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Just a thought: The fact that there is physics beyond current knowledge doesn't necessarily mean that it's achievable to find out about it. Think about it: Fin

• analog31 8y ago
  I think this kind of issue has always been lurking in the shadows for humanity, not only in physics but in other areas as well. While I'm not certain about the historical details, it seems to me that the ancient Greeks were able to dream up mathematical problems, that resisted solution for centuries. Similarly, the math required to put calculus on a decent theoretical foundation was unknown until more than a century after Newton's time. Other areas of science... how do humans think? Can we cure pain without killing people? Physics experienced an incredible series of lucky breaks over the past few centuries, but each breakthrough doesn't come with a schedule for when the next one will arrive, and we never know when the next one will be a real stumper. We don't know if it will take a month, a year, or a century.
• Recurecur 8y ago
  > What if the next level of yet unknown physics requires building a machine that's as large as the equator? Or larger than anything that can be built on earth? Well, one thought is that we already have access to much higher energies - via cosmic radiation. Of course, a lot about that radiation is uncontrolled, which makes things difficult... There's much to be done with lower energy experiments, including understanding the weak nuclear force and possibly LENR.
  • phkahler 8y ago
    I'm beginning to think governments are afraid of LENR for a couple reasons. One, it would disrupt the balance of power in the world on multiple levels. And two, it may turn out that nuclear weapons could be built cheap and easy. That later thought is frightening.
    • Scipio_Afri 8y ago
      If by governments you mean people who are tasked with thinking about the negative implications of policy and technology on other human beings and (hopefully) opting to act in ways to minimizing negative consequences for society while balancing the needs and human rights of people, then yes.
    • root_axis 8y ago
      This is conspiracy thinking unfounded by evidence. Nobody is scared of "LENR" and if the research surrounding it had even a little credibility then it would be the #1 national security concern for every 1st world nation.
      • phkahler 8y ago
        Why would it be a national security concern?
        • root_axis 8y ago
          Because such a fantastical technology would have gigantic military and economic implications for any nation in possession of it. If any credible researchers could demonstrate a plausible path towards such a discovery scientists would be up to their eyes in DARPA research grants.
          • phkahler 8y ago
            True, but I'd also posit that such research would be kept out of public view for exactly the reasons you stated. That means all we'd be seeing is the half-baked approaches by people who don't quite get it and can't seem to get high quality, useful, and reproducible results.
  • kevinpet 8y ago
    For anyone else who had to go look it up, LENR is the new name for cold fusion.
    • Recurecur 8y ago
      LENR is a much better name for a still little-understood phenomenon. From the NASA archives: "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions is a source of thermal energy. It is an immature technology that requires further research to determine the best propulsion system integration on a vehicle platform. LENR has the highest specific energy of the alternative energy sources mentioned at about 51,000,000 Wh/kg.3 This is a conservative estimate from the recent LENR reactor test that was conducted in March 2013." https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20150000549.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201500...
• rjf72 8y ago
  There's another, more simple, explanation. We have made some fundamental mistake which, due to its 'naturalness' was adopted as all but a certainty. You reach some point that trying to build upon things becomes impossible when your foundation is fundamentally broken. For an example of times past, just consider the geocentric vs heliocentric universe issue. The geocentric universe (that Earth is the center upon which everything else revolves) was fundamentally built upon a model and assumed to be correct. This means that any sort of 'weirdness' that emerged from it was not really a problem but instead just massaged into the model itself. As a couple of examples of this consider the fact that a geocentric universe means the planets that orbit us must travel in these really peculiar swirly type patterns. This happens nowhere else in nature and doesn't really make any physical sense, but when you assume a model of a geocentric universe it's not really a problem - you can just massage it into the model. Another example of a very bizarre oddity that would be seen nowhere else was in things like Mercury suddenly having to stop and start going backwards in its orbit. Again this is not seen anywhere else and doesn't really make much of any physical sense, but if we take a model as reality - then sure, you can massage it into it. Why not? These lead to the real problem. Model based science is a really bad idea, because it's really hard to falsify models. In the case of the geocentric universe it ultimately required being able to see the starts 'through the eyes of god'. A good deal of physics today is built around models. And as these models have absorbed more and more 'oddities' they've started to be seen not as models but as simple reality whose proof is but a mere formality. And as is the case with the geocentric universe, you reach some point at which time further discoveries start to seem ever more elusive. Imagine trying to research orbital mechanics when you start with the assumption that planets travel in 'swirlies' and some can even stop and go backwards! As this articles mentions, modern physics adopted some very substantial changes to the model of universal thinking in the 70s. And those adoptions have now, though unproven, become defacto 'reality.' Yet since then, there's been nothing. And maybe one of the worst problems with models is that they can be completely wrong but you give you valid answers. For instance you could (and can) determine the orbital periods and locations of planets using the geocentric model. And that was done for more than 1500 years! It was incredibly complex, but it was possible. That, in turn, could then be used as 'proof' of the model's correctness, when in reality it was anything but.
