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Comment by japanuspus | Hacker News Reader

As a low-energy quantum physicist, I completely agree: Experimental high-energy physics has become primarily an industrial subsidy scheme[1], and if we want the highest chance of reaching a grand unified theory, it seems the money would be much better spent elsewhere (cosmology, space-based observatories, research positions for young physicists without publish-or-perish incentives to run for the latest fad).

The short history of physics in TFA is spot on: Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise. This has been confirmed by numerous insiders, including by Hossenfelder as mentioned in the article, and Lee Smolin ("The trouble with physics") who is also a theoretical physicist.

Things have changed a lot since accelerators became a must-have for high-energy physics: Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned. I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations.

[1]: The industrial subsidy angle is not touched upon in TFA, but it is clear that there is a large number of people and companies making a good living from mega-physics, and talking to colleagues in the field, I get the distinct impression that it is not always they physicist walking in the front when asking for more machines.

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True, but sadly, if you defund Big Physics, it doesn't mean the money will go to 1000 experiments. It's more likely that nothing will be funded.

Same reason why nobody was able to effectively compete with YC: it's a lot less work for VCs to fund a few "big bets" than find 100 good early-stage startups. The VC strategy is a lot less effective, but they still earn their fees no matter what

The money could be spent on telescopes looking at non-human sources of particles (hard to do for particles of short lifetimes, but then again you have whole galaxies to work with). This is how much of QM and cosmology in general have been investigated.

> it doesn't mean the money will go to 1000 experiments. It's more likely that nothing will be funded

Perhaps it is reasonable to allow the money to remain unspent on topics related to physics! Spending has opportunity costs, after all; if these other experiments are not really the measure of the cost, then something else of value to society surely is.

The premise of this discussion is that those 1000 experiments would likely to be very scientifically vaaluable.

The premise of this subthread is that failing to fund another collider does not mean that those 1000 experiments will be funded. The person you're replying to is saying that even if money not thrown at a collider doesn't end up going to 1000 physics experiments, it will go to something. If that something is net-useful, it will be better than a new collider whose usefulness is questionable.

Physics is (or should be) regarded enviably by other disciplines. They keep managing to get these crazily expensive multinational projects funded: LHC, ITER, various space telescopes... multi-billion projects. I honestly cannot recall an official scientific experiment or tool in another discipline funded for even only 100 million. Just imagine that level of funding for your favourite discipline.

The direct scientific value may be limited; the spinoff of that much attention / funding isn't.

Not saying we should definitely fund a new collider. But the amount of effort needed is so huge, that even just the discussion will have positive impact for science.

Human Genome Project was $3B. It is especially salient because in a sense it was in competition with Superconducting Super Collider, which it won.

Big Science and Big Politics in the United States: Reflections on the Death of the SSC and the Life of the Human Genome Project (1997) is a classic in history of science analyzing this competition.

And there’s simply no argument that the Human Genome Project benefited humanity more than a collider. Think what $100 billion towards cancer could do.

Maybe not that much. They could 100x the sample size of all their experiments giving one decimal point more. They could research some more obscure cancers.

Research into virology seems a bigger thing to research. There is way more "parallelism" there meaning funding could be allocated more efficiently nin some given time frame.

California funded stem cell research with Proposition 71 at 3 billion, and the follow-up funding for Proposition 14 at an additional 5.5 billion.

This might not count as it's not a single 'official scientific experiment or tool', but I think that biosci is clearly getting heavily funded.

Computer Science? Biology (there are tons of multinational research labs.) I also wouldn’t consider telescopes physics. That’s astronomy.

Yes but if the person who is saying that those 1000 experiments won't be funded but the next large hadron collider will and the next LHC is a waste of money then the alternative is between funding a waste of money and funding possibly not a waste of money like maybe some social programs or something.

There is other science we can do besides just physics.

> Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise.

I'm not sure there is a fundamental distinction here. The only difference is success: Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist. When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment.

It feels like nature itself is against physicists here.

> Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist.

Nope. It's the other way around. The most important theories from Einstein an Schrödinger were created to explain effects there were experimentally known. The ones where they predicted the effects first and found them later were much less impactful.

