What No New Particles Means for Physics
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
Both of them are saying its time to question pre-conceived notions of how to extend the Standard model. And I think both of them are excited about it.
Rightly so. People are unhappy about the Standard Model because it is insufficiently simple and symmetrical. But 20 orders of magnitude lie between our experiments and the Planck scale, there's probably six levels of symmetry-braking, mess-making emergence between us and the real fundamentals.
We'll probably have to part with some basic assumption (like the one above) if we want to make further progress in fundamental physics.
Some theorists agree. Talk of disappointment is “crazy talk,” Arkani-Hamed said. “It’s actually nature! We’re learning the answer! These 6,000 people are busting their butts and you’re pouting like a little kid because you didn’t get the lollipop you wanted?”
Relativity challenges that. Quantum mechanics challenges that. The seeming lack of naturalness challenges that.
http://www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/nima-arkani-hamed-on-f...
Introduction ends and Nima starts about 4 minutes into the first lecture. :)
EDIT: wrote "visual" when I meant "verbal"
Arkani-Hamed has a knack for making things understandable without "pop-sciencing" them, a flair for the dramatic to make them exciting, and a serious background to validate his understanding.
I'm sure he's not for everyone (I'm guessing that physicists that already know the subjects may find him annoying) but for me, the guy is amazing.
Funding, and self-motivating research also has proven to be detrimental to research in the social sciences of late, but that seems to be with misapplication of statistical principles, and insufficient peer review, but a whole lot of citations.
[1] http://backreaction.blogspot.co.id/2016/08/the-lhc-nightmare...
They just spent 24 Billion and 30 years to discover nothing.
So next time they go to the governments of the world and say 'hey give us 24 Billion for the greatest experiment ever' ... what's going to happen?
Maybe we should give it to them, but there likely will be more scrutiny.
I understand that very well.
But most of the Standard Model was well confirmed.
Really what we got was confirmation of Higgs.
The 'non confirmation' of a bunch of interesting theories is not a very big win.
But don't forget the politics of it all: this is bordering on a 'big lose'.
They spent 24 Billion and really didn't get much out of it. There was a lot of hope, maybe even promise, and really - we got the 'lowest outcome' possible.
Ask yourself: would we have spent 24 Billion to 'confirm Higgs'?
Anyhow - I'm glad it was done, and if it were up to me I'd have spent it, knowing the outcome, but the optics of this are bad.
Yes. The Higgs field/boson is a fundamental feature of our best theory at the quantum scale and we needed to know whether we are right. Now we have another crucial bound for the theory that will supplant the standard model except now we can waste less time and money with theories that can't explain our results.
We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a large metal can flying at an altitude of 400km essentially to do microgravity research; I think we can afford to spend a tenth of that on a particle accelerator to probe the frontier of high energy physics.
This is not true. The space program has countless research opportunities, direct and indirect, with the underlying endeavour of objective of putting people on other planets, which is a pretty big opportunity in of itself.
I'm not sure paying $24 Billion to prove Higgs was worth it. I suggest maybe there were other, much less expensive ways to do that, were we to know up front that was the objective.
It's hard to say how much 'disproving a bunch of theories' is worth.
I suggest that much of theoretical physics is total rubbish speculation, which in some ways is 'ok', but it'd be nice to see some progress. If you add in String Theory to the pile ... it looks really bad for modern theoretical physics. Not much has happened in a very long time ... it seems there have been countless PhD's minted in fiction. Not good.
I'm not talking about the space program, I'm talking about the ISS. What, exactly, are those direct and indirect opportunities? Looking at NASA's own PR material, it boils down to effects of deep space on humans (microgravity and radiation), effects of microgravity on biotechnology, environmental monitoring (which can be done cheaper with satellites), and .... effects of microgravity on everything else. I'm not saying it's not worth it as a human endeavor, but let's not kid ourselves: it was an insanely expensive project just like the LHC that doesn't really seem to have resulted in much.
