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Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
- tehjoker 9mo agoIt's kind of legitimate, but it's kind of sad to see some of the smartest people in society just being like "maybe AI will just give me the answer," a phrase that has a lot of potential to be thought terminating.
- emmelaich 9mo agoThat's mentioned in the article too: >Cari Cesarotti, a postdoctoral fellow in the theory group at CERN, is skeptical about that future. She notices chatbots’ mistakes, and how they’ve become too much of a crutch for physics students. “AI is making people worse at physics,” she said.
- yalok 9mo agothis. Deep understanding of physics involves building a mental model & intuition how things work, and the process of building is what gives the skill to deduce & predict. Using AI to just get to the answers directly prevents building that "muscle" strength...
- gowld 9mo agoAI chatbots are also making people better at physics, by answering questions the textbook doesn't or the professor can't explain clearly, patiently. Critical thinking skills are critical. Students cheating with chatbots might not have put in the effort to learn without chatbots.
- 0x3f 9mo agoI'm quite happy that it might give me, with pre-existing skills, more time on the clock to stay relevant.
- jahnu 9mo agoI find the arguments from those who say there is no crisis convincing. Progress doesn’t happen at a constant rate. We made incredible unprecedented progress in the 20th century. The most likely scenario is that to slow down for a while. Perhaps hundreds of years again! Nobody can know. We are still making enormous strides compared to most of scientific history.
- Insanity 9mo agoAlthough we do have many more people now working on these problems than any time in the past. That said, science progresses one dead scientist at the time so might still take generations for a new golden era.
- ktallett 9mo agoIs it more that even the most dedicated and passionate researchers have to frame their interests in a way that will get funding? Particle Physics right now is not the thing those with the cash will fund right now. AI and QC is the focus.
- Legend2440 9mo agoWell, it's hard to make an argument for a $100 billion collider when your $10 billion collider didn't find anything revolutionary. Scaling up particle colliders has arguably hit diminishing returns.
- bananaflag 9mo agoIt's basically the opposite situation from 150 years ago. Back then, we thought our theory was more or less complete while having experimental data which disproved it (Michelson-Morley experiment, Mercury perihelion, I am sure there are others). Right now, we know our theories are incomplete (since GR and QFT are incompatible) while having no experimental data which contradicts them.
- Paracompact 9mo agoWhat about underexplained cosmological epicycles like dark matter (in explaining long-standing divergences of gravitational theory from observation), or the Hubble tension?
- XorNot 9mo agoThis is your regular reminder that epicycles were not an incorrect theory addition until an alternative hypothesis could explain the same behavior without requiring them.
- Paracompact 9mo agoSure, but in that regard dark matter is even more unsatisfying than (contemporary) epicycles, because not only does it add extra complexity, it doesn't even characterize the source of that complexity beyond its gravitational effects.
- cozzyd 9mo agoEven better, there are the "nightmare" scenarios where dark matter can only interact gravitationally with Standard Model particles.
- Paracompact 9mo agoPersonally—and this is where I expect to lose the materialists that I imagine predominate HN—I think we are already in a nightmare scenario with regard to another area: the science of consciousness. The following seem likely to me: (1) Consciousness exists, and is not an illusion that doesn't need explaining (a la Daniel Dennett), nor does it drop out of some magical part of physical theory we've somehow overlooked until now; (2) Mind-matter interactions do not exist, that is, purely physical phenomena can be perfectly explained by appeals to purely physical theories. Such are the stakes of "naturalistic dualist" thinkers like David Chalmers. But if this is the case, it implies that the physics of matter and the physics of consciousness are orthogonal to each other. Much like it would be a nightmare to stipulate that dark matter is a purely gravitational interaction and that's that, it would be a nightmare to stipulate that consciousness and qualia arise noninteractionally from certain physical processes just because. And if there is at least one materially noninteracting orthogonal component to our universe, what if there are more that we can't even perceive?
- davidw 9mo agoIt's impossible to tell without opening the box the particle physics is in.
