion: Google makes an insane amount of money, so they can afford this salary. The CERN (or whatever your favourite research institute is), on the other hand, is no money-printing machine.
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…
Unless cold fusion allows everyone to literally pull infinite energy out of thin air with no maintenance or labor costs, I don't buy that premise. Many other utilities are effectively free already in some places, but you still need metering to deter bad actors, which is what money is. Otherwise I'm going to take all available cold fusion capacity in existence and use it to build my own artificial sun with my face on it.
Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s not an optical illusion, there is actually is a large amount of money available to do things. This is all public data, you can check it yourself.
Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
Einstein laid the theoretical foundations for lasers in 1917, and it took over 40 years of "impractical" scientific work before the first functioning laser was built. It took decades more for them to become a cheap, ubiquitous technological building-block. The research is still continuing, and there's no reason to assume it will stop eventually bearing fruit (for the societies that haven't decimated their scientific…
In addition, lasers were long believed to be a scientific novelty without any real world use.
What's interesting is how many things can be made to lase, and how many ways there are to do it. The list appears to be never ending and new entries are made all the time.
Re: Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
#350Earlier 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?
Do you want the results of the research be open and available to all, or should it become IP of nvidia or apple?
Why wouldn't it be open to all? The person I replied to just said how great it is for open information to trickle down to everyone.