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It’s not such a problem that the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found new physics
- umollis 8y agoI would say it is a problem, because it has costed us a lot of money.
- ChrisSD 8y agoWhy is that a problem? It's done exactly what it set out to do. We got what we paid for.
- laichzeit0 8y agoHe’s probably trying the “we should have spent this money on starving people/curing cancer” line of argument. It’s some variant of virtue signaling.
- umollis 8y agoNo I'm not. I'm just saying: we spent so much money on this and we expected results (even though we know there was the possibility we could get none). We got no results, so it's wasted money. It is a problem that we wasted billions on basically nothing.
- ChrisSD 8y agoBut we got results. It's a shame they didn't rewrite physics as we know it but we asked questions and got answers.
- nathan_f77 8y ago"I didn't fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." - Thomas Edison
- ISL 8y agoLHC discovered the first known scalar particle, and the linchpin to the mass-generation mechanism of the Standard Model. Yes, it turned out where other experiments had begun to hint that it might be, but I can state from personal professional experience that, prior to LHC, nobody really knew what to expect. Furthermore, most of those experiments were done after LHC began construction. I would have bet on a single low-mass Higgs, had I been asked, only because it was the Standard Model prediction, but I would not have bet very much. I think most people expected something Higgs-like, but slightly different. I think everyone is surprised that there have been no surprises (hence this very article). The very absence of surprises is perhaps the most important result from LHC. There were lots of good reasons to expect new stuff at a few TeV, and for some reason, those reasons just weren't good enough. Viewed another way, if we hadn't built LHC, physicists would have continued to clamor to build something very akin to LHC until something LHC-like was built. It represented the most effort- and cost-efficient approach to the best predictions we could muster! A collider, probably lepton/anti-lepton, that sits on the Higgs resonance is the clear next step, now that the Higgs mass is known, just as it has been since the "discovery machine" LHC was proposed.
- DavidNielsen 8y agoAnd yet we also gained a lot of value we did not expect, such as the World Wide Web. You cannot predict the true value of basic research in a straight forward manner so let’s just stop. This is about extending our understanding of the universe. We will find ways to use that knowledge and ways to enrich our lives because of it in due course of time.
- umollis 8y agoWe gained the WWW from the LHC?
- Create 8y agoAre you referring to some NeXT box, RPC, or the cut-down SGML with links? Or any combination of thereof? It is amazing how easy it seems to appropriate technical engineering feats with simple narratives that are repeated often enough (ie. propaganda, in the Goebbelsian 20th century sense). Everything was ready by that time, just remember the conference where it was presented. Or compare the internal memo with contemporary systems, such as the Symbolics Document Examiner. Or the NeXT demo for that matter. The WWW you might allude to exists in large part due to US deregulation of that time, and therefore politics. The "value" part of it is as old as Alexandria, or Paul Otlet (TBL's boss who signed it off at the documentation dept. was also Belgian).
- liftbigweights 8y ago> And yet we also gained a lot of value we did not expect, such as the World Wide Web. Did berners lee even work on the LHC? I know he worked at CERN, but didn't realize he took part in the creation of the LHC.
- walrus1066 8y agoIt's a problem, because we are no closer to answering questions like: - what is dark matter (the stuff which makes up 97% of the universe!) - what is dark energy (I.e. Why is the universe expanding at an accelerating rate?) - what happens inside a black hole? - what happened at the big bang? - how does gravity work at the quantum scale? The Standard Model has nothing to say on these, it is fundamentally incomplete. I fear we won't answer these questions within my lifetime, sure, we may get tantalising hints from astronomy, but not direct observation in experiment. This is troubling for theoretical physics, it needs guidance by experimental physics. But all these super-smart theories to supersede the SM cannot be verified by experiment right now.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y agoErrata: * purported dark matter * purported dark energy * purported black holes * purported big bang
- codethief 8y agoI wouldn't put dark energy, black holes and the big bang on a level with dark matter. Dark energy is just a name for what's otherwise known as cosmological constant. Yes, some people might believe that it's unnatural for the cosmological constant to be as small as it is and others might believe that it should really follow from a proper quantum theory, so there are definitely a bunch of open questions. But that doesn't change the fact that it's there. The same thing goes for the Big Bang and black holes. We have absolutely no reason to believe they don't exist. (To the contrary, we have every reason to believe so.) Dark matter, however, is just one possible (and comparatively speculative) explanation for various experimental deviations from theoretical predictions, regarding among others the stellar velocity distribution within galaxies, gravitational lensing and structure formation.
- cambalache 8y ago* purported atoms * purported molecules * purported cells * purported persons
- rstuart4133 8y ago
- hnhg 8y agoA few responses here highlight a very common problem in science: namely that people don't appreciate negative results as much as positive ones. We've generally bemoaned (forgive me for not bothering to find examples but they're there) how difficult it is to get negative results published in scientific journals but we're exhibiting exactly the same attitude that leads to this in many comments here.