- gowld 9mo agoInformation content of the article: The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 completed the Standard Model of particle physics, but the field has since faced a "crisis" due to the lack of new discoveries. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has not found any particles or forces beyond the Standard Model, defying theoretical expectations that additional particles would appear to solve the "hierarchy problem"—the unnatural gap between the Higgs mass and the Planck scale. This absence of new physics challenged the "naturalness" argument that had long guided the field. In 2012, physicist Adam Falkowski predicted the field would undergo a slow decay without new discoveries. Reviewing the state of the field in 2026, he maintains that experimental particle physics is indeed dying, citing a "brain drain" where talented postdocs are leaving the field for jobs in AI and data science. However, the LHC remains operational and is expected to run for at least another decade. Artificial intelligence is now being integrated into the field to improve data handling. AI pattern recognizers are classifying collision debris more accurately than human-written algorithms, allowing for more precise measurements of "scattering amplitude" or interaction probabilities. Some physicists, like Matt Strassler, argue that new physics might not lie at higher energies but could be hidden in "unexplored territory" at lower energies, such as unstable dark matter particles that decay into muon-antimuon pairs. CERN physicists have proposed a Future Circular Collider (FCC), a 91-kilometer tunnel that would triple the circumference of the LHC. The plan involves first colliding electrons to measure scattering amplitudes precisely, followed by proton collisions at energies roughly seven times higher than the LHC later in the century. Formal approval and funding for this project are not expected before 2028. Meanwhile, U.S. physicists are pursuing a muon collider. Muons are elementary particles like electrons but are 200 times heavier, allowing for high-energy, clean collisions. The challenge is that muons are highly unstable and decay in microseconds, requiring rapid acceleration. A June 2025 national report endorsed the program, which is estimated to take about 30 years to develop and cost between $10 and $20 billion. China has reportedly moved away from plans to build a massive supercollider. Instead, they are favoring a cheaper experiment costing hundreds of millions of dollars—a "super-tau-charm facility"—designed to produce tau particles and charm quarks at lower energies. On the theoretical side, some researchers have shifted to "amplitudeology," the abstract mathematical study of scattering amplitudes, in hopes of reformulating particle physics equations to connect with quantum gravity. Additionally, Jared Kaplan, a former physicist and co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, suggests that AI progress is outpacing scientific experimentation, positing that future colliders or theoretical breakthroughs might eventually be designed or discovered by AI rather than humans.
- bsder 9mo agoTheoretical physics progresses via the anomalies it can't explain. The problem is that we've mostly explained everything we have easy access to. We simply don't have that many anomalies left. Theoretical physicists were both happy and disappointed that the LHC simply verified everything--theories were correct, but there weren't really any pointers to where to go next. Quantum gravity seems to be the big one, but that is not something we can penetrate easily. LIGO just came online, and could only really detect enormous events (like black hole mergers). And while we don't always understand what things do as we scale up or in the aggregate, that doesn't require new physics to explain.
- mhandley 9mo agoNeutrino mass is another anomaly, which is at least slightly easier to probe than quantum gravity: https://cerncourier.com/a/the-neutrino-mass-puzzle/ https://cerncourier.com/a/the-neutrino-mass-puzzle/
- beezle 9mo agoPlease do not conflate the broad "theoretical physics" with the very specific "beyond the standard model" physics questions. There are many other areas of physics with countless unsolved problems/mysteries.
- bsder 9mo agoSure, there are things like "Really, how do superconductors work?", but nobody (mostly) believes that understanding things like that requires "new physics". And, I think, most people would place that kind of stuff under "solid state physics" anyway.
- squeefers 9mo agooh i dont know, being able to predict the path of a particle seems pretty basic to me, and it cannot be done for any given particle.
