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At least they are finding nothing and confirming they are finding nothing. Less scrupulous operators might be always finding something even if its not there. So

by dlsa 4y ago

At least they are finding nothing and confirming they are finding nothing. Less scrupulous operators might be always finding something even if its not there. So that's a sign of good science. Maybe there's something they haven't found because there's so much data? Mix things up and look again? Change assumptions? Or as someone I know likes to say to various smaller humans: have you looked around the couch? Really? Are you sure? Have you had a good look? this is how the tv remote usually subsequently reappears as there is a difference between just looking and having a good look. The best science also happens when you've looked, not found it but now know where not to look. Even better science happens when you know exactly why it shouldn't have been there at all. Surprising science happens when you find the errors in your assumptions and discover it can sometimes be where it previously was not expected to be.

highwaylights 4y ago
They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is nothing. They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what they might find, and have established some evidence against others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.
- jordanpg 4y ago
  This. This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the only "success" is a new discovery. This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded. What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and public support for additional funding. That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment.
  - anticristi 4y ago
    > If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment. Sadly, that achievement -- public support for trillions in military expenditures -- belongs to a not-so-Western government invading a wanna-be-Western government.
  - Coding_Cat 4y ago
    The issue for particle physics specifically, is that they _hope_ to find something that breaks the theory. But so far, only find confirmations of the current Standard Model. Succesful experiments, yeah, but doing little for pushing our understanding of the universe unfortunately. The reason why they want to break the standard model is, simplified, two-fold: 1. While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks of the universe and it should therefore describe _everything_. 2. the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing some key insight that is needed to fix it. Finding something that breaks the standard model could go a huge way to solving both these issues. But the standard model just keeps getting confirmed at higher and higher resolution. In software terms: it's like you know there's a 1/1000'000 bug _somewhere_ in the software but every single test you write to try and find it passes.
    - gaze 4y ago
      There’s a huge mismatch between people who are science fans and people who are doing physics anywhere near particle physics. It’s quite hard to explain how the field is spinning it’s wheels squared against what people consider scientific progress. Edison’s “I found 100 things that didn’t work” is a nice parable but it doesn’t work across an entire field.
    - morbia 4y ago
      (former PhD in Particle Physics in QCD here, far from an expert) > While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks of the universe and it should therefore describe _everything_. I think this is a misunderstanding of what the Standard Model is and the scientific process that went into it. It is a model for describing the interactions of electroweak and strong force interactions, and that's it. This is based of years of experimental data and coming up with a consistent theory that fits the data. No one went out to come up with a "theory of everything", missed and ended up with the standard model. The Standard Model is clearly a low energy effective theory of something more, almost by definition. The problem is we have absolutely no data to drive predictions of higher order theories (which could also turn out to be low energy effective theories themselves). Without data, there is a very real chance that the standard model is the best model we're going to have for particle physics. > the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing some key insight that is needed to fix it. Ugly is a subjective term. A lot of people talk about stuff like 'naturalness' problems with the standard model, but is that really a problem? Who are we to say what numbers are the natural order of things. Gravity is orders upon orders of magnitude weaker than all the other forces, is that 'natural'? I think comparing it to Lorentzian aether is a little harsh. If you compare special relativity to Lorentzian relatively, special relativity is just a simpler model (it doesn't need aether). I think it's extremely unlikely at this stage that given only the data we have right now, someone would be able come up with a theory that would be fully consistent with the Standard Model but is simpler and doesn't predict new stuff. It's not impossible, but it is very unlikely. Actually I think the biggest problem with the Standard Model is how to go from the theory to real predictions. Formulating the lagriangian of QCD is the easy bit, converting that to real predictions (either on the lattice QCD end at large alpha_s or perturbative QCD at small alpha_s) is extremely difficult. It's almost laughably absurd where it is not unheard of for calculations of single processes to take a decade or more.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment. We just need, occasionally, a belligerent something to do something to remind us of why experimental particle physics is needed in its equivalent of peace-time.
  - brazzy 4y ago
    > This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded. The probem is, as far as I know, that there is an effectively infinite space of supersymmetry hypotheses. Ruling one of those out is pretty worthless success.
  - Certhas 4y ago
