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> Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be
by yccs27 4y ago
> Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise.
I'm not sure there is a fundamental distinction here. The only difference is success: Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist. When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment.
It feels like nature itself is against physicists here.
- pfortuny 4y agoSorry but several of the most prominent string theorists have gone from “LHC will find this to be a fact” to “We need a bigger LHC” as time passed. Not very trustworthy.
- XorNot 4y agoGonna have to ask you to show your work here: who specifically made an LHC prediction and is now asking for as bigger LHC?
- sanxiyn 4y agoMany did, but Gordon Kane is a standard example because he is kind of more brazen about it than most. In 2011: "This is a profound turning point in the quest for a fundamental unified theory of the physical world. The properties and mass of the LHC's Higgs boson suggest that physicists will soon find superpartners for particles, and that we have begun to connect string theory to the real world." from https://www.nature.com/articles/480415a https://www.nature.com/articles/480415a. We didn't find superpartners. In 2019: "One important lesson from studying such models is that we should not have expected to find superpartners at the LHC with masses below about 1500 GeV." from https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20190314a https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.2019031.... I mean, yes, you should not have expected that, but you totally did, so why should I believe when you say the next LHC will find superpartners?
- marcosdumay 4y ago> Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist. Nope. It's the other way around. The most important theories from Einstein an Schrödinger were created to explain effects there were experimentally known. The ones where they predicted the effects first and found them later were much less impactful.
- LordDragonfang 4y agoRight, but a theory's inferred veracity is only as good as its testable, falsifiable predictions.
- marcosdumay 4y agoLet me turn this around. A scientific theory is only as valuable as much as it can guide the action of some person. Popperism is an incredibly successful simplification that made it viable to judge a theory. But at the end of the day, it's just a proxy that nobody really cares about.
- eastbound 4y agoNoob here, can we discuss about what are the practical effects of understanding high-energy theories? ie have we invented anything practical based on those colliders?
- dekhn 4y agoThere are some side-effects of running a place like CERN that benefit scientists (for example, CERN makes and stores antimatter for experiments, and they sometimes develop new tech to solve their problems that can be applied in the real world, but by-and-large, high energy physics doesn't contribute directly to applied science or products. Countries run projects like this for prestige, not applications.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
- xyzzyz 4y ago> When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment. One of the reasons LHC was built in the first place was to try to detect the theoretically predicted Higgs boson.