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Comment by yk | Hacker News Reader

So the last hope collider people are getting desperate?

To explain a bit, the well known trouble with today's physical theories is, that on one hand we know that general relativity and quantum field theories do not fit well together, on the other hand we don't have a good idea of the way forward. So the hope was, that LHC would show something interesting, like supersymmetry, or at least deviations from the standard model. So far it only shows precisely what one expected before, so the theoretical problems are precisely the same as before.

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Not really. We have several ideas going forward, it's just that no experiment so far has produced evidence for them. On the other hand, a null result is still a result. Of course it would be cooler to witness supersymmetric partners, but the fact that we searched and didn't find them at those energies is a result in itself.

Is is true though? I've been to a talk by one of LHCb researchers [1] where he said that they observe a pretty significant anomaly in meson decay (I believe [2] has more details) and expect to publish updated results later in 2018. Looks like there is some hope

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edvdzh9Pggg

[2]: https://www.nature.com/news/physicists-excited-by-latest-lhc...

null result is still a result. thats cute. but looking at the budget of LHC i would hope for a bit more actual result. instead of using backward logic to promote failure as success.

ah, i have this wonderful theory.... i didn't prove it yet. but that doesn't disprove it... >.> what happened to solving real-world problems, with practical solutions, and doing science along the way? we used to discover many interesting things about nature and the universe in just that way, and at the same time this attitude changed, the 'null result is also a result' cult started to eat our brains and pollute our thought.

> what happened to solving real-world problems, with practical solutions, and doing science along the way?

Imho, the most beautiful results originated from letting people just sit in a room and think, rather than putting pressure on them to generate something useful (e.g. publication pressure, shareholder pressure).

Promote failure? Do you even know what the scientific method is? They found the higgs boson! They proved some of the most difficult particles predicted by the standard model. How is that a failure????

To demonstrate the importance of null results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...

> i didn't prove it yet. but that doesn't disprove it

A null result actually disproves a theory.

That's not a null result, but a negative result. A null result is a result that tells you nothing new (by definition). At least, according to the parlance in this thread.

Particle accelerator research has resulted in theories and equipment as a byproduct of what they found - either proving or disproving specific theories, or by producing new or unexpected results. The last of which results in new theories to explain those results. Those new theories producing “useful results”.

MRIs and PET scans were the result of theories that only came about as a result of data that came out of particle accelerators. The goal of the accelerators was never specifically “develop new medical imaging devices”, it was simply the “basic research” that makes thing like that possible in the future.

Isnt it more so that LHC proved the Higgs-Boson but not much else and they were expecting to find quite a few things more at the energies they are running (at least according to the theories).

Sorry to be unaware, but what were/are they hoping or expecting to discover with these experiments, that is other than find new subatomic particles. I mean, they did find a whole set of subatomic particles and their respective spins, so no reason why they couldn't find something more. I know it's all for recreating the scene of the big bang or whatever theory that they hope to prove or disprove or figure out a new one.

I do know of the Standard Model and Beyond the Standard Model types but it really seems to boil down to discovering new theories perhaps. That could also be uncertain as a new model could ally with QM or not, again I don't know if the current Standard Model allies well with QM. I think it doesn't again ally well with GR which is the same problem with QM and GR. It's funny though how they all behave.

They predicted and found the Higgs, but things like more particles that helped explain why the mass of the Higgs isn't what it should be, hoped to find things like super symmetry, extra dimensions, strings, new combinations of old particles, but it literally found nothing. (Im not an expert but am paraphrasing talks Ive hear from Sean Carrol). All it found was the Higgs and nothing else, and I think that is more than puzzling for physicists. The good thing is particle and quantum physicists like puzzles.

Correction: We don't have a testable idea of the way forward. As with current technology.

I've been out of the theoretical physics game a little while, what are the leading "untestable" quantum-gravity theories out there today?

String theory's one.

String theory's several trillion.

True, I should say "a" string theory.

String Theory is a theory in the same sense that Quantum Field Theory is a theory. You need concrete phenomenological models to make predictions. While there some ways to do that starting from string theory there is no one known model to rule them all, the way the earlier attempts like Georgie‘s SU(5) GUT Model was. For some flavors like F-theory it is even a research questions how to make certain predictions of matter content etc at all. This is made more uncomfortable by te fact that the most natural susy extensions of the standard model have been all but ruled out. This also eliminates one of the main reasons for susy: as a solution to the fine tuning problem.

To be fair, the parent asked for untestable theories.

Supersymmetry, supra-dimensionality, string theory, twistor theory, M-theory (which is a superset of string theory).

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