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What No New Particles Means for Physics
- sctb 10y agoRelated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197
- gus_massa 10y agoThis is not a dupe. This article has more information than the other. Both discuss the same topic. I'd classify them as "Related discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197 (307 points, 3 days ago, 199 comments)"
- sctb 10y agoDoes this Quanta article contain significant new information to be discussed? If so we'll unmark this one as a dupe and restore it. Otherwise it meets the criteria for a dupe which is: a specific topic having had significant discussion within the last year.
- gus_massa 10y agoI think that the difference between the article is very big. The quanta article discuss what they have saw in December and what they have saw now, in the section "The Bump that went away". Also that and why they expect to see a new particles due to supersimetry in the section "Missing Pieces". The Backreaction article discuss more about the influence of the lack of a experimental evidence of an unknown particle in the physics community, i.e. that without an experimental guidance is difficult to choose between the different theoretical approach, and some ideas for future research. Total different articles.
- sctb 10y agoThanks—we've restored this submission.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoDespite the more upbeat spin, I think the message from Arkani-Hamed is much the same as from Sabine Hossenfelder's "nightmare" post (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197). Both of them are saying its time to question pre-conceived notions of how to extend the Standard model. And I think both of them are excited about it. Rightly so. People are unhappy about the Standard Model because it is insufficiently simple and symmetrical. But 20 orders of magnitude lie between our experiments and the Planck scale, there's probably six levels of symmetry-braking, mess-making emergence between us and the real fundamentals.
- kkylin 10y agoYup! Always good to remember that the hydrogen atom is "only" about 10 orders of magnitude smaller than us meter-scale objects, and what's going on with atoms took a long time to figure out.
- captainmuon 10y agoAnd that is assuming that the high-energy limit is the fundamental scale. This is plausible, but by no means necessary. Maybe the truly fundamental scale is at an intermediate energy - and if you go past this to ever higher energies, you get more and more emergent artifacts, just like you get at lower energies. We'll probably have to part with some basic assumption (like the one above) if we want to make further progress in fundamental physics.
- whoByFire 10y agoThat final paragraph is great Some theorists agree. Talk of disappointment is “crazy talk,” Arkani-Hamed said. “It’s actually nature! We’re learning the answer! These 6,000 people are busting their butts and you’re pouting like a little kid because you didn’t get the lollipop you wanted?”
- iaw 10y agoEinstein demonstrated, from both sides of the coin, that people prefer things to make sense and be reasonable. Relativity challenges that. Quantum mechanics challenges that. The seeming lack of naturalness challenges that.
- acidbaseextract 10y agoNima Arkani-Hamed is an amazing speaker, and if you're interested in modern physics I highly recommend watching his talks. A great place to start is his 5 part Messenger lecture series. It starts with the discovery of quantum mechanics, and the last 3 talks all cover different frontiers of fundamental physics today. http://www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/nima-arkani-hamed-on-future-of-fundamental-physics http://www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/nima-arkani-hamed-on-f... Introduction ends and Nima starts about 4 minutes into the first lecture. :)
- nikofeyn 10y agoi actually find him unlistenable. he says "uh" every two words and has a very choppy way of speaking. he caries a certain amount of arrogance in his speaking as well. it is authorative but too much so.
- noobermin 10y agoI won't comment on the arrogance, but trust me, many scientists have verbal tics or habits that are distracting, including me. We aren't the best at public speaking, we are the best at science. EDIT: wrote "visual" when I meant "verbal"
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- combatentropy 10y agoStunningly lucid writing. Good job, Natalie Wolchover!
- Animats 10y agoWhat does it mean? Layoffs, probably. We may have reached the end of what big accelerators can tell us. Fermilab was shut down in 2011.
- benley 10y agoFermilab was not shut down in 2011. I believe the tevatron was shutdown in 2011, but research on site continues, and the "Proton Improvement Plan", which involves upgrading the accelerators, started in 2011 and is ongoing.
- captainmuon 10y agoIn terms common on this site, Fermilab "pivoted" around 2011 to neutrino physics. After they got most of the possible results out of the Tevatron project, they switched their focus to something with a better cost to discovery ratio.
