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There is alot going on in physics besides things directly related to the standard model. Running out of important things to study is of no concern. As a random

There is alot going on in physics besides things directly related to the standard model. Running out of important things to study is of no concern. As a random example check out the microscopy work by recent nobel prize winner Eric Betzig. I think people fail to appreciate the many frontiers that exist in just understanding how matter interracts with itself. The past was exciting because we got to discover new building blocks, but that only provides information on the periphery of whats going on. We know all sorts of stuff about the proton, but put it in a nucleus with a few dozen other nucleons and its a whole different story. All sorts of virtual particles are exchanged, its really complicated, and there literally arent any models that can predict the properties of the nucleus purely from first principles. There are important conceptual and computational innovations happening continuously to make progress on hundreds of problems just like this.

ImaCake 7y ago
I was briefly involved in Single Molecule Biophysics, where microscopes push the limits of what you can do with visible light in order to understand protein behaviour, where I heard the often repeated warning: "the microscope is an experiment itself". This was born out of the incredibly fancy and poorly understood microscope, which was experimental, and it was no guarantee that you were measuring the protein and not some weird light physics effect!
- Balgair 7y ago
  > and it was no guarantee that you were measuring the protein and not some weird light physics effect! My thesis was in fluorescent bio physics at the nano scale (STED). We literally had a PI effect. Normally, the 'PI effect' is that when the professor comes in, the experiment stops working, mostly due to Murphy's law. With our case, it was because the extra body heat caused the mirrors to expand and drift out of place, ruining the alignment. This also meant it took a while for the mirrors to come back into alignment after lunch and first thing in the morning. What a mess! So yes, in microscopy, the apparatus very much is part of the experiment and it takes ages to get things controlled and imaging correctly.
  - d-sc 7y ago
    I worked for a while on a team that designed an electron microscope from scratch. There was a phenomenal amount of work to take it from a bench top kluge that sometimes takes an image to a reliable product. When designing sensitive instruments we had to use almost a paranoid attention to detail.
  - ImaCake 7y ago
    Thanks for your reply! I actually found out one of my current coworkers helped build a single molecule scope, he talked about the use of an air cushion beneath the giant breadboard of lasers to ensure they stayed nm accurate.
    - Balgair 7y ago
      Most optics tables are floated on air pistons these days, they aren't super expensive. It helps with vibe issues and with shock absorption (there is a lot of slamming your head on the table when doing optics alignment :P ).
  - dekhn 7y ago
    Stupid question: normally the labs I work in have excellent temperature control for this reason. In fact, some of the labs are actually rooms-within-rooms (with the outer room having AC, and the inner room having another AC). Was this for budget reasons, or were you physically placing your bodies extremely close to the optical equipment while running experiments?
    - Balgair 7y ago
      The lab was in a bio lab, so the AC was set to STP. Well, mostly. Just having a warm person breathing in the tiny room was enough to throw the mirrors off. Since we were doing active tuning and development on the optics, we had to be in there, and it took a bit to get the room to a steady state with us in it. Fortunately, during the summer or winter, the only thing what would change was humidity, not the temperature, and that seemed to not affect things too much. Also, not a stupid question. We thought of it too and it took us a week to collect enough data to rule out the AC system as a cause.
- kwoff 7y ago
  Not sure how to say it, but however brief your involvement was, I'm glad to read your comment here on Hacker News.
dekhn 7y ago
Another frontier is light/matter interactions. This is an area where a ton of progress has occurred in a wide range of areas. And that work often has direct implications. I worked on a microscope recently that coupled 6 different lasers into a single fiber for fluorescent illumination. The tools we got to work with... some are from 100 years ago and are still great, others, like spatial light modulators and other light-conditioning tools are really amazing. These days you can reproduce the Michelson Morely experiment (technically VERY challenging at the time) in an afternoon. Or do a basic quantum eraser experiment with $2K in optical components(!)
- Balgair 7y ago
  One of the other students in my lab put it this way (very paraphrased): If you break up the Nobel Prizes and look at the optics based ones, ones that made up some new microscope, or used light in some new way, then Optics becomes a top 5 domain. In that a lot of Nobels come out of manipulating light. And a lot of the time, the sum total 'new thing' worthy of a Nobel is just a single optical object, sometimes it's five, not much more. But, the thing is, if you look at how long those experiments took to preform, from concept to working prototype taking some kind of data, then Optics varies wildly. Some, like DIC imaging, is just a single 1/4 waveplate in the middle, and it took Nomarski nearly a decade and a half to get it just right. Some, like STED, were built in Hell's living room over about a month. And that's the thing about Optics research, it's just blind luck most of the time. Sure, the equations help, but they tend to come after the apparatus is up and running. You can spend a few weekends in your living room in your underwear tinkering about while watching the game, or you can spend your entire career painstakingly laboring in the nauseating dark of the lab all alone. Incremental progress just doesn't seem to be a thing in Optics; you either get it right or you don't. Anyone that has been in totality during an eclipse knows that there is a huge difference between 99% and 100% coverage. Optics is exactly like that.
SiempreViernes 7y ago
Also, astronomy exists!
JabavuAdams 7y ago
Yeah, sure, but she's writing about the foundations of physics. I'm in biophysics in part because I want to have an impact in < 1 kiloyears.
- letitgo12345 7y ago
  Lots going on in the foundations as well, esp. cosmology. Particle physics is hardly the end all be all. I mean the reality is that for going significantly beyond the Standard Model you just need higher and higher energies -- energies that might even be impossible for humanity to explore ever. One could build a better accelerator which Sabine opposes because it's unclear whether it will yield anything (but honestly that's science. If there were guarantees, it wouldn't be called "research"). Or one can theorize and do thought experiments and hope that one will discover mathematical constraints that rule out a big class of models. It's not like she has a better plan. She says "new and better methods". I mean that's exactly what physicists try and pursue. I highly doubt that an ambitious young scientist wldn't try and get a cool publication if they could think of a novel theory. But the reality is that novel ideas that fit all the existing experimental constraints are very very very hard to figure out. People work on them but lack of a million new models a year is not because of some groupthink but because physics is hard.