Performing scientific experiments is not about winning first place, it's about creating abstractions/ models in order to achieve deeper insight. As such failing to find that your model is wrong is not like loosing a race. Ex: a bunch of fantastic physics was discovered and described with Newtonian mechanics , though inherently that model is flawed, it took a while to realize it.
I would be unbelievably excited about what the future holds. The goals of science cannot hang on how people feel about their careers.
But as someone with family formerly in university faculty tenure-track (circa-90s), the put-food-on-the-table part of your employment is tied up in politics. Being on the bubble for a tenure position you've worked 6-10 years towards? I would hope the department committee would be proud of my incredibly beautiful but disproved theory...
I'm interested in the psychological aspects of identity.
I suggest a lot of them have not choice but to continue on believing their mythology. Their sense of self depends on it, and surely their funding does. And getting funding depends on strong sense of self.
Isn't it amazing that despite their good intentions, that so many of them are hustlers and shysters? I'm not making a direct moral comparison, but a pragmatic one ...
It would be nice to have some experiments that put String Theory to bed as well, though sadly, these are not even conceivable! The String Theorists careers are protected by the fact their theory cannot be unproven :)
It's not that we shouldn't use math, but I suggest that when using Math we are predisposed to want clean, simple equations that explain everything.
There aren't many clean, simple equations (relatively speaking), compared to long, ugly ones.
Each time you make an equation longer, you have a huge variety of choices for the new bits; if we take "ugliness" to include things like asymmetry, arbitrary constants, lack of relationships between the parts, etc. then there are more ugly equations than beautiful ones.
It's more practical to look for simple, pretty laws since there are far fewer of them to try. Once we've exhausted them, we can try making things a little uglier, and seeing if that works; and keep incrementing.
After all, if you have enough epicycles you can explain any motion you like (since you're basically taking a fourier transform)
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.htm...
Also these quotes are interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreasonable_ineffectiveness_o...
Where is the math that predicted Dark Matter and Dark Energy?
Once in a while someone gets lucky and makes a guess that happens to match experimental reality. But it's more like a lottery than a demonstration of the predictive power of maths. They get a career and possibly a Nobel prize, and all the many, many people who made equally plausible predictions that happened not to match experimental reality are quietly forgotten.
Game changers like Einstein and Newton turn up occasionally, but they're very rare. We're desperately in need of one now, but the current academic system would probably exclude someone like Einstein. ("Works in a patent office" won't get you into Nature.)
The problem now is it's getting harder and more expensive to test new possibilities. The Standard Model is obviously incomplete, SUSY doesn't seem to be working out, there are a lot of loose ends, but it's hard to sell funding bodies on bigger accelerator designs if there's no serious prospect of finding new stuff.
Great examples you got, because those two did very little of the "here's a theory, let's see what it can explain" the GP is taking about, and focused basically on "here's some weird data, let's get a theory for explaining it".
And more appropriate to the diphoton bump: https://xkcd.com/1437/
We may have reached the end of what big accelerators can tell us. Fermilab was shut down in 2011.
Supersymmetry predicts a new form of conserved charge called "R" charge; since none of the light particles we've seen has R charge, any heavy particles with R charge cannot decay into them, and hence some of those particles (the lightest ones) will be stable.
If such heavy, stable particles were common, they could make up the dark matter we've inferred exists.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightest_Supersymmetric_Partic...
The problem is, each time a collider fails to find any of these heavy supersymmetry particles, the theory gets shuffled around and a new prediction is made with a higher mass. The mass range investigated by the LHC is now so large that it's difficult to shuffle around supersymmetry any more, and it might be time to consider it falsified.
I remember some Starts with a Bang post that said they must me "warm" particles, and heavy ones couldn't accumulate enough energy for matching. But I've never seen anybody else alk about it.
The quanta article discuss what they have saw in December and what they have saw now, in the section "The Bump that went away". Also that and why they expect to see a new particles due to supersimetry in the section "Missing Pieces".
The Backreaction article discuss more about the influence of the lack of a experimental evidence of an unknown particle in the physics community, i.e. that without an experimental guidance is difficult to choose between the different theoretical approach, and some ideas for future research.
Total different articles.