- GMoromisato 9mo agoThe use of "AI" in particle physics is not new. In 1999 they were using neural nets to compute various results. Here's one from Measurement of the top quark pair production cross section in p¯p collisions using multijet final states [https://repository.ias.ac.in/36977/1/36977.pdf https://repository.ias.ac.in/36977/1/36977.pdf] "The analysis has been optimized using neural networks to achieve the smallest expected fractional uncertainty on the t¯t production cross section"
- jdshaffer 9mo agoI remember back in 1995 or so being in a professor's office at Indiana University and he was talking about trying to figure out how to use Neural Networks to automatically track particle trails in bubble chamber results. He was part of a project at CERN at the time. So, yeah, they've been using NNs for quite awhile. :-)
- elashri 9mo agoParticle identification using NN classifiers was actually on the early success stories of NN. These are pretty standard algorithms in tracking and trigger software in HEP experiments now. There are even standard tools in the field to help you train your own. What is more interesting currently is things like anomaly detection using ML/NN and foundational models..etc.
- BrandoElFollito 9mo agoI did my PhD in physics using nn back in 1997. It was not thriving yet, but was quite advanced already. I remember I used a library (THE library) from a German university which was all the rage at that time.
- aatd86 9mo agoIsn't it the mathematics that is lagging? Amplituhedron? Higher dimensional models? Fun fact: I got to read the thesis of one my uncles who was a young professor back in the 90's. Right when they were discovering bosons. They were already modelling them as tensors back then. And probably multilinear transformations. Now that I am grown I can understand a little more, I was about 10 years old back then. I had no idea he was studying and teaching the state of the art. xD
- elzbardico 9mo agoTensors are pretty old in physics; they are a central concept in Einstein's General Relativity. You can find tensors even in some niche stuff in macroeconomics.
- ecshafer 9mo agoTensors are like 200 years old in mathematics. Gauss talked about Tensors.
- tasty_freeze 9mo agoHere is one fact that seems, to me, pretty convincing that there is another layer underneath what we know. The charge of electrons is -1 and protons +1. It has been experimentally measured out to 12 digits or so to be the same magnitude, just opposite charge. However, there are no theories why this is -- they are simply measured and that is it. It beggars belief that these just happen to be exactly (as far as we can measure) the same magnitude. There almost certainly is a lower level mechanism which explains why they are exactly the same but opposite.
- PaulHoule 9mo agoIf it wasn't the case then matter wouldn't be stable.
- libraryofbabel 9mo agoIs that actually true, if the charges differed at the 12th decimal place only? That’s non-obvious to me.
- baggy_trough 9mo agoYes because matter would have a residual charge that would massively overpower gravity even at that small a discrepancy.
- PaulHoule 9mo agoTo be devil's advocate maybe there is a surplus deficit of 1-part-in-10^12 in electrons relative to protons.
- tasty_freeze 9mo agoAgreed (well, assuming the delta is more than a small fraction of a percent or whatever). But this is begging the question. If they are really independent then the vast, overwhelming fraction of all possible universes simply wouldn't have matter. Ours does have matter, so it makes our universe exceedingly unlikely. I find it far more parsimonious to assume they are connected by an undiscovered (and perhaps never to be discovered) mechanism. Some lean on the multiverse and the anthropic principle to explain it, but that is far less parsimonious.
- meindnoch 9mo agoMaybe it's time for physicists to switch to agile? Don't try to solve the theory of the Universe at once; that's the waterfall model. Try to come up with just a single new equation each sprint!
- ggm 9mo agoI am sure others will say it better, but the cat-in-the-box experiment is a shockingly bad metaphor for the idea behind quantum states and observer effect. I will commit the first sin, by declaring without fear of contradiction the cat actually IS either alive or dead. it is not in a superposition of states. What is unknown is our knowledge of the state, and what collapses is that uncertainty. If you shift this to the particle, not the cat, what changes? because if very much changes, my first comment about the unsuitability of the metaphor is upheld, and if very little changes, my comment has been disproven. It would be clear I am neither a physicist nor a logician.
