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the thing is that this pattern of pushing to unexplored energy levels did work before. Unicorns were found in the unexplored forests of Congo. In fact an entire

the thing is that this pattern of pushing to unexplored energy levels did work before. Unicorns were found in the unexplored forests of Congo. In fact an entire zoo of unicorns of all shapes and forms was found, an incredible achievement that stands among the most important stuff our gray-tinted gel has managed to internalize about the universe. You can't blame modern day particle physicists for being born late for the Unicorn chasing party... so the argurment now is, for how much longer is it reasonable to be roaming difficult terrains in the hope that we might have a repeat miracle? Its practically impossible to answer. "All Unicorns have been discovered" has been a scientist's cry as far back as Laplace.

hinkley 4y ago
The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? That's 40 years. edit: her complaint is that once funding sources realize that 'particle physicists shill ridiculous ideas for research grants', all of the money dries up and won't return for at least a generation or two. That's an existential threat to the field. That sounds like a legitimate complaint to me. Unfortunately she's also shining a spotlight on the thing she's worried about other people noticing.
- college_physics 4y ago
  > That's 40 years. Is that a lot? On what basis could we decide?(1) I am not saying it isn't, I am just saying it is a rather subjective call which sort of looks at the prior pace of discoveries and extrapolates a judgement. (1) it took more than that from the first gravitational wave detector to an actual discovery
  - hinkley 4y ago
    I'm going to start repeating myself in separate replies here. Einstein didn't predict gravitational waves as a standalone theory. Gravitational waves are a prediction of General Relativity. General Relativity was shown to be plausible based on data already at hand and data they could collect. Gravity waves and lensing and frame dragging all confirm what we already suspected to be true. Which is good and bad news because they increase the corroborating evidence for an existing theory, and they take out huge chunks of opportunity for some other theory to explain the same phenomenon but introduce new loopholes or consequences that let us do new things like build Foundation power supplies (nuclear reactors the size of gumballs) or FTL travel or explain why galaxies move 'wrong'.
    - college_physics 4y ago
      Physics is not scifi. As the good professor might say, its stranger and always more surprising than the bizarre combinatorial pseudoscience our brains might concoct in the absence of experimental guard rails.
- Tostino 4y ago
  > The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? The Higgs Boson was found in 2012 by the LHC and was predicted by the standard model.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Higgs et al didn't just predict the boson though, right? His team explained other properties of particle physics and their model also predicted a particle.
- akiselev 4y ago
  > The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? That's 40 years. IANAPhysicist so correct me if I'm wrong but the last time we found something predicted [1] by the Standard Model was the Higgs Boson in 2012. Before that it was the Tau neutrino and the quark-gluon plasma in 2000, the top quark in 1995, and then (the discovery I think you're referring to) the W and Z bosons in 1983 [1] we mean experimental confirmation, right?
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Also not a physicist, but I think the distinction being made here is that Higgs et al explained existing phenomenon that did not make sense within the existing theory, and oh by the way if we're correct we've also created a hole in the standard model where a particle exists with certain properties that were a bit nebulous. For instance special relativity explains gravitational lensing and predicted that frame dragging would also be discovered, but also explained other problems. The theories that make a physicist's day seem to tie the past to the present and the present to the future: This happened, we don't know why. Here's a theory that explains those measurements. Here's a prediction we can test now/with a billion dollars that will corroborate my theory, and here are some new consequences of the theory that require <future tech> to be sure that this is 'true' instead of an accident of math. Like atomic clocks or giant particle accelerators.
    - staunton 4y ago
      > special relativity explains gravitational lensing You mean general relativity
sampo 4y ago
> You can't blame modern day particle physicists for being born late for the Unicorn chasing party... 1950s, 1950, 1970s, particle physics was a fast-moving field, theory and experiment moved hand in hand. Guided by the intuition of what is mathematically elegant, you propose an extension of current theories, and soon someone in experimental physics with particle colliders publishes results that confirm your theory. Or the other way round: Experimental physicists publish new collider results, and theorists rush in to explain them with new theories. But you had to be fast, and greedy (in a good way). If you didn't work out and publish the new mathematical expansion of current theories, someone else surely did. It was also a good time to be a scientist in academia: Population was growing (15% per decade in USA, 10% per decade in Europe), economy was growing, and graduates from a previous (smaller) generation found jobs and careers in the expanding university system, to teach the next (larger) generation of students. The standard model was competed in the 1970s. Theoretical particle physics was a well-oiled, battle tested fast spinning machine. Ready to continue the mad gold rush of past 30 years. Follow your intuition of mathematical elegance, propose new theories, wait for experiments to confirm them. But experiments stopped finding traces of new particles. The standard model of particle physics was complete, and apparently all its particles were already discovered. Well, you had to wait a bit longer for: Top quark 1995, tau neutrino 2000, Higgs boson 2012. The fast machine of theoretical physics kept rotating and spinning out mathematical structures and theories. But experiments were no longer confirming, or even guiding, the development of theory. The mode of work that had worked beautifully up to mid-1970s didn't work anymore. Supersymmetry made predictions, but all turned out to be wrong. String theory was such a complicated mathematical construction, that we don't even know if it makes predictions (in the Popperian sense) at all. So yes, we can blame particle physics. What first worked for 30 years, hasn't been working anymore for 40 years. You should try something different.
- college_physics 4y ago
  A good summary of key attributes of that journey (why I like HN) but I would insist the conclusion doesn't follow directly and is rushed. We know that we are far from having figured out all fundamental physics: All the "dark" stuff in cosmology points to the pieces of the puzzle not fitting well together, if at all. The question is what sort of local experiments can help lift that next weil of ignorance and if we are collectively capable to imagine them and pursue them. The issue with local physics is that it is what it is (as Feynman who triggered this thread might say) and what is accessible to us to explore does not match to perfection the socioeconomic convulsions of homo sapiens. The high energy accelerator physics paradigm (which is but one of the possible local physics windows) may have been exhausted for our current cirumstances but I would bet not in general. The pattern of all physical systems we know is that if you keep pushing them they keep revealing new behavior. We may have hit an energy gap that requires too many resources to cross. But maybe the only resource missing is imagination. Who is to tell? What is my conclusion? I would agree the success patterns of the past will not repeat on a cookie cutter basis. And theoretical physics is certainly gyrating uncontollably in the absence of experimental anchors. This only raises the bar for people to do a better job at connecting the dots.

