Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?
backreaction.blogspot.com
backreaction.blogspot.com
> "I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so a lot of people still work on it, most of them don’t like me. But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics, and everything quantum, quantum information, quantum computing, quantum metrology, and so on, which is why that’s what I mostly talk about these days."
The popular science literature is also full of string theory this and god particle that, and it's really not very satisfying or illuminating. If people want to get into this general subject, I'd recommend instead Stephen Hawking's compendium of classic papers on quantum physics, with commentary, "The Dreams That Stuff is Made Of."
One example is the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven. The money spent nationally and globally on these types of facilities are a fraction of what goes to LHC or, not long ago, the Tevatron at Fermilab.
> "The Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC takes X-ray snapshots of atoms and molecules at work, revealing fundamental processes in materials, technology and living things."
> "The European XFEL is a research facility of superlatives: It generates ultrashort X-ray flashes—27 000 times per second and with a brilliance that is a billion times higher than that of the best conventional X-ray radiation sources."
[bzzt bzzt bzzt] https://www.xfel.eu/facility/overview/index_eng.html
but for people unfamiliar with science it may sound like "defund LHC" (that would be unfortunate)
It is disappointing, and more unfortunately pretty much her personal brand now. There are, as she seems to have discovered, a lot of eyeballs to be had when you bash things that are poorly understood and already looked down upon for it.
She's a fine physicist and her points have merit, but she's smart enough to be perfectly aware that rather than improving the field through discussions with peers what she's doing here is just capitalizing on that distaste people have for their work and doing what she can to undermine them.
She's not trying to undermine anyone, just giving her opinion about where funding should go in order to actually advance our knowledge of the world.
Either she is socially clueless on how this can be seen negatively by the rest of the scientific community or she is malicious in her attempts to defund parts of science she believes shouldn't get funding.
If she's lying, then that's different. But I haven't seen any convincing evidence that she's lying. It's clear a lot of people don't like what she's saying, feel threatened by what she's saying, and think she's wrong. But that doesn't make her malicious.
It's also a step beyond casting shade.
You're too focused on whether there is "malicious intent" to see that your description fits just fine with the initial words you were objecting to.
As opposed to? This sentiment was bandied around a lot before the LHC went online, but no one ever had a proposition of what the alternative was is the goal was to advance fundamental particle physics. You've got exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic interactions: (1) particle accelerator measurement and (2) incidental measurements of high-energy spaceborne collisions.
We're doing both. Theoreticians being unable to conclusively find a new measurement is a problem independent of the fact the LHC exists to do those sorts of measurements that they'd need.
The Standard Model is a bit of a franken-theory of a thing, a kit of parts bolted together in awkward ways. It looks a lot like the pre-quantum ad-hoc theories that attempted to describe quantum effects before QM was invented.
It's hard to believe that physics can't do better. But easy to believe that physics won't do better while most of the money and all of the mental space is owned by concepts that are more than a hundred years old now.
Add to that that experimental physics is simply far more expensive then theoretical physics, and it should come as no surprise that we spend more money on experiments then pure theory.
The complaint about LHC is more about questioning weather spending $5 billion to smash protons together is the most effective way of getting more empirical evidence to the physicists.
About the same as a the price of a large modern sports club in a top league[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/apr/29/chelsea-sir...
Providing better bounds on the (non-)existence of phenomena predicted by existing non-Standard Model particle physics theories sounds like a worthwhile endeavor rather than praying that particle accelerators will maybe uncover a particle if you give it just a little bit more juice.
Sabine has recommended funding more telescopes to learn more about dark matter.
You'd be equally opposed to Sabine's alternative since what use is knowing anything about dark matter? For that matter who cares where the universe came from. What have telescopes helped us with lately?
This is not true! There's much more to particle physics than simply hunting for new particles. Our knowledge of even the particles we know to exist is massively incomplete. Several next-gen collider proposals are for "Higgs factories" to study the Higgs boson better, for example.
If you compare how much money is spend on fundamental research (or research in general), the pool of funds for a given direction is not limited because of other research. It's limited by all the other things we spend money on. If society wants to fund more DM, astro, whatever research, it would be much easier to find that money for example in the military spending. A minimal haircut there and you could double the research funding.
I don't think it's too strong to call it "disinformation" out of the journals. They claimed that the next big toy will prove or disprove supersymmetry. They never acknowledged that their claim had been incorrect, or that it was misleading.
Calling out that repeated pattern is, I think, on the respectful side of the public gadfly playbook.
I think she wants to "improve the field" by incenting theoretical advances that actually lead to testable predictions. Unfortunately, that transition will put a lot of e.g. string theorists out of work.
This isn't entirely true. In this blog post (http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/04/does-world-need-lar...) she recommends:
> "One of the key motivations for building a larger particle collider that particle physicists like to bring up is that we still do not know what dark matter is made of. But we are not even sure that dark matter is made of particles. And if it’s a particle, we do not know what mass it has or how it interacts. If it’s a light particle, you would not look for it with a bigger collider. So really it makes more sense to collect more information about the astrophysical situation first. That means concretely better telescopes, better sky coverage, better redshift resolution, better frequency coverage, and so on."