- sliken 9mo agoAlong similar lines, the double-slit experiment, seems simple. Two slits let light though and you get bands where they constructively or destructively interfere, just like waves. However I still find it crazy that when you slow down the laser and one photon at a time goes through either slit you still get the bands. Which begs the question, what exactly is it constructively or destructively interfering with? Still seems like there's much to be learned about the quantum world, gravity, and things like dark energy vs MOND.
- ggm 9mo agoI had a conversation about this in HN some months back. It's a surprisingly modern experiment. It demanded an ability to reliably emit single photons. Young's theory may be 1800 but single photon emission is 1970-80. (This is what I was told, exploring my belief it's always been fringes in streams of photons not emerging over repeated applications of single photons and I was wrong)
- lefra 9mo agoTo get single photons, you just need to stack up enough stained glass infront of a light source. That's been acheivable for aeons (the photon will go through at random time though). The difficult part is single photon _detectors_, they're the key technology to explore the single-photon version of Young's experiment (which originally showed that light has wave-like properties).
- mhandley 9mo agoOne interesting gap in the standard model is why neutrinos have mass: https://cerncourier.com/a/the-neutrino-mass-puzzle/ https://cerncourier.com/a/the-neutrino-mass-puzzle/
- beezle 9mo agoI never liked that the physics community shifted from 'high energy' particle physics (the topic of the article) to referring to this branch as just 'particle physics' which I think leaves the impression that anything to do with 'particles' is now a dead end. Nuclear physics (ie, low/medium energy physics) covers diverse topics, many with real world application - yet travels with a lot of the same particles (ie, quarks, gluons). Because it is so diverse, it is not dead/dying in the way HEP is today.
- grebc 9mo agoWhat’s the saying… if your only tool is a collider?
- mattlangston 9mo agoExperimental particle physicist here. It's just hard. I measured the electron's vector coupling to the Z boson at SLAC in the late 1990s, and the answer from that measurement is: we don't know yet - and that's the point. Thirty years later, the discrepancy between my experiment and LEP's hasn't been resolved. It might be nothing. It might be the first whisper of dark matter or a new force. And the only way to find out is to build the next machine. That's not 'dead', that's science being hard. My measurement is a thread that's been dangling for decades, waiting to be pulled.
- sashank_1509 9mo agoWhat would the cost of the “next machine” be? Is it going to be tens of billions or can we make progress with lesser money. If it is going to be tens of billions, then maybe we need to invest in engineering to reduce this cost, because it’s not sustainable to suspend thirty years, tens of billions for every incremental improvement.
- sigmoid10 9mo agoThis kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips that ultimately enabled you to type this comment on your phone/computer. The return on that investment is obvious. But it is not just about making money: The entire field of radiation therapy for cancer exists and continues to improve because people figured out ways to control particle beams with extreme precision and in a much more economical way to study particle physics. Heck, commercial MRIs exist and continue to improve because physicists want cheaper, stronger magnets so they can build more powerful colliders. What if in the future you could do advanced screening quickly and without hassle at your GP's office instead of having to wait for an appointment (and possibly pay lots of money) at an imaging specialist center? And if they find something they could immediately nuke it without cutting you open? We're talking about the ultimate possibility of Star Trek level medbays here. Let the physicists build the damn thing however they want and future society will be better off for sure. God knows what else they will figure out along the way, but it will definitely be better for the world than sinking another trillion dollars on wars in the middle east.
- GlibMonkeyDeath 9mo agoIt's hard. Particle physics faces the problem that in order to dig down to ever smaller scales, ironically, ever larger experiments are needed. We've pretty much built large enough colliders for our current understanding. No one really knows how much more energy would be needed to expose something new - it might be incremental, within current technical reach, or it might be many orders of magnitude beyond our current capabilities. The experiments have become expensive enough that there isn't a lot of appetite to build giant new systems without some really good reason. The hard part is coming up with a theory to justify the outlay, if you can't generate compelling data from existing systems. Physics advances have been generally driven by observation, obtained through better and better instrumentation. We might be entering a long period of technology development, waiting for the moment our measurements can access (either through greater energy or precision) some new physics.
