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Comment by hannob | Hacker News Reader

Just a thought: The fact that there is physics beyond current knowledge doesn't necessarily mean that it's achievable to find out about it.

Think about it: Finding confirmation for the Higgs Boson required building a particle accelerator of 27 kilometers. For the larger part of humanities existence it was probably unthinkable to design such an experiment.

What if the next level of yet unknown physics requires building a machine that's as large as the equator? Or larger than anything that can be built on earth?

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I think this kind of issue has always been lurking in the shadows for humanity, not only in physics but in other areas as well. While I'm not certain about the historical details, it seems to me that the ancient Greeks were able to dream up mathematical problems, that resisted solution for centuries.

Similarly, the math required to put calculus on a decent theoretical foundation was unknown until more than a century after Newton's time.

Other areas of science... how do humans think? Can we cure pain without killing people?

Physics experienced an incredible series of lucky breaks over the past few centuries, but each breakthrough doesn't come with a schedule for when the next one will arrive, and we never know when the next one will be a real stumper. We don't know if it will take a month, a year, or a century.

On the other hand, the double-slit experiment doesn't take any expensive equipment, and if things had gone differently, could easily have gone un-noticed until 2019. My bet is there are other experiments like double-slit which will be equally revolutionary and dirt cheap and everyone will be kicking themselves for not discovering them sooner.

I want to agree with you - if for no other reason than the current research path seems impossibly complicated. Needing to cool things down to milikelvin or building megastructures is restrictive.

> On the other hand, the double-slit experiment doesn't take any expensive equipment, and if things had gone differently, could easily have gone un-noticed until 2019.

This is highly doubtful.

The moment you have "something <mumble> is a wave" you immediately perform an interference experiment.

The photoelectric effect demands a particle interpretation.

The combination of the two in a double slit experiment is almost immediate and obvious.

We went from Millikan in 1913 determining the charge on an electron to DeBroglie hypothesizing electrons also having wave/particle duality in 1924 to the Davisson-Germer experiment in 1927. That's really fast given the technology of the day.

So why did it stall? Apparently death by committee at the Solvay Conference with the insistence on an indeterministic paradigm.

I've been having a field day learning about pilot wave theory and recent (this century) research that helps empirically visualize it. David Bohm had quite the mind.

> So why did it stall? Apparently death by committee at the Solvay Conference with the insistence on an indeterministic paradigm.

Not completely. Some of the issue is actually the technology available at the time.

Einstein (who propounded a fields explanation for things) vs Bohr is the great debate and Bohr won.

The problem, at the time, is that Einstein's formulations predicted certain things. For example, if Einstein's fields formulation is correct, you don't have electron levels that decay. And that's clearly incorrect.

Except ...

It turns out that the better and better you isolate an atom, the longer and longer it takes for its electrons to return to ground state.

So, Einstein was correct, but it's only been in the very recent decades that we can create isolated, single quantum state systems which we can probe.

Physics is often constrained by the technology of the time. How long did it take until Einstein's predictions were finally tested and confirmed?

Look at how much engineering it has taken to bring the Kibble balance up to enough accuracy to become the new kilogram standard.

I strongly suspect that there are some experiments that can be done similar to the Cavendish experiment which could prove the Quantized Inertia theory, and might even get a share of a Nobel prize. They could be done in a garage, with some cheap electronics, servos, and a raspberry pi or two.

> What if the next level of yet unknown physics requires building a machine that's as large as the equator? Or larger than anything that can be built on earth?

Then we need to fund that engineering.

That's part of the argument. Will a bigger collider really be the best use of funds?

Pouring enormous sums at, for example, the solid-state physics of superconductors and figuring out how to make an actual room temperature superconductor could advance many things simultaneously. (For example: room temp superconductors probably enable fusion at reasonable scales--and fusion at decent sizes gates most megascale engineering projects. Another example: quantum computers have several open questions about them that may mean that they never achieve generality--we should probably probe that intensely).

Nobody is saying to never build another collider. But the real question is "Do we have a good reason to build another collider right now? Or should we shunt that money elsewhere in physics?"

So what? If we don't take steps forward we will never get anywhere. We can only operate with the best capabilities and knowledge available to us today.

$20B is nothing compared to the world's GDP. If there aren't more compelling research projects of similar magnitude in fundamental physics, then we should build it. Of course, I'm not qualified to make that judgment, but I think we have good reason to trust that smart and reputable people are working hard to make the right call.

We should always be investing a proportion of our accumulated wealth and resources into exploring the unknown and making scientific discovery.

This a very simplified way to look at the original post, glossing over most of the details and missing nearly all the points.

Nobody is arguing against spending (lots of) money for scientific experiments. The problems that arise are qualitative rather than quantitive. As the original post outlines, there are many experimental domains one could allocate that money towards. One of the issues is that of cutting your losses. When does one accept that enough is enough and starts doing something else? Smart and reputable people are not infallible or less prone to making terrible (self-centered, ego-driven, profit-seeking) decisions.

