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Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
71–80 of 204 posts
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#72Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and t…
> Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. More structural funding for open source software would also be welcome. Software that deals with communication (browsers, protocols, email, filesystems, codecs, etc.) should be fully open and developed by universities and government institutions, imho.
I think the argument being made there is that when you gather smart people together, with resources to work on a hard problem, they will tend to invent things on the side which we didn't know we needed.
An academic committee to decide what software was worth funding, in the 80s, would probably have come up with a very different list to yours. And would have hired people from safer, more academic, backgrounds than Sir Tim.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Her opinion is totally legitimate and I’m glad people like her are speaking up. Everyone should agree that we need to spend money pushing the limits of science. That’s not the issue here. The point of Sabine’s criticism is that these empty promises need more scrutiny based on the failures of the recent past.
I don't really understand that argument. What does a failed prediction about super-symmetry in 1996 have to do with the opportunities of the next collider? How does "we didn't find evidence for or against supersymmetry at LHC" connect to dark matter experiments in its successor? I'm also not really convinced of what she categorizes as failure. She enumerates quite a few incorrect predictions, but is that sufficient t…
That's the Hossenfelder take on the scientific method for you: whereby you make the experiments to confirm the theory. Which is fantastic because if science had ever worked that way you would be done with all experiments as the sensible ones would give known results, so what's the point.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, going on to see what should be done instead, we find she advocates for different experiments with the same type of argument she's so gleefully savaging here > You already know we haven’t found anything yet—otherwise you’d have heard of it. But even null results are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us that some ideas—for example, that spacetime might be a regular lattice—are simply incompatible…
> This is really the large problem with her criticisms: the case that exists is for particle physics getting less priority, but her argument is that it should stop completely, the collaborations disbanded, and everyone goes to find a new job because they can't be trusted to think clearly. Huh? Where is she saying this? Everything I've read from her suggests that she's against building bigger accelerators , not stop i…
Show we were she actually advocates for building any accelerator and you'd have a case. She violently opposes the FCC despite one of it's explicit goals being precisions measurements of the Higgs.
In fact in the very post you link to she dismisses the idea of high precision measurements: "Yeah, except that I am the one saying we could do better things with $20 billion than measuring the next digits of some constants"
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#75Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and t…
> Whatever theorists predict is not the only reason for them to do it, higher energies are a technical challenge, a data processing challenge, something to focus your attention and creativity on.
I don't understand this argument. We should prefer a particular experiment not because it is more likely to answer a research question but because it, itself, is more challenging?
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#76I think it is worth noting that while this is an opinion not widely shared within physics, Sabine is not some completely far-out crank writing bizarre rants in green ink either.
In other words, we can all disagree. As it happens I do, but she's also not a lunatic whose ideas can just be dismissed as obviously uninformed.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#77Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and t…
> Whatever theorists predict is not the only reason for them to do it, higher energies are a technical challenge, a data processing challenge, something to focus your attention and creativity on. I don't understand this argument. We should prefer a particular experiment not because it is more likely to answer a research question but because it, itself, is more challenging?
There are few other ways of probing high energy physics systematically and a lot of them are funded and done aswell. This is not a zero sum game. We can bury detectors in the antarctic, in mines and have CERN. In fact technology developed at CERN helps those other experiments aswell.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#7879 points as of now. And how many points would hacker news have given to the Nature comment by Giudice and Gianotti? It is both curious and sad to see the outsize attention given to bitter polemicists (and not just in physics). Please read https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 . Edit: downvotes? let me rephrase: if you care about particle physics then there was no reason to ignore the original proposal.…
What are you highlighting? That article is a generic press releases saying they want $30B to look at particles.
I am afraid that, no matter how well thought out a strategy or plan for the future really is, there is always a ranting blogger who will get more attention.
And in that tradition I guess I should have expected a dismissive reply using 'generic press release' to describe the Comment that introduces an entire section of Nature Physics.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#79Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and t…
> She didn’t cut it and now is in a non-tenured position at a second rate institution. What an awful reply to legitimate criticism. I infer that some of your friends at CERN talk about her (quite successful) book this way?
Would FIAS (https://fias.institute/en/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Institute_for_Advanc...) even be considered a second rate institution?
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#80Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and t…
> Isn’t it nice (...) advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature? The criticism is that the ROI = (the potential advance) / (invested money) is too small. As you pointed out it can be argued that the real goal is elsewhere: in the engineering / technology or science of complex systems. Creating a big machine that verifiably works brings many unexpected advances in many fields. And what is more impo…
> ROI = (the potential advance) / (invested money) is too small
That's unknown in advance. To take example from maths, the conic sections, braid theory, number theory—they all used to be very abstract and un-applicable parts maths, until one day.