- Rury 9mo agoIt's just hard. I mean... it could very well be, that there's so many deeper layers underneath what we know in particle physics, but from our scale, also so infeasible to build something to analyze and decompose the nuanced behavior happening at that level, to the point that it's practically impossible to do so. Just like it is impossible to split an atom with your bare hands...
- albatross79 9mo agoWhy are we even trying to look deeper? To fit our mathematical curves better? Abstract spacetime, fields, virtual particles, wave function collapse, quantized energy, wave particle duality, etc. This is all BS. And I'm not disputing the theories or the experimental results. These concepts are unintelligible. They are self contradictory. They are not even abstractions, they are mutually exclusive paradigms forced together into a bewilderment. I'm not disputing that the math fits the observations. But these are not explanations. If this is what it's come to, all we can expect from here on is to better fit the math to the observation. And in the end, an equation that tells us nothing about what we really wanted to know, like "what is it really"? Nobody is going to be satisfied with an equation, so why are we still funding this enterprise, for better lasers to kill bad guys?
- drdeca 9mo agoThe universe is not obligated to appeal to your aesthetic tastes in its innermost functioning. Maybe you aren’t going to be satisfied with the sort of complicated mathematics which appears to be correct (or, on the right track). If you have complaints about the aesthetics of how the universe works, take it up with God. Personally, I think there is a lot of beauty to be found in it. I’ll admit that there are a few parts that go against my tastes (I don’t like needing to resort to distributions instead of proper functions), but that’s probably just intellectual laziness on my part.
- squeefers 9mo ago> The universe is not obligated to appeal to your aesthetic tastes in its innermost functioning. This is truly a copout. When science faulters in explaining the world we get answers like this. His argument isnt with the universe, but with out own scientific theories. If you dont want your theories about the physical world to explain physical world, then be an engineer. Science explains the world, engineers use those theories. QM has large gaps and doesnt actually explain much, but I guess the universe doesnt care whether our theories are wildly off the mark or not.
- albatross79 9mo agoIt's not a matter of taste. This is like going to a restaurant, expecting a delicious meal, and being brought a dish with a fancy name made out of the actual menu itself. Would anyone go back there to eat?
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoAll of science is getting harder as the easiest discoveries are all pretty much behind us. LLMs were a breakthrough I didn't expect and it's likely the last one we'll see in our lifetime.
- iterance 9mo agoSpecific fields may not advance for decades at a time, but we are hardly in a scientific drought. There have been dramatic advances in countless fields over the last 20 years alone and there is no good reason to expect such advances to abruptly cease. Frankly this is far too pessimistic.
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoI don't understand what is wrong with pessimism. That's not a valid critique. If someone is pessimistic but his description of the world matches REALITY, then there's nothing wrong with his view point. Either way this is also opinion based. There hasn't been a revolutionary change in technology in the last 20 years. I don't consider smart phones to be revolutionary. I consider going to the moon revolutionary and catching a rocket sort of revolutionary. Actually I take that back I predict mars as a possible break through along with LLMs, but we got lucky with musk.
- tehjoker 9mo agogenetic technology and computing technology have been the biggest drivers for a while. i do think it is remarkable to video call another continent. communication technology is disruptive and revolutionary though it looks like chaos. ai is interesting too if it lives up to the hype even slightly. catching a rocket is very impressive, but its just a lower cost method for earth orbit. it does unlock megaconstellations tho
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoYeah none of those are step function changes. Video calling another continent is like a tiny step from TV. Yeah I receive video wirelessly on my tv not that amazed when I can stretch the distance further with a call that has video. Big deal. AI is the step function change. The irony is that it became so pervasive and intertwined with slop people like you forget that what it does now (write all code) was unheard of just a couple years ago. ai surpassed the hype, now it’s popular to talk shit about it.