Right, but a theory's inferred veracity is only as good as its testable, falsifiable predictions.

Let me turn this around.

A scientific theory is only as valuable as much as it can guide the action of some person.

Popperism is an incredibly successful simplification that made it viable to judge a theory. But at the end of the day, it's just a proxy that nobody really cares about.

Noob here, can we discuss about what are the practical effects of understanding high-energy theories? ie have we invented anything practical based on those colliders?

I think the LHC was the first collider that didn't create any practical application from its main working. There were still spin-offs, but for a few decades the main research topic of high-energy physics has been entirely theoretical.

Anyway, this is not a large problem. Theories taking decades to give you any practical result is perfectly fine. If all of science gave quick returns, it wouldn't need government spending. The problem is that we do not expect practical results on the future at all, and also do not expect the next large collider to bring anything different enough to change the physics into a new, unpredictable course.

Or, in other words, the next big collider (as we can plan now) is probably way too small to matter. It will also be the largest scientific project ever (space and fusion projects included), and larger than most infrastructure projects on the world. It is a pretty bad picture.

There are some side-effects of running a place like CERN that benefit scientists (for example, CERN makes and stores antimatter for experiments, and they sometimes develop new tech to solve their problems that can be applied in the real world, but by-and-large, high energy physics doesn't contribute directly to applied science or products. Countries run projects like this for prestige, not applications.

I would add creating WWW as a nice side product of CERN. I am sure they do much more in their highly specialized fields, ie seen tons of stuff open sourced (but I am not an expert on this so can't say how usable it actually is to other physicists).

The web woudl have been created without CERN. If you have to fund a $10B accelerator to make the web, your funding model is broken.

The WWW is looking like kind of a mixed bag nowadays.

It is a criterion but not a way to generate theory. In fact the key turning points mentioned are those theory (qm and r) both tried to explain something theory failed itself (the crazy energy of ultraviolet like today zero field energy) or observation that cannot be explained (increase intensity does not give your more electron in photo-electric effect but frequency does, like dark energy and matter these days).

Popper is more against social “science” like Marx or philosopher like Plato. Whilst it clean up the field a bit not sure it is that helpful.

> When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment.

One of the reasons LHC was built in the first place was to try to detect the theoretically predicted Higgs boson.

Sorry but several of the most prominent string theorists have gone from “LHC will find this to be a fact” to “We need a bigger LHC” as time passed. Not very trustworthy.

Gonna have to ask you to show your work here: who specifically made an LHC prediction and is now asking for as bigger LHC?

Many did, but Gordon Kane is a standard example because he is kind of more brazen about it than most.

In 2011: "This is a profound turning point in the quest for a fundamental unified theory of the physical world. The properties and mass of the LHC's Higgs boson suggest that physicists will soon find superpartners for particles, and that we have begun to connect string theory to the real world." from https://www.nature.com/articles/480415a. We didn't find superpartners.

In 2019: "One important lesson from studying such models is that we should not have expected to find superpartners at the LHC with masses below about 1500 GeV." from https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.2019031.... I mean, yes, you should not have expected that, but you totally did, so why should I believe when you say the next LHC will find superpartners?

> ...than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations.

Genuine question from an ignorant layperson: was confirming the existence of the Higgs boson not significant?

(Former PhD student in Particle Physics Pheno here, far from an expert)

Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing. It's kind of weird because it was marketted as a success story to the public (and don't get me wrong, it was) but theorists were very confident that it was there by 2012. Thus far, it behaves exactly as expected according to the standard model and that is very dull.

HEP would have been left in a very funny position if we didn't find it. No Higgs Boson would have been fascinating from a theory perspective, but good luck trying to get funding for a new collider when you found nothing with the old one.

Not a particle physicist, but I think the entire history of human scientific discovery is set again that proposition. Namely: (1) that we have a fundamental theory that describes the Universe; (2) that it is within our technical capability to experimentally verify the reality of that theory; and (3) we choose not to do so.

It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagine how intolerable the world would be if we'd chosen not to verify it.

Information is a measure of surprise: we should choose to verify our predictions; but it's disappointing when our predictions turn out to be correct.

