5 ms·

> ...than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations. Genuine question from an ignorant la

by levi_n 4y ago

> ...than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations. Genuine question from an ignorant layperson: was confirming the existence of the Higgs boson not significant?

dTal 4y ago
In a scientific sense - no. It was predicted, it was found. No theories needed rewriting. Significant would have been if they'd failed to find it.
- fsloth 4y ago
  I would claim finding it was equally significant. Theory is not reality but just a model until verified. I know there is a trend in physics where computing is supposed to suffice without actually verifying anything but that is just wrong - I presume this notion is driven by the incentives to focus on publishing more than tedious collaboration.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    I agree. But isn't the issue that there is not really anything like Higgs for a new larger collider?
- nix23 4y ago
  So finding Black-holes is not significant because it was already predicted? And btw there is so much money around...we should not fight against different project but the spending that goes into science itself. LHC and NASA is really just a small drop compared to military spending (in the US). https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/photo/1 https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/p...
  - _heimdall 4y ago
    Why hello again, tragedy of the commons! Modern monetary theory is its own can of worms, but justifying massive spending in one area because of even more massive spending elsewhere isn't solving anything.
    - nix23 4y ago
      But: https://interestingengineering.com/these-7-cern-spinoffs-show-the-project-isnt-just-theoretical https://interestingengineering.com/these-7-cern-spinoffs-sho... And i think the ISS was still much more expensive (especially over the years) then LHC/Atlas etc.
      - worik 4y ago
        Those "practical" results were all due to the spending on technology. None were due to advances in physics, as far as I can tell (that website seems designed to obfuscate not illuminate)
        nix23 4y ago
        >spending on technology Like the Moon-landing right? None were due to advances in landing on the moon.
morbia 4y ago
(Former PhD student in Particle Physics Pheno here, far from an expert) Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing. It's kind of weird because it was marketted as a success story to the public (and don't get me wrong, it was) but theorists were very confident that it was there by 2012. Thus far, it behaves exactly as expected according to the standard model and that is very dull. HEP would have been left in a very funny position if we didn't find it. No Higgs Boson would have been fascinating from a theory perspective, but good luck trying to get funding for a new collider when you found nothing with the old one.
- toxik 4y ago
  I’m pretty sure there remains a discrepancy between the predicted mass of the Higgs boson and the measured mass in experiments. Is this resolved then? I was under the impression that this was a smoking gun for something being off with the theory, a bit like the ultraviolet catastrophe that led to QM or the orbital aberration that was resolved by GR.
  - morbia 4y ago
    > I’m pretty sure there remains a discrepancy between the predicted mass of the Higgs boson and the measured mass in experiments. Is this resolved then? Sort of. The higgs boson mass is a parameter to the Standard Model. As far as the Standard Model is concerned, that is the end of the story. There are just a series of constants need to be fitted to data in the Standard Model and that's one of them. However, the "problem" is why ~125GeV. If there are extremely high energy particles (which are expected in a Grand Unified Theory), then corrections to the Higgs mass would be enormous. This is a fine tuning problem where we arbitrarily tweak those corrections such that we magically end up at 125GeV. Supersymmetry and other Beyond Standard Models look to 'fix' this, and that's where my knowledge ends. Honestly, when I was doing my PhD I took the pragmatic view on this. Trying to infer things at energy scales we can't probe struck me as more as a mathematical exercise than Physics. Many, many people would disagree with that though (and staked their careers on it).
marcosdumay 4y ago
Did it change your life in any way? (Most times, people don't know how to judge that, but high-energy physics really didn't impact anything.)

by levi_n 4y ago

dTal 4y ago

In a scientific sense - no. It was predicted, it was found. No theories needed rewriting. Significant would have been if they'd failed to find it.

fsloth 4y ago
I would claim finding it was equally significant. Theory is not reality but just a model until verified. I know there is a trend in physics where computing is supposed to suffice without actually verifying anything but that is just wrong - I presume this notion is driven by the incentives to focus on publishing more than tedious collaboration.
- geysersam 4y ago
  I agree. But isn't the issue that there is not really anything like Higgs for a new larger collider?
nix23 4y ago
So finding Black-holes is not significant because it was already predicted? And btw there is so much money around...we should not fight against different project but the spending that goes into science itself. LHC and NASA is really just a small drop compared to military spending (in the US). https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/photo/1 https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/p...
- _heimdall 4y ago
  Why hello again, tragedy of the commons! Modern monetary theory is its own can of worms, but justifying massive spending in one area because of even more massive spending elsewhere isn't solving anything.
  - nix23 4y ago
    But: https://interestingengineering.com/these-7-cern-spinoffs-show-the-project-isnt-just-theoretical https://interestingengineering.com/these-7-cern-spinoffs-sho... And i think the ISS was still much more expensive (especially over the years) then LHC/Atlas etc.
    - worik 4y ago
      Those "practical" results were all due to the spending on technology. None were due to advances in physics, as far as I can tell (that website seems designed to obfuscate not illuminate)
      - nix23 4y ago
        >spending on technology Like the Moon-landing right? None were due to advances in landing on the moon.

morbia 4y ago

(Former PhD student in Particle Physics Pheno here, far from an expert) Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing. It's kind of weird because it was marketted as a success story to the public (and don't get me wrong, it was) but theorists were very confident that it was there by 2012. Thus far, it behaves exactly as expected according to the standard model and that is very dull. HEP would have been left in a very funny position if we didn't find it. No Higgs Boson would have been fascinating from a theory perspective, but good luck trying to get funding for a new collider when you found nothing with the old one.

toxik 4y ago
I’m pretty sure there remains a discrepancy between the predicted mass of the Higgs boson and the measured mass in experiments. Is this resolved then? I was under the impression that this was a smoking gun for something being off with the theory, a bit like the ultraviolet catastrophe that led to QM or the orbital aberration that was resolved by GR.
- morbia 4y ago
  > I’m pretty sure there remains a discrepancy between the predicted mass of the Higgs boson and the measured mass in experiments. Is this resolved then? Sort of. The higgs boson mass is a parameter to the Standard Model. As far as the Standard Model is concerned, that is the end of the story. There are just a series of constants need to be fitted to data in the Standard Model and that's one of them. However, the "problem" is why ~125GeV. If there are extremely high energy particles (which are expected in a Grand Unified Theory), then corrections to the Higgs mass would be enormous. This is a fine tuning problem where we arbitrarily tweak those corrections such that we magically end up at 125GeV. Supersymmetry and other Beyond Standard Models look to 'fix' this, and that's where my knowledge ends. Honestly, when I was doing my PhD I took the pragmatic view on this. Trying to infer things at energy scales we can't probe struck me as more as a mathematical exercise than Physics. Many, many people would disagree with that though (and staked their careers on it).

marcosdumay 4y ago

Did it change your life in any way? (Most times, people don't know how to judge that, but high-energy physics really didn't impact anything.)