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Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up
- ThrowawayTestr 3mo agoThat's the best part about science.
- pavel_lishin 3mo agoI remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled, not suicidal!
- an0malous 3mo agoThe history of scientific revolutions does not support this view
- pavel_lishin 3mo agoHow do you mean? I cannot remember any particular scientific revolution where scientists were suicidal, or even particularly crestfallen. Quantum Mechanics is the closest thing I can think of, where Einstein famously refused to accept some of the implications, and where scientists had great disagreements about things like the Copenhagen interpretation and what it means for the actual nature of reality - but I don't think any of them were sad about it.
- ceejayoz 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall had to drink a beaker of Helicobacter pylori because no one would believe it caused ulcers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands. Scientists get hidebound just like the rest of us, at times.
- pton_xd 3mo ago> wound up in an insane asylum for suggesting surgeons should wash their hands. Was rejected and mocked by the medical community for his idea, developed a drinking problem and eventually committed to an asylum by his colleagues after having a nervous breakdown. While in the asylum he was beaten by the guards and died from a wound infection ... yikes!!
- glenstein 3mo agoThose are definitely unfortunate examples and I can see how those environments pushed them to their limits. But if we're talking large-scale systematic thinking about what kind of data would be necessary to show that there's such a thing as a typical, characteristic civilization scale negative reaction to scientific revolutions, these don't demonstrate that this is the usual case. Obviously they're important in their own right. But also the book doesn't suggest that scientists going missing was just a function of humanity's customary response to scientific progress. In the book, it's a very intentional sabotage campaign.
- applfanboysbgon 3mo agoThe point being made is about the general reaction to weird results. The original supposition was that it would be implausible for scientists at large to have an adverse reaction to results that defied their current worldview. Given that we have seen this play out, there is in fact nothing implausible about it at all. The specifics (proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging scientific experiments by altering the outcomes into incoherent results, the adverse reaction being suicide) aren't important here, because that's obviously the realm of fiction -- we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results[1]. We just need to acknowledge that adverse reactions to unexpected results do happen, so plausibly in a fictional story if you have very unexpected results then your scientists could have very adverse reactions as well. [1] That we know of.
- glenstein 3mo ago
- ben_w 3mo agoOne of the boldest chapter one introductions I've ever seen comes to mind: Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. - "States of Matter", David L. Goodstein, https://archive.org/details/statesofmatter0000good_e2n5/page/n15/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/statesofmatter0000good_e2n5/page...
- Ar-Curunir 3mo agoIt is, of course, meant to be taken in a humorous tone here, despite the morbid subject.
- traes 3mo agoA very interesting story that's worth reading up on. "Natural philosophers" of the day refused to accept the idea of a particle too small to directly observe on purely philosophical grounds. They essentially bullied him out of the field for championing the idea of the atom, despite his math yielding numerous correct results. They fruitlessly pursued the idea of energetics instead. (One of the many instances of die hard philosophers playing the villain in physics history. See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein.) This makes it perhaps not a particularly good example of the phenomena being discussed, as he was suicidal not because of what he had discovered, but because no one believed what he had discovered.
- ben_w 3mo ago> See also why Emmy Noether wasn't given a professorship despite a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein I thought that was sexism rather than philosophers? This was the same era and place that mostly ignored Bertha Benz. (Or did you mean after moving to the USA?)
- traes 3mo agoIt was indeed sexism, but it was not sexism from the math department, who very much wanted to hire her. In fact, the Chair of Mathematics David Hilbert (of Hilbert space fame) personally recruited her.
- jpk 3mo agoYeah. In principal, scientists should be excited by weird results. In practice, though, humans are complex creatures with intellectual and emotional inertia. There's an understandable element of dread when you realize your life's work finds itself on shaky ground.