We want our best predictions to be proven wrong, since we would learn a lot.

I get where you're coming from, but at the same time, we have to KNOW things before we can continue to theorize about new things. If you keep theorizing on things that turn out to not be true, then it's just a waste of everyone's time. Find things that are true, theorize on the next step, test, prove/disprove, lather, rinse, repeat.

Just coming up with stuff and disproving it isn't always "learning a lot", it's just showing how bad we are at logically thinking about the next step.

> Just coming up with stuff and disproving it isn't always "learning a lot", it's just showing how bad we are at logically thinking about the next step.

That's why I said "our best predictions"; as in, what we actually think is the case (and would put money on).

If "information is a measure of surprise", then you don't want every prediction to be wrong. You want every prediction to have a 50% chance of being wrong. Half of your experiments should be failures.

I don't understand this logic at all. At those odds, you're just guessing like flipping a coin. An inferred prediction should have a higher success rate. We look at the data we do know, we see what holes are there, and then make predictions based on all of our previous knowledge. The fact that the previous knowledge allows us to make more accurate predictions shows we have a better understanding of the subject than just random coin flips.

The most apt phrase here is “building castles in the air.”

Yes and, riffing on your clarification, maybe also make a distinction between hypothesis and prediction. Both are based on models, but a hypothesis hasn't been experimentally validated yet.

> It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagine how intolerable the world would be if we'd chosen not to verify it.

I once read a paper complaining that the most of psychology experiments are trivial in the sense that their results are predictable in advance. It is like all people know that angry people tend to make other people angry and so if angry person try to communicate then oftentimes communications ends with a conflict. What the point of making an experiment from this?

I'm not sure how much of a psychology fall victim of this, but sometimes I read a paper and think that I've found one more example of this. I personally get nothing from reading such a paper. I can get some ideas while reading about methods researchers used, but it means that the paper is not about how human mind works, but about how to measure psychological phenomena, or how to conduct an experiment. I bet that the most interesting part of the hypothetical paper with angry communicating people would be the trick researchers used to make people angry without violating ethics.

There is some value in experiments that try to prove something that everyone knows already, but not much of a value. So the question is: is it ok to spend $10G to conduct such an experiment?

I’m pretty sure there remains a discrepancy between the predicted mass of the Higgs boson and the measured mass in experiments. Is this resolved then?

I was under the impression that this was a smoking gun for something being off with the theory, a bit like the ultraviolet catastrophe that led to QM or the orbital aberration that was resolved by GR.

> I’m pretty sure there remains a discrepancy between the predicted mass of the Higgs boson and the measured mass in experiments. Is this resolved then?

Sort of.

The higgs boson mass is a parameter to the Standard Model. As far as the Standard Model is concerned, that is the end of the story. There are just a series of constants need to be fitted to data in the Standard Model and that's one of them.

However, the "problem" is why ~125GeV. If there are extremely high energy particles (which are expected in a Grand Unified Theory), then corrections to the Higgs mass would be enormous. This is a fine tuning problem where we arbitrarily tweak those corrections such that we magically end up at 125GeV. Supersymmetry and other Beyond Standard Models look to 'fix' this, and that's where my knowledge ends.

Honestly, when I was doing my PhD I took the pragmatic view on this. Trying to infer things at energy scales we can't probe struck me as more as a mathematical exercise than Physics. Many, many people would disagree with that though (and staked their careers on it).

> However, the "problem" is why ~125GeV. If there are extremely high energy particles (which are expected in a Grand Unified Theory), then corrections to the Higgs mass would be enormous. This is a fine tuning problem where we arbitrarily tweak those corrections such that we magically end up at 125GeV.

When I was undergraduate at CERN summer school program I got that this was one of main themes to justify existence of SUSY. However I am still puzzled even after having obtained a PhD (condensed matter) how does this arbitrary tweaking of corrections does look like.

Is it simply unwillingness to accept for world as we live know some parameters of the world like particles masses are not that independent from each other?

There are other problems with the theory too, they probably weren't solved perfectly by whatever SUSY model your supervisor was working on so they got less attention.