    The author correctly reports a scientific debate inside of science amongst scientists. Particle Physicists can pretend this is just a political problem all they want, but if more and more other physicists are convinced the field is entering a desert there will be no new accelerator. Maybe even more importantly, if students learn about the true state of the field they will chose more interesting things to study. Human time and effort is limited, and scientists don't go around and devote hundreds of thousands of person years to rule out random hypothesis. Effort at LHC level is only devoted because there is a very very good reason to band together to get this done that convinced many other scientists (who in turn helped convince funding bodies). LHC has been a huge success on its own terms, but its results are simultaneously a massive problem for particle physics as it stands right now. Not a problem for science, just a problem for the field of particle physics, which will need to adjust to the current reality rather than holding out for more data.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Expectation is that a new collider 10x as powerful and expensive would not be anywhere near big enough to test current hypotheses. There is plenty left to investigate in solid-state and superfluid physics. You don't need (much of) a collider for those.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    A new discovery over some time period is a reasonable expectation. For example, if we discover nothing in the next 1000 years we would have to conclude that there is no longer any point in trying.
  - jerf 4y ago
    The problem isn't that "finding nothing" isn't progress. The problem is that "finding nothing" is terrible progress-per-dollar. If you're still having trouble with that concept, peer into the alternate universe where the LHC actually provided enough data to nail down the Theory of Everything. Now that would be some progress-per-dollar to celebrate. There's a contingent of people who just don't want to think about "how much" progress something is making and want to live in a fantasy world where building a multi-billion dollar particle collider that finds nothing is exactly the same as a $50,000 experiment that finds nothing. I don't know that I'm terribly interested in trying to argue y'all out of that belief. But I can say with great confidence that no matter how good it may make you feel, if you go on to argue about how vital it is to spend another 5x times as much money to build another particle collider that we have no reason to believe will find anything new, you will continue to be marginalized and find your influence waning to apparently no effect. But in the faint hope of maybe convincing you, consider that there is no infinite money fountain, and even if you just can't process that fact, there certainly aren't an infinite amount of physicists. What is so vital about another particle accelerator that we must dedicate thousands of professional careers to it despite the lack of solid reason to hope anything will come of it? Why not let them do something else? I submit it's all Availability Heuristic. You see and apprehend the particle accelerator, so it must be a good idea. You don't see the thousands upon thousands of other things you're trading away for it, so they don't factor in. But given the current big fat zero rational reason to build another, it is very easy to build a model in which those other experiments will actually be the ones that make the difference somehow. Probably by some long, convoluted chain we can't imagine now; I doubt there's a bench experiment that we just haven't done that will nail down quantum gravity. But there's a lot of other interesting paths. Quantum computers, for instance, just by their nature, tend to probe the limits of quantum theory in a way nothing else can. Something very interesting could come out of that. Dark matter detectors could produce something. Someone might actually work a theory down into something that can be tested.
    - SkyBelow 4y ago
      What are the alternatives? Better weapons, better ad targeting systems, better gambling hidden behind a veneer of gaming on mobile? We can look at where our government and our society currently allocates money and find that the allocations looks bad enough that even building a bigger particle accelerator that might not find anything is an improvement overall. As a singular species, I think we would be better for going down that route given the average of what would be given up. Problem is that humanity is not unified for our own betterment, so that ends up being a bad metric to judge actions upon. I think you are right in the outcome, it would mean losing influence, and even if we get funding it'll likely be diverted from the areas we least want it diverted from. You're probably right and I find that unsatisfactory.
  - SkyBelow 4y ago
    >That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment. Is it solvable? Humans are notoriously bad at certain things and investing in things that aren't showing interesting results is one of them. How many companies will cut something that prevents problems because they don't see problems? If you want to solve this, you would need to do it the same way the MIC has solved military funding, by ensuring continued funding of science is necessary for politicians to be re-elected. But that borders close enough to corruption I'm not sure the scientists who need the funding will be agreeable to it, to say nothing of the difficulty engineering this.
  - roywiggins 4y ago
    It's like going treasure-hunting and demonstrating to everyone's satisfaction that there is definitely no treasure where you looked. It doesn't tell you very much about 1) if the treasure you're hunting really exists (there's many more places it could be), or 2) what exactly the treasure consists of. It's technically more information, but it's not very much information. eg, what did we learn from the underwater hunt for MH370? not a lot, millions were spent to still have no clue where the thing is. It's not just political to say that the hunt failed in an important way.
    - atx42 4y ago