hinkley 4y ago

The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? That's 40 years. edit: her complaint is that once funding sources realize that 'particle physicists shill ridiculous ideas for research grants', all of the money dries up and won't return for at least a generation or two. That's an existential threat to the field. That sounds like a legitimate complaint to me. Unfortunately she's also shining a spotlight on the thing she's worried about other people noticing.

college_physics 4y ago
> That's 40 years. Is that a lot? On what basis could we decide?(1) I am not saying it isn't, I am just saying it is a rather subjective call which sort of looks at the prior pace of discoveries and extrapolates a judgement. (1) it took more than that from the first gravitational wave detector to an actual discovery
- hinkley 4y ago
  I'm going to start repeating myself in separate replies here. Einstein didn't predict gravitational waves as a standalone theory. Gravitational waves are a prediction of General Relativity. General Relativity was shown to be plausible based on data already at hand and data they could collect. Gravity waves and lensing and frame dragging all confirm what we already suspected to be true. Which is good and bad news because they increase the corroborating evidence for an existing theory, and they take out huge chunks of opportunity for some other theory to explain the same phenomenon but introduce new loopholes or consequences that let us do new things like build Foundation power supplies (nuclear reactors the size of gumballs) or FTL travel or explain why galaxies move 'wrong'.
  - college_physics 4y ago
    Physics is not scifi. As the good professor might say, its stranger and always more surprising than the bizarre combinatorial pseudoscience our brains might concoct in the absence of experimental guard rails.
Tostino 4y ago
> The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? The Higgs Boson was found in 2012 by the LHC and was predicted by the standard model.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Higgs et al didn't just predict the boson though, right? His team explained other properties of particle physics and their model also predicted a particle.
akiselev 4y ago
> The last time we found something that was predicted by the Standard Model was 1983, wasn't it? That's 40 years. IANAPhysicist so correct me if I'm wrong but the last time we found something predicted [1] by the Standard Model was the Higgs Boson in 2012. Before that it was the Tau neutrino and the quark-gluon plasma in 2000, the top quark in 1995, and then (the discovery I think you're referring to) the W and Z bosons in 1983 [1] we mean experimental confirmation, right?
- hinkley 4y ago
  Also not a physicist, but I think the distinction being made here is that Higgs et al explained existing phenomenon that did not make sense within the existing theory, and oh by the way if we're correct we've also created a hole in the standard model where a particle exists with certain properties that were a bit nebulous. For instance special relativity explains gravitational lensing and predicted that frame dragging would also be discovered, but also explained other problems. The theories that make a physicist's day seem to tie the past to the present and the present to the future: This happened, we don't know why. Here's a theory that explains those measurements. Here's a prediction we can test now/with a billion dollars that will corroborate my theory, and here are some new consequences of the theory that require <future tech> to be sure that this is 'true' instead of an accident of math. Like atomic clocks or giant particle accelerators.
  - staunton 4y ago
    > special relativity explains gravitational lensing You mean general relativity