- tgarrett 3mo agoI'm a plasma physicist, and personally I love weird results - new mysteries to solve! That said, there are a wide range of personality types out there. And I would also be extremely surprised if the correct solution to some particular weird result was, for instance, that the Maxwell equations are broken for that regime (other than expected quantum corrections, e.g. the Schwinger limit).
- ck2 3mo agowell maybe depends how fundamental if objects you put on a table started falling through the floor it would be a bit stressful lol but Dr. Becky gets really excited about all the various "crisis in cosmology" because she knows new science/knowledge will emerge from solving those questions and you remind me there's another season coming up in that series, can't wait "Is he still in the grandmother’s house? We would like to speak to him."
- Diogenesian 3mo agoI believe the alien scientists were depressed by the guaranteed collapse of their civilization, not the difficulty of certain differential equations. So it's more like a doctor getting weird results while working on a cure for a pandemic. Edit: oops, see the reply below... and my grumpy response. I seriously forgot about that entire plot point.
- glenstein 3mo agoI'm pretty sure they're referring to scientists on Earth. Edit: Though I agree that alien scientists of Tri-Solaris probably lead more depressing lives than their counterparts on earth I don't know if this series is yet considered far enough in the past that we don't have to worry about spoiler warnings (I feel like the house rules about this apply differently to books than to movies), but I will just say that one of the most fascinating and mind-bending considerations in the book is the idea that some civilizations progress linearly and some progress exponentially, and how mind bending it is to have to plan ahead for exponential advances.
- Diogenesian 3mo agoHmm, fair enough - I checked Wikipedia. My mind completely erased the "sophon" bit or whatever it was called, it just got erased again. Not a fan of that particular fairy dust. I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.
- glenstein 3mo agoThat's actually a great example for what it is. If I were a scientist I probably wouldn't be reacting with "yay science" to every next failure that destroys civilization, even if notionally those are building up the body of data that could eventually lead to success.
- pavel_lishin 3mo agoNo, I was referring to the human scientists' reaction to the sophons' interference. But I thought that the Trisolarians' inability to predict their planets' path also seemed weird. Yes, the three-body problem isn't analytically solvable, but you can brute force it, and I would imagine that a species that is capable of creating sophons and starships with hulls made out of the Strong-force could calculate their planet's trajectory for the next thousand years without too many problems. (It would be academic, anyway - if you can build that kind of technology, why do you even need planets?) And I also hated the sophons.
- black6 3mo agoThey were getting inconsistent results, not just weird ones. However I agree that suicide probably wouldn't be where they would end up.
- dguest 3mo agoI seem to remember something about the scientist being distraught because physics didn't make sense, not because she was having trouble getting clean data. That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken. As someone who has looked for inconsistencies with the Standard Model for a while now, and seen every measurement land bang-on the prediction, I can say that I would love any deviation that said our existing theories are broken. And sure, crank up the detector noise and we'd be sad, but ask any grad student: having your apparatus suddenly spit out garbage data is just an average day. I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.
- ASalazarMX 3mo ago> I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data. I want to read a spinoff of the Three-Body Problem with this premise.
- glenstein 3mo ago>That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken. I think in the context of the book, the specific means of sabotage was something close to impossible to figure out, so I can see the despair of checking every conceivable explanation, coming up empty, and making an inference about reality itself. And it wasn't a kind of peripheral, controllable amount of noise, it was a complete global sabotage of all particle physics, on a scale that amounted to a global catastrophe rather than just another blip in the daily grind. I think one thing that really hooked me on the book series in the beginning was being able to appreciate the kind of cosmic despair one scientist was sharing during the pool table conversation, because thinking big about meaning and order in the universe, and how important the universes' intelligibility is to our relationship with it, informed by data, is a synthesis of things that really matter to me as a reader - taking the intersection of science and meaning seriously. I don't think that would be enough for plausibly explaining particular scientists offing themselves, but the psychology of someone to whom that kind of question matters that much, which is very much the heart and soul of what drives my interest in non-fiction reading, seems tragically underrepresented as a driving motivation in fiction which I think is terribly unfortunate. But sci-fi sometimes cares about it, and sometimes a lot.