Though she goes on to say
> "But really my intention here is not to advocate a particular alternative. I merely think that physicists should have an honest debate about the evident lack of progress in the foundations of physics and what to do about it."
And all of this is being built currently or already exists (ELT, ASSN, Vera Rubin, SKA, CTA), so it's not clear what she's advocating.
So "more of that" isn't a very useful position, science output isn't a linear, or even monotonous function of dollars spent.
Even if we suppose that the standard model is completely correct, it does not allow the computation of the majority of the useful physical quantities.
What is needed is a model that would be able to compute all the physical quantities that are important in practice, e.g. the masses of all hadrons and of all atomic nuclei, also their magnetic moments, the energies of their excited states, the energies of the excited states of the atoms and of the ions, and so on, starting from the properties of the elementary particles and of their interactions.
Despite the huge progresses which have happened in experimental physics, we are now no closer of having a useful theory able to compute what we need ab initio, than we were exactly one hundred years ago, before the most influential work in quantum physics was published by de Broglie, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Born et al (from the point of view of the computable values, the Dirac theory of the hydrogen atom was only a minor improvement over what could be done using the Wilson-Sommerfeld quantization condition from 1915 and the more complex systems remained uncomputable; the quantum field theory improved a little the precision of some previously computable values, but only very few other additional quantities became computable ab initio).
All the useful applied physics, e.g. the theory of the semiconductor devices, or theory of the lasers, and any other theory used to design real devices, do not have any use for the standard model, but they use various empirical mathematical models, which contain lots of parameters that are determined experimentally, in order to match the predictions of those models with the experiments.
This qualitative understanding has been very helpful as a guidance in the development of various approximate methods used for the modeling of the systems that are too complex to be computable ab initio, e.g. atomic nuclei, atoms with many electrons, molecules, semiconductors, superconductors and so on.
Nevertheless, while the qualitative understanding was improved by the more recent theories, they remain useless for obtaining quantitative results.
All physical systems that are interesting are too complex to be computable ab initio, so in order to predict anything about them, wild approximations must be used, which are different for every physical system. There are no universal rules about how to develop such approximations.
If an approximation method is found, which after measuring experimentally the values of various parameters allows a model to predict other experiments with sufficient precision, then good. If not, there is no way to know if some other acceptable method can be found, and how to search for it.
These special values are too few to matter for practical applications and they apply only to exceedingly simple systems, e.g. a single free lepton or a single pair of interacting elementary particles.
The practical value of QED is null. By far the greatest success of QED is what you have mentioned, i.e. that it explains why g_e is not exactly 2, but it is slightly different. This fact could not be explained by the Dirac theory. However, we already knew the value of g_e through experiments. Having an explanation for our peace of mind is good, but this cannot help us design anything.
For example, it would have been enormously helpful if there would have existed any method to compute accurately the frequencies and various other properties of the spectral lines of the atoms and ions.
This would have allowed e.g. to find through computation optimal substances for applications like lasers and atomic clocks.
Because there exists no such method, the advances continue to be done only by discovering through experiments new better spectral transitions of certain atoms or ions.
We know how to match our effective field theory of protons and neutrons in nuclei to QCD observables. This project has been under way for 20 years. Expect major breakthroughs as the exascale machines mature. If we match our EFTs to QCD calculations then there would be no additional parameters fit to data, and our intellectual edifice will have quantitative predictivity from fundamental particles to neutron stars. It's hard. Nobody promised that physics should be easy.
That means that such computations have little, if any, practical importance.
With the current QCD, it is not possible to compute the ratio between the mass of the neutron and the mass of a proton with a useful precision. The mass ratio between the proton and the electron or the mass ratios between light nuclei or their magnetic moments are even less possible to compute.
QCD would become a useful theory only when it would be possible to compute things like the probability of fusion of light nuclei with a precision good enough to eliminate the need to measure such values experimentally.
QCD would need revolutionary improvements to achieve such goals.
Supercomputers are not enough for a progress in this domain. Different solving methods must be discovered.
> QCD would need revolutionary improvements to achieve such goals.
Make the computers 10x faster and the algorithms / libraries 10x faster and all the things you wish for are within reach. Much more plausible than _overthrowing the standard model with something that offers easier calculations_.
Why is it a bad thing to have preferences?
> but for people unfamiliar with science it may sound like "defund LHC" (that would be unfortunate)
She's on the record against building bigger colliders. It follows from her views that we should fund other stuff and not colliders.
Everybody ignores the condensed matter people!
Can anybody explain the relevance of cosmology and astrophysics to societal progress? I'm sure these are very worthwhile fields of study in other respects.. but societal progress?
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-b...
The effect is more psychological than technological, but it shows the foolishness of global warfare and resource exhaustion in the name of short-term profit, and encourages people to live together peacefully and work together to solve global-scale problems.
Hey, guess what? It didn't work. Have you read the news lately?
Besides, I know a few sociopaths that would look at that Pale Blue Dot and think "I want it all".
https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting...
But can a dataset really encapsulate human suffering? Is there a lower percent of people suffering but are they each suffering more individually? What is the quality of the suffering? Is it better to suffer 30 years with pain or to die after a month of it?
