ATLAS sees first direct evidence of light-by-light scattering at high energy

Post by carapace » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 8:15 PM UTC

petters wrote: post #72

carapace wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an unexpected drift in the clocks In every kind of clock. I would hope in this scenario that that would have been noticed and it would have aroused sufficient curiosity to investigate and eventually discover that the effect was due to time itself flowing at a different rate.

Imagine trying to find that bug. Finally, after an enormous effort being able to tell your manager that the error is in the space-time of the universe.

Riiight?

It reminds me of something I read about the search for what we would now call "violations of conservation of energy". Scientists kept coming up with more experiments to try to show this phenomenon, but none of them worked. Eventually they were forced to conclude that that's just the way it is:

"A perfect conspiracy is a law of nature."

Post by littlestymaar » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 5:47 AM UTC

mnl wrote: post #77

jerf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Given the choice between trial and error engineering and science backed engineering I much prefer the latter." That's not the question; the question is, are we forced to give up engineering if we don't have "the science" yet? And the answer is an objective "no", from abundant past human history. There's this myth sold that science always precedes engineering that is very, very popular. I'm not even sure where it's c…

Maybe it's because for instance there were exactly zero engineers working with radio waves before Maxwell and Hertz, or zero engineers working with semiconductor transistors before, basically, Brattain, Bardeen and Shockley. Electromagnetism and electronics happen to come straight from science labs. You could check also Idk... chemical synthesis, polymer science... nuclear physics? I don't understand why would you co…

> Maybe it's because for instance there were exactly zero engineers working with radio waves before Maxwell and Hertz

Well, humans have been crafting optical lens way before Maxwell ;). And even way before [1] Descartes and Newton decided to study light.

For everything out of reach of our senses, like the examples you gave, we need formal science. But for everything humans can see, smell or touch, we're pretty good with empirical observations : chemistry, fluide dynamics, genetics and mechanics where comonly used way before formal science was even a thing.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrud_lens

Re: ATLAS sees first direct evidence of light-by-light scattering at high energy

Re: ATLAS sees first direct evidence of light-by-light scattering at high energy