- Hikikomori 3mo agoIn the book they get different results on all tests they run, consistency is gone, that is something else.
- ASalazarMX 3mo agoSpecially because only particle physics suddenly became inconsistent. I can see scientists fruitlessly obsessing with finding why the universe was toying with them, but suicide? OK, they were also seeing intent with individualized hallucinations, and computer interference, but IIRC those messages asked them to to stop particle physics, not to off themselves. They could change fields and live on.
- root_axis 3mo ago[dead]
- storywatch 3mo agoIt's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..
- radicaldreamer 3mo agoThis happens in biology all the time. PHDs will spend years mastering some intricate multi-day long procedure to do some thing and a new discovery will obviate the need for the procedure completely.
- randomImmigrant 3mo agoPreach. The way out is to find truly basic problems that you’re attacking at a fundamental level. That rarely gets funded. And even more rarely handed off to grad students. In a sense the failure of a bunch of grad students is priced in to the way science is done. Which makes it so perverse their lives and careers depend on success as newcomers.
- tansey 3mo agoAcademic here. It's actually great for us. You're usually the first to see the implications for your niche area and have a chance to get a hot paper out rather than a moderately impactful one.
- gertop 3mo agoThe perspective changes if you're in your last year of PhD as GP said. I'm sure the system is built in a way that you'll still graduate because your supervisor knows this is about learning how to conduct research and not about being right. But it's likely still soul crushing to come out with no published paper (unless you still publish knowing you're wrong, which in some cases might be valuable).
- touisteur 3mo ago
- qsera 3mo agoI am a bit sick of this narrative. That science can make mistakes is in no shape or form, one of its strengths. It is a weakness of the process. The lipstick putting can be exposed by simply asking if you would not prefer a version of the scientific method that is never wrong.
- pmontra 3mo agoMathematicians proof theorems so they are always correct. Physicists don't have that privilege.
- qsera 3mo ago>Physicists don't have that privilege. Then don't claim it as a strength!
- exmadscientist 3mo agoCelebrating the mistakes is, as you're saying, perhaps a bit too far. But mistakes will happen, it's just the nature of the world. That makes developing a robust error correction mentality something that genuinely is worth celebrating.
- jibal 3mo agoNo one celebrates the mistakes ... what an absurd strawman (qsera's). Rather we celebrate the scientific method that finds and corrects mistakes, as you say.
- qsera 3mo agoYour "scientific method" can only correct the "mistakes" as long as economics allows it. A wrong belief held "scientifically" will go on and on if there is sufficient economic incentives to make it go on....And it is the "true believers" of science that provides such economic incentives..! So much for celebration! Sure this "Muon mystery" that no one cares about financially could be corrected without much effort. May be you should praise the gods of economics to make changes that are in the best interests of humanity possible..
- lokimedes 3mo agoGlad I didn’t spend the last ten years on that problem! As my CERN advisor suggested :)
- pjmlp 3mo agoAll Alumni know that the best discoveries happen after hours of reflection on R1 tables during Summertime. :)
- colechristensen 3mo agoI really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all. It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.
- gloryjulio 3mo agoYep. This would backfire spectacularly for people just want to know what's going on. They would just dump the article in the llm and ask, 'what problem is this article about'
- wuliwong 3mo agoYou dislike that people write for audiences other than yourself.
- colechristensen 3mo agoNo. If you're writing an article about a man going to the store to buy a sandwich, the man, the store, and the sandwich should all make appearances by the end of the first paragraph. These people are writing informative articles like novels and it's incredibly irritating and a disservice if you're actually trying to inform anybody about anything. If you're writing an article about the g-2 anomaly, "g-2 anomaly" belongs in the title not 1/3 the way in.