- ankurdhama 10y agoThis should send a strong message to the scientists who are more passionate about elegant and beauty of mathematics and think that nature is written in mathematics and using mathematics only they can figure out natures secret. I know this has worked couple of times in past where a mathematical theory predicted existence of some entity or phenomena and then it was found to be true through experiments BUT that doesn't mean this trick will always work coz we try to understand nature using the tool of mathematics and nature doesn't give a crap about what we use to understand it.
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- aleksei 10y agoMathematics has also been used extensively to correctly model experimental observations. But what would you propose instead of mathematics?
- jomamaxx 10y ago"But what would you propose instead of mathematics?" It's not that we shouldn't use math, but I suggest that when using Math we are predisposed to want clean, simple equations that explain everything.
- Jach 10y agoMaxwell's equations can be written as one equation with geometric algebra, □A =J/(c є0) If the math comes out ugly we can just macro our way to prettier math and stick complicated things behind simple looking symbols. I don't think this is a predisposition in the initial search as much as aesthetics on making the form of work pleasant regardless of what you start with. But then, maybe it's even more than aesthetics, truth and reality seem to have an (unreasonable?) simplicity to them, so maybe there's objective beauty in simplicity; I don't see the point in intentionally seeking out ugly formalisms for ugly's sake especially when we've had so much success with simple and elegant.
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- jomamaxx 10y agoImagine if you spent your whole life supporting some complex idea that is likely now to be BS. And you spread it. I'm interested in the psychological aspects of identity. I suggest a lot of them have not choice but to continue on believing their mythology. Their sense of self depends on it, and surely their funding does. And getting funding depends on strong sense of self. Isn't it amazing that despite their good intentions, that so many of them are hustlers and shysters? I'm not making a direct moral comparison, but a pragmatic one ... It would be nice to have some experiments that put String Theory to bed as well, though sadly, these are not even conceivable! The String Theorists careers are protected by the fact their theory cannot be unproven :)
- lawpoop 10y agoThis is one of the reasons why I'm in favor of basic income. People who get degrees in mathematics or physics can do their work uninhibited by the politics of getting funding.
- gumby 10y agoNaturally this topic calls for an xkcd: https://xkcd.com/401/ https://xkcd.com/401/ And more appropriate to the diphoton bump: https://xkcd.com/1437/ https://xkcd.com/1437/
- pepve 10y agoOr this one: https://xkcd.com/1489/ https://xkcd.com/1489/
- chriswarbo 10y agoThe diphoton bump made me think of https://xkcd.com/955/ https://xkcd.com/955/
- 7sigma 10y agoDoes anybody know the consequences of this regarding the search for dark matter? Specifically, dark matter particles?
- chriswarbo 10y agoMost of the exotic particles created in colliders are unstable and decay quite quickly into lighter particles, so they're not good candidates for dark matter. Which lighter particles are produced depends on properties of the initial particle, since quantities like electric charge are conserved (the initial particle's charge must equal the sum of the decay products' charges). Supersymmetry predicts a new form of conserved charge called "R" charge; since none of the light particles we've seen has R charge, any heavy particles with R charge cannot decay into them, and hence some of those particles (the lightest ones) will be stable. If such heavy, stable particles were common, they could make up the dark matter we've inferred exists. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightest_Supersymmetric_Particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightest_Supersymmetric_Partic... The problem is, each time a collider fails to find any of these heavy supersymmetry particles, the theory gets shuffled around and a new prediction is made with a higher mass. The mass range investigated by the LHC is now so large that it's difficult to shuffle around supersymmetry any more, and it might be time to consider it falsified.
- marcosdumay 10y agoIs there a widely agreed limit on how heavy dark matter particles must be? I remember some Starts with a Bang post that said they must me "warm" particles, and heavy ones couldn't accumulate enough energy for matching. But I've never seen anybody else alk about it.
- steve_taylor 10y agoNo new particles means that we're going to need a bigger accelerator.
- ajuc 10y agoAt some point bigger accelerator doesn't help. It just creates bigger and bigger black holes.
- T-A 10y agoThat point is a factor 10^14 away.
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- yyhhsj0521 10y agoThe authors says that particles which could only be detected by a bigger accelerator is too "heavy" to solve the tugging problem.