Yes
> Is there a lower percent of people suffering but are they each suffering more individually?
No
> What is the quality of the suffering?
Lower
> Is it better to suffer 30 years with pain or to die after a month of it?
Depends on quality of life.
> Yes
Suffering its subjective so it is impossible. And you proved it with:
> Depends on quality of life.
because quality of life depends on how much suffering you can live with.
It’s become a bottomless trap of sorts.
Given that resources—money and bright minds—aren’t infinite, she then proposes that there are other areas of research that received less attention and are ripe for discovery.
Those days have ended.
There never was a golden age of interoperability on the internet, at least not after HTTP. Maybe there was a lot of cooperation when it was purely academic in the late 70s and 80s. BBS operators often were cooperative. But commercial internet has always and forever been cutthroat.
But why you brought this up in a discussion about the invention of the web, I have no idea.
Just because TBL happened to work at CERN and have a need for hypermedia, doesn't mean that we wouldn't have the WWW in approximately the same shape in approximately the same time frame without CERN or TBL.
[1] http://www.art.net/studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/hyperlook/ind...
[2] https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go... (with screen shots)
[3] https://libarynth.org/hyperlook (larger screenshots)
based on
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
running atop of whatever, maybe even
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project
&
[6] http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/homepage.html
instead of the bloat we have now.
And that's important to keep in mind because money is a limited resource and what's relevant is where that money didn't go rather than just speaking idealistically about the potential benefits of a megaproject.
Also not sure where you got the 23 billions from. Total budget for LHC is less than 8 billion euros. And that's over quite a long time frame. The whole CERN budget is only 1.1 billion a year (and they run quite a few different experiments apart from the LHC). That's within a factor of a few of a major sports club!
This is extremely false. The new engineering science required to make the incredibly strong magnets for each collider (newer colliders requiring stronger magnets) is one obvious counterexample.
(BTW, with 100k, in experimental physics, you can't even pay for a postdoc at an US institution for a year)
That shouldn't mean NASA should get less money. But 23 billion for a world-wide, multi-decade project isn't that much.
I’ve heard that, yes, as well as NASA inventing velcro and zippers and teflon, and all of it has a faint tinge of “not actually true at all” to it.
What they do seem to question what immediate, house hold, benefit you get from putting people on the moon. Common examples such as vecro and teflon turn out to be wild hyperbole based on at most "NASA made their own version of existing technology".
This is a fair remark and something I actually had in mind when I made the comment originally: science doesn't provide very much direct and immediate benefit, all the concrete examples are actually sort of boring things of the "this existing thing is now better (for a surprising reason)" type.
But there are also lots of indirect benefits as you say, from the inspiration and philosophical satisfaction (tricky thing to put a monetary value on) to just the plain old developing of technical skill that transfers to other specialised areas of society.
No, not since World War 2. Examples?
Out of (off-topic) curiosity, what is the reason for that choice of life style? Just minimalism?
What I'm saying here is essentially "idle hands are the devil's playground." Keeping wonks fascinated by the minutae of the nature of the universe is, in my mind, better for society than many alternatives I see.
Careful observation of the orbit of Mercury —> Special Relativity —> General Relativity —> GPS satellites able to keep exact time —> the map app on your mobile phone.
That it was able to explain Mercury's orbit was a nice bit of empirical confirmation after the theory was developed. Having such evidence probably helped get the theory accepted faster; but probably wasn't necessary. Almost by definition, a theory that is ultimately useful can be confirmed without need of astronomy. If the theory is useful to do X, then we can try doing X as an experiment and see if it works how the theory predicts.
As a secondary point, we could probably get GPS to work even without relativity. The core idea makes just as much sense under any theory of a finite speed of light. When we actually launched a GPS constellation and try it, the engineers would notice that the clocks were drifting for some unknown reason. Some ad-hoc corrections later and the engineers could account for the drift based on empirical evidence, likely with regular re synchronization and recalibration of the fudge factors.
What special relativity did was solve the purely theoretical contradictions between Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell's electrodynamics (hence the title of Einstein's paper "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies"), reinterpreting Lorentz' math for the description of movement through the ether as transformations of spacetime itself and doing away with the ether.
There is a myth of Einstein that just isn't credible, which is that Einstein, while working as a patent clerk just came up with Special Relativity out of the blue without anyone's input, without the benefit of history.
But Special Relativity was in the air. Henri Poincare was already writing about relativity, and so were others in years previous to Einstien's publication. If Einstein hadn't published when he did, someone else would have within a few years at best.
Einstein was amazing, also, just a man, but definitely was not the myth taught to us in elementary school, like Abe Lincoln carrying an ax, these are childish and frankly false ideas. Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants, and there was massive amounts of empirical evidence for Special Relativity going back thousands of years, really, billions.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity
Heroes, such as Einstein, are good in that they motivate certain people, me included, to go into natural sciences, but once you start grasping more of historical context of scientific breakthroughs you begin to wonder why some scientists were elevated to that rank in general public's mind.
I would say that this is some kind of PR type selection. It's natural that general public is aware of science communicators (amongs other things) like Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowski or Neil deGrasse Tyson, but it is interesting that they wouldn't know as much about Lorenz, Poincare or Riemann, even though they have played significant roles in Special and General Relativity developments.
