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Comment by fanzhang | Hacker News Reader

What does this mean for the future of science and technology?

I find it fascinating that so much interesting physics has been discovered in the last century -- for example I only recently found out the neutron essentially a post WWI era discovery [1]. And yet so little fundamental physics has come by in the last 30 years.

Now that there is no more increase in microstructure knowledge of the universe, will the other sciences and then technology follow in this stoppage?

Arguably the Internet followed from computers which followed from transistors which followed from fundamental physical theory of atoms and electrons from less than 150 years ago.

Will the lack of new physics cascade down, or is there enough "stuff" between physics and technology that tech can keep on going.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_the_neutron

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Nothing. We are centuries away from using anything in HEP in tech application. (If someone thinks otherwise I'd love to hear counterpoints!)

The thing is, subatomic stuff is extremely energy dense and packed very stably into particles and atoms. Even to just crack open that package we require massive machines like the LHC. Even if we could control things there it's not clear that it's even possible to rearrange the parts into other configurations. All such configurations would be extremely energy dense and intrinsically unstable, with QM making sure they decay quickly. So figuring out what stuff is made of doesn't give us more ways to interact with it.

The good news is that we're far from done understanding how atoms can combine into interesting structures. Like _really_ far from done. From topological states of matter to meta materials there are lots of surprises.

> Even to just crack open that package we require massive machines like the LHC.

as a small correction, this is not true. what you probably really mean is massive amounts of energy, but large machines are not the requirement because RF-based acceleration is not the end solution. see laser-based plasma accelerators.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration

I don't understand this opinion of "little fundamental physics". First, what do people actually know about all of modern physics to make such a statement?

There's despair at HEP, yes, but it's because we can't discover a Higgs boson every year and many physicists thought that maybe there were lots of new particles coming up. There was a solid theoretical possibility that would have allowed in a way to get something similar. But they're not there, or at least we don't have the means to produce them now, so you have to try other things. That's not bad, that's simply how science works.

You can't make up new particles if they don't exist. That's not a failure, that's the sign that you have done your job. The better you get at something, the harder it gets to improve your results. No one tells biologists that they have to get something better than Evolution every decade.

That disappointment of many can't spoil what has been a triumph, the Standard Model with warts and all is how Nature works: there really are Higgs bosons which we didn't have the technology to even look for until now. And there are still precision measurements to be made that will give us information about what we can't reach directly, because it's hiding in some numbers there. Such things don't make it to headlines, though.

About fundamental physics... Well, we've discovered that neutrinos have mass, that's new physics right there. We've measured gravitational waves, which many thought was impossible. We've discovered that the Universe expansion is accelerating, more new physics. Also that dark matter is pretty much not an hypothesis, because of weak lensing and a number of other independent observations, so there's exotic matter out there. There's a lot of work to be done, yes, but we've learned a lot already.

> Will the lack of new physics cascade down

It's not that there's "lack" of anything, except understanding. "New" is in the eyes of the observer, the way I see it, there are very new and fascinating discoveries every year. It's more how the expectations aren't properly communicated. Like the article author writes:

"I fear a complex set of issues is likely to get over-simplified, and this over-simplified version of the book’s argument is all that much of the public is ever going to hear about it. "

It's all about for what the physicists can get the funding to explore. The biggest worry is the perception of "simple" public (some of which are actually deciding what is going to be financed) that there have to be "successes" however the "successes" are defined.

In reality, in physics, investing a lot of energy to find something and not finding that something can still be a point of a new beginning, and we had that in history a lot. Without Michelson-Morley experiments that didn't find what was "expected" there would be no Special and General Relativity -- these experiments were necessary. And the invention of Michelson still gives fascinating results: the first measurement of merging of black holes, only a few years ago, more than 100 years after Michelson's first experiment, used as the basis the concepts first invented by Michelson. We simply have to fund the experiments, and every properly done experiment is success, even if the results aren't what a lot of people expected to be.

There were the times where new paricles “appearing” wasn’t expected. Now the expectations were that even relatively small efforts must bring new particles. These expectations will most likely be adjusted.

Regarding financing, for example, the last time I've checked the total cost of everything LHC did, including building it and operating it for years, was around 9 billion of dollars. It's effectively nothing, compared to 1,500 billions of dollars (!) that are still planned to be spent on a plane that will surely not advance the science, famous F-35(!) (and much more is already spent than on LHC!) That puts some views in real perspective. One military plane could finance building and operation of one totally new LHC for at least 150 years, every year one new.