- tariky 9mo agoTo my uneducated eye it looks like they are stuck in limbo for 120 years. Nothing practical has been create based on those theories. It is just words and calculations spinning in circles. I wish those people focus on practical real world physics. So we all can enjoy new innovations.
- WantonQuantum 9mo agoThe device you used to make this comment relies heavily on quantum effects to make efficient transistors. The necessary theoretical understanding of semiconductors did not exist 120 years ago.
- jacquesm 9mo ago> Nothing practical has been create based on those theories. Ever used GPS? A CD player? A laser? Semiconductors?
- gary_0 9mo agoEinstein laid the theoretical foundations for lasers in 1917, and it took over 40 years of "impractical" scientific work before the first functioning laser was built. It took decades more for them to become a cheap, ubiquitous technological building-block. The research is still continuing, and there's no reason to assume it will stop eventually bearing fruit (for the societies that haven't decimated their scientific workforce, anyways). Look at the insanity required to design and build the EUV lasers in ASML's machines, which were used to fabricate the CPU I'm using right now, over a century after Einstein first scribbled down those obscure equations!
- jacquesm 9mo agoI sincerely wonder how someone that is unaware of any of this finds their way onto HN, but at the same time it is an educational opportunity. 'nothing practical' indeed...
- davrosthedalek 9mo agoIn addition, lasers were long believed to be a scientific novelty without any real world use.
- Razengan 9mo agoMaybe this is all we can learn from home and we need to get out more.
- benreesman 9mo agoIt is almost always the case that when progress stops for some meaningful period of time that a parochial taboo would need violating to move forwards. The best known example is the pre- and post-Copernican conceptions of our relationship to the sun. But long before and ever since: if you show me physics with its wheels slipping in mud I'll show you a culture not yet ready for a new frame. We are so very attached to the notions of a unique and continuous identity observed by a physically real consciousness observing an unambiguous arrow of time. Causality. That's what you give up next.
- mastermage 9mo agothe fuck you mean giving up causality?
- fatbird 9mo agoThis is a common framing of the Copernican revolution, and it's wrong. Copernicus was proposing circular orbits with the sun at the center instead of the earth. The Copernican model required more epicycles for accurate predictions than the considerably well-proven Ptolemaic model did, with the earth at the centre. It wasn't until Kepler came along and proposed elliptical orbits that a heliocentric solar system was obviously a genuine advance on the model, both simpler and more accurate. There was no taboo being preserved by rejecting Copernicus's model. The thinkers of the day rightfully saw a conceptual shift with no apparent advantage and several additional costs.
- kubanczyk 9mo ago> The thinkers of the day rightfully saw a conceptual shift with no apparent advantage and several additional costs. I'm holding a big fat Citation Needed banner. Seemingly none of these "thinkers of the day" took it far enough to write down the thoughts. While at it, were the "thinkers of the day" fond of the idea of Ptolemy's equant?
- raincole 9mo agoIt's easy to give up existing concepts. It's called being a crackpot and you can find thousands of papers doing that online.