sampo 4y ago

> You can't blame modern day particle physicists for being born late for the Unicorn chasing party... 1950s, 1950, 1970s, particle physics was a fast-moving field, theory and experiment moved hand in hand. Guided by the intuition of what is mathematically elegant, you propose an extension of current theories, and soon someone in experimental physics with particle colliders publishes results that confirm your theory. Or the other way round: Experimental physicists publish new collider results, and theorists rush in to explain them with new theories. But you had to be fast, and greedy (in a good way). If you didn't work out and publish the new mathematical expansion of current theories, someone else surely did. It was also a good time to be a scientist in academia: Population was growing (15% per decade in USA, 10% per decade in Europe), economy was growing, and graduates from a previous (smaller) generation found jobs and careers in the expanding university system, to teach the next (larger) generation of students. The standard model was competed in the 1970s. Theoretical particle physics was a well-oiled, battle tested fast spinning machine. Ready to continue the mad gold rush of past 30 years. Follow your intuition of mathematical elegance, propose new theories, wait for experiments to confirm them. But experiments stopped finding traces of new particles. The standard model of particle physics was complete, and apparently all its particles were already discovered. Well, you had to wait a bit longer for: Top quark 1995, tau neutrino 2000, Higgs boson 2012. The fast machine of theoretical physics kept rotating and spinning out mathematical structures and theories. But experiments were no longer confirming, or even guiding, the development of theory. The mode of work that had worked beautifully up to mid-1970s didn't work anymore. Supersymmetry made predictions, but all turned out to be wrong. String theory was such a complicated mathematical construction, that we don't even know if it makes predictions (in the Popperian sense) at all. So yes, we can blame particle physics. What first worked for 30 years, hasn't been working anymore for 40 years. You should try something different.

college_physics 4y ago
A good summary of key attributes of that journey (why I like HN) but I would insist the conclusion doesn't follow directly and is rushed. We know that we are far from having figured out all fundamental physics: All the "dark" stuff in cosmology points to the pieces of the puzzle not fitting well together, if at all. The question is what sort of local experiments can help lift that next weil of ignorance and if we are collectively capable to imagine them and pursue them. The issue with local physics is that it is what it is (as Feynman who triggered this thread might say) and what is accessible to us to explore does not match to perfection the socioeconomic convulsions of homo sapiens. The high energy accelerator physics paradigm (which is but one of the possible local physics windows) may have been exhausted for our current cirumstances but I would bet not in general. The pattern of all physical systems we know is that if you keep pushing them they keep revealing new behavior. We may have hit an energy gap that requires too many resources to cross. But maybe the only resource missing is imagination. Who is to tell? What is my conclusion? I would agree the success patterns of the past will not repeat on a cookie cutter basis. And theoretical physics is certainly gyrating uncontollably in the absence of experimental anchors. This only raises the bar for people to do a better job at connecting the dots.