9 ms·
Can Foundational Physics Be Saved?
- rumcajz 8y agoIf LHC is producing data that confirm our theories, then all the better, no? Maybe we should instead focus of different, under-reasearched areas of physics? Or maybe on different sciences?
- fantispug 8y agoAbsolutely. There are some known anomalies in particle physics (e.g. neutrino oscillations) but for the most part it is insanely robust. What's really hard is moving from these first principles to modelling real world phenomena; there are huge problems like protein folding, low temperature superconductors and even just predicting properties of new materials and chemicals. It's still important for some people to work on fundamental physics, but I suspect there is a lot more opportunity in mere phenomenology.
- AlexCoventry 8y agoI expect informative new physics data will come out of the failure of quantum computing devices. Actual quantum supremacy would be a nice consolation prize, though.
- garmaine 8y agoWhat do you mean? There are working devices today.
- AlexCoventry 8y agoThere's no clear path from today's devices to quantum supremacy.
- garmaine 8y agoActually there are. But in any case, it's not the same as "the failure of quantum computing devices." Maybe you meant market failure?
- AlexCoventry 8y agoNo, I mean failure to achieve the anticipated speed up.
- garmaine 8y agoThat's like saying quicksort will fail to achieve O(n log n) sort times. The processes underlying quantum computers doesn't exist in isolation. It's not some unique property of some untested physical theory (that string theory or quantum gravity) that might end up being totally wrong. It's the same physical processes you can test in any college physics laboratory, even your garage if you're willing to put in some work, and which underlie basic chemistry and material science. The computer or phone you're reading this on works by the same underlying physical properties as quantum computers are built on. The only reason we don't have quantum supremacy today is because they require atomic precision in their construction, something we lack the ability to do now but for which there is nothing preventing us from doing in principle. We will get there, eventually.
- AlexCoventry 8y agoIt's exactly that necessary precision which makes me skeptical. It's a different regime than we've been able to test, so far. Anyway, I'm not saying it's impossible it'll work out that way, just that I think it's unlikely, and the less interesting possibility. I definitely think the attempts to make it work are worthwhile.
- archgoon 8y agoSabine Hossenfelder also recently commented on the market proposal that Robin Hanson proposed. Interestingly; she's felt over the past decade that it's a much better idea than she originally felt. >But what if scientists could make larger gains by betting >smartly than they could make by promoting their own >research? “Who would bet against their career?” I asked >Robin when we spoke last week. > >“You did,” he pointed out. http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/12/dont-ask-what-science-can-do-for-you.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/12/dont-ask-what-scien...
- wmnwmn 8y agoIt's funny how nonphysicists (this author) and non-productive physicists (Hossenfelder) beat this drum most loudly. How about we do this: let the people who are obviously smartest make their own decision about what is most promising to work on, and have enough modesty to realize that their decision is better informed than our efforts to advise.
- PopePompus 8y agoSounds good, as long as the public isn't expected to cough up the funds for their research. Otherwise, don't blame the public for wondering if the LHC was worth the cost.
- JoshCalbet 8y ago"Their research" is the one that keeps pushing technology forwards, the technology that you are using in this moment
- xv1823 8y agoWhat technology came from the LHC? Or string theory for that matter?
- cygx 8y agohttps://kt.cern/technologies https://kt.cern/technologies https://kt.cern/cern-technologies-society https://kt.cern/cern-technologies-society If you want to include past contributions, that WWW thing is kind of neat...
- T-A 8y agoExcept it had nothing to do with physics and was not a research project, just yet another hypertext system.
- yorwba 8y agoTim Berners-Lee developed HTTP (and the underlying idea of "hypertext" made of interlinked documents) to support scientific collaboration at CERN. I'm not aware of any technological advances produced by the measurements at the LHC, but it has been running for barely 10 years. On the other hand, building the thing probably required significant innovations in magnets and sensors.
- Maro 8y agoOne thing I wish would happen: create a nice, asthetic, smooth way for a smart student to go from the two-slit experiment to QED/QCD [in 2-3 years], while having clarity what the input parameters are in the model (=needs to be measured), what is predicted by the model (=this comes out and is measurable), where an approximation is being made, what the current spacetime model is assumed to be, etc. Also, a mathematician should be able to look at this "journey" and approve that it's not too handwavy. Given that there's "not much to do", it's weird that there isn't a 1% group somewhere out there who thinks this is worthwhile. Context = I studied particle/astro physics 15 years ago and then "dodged the bullet" as the OP nicely puts it. I felt the way we were taught modern phsyics was quite poor/handwavy, esp. once the cross was made to QFT territory, and led to a lot of misunderstanding/confusion, which I still see in comment threads today, incl. between academics (!). Also, when I speak to mathematicians about this, they deeply disapprove of the way physics is taught/run today in this respect, and can routinely point to misunderstandings/confusion that hinders progress. A good example (but probably too mathy) is the work of Tamas Matolcsi: `Spacetime without reference frames` and `Ordinary thermodynamics`. https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&text=Tamas+Matolcsi&search-alias=books&field-author=Tamas+Matolcsi&sort=relevancerank https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&tex...