> One military plane

To be fair, that budget is for 2500 planes and their maintenance over 50 years.

Still, the difference in potential outcomes for humanity are substantial. For sure one will only ever achieve blowing up someone with better precision than before... how exiting!

F-35 isn't for blowing things up, it's for deterring war. Fat good your particle accelerators do if thet constant get blown up in war.

Deterring war is the greatest way to unlock human prosperity.

And killing with precision means saving lives, the greatest good in the world.

Do you believe that? All that kind of investment does is keep the war machine spinning, and the U.S. will continue to keep the world a violent place.

Investing in healthcare, education, and infrastructure on a global scale would a) be possible with that kind of budget and b) do a lot more to prevent war, since there would be a whole lot less to fight about.

And it's compared to the budget of all costs for the development, building, maintenance and running of a single and unique LHC. Whereas the costs for producing 2500 planes are spread to all of them. Nevertheless the total LHC budget is a cost of mere 15 of the said series of 2500 units. The cost per unit of the whole series is 600 millions per unit! It's quite obvious something is wrong in these investments.

But the real science (especially to observe the Earth, the climate and the effects of global warming) struggles for breadcrumbs or even for pure survival. Because ideology, not rational thinking.

I think there's undue emphasis on "fundamental". Modelling complex systems is important in actually making real world predictions. Condensed matter physics, as one example, is an area that is growing and has a plethora practical implications.

Yes, why should physics just be "fundamental"? I think advances in tech, AI will help physicians explore complex systems.

I guess we humans are just impatient due to our limited lifespan. If you look at the really grand scale of things, even the the speed of light, which for us humans is indistinguishable from instantaneous, becomes incredibly slow.

So we now have picked all the 'low hanging fruits' in physics. The really hard stuff may take a few millenniums, which is still unimaginable short compared to the age of the universe. And the universe itself is just out of its infancy and can go on for trillions of years... But we may find another interesting thing or two before we fade away.

Probably that high-energy physics isn't going to produce much new for a while. Low-energy physics, down near absolute zero or involving single particles, seems to be doing quite well. Slowing down light, quantum entanglement - those are all recent developments which look useful.

Microbiology has lots of work ahead. We can read DNA, but progress in understanding it is slow. Lots of potential there.

> Probably that high-energy physics isn't going to produce much new for a while

The discoveries of particle physics are not where the bulk of technology spin off comes from. Most of the particles that are generated don't last long, and are hard to generate. Most of the particles that have been discovered have had limited utility. If the particles aren't naturally generated (like in muon imaging detection) there isn't too much use for them.

So, you get things like muon tomography of the pyramids

https://www.nature.com/news/cosmic-ray-particles-reveal-secr...

But you don't generate the muons yourself. Similarly, understanding cosmic rays in the atmosphere requires you to have some understanding of the various decay products, but unless you're trying to do something really sensitive, you may not care.

University College London's put out a document talking about the technological benefits of high energy physics research

http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/~markl/pp2020/KnowledgeExchangeDocu...

And they basically break it down to "Accelerator Science and Technology", "Detector Research and Development", "Impact of Electronics and Readout Developed for Particle Physics", "Computing, Software and Analysis Techniques", and "Special Skills and Competencies". In short, nothing really to do with the actual discoveries themselves; it's the process of building tools to explore the high energy regimes that is useful to technology. Arguably, the same can be said about the theoretical side.

An (overly pragmatic) argument is: "If you can't detect any deviations from the Standard Model, then the Standard Model is sufficient for all forseeable technological applications."

And there's plenty of things to measure and discover within the Standard Model. It's not all about discovering new fundamental particles. There's actually producing hypothetical particles as well that are predicted by the standard model but have never been made. Like Glueballs for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glueball

(Which, as the wikipedia article points out, has no actual applications :) )

There seems to be an implied assumption that research should find practical application. This is not a self-evident position.

Modern advancements in physics over the past 100 years have opened a can of worms. We still haven't even scratched the surface of quantum systems in applications.