There seems to be a preference for scientists that deal with more concrete problems, easier to understand in a very generic way (Cosmology seems to be a good pick).
Also particular personal struggle like in Hawking's case or personality (Feynman comes to mind).
So it is easier to talk about black holes and expanding universe (Hawking, Einstein) than abstract mathematics with none/loose/difficult to grasp connection to reality (Poincare, Riemann). Outside CS it might even be rare for people to know about Von Neumann.
I wonder from current generation of scientists who will be remembered and what would be a reason behind it.
There seems to be a requirement for some form of mystic atmosphere around a person in order to be talked about.
I don't know how it was in Riemann's, Einstein's or Feynman's times, but today, most of the actual original research in sciences and math (and CS) is done not by the big prof but by the lower tiers, all the way down to PhD students. Those are doing the footwork, write the papers, work long hours with ridiculous pay. Sure you need some visionary at the top, but the actual results are not produced by those.
Everybody is well aware that Elon Musk didn't personally build the first Tesla or the first SpaceX rocket. But big theorems or theories are still named after by the big prof instead of the person who actually did the work.
For general relativity, yes.
> My understanding was that experimental impetus for relativity was the Michelson–Morley experiment
This was one of the results that pointed the way to special relativity. It had nothing to do with general relativity.
> General relativity was then developed on a purely theoretical basis.
No, it wasn't. There was a huge body of experimental evidence already about gravity. It was true that all of that evidence, except for the anomalous precession of Mercury's perihelion, could be explained by Newtonian gravity; but general relativity, as a proposed new theory of gravity, had to also account for all of that experimental evidence. In other words, in the appropriate limiting case (weak fields and low speeds compared to the speed of light), general relativity had to reproduce all of the correct predictions of Newtonian gravity. That was a huge, and very important, experimental constraint.
> Almost by definition, a theory that is ultimately useful can be confirmed without need of astronomy.
Not if the differences between its predictions and the predictions of the previous theory (in this case Newtonian gravity) are only measurable in astronomical observations at the time the new theory is proposed. That was true of general relativity in 1915 and for at least a couple of decades afterwards. The differences between GR and Newtonian gravity for earthbound experiments were simply too small for the technology of the time to measure. So astronomical observations were the only way to test GR when it was proposed.
> we could probably get GPS to work even without relativity
Technology can of course be developed on a purely empirical basis, if you're prepared to make a lot of mistakes along the way that you wouldn't make without a good theoretical foundation. If it hadn't been for the knowledge of relativity on the part of the scientists involved, the GPS satellites probably would have been launched without any capability for adjusting their clock rates. Which would have meant that, once clock rate drift due to relativistic effects was seen, there would have been no way to adjust for it. So those satellites would have become expensive but useless toys, and a new constellation of satellites would have had to be built and launched.
Yes. I assumed that reproducing Newtonian gravity in the classical limit would be considered theoretical, as we had a solid theoretical understanding of Newtonian physics. Implicit in that would be a bunch of empirical evidence; but Einstein wouldn't need to explicitly think about the details of what evidence supported Newtonian mechanics (beyond the general understanding that it was all in the classical limit).
> Not if the differences between its predictions and the predictions of the previous theory (in this case Newtonian gravity) are only measurable in astronomical observations at the time the new theory is proposed.
Such a theory is not "useful", for many definitions of useful. Astronomical observations allowed us to verify Relativity earlier than we otherwise would be able to; but eventually technology advanced to the point where we could conduct satellite based experiments to directly confirm it. The theory was not practically useful until we had this technology.
> Technology can of course be developed on a purely empirical basis, if you're prepared to make a lot of mistakes along the way that you wouldn't make without a good theoretical foundation. If it hadn't been for the knowledge of relativity on the part of the scientists involved, the GPS satellites probably would have been launched without any capability for adjusting their clock rates.
Its not like we launched the entire GPS constellation then just hoped it would work. Before launching the GPS constellation, we launched the experimental Timation satellites to act as a proof of concept. Difficulties with maintaining accurate clocks in orbit would have been noticed then (if not sooner).
GR itself is a classical (i.e., non-quantum) theory. The Newtonian limit of GR is not usually considered a "classical" limit, just a weak field, slow motion limit.
> would be considered theoretical
Ok, then we just have different definitions of "theoretical". To me, having to account for a mass of experimental data is an experimental constraint. It might be easier for a theory to meet it if the theory can be shown to reduce in an appropriate limit to a previous theory that accounts for all that data.
By contrast, for researchers investigating possible quantum theories of gravity, any quantum constraints on their theories can only be theoretical, since we have no experimental data at all on quantum aspects of gravity. But to me, the fact that a quantum theory of gravity has to account for all of the classical experimental data on gravity is an experimental constraint (which any such theory would presumably meet by reducing to GR in the classical limit).
> Such a theory is not "useful", for many definitions of useful.
No theory is useful for all definitions of useful.
> Before launching the GPS constellation, we launched the experimental Timation satellites to act as a proof of concept.
