8 ms·

Musings on the Current Status of High Energy Physics

46 points by ArtWomb 7y ago

btrettel 7y ago
> the giant resonance mode. In this mode each novel idea, once it appears, spreads in an explosive manner in the theoretical community, sucking into itself a majority of active theorists, especially young theorists. Naturally, alternative lines of thought by and large dry out. Then, before this given idea bears fruit in the understanding of natural phenomena (due to the lack of experimental data and the fact that on the theory side crucial difficult problems are left behind, unsolved), a new novel idea arrives, the old one is abandoned, and a new majority jumps onto the new train. Reminds me of Jamie Zawinski's "CADT Model" of software development. There seems to be a dynamic in many fields where fixing known problems or finishing a project doesn't seem important to many people.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  sounds like a decent simulated annealing or genetic algorithm search. which seems fine. smart people trying different ideas for a while.
  - btrettel 7y ago
    I'm in favor of trying many different ideas, for a while, i.e., when a problem is new. But at a certain point you need to address issues that are viewed as critical. In the academic fields that I'm familiar with, I don't see that occur as frequently as people try new ideas that don't obviously address the most critical issues. These new ideas typically do address some issues but they might be regressions in some areas, ignore other important issues, or address the issues they focus on poorly. In software development you have bug trackers. In scientific research you have review articles. These are useful tools that should be used to guide new work. Otherwise you're not doing simulated annealing or whatnot, you're just doing an inefficient random search.
BrandoElFollito 7y ago
I have a PhD in physics, and left academia for industry (20 years ago). One of the reasons was that physics today (or at least at that time) was dealing with exotic stuff, away from everyday life. It was not the time of Planck or Curie where within 30 years physics was boiling hot, with key discoveries almost everyday. Just look at the picture from the Solvay confrence where you see names of people you read about in a high school book. I would hope we are in a stage like in the late XIX century, where everything seemed to be known in physics, with some tiny things still needing an explanation : the Michelson Morley experiment, the uv catastrophe etc.
- bjornsing 7y ago
  I got out with just an MSc, for pretty much the same reason. You know physics has lost a lot of steam[1] when the perhaps leading theoretical physicist of our time, Leonard Susskind, regularly gives talks about... how he knew Richard Feynman. Regarding your hope: I very much doubt we’ll get to experience the following stage in our lifetime. 1. It’s amazing to think just how much steam: just as an example, you could argue that physicists determined the outcome of WWII, and with it the whole path of civilization.
  - ianai 7y ago
    QTT seems like a path forward from “the breach” of current understanding.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    > you could argue that physicists determined the outcome of WWII If you're referring to the A-bomb, no. Germany was defeated without it, and the Japanese military didn't really care if civilians were turned to ashes. You could argue that a combination of events ended the Pacific War, including starvation, no fuel, Russians advancing in the north, the destruction of the Japanese navy by the USA, the destruction of the Japanese army in Manchuria/Russian border, plus the A-bomb. The Japanese Emperor was a world-class marine biologist and understood the A-bomb in general terms, but had very little influence over the military. He did a radio broadcast and survived retaliation from the military, so he does get credit for that. Hitler and the Japanese military were die-hard end-of-the-world types. Important to realize when dealing with other tyrants. For them, there is no Plan B or surrender.
kristianp 7y ago
Does it make sense to build the FCC, when it costs so much money and doesn't necessarily have enough energy to discover any new physics, at 10x the energy of the LHC? Maybe it makes more sense to start working towards producing microscopic black holes in space, where results about quantum gravity can be gained [1]. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/f/612766/cern-wants-to-build-a-particle-collider-thats-four-times-bigger-than-the-lhc/ https://www.technologyreview.com/f/612766/cern-wants-to-buil... [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803 https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803 , Are Black Hole Starships Possible
robochat42 7y ago
I love reading about high energy physics and this isn't the first account from a high energy theorist which excludes weariness at the lack of progress over the last decades. We can hope that someone has a breakthrough that unlocks a new era of high energy physics. Maybe the neutrino masses hold the key or new symmetries will be found. Maybe a small alteration will make an old idea viable. So many promising ideas have been shot down: Grand Unified Theories looked for proton decays, axions looked for light spontaneously going through solid walls and supersymmetry searched for new particles. Nothing was found. As an ex-physicist with a more experimental background in condensed matters, the real discussions and theories are way beyond me though. Just look at this paragraph from the article: "Assume we consider two-dimensional Schwinger model with one massless Dirac fermion of charge 2 [18]. More exactly, in addition to the dynamicalcharge-2 fermion, there is a heavy probe charge-1 fermion whose mass can be viewed as tending to infinity. Next, assume that in this model we compactify the spatial dimension on a circle of circumference L, i.e. impose either periodic or antiperiodic boundary conditions on the fermion fields. Then one can show that this model has two discrete Z2 symmetries – one 0-form and another 1-form. These two global Z2 symmetries have generators which do not commute with each other [18]. Thus, only one of these symmetries can be implemented,the other one must be spontaneously broken. Hence, the ground state is doubly degenerate. In other words, we observe in this example (see Appendix on page 15 and also [17]) the power of the mixed anomalies – the prediction of the projective action of the symmetries and the ground state degeneracy. This is a strong result at strong coupling. Sorry for the pun... After [12, 13, 14] a large number of non-trivial applications has been worked out.Many relevant references can be found in [18, 19]." My hope is that there will be a revolution in accelerator technology. The LHC is a triumph of collaborative engineering but maybe the next accelerator will be based upon different principles such as wakefield acceleration or miniaturized accelerators. Or we could find different ways of testing high energy physics, more subtle than smashing two particles together!
- mnowicki 7y ago
  What, you don't even know how to 'compactify the spatial dimension'?
  - 7y ago

