The LHC “nightmare scenario” has come true
backreaction.blogspot.com
backreaction.blogspot.com
This is an accurate characterization of the worst outcome (that doesn't involve space aliens) that scientists were worried about when the LHC launched.
In this instance, however, I think it's more of a question of there being a big question as to "what is the nightmare scenario"; each part of the article is relevant to this question, explaining the state of the particle physics and the build up towards the apparent disappointment with the results from the LHC research.
Nightmare scenario is being fairly specific here; it's not really in the same field as "See what happens next" or "You won't believe what happens" in my mind since those have no substance or real connection to their content. This article headline is very attention grabbing, since we're not sure what the LHC Nightmare Scenario is. However, the article substantiates the title. It provides the author's reasons specifically why the current status of LHC research is in a nightmare scenario.
The title is provocative, yes, but I feel that conflating provocative with "Clickbait" is disingenuous. Some of the most famous headlines in history have arguably been clickbait by that metric, yet they're not held to the same scrutiny.
I disagree. I believe that the intended audience of this article, people familiar with what the LHC has been up to, what it's goals were, who are keeping up with current events, like knowing that the diphoton bump has vanished, would immediately recognize what the article would be about. I did at least. It seems completely unfair to say "This article doesn't cater to HN" and then accuse the author of engaging in sensationalistic clickbait, especially when HN doesn't trust submitters to provide more context in headlines.
This lack of context is because, it appears, most HN readers are more familiar with the actual clickbait headlines from media outlets proclaiming "Mini Blackholes may destroy the earth!", "Strangelets could destroy the earth!", "The LHC will start the Zombie Apocalypse!", than the actual concerns of scientists. Again, this seems monstrously unfair that actual clickbait has set the conversation, and people who actually are talking about the actual 'nightmare scenario' are now accused of clickbait.
Not all nightmares are about monsters chasing you. A lot of them are showing up to class in your underwear, or trying to find that report that you know should be on the table. I would not be surprised that several physicists have in fact had actual nightmares of this exact scenario.
I'm not sure where the idea of "this article doesn't cater to HN" and the following accusation comes from in relation to the thread that was being discussed.
I do agree with you that it's unfair to call it clickbait, that there's a large difference between a provocative headline and a clickbait headline. Personally I'm not familiar enough with the going-ons of the LHC to really comment intelligently on the research, so I have and will hold off on that.
The primary response to this article, given the comments, is "what do you mean you're not talking about black holes" rather than an actual discussion of the ideas of the article (the failure of "naturalness" and "beauty" to make predictions for the LHC). Which leads me to conclude that HN is not a good place to talk about this (since most people are complaining that the , as we're arguing about the most boring, superficial part of the article.
My statement that people are complaining about "This article doesn't cater to HN", is my summary of the idea that 'I am not familiar with the context associated with the headline, and to me it sounds sensationalistic, and therefore it is clickbait, and the author should have picked a better title'. You obviously, are not advocating that position.
The rest I believe you and I are in agreement over. :)
I thought it confirmed what we thought we knew (and is the only way to confirm it), so that doesn't seem like wasted money.
The more fun version would be where black holes do not evaporate, at which point it will still be a very long time before it's a problem, we need to worry about Andromeda crashing into our galaxy and the sun becoming a red giant first.
Or maybe they are the dark.
The Sun's dying and will become a red giant (about 5 billion years to go), but it's luminosity is currently increasing, so our rock will become a scorched Earth in around a billion years. Then there's the potential for meteors, climate-change, antibiotic resistance, or millions of tiny black holes to do us off first (how quickly do black holes grow, anyway?)
Colonising other planets and other solar systems seems the only viable solution to the long-term survival of the human race.
Personally, I'm in the it's all good unless you create a black hole, explosion, or gateway to someplace we don't want to visit or want visitors from.
