Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes | Hacker News Reader

Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes

quantamagazine.org

140 pointstheafh88 comments

Open articleView on HN

Since we are talking about CERN let me take this opportunity to invite, whoever is interested, to visit the laboratory.

Beside the stop imposed by COVID, CERN organize guided tour to the laboratory and when possible the detectors.

If you are around the area of Geneva or you happen to be around, I really suggest the visits.

The guides are usually people working at CERN so they are quite knowable about it.

It is necessary to book the visit in advance.

A lot in advance :) I booked more than a month before because there are 10/20 places available per day.. I visited by myself the Globe (where Tim Berners Lee machine is located) and the microcosm exhibitions by myself, and the guided tour covered and introduction, the LHC control room and the first accelerator (synchrocyclotron)

Thanks. I got to visit as a student, in 2008/2009 I believe, and it was a great time. Seeing ATLAS and many other experiments.

Second! Visiting is very interesting, and the tour guides are real scientists that actually work there. I was lucky that they were able to fit me in same-day even though I hadn't booked ahead as strongly recommended.

"Growing anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider" sounds like a premise for a Hollywood horror movie about a strange, shimmering anomaly growing at a science lab.

I would so watch this. Perhaps it could involve the infamous baguette [1] mutating into something horrifying.

[1] https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2009-11/bread-loving-...

Alternatively, see "The Three Body Problem" by Cixin Liu [1] for an interesting take on what such anomalies could indicate!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)

Ugh. That book was _terrible_. Maybe something got lost in translation since it's so highly acclaimed, but I just couldn't get past the opening chapters.

I'm currently listening to it and I agree so far. There are a lot of very dragging and near pointless chapters. But there have been some stories that pulled me in a bit and that moved the whole topic along.

I still don't understand what the opening chapters set up or tried to explain. Maybe it was just about the political/environmental setting or maybe it starts to make sense later on...

Think of it as a period piece setting. American equivalent might be growing up during the Civil Rights movement. Establishes motivations for characters. Something this book could have used more of, not less.

Seems a bit silly to judge a 1400+ pages sci-fi trilogy based on a few chapters. It's not like science fiction books are usually great in prose.

Perhaps, but OP is absolutely not wrong to have done so either - the characterisation and exposition across the trilogy is generally awful and sub pulp fiction quality.

That said, I did enjoy the books and I thought some of the 'science' profoundly novel (if occasionally wince-inducing in its unlikelihood, but hey it's science 'fiction'!)

It's certainly true that a surprising number of books are poorly written. But even if you want to win me over on the strength of your ideas rather than the prose, you still need to lead with those ideas. If a book doesn't grab me in the first 4 chapters, I'm unlikely to read much further.

I persisted till the end and still have no slightest idea what is it that I'm apparently missing.

The opening chapters were awful from a literary standpoint and didn't offer much in the was off science fiction either. It does get better. It's probably overrated (how could it not be at this point), but it has redeeming qualities and provokes thought.

Personally, I loved it. A lot gets translated in a clunky fashion, and I thought book 2 was the clunkiest translation, but the ideas are fantastic.

I have a feeling that the "Dark Forest" theory is going to be accepted as a valid answer to the conundrum of the Drake equation.

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_dangerous_...

Apparently there is also a easy solution to the Fermi paradox by taking the uncertainty in the Drake parameters into account: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

"We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of magnitude. This makes a stark difference. When the model is recast to represent realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial {\em ex ante} probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it."

I've been told it's how modern Chinese novels are written. To a Western reader, it reads like juvenile fiction. The language is childishly simple, and all of the character's inner live — motivations and emotions and thoughts — are spelled out rather than inferred, and there's little no depth or ambiguity anywhere. I liked the historical context, but I found the whole thing to be very wooden and unimaginative.

I finished the first book, but I couldn't deal with it either. I think it could have worked terrifically if it had been written in a satirical style like Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s The Sirens of Titan. Some of the chapters about the aliens do come across like Vonnegutian comedy, but I'm not sure if this was intended. Overall, the book takes itself very seriously.

Maybe the point is to spell out the core narratives so that the reader can build on it themselves?

I'm not one for subtlety if it doesn't add any insight.

I doubt their state education system is full of literature teachers who encourage a lot of looking past the surface narrative of things.

Lol love the casual racism

It doesn't have to be racism. It could be a reflection on the fact that China has a totalitarian state with strong censorship. Hidden subtexts are hard to censor.

Here's an interesting perspective on the english translation: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/wired-book-club-ken-liu-interv...

I was so fascinated with the story that I read all 3 books in 3.5 days.

