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Comment by mfoy_ | Hacker News Reader

I guess it's hard to say, because we don't know what we don't know. The famous example is Newtonian physics which seemed to perfectly explain everything.... until new tools and methods came out that were capable of showing it break down under extreme circumstances. That's how we ended up with Einsteinian physics, where it accounted for the old model and the new observed discrepancies.

So... how do we know that we will not find some bizarre scenario in the future the throws the Standard Model into a similar existential crisis?

I say keep your mind open.

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Although Einstein apparently knew about the Michelson-Morley experiment, it's unclear how much his development of relativity depended on it. He seems to have moved on to being motivated mainly by rationalist abstraction and the use of gedanken experiments, rather than actual experiments. The predictions of relativity were then confirmed by later observations and experiments.

"On the role of the Michelson-Morley experiment: Einstein in Chicago" http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4778/1/Einstein_Chicago_Web2...

It seems that the development of quantum mechanics has been much more driven by experimental results, although there are exceptions, such as Dirac's prediction of the positron.

Einstein's theory hasn't yet been reconciled with quantum theory. That's a good place to watch for progress.

I wonder if there is a Future Circular Collider that could help expand the standard model into this regime.

There unfortunately isn't, at least not at a scale that's feasible right now. [0]

[0]: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...

That may require waiting to become a Kardashev III[1] civilization so we can do experiments where we know General Relativity and the Standard Model give different results. The energies required for the disagreements to show up are really insane.

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

More or less. We can hope that something more clever would be possible, like in the novel Schild's Ladder...

Though we'd have to hope that, unlike that novel, we don't accidentally set off a vacuum collapse. That would be unfortunate.

It will also be a civilization-scale experiment on quantum immortality, where we can't get negative result.

You'll excuse me for not wanting to test that.

Not really sure about that. Physicists are getting really frustrated by the fact that the LHC has found exactly the missing piece that the SM predicted (the Higgs) and zero evidence of any physics beyond that, anything that would get us closer to quantum gravity. No strings, no supersymmetry, not even any hints as to the nature of dark matter. All it has done is give new lower bounds to the energy scales at which something interesting might start to happen. For all we know, we might need a solar system size collider to attain the required energies.

>For all we know, we might need a solar system size collider to attain the required energies.

We just need to observe the collisions happening at these energies - we don't necessarily need to produce them ourselves.

Some physicists are starting to think about how we might be able to observe naturally occurring collisions at these energy levels rather than producing them ourselves.

IIRC that only buys you 2-3 orders over LHC energy.

Considering this would represent a continent-sized collider... I'll take it.

AIUI, the trick with colliders isn't so much creating high-energy collisions, but creating them exactly inside gigantic detectors that can measure what happens in those collisions, as well as the collisions having a known amount of energy and contents.

Well, to the best of my understanding, both are an issue with current colliders. I've not read any of the papers around the idea of observing collisions caused by high energy events elsewhere in the galaxy/universe, but the articles I read made it sound like this would solve a portion of the problem that we otherwise might not be able to without a solar system sized collider. They didn't make it sound like this would be anything we could do anytime soon, however. But potentially sooner than we'd be able to generate the energy needed to cause collisions at those energy levels.

I'm having trouble finding the articles I've read on the subject - I'll follow back up if I do manage to find 'em.

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