A black hole with the mass of a big chunk of equipment would be enormously deadly. Ten megatons per pound, assuming it evaporates. Most of the planet collapsing into it if it doesn't.
By contrast, the nightmare scenario here is really the worst kind scenario under the assumption that we have a good idea about physics at the TeV scale. We do not learn anything, and even worse the LHC is the wrong machine. With a light Higgs and no additional particles, a slight upgrade to the LEP, the predecessor of the LHC, would have found the Higgs in 2005 and would be a much better machine to study it in detail.
^1 Hawking radiation (and its close relative Unruh radiation) are basically the only two effects which involve both gravity and quantum field theory anybody has any kind of believe in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11893164
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11250931
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9420043
[4] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/potential-new-part...
[5] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hope-for-new-parti...
Her main point is that the HEP community has been racing down a road for many years and probably missed the "dead end" sign some years back. In particular, she takes issue with what is called 'naturalness' and its often used justification for PBTSM. She concluded with:
"I hope that this latest null result will send a clear message that you can’t trust the judgement of scientists whose future funding depends on their continued optimism."
We would be virtual scientist detecting features in physics simulation software that builds the world he is living in.
The most entertaining "simulation theory" (among Elon Musk's, Nick Bostrom's, etc) is Stephen Wolfram's one, who argues that "we could be the videogame (WoW of the future) of a teenager AI"...
Have you read Mogworld? That's basically the premise.
Now, for the long-term survival of intelligent life, I hope you're right and we figure out how to hack the VM :)
Also, this is literally the plot of Star Ocean 3.
I'm no expert here and don't understand the dichotomy, such as it were, here. Also, how are condensed matter physics contributing to fundamental theories of the universe today? I've heard a lot more of condensed matter physics in specific areas (eg superconductivity), but not often heard it discussed in relation to fundamental physics. But I'm pretty uninformed here, overall.
Does anyone with more expertise here have a quick breakdown of what these commenters mean?
I don't think it's a stretch to say that if more people are actively experimenting and thinking about problems in a field, the more likely new results are going to be found. (That's not to say particle physics experiments aren't useful.)
Two extremely important ideas that developed first in condensed matter are symmetry breaking (invented to explain ferromagnetism and other phase transitions - ideas were borrowed for example in the Higgs) and renormalization. They are of fundamental importance in particle physics as well. Of course this was way back in the 50s and 60s.
I am aware of a couple of collaborations between condensed matter and particle/string theorists these days:
1. String theorists have discovered that their mathematical techniques are useful in solving certain Quantum Field Theories which are important in condensed matter. Google Ads/CMT, or strange metals.
2. String theorists believe that in quantum gravity entanglement and gravity are closely linked. They have used ideas from condensed matter studies of entanglement called tensor networks (MERA) to build toy-models of gravity.
The nice thing about looking at such systems is, that we have experimental access at all scales, so we can study the breakdown of a quantum field theory in detail. The unfortunate thing is, that there may or may not be an analogy between a condensed matter system and fundamental physics, that is just as much conjecture as is naturalness.
If understanding the ground rules meant you understood everything that can arise within them, math would be boring by definition since we generally choose our ground rules in mathematics. So we're still finding interesting and unexpected things in other areas, including fundamental rules that are non-obvious features of existing theories (theoretical quantum information work finds new things here all the time). So for people in high energy that like finding new fundamental facts about the universe, this is a good place to go. Some methods developed by string theory and other unification theories are actually already used in condensed matter!
Knowing fundamental principles wouldn't make us all powerful.
Very interesting argument though.
I just don't dig the obsession with "aesthetics". It just doesn't compute. I understand the need for simplicity, but there's JUST NO PLACE for aesthetics in science. We need simple verifiable experiments and results, no "my model is more beautiful than yours" stupidity.
One important thing: scientists need to recognize where science ends and passion/preference begins. Scientism is the greatest foe of science.
Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist.
