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Comment by gautamcgoel | Hacker News Reader

Honestly feel sorry for particle physicists... Their entire gig is spending billions on fancy equipment, and hoping that observe something unexpected. If they see exactly what they expected to see, all that effort was basically wasted. Also, a lot of "discoveries" turn out to be equipment miscalibration - remember those particles which supposedly moved faster than light a few years back? Always struck me as an odd way to do science.

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From a physicists standpoint, not seeing something unexpected is not a waste at all.

From a physicist's standpoint, always being right is disheartening.

I think that every physicist hopes to see something that does not match and then a fantastic work begins.

I did not see anything like this during my studies, PhD and short career and moved to industry. I terribly miss the teaching, though.

Is there a way you can continue to teach in some capacity?

This is something I have in mind for some time. I have a great job, but it takes all my "professional" time, the rest if for my family and hobbies.

I am still 10-12 years away from official retirement and until then I doubt to have the time. Taken into account the seniority of my position, I am quite confident that I could teach afterwards at a good school, something I would do even for free.

Can you expand on that? I was under the impression that many thought of it as a waste (Sabine Hossenfelder comes to mind, for example).

> Sabine Hossenfelder

Hossenfelder has a lot of... unique takes in the physics world, I don't think she should be used as a general barometer of the field.

Yea, some people are disappointed; some of the more interesting and exciting moments in physics are when we find out we're wrong, but not always. E.g. I will never forget the time and place I heard about the preliminary detection of primordial B-modes by BICEP (which turned out to be dust contamination) -- that was a predicted detection from canonical inflation models, as the Higgs was a standard prediction from the standard model (also a pretty exciting moment).

Not seeing something when we "expect" to not see anything (from the perspective of certain models) might be more boring, but it's definitely not a "waste" (again speaking purely from a physicist's standpoint).

We know the standard model is incomplete, but where and how are not well known. Not seeing evidence for new physics rules out certain models, and places upper/lower limits on others. It's progress either way.

Some do I'm sure. However if we see something unexpected and it turns out to be true that means our ideas of physics are fundamentally wrong. While it is long term good to correct our understanding, in the mean time a lot of the real world depends on us being right, and so until we correct the theory who knows what will work. I'd hate to find our margin of safety on nuclear bombs was too small and it is only luck that they haven't all blown up in their silos over the years.

I assume it helps trim off the branches of research that become unviable with the new evidence.

Theorizing a phenomenon and having experimental evidence of a phenomenon are very different things.

The quantum mechanics approach is to get a good idea about what happens for everything under a certain energy level.

They keep building bigger machines to fill out the parts that don't have a definition yet.

Anything that specifies what happens at the next band of energy levels is a success, whether it yields new particles, or rules them out at that energy level.

There's some destination of approaching the most energy dense states like describing the mechanics that were active during the big bang period

> Honestly feel sorry for particle physicists... Their entire gig is spending billions on fancy equipment, and hoping that observe something unexpected.

This isn’t the way I would frame it. No one will fund billions on fancy equipment for unexpected results, and no one is flipping a coin expecting something other than heads/tails. The usual course is that there is some theoretical expectation/justification of a result, however we then need to build the experimental capacity to see if it is true.

I think learning to observe anything at such small scales as a routine matter will increase understanding of all kinds of other things we look at. There are folks riding on their coattails, and folks riding on their coattails.

But yeah, it's the long game.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn lays all this out pretty clearly. The work of "normal science" is to make predictions based on established models and test them until you find something that breaks, then you have a "paradigm shift" that creates a new model.

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

Remember, you can't solve the halting problem.

This is progress. Sometimes science takes two steps back and one step forward. Sometimes that one step is bigger than you realized. And it wasn't backwards, it was projecting into a different spacial dimension. Or something.

The point is, this is probably good news, honestly.

Could you explain what you mean by halting problem in this context?

Two steps back, but the new step forward is in better direction.

> If they see exactly what they expected to see

Why? Validating a hypothesis is quite valuable.

It's actually not at all. Or more precisely, no one treats it as valuable. If you fail to reject H0 repeatedly your career is doomed to mediocrity.

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