Wow. I think it took me a month. If you don’t mind me asking, have there been any other books or book series that you have read at similar Cannonball Run speed?

No, not at this speed.

The opening was the best part. It's the rest of the book where it defines itself as complete tripe. The initial set up was a good foray into Chinese history.

The ideas in the book were good, but I found the characters and the style of writing to be _awful_. It was _tiring_ to read. I think atombender explains it better. The whole style of the book was different (and in a bad way for me).

The way people/groups of people/organisations/societies acted was also not realistic. They all had the same way of reacting.

Still worth a read if you can stomach the writing.

You gotta stick with it, the whole first half of the first book is slow exposition and it’s much more gratifying if you can get past it.

Liu Cixin himself was quoted that he couldn't start the narrative as straight up science fiction because this genre is essentially unknowm in China. So he decided to build up to the actual science fiction part of the story in a deliberate, slow pace. The story arc then develops from an almost historic setting with Rwd Coast Base as a starting point to some crazy ending to the arc that is way out there at the end of book three.

Every serious critique of the books that I came across mentions the poor character portrayals. But the story offers a view of a universe that is intrinsically hostile in a very depressing way and I did enjoy it for that.

> Liu Cixin himself was quoted that he couldn't start the narrative as straight up science fiction because this genre is essentially unknowm in China. So he decided to build up to the actual science fiction part of the story in a deliberate, slow pace.

Apparently the order of the story is different between the Chinese and English versions.

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/wired-book-club-ken-liu-interv...

The article explains the reasoning as being sensitive to the culture part of it and not the sci-fi portion.

I read all 3 books, and the prose was ok (I'm not a native English speaker though). But the science and plot devices were absurd and I couldn't treat it seriously as a sci-fi book.

I found this to be one of the least enjoyable science fiction books I've ever read.

Sounds a like a typical Black Mesa incident...

Prepare for unforeseen consequences.

Please report to the surface for processing.

Uh...it's probably not a problem...probably...but I'm showing a small discrepancy in...well, no, it's well within acceptable bounds again. Sustaining sequence.

Have you read The Fold by Peter Clines? This headline sounds like it would come from that universe!

There's a great quote on this that's escaping me now, but essentially reproducing other people's experimental results is great for them not so much for you, or just proves that you are competent at running experiments.

Being able to run experiments properly is foundational for new science, but it isn't new science. Unexpected results that cannot be explained by human error (ie, bad experiments) is the origin story for new science.

So when weird results happen without any reasonable, rational explanation, everybody starts to salivate. "Growing anomalies" I expect is a bit like when the aromas start coming out of the kitchen before a big dinner is served.

It’s 4.7/fb of data, meaning data taken up to 2016, but with some gaps it seems. I think the total pp luminosity for the two big ones is around 15/fb, wonder why LHCb has so little in this analysis?

Bummer that the significance is only about 0.3 bigger than the last analysis, but at least it’s not a 750 peak yet.

What's an fb?

A femtobarn, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_(unit)

Quoting:

> During Manhattan Project research on the atomic bomb during World War II, American physicists at Purdue University needed a secretive unit to describe the approximate cross-sectional area presented by the typical nucleus (10^−28 m2) and decided on "barn". They considered this a large target for particle accelerators that needed to have direct strikes on nuclei, and the American idiom "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn" refers to someone whose aim is very bad. ...

> Other related units are the outhouse (1 μb, or 10^−34 m^2) and the shed (10^−24 b (1 yb), or 10^−52 m^2), although these are rarely used in practice.

> needed a secretive unit

> American idiom "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn"

It's being clever like that what got the Germans in WWII in trouble, I particularly like Wotan -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_name#German_code_names

Were as the brits made up a random code for this purpose - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rainbow_Codes

RV Jones's book is a great read about scientific intelligence of WW2.

Also, the NRO have previously given away classified orbits of spy satellites on their mission patches.

femtobarn

Strictly speaking, those are inverse femtobarns, the nonsensical unit for accumulated number of collisions that particle physicists use.

OK, attempt at ELI5:

The people are crashing lots of bunches of pebbles into each other, in two streams that meet.

Some of the people are interested in observing what happens when the small blue pebble hits a big gray pebble and the big one cracks. They know the "probability" (cross-section) of this process is around 100 fb.

Other people care about what happens when little tiny green pebbles collide three at a time. They know the "probability" of this is 11 fb - not so likely since three things need to line up.

The people operating the streams of pebbles keep track of how many inverse fb they produce. Let's say in 2019 they produced 0.7 inverse fb.