It comes from the history of physics. A few equations define classical dynamics. Maxwell's four equations describe electromagnetism. A few short equations define quantum electrodynamics. High-energy physicists have been looking for something equally terse. It just isn't happening.
I'm sure whatever turns up for quantum gravity will be hideous to begin with, but then eventually we'll understand it.
You're also confusing understanding with logical omniscience and omnipotence. I know all the rules of chess, but I do not know every fact those rules entail, and I do not know how to win every chess game. Even if I did know those things, certain moves are impossible even though I know everything about chess.
This is called the hierarchy problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem#The_Higgs_ma...
It looks like my bet was right. I miss the math in HEP but I feel somewhat justified. I'm not sure what this means for HEP going forward. May be scientists can move the goalposts but will funders be as sympathetic?
Science looks for a system which can exist without supernatural intervention, but the creation of time/space/matter doesn't fit within those constraints.
Admittedly that is a philosophical or even theological take, but at least it's honest.
As much as a physicist might hope to uncover a universal law that is simple enough for children to memorize yet subtle enough to warrant a lifetime of learning to fully understand, nature is perfectly content with fundamental parameters that settle into working values completely at random.
The scientific method seeks to be entirely empirical - which makes sense for understanding what we can observe.
But what happens when what you are trying to understand is not observable? You fool yourself if you think you are being empirical when you are not. (His comment about moving the yardsticks applies here).
Any endeavor to understand the universe, especially origins, ends up involving philosophical presuppositions. Science aspires to avoid that, but can it?
So our universe must fundamentally be a supernatural creation?
That's an extraordinary claim, what is your evidence? We currently have insufficient data and incomplete theories to fully describe the origins of the universe, sure. But how is this different from someone 500 years ago saying:
"Science looks for a system which can exist without supernatural intervention, but the creation of the Earth and humanity doesn't fit within those constraints."
In my comment I wasn't making the argument that our universe must fundamentally be a supernatural creation. I was trying to show that presupposing it is a natural creation is not philosophically neutral, especially when what we have observed naturally seems to oppose the idea of energy or matter coming out of nowhere.
>What is your evidence? From my perspective, accepting the probability of a transcendent creator is a reasonable conclusion to draw based on the existence of the universe. I realize that will be judged to be a 'faith position', but from my perspective so is supposing it could exist on it's own.
The answer: confirming the Higgs boson, but no other new physics that would narrow things beyond what we've been exploring for the past fifty years.
Presumably the capacity of a universe's laws to cluster matter lead both to black holes and to enough planets that life is more likely, so that our existence correlates with good universe fitness. Other universes might do pretty badly with getting stuff to stick together.
As a curious bystander, it seems like some folks may have gotten a false sense of how difficult these next steps will be, after the recent and astounding success of mechanics and relativity. We could see another "extended" period where new observations are insufficient to support a better theory, and if so we have to be OK with that (but keep looking to make progress if at all possible).
'AI' solutions don't always solve the problem you're trying to train them on, sometimes they solve the problem of giving you the expected answer from the samples you give them.
Oh well, perhaps they'll build an Even Larger Hadron Collider?
Naturalness probably spawns from mathematical constants, most of which are around 1. [1] This also assumes the dimensional analysis is correct, or that certain values are not derived.
Also, have all of the easy physic experiments been done? Seems like physics is only being explored at high energies in expensive set-ups. Some of the biggest discoveries of 100 years ago were done with relatively cheap set-ups, see the Gold Foil Experiment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_constants_and_fun...
If you have any ideas for easy, novel physics experiments, please dive in. But after 100 years of lots and lots and lots of people playing around, most of what people can imagine has been done. If there's going to be something new, it's going to be radically different, most likely, with entirely new areas of physics, not some refinement of existing theory.
If "physics" were a newly discovered continent, there's a good chance that we've discovered most of what's on the surface.
There's still exploration, I think. I'm not a physicist by any means, but it seems that things like condensed matter physics are plowing ahead in new areas, away from the "surface of the continent," if you will allow me to continue the metaphor.