- robertAngst 8y agoThis is entirely why I find engineering far more trustworthy than 'science' in 2018. Academia has a professor who wants to prove their idea is true. They rig up an experiement to prove their idea is true. They teach a kid how to collect the data. Then wow, they proved it true! Discovery? No. Engineering- prove your idea works and dont stop until the problem goes away.
- andybak 8y ago> Then wow, they proved it true! I don't know of any reputable scientists that would claim to "prove" anything. Popper rather put an end to that.
- um_ya 8y agoIt would be improper to say it doesn't revolve around certain outcomes though. I know a few guys in college that would get free money and travel to some remote part of the world to "research" climate change. It was pretty much a paid vacation for them. If you were studying how the climate followed cycles and it may have less to do with what humans are doing, you wouldn't get the funding.
- andybak 8y agoI think there's a lot of bullshit in academia but it's not so much about the engineering vs science distinction being made here as it is about any situation where people can play the game. I think any large organisation will have it's fair share of bullshit and people playing the system. It's hard to align incentives with outcomes.
- lngnmn1 8y agoIt is OK, The Pyramids in Egypt hasn't found any gods either.
- ThePhysicist 8y agoI think the high expectations are mostly a result of us making so tremendous (from our point of view) progress in the understanding of the universe in the last 100 years. There's no reason that nature should make it so easy for us to discover new laws of physics in the future though, especially since our technology is still quite limited (e.g. we can't produce very high energy particles and can't control quantum systems very precisely yet). It is said that at the beginning of the 20. century many physicists thought that there wasn't that much more to discover and that most of the theories had been worked out already. There were a few areas where "weird" phenomena were observed (notably in electrodynamics and atom theory) but many people were confident that these would eventually be resolved with the existing theories. Fast forward 20 years and two completely new fields of physics (quantum mechanics and relativity) were discovered. Personally I still think that we've just scratched the surface of the laws of the universe and it's not impossible that we'll have another wave of theories that will make our current understanding of physics seem hopelessly outdated by the end of the century. And in fact there are some areas where "weird" stuff seems to happen, dark energy or dark matter is a good example for this. I'd be really disappointed if we already discovered everything there is as well in terms of the laws of physics, I mean how boring would that be?
- yoodenvranx 8y ago> Personally I still think that we've just scratched the surface of the laws of the universe and it's not impossible that we'll have another wave of theories that will make our current understanding of physics seem hopelessly outdated by the end of the century. I hope that this the case, otherwise humanity will die on this planet. If there are no new physics then there is no faster-than-light travel and escaping earth will be pretty much impossible.
- ChrisSD 8y agoI'm not sure new physics will help with that. Faster than light travel, if possible, would really screw with causality. Besides, we can always travel the slow way. Either with ships built for multi-generational habitation or some way to suspend/resume human life over long periods.
- coldtea 8y agoIt is a problem when the whole premise of funding it and how it was sold to the public and politicians was that it will find new physics...
- skybrian 8y agoThis is what I expected the article to be about, but it's more interesting than that.
- kgwgk 8y ago“The LHC hasn’t seen anything new besides the Higgs. This means the laws of nature aren’t “natural” in the way that particle physicists would have wanted them to be. The consequence is not only that there are no new particles at the LHC. The consequence is also that we have no reason to think there will be new particles at the next higher energies – not until you go up a full 15 orders of magnitude, far beyond what even futuristic technologies may reach. “So what now? What if there are no more new particles? What if we’ve caught them all and that’s it, game over? What will happen to particle physics or, more to the point, to particle physicists?” http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-is-coming.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-is-c...
- jbakhos 8y agoI posit this hypothesis that does away with both dark matter and also dark energy. I posit that at a distance of approximately 1.5 million light-years gravity becomes slightly repulsive, gradually increasing with distance to achieve a peak repulsion, and then decreasing with distance to zero. Thus, cosmological expansion is caused by galaxies pushing against each other, and galactic rotation can be explained by the fact that each galaxy is surrounded by a "womb" of dust, gas, and other galaxies, and this "womb" pushes with repulsive gravity upon the outer stars of a galaxy to keep them in orbit at a higher speed than expected. I give a cosmological / mathematical justification for this behavior in my Reddit article: https://www.reddit.com/r/MyTheoryIs/comments/87pcgq/what_dark_matter_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MyTheoryIs/comments/87pcgq/what_dar... At the bottom, in the responses, I explain how General Relativity can be adjusted so as to retain time dilation while rejecting curved space and retaining flat, 3D, Euclidean space.