One of the points that the original post is making is that high energy physics is dominated by these kinds of people. Predictions repeatedly invalidated yet still clinging to the same ideas. That is starting to look more like a religion or mania than science.

the purpose of the LHC was not to find the Higgs boson, but to keep probing matter at higher energies to find whatever is to be found. It is not particularly smart to brute force stuff but it is a rational choice unless one can propose an alternative. It is the default choice considering the options, and i believe there is a hope that given enough time something useful may be produced as a side-effect (I mean, the WWW was not a bad perk). The next level of physics may not have to do with higher energies but with bird droppings again.

There's another, more simple, explanation. We have made some fundamental mistake which, due to its 'naturalness' was adopted as all but a certainty. You reach some point that trying to build upon things becomes impossible when your foundation is fundamentally broken. For an example of times past, just consider the geocentric vs heliocentric universe issue. The geocentric universe (that Earth is the center upon which everything else revolves) was fundamentally built upon a model and assumed to be correct. This means that any sort of 'weirdness' that emerged from it was not really a problem but instead just massaged into the model itself.

As a couple of examples of this consider the fact that a geocentric universe means the planets that orbit us must travel in these really peculiar swirly type patterns. This happens nowhere else in nature and doesn't really make any physical sense, but when you assume a model of a geocentric universe it's not really a problem - you can just massage it into the model. Another example of a very bizarre oddity that would be seen nowhere else was in things like Mercury suddenly having to stop and start going backwards in its orbit. Again this is not seen anywhere else and doesn't really make much of any physical sense, but if we take a model as reality - then sure, you can massage it into it. Why not?

These lead to the real problem. Model based science is a really bad idea, because it's really hard to falsify models. In the case of the geocentric universe it ultimately required being able to see the starts 'through the eyes of god'. A good deal of physics today is built around models. And as these models have absorbed more and more 'oddities' they've started to be seen not as models but as simple reality whose proof is but a mere formality. And as is the case with the geocentric universe, you reach some point at which time further discoveries start to seem ever more elusive. Imagine trying to research orbital mechanics when you start with the assumption that planets travel in 'swirlies' and some can even stop and go backwards!

As this articles mentions, modern physics adopted some very substantial changes to the model of universal thinking in the 70s. And those adoptions have now, though unproven, become defacto 'reality.' Yet since then, there's been nothing. And maybe one of the worst problems with models is that they can be completely wrong but you give you valid answers. For instance you could (and can) determine the orbital periods and locations of planets using the geocentric model. And that was done for more than 1500 years! It was incredibly complex, but it was possible. That, in turn, could then be used as 'proof' of the model's correctness, when in reality it was anything but.

You can make naked eye observations but it took the telescope (and more accurate time keeping) to have accurate enough measurements for an actual proof. Multiple ancient Greeks who had strong arguments for Heliocentrism, but there wasn't enough empirical evidence. That took Keplers Laws and a telescope. It could not have been proven without the necessary level of technology.

The same is true today. Except we know our theories are incomplete and in many cases we know under precisely which conditions it's incomplete. We simply can't access those energy levels to reach the next step yet. We also know constraints on what can be possible while keeping most of what we think is true, we lack the ability to go further than that however.

So we are waiting for the technological breakthroughs to prove or disprove our many candidate theories. It's like Kepler waiting for Tyco's telescope data. We can't rule things out without stronger accelerators or radical ideas that are actually testable.

We have made some fundamental mistake...

I was just thinking about how Schroedinger 'worked up' his famed equation. A physics historian told me (not in these words) that he didn't actually 'derive it' but sort of ... 'arrived at' it.

The WP bio says that in his fourth paper on the subject (which first involves time), he greatly simplified the -equation- by introducing complex numbers ... and then:

"something magical happened, and all of wave mechanics was at his feet.... Schrödinger was not entirely comfortable with the implications of quantum theory. He wrote about the probability interpretation of quantum mechanics, saying: 'I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.'"

Introducing complex numbers -made the equation more beautiful-. The equation e^(i*pi) = i^2 is amazing, but may also suggest that we're not looking at the math's basement level.

It's been suggested that all of the pyramids' stones couldn't have been cut with two-foot-long copper saws. It may be that the 'beauty' people are seeking is limited by their tools, as much as their imaginations.

> It's been suggested that all of the pyramids' stones couldn't have been cut with two-foot-long copper saws.

Pyramid stones are made of concrete and cast in place. It's very primitive technology, which is known for few thousand years.

The pyramids were not made of concrete. They were built from sandstone blocks and clad in limestone. and the stones were cut using stone tools, not copper. Copper is too soft for stone working but quite a few rocks are harder than sandstone.

Quote:

The pair believe that the concrete method was used only for the stones on the higher levels of the Pyramids. There are some 2.5 million stone blocks on the Cheops Pyramid. The 10-tonne granite blocks at their heart were also natural, they say. The professors agree with the “Davidovits theory” that soft limestone was quarried on the damp south side of the Giza Plateau. This was then dissolved in large, Nile-fed pools until it became a watery slurry.