But if you're starting with the physics that you learn as an undergrad taking engineering and what you get from newspapers, those branches seem pretty well capped off for the foreseeable future. Better to go to new areas that still have millions of discoveries waiting, like biology or other complex systems.
Of course verifying this probably requires that we inspect most of our universe directly...
So would universes come in existance with varying degrees of stability. No one has to say 'this is a stable universe'. We can say 'this universe has been stable for quite a long while'. Long enough to spawn us and the very interesting universe around us.
Just like in biology, merely the fact that we could be here, is the reason we're here.
Of course, that's assuming that for some reason big bangs with varying values for universal constants are a constant occurrence. Unfortunately, this is not likely to be something we're ever going to be able to measure/observe. Though there are/have been (theoretical) experiments to see if universal constants really are constant. If they're not, that would be a nice indicator that the universe really is unstable enough to create stability.
It's actually quite a neat concept, if very similar to the anthropic principle. Unfortunately, it offers no predictions.
Physics has a lot of data and several models that work really well, but they don't really fit into a single coherent system. QM vs Relativity etc. The density needed to form a black hole decreases linearly with radius, sho why is the universe not one?
I feel like this explains it pretty well.
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-50-why-didnt...
tl;dr: Schwarzschild’s solution is a static one, meaning that the metric of space does not evolve as time progresses.
New child universes are spawned with new values for various constants. Stable arrangements (combinations) persist, spawning new grandchildren universes. Unstable arrangements blink out of existence.
Edit: I want to apologize for volunteering an answer to the question of how natural selection might work at a cosmic level with some speculation I've read. I regret the error.
For example, all we know about distant stars is complete conjecture and approximation based on testing various ideas to see which one fits. We simply don't know if "gravity" is exactly the same for all of them. Small variations of G would still light them up.
> but it doesn't tell us why there is something to > observe (instead of nothing), and why the laws and > fundamental constants are the way they are.
I'm no physicist, but I simply cannot imagine candidate answers to such questions.
See above. My comment was in response to ansible's reply to themgt. themgt was asking why the universe looks the way it does, and ansible responded with the anthropic principle. The problem with ansible's line of thinking is that the anthropic principle tells me a great deal about me (why I can exist and observe), but not much about the universe, which was themgt's question.
In response to your broader objection that there are some basic questions in physics that can't be answered, let me point out that the entire project of physics is to seek material causes for the structure of the universe. So if nature is all that exists, and the universe itself only has material causes, what are those causes? The entire field of cosmology dedicated to answering exactly this question, and many believe it's capable of doing so.
As far as Leibniz's famous question "why is there something rather than nothing?" is concerned: admittedly this is a metaphysical question, not a physical question. Still, I think we owe it to ourselves to answer this question too, and not simply dismiss it out of hand.
> I'm no physicist, but I simply cannot imagine candidate answers to such questions.
Even if this is true, it tells us something about you but not about the universe. By analogy, somehow my body "knew" to put my liver in my torso, not in my neck. I cannot begin to imagine what physical processes led to the proper placement of my liver, but we certainly shouldn't take this to mean there are no reasons.
Moreover, we shouldn't sell ourselves short in these matters. Undoubtedly, given enough study I could discover what others have said about organ placement during embryonic development and have a fairly robust understanding of the best of our knowledge regarding the topic. The same is true of cosmology and philosophy.
That is the big, big question.
On the one hand, I can easily imaging that there is nothing, nowhere, ever.
But on the other hand, doesn't it necessarily seem the case that there should be something existing somewhere, for at least some time? How can nothing exist... ever?
Even after all this time, I still can't wrap my head around this question.
Funny you mention it, this was Leibniz's exact dilemma. He realized there must be two classes of existence: necessary (things that must exist), and contingent (things that don't have to exist). Not many things must exist, if you really think about it, and he came to the conclusion that God is the most reasonable explanation for why any contingent thing exists at all.
