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Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

economist.com

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Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#71

Post by sandworm101 »

whaaswijk wrote: post #59
Koshkin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difference is, the discovery of quantum mechanics did not require billion-dollar investment in equipment and manpower (not until work began on nuclear weapon, anyway). Besides, current research in high-energy physics, while being expensive, only brings scientific value and not much at all in the way of practical application (except, perhaps, as a side-effect of building more and more sophisticated equipment - but tha…

How can you be sure that the new science won't have any practical applications?

>> How can you be sure that the new science won't have any practical applications?

Nobody is sure about anything. Nobody denies that high-energy physics might one day bring great things. The problem is cost. Other areas of science are much more likely to bring great things with far less money. If tens of billions are to be spent on a bigger microscope, let it be one that will give us better solar panels, or a direct treatment for viruses. Polishing the details of the standard model can wait.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#72

Post by achillesheels »

EastLondonCoder wrote: post #48
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #8

A counter point by Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/particle-physics-...

In the late 19th century people that went into science where actively discourage to study physics since many believed there was nothing left to find out. Without quantum mechanics we would not have the transistor, there would be no computers. The immense economic value delivered by fundamental research makes a 10 billion usd investment look like a microscopic peanut crumb compared to the potential value it can give.…

Can you please elaborate on QM being necessary for the transistor? Was it necessary for its invention in Bell Labs?

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#73

Post by pacala »

Nbox9 wrote: post #67
thysultan wrote: post #61

Sounds like the particle collider people are having tunnel vision. "1 after the new particle collider": Guess what? we need an even bigger particle collider. What we really need is to build one on the moon.

Is it turtles all the way down, or is there a theoretical maximum size of a particle collider where no larger size would yield interesting results?

I've heard 'solar system size' and even 'galaxy size'. Maybe we should take a step back and realize that funding for high energy physics is rooted in the Cold War's nuclear arm's race. We already have nuclear devices more powerful than we'd ever need, not clear why we'd fund ever larger particle colliders.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#74

Post by FriendlyNormie »

djaque wrote: post #70

My personal opinion (and I might be biased since I'm not a collider guy) is that it's time to take a break from the energy frontier and put our efforts into other kinds of physics. There's a whole world out there besides "fixing" the standard model. I'm having a hard time finding it, but there's a quote from a famous physicist along the lines of "we already have a theory of everything we encounter in daily life, it's…

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Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#75

Post by djaque »

thysultan wrote: post #61

Sounds like the particle collider people are having tunnel vision. "1 after the new particle collider": Guess what? we need an even bigger particle collider. What we really need is to build one on the moon.

It is not tunnel vision when the problem they're tackling is literally stuck in a tunnel. Bigger and bigger colliders are the only direct way we have to study high energy phenomena. It's not that physicists are lazy, it's that the problems they're studying are hard.

I'm also seeing a lot resentment for the price tag of colliders in this thread. My personal opinion is that we shouldn't build a new one, but I'll point out that colliders are incredibly cost efficient.

The whole LHC (which has been running and providing jobs to people for 12 years) costs a similar amount as just two B-2 bombers. The US owns like 20 of those and that money went somewhere into huge defense contractors profits as opposed to knowledge and tech which is now accessible to the whole world.

You might not know this, but a lot of the technology developed during the construction of the LHC is now used to improve medical imaging and power transmission to name a few applications. These all have a direct impact on the quality of our every day life. That fancy PET scan you received to diagnose your cancer was literally funded in part by the LHC.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#76

Post by ellofromoversea »

0xTJ wrote: post #58
yters wrote: post #56

Used to be breakthroughs could be made by a lens maker accidentally discovering micro biology or the president of the treasury thinking through the mathematics behind his observations and discovering the law of gravity or a patent clerk resolving contradictions between data and theory in his spare time to discover relativity or a barely employed artist describing in detail inventing concepts that would not be created…

What you've said makes no sense. Why shouldn't new tech be required? You're not even comparing similar science topics to modern physics. When you're pushing the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe, there's no human perception that can itself detect anything new.