- captainperl 8y agoWhat's interesting is that this is happening in aerodynamics today as students and researchers rediscover on youtube the amazing Shell Oil-sponsored "High Speed Flight" videos from the 1950's - they're like an instant Masters Degree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bELu-if5ckU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bELu-if5ckU
- CompelTechnic 8y agoWatching this now. It is great!
- fantispug 8y agoI wonder whether using computers more (whether numerical or symbolic calculations) could remove some of the burden of understanding mathematical techniques and make this process smoother. Or maybe it would just obscure the fundamental assumptions to software and increase the burden on learning computational techniques. Does it matter whether mathematicians think it is handwavy? If any two trained practitioners can get to the same result of a calculation and it matches experiment to appropriate approximations that seems good enough to me.
- letitgo12345 8y agoThis kind of glosses over some of the very real progress made in the last 30 years -- the Ads/CFT correspondence, solar neutrinos that led to discovery of neutrino oscillation, AMPS thought experiment with respect to black holes, etc. LIGO with gravitational wave astronomy and the Event Horizon telescope with very long baseline interferometry are opening up new ways to observe the universe. Yes the data is not as abundant as it used to be a few decades ago but that's the nature of the game. Our current models work very well in terms of describing accessible energies. So this is going to take longer and require more and more ingenuity. I don't think the problem here is lack of motivation for getting good answers -- to the contrary, anyone who can discovery something major is going to have a lot of fame and credit come to them.
- fouc 8y agoDon't miss the author's (Bee) comment https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/12/can-foundational-physics-be-saved.html#comment-4240946455 https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/12/can-foundational-phys... >But I have on my blog discussed what I think should be done, eg here: >http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/03/academia-is-fucked-up-so-why-isnt.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/03/academia-is-fucked-... >Which is a project I have partly realized, see here >http://scimeter.org http://scimeter.org >And in case that isn't enough, I have a 15 page proposal here: >https://fias.uni-frankfurt.de/~hossi/Physics/PartB2_SciMeter.pdf https://fias.uni-frankfurt.de/~hossi/Physics/PartB2_SciMeter...
- JoshCalbet 8y agoI'm sorry, I stopped reading when I found: > From a billion events, this “trigger mechanism” keeps only one hundred to two hundred selected ones. … That CERN has spent the last ten years deleting data that hold the key to new fundamental physics is what I would call the nightmare scenario. These words show their opinions come from someone that does not know/understand the technology behind these systems and behind the computing power and capabilities at CERN. Of course, they have limitations, but are the kind of limitation that keeps pushing technology forwards. Using quotes on the trigger mechanism is saying how strange those concepts are for them. The trigger system is a fine tuned filter that allows the electronics to work, otherwise they will be overloaded and will crash as they will be receiving a rate of data that simply can not be handled. How this trigger is being set depends on the specific physical process that is being studied and is supported by theory and simulation, the scope that can be tested is also limited so the selection is highly scrutinized and reviewed
- walrus1066 8y agoAbsolutely, also worth adding the detectors also have 'minimum bias' triggers, that store a small fraction of events without applying any selection criteria. I recall this was mainly used for calibration and verifying stimulation data. So we still have many petabytes of collision events that did not have any selection criteria applied.
- antt 8y agoYou do realize you just said what the author said but in a mocking tone? Their point is exactly that the trigger systems are controlled by algorithms based on current theories, which so far have shown nothing for all their efforts. I haven't been in the field since the LHC started operating but from memory it was exactly billions of events per second and storage could only keep up with hundreds.
- abeld 8y agoEvery experiment will be based on some sort of theory: without that, you can't design the equipment, and you wouldn't be able to interpret the data that is generated. If by "so far have shown nothing for all their effort" you mean that no new results were found, that isn't due to the current theories being bad: in fact, it is due to them being too good: they describe the results too well and thus there is not enough difference between the current theories and current results that would require a new theory.
- walrus1066 8y ago'During experiments, the LHC creates about a billion proton-proton collisions per second. … The events are filtered in real time and discarded unless an algorithm marks them as interesting. From a billion events, this “trigger mechanism” keeps only one hundred to two hundred selected ones. … That CERN has spent the last ten years deleting data that hold the key to new fundamental physics is what I would call the nightmare scenario.' I don't know what the author is proposing. We don't have enough storage to persist all collision events, that would require zettabytes of disk space. The detectors are bottlenecked to store a few hundred events a second. Therefore they need to filter out the majority of the 40 million collision events per second that occur in the LHC. Even then, I recall around 1% or so of the stored events were saved via a 'minimal bias' trigger, one that doesn't apply any filter criteria. This was mainly for calibration purposes, and cross checking stimulation data. So we still have petabytes of collision events that didn't have any selection criteria applied.