      My take is we were asking the wrong questions, and now we know that, so hopefully we can figure out the right questions.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  The problem IS that they have found nothing. We know the Standard Model, as good as it is, is either incomplete or incorrect and without new physics somewhere we have no indication of how to fix it.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > without new physics somewhere we have no indication of how to fix it This is a bit harsh. We have loads of unexplained, well measured phenomena. More clues helps. But it's not conclusively necessary.
    - adamsmith143 4y ago
      Idk, theres been no major progress since the 60s-70s after QCD, String Theory is a complete dead end and there aren't any great candidate theories out there. So the lack of findings certainly hasn't helped.
  - usrbinbash 4y ago
    This "nothing" is valueable information nonetheless. Science is just as much (often more) about ruling out hypotheses as it is about confirming them. Sometimes that means ruling out all existing hypotheses, meaning new ones have to be formulated to be tested in turn.
    - fhars 4y ago
      The problem here is that the most favoured hypothesis currently is "there is nothing there that can be discovered with any accelerator that can be built using less than 80% of the world's GDP over the next 50 years." And all the valuable "nothing" we currently find just supports the hypothesis and that there is no point in formulating additional hypotheses.
      - bpye 4y ago
        I'm curious, what are the experiments we could run if we had for example 80% of the world's GDP?
- jug 4y ago
  This is indeed progress but as I understand the situation, it is progress in the shape of taking another step on the ladder but only to realize it looks like it was the final step, after having searched for billions of dollars during decades. Maybe, scary thought, the theory of general relativity and the standard model is pretty much entirely self-contained and cannot per their design extend to encompass the quantum world? Other theories maybe can, but then we need to look at even what we have from a completely different angle? Like how we have colors. By watching a rainbow we can see them all. There can be nothing more. Until you realize they are mere wavelengths in the optical spectrum and there is so much more. But that is a quantum leap in viewing things. However, maybe this is what is needed? Maybe this is just philosophical garbage though. :D
  - qsdf38100 4y ago
    Note that colors we can perceive aren’t all in the rainbow. There’s no pink in the rainbow. That’s because pink is what is left when you take white light and remove the green part. It’s minus green. There’s no wavelength that corresponds to pink.
    - Koshkin 4y ago
      So what? A mix of wavelengths is just as real as a single wavelength. More to the point, colors are merely perceptions (artifacts of consciousness) which can be caused by a variety of factors.
  - Koshkin 4y ago
    Sure, GR may well be self-contained and cannot encompass the quantum world in the same sense as the Newtonian mechanics is and can't. But the Nature does not have such boundaries, especially at such a fundamental level, and it is "self-contained" as a whole. So, while it may be impractical to try an create a unified theory of some aspects of reality, say, quantum mechanics and linguistics or economy, theories concerning fundamental aspects of Nature naturally are, and have been, subject to unification.
ramraj07 4y ago
- dang 4y ago
  Hey, can you please not fulminate on HN? It sounds like you might know quite a bit about the field (or some of it), but commenting like this degrades discussion and evokes worse from others. If you would make your substantive points thoughtfully, and share some of what you know, that would be much better. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - hamsand 4y ago
    the more posts are banned and shadowbanned the more like reddit this website becomes, aka a boring place for boring people to say boring things. interesting people don’t like censorship
    - smolder 4y ago
      It's the opposite. The moderation is good, is very needed, and helps keeps discussion quality/signal-to-noise high, making this a site worth visiting. The thoughtless flamewars you can find everywhere else on the web are what bore me, personally. The rules of conduct on this site aren't even a high bar, and no one is preventing anyone from being jerks if they want to merely by keeping it outside of this forum.
    - dang 4y ago
      I think if the GP had written something relevant about their personal experience in a scientific field, that would have been much more interesting, as well as not breaking the site guidelines. The trouble with your argument "interesting people don't like censorship" isn't that you're wrong—it's that there are also a lot of people (many more, actually) who post dreck. If you want a forum that doesn't get overrun with internet dreck, you have to have some strategy for countering it. HN's strategy is to have a clear organizing principle (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) and clear rules to support it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That barely works, but it's a lot better than nothing.
vanderZwan 4y ago
> Have you had a good look? Are you aware of how hilarious it is in the context of high energy physicists verifying the standard model to ask if they had "good look"? I don't think a collective effort to look any harder has ever existed in the history of humankind.
- dlsa 4y ago
  I've received feedback from some very smart people who laughed out loud and knew exactly what I meant by having a good look. Two of them are physicists and many more are engineers. They said they have found many metaphorical couches and there's a lot of nothing. They've also found quite a few interesting metaphorical paperclips and other debris. But that there's so many more places to look. They also think there's a bunch of metaphorical couches they still haven't found. Its especially hard to look under something when you can't even recognise what it is to look under. Thats part of the difficulty. They've also assured me they'll let me know when they finally find another metaphorical tv remote.