46 points by ArtWomb 7y ago

> the giant resonance mode. In this mode each novel idea, once it appears, spreads in an explosive manner in the theoretical community, sucking into itself a majority of active theorists, especially young theorists. Naturally, alternative lines of thought by and large dry out. Then, before this given idea bears fruit in the understanding of natural phenomena (due to the lack of experimental data and the fact that on the theory side crucial difficult problems are left behind, unsolved), a new novel idea arrives, the old one is abandoned, and a new majority jumps onto the new train. Reminds me of Jamie Zawinski's "CADT Model" of software development. There seems to be a dynamic in many fields where fixing known problems or finishing a project doesn't seem important to many people.

gameswithgo 7y ago
sounds like a decent simulated annealing or genetic algorithm search. which seems fine. smart people trying different ideas for a while.
- btrettel 7y ago
  I'm in favor of trying many different ideas, for a while, i.e., when a problem is new. But at a certain point you need to address issues that are viewed as critical. In the academic fields that I'm familiar with, I don't see that occur as frequently as people try new ideas that don't obviously address the most critical issues. These new ideas typically do address some issues but they might be regressions in some areas, ignore other important issues, or address the issues they focus on poorly. In software development you have bug trackers. In scientific research you have review articles. These are useful tools that should be used to guide new work. Otherwise you're not doing simulated annealing or whatnot, you're just doing an inefficient random search.

BrandoElFollito 7y ago

I have a PhD in physics, and left academia for industry (20 years ago). One of the reasons was that physics today (or at least at that time) was dealing with exotic stuff, away from everyday life. It was not the time of Planck or Curie where within 30 years physics was boiling hot, with key discoveries almost everyday. Just look at the picture from the Solvay confrence where you see names of people you read about in a high school book. I would hope we are in a stage like in the late XIX century, where everything seemed to be known in physics, with some tiny things still needing an explanation : the Michelson Morley experiment, the uv catastrophe etc.

bjornsing 7y ago
I got out with just an MSc, for pretty much the same reason. You know physics has lost a lot of steam[1] when the perhaps leading theoretical physicist of our time, Leonard Susskind, regularly gives talks about... how he knew Richard Feynman. Regarding your hope: I very much doubt we’ll get to experience the following stage in our lifetime. 1. It’s amazing to think just how much steam: just as an example, you could argue that physicists determined the outcome of WWII, and with it the whole path of civilization.
- ianai 7y ago
  QTT seems like a path forward from “the breach” of current understanding.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  > you could argue that physicists determined the outcome of WWII If you're referring to the A-bomb, no. Germany was defeated without it, and the Japanese military didn't really care if civilians were turned to ashes. You could argue that a combination of events ended the Pacific War, including starvation, no fuel, Russians advancing in the north, the destruction of the Japanese navy by the USA, the destruction of the Japanese army in Manchuria/Russian border, plus the A-bomb. The Japanese Emperor was a world-class marine biologist and understood the A-bomb in general terms, but had very little influence over the military. He did a radio broadcast and survived retaliation from the military, so he does get credit for that. Hitler and the Japanese military were die-hard end-of-the-world types. Important to realize when dealing with other tyrants. For them, there is no Plan B or surrender.

kristianp 7y ago

Does it make sense to build the FCC, when it costs so much money and doesn't necessarily have enough energy to discover any new physics, at 10x the energy of the LHC? Maybe it makes more sense to start working towards producing microscopic black holes in space, where results about quantum gravity can be gained [1]. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/f/612766/cern-wants-to-build-a-particle-collider-thats-four-times-bigger-than-the-lhc/ https://www.technologyreview.com/f/612766/cern-wants-to-buil... [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803 https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803 , Are Black Hole Starships Possible

robochat42 7y ago

I love reading about high energy physics and this isn't the first account from a high energy theorist which excludes weariness at the lack of progress over the last decades. We can hope that someone has a breakthrough that unlocks a new era of high energy physics. Maybe the neutrino masses hold the key or new symmetries will be found. Maybe a small alteration will make an old idea viable. So many promising ideas have been shot down: Grand Unified Theories looked for proton decays, axions looked for light spontaneously going through solid walls and supersymmetry searched for new particles. Nothing was found. As an ex-physicist with a more experimental background in condensed matters, the real discussions and theories are way beyond me though. Just look at this paragraph from the article: "Assume we consider two-dimensional Schwinger model with one massless Dirac fermion of charge 2 [18]. More exactly, in addition to the dynamicalcharge-2 fermion, there is a heavy probe charge-1 fermion whose mass can be viewed as tending to infinity. Next, assume that in this model we compactify the spatial dimension on a circle of circumference L, i.e. impose either periodic or antiperiodic boundary conditions on the fermion fields. Then one can show that this model has two discrete Z2 symmetries – one 0-form and another 1-form. These two global Z2 symmetries have generators which do not commute with each other [18]. Thus, only one of these symmetries can be implemented,the other one must be spontaneously broken. Hence, the ground state is doubly degenerate. In other words, we observe in this example (see Appendix on page 15 and also [17]) the power of the mixed anomalies – the prediction of the projective action of the symmetries and the ground state degeneracy. This is a strong result at strong coupling. Sorry for the pun... After [12, 13, 14] a large number of non-trivial applications has been worked out.Many relevant references can be found in [18, 19]." My hope is that there will be a revolution in accelerator technology. The LHC is a triumph of collaborative engineering but maybe the next accelerator will be based upon different principles such as wakefield acceleration or miniaturized accelerators. Or we could find different ways of testing high energy physics, more subtle than smashing two particles together!

mnowicki 7y ago
What, you don't even know how to 'compactify the spatial dimension'?
- 7y ago