Worth your 5 minutes, if you're interested in this question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPCzEP0oD7I
If you're interested enough to dedicate 100 minutes, here's a 3 part discussion with responses to objections.
https://youtu.be/EfpAqqadQVA?list=PLIpO3BUiq2IFMS3AP3Yi2oDfc...
https://youtu.be/NgXML-wI1tQ?list=PLIpO3BUiq2IFMS3AP3Yi2oDfc...
https://youtu.be/Y4J5vR3rgp4?list=PLIpO3BUiq2IFMS3AP3Yi2oDfc...
Selection need not be wholly external. It can be emergent from within the system, as it is with life viewed collectively as it manifests ecology and coevolution. But in the end there is still the basic criterion of mortality and reproductive fitness that serves as a top level goal function to orient the entire system. There is the environment and the implied goal of genetic survival.
What might the top level goal function be for an evolving universe? And where would it come from? How can "all that there is" possess an environment?
Of course in an eternal universe model with changing physical laws you could have a random walk across state space, but this amounts to saying the digits of pi contain Shakespeare. They do but it doesn't tell us any more than infinite multiverse theories. In fact we might call this an infinite multiverse theory linearized across time instead of parallelized across dimensions.
Reproductive fitness is necessary to apply the concept of evolution, but mortality isn't.
This world exists according to a singular, fundamental principle which is that a thing that comes into existence once makes results on the basis of what is inside of itself from the past, and makes itself exist continuously by repeating its activities endlessly. A thing's very activities become the cause through which it makes itself come into being in the future.
So, seeing the world from this principle, we can find two or three laws: The law of cause and effect, and the law of existing by changing through activities (repetition). Rather than coming up with theory and finding evidence, we can take any sample from the entire world and verify this theory as their method of operation.
(If you're wondering about the question of infinitely regressing this statement to the origin of the world, I can say that the same explanation applies. The world itself also repeats (ends and begins again) periodically and also displays the entire process of evolution according to the law of cause and effect.)
When people really understand this principle and see things in the world on the principle, they come to realize the fundamental problem in physics is gravity. People don't really understand what general relativity means. It's sort of like how most people don't know that Schrödinger was joking when he talked about not knowing if the cat would be alive or dead. That's why physics has gone on a massive detour over the last 100 years. Unless physicists solve the problem of gravity, humanity won't be able to recognize the cause of and survive through the collapse of the Earth's ecosystem. Things are more serious than people realize - even after all these years. It sounds fantastical to people who haven't confirmed, but what I point out here is undeniable after confirmation of facts. So, from one perspective, it's as if physicists don't have the willpower or courage to admit the reality of the situation today, which is what fundamentally prevents them from pursuing the way to confirm about gravity - it would result in them confronting today's reality. Realistically, it's a hard burden for anyone to bear. That's one of the reasons why a person who says what I say here is rarely welcomed.
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Yeah, maybe you're getting downvoted because the sheeple here can't cope with the audacity of your message. But maybe, just maybe, you're getting downvoted for making grandiose claims with nothing to back them up.
Funny enough, the article itself was about how physicists cannot find the proof to sustain their development of further theory. Doesn't it seem even slightly suspicious to you that the person who points out that fact about those scientists is being accused of the very thing they do?
You intimate that I do the same kinds of things as a clown. The only reason you can suggest that is that you exclude everything I said aside from a few words. That's quite obviously a deception tactic and if you included actual proof in your own words, you would have had to reference the rest of my words. But you can't do that because it won't support your point.
In fact, if you can disprove anything I said, I'll wire you all of my money immediately. Furthermore, if you can show that anything I've said cannot be verified, I'll do the same. Or if you prefer, you can take my head. But I'm quite certain that will never happen.
