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As a (non-practicing) physicist, I've always disliked the penchant of some in the HEP community to say what this article says. They (the HEP community) tends t
by hpcjoe 6y ago
As a (non-practicing) physicist, I've always disliked the penchant of some in the HEP community to say what this article says. They (the HEP community) tends to equate physics with HEP physics.
It's not.
When this is pointed out to the people espousing this odd viewpoint, they usually respond with some passive aggressive comment. I've seen/experienced much of this during my time in research.
New physics not requiring an accelerator would include quantum computing; the real stuff of entangled qubits, and the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits. More generally quantum mechanics interpretation and meaning. There are some unsettling things within QM, such as non-locality, and how to understand them.
There are many other examples, just listing 1 for brevity.
Basically, any text that begins with "the set of all physics is HEP physics" such as this article implies, is, pretty much by definition, incorrect.
I recall while the SSC was being built in Texas, that when the NSF asked for more money for researchers not involved in SSC, they were told that physics folks were getting enough. I remember my thesis advisor's grant that I was funded on, getting cut to help fund other things.
Equating the new physics with new HEP physics is, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, not even wrong. We don't need accelerators for most new physics.
- djaque 6y agoWell said. Whenever I bring up that point on physics subreddits I also get tons of passive aggressive comments. It's super toxic. The HEP people in my own department also seem to believe that anything other than beyond the standard model physics isn't fundamental or isn't pure enough to care about.
- eigenspace 6y agoI think a lot of it comes from the fact that they used to be the golden child of science, but the influence and prestige of HEP has been a victim of it's own success. HEP just doesn't hold the same importance it used to, and that stings for the people who dedicated their lives to it. As they pushed to higher and higher energies and events with lower and lower cross sections, they're solving problems that matter less and less, and are increasingly less likely to be useful in any way. Of course, it's still incredibly interesting to know about the fundamental building blocks of the universe, but without a promise of practical applications, or at least a convincing argument that they'll find something interesting with this new collider, I find it really hard to justify the price tag. Would knowing what physics does at 100TeV be any more valuable to us than a great work of literature? I'm not sure.
- battery_cowboy 6y ago> they're solving problems that matter less and less, and are increasingly less likely to be useful in any way Can you expand on why you think this? I'm not a physicist, but I feel like one shouldn't discount the possibility of useful discoveries. I'd love to hear if there are reasons that's not true.
- eigenspace 6y agoThe problem is that the effects they're looking at are confined to such high energy and small length scales that they're utterly invisible to things even on the scale of a single proton. It's very difficult to imagine how (or even why) one would ever build a device that takes advantage of a TeV scale effect to do something useful, given that these effects are meaningless to the sorts of matter we care about and interact with. Is it possible that we might discover something revolutionary at 100TeV that will have gigantic consequences to our daily lives? Sure. But that's like saying that it's possible that there's a treasure chest full of gold buried in your backyard. Yes, if you dug up your back yard it is possible you'll find something amazing and life changing. But for right now, we don't really have any convincing reason to think that's the case, and you'd probably just be spending a lot of effort to dig a big hole in the ground. Arguing that it'd have good effects like increasing your fitness and "who knows, you might strike gold!" isn't really a convincing argument for me to dig up my yard.
- battery_cowboy 6y agoThat makes sense, thanks for the reply. At those energies, I guess you'd be hard pressed to make a useful 'finding' that could be utilized outside of a huge collider.
- fsflover 6y agoYou could say the same during invention of quantum mechanics: "They are looking at the effects on the scale of single atom/electron, hardly ever useful in our everyday life." Or about going to the space. You can never know what new discoveries bring.
- sandwall 6y ago100% as a fellow non-HEP (practicing) physicist -- There's so much more to physics. Science, at least from the funding perspective, has always leaned toward what's fashionable -- "nuclear" dominated following WW2, "particle" has had it's moment, and we're moving full force toward "quantum" (& "AI"!) Scientists seeking funding bend themselves in knots to ensure they include all the key words in their grant applications
- tobbykop 6y agoWe already have quantum computers, at this point that’s not new physics it’s engineering. And if the well established frameworks don’t settle your thirst for understanding quantum mechanics, thats about philosophy not physics.
- xref 6y agoThat’s as silly as saying “we already have particle colliders, at this point they’re just an engineering problem”. It completely misses the forest for the trees.
- jjdredd 6y agoYes, quantum computing is not a problem in modern fundamental physics. Yes, collider construction is not a problem in modern fundamental physics.
- hpcjoe 6y agoWell ... no. We have several interpretations of QM, one of which has been dominant for most of the last century. But the other interpretations have been getting deeper looks due to things that the current interpretation "hand waves" (particle wave duality, etc.) We are generally willing to accept the interpretation, as long as we don't look to closely at it. Once we do, we have to start asking questions of nature as to which (set of) interpretation(s) are more likely correct. As in provides an understandable model, and provides correct calculation capability for predicting features given experiments.
