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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

#91

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

Or as Feynman put it, "Dogs are easier to understand, but nobody yet knows how dogs work."

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#93

Post by traes »

> A minifigure, 3 blocks high, is repesentative of an average American adult, at 1.753 meters tall

Shouldn't it be the height of an average adult from Denmark? At 1.672m (edit: closer to 1.8) it's a big enough difference to matter. The inaccuracies in this article are disgusting! This is a serious matter that has numerous implications, and is definitely not a joke.

Edit: I meant to post this somewhere else. Sorry.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#94

Post by MiroF »

willis936 wrote: post #90
MiroF wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has a lot of STEM expertise, I'm confident they could probably figure it out.

Then it should be easy to demonstrate with smaller scale projects. Where are those demonstrations?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...

If you mean smaller accelerators, it's unclear what the value in that would be.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#95

Post by kochthesecond »

Koshkin wrote: post #51
EastLondonCoder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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…

I think its too dismissive to claim it will have 0 practical applications. Often this type of fundamental research take decades to result in something useful in an unexpected way. We can only go where the roads lead us, who are we to dismiss the roads not taken.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#96

Post by Koshkin »

traes wrote: post #93

> A minifigure, 3 blocks high, is repesentative of an average American adult, at 1.753 meters tall Shouldn't it be the height of an average adult from Denmark? At 1.672m (edit: closer to 1.8) it's a big enough difference to matter. The inaccuracies in this article are disgusting! This is a serious matter that has numerous implications, and is definitely not a joke. Edit: I meant to post this somewhere else. Sorry.

I think you’ve misspelled ‘9’ as ‘6’.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#97

Post by eigenspace »

MiroF wrote: post #81
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…

> we still have no idea how unconventional superconductors work. Of course, they're completely described by plain old quantum mechanics without even using field theory News to me - I thought that study of non-conventional superconductors relied heavily on effective field theories. Also, I think this is a bit of a strawman - there's a ton of money and effort going into condensed matter physics right now.

> News to me - I thought that study of non-conventional superconductors relied heavily on effective field theories.

What they meant is that understanding the microscopic degrees of freedom, the electrons and ions in a superconductor, does not require field theory. The plain old particle based Schrodinger equations for N electrons interacting with N ions should be absolutely fine.

The problem is that we can't actually do anything with that description, so things like effective field theories help us distill the important parts away.

> Also, I think this is a bit of a strawman - there's a ton of money and effort going into condensed matter physics right now.

While I agree, and I would love to see more progress in particle physics, I also think that comparing the funding landscape of particle physics to condensed matter physics is a little misleading.

New discoveries and incremental improvements in condensed matter physics benefit the world in direct and tangible ways. The frontiers of particle physics left the regime where it can benefit the world long, long ago. The energies are just too high, there's no reason to believe that anything they discover will actually matter to anyone other than satisfying their intellectual curiosity (or spinoff technologies).

I don't want to sound dismissive of particle physics, because I really do believe in doing physics for its own sake, but honestly a better understanding of particle physics is unlikely to benefit us any more than a great new piece of literature, and the price tag on the next generation collider is just mind-bogglingly high.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#98

Post by mannykannot »

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?

This is just burden-shifting, and if it is the best argument that can be made, there would be essentially no case for a bigger accelerator at this point.

Things are not quite that bad, but the case is weaker now than it has ever been before.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#99

Post by Random_ernest »

ganzuul wrote: post #78
Random_ernest wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The higher the frequency, the steeper the gradient.

Losses also scale with frequency.

And while other acceleration principles have higher voltage gradient, they still can't reach TeV of collision energy, since you either can't concatenate them, or you can't control the beam sufficiently well.

As I wrote in another comment, stuff like plasma wakefield accelerators need to get better by a factor of 1000 before they reach the realms of SRF accelerators. This wont magically happen over night.

And most of these people have tenure, they hardly care for trends.

I have been to all major accelerator physics conferences over nearly the last decade. Despite clic there is no one seriously claiming to go beyond LHC energy without SRF. No one. Not the plasma wakefield guys, not some strange theoretical accelerator principle. No matter what you read on Wikipedia.

Your namedropping comments with very little actual content, disregarding the work of thousands of scientists show a certain arrogance that is super annoying.

Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

#100

Post by Koshkin »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #91
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…

Or as Feynman put it, "Dogs are easier to understand, but nobody yet knows how dogs work."

Well, a more appropriate thing to say, going back to physics, would be, “we know how these things work, but we still do not understand them.”
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