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Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

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Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#91

Post by exmadscientist »

gtowey wrote: post #81
dieselgate wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.

The thing is we have a lot of models which make very accurate predictions most of the time, which are useful for doing some impressive science. But we have no accepted theory of what is actually happening behind the math. What we have is that in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we have already uncovered the most fundamental structures of the universe and further investigation into how or why things are t…

> in 1925 most theoretical physicists decided that we [are done]

No. Just... no. Even advancing that fifty years to 1975, the Standard Model reigns not because people want it to reign, but because no one can knock it off its throne. There is no better idea that can explain more than the Standard Model can. It's not a conspiracy.

(I did used to joke with my students that progress in physics stopped around 1975, which is around when LSD got banned, so there might well be a lack of ideas. But I'll leave that one to the reader!)

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#92

Post by shusaku »

blooalien wrote: post #90
jambalaya8 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aye, but we only sorta kinda "know" what things like black holes might be. We have models that make sense to us based on our understanding of science, and we think our instruments can faithfully report on what they can be with measurements we believe we are making correctly, but we have no clue what we don't know, and no real way to prove it, just theorize, and sort of bundle up what we believe is data supporting it.

"The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know." — Aristotle

The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know to whom you should ascribe a quote.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#93

Post by jcranmer »

jongjong wrote: post #87

The framing that there is some unknown particle affecting the results is probably an understatement. Probably there are a LOT of unknown 'forces' affecting the results. Look at the size of the machine, the aging components, the number of components involved, the amount of software required, surely all of that is affecting the results. Are humans even capable of building perfectly reliable systems?

My gut reaction is that the probable cause of the discrepancy is ultimately "someone calculated something wrong." It's not like particle physics experiments actually generate something directly measurable like the muon's magnetic moment; you instead get an indirect result that you have to calculate to the value you're trying to measure. And half of the constants in that calculation are themselves from reported results in other experiments, which similarly returned indirect results that are dependent on correct results from other experiments... and it's not hard to imagine that the result of "value X is A" depends on an assumption that "value X is B" somewhere in the calculation tree.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#94

Post by applfanboysbgon »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #88
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note that one or two outliers do not contradict a larger trend. The listed cases are not outliers in the scientific community. The individuals were outliers, but the scientific community, in a mode of behaviour that was not outlier-ish, shunned them. This tendency of scientists is well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle At the end of the day, humans are largely egotistical, self-centred…

You're trying to shift the goalposts rather than concede the point. We weren't speaking of cliquish behavior or resistance to new ideas which are indeed (unfortunately) common enough even in the scientific world. Rather the point under dispute was individuals experiencing markedly adverse emotional reactions to the point of harm in direct response to results that challenge their understanding of how things work. So t…

> You're trying to shift the goalposts rather than concede the point. We weren't speaking of cliquish behavior or resistance to new ideas which are indeed (unfortunately) common enough even in the scientific world. Rather the point under dispute was individuals experiencing markedly adverse emotional reactions to the point of harm in direct response to results that challenge their understanding of how things work.

I wasn't shifting goalposts; I think we had a fundamentally different reading of this thread from the beginning. I was not considering the examples of individuals coming to harm in the same way you did. I took them as a point of evidence that scientists (the community, not individuals) can behave in a reactionary manner against findings that undermine their beliefs. I didn't necessarily think an actual example of self-harm was necessary to justify the plausibility of scientists committing suicide under sufficient scientific duress, if the fictional grievance against their worldview were sufficiently large. I believed it's simply enough to establish that in the real world, scientists are in fact frequently not "thrilled" at new discoveries at all, to establish plausibility. Given how the scientific community has reacted to new ideas in the past, it does sound plausible to me that a minority of scientists might commit suicide if their entire education, career, and life's work were upended by sabotaged "discoveries" they couldn't make any sense of, certainly more plausible than pure fascination as you would expect from the naive platonic ideal of a scientist.

> On a more personal note, your view of the sciences seems to me to be myopic and overly cynical.

My view isn't particular to the sciences. I am very, very cynical towards humanity as a whole. I simply think scientists, as a bunch, are no different.