Then the people who care about blue/gray collisions know they can expect to find around 70 events in all the data from 2019, while the green/green/green people know they can expect about 7-8 events.

When the people who collide streams of pebbles are going to build yet another Even Bigger Pebble Crashing Machine, they estimate in advance what the "luminosity" will be - how many inverse fb they will produce per year. Then the people looking for events know, "aha, with the new great crasher I can science even more!"

In other words, someone has lost their marbles?

While I really appreciate this attempt to explain what /fb means, I'm not sure replacing sub-atomic particles with pebbles really helps.

I did onderstand from your explanation that /fb is called inverse fb and it represents an estimation of a number of collisions. So thanks for that.

I freely admit the pebbles were an attempt at deadpan humour that would pass the great HN downvote filter - a most arduous challenge.

I appreciate the attempt, but this gives no information about what an fb actually is.

The word people need is "femtobarn".

I see your point; FWIW when I posted this there were three other comments saying "femtobarn" or "inverse femtobarn" with no further explanation.

A femtobarn being about 10^-45 (not 10^-15) times the broad side of a regular barn.

A femtobarn. Unitwise, it's an area, a measure of the probability of an interaction, the "literal" cross section of the things you try to hit.

Luminosity, often measured in inverse (femto) barn, is the other side: The number of tries, given by the number of particles you collided.

The product of these is the number of events of this type which occur on average.

So if you measured for 10 inverse femtobarn integrated luminosity, a process which has a cross section of 1 femtobarn should have happened 10 times.

Facebook, duh.

I found this detailed explanation: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/12071/246093

The LHCb detector is different in that it is designed to measure decay products that fly along the beam pipe, rather than those that fly off in all directions like ATLAS and CMB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHCb_experiment#The_LHCb_detec...

https://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/en/Detector/Detector-en.html

That’s right, it’s mostly forward! So they’re just much less efficient at generating data from the events compared to the big detectors?

Still, what’s up with the lack of data from 2013-2015, was it shutdown during all that time?

> So they’re just much less efficient at generating data from the events compared to the big detectors?

Yeah basically.

> Still, what’s up with the lack of data from 2013-2015, was it shutdown during all that time?

That'd be the Long Shutdown 1. We're currently in the Long Shutdown 2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Long_Shu...

Looks like they got hugged to death: https://visit.cern/tours

Additional uncaught exception thrown while handling exception. Original

PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2013] Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 111 in language_list() (line 3053 of /drupal/7.69/includes/bootstrap.inc). Additional

PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2013] Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 111 in db_merge() (line 2504 of /drupal/7.69/includes/database/database.inc).

Not about the article per se:

Why do particle/high-energy and quantum physics get so much media attention compared against other branches of physics?

HEP and quantum physics are fairly uninteresting to me but I'm wondering about others.

Because probing the fundamental building blocks of the universe is very interesting to some people. So now your question is: why do people care what we're made of? Not sure about that one although i spend over a decade in HEP... on the other hand, if they don't then what do they care about? It is easier to do physics than to understand people...

I suppose I disagree about what is "fundamental".

On some level I can see how HEP and quantum mechanics are "fundamental" in that they describe the "building blocks" of the universe.

But these branches of physics really only describe matter at very small scales. In terms of being actually useful to understand the vast majority of physical situations encounted in practice, HEP and quantum physics are mostly useless. "Classical" physics is more "fundamental" in the sense that it is more useful in a wider variety of contexts.

Or at least this is my view, as a fluid dynamicist. Turbulence is far more important than HEP, but unfortunately it receives far less media attention and far less attention from the brightest people. (I think turbulence has HEP beat in funding, though. :-)

> Turbulence is far more important than HEP

maybe ("importance" is somewhat subjective and I think it's totally valid to have that opinion), but I would argue HEP and maybe early universe cosmology are more fundamental meaning they study the most fundamental building blocks of physics itself. But "fundamental" is not the same as "important" so I'm not trying to suggest these fields are more or less important than others.

Let us not forget that Heisenberg did his PhD thesis on turbulence, probably found it too difficult, and then went to do easier things: winning a Nobel for the creation of quantum mechanics, building the Leipzig L-IV atomic pile, etc. etc.

"fundamental" is very different from "useful". ...and I don't even agree that turbulence is more useful. It's only more useful right now. ...but understanding the building blocks of all matter is probably more useful for humanity in the long run.

I am not saying fluid dynamics is boring, but a lot of people are really interested in small and large things - on whole other level than turbulence. This is not just pr, i think people really care. Of course i could be wrong...