- dylan604 6y agoSo, what other types of physics is not well understood and requires funding to further research. We know F=ma, things in motion stay in motion, blah, and so on. We know a current flowing down a path will generate a magnetic field. We electrons moving to a lower energy path will release energy. We know light bends in a lens, and how to make that useful. Essentially, the funding for pure research and discovery is going to be more exciting than how to take a current understanding of physics into a way of making money. Plus, that kind of research should be undertaken by private investment.
- semi-extrinsic 6y agoOne very simple way to answer this question is that the American Physical Society publishes journals called Physical Review {A,B,C,D,E}. Of these, Phys Rev D is the one focused on high-energy physics. If there was no other interesting physics requiring further research, how could those other fields be generating enough papers to fill 4 journals? And this isn't even counting more recent journals like Phys. Rev. Fluids.
- godelski 6y agoSuper conductors, semiconductors, cosmology, qm (including computing), and optics to name a few. There's still significant research to be done in all these fields, and more.
- agumonkey 6y ago> semiconductors even after decades of massive use ?
- jjdredd 6y agoSM/beyond SM is the only field in fundamental physics though. Everything else is either a consequence of those models or applied physics.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoIt depends on whether you regard quantum gravity as SM/beyond SM or not. Even if you don't, though, there's still cosmology and black hole physics.
- jjdredd 6y agoTrue. I don't know much about cosmology.
- codethief 6y ago…and (if I may add) foundations of quantum mechanics (which may or may not be related to quantum gravity). And dozens of open questions in relativity alone (that have little to do with black holes).
- hpcjoe 6y agoI personally find the entropy connection with information theory and black holes fascinating.
- eigenspace 6y agoI'm a big fan of Phil Anderson's article, More is Different[1] where he argues why he things this reductionist view (the view that the physics most worthy of understanding is the physics of the smallest things) is flawed. The fact of the matter is that at all sorts of scales regularities in the laws of nature emerge, and understanding the smaller and smaller building blocks is only one interesting path for physics research. Condensed matter physics is, in my opinion, a far more interesting and varied field of study than high energy physics. Not only does it contribute to society in a way high energy physics no longer does, but in many senses it takes on a fundamental character like HEP. Every material in the long wavelength limit acts like its own little universe with its own set of fundamental particles and quantum fields. The universes Condensed matter physics studies have supersymmetry, Majorana fermions, magnetic monopoles, dualities and any other genuinely interesting physical phenomenon you could want. What's more is that by understanding the physics of these phenomena, we can create new technologies that really matter. [1] https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_differen...
- jameslevy 6y ago> the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits Where is the innovation/research in this area happening? This is one of those topics that I find very interesting but any attempt to serious inquiry into it tends to result in ridicule from people I know with some expertise in physics and thermodynamics, as though it was just obviously nonsense.
- konschubert 6y agoHEP stands for High Energy Physics, which is what is done with an accelerator.
- dnautics 6y agoI remember at the University of Chicago there was a researcher studying "breakfast physics" - what governs the peak angle of granular piles (like salt piles or grain or sandpiles), what happens at the singularity when a drizzle of honey goes from a hyperboloid of one sheet to a hyperboloid of two sheets. I think he also measured the effect of vacuum on fluid splatters. These are all quotidian problems in I guess "condensed matter" physics which are 0) largely unsexy and ignored 1) still largely unsolved, 2) liable to watershed huge, life- and money- saving innovations, while exotic HEP and Low Temp Condensed, are still what most physics students study their way into.
- mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y agoMy friend's thesis was about optimal mixing of granular matter. It's pretty hilarious physics and I was said also practically important in pharmaceutics and cosmetics industry.
- jessriedel 6y agoAs a practicing physicist in quantum information, I can say (1) "New physics" is jargon understood by experts to mean new fundamental physics, i.e., new laws/forces/particles at the base of our theoretical edifice. This does not mean that non-fundamental physics is necessarily less important -- see for instance the late Phillip Anderson's "More is different" [ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393 ] -- but the distinction is real and meaningful. The use of this phrase does not equate physics with HEP physics. The reason you might make that mistake is because... (2) To my knowledge, every single discovery of new physics in the past half century years has been made with a particle accelerator. I am confident that a new particle accelerator is a lot more likely to discover new physics than building a quantum computer or any other experimental work in quantum information. This, I'm sure, is the consensus view, even among people who put a low credence on the chance that new physics will be found at the next accelerator, or that such an investment is worthwhile. (3) In my opinion, the strongest argument for pursuing quantum information experiments over HEP is that a departure from quantum mechanics would be more revolutionary than merely finding another set of particles and forces with largely unexplained parameters. In that sense, you need to make the reverse argument to the one you are trying to make, i.e., that quantum information is more fundamental than HEP. But for the very same reason, discrepancies with quantum mechanics are just very, very unlikely to be found.
- hpcjoe 6y agoThe Majorana fermion was just observed and reported this past year. Fundamental physics. Foundational physics. No accelerators needed. Bose-Einstein condensates have been observed and used in a variety of situations. No accelerators needed. And I could go on. The point is though, fundamental foundational physics is available and accessible in all the various sub-fields.
- jessriedel 6y agoQuasiparticles aren't changes to the theoretical foundations. They can be derived from the existing foundations. You might as well argue that new classes of molecules synthesized by chemists are new physics.