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> 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 fi

by 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.

by sampo 4y ago

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.