The story of quantum and particle physics is more accessible to most people because of its interplay with modern (i.e., post World War I) popular culture. People may not know the technical details, but they've heard of the players (Einstein, von Neumann,...) and they've seen the impact on the world (Manhattan project, World Wide Web). This gives them some basis for relating to news about particle physics. Maybe if we lived in a different world (underwater?), everyone might have heard of Kolmogorov instead. Then we'd be treated to lots of arm-chair speculation about whether Navier-Stokes solutions exist...

Even if one doesn't find the physics intrinsically interesting, one can at least appreciate the engineering achievements.

I'll agree with you that culture is a major factor and that in a plausible alternative history Kolmogorov and others who worked on fluids would be better known. However, I disagree on the point that people see the impacts of modern physics more readily:

> Maybe if we lived in a different world (underwater?), everyone might have heard of Kolmogorov instead.

We are immersed in a fluid: air. One could argue that the 3 orders of magnitude difference in density could be a factor in popularity, but I'm not so sure.

> one can at least appreciate the engineering achievements

I don't think that (e.g.) aerospace engineering had worse achievements or marketing than nuclear weapons. Around and after WWII both made huge and impressive advances. One could argue that aerospace engineering was more visible as well, with flying being a common mode of transportation and the exploration of space being of popular interest. For some reason that doesn't seem to make fluid dynamics as interesting to most folks as modern physics. (Though I certainly would claim that the space race in particular improved the standing of fluid dynamics.)

Because there is still a persistent and almost certainly naive hope that HEP will eventually give us warp drives and accessible interstellar colonization. You know, the things sci-fi is made of.

Turbulence is just about as likely to offer up such secrets, but that's less obvious :)

CERN has a bigger marketing budget than lots of little labs doing smaller scale stuff.

I my case - and I could well imagine this to be true for many - it is not really about physics at all. It is more about the philosophical aspect, wanting to know how the universe works at a fundamental level, what exists, what is space, what is time, what does this mean for free will and consciousness. In everyday life relativity, quantum mechanics, and particle physics are as useless as being able to calculate stresses in a beam or understanding turbulence or knowing about metamaterials. From time to time I may actually need some classical mechanics or electrodynamics to understand how something works or to solve a specific problem, but unless it is part of your hobby or job non-fundamental physics beyond some basic knowledge is just as irrelevant as fundamental physics in most peoples life. Fundamental physics and cosmology on the other hand fills in a certain sense the same spot that religion does for other people.

Thanks for your comment. I don't seem to appreciate the philosophical aspects as much as others.

I feel the same way about databases.

You might be coming at it from a purely technical angle, rather than thinking about the story. "Humans build giant machine to uncover the secrets of the universe" is an interesting story with mass appeal. The physics are irrelevant.

They're focusing on answering questions that has been wondered about since the beginning of human civilization, and the earliest philosophers. "What are the fundamental building blocks of the universe? Why is there something rather than nothing?" Questions like that are more universally interesting than 'how can we build a room temperature super conductor'

I heard an interesting theory, I wish I could credit whoever thought it up but I've forgotten. The theory is that the success Dirac had and all of the successes of the other luminaries around the early 1900 - 1930's (essentially everyone in the picture of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference#Fifth_Confer...) has created the perception that HEP and quantum physics are this dynamic field where the mysteries of the universe are being rapidly discovered. According to this theory, this romantic vision has led kids to get into the field even when real discoveries have actually ground to a halt and what is achievable has shrunk and shrunk. Basically, this area of science is played out or is in a natural ebb causing everyone in the field to have an existential crisis. Interesting theory.

Something like that would make a lot of sense to me. Today, I think quantum physics isn't such a bad field for scientists to work in, but only because of quantum computing. On the other hand, I can't see any compelling reason to work on HEP.

Probably just weasels. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/29/476154494...

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." - Matt Groening

The previous similar happening is documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/750_GeV_diphoton_excess.

super cool

I have found it dis-heartening that higher energy levels at the LHC have not opened new doors into reality. This simulation in which we find ourselves seems designed to obfuscate. :)

This small aberration may give some clues... maybe... some day

>I have found it dis-heartening that higher energy levels at the LHC have not opened new doors into reality.

I think the last thing we need is LHC opening new doors into reality. The only thing that could be more dangerous than such research into teleportation is research into teleportation that's conducted on Mars.

But just think of all the great things we could do with that Argent Energy.

Don't forget the LHC April Fool's joke where the remote cameras show a black hole eating CERN.

There's also a great documentary about interdimensional portals, called Hell Boy, that everyone should watch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com