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    Yeah I assumed your comment was in good faith, and as a physics drop-out I'm well aware of how most people have no idea of the sheer scope of these research projects, so I didn't mean it as a jab against you.
    - dlsa 4y ago
      I didn't take it as a jab. I also received a bunch of messages from people poking fun at me elsewhere for my comment. In the past several physicists have been a source of fine wine when I've won a bet. There will probably be photos of couches in my office next week when I get back.
  - not_kurt_godel 4y ago
    Ok, then where should they look if you're so smart? You think people who have dedicated their lives to studying this subject haven't considered the concept of looking everywhere possible, and that you're adding something to the discussion by trotting out this 'clever' metaphor?
gus_massa 4y ago
> Have you had a good look? It's difficult to explain, but they[1] tried very hard. For example the electron has an electric charge but it's also like a small magnet. In an ideal elementary particle, the value of the magnet is 2 * something. In a real elementary particle the value is almost-2 * something, so they are measuring the almost-2, and it's call g [2]. For an electron, the measured value of g is 2.00231930436256(35) , there are is an uncertainty of 0.000000000002%. The problem is that it agree with the current theoretical prediction. The muon is very similar to an electron, but the experimental g is [3] 2.0023318416(13) and the current theoretical prediction is 2.00233183620(86) It's a difference of 0.000000001%. Most people will be happy with that disagreement and forget about it. But They are happy because there is a disagreement and perhaps they can use that to discover a new particle. It still may be a long lived statistical fluke, but it already survived many years. Other team claimed that there is a small error in one of the experimental numbers used in the theoretical calculation, but I'm not sure if they are genius or crackpots or something in between. And there are many other experiments. I like for example the IceCube [4] that is just a giant chunk of ice in the Antarctica. They try to detect neutrinos from stars. It has many experiments, but in particular some experiments are useful to measure the difference of mass of the neutrinos that is a not very clear part of the Standard Model. [1] Not my area of research. They live in the next corridor. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_g-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_g-2 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
- abhv 4y ago
  gus_massa: Since you are likely an expert, could you recommend a resource that explains how you use the Lagrangian equation for the standard model [1] to actually compute a predicted value for the electron's g ? An elementary resource that goes through basic steps for a computer scientist (non expert in QFT) would be a great. A simpler particle than electron is also ok, but I'd love to understand how you mess with that equation. [1] http://nuclear.ucdavis.edu/~tgutierr/files/stmL1.html http://nuclear.ucdavis.edu/~tgutierr/files/stmL1.html
  - 4y ago
elorant 4y ago
One thing to notice is that during the experiments they keep only a small percentage of the total data they could record due to limitations in storage and processing capabilities. There’s a lot of fuss inside the scientific community about what to keep and what to disregard.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
There probably is a hard limit on how many elemental particles you can find in the first place. I don't know if there are further theories. Are there X or Y-Bosons? Lowfat quark anti-particles?
- gus_massa 4y ago
  There are many enhancements of the Standard Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Mo... Some of them propose new particles, some of them make small changes to the particles we know.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
And sometimes there just isn't anything there to find. But we keep looking because the idea of nothing is simply too abhorrent. There is a tremendously difficult and disturbing aspect to Peer Gynt (the original story, not the music on which it's based). Searching for his "self" he peels off layer after layer like an onion, getting ever deeper seemingly towards a real self. But on the last layer he experiences the horror of finding nothing more. What he "is", is constituted by the sum of the layers. After that, the entire nature of the "search for meaning" has to change.
strbean 4y ago
> Or as someone I know likes to say to various smaller humans: have you looked around the couch? Really? Are you sure? Have you had a good look? this is how the tv remote usually subsequently reappears as there is a difference between just looking and having a good look. Dealing with larger humans in a social setting - the only method I've found that works for finding the remote is addressing one of them on the couch and saying "The remote is UNDER YOU!" Then they *actually look*.
Melatonic 4y ago
I've always thought that a huge limiting factor is that we can only really observe from our current point in time. We are time limited which is a big hindrance just as it would be to only observe things form a single physical position (which is also sort of true - but at least we can send probes and whatnot out there).
z3t4 4y ago
The best science is found by accident.
analog31 4y ago
That's happening. I have a friend who did a physics + data science PhD for analyzing existing data in a new way.
AussieWog93 4y ago
Just based on my experience in academia, there are probably plenty of people with good hunches about where to go next. Unfortunately, the system (grants system especially) is actively discouraging them from trying anything too new that would undermine the status of the incumbent experts. If you banned every single influential scientist who hasn't contributed a major discovery in the last 10 years from participating in academia, we'd have colonised the galaxy decades ago.