- mastermage 9mo agoIts probably just very hard, in my opinion as a physicist
- AIorNot 9mo agoCurious what everyone thinks about this physicists idea - the universe as a Neural Network (yes yes moving the universe model paradigm from the old Clockwork to machine to computer to neural network) I found it interesting and speculative but also fascinating See video here: https://youtu.be/73IdQGgfxas?si=PKyTP8ElWNr87prG https://youtu.be/73IdQGgfxas?si=PKyTP8ElWNr87prG AI summary of the video: This video discusses Professor Vitaly Vanchurin's theory that the universe is literally a neural network, where learning dynamics are the fundamental physics (0:24). This concept goes beyond simply using neural networks to model physical phenomena; instead, it posits that the universe's own learning process gives rise to physical laws (0:46). Key takeaways from the discussion include: • The Universe as a Neural Network (0:00-0:57): Vanchurin emphasizes that he is proposing this as a promising model for describing the universe, rather than a definitive statement of its ontological nature (2:48). The core idea is that the learning dynamics, which are typically used to optimize functions in machine learning, are the fundamental physics of the cosmos (6:20). • Deriving Fundamental Field Equations (21:17-22:01): The theory suggests that well-known physics equations, such as Einstein's field equations, Dirac, and Klein-Gordon equations, emerge from the learning process of this neural network universe. • Fermions and Particle Emergence (28:47-32:15): The conversation delves into how particles like fermions could emerge within this framework, with the idea that useful network configurations for learning survive, similar to natural selection. • Emergent Quantum Mechanics (44:53-49:31): The video explores how quantum behaviors, including the Schrödinger equation, could emerge from the two distinct dynamics within the system: activation and learning. This requires the system to have access to a "bath" or "reservoir" of neurons. • Natural Selection at the Subatomic Scale (1:05:10-1:07:34): Vanchurin suggests that natural selection operates on subatomic particles, where configurations that are more useful for minimizing the loss function (i.e., for efficient learning) survive and those that are not are removed. • Consciousness and Observers (1:15:40-1:24:09): The theory integrates the concept of observers into physics, proposing a three-way unification of quantum mechanics, general relativity, and observers. Consciousness is viewed as a measure of learning efficiency within a subsystem (1:30:38).
- pjmlp 9mo agoAs CERN Alumni, this isn't easy, the data is endless, processing it takes take, usually everything is new technology, and also needs to be validated before being put into use. Thousands of people have worked on bringing LHC up during a few decades before, Higgs came to be, across all engineering branches. This stuff is hard, and there is no roadmap on how to get there.
- alt227 9mo ago> Higgs came to be Did it? I thought the whole point was that the data that came from LHC showed that it was inconclusive and needed a bigger more powerful machine to prove it. Happy to be proved wrong.
- pjmlp 9mo agoI am out of CERN since 2004, and only return there during Alumni related events, not keeping up with has happened with Higgs during the last years.
- franktankbank 9mo agoIs this some mandella effect going on? No, they discovered the Higgs and did rough measurements.
- nephihaha 9mo agoWhen the model appears to have massive problems, maybe it's time to go back and revise it.
- squeefers 9mo agoor if youre micho kaku, just parrot it on low grade tv shows and public appearances because its easier to gain notoriety than to do science
- nephihaha 9mo agoYes, that too LOL. He really is a grifter. But he is entertaining on TV and has that eccentric professor look about him. Heinz Wolff used to fill a similar role on British TV.
- sprash 9mo agoIt is obviously not dead but it should be dead: Almost all of the technical and economic progress made in the last century was achieved with macroscopic quantum effects. Particle physics spends a lot of energy and material resources to measure microscopic effects. The priorities are esentially inverted. At this point it is not even about discovery. Experiments are relegated to precision measurements. What practical use will it be if we know the mass/charge distribution/polarizability of some particles more precicely by a few percent? About nothing.
- KolibriFly 9mo agoThis feels less like a story about particle physics "failing" and more like a story about a field running out of easy leverage
- davrosthedalek 9mo agoExactly. The field has been a tik-tok between times of discovery and times of precision. We are now just swinging back from a discovery period. The next machine will be first a precision machine and then upgraded to be a discovery machine again.
- kachapopopow 9mo agoNone of the comments seem to mention that it's also really really really really really expensive.
- layer8 9mo agoThat depends on what you compare it to.
- kdavis 9mo agoAlmost anything, i.e. the next generation accelerator[1] at CERN is about 15B CHF which is about 20B USD. [1] https://home.cern/science/accelerators/future-circular-collider https://home.cern/science/accelerators/future-circular-colli...
- kachapopopow 9mo ago"quite literally everything else", well you got iter etc but those are on the same spectrum. It's rare that military projects in the US get that kind of funding.
- stefantalpalaru 9mo ago[dead]
- JackFr 9mo agoMaybe a dumb question here, but how would they discover a dark matter particle, if dark matter is basically invisible to us except for its gravitational effects?