Physics is on the verge of an Earth-shattering discovery? | Hacker News Reader

Physics is on the verge of an Earth-shattering discovery?

aeon.co

58 pointsOletros20 comments

Among the particle theorists and phenomenologists I talked to at lunch at the Perimeter Institute, the probability assigned to this being real was in the 5%-20% range, with older physicists more skeptical.

Still no liquid betting market though...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/05/how-to-reform-academia...

http://infoproc.blogspot.ca/2006/01/prediction-markets-and-l...

It's over three sigma, which makes it more like 5-20% that it's not real.

My money is on it being our first observed sparticle.

The 3-sigma that you're quoting may not account for the "look elsewhere" effect: the possibility that a comparable fluctuation might have occurred in any number of other energy levels or other decay channels. It's really hard to correct for that properly, and particle theory has a long history of promising signals melting away with more data. That's why the folks involved are being pretty cautious.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure how well the observed decay mode fits with the most common supersymmetric models: I have the strong impression that it's not one that SUSY phenomenologists were expecting going in.

It's going to be fun to see where this takes us! Maybe a surprise would be the best outcome of all.

Lots wrong with this comment. Here's one place to start:

http://www.science20.com/a_quantum_diaries_survivor/true_and...

I agree, and you provided a link to a nice summary of why.

I do wonder, though, if there's ever been evidence from two independent detectors that ended up being false. That's a significant difference in the present situation.

Thanks, that's really interesting - I was just going with the raw definition of sigma. Consider me corrected!

Metaculus prediction pool has it at 30% likely to be verified by end of summer : http://www.metaculus.com/questions/41/

I like the general philosophy behind Metaculus (that we should all be more public and accountable with our speculation) but I don't think the numbers are currently reliable because posting is open to anyone and there's no money on the line.

That's probably because the older physicists learned the hard way that nobody has ever made any money by betting against the standard model.

Hyperbole, but the actual article isn't entirely awful.

The TL;DR of this is that no-one's entirely certain as to what it is that's being created, if anything is being created at all. It's still very possible that this is noisy data.

That being said, the main contender at this point is a boson. At the far end of the possible options are things like a graviton, or a fermion, which would make the supersymmetry crowd happy.

That title is some serious clickbait. It's just as strongly expected that the signal will disappear on closer inspection.

Yeah very early but the detected the signal in both ATLAS AND CMS but well below the 5 sigma rating currently. I'm excited to see what happens next

They are about to synthesize Illudium PU-36?

Note the book author only lists past tense academic affiliations so she might be a member of the great silent majority of unemployed physicists.

Paul, not sure what the point of your comment was. But it reads like a speculative, vaguely ad hominem attack.

As I'm sure you could have found out with a little digging, the author is 61 years old. She had a long career in research and now seems to be focusing on science writing and communication.

> great silent majority of unemployed physicists

Do you have a reference for that? When I graduated (~10 years ago), I recall a statistic saying that 98% of physicists found employment (not all in physics, of course).

Literally earth-shattering perhaps. Why have we never discovered alien life despite statisticians saying there must be thousands of alien civilisations? Probably because they blow themselves up looking for new particles.

Particles of much higher energy than the LHC is capable of generating slam into the earth's upper atmosphere every day. It's been going on for billions of years. If something exotic were to happen, it would have happened a long time ago.

And the effects reach all far enough down to flip bits. The experiments that we run probably can't reach out further than a few meters. We have a very long way to go before we start competing with nature.

The down vote is not justified, IMHO. He is talking about potentially more advanced civilizations, and the complains is about our current limitations.

This is human behavior: The explosion was too small? Let's try harder!

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