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Someone please help correct my intuition here: the harder it is to find flaws in the Standard Model, the harder it would be to use such new physics in engineer

by qws 7y ago

Someone please help correct my intuition here: the harder it is to find flaws in the Standard Model, the harder it would be to use such new physics in engineering. Basically I'm curious whether continuing failures to find new physics can be taken as evidence that, if and when we find the new physics, it will be very difficult to apply. I'm not against science for its own sake, however. Just more of an engineer than a scientist, myself.

skrebbel 7y ago
Don't forget that our engineering ability grows as well. I guess that when Einstein proposed his relativity theories, it seemed totally inapplicable. But fast forward a few decades, and we got GPS which wouldn't work without them.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Much more impressive are the gravitational wave detectors.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I remember that when they discovered electrons they thought that it’s also totally useless.
jerf 7y ago
"the harder it is to find flaws in the Standard Model, the harder it would be to use such new physics in engineering." I think that is very likely, but not necessarily guaranteed. I use similar logic with regard to FTL and time travel; if physics has not quite entirely ruled it out, the window is getting smaller and smaller, and is already to the point it's entirely plausible that even if it's theoretically possible there may be no conceivable engineering path to get to it, even for a hypothetical civilization that can fling black holes around. However, we can't entirely rule out the possibility that some new physics will come along that will reveal how to easily "flip" matter into anti-matter (there seems to be no fundamental reason why this is impossible, it's just... too hard to be useful), or enable the creation of some state of matter or energy that may be exceedingly unlikely to be created naturally [1], but once created could be leveraged into something useful, or other such things. Stabilized muon fusion [2]? Relatively & QM fusion will certainly reveal something new about gravity; it can't be entirely ruled out that it will in some way be useful to engineering. (Although in this particular case, remember we can eliminate not just the "scientific" theories, but also observe engineers have yet to blunder into anything that seems to indicate any manipulation of gravity in any sensible way. Every real-world device ever built is also a test that shows that particular device must not be doing large-scale gravity manipulation.) Will quantum computers reveal some limit of reality's ability to calculate, and will that limit somehow itself turn out to be useful? Maybe. Still, I tend to think that as much fun as flights of fancy about time travel, FTL, or bizarre alien tech can be, that the most likely hypothesis by far is that we are indeed very unlikely to discover anything in particle physics anymore that will be of any engineering value. But I wouldn't counsel disappointment. There's still a lot of room at the bottom. We're not going to run out of technology in our lifetimes. If particle physics bores you, check out what's going on in materials science. They're making qubits sing and dance on command. It may still not build UFOs, but they're doing weird stuff in there. [1]: As a sort of example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet#Dangers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet#Dangers (Stranger Danger has nothing on Stranglet Danger.) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
BurningFrog 7y ago
If applying the new physics requires gigantic particle accelerators, sure. But maybe it's under a completely different rock, that we haven't thought of turning over.
- davrosthedalek 7y ago
  The nice thing about precision nuclear physics is that often lower energies are enough -- most accelerators actually have too much energy to measure the proton radius for example. And energy recovering linacs for these energies can be build quite small. Think Basketball court.
jarfil 7y ago
Depends on the kind of difficulty. If it's quantitative, as in requiring orders of magnitude more energy, mass or time, then yes. But it might be just more difficult qualitatively, like some different and non-intuitive way of interpreting everything, which might only require switching a few equations and changing some procedures.
pfdietz 7y ago
If the effects require an accelerator the size of a small country to show up, then it's unlikely they'll be useful in anything small. I think people have been misled by science fiction. Stories posit all sorts of interesting and exciting physics not because that's plausible, but because it makes interesting stories.

by qws 7y ago

skrebbel 7y ago

Don't forget that our engineering ability grows as well. I guess that when Einstein proposed his relativity theories, it seemed totally inapplicable. But fast forward a few decades, and we got GPS which wouldn't work without them.

adrianN 7y ago
Much more impressive are the gravitational wave detectors.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I remember that when they discovered electrons they thought that it’s also totally useless.

jerf 7y ago

"the harder it is to find flaws in the Standard Model, the harder it would be to use such new physics in engineering." I think that is very likely, but not necessarily guaranteed. I use similar logic with regard to FTL and time travel; if physics has not quite entirely ruled it out, the window is getting smaller and smaller, and is already to the point it's entirely plausible that even if it's theoretically possible there may be no conceivable engineering path to get to it, even for a hypothetical civilization that can fling black holes around. However, we can't entirely rule out the possibility that some new physics will come along that will reveal how to easily "flip" matter into anti-matter (there seems to be no fundamental reason why this is impossible, it's just... too hard to be useful), or enable the creation of some state of matter or energy that may be exceedingly unlikely to be created naturally [1], but once created could be leveraged into something useful, or other such things. Stabilized muon fusion [2]? Relatively & QM fusion will certainly reveal something new about gravity; it can't be entirely ruled out that it will in some way be useful to engineering. (Although in this particular case, remember we can eliminate not just the "scientific" theories, but also observe engineers have yet to blunder into anything that seems to indicate any manipulation of gravity in any sensible way. Every real-world device ever built is also a test that shows that particular device must not be doing large-scale gravity manipulation.) Will quantum computers reveal some limit of reality's ability to calculate, and will that limit somehow itself turn out to be useful? Maybe. Still, I tend to think that as much fun as flights of fancy about time travel, FTL, or bizarre alien tech can be, that the most likely hypothesis by far is that we are indeed very unlikely to discover anything in particle physics anymore that will be of any engineering value. But I wouldn't counsel disappointment. There's still a lot of room at the bottom. We're not going to run out of technology in our lifetimes. If particle physics bores you, check out what's going on in materials science. They're making qubits sing and dance on command. It may still not build UFOs, but they're doing weird stuff in there. [1]: As a sort of example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet#Dangers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet#Dangers (Stranger Danger has nothing on Stranglet Danger.) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

BurningFrog 7y ago

If applying the new physics requires gigantic particle accelerators, sure. But maybe it's under a completely different rock, that we haven't thought of turning over.

davrosthedalek 7y ago
The nice thing about precision nuclear physics is that often lower energies are enough -- most accelerators actually have too much energy to measure the proton radius for example. And energy recovering linacs for these energies can be build quite small. Think Basketball court.

jarfil 7y ago

Depends on the kind of difficulty. If it's quantitative, as in requiring orders of magnitude more energy, mass or time, then yes. But it might be just more difficult qualitatively, like some different and non-intuitive way of interpreting everything, which might only require switching a few equations and changing some procedures.

pfdietz 7y ago

If the effects require an accelerator the size of a small country to show up, then it's unlikely they'll be useful in anything small. I think people have been misled by science fiction. Stories posit all sorts of interesting and exciting physics not because that's plausible, but because it makes interesting stories.