By the way, your reaction is also the proof of what I say. The problem is you don't understand what I said. It would be better to admit that instead of attacking one of the people who can solve your questions.
In other words, you're acting on the basis of what you do not know and informing others of your feelings. That tells me all I need to know about your ability to judge toxicity from teaching. It's never easy for people to learn something new. But you are only aware of how it feels to you, and you don't have the ability to distinguish whether it makes you change for the better or worse.
Do you mean you want me to say you haven't proved it here (which is obvious, you proved nothing), or that you don't have proof you aren't showing us?
I can't show you don't have a hidden proof. You can't show I don't have a unicorn.
The quote about clowns he gave you is a general quote. basically, just because people disagree with you / call you a fool / downvote you doesn't make you right. Sometimes it means you are right, but more often it means you are wrong.
When you say you will wire me all your money if I can prove anything you said wrong, what would convince you something you said was wrong?
I can imagine what a disproof of Newtown's laws of physics, or quantum mechanics, or general relativity wrong would look like. These are well-defined mathematical models, so just show something in the real world not following those mathematical rules. I'm not sure how I could prove your system is "wrong", as it doesn't predict anything.
I can use Newtown's laws to predict how my car behaves. I can use quantum physics to predict how my CPU will behave. I can use general relativity to predict mercury's orbit. What does your system allow me to predict accurately?
Are you open-minded enough to consider places where you're mistaken? You contradict yourself a few times. This is not intended as ad hominem but as an indicator that you may want to reconsider whether your judgement can be correct. One example of a few: In the beginning of your comment you said that someone calling me a fool doesn't make me right. Agreed. But you contradict yourself by saying that it does sometimes make me right. That's definitely not true.
I'm going to skip replying to the rest of what you said because I know it was not based on having understood what I said. I'm ready to weather the obvious conclusion you're going to draw from that.
I clearly am going to decide you are talking nonsense, as you suggest, as you have still never said anything understandable. You say "you didn't understand my explanation if you assert it makes no predictive claims.".
Why don't you just make a predictive claim that could be tested?
Are you saying that a thing exists before it comes into existence?
First paragraph: "I finished highschool in ..."
Second paragraph: "Little did I realize"
Third paragraph: "Since I entered physics"
Fourth paragraph: "During my professional career"
Fifth paragraph: "When I look at"
Sixth paragraph: "For the last ten years you’ve been told that the LHC must see some new physics besides the Higgs because otherwise nature isn’t “natural” - [...]. I’ve been laughed at when I explained that I don’t buy into naturalness"
Seventh paragraph: "The idea of naturalness"
Eighth paragraph: "we’ve entered what has become known as the “nightmare scenario” for the LHC: The Higgs and nothing else."
Ah, the article starts in the eighth paragraph. Summary: read paragraphs 8 and the last, 9.
Take your comment for example. Your comment's thesis is the last sentence "Summary: read paragraphs 8 and the last, 9", but delaying that to the end yields a different effect for the reader than if you began with the thesis and then supplied examples.
This is not analogous. If parent had begun the comment with a personal history of experience in reading verbose articles with clickbait-y headlines that then meander to the actual meat of the bait, then it'd be similar.
The parent comment is instead succinctly presenting evidence /observations which build to a conclusion. Not the same thing.
But time went on and I got tired of it. I discovered time is not infinite even when I have about sixty years ahead of me. I don't read mainstream news because knowing about the latest terror attack (or even positive news, like the latest rare animal being born in a zoo) doesn't help me in any way. Most of the time it just makes me feel bad for or angry about something that I can do nothing about nor affects me in any way.
I still read fiction as a past time activity and as I said, I used to enjoy these articles too, so I understand your point. It's just not the format I like to read for news.
(As for my own comment, burying the main thing, in my defense: it has structure that you can skip past very easily until the last sentence. But again, I see your point.)
also with time, it should be common practice to highlight the tldnr parts.
i could t help but think though, i thought the nightmare scenario for the LHC was to create a singularity and suck us all into a black hole ^_^
Here's my guess on why the article's slow build up irrated many readers: It was the apocalyptic armageddon title and then the first sentence the reader sees is, "I finished high school in 1995."