by dlsa 4y ago

highwaylights 4y ago

They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is nothing. They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what they might find, and have established some evidence against others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.

jordanpg 4y ago
This. This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the only "success" is a new discovery. This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded. What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and public support for additional funding. That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment.
- anticristi 4y ago
  > If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment. Sadly, that achievement -- public support for trillions in military expenditures -- belongs to a not-so-Western government invading a wanna-be-Western government.
- Coding_Cat 4y ago
  The issue for particle physics specifically, is that they _hope_ to find something that breaks the theory. But so far, only find confirmations of the current Standard Model. Succesful experiments, yeah, but doing little for pushing our understanding of the universe unfortunately. The reason why they want to break the standard model is, simplified, two-fold: 1. While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks of the universe and it should therefore describe _everything_. 2. the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing some key insight that is needed to fix it. Finding something that breaks the standard model could go a huge way to solving both these issues. But the standard model just keeps getting confirmed at higher and higher resolution. In software terms: it's like you know there's a 1/1000'000 bug _somewhere_ in the software but every single test you write to try and find it passes.
  - gaze 4y ago
    There’s a huge mismatch between people who are science fans and people who are doing physics anywhere near particle physics. It’s quite hard to explain how the field is spinning it’s wheels squared against what people consider scientific progress. Edison’s “I found 100 things that didn’t work” is a nice parable but it doesn’t work across an entire field.
  - morbia 4y ago
    (former PhD in Particle Physics in QCD here, far from an expert) > While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks of the universe and it should therefore describe _everything_. I think this is a misunderstanding of what the Standard Model is and the scientific process that went into it. It is a model for describing the interactions of electroweak and strong force interactions, and that's it. This is based of years of experimental data and coming up with a consistent theory that fits the data. No one went out to come up with a "theory of everything", missed and ended up with the standard model. The Standard Model is clearly a low energy effective theory of something more, almost by definition. The problem is we have absolutely no data to drive predictions of higher order theories (which could also turn out to be low energy effective theories themselves). Without data, there is a very real chance that the standard model is the best model we're going to have for particle physics. > the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing some key insight that is needed to fix it. Ugly is a subjective term. A lot of people talk about stuff like 'naturalness' problems with the standard model, but is that really a problem? Who are we to say what numbers are the natural order of things. Gravity is orders upon orders of magnitude weaker than all the other forces, is that 'natural'? I think comparing it to Lorentzian aether is a little harsh. If you compare special relativity to Lorentzian relatively, special relativity is just a simpler model (it doesn't need aether). I think it's extremely unlikely at this stage that given only the data we have right now, someone would be able come up with a theory that would be fully consistent with the Standard Model but is simpler and doesn't predict new stuff. It's not impossible, but it is very unlikely. Actually I think the biggest problem with the Standard Model is how to go from the theory to real predictions. Formulating the lagriangian of QCD is the easy bit, converting that to real predictions (either on the lattice QCD end at large alpha_s or perturbative QCD at small alpha_s) is extremely difficult. It's almost laughably absurd where it is not unheard of for calculations of single processes to take a decade or more.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment. We just need, occasionally, a belligerent something to do something to remind us of why experimental particle physics is needed in its equivalent of peace-time.
- brazzy 4y ago
  > This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded. The probem is, as far as I know, that there is an effectively infinite space of supersymmetry hypotheses. Ruling one of those out is pretty worthless success.
- Certhas 4y ago
  The author correctly reports a scientific debate inside of science amongst scientists. Particle Physicists can pretend this is just a political problem all they want, but if more and more other physicists are convinced the field is entering a desert there will be no new accelerator. Maybe even more importantly, if students learn about the true state of the field they will chose more interesting things to study. Human time and effort is limited, and scientists don't go around and devote hundreds of thousands of person years to rule out random hypothesis. Effort at LHC level is only devoted because there is a very very good reason to band together to get this done that convinced many other scientists (who in turn helped convince funding bodies). LHC has been a huge success on its own terms, but its results are simultaneously a massive problem for particle physics as it stands right now. Not a problem for science, just a problem for the field of particle physics, which will need to adjust to the current reality rather than holding out for more data.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Expectation is that a new collider 10x as powerful and expensive would not be anywhere near big enough to test current hypotheses. There is plenty left to investigate in solid-state and superfluid physics. You don't need (much of) a collider for those.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  A new discovery over some time period is a reasonable expectation. For example, if we discover nothing in the next 1000 years we would have to conclude that there is no longer any point in trying.
- jerf 4y ago