Lime from fireplace ash and salt were mixed in with it. The water evaporated, leaving a moist, clay-like mixture. This wet “concrete” would have been carried to the site and packed into wooden moulds where it would set hard in a few days. Mr Davidovits and his team at the Geopolymer Institute at Saint-Quentin tested the method recently, producing a large block of concrete limestone in ten days.

http://www.ce.memphis.edu/1101/interesting_stuff/pyramids_in... https://www.geopolymer.org/archaeology/pyramids/are-pyramids...

This is very far from accepted and is thoroughly refuted here

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288698728_Evidence_...

Accepted by whom? Information about ancient concrete and other types of cementation can be found in various books, e.g. [1].

I saw picture of cement klin (oven?, non-native speaker) in Peru, built more than thousand years ago, which looks _exactly_ like freshly build cement klin near to my home (Rivne, Ukraine), but labeled as "an ancient temple, filled with dirt".

[1]: Lea's Chemistry of Cement and Concrete

Concrete is a science of its own- it is not so simple at all.

Yep, so it's why it was forgotten so many times in history.

Well, 'models', or concepts in general, have been seen as flawed for many centuries when it comes to apprehending reality. Sadly, there's no other game in town.

It's also really questionable if another game could make logical sense. Kant's stuff on speculative reason comes to mind.

Geocentric vs heliocentric universe issue is an interesting example, because the geocentric version is not actually wrong, the whole point of the general relativity principle is that it geocentric an equally valid viewpoint.

The trick was understanding that circles+epicycles around earth are in fact equivalent earth and everything else rotating around some other point. Which is a relatively easy insight with analytical geometry, but is hard to see without it, and people noticed it only after they had more detailed data, and had to describe epicycles for ellipses instead of simple circles.

So if this teaches us something, it is that most likely we already have all the data that we need, we just need to look at it differently. But to look at things differently we need more math, and more experiments.

The Relativity of Wrong is worth reading here. No one proved heliocentrism without first showing they could recover the epicycles from the heliocentric model.

The funny part is, both geocentric and heliocentric is wrong. The sun and the planets all rotate around the barycenter. None of them is special.

The orbits being ellipses instead of circles, center of mass being different from center of sun, precession because of general relativity effects, are all small corrections, and as described in Asimov's relativity of wrong suggested by the sibling comment, they only add detail to the picture. The question of geocentric vs heliocentric is different, because it is about looking at the same data in a different way. All the corrections can be added in geocentric model as well, but everything looks much more complicated in it.

It is very similar to the formulation of classical mechanics in terms of least action principle. Both formulations make the same predictions, but least action principle leads to a simpler formulation of quantum mechanics: Feynman's path integrals.

You need the same corrections in a true heliocentric model as well, they are just smaller. The true leap in understanding comes when you realize that none of the objects is special, none of them is the true center, they all follow the same rules. That's where the simplification of the theory happens.

Well this is why we have Occam's Razor: If two models make the same predictions, but one is simpler, then we use the simple model. You can make accurate predictions with a geocentric model of the solar system, but it will be incredibly complex, whereas the same predictions are made much simpler by a heliocentric model.

If you can create a model of physics that makes predictions matching what we've already verified, and it is simpler than the Standard Model, then I'll bet there's a Nobel in it for you.

> What if the next level of yet unknown physics requires building a machine that's as large as the equator? Or larger than anything that can be built on earth?

Well, one thought is that we already have access to much higher energies - via cosmic radiation.

Of course, a lot about that radiation is uncontrolled, which makes things difficult...

There's much to be done with lower energy experiments, including understanding the weak nuclear force and possibly LENR.

I'm beginning to think governments are afraid of LENR for a couple reasons. One, it would disrupt the balance of power in the world on multiple levels. And two, it may turn out that nuclear weapons could be built cheap and easy. That later thought is frightening.

If by governments you mean people who are tasked with thinking about the negative implications of policy and technology on other human beings and (hopefully) opting to act in ways to minimizing negative consequences for society while balancing the needs and human rights of people, then yes.

This is conspiracy thinking unfounded by evidence. Nobody is scared of "LENR" and if the research surrounding it had even a little credibility then it would be the #1 national security concern for every 1st world nation.

Why would it be a national security concern?

Because such a fantastical technology would have gigantic military and economic implications for any nation in possession of it. If any credible researchers could demonstrate a plausible path towards such a discovery scientists would be up to their eyes in DARPA research grants.

True, but I'd also posit that such research would be kept out of public view for exactly the reasons you stated. That means all we'd be seeing is the half-baked approaches by people who don't quite get it and can't seem to get high quality, useful, and reproducible results.

For anyone else who had to go look it up, LENR is the new name for cold fusion.

LENR is a much better name for a still little-understood phenomenon.

From the NASA archives:

"Low Energy Nuclear Reactions is a source of thermal energy. It is an immature technology that requires further research to determine the best propulsion system integration on a vehicle platform. LENR has the highest specific energy of the alternative energy sources mentioned at about 51,000,000 Wh/kg.3

This is a conservative estimate from the recent LENR reactor test that was conducted in March 2013."

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201500...

Or instead of upping the size dimension, perhaps exploiting some relatively newly discovered phenomenon to continue the exploration.

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