ImaCake 7y ago

I was briefly involved in Single Molecule Biophysics, where microscopes push the limits of what you can do with visible light in order to understand protein behaviour, where I heard the often repeated warning: "the microscope is an experiment itself". This was born out of the incredibly fancy and poorly understood microscope, which was experimental, and it was no guarantee that you were measuring the protein and not some weird light physics effect!

Balgair 7y ago
> and it was no guarantee that you were measuring the protein and not some weird light physics effect! My thesis was in fluorescent bio physics at the nano scale (STED). We literally had a PI effect. Normally, the 'PI effect' is that when the professor comes in, the experiment stops working, mostly due to Murphy's law. With our case, it was because the extra body heat caused the mirrors to expand and drift out of place, ruining the alignment. This also meant it took a while for the mirrors to come back into alignment after lunch and first thing in the morning. What a mess! So yes, in microscopy, the apparatus very much is part of the experiment and it takes ages to get things controlled and imaging correctly.
- d-sc 7y ago
  I worked for a while on a team that designed an electron microscope from scratch. There was a phenomenal amount of work to take it from a bench top kluge that sometimes takes an image to a reliable product. When designing sensitive instruments we had to use almost a paranoid attention to detail.
- ImaCake 7y ago
  Thanks for your reply! I actually found out one of my current coworkers helped build a single molecule scope, he talked about the use of an air cushion beneath the giant breadboard of lasers to ensure they stayed nm accurate.
  - Balgair 7y ago
    Most optics tables are floated on air pistons these days, they aren't super expensive. It helps with vibe issues and with shock absorption (there is a lot of slamming your head on the table when doing optics alignment :P ).
- dekhn 7y ago
  Stupid question: normally the labs I work in have excellent temperature control for this reason. In fact, some of the labs are actually rooms-within-rooms (with the outer room having AC, and the inner room having another AC). Was this for budget reasons, or were you physically placing your bodies extremely close to the optical equipment while running experiments?
  - Balgair 7y ago
    The lab was in a bio lab, so the AC was set to STP. Well, mostly. Just having a warm person breathing in the tiny room was enough to throw the mirrors off. Since we were doing active tuning and development on the optics, we had to be in there, and it took a bit to get the room to a steady state with us in it. Fortunately, during the summer or winter, the only thing what would change was humidity, not the temperature, and that seemed to not affect things too much. Also, not a stupid question. We thought of it too and it took us a week to collect enough data to rule out the AC system as a cause.
kwoff 7y ago
Not sure how to say it, but however brief your involvement was, I'm glad to read your comment here on Hacker News.

dekhn 7y ago

Another frontier is light/matter interactions. This is an area where a ton of progress has occurred in a wide range of areas. And that work often has direct implications. I worked on a microscope recently that coupled 6 different lasers into a single fiber for fluorescent illumination. The tools we got to work with... some are from 100 years ago and are still great, others, like spatial light modulators and other light-conditioning tools are really amazing. These days you can reproduce the Michelson Morely experiment (technically VERY challenging at the time) in an afternoon. Or do a basic quantum eraser experiment with $2K in optical components(!)

Balgair 7y ago
One of the other students in my lab put it this way (very paraphrased): If you break up the Nobel Prizes and look at the optics based ones, ones that made up some new microscope, or used light in some new way, then Optics becomes a top 5 domain. In that a lot of Nobels come out of manipulating light. And a lot of the time, the sum total 'new thing' worthy of a Nobel is just a single optical object, sometimes it's five, not much more. But, the thing is, if you look at how long those experiments took to preform, from concept to working prototype taking some kind of data, then Optics varies wildly. Some, like DIC imaging, is just a single 1/4 waveplate in the middle, and it took Nomarski nearly a decade and a half to get it just right. Some, like STED, were built in Hell's living room over about a month. And that's the thing about Optics research, it's just blind luck most of the time. Sure, the equations help, but they tend to come after the apparatus is up and running. You can spend a few weekends in your living room in your underwear tinkering about while watching the game, or you can spend your entire career painstakingly laboring in the nauseating dark of the lab all alone. Incremental progress just doesn't seem to be a thing in Optics; you either get it right or you don't. Anyone that has been in totality during an eclipse knows that there is a huge difference between 99% and 100% coverage. Optics is exactly like that.

SiempreViernes 7y ago

Also, astronomy exists!

JabavuAdams 7y ago

Yeah, sure, but she's writing about the foundations of physics. I'm in biophysics in part because I want to have an impact in < 1 kiloyears.

letitgo12345 7y ago
Lots going on in the foundations as well, esp. cosmology. Particle physics is hardly the end all be all. I mean the reality is that for going significantly beyond the Standard Model you just need higher and higher energies -- energies that might even be impossible for humanity to explore ever. One could build a better accelerator which Sabine opposes because it's unclear whether it will yield anything (but honestly that's science. If there were guarantees, it wouldn't be called "research"). Or one can theorize and do thought experiments and hope that one will discover mathematical constraints that rule out a big class of models. It's not like she has a better plan. She says "new and better methods". I mean that's exactly what physicists try and pursue. I highly doubt that an ambitious young scientist wldn't try and get a cool publication if they could think of a novel theory. But the reality is that novel ideas that fit all the existing experimental constraints are very very very hard to figure out. People work on them but lack of a million new models a year is not because of some groupthink but because physics is hard.