  The problem isn't that "finding nothing" isn't progress. The problem is that "finding nothing" is terrible progress-per-dollar. If you're still having trouble with that concept, peer into the alternate universe where the LHC actually provided enough data to nail down the Theory of Everything. Now that would be some progress-per-dollar to celebrate. There's a contingent of people who just don't want to think about "how much" progress something is making and want to live in a fantasy world where building a multi-billion dollar particle collider that finds nothing is exactly the same as a $50,000 experiment that finds nothing. I don't know that I'm terribly interested in trying to argue y'all out of that belief. But I can say with great confidence that no matter how good it may make you feel, if you go on to argue about how vital it is to spend another 5x times as much money to build another particle collider that we have no reason to believe will find anything new, you will continue to be marginalized and find your influence waning to apparently no effect. But in the faint hope of maybe convincing you, consider that there is no infinite money fountain, and even if you just can't process that fact, there certainly aren't an infinite amount of physicists. What is so vital about another particle accelerator that we must dedicate thousands of professional careers to it despite the lack of solid reason to hope anything will come of it? Why not let them do something else? I submit it's all Availability Heuristic. You see and apprehend the particle accelerator, so it must be a good idea. You don't see the thousands upon thousands of other things you're trading away for it, so they don't factor in. But given the current big fat zero rational reason to build another, it is very easy to build a model in which those other experiments will actually be the ones that make the difference somehow. Probably by some long, convoluted chain we can't imagine now; I doubt there's a bench experiment that we just haven't done that will nail down quantum gravity. But there's a lot of other interesting paths. Quantum computers, for instance, just by their nature, tend to probe the limits of quantum theory in a way nothing else can. Something very interesting could come out of that. Dark matter detectors could produce something. Someone might actually work a theory down into something that can be tested.
  - SkyBelow 4y ago
    What are the alternatives? Better weapons, better ad targeting systems, better gambling hidden behind a veneer of gaming on mobile? We can look at where our government and our society currently allocates money and find that the allocations looks bad enough that even building a bigger particle accelerator that might not find anything is an improvement overall. As a singular species, I think we would be better for going down that route given the average of what would be given up. Problem is that humanity is not unified for our own betterment, so that ends up being a bad metric to judge actions upon. I think you are right in the outcome, it would mean losing influence, and even if we get funding it'll likely be diverted from the areas we least want it diverted from. You're probably right and I find that unsatisfactory.
- SkyBelow 4y ago
  >That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment. Is it solvable? Humans are notoriously bad at certain things and investing in things that aren't showing interesting results is one of them. How many companies will cut something that prevents problems because they don't see problems? If you want to solve this, you would need to do it the same way the MIC has solved military funding, by ensuring continued funding of science is necessary for politicians to be re-elected. But that borders close enough to corruption I'm not sure the scientists who need the funding will be agreeable to it, to say nothing of the difficulty engineering this.
- roywiggins 4y ago
  It's like going treasure-hunting and demonstrating to everyone's satisfaction that there is definitely no treasure where you looked. It doesn't tell you very much about 1) if the treasure you're hunting really exists (there's many more places it could be), or 2) what exactly the treasure consists of. It's technically more information, but it's not very much information. eg, what did we learn from the underwater hunt for MH370? not a lot, millions were spent to still have no clue where the thing is. It's not just political to say that the hunt failed in an important way.
  - atx42 4y ago
    My take is we were asking the wrong questions, and now we know that, so hopefully we can figure out the right questions.
adamsmith143 4y ago
The problem IS that they have found nothing. We know the Standard Model, as good as it is, is either incomplete or incorrect and without new physics somewhere we have no indication of how to fix it.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > without new physics somewhere we have no indication of how to fix it This is a bit harsh. We have loads of unexplained, well measured phenomena. More clues helps. But it's not conclusively necessary.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    Idk, theres been no major progress since the 60s-70s after QCD, String Theory is a complete dead end and there aren't any great candidate theories out there. So the lack of findings certainly hasn't helped.
- usrbinbash 4y ago
  This "nothing" is valueable information nonetheless. Science is just as much (often more) about ruling out hypotheses as it is about confirming them. Sometimes that means ruling out all existing hypotheses, meaning new ones have to be formulated to be tested in turn.
  - fhars 4y ago
    The problem here is that the most favoured hypothesis currently is "there is nothing there that can be discovered with any accelerator that can be built using less than 80% of the world's GDP over the next 50 years." And all the valuable "nothing" we currently find just supports the hypothesis and that there is no point in formulating additional hypotheses.
    - bpye 4y ago
      I'm curious, what are the experiments we could run if we had for example 80% of the world's GDP?
jug 4y ago
This is indeed progress but as I understand the situation, it is progress in the shape of taking another step on the ladder but only to realize it looks like it was the final step, after having searched for billions of dollars during decades. Maybe, scary thought, the theory of general relativity and the standard model is pretty much entirely self-contained and cannot per their design extend to encompass the quantum world? Other theories maybe can, but then we need to look at even what we have from a completely different angle? Like how we have colors. By watching a rainbow we can see them all. There can be nothing more. Until you realize they are mere wavelengths in the optical spectrum and there is so much more. But that is a quantum leap in viewing things. However, maybe this is what is needed? Maybe this is just philosophical garbage though. :D
- qsdf38100 4y ago
  Note that colors we can perceive aren’t all in the rainbow. There’s no pink in the rainbow. That’s because pink is what is left when you take white light and remove the green part. It’s minus green. There’s no wavelength that corresponds to pink.
  - Koshkin 4y ago
    So what? A mix of wavelengths is just as real as a single wavelength. More to the point, colors are merely perceptions (artifacts of consciousness) which can be caused by a variety of factors.
- Koshkin 4y ago
  Sure, GR may well be self-contained and cannot encompass the quantum world in the same sense as the Newtonian mechanics is and can't. But the Nature does not have such boundaries, especially at such a fundamental level, and it is "self-contained" as a whole. So, while it may be impractical to try an create a unified theory of some aspects of reality, say, quantum mechanics and linguistics or economy, theories concerning fundamental aspects of Nature naturally are, and have been, subject to unification.