As I understand it, the Timation satellites did not keep independent time using clocks aboard the satellites. They just re-broadcast time signals from the ground. One of the major difficulties with getting GPS operational was the additional complexity involved in having independent clocks on the satellites that would keep their own time, with only periodic updates from the ground. And one of the major issues with that was that many non-scientists involved in the GPS project did not understand relativity and did not believe that the "natural" clock rates of the clocks on the satellites would be different from those of ground clocks, so some kind of adjustment would have to be made. And there was no data from previous projects to convince them since the relative clock rates of previous satellites vs. ground clocks had not been measured. If the non-scientists in the GPS project had not given in to the scientists who wanted to include the capability for adjusting the clock frequency in the initial set of GPS satellites, those satellites would indeed have been useless.
I mean the original context is societal contribution, so getting something import understood faster I think counts, no?
I wished everyone would read "Law, Legislation & Liberty" by Hayek, where he criticizes people who think systems, like economy, work like an organization. That is, that one can through rational planning and arrangement achieve some goal. That is NOT how markets, economy, society etc. works. That is of course an attack on the utilitarian principles.
Only uneducated minds could fall into the trap of thinking in exploitative utilitarian ways about everything, including themselves by self-abusive through productivity obsession. This discussion could not be more US American.
I do think particle theory probably does push knowledge forward, the problem is it is quite a bit further from something that can be tested, it is more akin to mathematics these days where they're not really trying to describe reality because as she says, susy and friends could be morphed to fit anything. In fact, and this might be a stretch, but I feel like there is a motivation not to have predictions sometimes because then you could be proven wrong. Perhaps this is still "pushing knowledge in general forward" as opposed to knowledge that actually describes reality, similar to mathematics perhaps.
Not really related to societal progress, but the difference between particle theory with mathematics is mathematicians are actually rigorous while particle physicists get by with the usual lack of rigor (relatively) of physics in general. The argument usually employed by theorists in other physics fields is that this lack of rigor is okay because physics is science and you could always do an experiment afterwards to validate theory. Particle physics less and less has that, so, where does it sit? I feel like may be a valid path forward is for particle physicists to embrace that they are no longer really doing science and are rather doing mathematics, and probably to even adopt some of the rigor of mathematics, then particle theory could really bloom into a really valuable field of study on the "pushing general knowledge forward" side of things.
What is "societal progress" anyway? I'd argue that society is regressing, not progressing. I'd further argue that the worth of your pursuits and endeavors have no relation to the progression or regression of society at large.
1) Direct means: this is stuff like finding helium in the sun, and from there being able to see its signature and find it elsewhere (we can say this for other atoms and molecules too). Stopping nuclear war, due to tracking the proper origin (and providing an explanation) of the source of gamma bursts. Studying reactions in nature and then attempting to replicate them on earth (fusion is an obvious example but there are others). These tend to be kinda weak if we don't include things like justification to go to space, which is iffy either way.
2) Indirect means: These are probably providing the most value. This is pretty true for any advance science though. When you're pushing the extremes of our knowledge you have to invent new things to measure and test. You might say that these could be built by industry, but the thing is that these are often extremely expensive. So one can also think of science as a means for governments to inject innovation into their economies. You need to detect a star really far away? Well you're going to also be building cutting edge mirrors, radio instruments, and other things. Want to detect gravitational waves? You got to write code that is really good at detecting noise and differentiating a signal that is smaller than fp64 precision. These all have huge benefits. The science becomes public and as these things are being invented papers are being written and industry is able to learn from these challenges and transfer the lessons learned to their own applications, which dramatically reduces R&D costs. Additionally, a lot of mathematical frameworks and tools are build out of this (I was considering putting this under #1). These maths apply far beyond a specific problem. You might find things like how to do fast QR decomposition or signal analysis.
I'll add a bit to #2 too. You might ask why not push that money into industries. Well there's a few reasons. First, science is exploratory by nature. You may have no idea about all the challenges you're going to face and all the things you need when undertaking big projects like these (that's why there's constant delays). I mean we got the internet out of a problem like this with CERN. Second off, scientists don't give a shit about industry (well not to the same degree). They say that happiness is worth 10 IQ points. If you've ever talked to scientists in a big lab they will nerd out on you. It is exciting just exploring what makes the universe and us. Maybe it is just my degree in physics, but I also think there's something poetic to trying to understand the environment around us. Does everything have to have a direct monetary value? What's wrong about learning for the sake of learning? Also, sometimes the return on investment on science is hundreds of years, but it does seem to always pay dividends.
It is like asking artists what the benefit on society is, it does not make sense to ask that question in that context, because it is not about exploiting something for a moment in time for some purpose which is supposedly "progress".
I think Sabine is way overdoing her position for marketing purposes and everyone is biting..
I think what would be interesting would be a study of why researchers are drawn to string theory. I remember reading about it in OMNI magazine as a teen back in the 80's. During my studies at university, I learned about many proposals in physics that failed after people spend decades trying to hammer into reality (like the electrical ether, or planetary motion), only to have a genius show up and resolve the dilemmas with a completely different proposal. Going on its 5th decade, string theory feels like one of these ancient red herrings, but maybe it just needs a few more centuries?
