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Experiments are HARD. There is a joke among physicists that theoreticians are washed up by 35 but experimentalists don't even get started until 45. To make a
by bsder 2y ago
Experiments are HARD. There is a joke among physicists that theoreticians are washed up by 35 but experimentalists don't even get started until 45.
To make a physics experiment work you have to be ridiculous about recording details and have a strong intuition. You have to design the experiment such that you can differentiate between "hypothesis wrong" and "equipment doesn't work" because you don't know the answer.
(For example: When they turned on LIGO for the first time, they almost immediately caught a great event. Huge victory party, right? Nope. They promptly ignored it assuming that something was wrong with the machine. And it was only after significant post analysis and correlation that they decided that it was a real event.)
- andreareina 2y agoThe lengths they're going to fix the "loopholes" in the Bell Inequality tests are amazing.
- raverbashing 2y ago100% true And this is my sticking point with a lot of "Science skeptics" around that have skepticism as their personality Make no mistake, I do take scientific discoveries and knowledge very serious, and knowing the stories make it appreciate more the efforts and the work it took to get there But a lot of times people think the experiments give a very clear-cut results, when it's more like "one line is squiggly down and the other is squiggly up" with data being barely over 5 sigma