But ultimately, yes. The entirety of modern physics is largely borne out of the unwillingness to accept the the world is simply as it appears and that there's no deeper unifying principles.

> Is it simply unwillingness to accept for world as we live know some parameters of the world like particles masses are not that independent from each other?

Based on what I understood from Sabine Hossenfelder's writing, yes, that is a big chunk of modern physics. One example is "the naturalness problem", that some base parameters of the SM are orders of magnitude larger or smaller than other ones - which is of course entirely possible as a fact of nature.

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

Yogi Berra

I was thinking the same thing! Haha

>Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing.

Well you would have needed the LHC to confirm that, too, right? As a totally uneducated person just remembering media and online discussion about it at the time, I think the most interesting possibility was the detection of entirely new particles, which didn't happen.

And in the run-up to the LHC, I think there was a lot of hope in the possibility of finding stuff, but maybe there's not as much hope now.

Well that's sort of my point. In the media there was a lot of excitement about detecting supersymmetry with a whole array of new particles. When talking to the general public, it's easy to drum up the excitement by saying we're going to find lots of stuff. On the other hand, wheeling out a Physicist in front of the public and say "Finding nothing would be the most exciting outcome!" is a much harder sell, even though it is arguably true.

Which is the most exciting outcome between SUSY and absolutely nothing is very much debatable. However, I really can't stress how big an outcome it would have been if we didn't detect the Higgs. Generating a mass term for the W and Z bosons which is gauge invariant is hard. Without the Higgs mechanism, all the gauge bosons should be massless and yet the W and Z are very heavy. It wouldn't just be the case of the model doesn't work in some cases (massive neutrinos, dark matter candidate etc), you might as well throw the whole thing in the bin.

Edit: Typo

In a scientific sense - no. It was predicted, it was found. No theories needed rewriting.

Significant would have been if they'd failed to find it.

I would claim finding it was equally significant. Theory is not reality but just a model until verified. I know there is a trend in physics where computing is supposed to suffice without actually verifying anything but that is just wrong - I presume this notion is driven by the incentives to focus on publishing more than tedious collaboration.

I agree. But isn't the issue that there is not really anything like Higgs for a new larger collider?

So finding Black-holes is not significant because it was already predicted?

And btw there is so much money around...we should not fight against different project but the spending that goes into science itself. LHC and NASA is really just a small drop compared to military spending (in the US).

https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/p...

Why hello again, tragedy of the commons!

Modern monetary theory is its own can of worms, but justifying massive spending in one area because of even more massive spending elsewhere isn't solving anything.

But:

https://interestingengineering.com/these-7-cern-spinoffs-sho...

And i think the ISS was still much more expensive (especially over the years) then LHC/Atlas etc.

Those "practical" results were all due to the spending on technology. None were due to advances in physics, as far as I can tell (that website seems designed to obfuscate not illuminate)

>spending on technology

Like the Moon-landing right? None were due to advances in landing on the moon.

Did it change your life in any way?

(Most times, people don't know how to judge that, but high-energy physics really didn't impact anything.)

> I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations.

What is interesting, is that a lot of the fundamental physics theories were discovered by amateurs. Einstein was a patent clerk, for example.

Maybe we should work on democratizing data collection, and making more raw data available for people to work with. With the advent of cloud computing and on demand computing, maybe your hobby group could code up a an analysis and run it on AWS for a few hundred dollars and discover some new theory.

> Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned.

Couldn't the LHC be upgraded then to take advantage of this? Sounds like a much cheaper option. But I'm not a physicist at all so I'm sure I'm oversimplifying.

The detectors on the LHC get upgraded regularly, between every run some part gets updated. Computing-wise as well, better computing resources are there.

The fundamental limitations isn't the detectors or computers, it's the energies you can reach with a collider of that size. Yes you can completely retool the LHC, which will probably allow you to do slightly better precision measurements, but won't strongly affect the energies you can probe.

To get to really high energies you need to build bigger. As a (former) particle physicist, I am also a bit sceptical if going bigger is better; the LHC was a calculated risk, with the goal of finding SUSY, which was a very plausible theory at the time.

The FCC seems to be a shot in the dark.