I don't think any subsequent new big theory like string theory accomplished that and Einstein-emulation seems a dead end. However theorist don't give up on the approach and quite a lot of them seem to argue that beauty without testability is good enough, while that is really really iffy.
“I left the field because it's a paper production machine that adds no value to society” without substantiation is simply a frustration ridden meme.
So the claim that there is no substantiation is false. You just didn't bother to find out.
I think you mean this: “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray”
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/04...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1KFTPqc0nQ
I still find the tone off putting, reminds me of the fox and the grapes fable, not sure if it's known to most cultures.
Nevertheless, I'll watch the video and reexamine my opinion.
I still found her point valid and interesting and not at all noise. My takeaway is more that new physics might well be out of our energetic grasps until we build some much larger accelerators. Little idea how to convince society of the worth of that expense. Maybe if it can produce useful substances for industrial use. I’d love more knowledge on expansions to the periodic table, for example.
That's one of Aesop's fables. I believe it's widely known, at least in all western cultures. The fox can't reach the grapes he desires, so he concludes the grapes were sour and he didn't want them anyway.
I would point out that lots of other important scientific fields have been in this situation before. Maybe there’s an interesting argument to the overfunding (but then again, developing theories is also pretty important!). But mostly it just feels like she’s made the point and while it’s an important point, getting a clear picture of the scientific results is more valuable than this particular opinion. (But I stress, it is her platform to do with as she wants.)
Really? Pretty much every article in this field is some click bait title similar to "did this recent discovery break science?" and is quite tiresome. But a more accurate title like "Results from new experiment are so far out of norm for prior understanding that much more scrutiny is needed" doesn't gain attraction.
I can't help but wonder if she is just speaking uncomfortable truths about things a lot of the hn audience like, where nobody can really come up with a counter per se but there is still a negative gut reaction of i-don't-like-people-challenging-my-world-view so the criticism comes out as, i dont mind your view i just hate the way you say it.
But I still have a negative reaction to the way she (and others in other fields) does it.
Because whether it's true or not, it doesn't tend to get results in changing how things are done.
But at the same time, several comments on this post are talking about how they think her diatribes will have an undue influence on funding decisions, so i doubt that accounts for all the negativity.
The reason people trust science is because it listens to skeptics and critics and refutes their arguments. Of course some people are cranks that cannot be reasoned with, but this person clearly does not fall into the category.
Sweeping disenting voices under the rug is how people lose faith in institutions in the long term.
At least from what i read - she's basically saying that there is such a derth of new data and plausible ways to get it in the near/medium term, that theoretical particle physicists have basically been creating abstract theories which while may or may not be true, are increasingly detached from the emperical world. To the point where they are no longer predictive theories and there are so many free parameters that you can post-hoc fit it to any data you might collect. Hence the real world applicability is akin to speculating how many angels could fit on a pin head.
Now this may or may not be true. I don't have the background to know. But this is not a science argument, it is a philosophical argument. Fundamentally its asking are theoretical particle physicists engaging in science or are they engaging in some combination of math and metaphysics. Is arxiv really the place to have such philosophical debates?
> There are many theories in theoretical physics where it is very difficult or impossible to come up with experiments to prove or disprove them, e.g. Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation or the String Theory. One might call these sorts of theories metaphysical, fine, but it doesn’t make them into disproven pseudoscience or religions.
Like i'm really not sure how you can argue that religion and metaphysics are distinct. The main difference is just how much cultural baggage is attached.
Ultimately after reading that article (and having not watched the video it is responding to) my conclusion is not that Sabine misunderstands the simulation theory (she may or may not, but nothing there convinced me she did) but that the author of the article misunderstands what the word "science" means. Like the term "pseudoscience" may be unfair, as that has specific connotations, but its clearly a metaphysical theory not a scientific theory.
If anything, the simulation hypothesis seems to be an attempt to partially shed light on those traditional metaphysical questions. I would say the hypothesis is not tangential but directly bears on metaphysics.
Einstein passed away in 1955. Quarks were theorized in 1964 and experimentally confirmed in 1968. Quarks are necessary to explain how a neutron can become a proton, how an atom with more than one proton can possibly be stable, what pions and kaons from cosmic ray impacts even are, and many other everyday things.
Less has happened since Feynman passed; I would say it was Feynman dying and glam metal taking over the music scene that finally made the world realize technology had gone too far. Indeed, grunge was the next wave.
This is one of those places where peer-review fails, if you study or proclaim something against the prevailing norms. There is a slight hope for you if you're a well known name already, like Hossenfelder, but it's pretty much a death sentence for you if you're at a no-name university somewhere. There really is no motivation to pierce the wall vs. just silently doing little incremental work that continues the current established theory even when on a whole that theory is leading the field nowhere.
Usually, at some point the funding dries up but they're lucky all the big famous names are sympathetic to particle physics and it continues to command a large amount of funding amongst those studying fundamental physics. So things march on.
Nor do I think it is unreasonable to point out that this result, if correct, would not validate supersymmetry (if that is, in fact, the case.)