ramraj07 4y ago

dang 4y ago
Hey, can you please not fulminate on HN? It sounds like you might know quite a bit about the field (or some of it), but commenting like this degrades discussion and evokes worse from others. If you would make your substantive points thoughtfully, and share some of what you know, that would be much better. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hamsand 4y ago
  the more posts are banned and shadowbanned the more like reddit this website becomes, aka a boring place for boring people to say boring things. interesting people don’t like censorship
  - smolder 4y ago
    It's the opposite. The moderation is good, is very needed, and helps keeps discussion quality/signal-to-noise high, making this a site worth visiting. The thoughtless flamewars you can find everywhere else on the web are what bore me, personally. The rules of conduct on this site aren't even a high bar, and no one is preventing anyone from being jerks if they want to merely by keeping it outside of this forum.
  - dang 4y ago
    I think if the GP had written something relevant about their personal experience in a scientific field, that would have been much more interesting, as well as not breaking the site guidelines. The trouble with your argument "interesting people don't like censorship" isn't that you're wrong—it's that there are also a lot of people (many more, actually) who post dreck. If you want a forum that doesn't get overrun with internet dreck, you have to have some strategy for countering it. HN's strategy is to have a clear organizing principle (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) and clear rules to support it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That barely works, but it's a lot better than nothing.

vanderZwan 4y ago

> Have you had a good look? Are you aware of how hilarious it is in the context of high energy physicists verifying the standard model to ask if they had "good look"? I don't think a collective effort to look any harder has ever existed in the history of humankind.

dlsa 4y ago
I've received feedback from some very smart people who laughed out loud and knew exactly what I meant by having a good look. Two of them are physicists and many more are engineers. They said they have found many metaphorical couches and there's a lot of nothing. They've also found quite a few interesting metaphorical paperclips and other debris. But that there's so many more places to look. They also think there's a bunch of metaphorical couches they still haven't found. Its especially hard to look under something when you can't even recognise what it is to look under. Thats part of the difficulty. They've also assured me they'll let me know when they finally find another metaphorical tv remote.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  Yeah I assumed your comment was in good faith, and as a physics drop-out I'm well aware of how most people have no idea of the sheer scope of these research projects, so I didn't mean it as a jab against you.
  - dlsa 4y ago
    I didn't take it as a jab. I also received a bunch of messages from people poking fun at me elsewhere for my comment. In the past several physicists have been a source of fine wine when I've won a bet. There will probably be photos of couches in my office next week when I get back.
- not_kurt_godel 4y ago
  Ok, then where should they look if you're so smart? You think people who have dedicated their lives to studying this subject haven't considered the concept of looking everywhere possible, and that you're adding something to the discussion by trotting out this 'clever' metaphor?