There is the argument that if we don't build a bigger one now we'll lose a lot of expertise, but that feels like a knee-jerk reaction from the community.

> we'll lose a lot of expertise, but that feels like a knee-jerk reaction from the community.

It's a valid concern that must always be considered. It's the kind of thing that's been biting Intel in the ass for the past 7 years. Even if your decision is "we'll lose a lot of expertise and that's okay", it needs to be a conscious, well-grounded decision, otherwise that is a knee-jerk reaction based on your own biases and assumptions that could have significant, even irrevocable, consequences for the future.

> to get to really high energies you need to build bigger

Superconducting magnets enable much higher energies in smaller (granted, theoretical) fusion reactor designs than previously possible. Does the same not apply to colliders?

Colliders already use superconducting magnets

With new developments, you can use much smaller magnets.

Like the sibling comment says: we’re currently doing this. Higher energies are not really feasible without a bigger ring though so we’re increasing the beam intensity (sort of) to produce more physics per time unit. This very likely won’t reveal any new physics processes, but it will allow us to increase the precision in many measurements we do and could allow us to find discrepancies or otherwise increase our understanding of the existing model.

This is effectively a measure to maximize the output we can get from the machine, so to maximize the return in investment.

There’s a lot of debate in the field what should happen next. FCC is one possibility, but I’m personally sceptical (even though I work at CERN myself).

It seems to me there’s a clear need for a Higgs-factory as a follow up to LHC, but that doesn’t have to be a ring collider, a electron positron linear collider could fulfill this purpose as well.

Aren't Hossenfelder and Smolin basically paying their bills by being contrarians though?

That’s a passive aggressive ad hominem without any substance whatsoever.

These people are not some obscenely rich opportunists in power. They are working scientists, who draw public interest because they say interesting things and they are part of a larger discourse.

Now Hossenfelder isn’t known for her fingerspitzengefühl when it comes to criticizing others, but I have yet to find an instance where she doesn’t treat the subject matter with the utomst respect it deserves.

Also, Lee Smolin's been public about his opinions for...at least 25 years now, that my memory serves, so it's certainly not opportunism on his part.

I will always get onboard to boost Hossenfelder. She respects the subject matter and also the students, and it impresses me a lot to see it in practice.

I don't think her analysis of LIGO made any sense at all.

Elaborate?

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-ligo....

Her claim is that there isn't enough secondary validation to truly conclude they detected gravity waves. the community disagrees and is building more detectors. The creators of the project were awarded Nobel prizes. At best, she raises some interesting questions but the narrative that the data isn't sufficient really doesn't work.

You're just pitting argument from authority against itself. The "community" is often wrong. Do you have a technical challenge to her position?

At least for Hossenfelder, I think she's lost the message. She accused LIGO of fraud a while back. However, none of the points she made ended up being real. Even after being corrected, she kept pushing the narrative. I guess because it gets her more views.

Well, the same way that String Theorists are paying their bills from the taxpayers, mostly by pushing that theory as Physics.

Given that they are physicists and no one has actually been able to properly find an alternative to string theory isn't that what they're supposed to be doing?

Isn't the main alternative LQG which is apparently a dead end?

In any case this is not how science works, you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not. Both Smolin and Hossenfelder have been somewhat successful in doing so themselves, but Hossenfelder specifically didn’t manage to secure a professorship for various reasons and I am sure she has some axe to grind (again probably partially justified, partially not).

> you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer-reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not

No, science is not the act of publishing in a peer-reviewed journals, science is using past observations to make models that predict future observations, and then evaluating those models after making the future observations. Peer review is just the industry standard quality control mechanism.

I could have made the point differently. What I wanted to emphasize is that there is an external view of a given field and an internal view. The actual inner workings and process are poorely understood and the few public debates give a very skewed view of the field.

There can be lots of new alternatives. Why not fund those instead, by creating “moonshine physics departments”? (That is just a comment, not a suggestion).

The problem with String Theory is it unfalsifiability and that it has not even grown to explain 3D phenomena AT ALL. 40 years later.

Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (both special and general) gave results in a single decade.

What do you mean by 3D phenomena?

String theory is as far as I have ever read the only thing even close to a working theory in this area. That doesn't mean it's correct but in my admittedly limited understanding of the literature many alternatives are either dead or are similar to string theory only without the underlying principles.

People do work on alternatives. there are a lot of smart people unhappy with string theory they just can't actually provide any alternatives.

One thing I'd like to say as well is that if someone does provide an alternative there will be a large movement of minds. This always happens in science, people like to think of physicists as a kind of unionized cabal but this isn't true historically or today as far as I'm concerned. Certainly not with the physicists of tomorrow.

Of all the post-Standard Model theories in existence, string theory has the best publicists and has (to a degree) sucked up all of the air out of competing theories, so that the lack of competing theories is less due to string theory being better and more due to being unable to get funding to work on competing theories.

As far as I understand it, string theory has yet to provide a working model of quantum gravity despite focused work on it for ~30 years. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Newton explained interplanetary attraction.

Plank explained the black-body radiation.

Einstein explained too many things to say but predicted the precession of mercury which was unexplained.

Witten has explained either everything (which is to say nothing useful) or nothing at all (it depends on your position). In any of both cases, after 40 years and several LHC unfulfilled “expectations” it is time to accept the facts.

The issue is not that nobody found an alternative to string theory, the problem is that nobody found a use for string theory. Essentially vast amount of funding and talent has been pushed into string theory (via the tenure processes at universities which favored string theory for a long time, because it was considered the cutting edge of theoretical physics), and what did we get from it? Not one falsifiable prediction, which as Popper would tell you is necessary to do science. So everything and nothing would be an alternative to string theory.

String theory does make falsifiable predictions they're just at very high energy, technically.

For example my understanding of string theory is that Lorentz covariance must be exact, if you find this is either inconsistent or not true in reality then you have cut ze string.

In my opinion, we are hitting diminishing returns.. It's harder to learn new things now than ever before. You need big machines to do anything interesting?

How about thinking about this on a grander scale / in the open - and just have more and even larger “industrial subsidy schemes”? Wouldn’t you like to work on another BIG SCIENCE project that tries to find answers to something that seems more worthwhile (to you)?

I'd much rather live on a planet with too many giant science projects than have top engineers and scientists with obscene budgets for blowing up whole countries into the middle ages for political gain.

Agree. The total US non-defense research budget has hovered below 2% of federal spending for the last four decades. The military budget has been around 15%. We need more research, not less.

> Einstein and the quantum pioneers

Einstein wasn't a 'quantum pioneer'. Einstein was a proponent of classical physics and against quantum physics.

His Nobel Prize was for his early quantum work (explaining the photoelectric effect). He was a major participant at the first Solvay conference. Bose-Einstein statistics didn't get that name just because someone though it looked cool.

He of course fully knew that the world is quantum, not classical. His beef with the mainstream QM past the mid to late '20s was with the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein believed that a complete theory would have realism and so Copenhagen could not be the complete theory.

Solving the photoelectric effect gave birth to the field. He just didn't like the monster he had created.

No. He was working on the photoelectric effect because "the field" already existed. And he was working on it from a classical physics standpoint. What makes quantum physics revolutionary is it's non-classical nature. That's what einstein was against - quantum physics as we know it today. Einstein was a life long classic physicist. His relativity was grounded on classical physics. It's why many are working towards a quantum theory of gravity.

If you had even the shallowest understanding of what Einstein's contributions to physics are, you wouldn't make such comments... He literally got his Nobel prize for photoelectric effect in 2021.

That isn't true. Einstein's "breakout" paper was on the Photoelectric effect. He wasn't a fan of probabilistic interpretations of quantum mechanics but it's not accurate to say that he didn't have a hand in it

I didn’t read that as intending to include Einstein in that group.

> I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit

Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results.

Or are you seriously imagining that there is a cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret?

Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?

> "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh"

The idea of getting young physicists to do lots of research is not at all about ignoring the old knowledge. These young people will have gotten a PhD in physics. They will have absorbed a lot of the relevant old knowledge. The idea is that, because they came to this knowledge quite quickly, they have a fresh view on it. You simply get a different view on knowledge you build over decades as opposed to knowledge you learnt in a few years. This different view could very well lead to new and valuable insights.

There is not a "cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret". But there is a "group of people who have been doing high energy physics that want to keep doing high energy physics". It makes sense that they want to keep doing it, even if other approaches would be more fruitful. They have invested lots of time into it, and they might not even know about the other approaches. And doing 'more of the old thing' is a safe bet.

It's just that by now 'more of the old thing' is getting really stupidly expensive. And it looks to be a lot more efficient to try a lot more new things. Give the people with a fresh look on it a change to come up with ideas.

> Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?

These people surely do exist. But there are plenty of others out there that have ideas for 10 million dollar machines rather than 100 billion dollar machines. Try some of the 10 million dollar machines rather than only the 100 billion dollar machines.

I think many of the 10 million dollar machines are currently not being funded because that level of funding requires clout, reputation, and political acumen to get. This currently lies with the people who like doing accelerators. They don't like building non-accelerators that cost 10 million dollars, so they don't help the 10 million dollar machines as much.

That is not malice, these people aren't evil. They just like a tool that is getting inefficient.

> But there is a "group of people who have been doing high energy physics that want to keep doing high energy physics".

Apparently it needs to be said because people act like they don't know it: those are the only people interested in answering questions about the fundamental particles! Diverging interests is the fundamental reason people separate into different fields.

> they might not even know about the other approaches

You can easily find the lists of seminars given at CERN and other places: they do know about other fields. In fact people from HEP move to other fields, and folks from other fields move into HEP.

> Try some of the 10 million dollar machines rather than only the 100 billion dollar machines.

They are being built though! In fact there are 2 billion experiments being built.

The argument here is something else: that High energy physics should just stop building big machines at all, and instead magically solve the problem that small machines were built and fully exploited many many decades ago.

The proposed FCC cost is 30 billion.

It's also often said that science advances one funeral at a time. It's entirely possible for an entire field to be stuck in a local maximum and refuse to admit that they are not advancing, especially when huge money depends on it. A recent example is the amyloid hypothesis for Alzheimers, which has failed every single time it was tested in clinical trials, but is still being pushed again and again, mostly by a cabal of academics that refuse to accept that were wrong, and industry bureaucrats that are afraid to challenge the orthodoxy (no one was ever fired for approving research proposed by the foremost expert in their field!).

Yes it's said a lot by non-scientist commentators on internet forums, frequently about 5 seconds before they push whatever bizzare conspiracy theory they've made their pet cause.

And there it is right in this post.

It was said by Max Planck (well, not this exact quote, but the spirit is entirely there), not exactly a non-scientist commenting on an internet forum.

Also, the controversy over the amyloid hypothesis is real. Here [0] is a paper showing arguments for and against with 268 citations. Here [1] is a more journalistic article in Nature. While this is still up in the air, it's nby no means a "conspiracy theory" to suggest that it's possibly a 25-year wild goose chase, or close to it. I would love to be wrong about this, but I suppose time will tell.

[0] https://actaneurocomms.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s4...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4

A better qualified person saying something doesn't make you qualified to repeat it.

It's not like it's some subtle mathematical conjecture that laymen can't possibly comprehend. It's a social comment by a well known researcher that has a good chance of being a fact of the scientific community today just as much as then.

If you believe things have changed, just say so, and move the conversation on. If you don't think it's a fruitful conversation, don't participate.

I specifically replied to someone claiming that new minds re-thinking the foundations of a field couldn't possibly be a good idea, and I did so with a relevant quote from one of the new minds that completely re-wrote the foundations of their field. I believe this was a constructive observation moving the conversation.

>Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results.

This is coming from a forum where it's normal to see "something that already exists, but written in $newLanguage/Framework" as a thing to celebrate. So why not just redo science but with newShiny so we haven't actually achieved anything? /s

Just do "import SUSY" I don't know why you think it's hard to find!

I'm pretty sure this is wrapped in all sorts of dependancy hell

>As a low-energy quantum physicist...

===

Thats just how I read your comment to begin with.

In Steven Wrights voice.

"People ask me what I'm into... Low energy quantum physics... its basically everything"

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