If the title is bombastic or provocative, your readers are going to want the Inverted Pyramid[1].
Had the author titled it something more toned down like, "Coming to grips with LHC's lack of new particle discoveries" ... the immediate juxtaposition of "I finished high school in 1995" wouldn't have been such a letdown. The phrase "coming to grips" sets up the reader to sit back and relax for a "timeline".
Put another way, if the writer puts a promising title but buries the reader with personal details, it is often seen as a self-indulgent style of writing that does not respect the readers' time.
If you're going to have a title like 'LHC nightmare scenario" tell me precisely what it is -- briefly -- in the first paragraph and then introduce me to the fact that we're going to follow your maturing into a physicist and how that went along with the development and end with a good bang of expanding on that nightmare scenario.
Don't lure me in with a grabby title and then ignore it until the end. Make an interesting title, sell the title and the rest of the article in the first paragraph, and then get to the content.
I enjoy reading about the lives of scientists, just let me know that that's what I'll be reading.
Clicking on a title with this amount of drama and urgency, I expect to read something related to the title. So I see this as clickbait of sorts.
Makes me wonder if writing of this type comes from educational requirements having a word minimum, equating wordiness with value.
Similar to YouTube tutorials filling 5 minutes with fluff before the 30 seconds of what I was hoping to see.
I wish there was a "scroll to the topic related to the link you clicked" kind of thing.
Edit: (tongue in cheek) maybe you can find something more in line with your expectations here: https://www.google.ca/search?tbm=isch&q=physics+comic+strips
The frustration I think is because you have a very specific title, promising to have a very specific insight, and then it starts in 1980 and promises to bring you up to 2016....
I actually had the same reaction to that Bloom Filter article yesterday. But I ultimately skipped the first 3 and then got into it.
I don't mind this kind of writing for this length of article. I like it in fact. It took me much less to read it than to write this comment.
Now the rest of the comments on this thread are mostly banal arguments about writing style instead of the LHC.
1p: The mathematics that allow physicists to reconstruct the structure of matter is fascinating.
2p: The standard model, though ugly, is still undefeated (with examples).
3p: The LHC hasn't led to the discovery of new particles, and physicists are in denial (with examples and a link).
4p: There is a worrying trend about the failure to learn from failure.
5p: The trust in naturalness/beauty/simplicity to guide the search for a unified model is not working.
6p: Turns out "naturalness" is philosophical, not scientific.
7p: Physicists are opportunistic, so they'll try to justify a larger collider to try to discover new particles.
8p: The nightmare scenario: no new particles discovered with the LHC, so physicists have no guidance to continue.
9p: We've been doing it wrong with the use of naturalness as guidance. You can't trust the judgement of scientists when their future funding depends on continuing working in this direction.
So paragraphs 1 through 7 do offer a good background to support his thesis that "naturalness as guidance" is wrongheaded, which is the real point of the article. If you only read the last paragraphs his thesis sounds shaky and arbitrary.
Perhaps you mean "the subject of the title" begins in the eight paragraph.
The essence of an article or book or movie is not always at the title. Nor it's necessary for it to move to what the title says as fast as possible.
Also good to know: Headlines in newspapers are not written by the reporter, that is traditionally up to the copy-editor.
Titles of books are often not chosen by the author either.
A title or headline isn't a promise, it's a 'hook.' There is no reason to get mad once you understand that.
Edit: This quote from the scientific american article provides a counter-perspective
“We would have been very lucky if we found something, some new phenomenon or some new state of matter at this early stage,” says CMS physicist Tiziano Camporesi. “But we have to be patient.”
Also, this article takes forever to get to the point - I was able to skip most of the content until like 75% the way through the thing.