- blfr 8y agoI haven't read the book but from what I gather the author would expect better guesses at what is going to be important from theorists so that experimental physicists can apply better filters.
- magicalhippo 8y agoI found this[1] talk about LHCb results and future direction illuminating. He explains the trigger setup during the first few minutes, later on he explains how they're searching for new physics. For run 2 of LHC they used 50000 CPU cores for their software triggers, after the hardware trigger has reduced the 40 MHz input rate down to 1 MHz. The final output of the software triggers is 12.5 kHz, which is persisted to disk. Keep in mind this is just for the LHCb detector. For run 3, they're planning to remove the hardware trigger bit, running the software triggers directly from the 40 Mhz signal. This would allow them to reprogram the triggers during the run, in case some new interesting theory comes along which for some reason has a signal their current trigger won't identify. [1]: http://pirsa.org/16010060 http://pirsa.org/16010060
- walrus1066 8y ago
- baxtr 8y agoReminds me of the book “Constructing Quarks”
- nyc111 8y agoWe also need to suspect that no state will spend immense amounts of cash to build an expensive machine to chase supposed particles unless they can also develop and test militaryly useful technologies such as high vacuum technologies. CERN's website explicitely states that they are not about military technology but as per some post at HN recently we know that CERN officials can lie when it suits them. I'm not saying it's good or bad that they do military research if they do (after all internet came out of DARPA) but I'm saying that particle search may just be a cover and not their main purpose.
- T-A 8y agoHere's a list of CERN's member state, observers and non-members with cooperation agreements: https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-governance/member-states https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-governance/member-sta... It's basically every developed country on the planet, including US, Russia and China. And if you had ever visited CERN, you would know that anyone can go pretty much anywhere; the strongest deterrent you are likely to encounter are signs warning about possible radiation exposure. It's hard to imagine a worse place to try doing military research.
- nyc111 8y ago> It's hard to imagine a worse place to try doing military research. You are right of course. I don't mean overt military research. They can develop all kinds of high vacuum and laser technologies to search for elusive particles then it's trivial to turn that research into laser guns. But this is a guess. To me, you need to suspend disbelief to believe that a government, any government, will spend money to add few more particles to the Standard Model unless there is something in it for themselves. This is only a guess. I might be wrong.
- T-A 8y agoIt's a combination of two things: 1) Training facility for new engineers and scientists, most of whom will eventually leave academia for jobs (it is hoped) in the tax-paying sector. 2) Boondoggle to economically support contractors (because they hire large numbers of voters and/or fill an important function but suffer from uneven demand).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- meroes 8y agoI was under the impression we aren't expecting by to see any new physics at CERN anymore anyway as it's too low energy to probe. Aren't physicists kind of waiting for the next scale of colliders?
- rjf72 8y agoThere's one correlation I find really interesting here. The time frame where physics started to "dry up" as the article puts it, corresponds extremely strongly with the transition away from a strong connection between experimental:theoretical physics. Instead theoretical physics began to more actively just build upon itself with extensive use of model driven tests. The biggest issue with using models as a tool in science is that they start to become unfalsifiable. To avoid the hornet's nest of modern models consider geocentricism - the belief that Earth was uniquely at the center of the solar system, universe, and everything. In times before telescopes this belief was justified by models. If you assume this is true, then you get some really bizarre behavior from the planets that now orbit the Earth. In particular some planets will suddenly stop and start moving the other way, most planets will travel in 'swirly' patterns, and so on. But when you have a model none of this matters. Planets need to go backwards? Sure, why not. They travel in swirlies? Sure, why not. So you get these increasingly convoluted and complex theories, but in spite of how irrational they seem - they are supported by what we see. But at some point you're going to reach a dead end when the model becomes so intractable that it becomes impossible to juryrig yet another observation into it. And it's only at that point that we start to scratch our head and wonder what's going on. And finding the problem there can be inconceivably difficult because it can be something far more fundamental than you'd ever look for. For instance in a geocentric universe you might search for why planets travel in swirlies. Yet you're at a much higher level than the actual problem - which is that they don't actually travel in swirlies. And in this toy example things are much better than they might be in our reality. There you're only a couple of 'fundamentals' separated from the real problem. With our rapid pace of publication and 'stair stepping', models advance and build upon themselves exponentially more rapidly. Like a single cog in a clock breaking, all it takes is a single falsehood be assumed as truth in a model to begin to undermine the entire phenomenally complex system.