Math and humans modeled the Higgs before technology “found it”

IMO like with space ships this is just not a useful engineering endeavor in general

We probably could iterate on engineering AI and nanotechnology so future people could programmatically build specific machines

But let’s go on a whim and prematurely optimize a machine to maybe produce new insights at scale that, unlike with the Higgs, we’re still trying to find consensus mathematics to define

We’re putting the cart before the horse this time and the fact the LHC hasn’t produced much else even with all the mathy theories has shown on paper we’re so off the mark a giant new machine would be built just to titillate a generation that is addicted to being titillated

Maybe we could just get our own imaginations back for a bit before we keep following the imaginings of yesterday

Not sure if you’ve noticed but pandemic life is making building such a thing a non-starter. How do you design, plan, and assemble such a thing when groups of people have to work on a basement?

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#77

Post by yummypaint »

djaque wrote: post #70

My personal opinion (and I might be biased since I'm not a collider guy) is that it's time to take a break from the energy frontier and put our efforts into other kinds of physics. There's a whole world out there besides "fixing" the standard model. I'm having a hard time finding it, but there's a quote from a famous physicist along the lines of "we already have a theory of everything we encounter in daily life, it's…

My perception is that this is closer to the direction the field has been moving for the last half decade or so. Pushing the "energy frontier" was needed to experimentally find the higs and test supersymmetric theories. The higs was measured, and literally hundreds of proposed theories and particles, including very well-liked theories, have been eliminated. This is a big success.

However, it turns out that some of the same physics of extremely high energy scales is also accessible through extremely high precision/low background experiments like the many neutrinoless double beta decay searches, or the rapidly growing field of neutrino experiments.

In my oppinion, there is still compelling need for an accelerator specialized in colliding electrons with ions at lower energy than at the LHC. The nuclear physics community has been after this for some time now, and it looks like it will be built at Brookhaven. Now that FRIB is almost finished, this will probably be the big budget nuclear physics project for the next 5 years or so.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#78

Post by ganzuul »

Random_ernest wrote: post #65
ganzuul wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There wont be some magical new accelerator popping up. There will and it will come from photonics research.

That is really vague. Even if there are interesting advancements in photonics, I seriously doubt that it will be able to accelerate particles to terra electron volts of colision energy in a controlled manner (in the next few years). Everybody I know that works in accelerator physics believes that for large machines, superconducting radio frequency cavities are the way to go.

Of course they do because their jobs depend on it. And nothing in this field has ever been done in a time-frame of a few years.

It is a simple matter of voltage gradient. The higher the frequency, the steeper the gradient.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#79

Post by dtech »

beojan wrote: post #21
kd5bjo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a maximum price tag for potentially knowing more about the universe? Yes. On the extreme end, there’s a finite amount of useful work that can be done before the heat death of the universe. An energy budget the size of the combined output of all power stations on the planet is much smaller than that, but also too much. At a more realistic scale, human knowledge is only valuable in so far as it improves the…

> Other research areas could be more important to progress right now and we only have so many scientists available to do the work. Allocating those scientists to research areas is an incredibly hard task, but it’s a necessary one. That's not really how it works. People work on things they're interested in, not what they get assigned to.

There's not really a million [1] lawyers because all million have a passion for corporate law, its also because it pays well

[1] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/m...

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#80

Post by warranty »

djaque wrote: post #57
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #8

A counter point by Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/particle-physics-...

I post this every time someone links to Hossenfelder, but please take her opinions with a grain of salt. She seems more interested in attacking the "physics establishment" than in giving people a picture of the reality of our situation. Take a look at her articles on LIGO [1] for instance where she makes conspiracy theory level claims saying that the group is lying about their data and that "big physics" is in on it.…

The lying of the group is well established in her book. Thanks to Hossenfelder we now know mainstream physics establishment is a front for thinksheparding humanity into confusion.
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