It wouldn't surprise me if the majority of physicists are now leaning towards applications and less "fundamental" disciplines. Newton and Einstein were two centuries apart! I think the past 100 years of physics will still run us another century before we make any more groundbreaking advancements in theory. It's not even as bleak as it sounds, because we're really at the tip of an iceberg here already.

Well, today we have tools (and math) that are infinitely more powerful than what we had a hundred years ago, while, in comparison, progress in fundamental physics is now infinitesimally slow. That should tell you something.

There were plenty of groundbreaking physics results between Newton and Einstein.

I think that's a fair questioning. Transistor scaling seems to have run its course, sitting right at the atomic scale (but not beyond -- hence it would be probably undisturbed by subatomic discoveries).

At least there are plenty of biological examples that we haven't gotten close to replicating technologically -- while we have substitutes for almost every biological functionality, there are areas in the parameter space where the bio versions comfortably lead. The brain of course is an example, leading in efficiency and capabilities; but there are many others like compact self-replication, self-repair of structures, micro and nanomachinery (exhibited in cells), and so much more. None of that of course requires advancing physics.

Even for long term technologies, I don't think a deeper understanding of physics would have much to contribute, unless we found something wild like a compound made from new particles. That isn't to say it's not worth pursuing; it just takes a different relation to society, similar to math and philosophy.

The issue is, as I understand it, that physics has taken as to the limits of what is controllable by humans. Results of almost everything that we can control can be derived from fundamental physics that we do have. We may not have compute / math to actually carry out analysis, so there is still room for progress, but it is just not fundamental physics. Also, we know what to do to test different new fundamental theories, but it requires ridiculous experiments.

From this one could reason, that the new fundamental physics would resolve issues that would have no practical significance. For example I don't know of any impact of discovering Higgs boson on engineering. But there is of course option of discovering something that we don't even imagine at this point and this could have practical implications.

Tl;Dr: If gathered resources of the whole world are not enough to test it, it may not have any practical, engineering significance.

> no practical significance

Imagine how many people would have said something similar about quantum physics before the first A-bomb was developed.

Historically, the practical significance of major discoveries often came much later than the discovery itself. We do need the discoveries, especially those "of no practical significance" as long as they really improve our understanding of the physical world.

I did mention that: But there is of course option of discovering something that we don't even imagine at this point and this could have practical implications.

Also, I wrote "From this one could reason". I, myself, actually hope that we will get some breakthroughs, because established theories make ridiculous predictions or require equally ridiculous fine tuning. One example is vacuum catastrophe: "the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics". We have had similar prediction in the past e.g. "ultraviolet catastrophe" that lead to the whole idea of "quantum".

But IMO the issue here may be more fundamental. Testing quantum gravity theories requires energies way beyond stupidly high energies like in LHC. As I understand, the requirement follows from the theory. It's like light speed limit, it's not something you can engineer around to see in lower energies. You can engineer your way up to get these energies, but there doesn't seems to be a short cut like with positive feedback loops in case of A-bombs.

Chicago Pile 1, first nuclear reactor cost 50 000$ at the time, so something below 1 million $ today. Most of historically important experiment then was even cheaper. We stumbled upon lot of things because we were doing sort of cheap random search around things we did not understand. Most importantly cheapness of these experiments coincided with potential of practical applicability. I fear that this is mostly over, because as far as I know we don't have fundamentally inexplicable phenomena, I stress "fundamentally", that we can play around with cheaply. LHC budget is somewhat around 10 billion $, JWST another 10 billion $, LIGO somewhat around 1 billion $. And as I understand this is nothing in comparison to what would be required to reject e.g. string theory.

If you can't experiment with it cheaply I doubt that you can apply it cheaply.

I believe it’s still worthy to increase the energies as much as it is technically possible: e.g. I think China still plans CEPC.

Yes, I agree on that. I think that just possibility of deeper understanding of the world is worth it. I hope that especially gravitational astronomy will flourish.

> Will the lack of new physics cascade down, or is there enough "stuff" between physics and technology that tech can keep on going.

Definitely enough. We're at the dawn of bio and nanotech and haven't even scratched the surface of the consequences of 20st century science. It'll keep technologists busy for at least 50 years if not more.

Pure physicists on the other hand are in a tough spot. By pure I mean those not involved in applications, e.g., HEP, string theorists, etc. Though I'm not a pure physicist and it's just my opinion.

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