- bawolff 3mo agoI dont particularly agree with this article, but there have been quanta articles i've read in the past that went so far trying to make the topic accessible that it became incomprehensible. Where they used so many metaphors and simplifications that it lost all meaning. Science writing for a general audience is really challenging.
- Dylan16807 3mo agoWriting for an unfamiliar audience doesn't mean you should hide the name of the problem until after a huge pile of setup.
- ordu 3mo agoHmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence. In any case it gives me ideas how to check the hypothesis. If the Reality has a limited horizon for planning for new laws, scientists can trick it into inventing new laws that eventually (after some more research and even more laws observed) would start contradicting to each other, and at that point the Reality would snap into a different set of rules. If it is true, then the plan is like this: we need to wipe all the scientific knowledge from this world and start again, and trick the the Reality into devising better laws of nature. Ah, wait, we have no evidence that the Reality can abandon laws that were introduced already. Pity, the plan is brilliant, but how to check if the Reality can abandon its laws? If laws are local... we can do something like Stephenson described in his Anathem: establish maths doing independent research and comparing their results once in 1000 years.
- xprnio 3mo agoI love how the closer we get to “the edge of the Reality”, the more it sounds like the ramblings of someone that got their hands on some of that GOOD stuff
- jambalaya8 3mo agoI suspect the universe is very very strange.
- touisteur 3mo agoYou might want to read Dan Simmons' Ilium and if you can stomach some weird post-9/11 shit, Olympos. One of the overarching themes is what you describe... or similar.
- tatjam 3mo agoAlso read Greg Egan's short story Luminous :)
- thisisauserid 3mo agoWorst Feynman diagrams ever.
- whatsThisBtn4 3mo ago9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science. The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be. Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically) But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum. Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime. I thank scientists, but I do not envy them.
- dieselgate 3mo ago> The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.
- jambalaya8 3mo agoAye, but we only sorta kinda "know" what things like black holes might be. We have models that make sense to us based on our understanding of science, and we think our instruments can faithfully report on what they can be with measurements we believe we are making correctly, but we have no clue what we don't know, and no real way to prove it, just theorize, and sort of bundle up what we believe is data supporting it.
- kazinator 3mo agoI bet you that old results still add up in the parallel universe in which the muon mystery has not yet been solved!
- allenrb 3mo agoI was thinking someone must have fixed a bug in the simulation (in which we live) between when the old results were generated and now. Only 1/2 :-)
- BobbyTables2 3mo agoOr an exceedingly rare random bit flip very subtly altered the simulated physics behavior…
- gbriel 3mo agoReality is probabilistic, not branching. Before measurement, multiple outcomes are possible; after collapse, only one becomes real.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jongjong 3mo agoThe framing that there is some unknown particle affecting the results is probably an understatement. Probably there are a LOT of unknown 'forces' affecting the results. Look at the size of the machine, the aging components, the number of components involved, the amount of software required, surely all of that is affecting the results. Are humans even capable of building perfectly reliable systems?
- exmadscientist 3mo agoYou would probably be very surprised about just how much work is put in to characterizing these things. My graduate work was on another experiment (though our postdoc worked on one of the earlier g−2 experiments mentioned here!), but we literally had man-years of work sunk into measuring one thing about the experiment, one number, as accurately as possible and with valid error bars. That was not the only thing about the apparatus, just one of the most important, but the point is: we cared, we cared a lot, and we cared a lot about a lot of things.
