3 ms·
Despite 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.
by adrianratnapala 10y ago
Despite 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.