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• xamuel 8y ago
  On the other hand, the double-slit experiment doesn't take any expensive equipment, and if things had gone differently, could easily have gone un-noticed until 2019. My bet is there are other experiments like double-slit which will be equally revolutionary and dirt cheap and everyone will be kicking themselves for not discovering them sooner.
  • ianai 8y ago
    I want to agree with you - if for no other reason than the current research path seems impossibly complicated. Needing to cool things down to milikelvin or building megastructures is restrictive.
  • bsder 8y ago
    > On the other hand, the double-slit experiment doesn't take any expensive equipment, and if things had gone differently, could easily have gone un-noticed until 2019. This is highly doubtful. The moment you have "something <mumble> is a wave" you immediately perform an interference experiment. The photoelectric effect demands a particle interpretation. The combination of the two in a double slit experiment is almost immediate and obvious. We went from Millikan in 1913 determining the charge on an electron to DeBroglie hypothesizing electrons also having wave/particle duality in 1924 to the Davisson-Germer experiment in 1927. That's really fast given the technology of the day.
    • achillesheels 8y ago
      So why did it stall? Apparently death by committee at the Solvay Conference with the insistence on an indeterministic paradigm. I've been having a field day learning about pilot wave theory and recent (this century) research that helps empirically visualize it. David Bohm had quite the mind.
      • bsder 8y ago
        > So why did it stall? Apparently death by committee at the Solvay Conference with the insistence on an indeterministic paradigm. Not completely. Some of the issue is actually the technology available at the time. Einstein (who propounded a fields explanation for things) vs Bohr is the great debate and Bohr won. The problem, at the time, is that Einstein's formulations predicted certain things. For example, if Einstein's fields formulation is correct, you don't have electron levels that decay. And that's clearly incorrect. Except ... It turns out that the better and better you isolate an atom, the longer and longer it takes for its electrons to return to ground state. So, Einstein was correct, but it's only been in the very recent decades that we can create isolated, single quantum state systems which we can probe. Physics is often constrained by the technology of the time. How long did it take until Einstein's predictions were finally tested and confirmed? Look at how much engineering it has taken to bring the Kibble balance up to enough accuracy to become the new kilogram standard.
• buboard 8y ago
  the purpose of the LHC was not to find the Higgs boson, but to keep probing matter at higher energies to find whatever is to be found. It is not particularly smart to brute force stuff but it is a rational choice unless one can propose an alternative. It is the default choice considering the options, and i believe there is a hope that given enough time something useful may be produced as a side-effect (I mean, the WWW was not a bad perk). The next level of physics may not have to do with higher energies but with bird droppings again.
• dwaltrip 8y ago
  So what? If we don't take steps forward we will never get anywhere. We can only operate with the best capabilities and knowledge available to us today. $20B is nothing compared to the world's GDP. If there aren't more compelling research projects of similar magnitude in fundamental physics, then we should build it. Of course, I'm not qualified to make that judgment, but I think we have good reason to trust that smart and reputable people are working hard to make the right call. We should always be investing a proportion of our accumulated wealth and resources into exploring the unknown and making scientific discovery.
  • armitron 8y ago
    This a very simplified way to look at the original post, glossing over most of the details and missing nearly all the points. Nobody is arguing against spending (lots of) money for scientific experiments. The problems that arise are qualitative rather than quantitive. As the original post outlines, there are many experimental domains one could allocate that money towards. One of the issues is that of cutting your losses. When does one accept that enough is enough and starts doing something else? Smart and reputable people are not infallible or less prone to making terrible (self-centered, ego-driven, profit-seeking) decisions. One of the points that the original post is making is that high energy physics is dominated by these kinds of people. Predictions repeatedly invalidated yet still clinging to the same ideas. That is starting to look more like a religion or mania than science.
• bsder 8y ago
  > What if the next level of yet unknown physics requires building a machine that's as large as the equator? Or larger than anything that can be built on earth? Then we need to fund that engineering. That's part of the argument. Will a bigger collider really be the best use of funds? Pouring enormous sums at, for example, the solid-state physics of superconductors and figuring out how to make an actual room temperature superconductor could advance many things simultaneously. (For example: room temp superconductors probably enable fusion at reasonable scales--and fusion at decent sizes gates most megascale engineering projects. Another example: quantum computers have several open questions about them that may mean that they never achieve generality--we should probably probe that intensely). Nobody is saying to never build another collider. But the real question is "Do we have a good reason to build another collider right now? Or should we shunt that money elsewhere in physics?"
• colordrops 8y ago
  Or instead of upping the size dimension, perhaps exploiting some relatively newly discovered phenomenon to continue the exploration.