- jongjong 3mo agoSure, but you can only solve a problem that you are aware of. My concern here is about the unknown unknowns. The task at hand is exceedingly complex and requires extreme precision, with many unknown variables... And the people solving the problems have conflicting interests as they are paid hourly. Even if there are bonuses, all the bonuses would be given on the basis of solving known problems. There is literally zero monetary incentive to solve unknown problems; only owners care about that stuff. Employees don't care about that. They might point out some whilst not mentioning others. I've been a software engineer for 15 years and my experience is that unknown unknowns in tech are like a secret piggy bank for engineers to tap into in times of need. They are rarely brought up; only in the event that an engineer feels the need to justify their value to the company/project. The accumulation of secrets gives engineers differentiable value within the project/company and makes them hard to replace... So they tend to keep at least a couple to themselves... They ration it; like retirement planning. The individual incentive to conceal issues until a time of personal need (when layoffs are looming) outweighs the collective incentive to identify new issues to generate more billable hours of work for the team. If you're the only person who knows the issue which prevents a multi-million dollar project from coming to fruition, that is valuable information and gives you a lot of leverage in terms of job security... Which is the biggest reward you can get in this line of work. And it's not malicious; the people who know about those issues probably also solve more issues and contribute more solutions than anyone else. The concealment may be happening subconsciously; they won't admit to themselves that a specific kind of problem exists. Like when I worked in crypto, all the engineers there believed that the project could scale and also be decentralized... When it couldn't, given the chosen approach. The belief is still there years later; though all the rational engineers left, they were promptly replaced by believers.
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- cobbzilla 3mo agoThis “data driven” science approach sure looks like empiricism from a distance. What am I missing?
- 21asdffdsa12 3mo agoThe beauty of untestable abstractions upon abstractions? That even stay around when refuted -
- teamonkey 3mo agoI think it describes the methods needed to obtain and process a large amount of data in a field where getting a small amount of data is expensive and requires incredible hardware.
- throwawayffffas 3mo agoOut of my depth really, but I believe the "data driven" approach probably refers to some sort of renormalization. What renormalization does is your theory produces all sort of infinities but you know there is mechanism that eliminates them but your theory is not able to calculate how that happens and the exact degree so you go out look at real numbers and then tweak your model to predict the correct values . I may be glossing over misrepresenting stuff but that is the gist of it I think. As far as I understand physists don't love this, Feynman and company had reservations (not objections mid you), but it works and allows you to do additional useful work.
- physicsdude 3mo agoThe data-driven approach is referring to a more general technique --- it's a less fancy concept than renormalization, which only comes up when doing full-blown relativistic quantum field theory. Specifically, it refers to the use of a couple of well-grounded mathematical tricks to sidestep doing a from-first-principles calculation by, effectively, translating the results of different measurements into a prediction for something new (in this case, a quantity that contributes to the calculation of the magnetic moment). In non-relativistic quantum mechanics, there is the concept of the "wavefunction," from which you can predict the results of measurements of a particle/system. But in most real-world scenarios, you can't actually compute the wavefunction, and so naively you can't make any predictions. But there is something called the "optical theorem," which relates a single evaluation of the wavefunction to a scattering cross-section, which is something that can be measured. If you're familiar with complex analysis, there is also the "residue theorem" which allows you relate individual function values with integrals of the function in the complex plane. Basically, you can combine those two relations to translate kind one integral (which you need to compute) into a different integral (which can be measured). This is what was done here --- just instead of a simple QM wavefunction, the relevant concept is called a "vacuum polarization function."
- shevy-java 3mo agoIf old results do not add up then I can see two immediate reasons: - The new results are wrong. That's why there is a difference. - The old results were wrong. In this case all involved scientists should be very much ashamed to have helpfully participated in worshipping wrongness and fakery. A third option could be partial wrongness, but I group this into the second case. In the modern era I no longer buy into honesty of scientists at all times. Case in point: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258 - bacterium growing via arsenic. Totally fabricated, hence lateron "retracted" (originally published in 2010).
- throwawayffffas 3mo agoThere is a fourth option, something has changed in between the old and new expirements. This has happened before in other settings, disappearing polymorphs are a real thing.
- amai 3mo agoI bet on a loose cable as explanation for the difference. See https://www.sciencenews.org/article/loose-cable-blamed-speedy-neutrinos https://www.sciencenews.org/article/loose-cable-blamed-speed...
- sylware 3mo agoIs Sabine H. on the case?
- odetojoy 3mo ago[flagged]