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

81–90 of 408 posts

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

#81

Post by cozzyd »

mikkupikku wrote: post #58
idiotsecant wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. Newtonian physics was 'good enough' until we disproved it. Imagine where we would be if all we had was Newtonian physics.

Newtonian physics is good enough for almost everything that humans do. It's not good for predicting the shit we see in telescopes, and apparently it's not good for GPS, although honestly I think without general relativity, GPS would still get made but there'd be a fudge factor that people just shrug about. For just about anything else, Newton has us covered.

quantum mechanics (also very much not Newtonian) is much more important to our day-to-day lives.

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

#82

Post by PaulHoule »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #66
PaulHoule wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn't the case then matter wouldn't be stable.

Agreed (well, assuming the delta is more than a small fraction of a percent or whatever). But this is begging the question. If they are really independent then the vast, overwhelming fraction of all possible universes simply wouldn't have matter. Ours does have matter, so it makes our universe exceedingly unlikely. I find it far more parsimonious to assume they are connected by an undiscovered (and perhaps never to b…

Also note that the proton is not an elementary particle so it is really a question of "are the various quarks really 1/3, 2/3 of an electron charge".

Crackpots have found thousands of formula that try to explain the ratio of the proton to electron mass but there is no expectation that there is a simple relationship between those masses since the proton mass is the sum of all sorts of terms.

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

#83

Post by GlibMonkeyDeath »

It's hard. Particle physics faces the problem that in order to dig down to ever smaller scales, ironically, ever larger experiments are needed. We've pretty much built large enough colliders for our current understanding. No one really knows how much more energy would be needed to expose something new - it might be incremental, within current technical reach, or it might be many orders of magnitude beyond our current capabilities. The experiments have become expensive enough that there isn't a lot of appetite to build giant new systems without some really good reason. The hard part is coming up with a theory to justify the outlay, if you can't generate compelling data from existing systems.

Physics advances have been generally driven by observation, obtained through better and better instrumentation. We might be entering a long period of technology development, waiting for the moment our measurements can access (either through greater energy or precision) some new physics.

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

#84

Post by cozzyd »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #15

Here is one fact that seems, to me, pretty convincing that there is another layer underneath what we know. The charge of electrons is -1 and protons +1. It has been experimentally measured out to 12 digits or so to be the same magnitude, just opposite charge. However, there are no theories why this is -- they are simply measured and that is it. It beggars belief that these just happen to be exactly (as far as we can…

As soon as charge is quantized, this will happen. In any quantization scheme you will have some smallest charge. There are particles with charge +2 (the Delta++, for example), but ... anything that can decay while preserving quantum numbers will decay, so you end up with protons in the end. (ok, the quarks have fractional charge but that's not really relevant at scales we care about QED)

If the question is, why is quantum mechanics the correct theory? Well, I guess that's how our universe works...

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

#85

Post by gsf_emergency_6 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #82
tasty_freeze wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed (well, assuming the delta is more than a small fraction of a percent or whatever). But this is begging the question. If they are really independent then the vast, overwhelming fraction of all possible universes simply wouldn't have matter. Ours does have matter, so it makes our universe exceedingly unlikely. I find it far more parsimonious to assume they are connected by an undiscovered (and perhaps never to b…

Also note that the proton is not an elementary particle so it is really a question of "are the various quarks really 1/3, 2/3 of an electron charge". Crackpots have found thousands of formula that try to explain the ratio of the proton to electron mass but there is no expectation that there is a simple relationship between those masses since the proton mass is the sum of all sorts of terms.

Crackpots are downstream of the "physics community" awarding cultural cachet to certain types of questions -- those with affordances they don't necessarily "deserve"-- but not others.

(I use quotes because those are emergent concepts)

Same as "hacker community" deciding that AI is worth FOMO'ing about

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

#86

Post by Rury »

It's just hard. I mean... it could very well be, that there's so many deeper layers underneath what we know in particle physics, but from our scale, also so infeasible to build something to analyze and decompose the nuanced behavior happening at that level, to the point that it's practically impossible to do so. Just like it is impossible to split an atom with your bare hands...

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

#87

Post by idiotsecant »

mikkupikku wrote: post #58
idiotsecant wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. Newtonian physics was 'good enough' until we disproved it. Imagine where we would be if all we had was Newtonian physics.

Newtonian physics is good enough for almost everything that humans do. It's not good for predicting the shit we see in telescopes, and apparently it's not good for GPS, although honestly I think without general relativity, GPS would still get made but there'd be a fudge factor that people just shrug about. For just about anything else, Newton has us covered.

Oh sure, nothing major. Just transistors, lasers, MRI, GPS,nuke power, photovoltaics, LEDs, x-rays, and pretty much anything requiring maxwells equations.

Nothing major.

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

#88

Post by albatross79 »

f30e3dfed1c9 wrote: post #79
smnplk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are layers science can not access.

Well OK then! Let's tell all the physicists they can close up shop now. They might not have realized it, but they're done. All their little "theories" and "experiments" and what not have taken them as far as they can go.

We're already in the realm of virtual particles, instantaneous collapse, fields with abstract geometric shape and no material reality, wave particle duality, quantized energy etc. The project of physics was to discover what the universe was made of. None of these things can answer that. If intelligibility was the goal, we lost that. So in an important sense, they might as well have closed up shop. If you're interested in the specific value of a certain property to the nth decimal place, there is work to do, but if you're interested in the workings of the universe in a fundamentally intelligible sense, that project is over with. What they're doing now is making doodles around mathematical abstractions that fit the data and presenting those as discoveries.

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

#89

Post by jaybrendansmith »

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.

Perhaps only visible matter is made up of particles with these exactly matching charges? If they did not match, they would not stay in equilibrium, and would not be so easily found.

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

#90

Post by baggy_trough »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #41
PaulHoule wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn't the case then matter wouldn't be stable.

Is that actually true, if the charges differed at the 12th decimal place only? That’s non-obvious to me.

Yes because matter would have a residual charge that would massively overpower gravity even at that small a discrepancy.
Post reply on HN