On the other hand, the fact that supersymmetry isn’t a theory, but a property of a class of models that can be tweaked to fit a broad range of experimental results (again, if that is, in fact, the case) does not rule out the possibility that the LHC could have found evidence that strongly supported one specific theory that happens to be supersymmetric. Hossenfelder seems to be saying that the LHC definitively ruled out what was considered to be the most plausible candidate(s), which would imply there was at least one such falsifiable theory. Allegations of incompetence or mendacity should not be made lightly, and unless the promoters of the LHC routinely said supersymmetry in general might be disproved, the allegations seem unwarranted.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-is-c...
Quote:
Before the LHC’s launch in 2008, many theorists expressed themselves confident the collider would produce new particles besides the Higgs boson. That hasn’t happened. And the public isn’t remotely as dumb as many academics wish. They’ll remember next time we come ask for money.
The big proclamations came almost exclusively from theoretical physicists; CERN didn’t promise anything they didn’t deliver. That is an important distinction, but I am afraid in the public perception the subtler differences won’t matter. It’s “physicists said.” And what physicists said was wrong. Like hair, trust is hard to split. And like hair, trust is easier to lose than to grow.
What the particle physicists got wrong was an argument based on a mathematical criterion called “naturalness”. If the laws of nature were “natural” according to this definition, then the LHC should have seen something besides the Higgs. The data analysis isn’t yet completed, but at this point it seems unlikely something more than statistical anomalies will show up.
I must have sat through hundreds of seminars in which naturalness arguments were repeated. Let me just flash you a representative slide from a 2007 talk by Michelangelo L. Mangano (full pdf here), so you get the idea. The punchline is at the very top: “new particles must appear” in an energy range of about a TeV (ie accessible at the LHC) “to avoid finetuning.”
I don’t mean to pick on Mangano in particular; his slides are just the first example that Google brought up. This was the argument why the LHC should see something new: To avoid finetuning and to preserve naturalness.
I explained many times previously why the conclusions based on naturalness were not predictions, but merely pleas for the laws of nature to be pretty. Luckily I no longer have to repeat these warnings, because the data agree that naturalness isn’t a good argument.
> When Kepler found a spinning object theory which worked, it wasn't overfitting.
Well, yeah, that's true, but the important thing about Kepler was not the fact that it was a "spinning object theory", it was the switch from a "circular theory" to an "elliptical theory". (Also the switch from geocentrism to heliocentrism, but that was Copernicus, not Kepler).
This is the sort of thing that the supersymmetrists are hoping to achieve, but have not yet achieved, most likely because nature is not supersymmetric in point of actual fact.
So each one propose her/his own pet theory. Supersymmetry? A second Higgs boson? Other ...????
She doesn't like supersymmetry, and rants too much about the people that guess the fix will use supersymmetry.
(I like supersymmetry, but this is not my research area, so she knows much more about this than me about this.)
It made me realize QED is the equivalent of a million lines spaghetti codebase that's been continually built upon, fudge after fudge since the 40s, while being sold as the best thing ever, the ultimate model of reality, etc. While it really started as a temporary solution like a bash script that should've been replaced by something more elegant... many decades ago. And now we are in this mess.
An "independent researcher" might consider that a discovery, but you could learn a lot more just by picking up any textbook.
It's not "rotten". It's an open research question. One that every physicist already knew about.
For example (from the blog post): "Consa gives an analogy wherein Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan has claimed that the sum of all positive integers is not infinite, but is instead -1/12. It’s wrong, it’s absurd, but renormalization has now been accepted, and is even sold as a virtue."
One when performs zeta function regularization, one gets -1/12. This isn't some mystery; it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Analytic continuation has been understood since the 1800s.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_function_regularization
Edit: I read more of the linked paper. The claim that Karplus and Kroll committed "fraud" is basically libel, as can be seen by reading the complete account. The worst one can say is that people didn't publish full details of calculations due to page limitations or laziness, but this is hardly a special feature of QED. For instance, Onsager famously solved the 2-d Ising model exactly in 1944 but never provided details in print, just the final solution.
I never actually learned this stuff. Is there a good textbook account of this isotropic-to-nematic transition that includes full details? Or is there still a gaping hole in the published literature?
In other words, did your colleague do this as a kind of history project, or because the details weren't available anywhere else?
https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.48.587?casa_toke...
... and then the classic review paper on liquid crystals by Stephen and Straley:
https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.46.617?casa_toke...
But I believe the "gaping hole" as you call it has been mostly filled by the recent work. You probably still need to spend some weeks to follow along though.
The motivation for my colleague was to develop the Onsager theory further, since Onsager only went to the second virial coefficient. They were able to go to higher-body contributions and get nice algebraic results for the equation of state, IIRC. I can probably dig up the DOI if you want to read it.
You have to do the experiment to get the number, if the number doesn't fit with the experiment you have to figure out how to arrange the equation to fit with the experiment. I find this truly the basis for scientific progress. Even if we don't understand yet why it works the way it does. Why is the fine-structure constant everywhere in physics? It's not a hack it's experimentally derivable and has been reproduced over and over again.
I don't see anything inherently wrong with what those scientists "did" with their fudging and playing with numbers. Experimentalists are not infallible. That's why we need reproduction and for others to think up other experiments and to do them. That's what science is about. Nice history paper though.
I watched that with Sam Harris. He seemed to have interesting ideas but now he seems just to be good at debating. Same for Jordan Peterson.
