but for people unfamiliar with science it may sound like "defund LHC" (that would be unfortunate)
but for people unfamiliar with science it may sound like "defund LHC" (that would be unfortunate)
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_.
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.
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.