> No worthwhile scientist

That's the catch, isn't it? How many would you estimate are worthwhile? There are undeniably great scientists who wouldn't get caught up on learning more about the world, even if their preconceptions about it were wrong, but my cynical reading of humanity is that the majority of people in most professions that can't be reduced to rote work are actually not worthwhile members of their profession, in terms of both skill and personal ethics.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#95

Post by stonedivot »

ceejayoz wrote: post #9
pavel_lishin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you mean? I cannot remember any particular scientific revolution where scientists were suicidal, or even particularly crestfallen. Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't t…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall had to drink a beaker of Helicobacter pylori because no one would believe it caused ulcers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands. Scientists get hidebound just like the rest of us, at times.

The person you replied to was clearly asking of examples where some large paradigm shift caused large scale instances of suicidal thoughts, self harm, or otherwise, as a direct result of these new ideas.

Providing two cases is, first of all, certainly not anything like "large scale". Second, these two cases are in complete and total isolation of each other, so not evidence of people getting riled up over the same new idea. And third, these seem like extreme reactions to people not believe their OWN ideas, not reactions to other scientists presenting new ideas.

What do you think you've proven with these links?

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#96

Post by odyssey7 »

blooalien wrote: post #90
jambalaya8 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aye, but we only sorta kinda "know" what things like black holes might be. We have models that make sense to us based on our understanding of science, and we think our instruments can faithfully report on what they can be with measurements we believe we are making correctly, but we have no clue what we don't know, and no real way to prove it, just theorize, and sort of bundle up what we believe is data supporting it.

"The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know." — Aristotle

Could have learned a thing from Socrates.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#97

Post by GlibMonkeyDeath »

traes wrote: post #45
sigbottle wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked this up, and sure enough, Ernst Mach was the one who lead the charge (a self proclaimed positivist, which is a position that many scientists would gladly say they support). Sure enough, it's what I thought - you don't mean that some evil boogeyman named Hegel lead a worldwide charge against physics. (I doubt Hegel even understood physics, lol. But you get my point.) You mean that two physicists had a disagre…

Is it really wrong to blame this one on philosophy? The source of the disagreement was inherently philosophical, lead by a philosopher, backed up by other mainstream philosophers, and undeniably held back physics. I don't mean to imply that philosophy is fundamentally evil or useless even when applied to physics; most early physicists also considered themselves philosophers. I'm just pointing out a mildly interesting…

>He also famously rejected quantum mechanics due to his philosophical beliefs, which many consider a slight stain on his legacy.

The stain comes from the distortion of what others have interpreted as Einstein's "rejection". Einstein believed that quantum mechanics must be incomplete, not wrong. The famous EPR paper wasn't a paradox at all - Einstein proposed a model (local hidden variables) that might have been valid. It took until Bell and later experiments of Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger (and others, but these three got the recent Nobel) to rule out local hidden variables.

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#99

Post by BobbyTables2 »

allenrb wrote: post #78
kazinator wrote: post #73

I bet you that old results still add up in the parallel universe in which the muon mystery has not yet been solved!

I was thinking someone must have fixed a bug in the simulation (in which we live) between when the old results were generated and now. Only 1/2 :-)

Or an exceedingly rare random bit flip very subtly altered the simulated physics behavior…

Re: Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

#100

Post by podocarp »

whatsThisBtn4 wrote: post #68

9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science. The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be. Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best…

The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun. There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. If I do a push up the Earth moves beneath me but no reasonable person says I'm pushing the Earth away. Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathematical convenience. It's a fact you can see with a camera. The relativism or perspective argument is irrelevant because as we established you have to be very unreasonable to describe a picture of a huge ass sun that hardly moves with small planets zooming around it as earth centric.

On the other hand nobody has observed any particle or ever will, we only see effects of particles (cloud chamber trails, other particles, radiation, etc). This makes it very different for the traditional "seeing is believing" claim. In this case you actually possible to argue it's a mathematical convenience. It's possible to say we are stuck in the pre Copernican age in QM, we're modelling these things in such a complicated way, maybe one day we will see aha we got it all backwards, electrons are actually made of trapped light, or some crazy theory will come out... And I can't blame string theorists and physicists in general for trying.

Take for example quarks. QCD actually forbids naked quarks. That means you can never observe one on its own. How's that for a falsifiable scientific theory? Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.

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