It's more like everyone is doing the marketing for her
The field of physics has gotten bigger overall, including experimental physics. It's not like physics is 100% theoretical , untestable stuff.
Unfortunately the untestable stuff gets the most press. If you talk to experimental physicists in university, they'll tell you all that stuff isn't treated seriously by them, but reading the press you may get the impression that things like string theory are widely-respectable and that there is only some disagreement, usual science stuff. The press really distorts the picture of what most physicists think about these topics.
(Also, I wouldn't use the term "theoretical" for untestable stuff. I would use "speculative". "Theoretical physics" does not imply unfalsifiable speculation, it can actually be fruitful scientifically.)
Almost by definition people who are mildly interested in string theory don't talk about it unless asked.
String theory has the potential to work, and doesn't involve as much parameter-hacking as other models, whereas its main competitors don't even work "in theory".
It's also worth saying that a lot of "string theorists" are actually working on consequences of things like holography rather than banging their head against a book trying to work on the very essence of the theory.
Still, I think breaking the standard model is a good thing. It means there's more physics to be discovered.
Like Tolstoy said about happy families, successful physics theories are boring. In fact, if a fundamental theory is too successful, physicists start to get restless. The people who have a problem with breaking the standard model are those who were looking for a perfect final theory, or who wasted their time looking for its philosophical implications.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Q4UAiKacw&ab_channel=PBSSp...
I am surprised to find so many people here have negative opinions on Sabine. I've probably seen a dozen videos about the double slit experiment but her explanation about it (and why the other videos were not precise/accurate) was really eye opening for me as a layman. Also her explanations about delayed observer not being as "weird" as people claim was also very helpful in demystifying quantum weirdnesses.
She seems like a competent physicist with strong opinions that are grounded in some basis - can someone elaborate why they don't like her points of view? Are they problematic scientifically or do they just not like her style of rhetoric?
Honestly I think fewer people would have an issue with her if she was like 80% less abrasive, no matter how out there her ideas are. So keep watching, but be aware that there are conflicting viewpoints with more significant backing.
edit: To sum in Bayesian terms, the prior probability of reading a good book is greater if the publisher had sunk money into a high quality cover, because they believe in its content, while a trashy cover might be the only thing a trash book could obtain. Likewise, the prior probability of bullshit is greater if the tone is shrill, accusatory, and exaggerated, while the prior probability of quality content is greater if the scientific commentary is academic, serious, and professional.
> "The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken" - Bertrand Russel
Physics is not one of those arenas. I am not even remotely worried that selecting explorations of QM interpretations based on tone might result in giving me a skewed perception of the topic due to my ignoring the views of those being harmed by them.
Now, I'm not saying that Sabine Hossenfelder should go into detail about that, but that she should mention the gargantuan amounts of data involved because that alone should be enough to cause people to wonder just how solid these results are.
Fine, leave the field, thats your prerogative, and do whats best for you. But please get back down off a soapbox and stop attacking the field that trained, educated and gave you the knowledge you have.
Will the next collider solve climate change?
Asking if it solved climate change is like me asking if your netflix subscription does. I'll ask nicely please don't be facetious.
This is an irrelevant appeal to emotion, try to engage faithfully
I’d like to find a name for this old fallacy. Something like “motherland fallacy” maybe?
Write it down for particles and it is as godawful mess.
"the mean value of the new measurement isn’t so different from earlier data analyses. The striking thing about this new analysis is the small error bar. That the error bar is so small is the reason why this result has such a high statistical significance. They quote a disagreement with the standard model at 6.9 sigma. That’s well above the discovery threshold in particle physics which is often somewhat arbitrarily put at 5 sigma."
"What did they do to get the error bar so small? Well for one thing they have a lot of data. But they also did a lot of calibration cross-checks with other measurements, which basically means they know very precisely how to extract the physical parameters from the raw data, or at least they think they do. Is this reasonable? Yes. Is it correct? I don’t know. It could be. But in all honesty, I am very skeptical that this result will hold up. More likely, they have underestimated the error and their result is actually compatible with the other measurements."
I think it's great that someone can tell me about the nature of the difference in the mass and whether it's likely to hold up under more scrutiny (no). I believe Sabine's judgement here as other small discrepancies have disappeared in the past.
This, coming from a physicist, shows how corrupt aademic physics has become. Academic physics is nothing more than old school scholasticism.
> Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science.
Another sign of scholasticism. You just write commentary on commentary to earn academic points.
> They never admitted to having made false statements, accidentally or deliberately, and they never gave us any reason to think it wouldn’t happen again. I quite simply don’t trust them.
I'm German and I have never heard this before, but I like it.
(I'm German, but I live in the Netherlands. I absolutely love these jokes between you)
'Ober, deze soep smaakt naar afwaswater.' 'Hoe weet u dat, meneer?'
Einstürzende Neubauten - the band, but the word means "a new building thats always in disrepair" (or so I was told)
Einstürzend = collapsing
Neubauten = made of "Neu"=new and "bauten"=buildings
Timestamp 0:25
--English speaker trying to make sense of it
Just like the "Oktoberfests" that take place in America. It's a shit-show.