gus_massa 4y ago

> Have you had a good look? It's difficult to explain, but they[1] tried very hard. For example the electron has an electric charge but it's also like a small magnet. In an ideal elementary particle, the value of the magnet is 2 * something. In a real elementary particle the value is almost-2 * something, so they are measuring the almost-2, and it's call g [2]. For an electron, the measured value of g is 2.00231930436256(35) , there are is an uncertainty of 0.000000000002%. The problem is that it agree with the current theoretical prediction. The muon is very similar to an electron, but the experimental g is [3] 2.0023318416(13) and the current theoretical prediction is 2.00233183620(86) It's a difference of 0.000000001%. Most people will be happy with that disagreement and forget about it. But They are happy because there is a disagreement and perhaps they can use that to discover a new particle. It still may be a long lived statistical fluke, but it already survived many years. Other team claimed that there is a small error in one of the experimental numbers used in the theoretical calculation, but I'm not sure if they are genius or crackpots or something in between. And there are many other experiments. I like for example the IceCube [4] that is just a giant chunk of ice in the Antarctica. They try to detect neutrinos from stars. It has many experiments, but in particular some experiments are useful to measure the difference of mass of the neutrinos that is a not very clear part of the Standard Model. [1] Not my area of research. They live in the next corridor. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-factor_(physics) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_g-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_g-2 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory

abhv 4y ago
gus_massa: Since you are likely an expert, could you recommend a resource that explains how you use the Lagrangian equation for the standard model [1] to actually compute a predicted value for the electron's g ? An elementary resource that goes through basic steps for a computer scientist (non expert in QFT) would be a great. A simpler particle than electron is also ok, but I'd love to understand how you mess with that equation. [1] http://nuclear.ucdavis.edu/~tgutierr/files/stmL1.html http://nuclear.ucdavis.edu/~tgutierr/files/stmL1.html
- 4y ago

elorant 4y ago

One thing to notice is that during the experiments they keep only a small percentage of the total data they could record due to limitations in storage and processing capabilities. There’s a lot of fuss inside the scientific community about what to keep and what to disregard.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

There probably is a hard limit on how many elemental particles you can find in the first place. I don't know if there are further theories. Are there X or Y-Bosons? Lowfat quark anti-particles?

gus_massa 4y ago
There are many enhancements of the Standard Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Mo... Some of them propose new particles, some of them make small changes to the particles we know.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

And sometimes there just isn't anything there to find. But we keep looking because the idea of nothing is simply too abhorrent. There is a tremendously difficult and disturbing aspect to Peer Gynt (the original story, not the music on which it's based). Searching for his "self" he peels off layer after layer like an onion, getting ever deeper seemingly towards a real self. But on the last layer he experiences the horror of finding nothing more. What he "is", is constituted by the sum of the layers. After that, the entire nature of the "search for meaning" has to change.

strbean 4y ago

> Or as someone I know likes to say to various smaller humans: have you looked around the couch? Really? Are you sure? Have you had a good look? this is how the tv remote usually subsequently reappears as there is a difference between just looking and having a good look. Dealing with larger humans in a social setting - the only method I've found that works for finding the remote is addressing one of them on the couch and saying "The remote is UNDER YOU!" Then they *actually look*.

Melatonic 4y ago

I've always thought that a huge limiting factor is that we can only really observe from our current point in time. We are time limited which is a big hindrance just as it would be to only observe things form a single physical position (which is also sort of true - but at least we can send probes and whatnot out there).

z3t4 4y ago

The best science is found by accident.

analog31 4y ago

That's happening. I have a friend who did a physics + data science PhD for analyzing existing data in a new way.

AussieWog93 4y ago

Just based on my experience in academia, there are probably plenty of people with good hunches about where to go next. Unfortunately, the system (grants system especially) is actively discouraging them from trying anything too new that would undermine the status of the incumbent experts. If you banned every single influential scientist who hasn't contributed a major discovery in the last 10 years from participating in academia, we'd have colonised the galaxy decades ago.