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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 rule

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.

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.