3 ms·

Stagnation of scientific fields is normal and can last many years. In that time, little anomalies pile up, are swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. To ad

Stagnation of scientific fields is normal and can last many years. In that time, little anomalies pile up, are swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. To admit anomalies can ruin careers, after all. Eventually someone (often very young/inexperienced) comes along and upends the field by proposing a different model or doing the experiment whose weight breaks the camels back. What's new here is the scale of the work. It's not clear how you upend a field where the price of entry is measured in billions of dollars.

XorNot 4y ago
Well that's not the case though: you can upend the field with data from the LHC - after all Einstein didn't do the Michelson-Mauley (how I spelt that right) experiment himself, but Special Relativity was developed out of that result existing.
- chopin 4y ago
  Michelson-Morley experiment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exp....
adamsmith143 4y ago
>Stagnation of scientific fields is normal and can last many years. In that time, little anomalies pile up, are swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. To admit anomalies can ruin careers, after all. Could not be more wrong for Particle Physics. An Anomaly could define your career and herald a Nobel Prize. That's exactly what we're looking for. We desperately want to find anomalies, not hide them.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  Really? Because the article seems to say the complete opposite in multiple instances. "Oh hey this thing doesn't match what is expected according to the standard model but yeah the standard model is tots fine bro." > For example, in 2017, physicists working with LHCb, one of four large particle detectors fed by the LHC, found that B mesons, particles that contain a heavy bottom quark, decay more often to an electron and a positron than to a particle called a muon and an antimuon. The standard model says the two rates should be the same, and the difference might be a hint of supersymmetric partners, Ellis says. So why is the standard model not in the trashcan?
  - at_a_remove 4y ago
    You never trashcan a model. You replace a model. You replace it with something else that is better. Currently, we don't have a "something else" that 1) explains everything the Standard Model does in the same places with the same results, 2) also explains whatever anomaly.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    >Really? Because the article seems to say the complete opposite in multiple instances. Where is it saying that Physicists are trying to avoid anomalous data? >"Oh hey this thing doesn't match what is expected according to the standard model but yeah the standard model is tots fine bro." No one in the Physics community thinks like this. As I said it's very nearly the complete opposite, that if major problems in the model were found via experiment the person who found it would be cheering because they just guaranteed themselves a Nobel Prize. The problems with the Standard Model are widely known and deeply studied. >So why is the standard model not in the trashcan? Because despite it's known shortcomings it can still calculate 99.99% of scenarios with arbitrary accuracy. There's a reason Newtonian Mechanics are still taught, because for the cast majority of cases it completely works.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > So why is the standard model not in the trashcan? Because there's not a strictly superior replacement yet. All models are wrong, some are useful.
  - cevi 4y ago
    My understanding is that we currently don't have enough data to be sure that the B meson anomaly is real, and not just a statistical fluctuation - it is only a few standard deviations away from what is expected. (A few more years of data should resolve the question of whether it is real, one way or the other.)
noslenwerdna 4y ago
How does finding an anomaly ruin a career? Any examples from particle physics?
chasil 4y ago
Fortunately, this new table-top Higgs discovery was not very expensive. Anything requiring the resources of the LHC or more will be far from spontaneous. https://www.livescience.com/magnetic-higgs-relative-discovered https://www.livescience.com/magnetic-higgs-relative-discover...
- roywiggins 4y ago
  The reporting on that one was pretty terrible. They discovered a quasi-particle, a behavior of some bulk matter that behaves like a Higgs. Not the same thing at all as the LHC's Higgs discovery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle

XorNot 4y ago

Well that's not the case though: you can upend the field with data from the LHC - after all Einstein didn't do the Michelson-Mauley (how I spelt that right) experiment himself, but Special Relativity was developed out of that result existing.

chopin 4y ago
Michelson-Morley experiment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exp....

adamsmith143 4y ago

>Stagnation of scientific fields is normal and can last many years. In that time, little anomalies pile up, are swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. To admit anomalies can ruin careers, after all. Could not be more wrong for Particle Physics. An Anomaly could define your career and herald a Nobel Prize. That's exactly what we're looking for. We desperately want to find anomalies, not hide them.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
Really? Because the article seems to say the complete opposite in multiple instances. "Oh hey this thing doesn't match what is expected according to the standard model but yeah the standard model is tots fine bro." > For example, in 2017, physicists working with LHCb, one of four large particle detectors fed by the LHC, found that B mesons, particles that contain a heavy bottom quark, decay more often to an electron and a positron than to a particle called a muon and an antimuon. The standard model says the two rates should be the same, and the difference might be a hint of supersymmetric partners, Ellis says. So why is the standard model not in the trashcan?
- at_a_remove 4y ago
  You never trashcan a model. You replace a model. You replace it with something else that is better. Currently, we don't have a "something else" that 1) explains everything the Standard Model does in the same places with the same results, 2) also explains whatever anomaly.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  >Really? Because the article seems to say the complete opposite in multiple instances. Where is it saying that Physicists are trying to avoid anomalous data? >"Oh hey this thing doesn't match what is expected according to the standard model but yeah the standard model is tots fine bro." No one in the Physics community thinks like this. As I said it's very nearly the complete opposite, that if major problems in the model were found via experiment the person who found it would be cheering because they just guaranteed themselves a Nobel Prize. The problems with the Standard Model are widely known and deeply studied. >So why is the standard model not in the trashcan? Because despite it's known shortcomings it can still calculate 99.99% of scenarios with arbitrary accuracy. There's a reason Newtonian Mechanics are still taught, because for the cast majority of cases it completely works.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > So why is the standard model not in the trashcan? Because there's not a strictly superior replacement yet. All models are wrong, some are useful.
- cevi 4y ago
  My understanding is that we currently don't have enough data to be sure that the B meson anomaly is real, and not just a statistical fluctuation - it is only a few standard deviations away from what is expected. (A few more years of data should resolve the question of whether it is real, one way or the other.)

noslenwerdna 4y ago

How does finding an anomaly ruin a career? Any examples from particle physics?

chasil 4y ago

Fortunately, this new table-top Higgs discovery was not very expensive. Anything requiring the resources of the LHC or more will be far from spontaneous. https://www.livescience.com/magnetic-higgs-relative-discovered https://www.livescience.com/magnetic-higgs-relative-discover...

roywiggins 4y ago
The reporting on that one was pretty terrible. They discovered a quasi-particle, a behavior of some bulk matter that behaves like a Higgs. Not the same thing at all as the LHC's Higgs discovery. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle