> ...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?
Genuine question from an ignorant layperson: was confirming the existence of the Higgs boson not significant?
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
I was thinking the same thing! Haha
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.
We want our best predictions to be proven wrong, since we would learn a lot.
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).
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?
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.
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
Significant would have been if they'd failed to find it.
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...
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.
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.
Like the Moon-landing right? None were due to advances in landing on the moon.
(Most times, people don't know how to judge that, but high-energy physics really didn't impact anything.)