Oh jesus christ, the constant whining!
This is science. This is how it works. Maybe there's nothing else to discover, maybe it will take us 100 years, we don't know, that's why it's called research.
This is science. This is how it works. Maybe there's nothing else to discover, maybe it will take us 100 years, we don't know, that's why it's called research.
If that's so it will mean a major restructuring of the field of physics. It has vast implications for researchers that chose what to work on or whom to fund. Yes it's all part of research, but the flavor and type of research in one of the most prominent fields of science is undergoing a massive shift. That's news that's well suited for a publication called Science. And it reflects genuine scientific debate that's been going on for more than a decade on the inside.
But institutions don't tend to dismantle themselves, so I expect a few decades of "we might find something soon!" until the leaders have retired.
> The report led to the complete dismantling of AI research in England.[15] AI research continued in only a few universities (Edinburgh, Essex and Sussex).
Playing devil's advocate only slightly, maybe particle physics should similarly pare down to a bare maintenance level of research (or even mostly teaching) for a few centuries until we can harness much higher energies.
I think the argument is not whether we invest in research or not, but are we putting our limited resources into viable research or not. Sabine Hossenfelder argues that many researchers are more interested in testing their pet theory based on mathematical beauty than actually working on more boring forms of fundamental research. This imbalance leads to poor returns on research investments.
>It’s too early to despair, many physicists say
or
>“I very much doubt that in 20 years, I will say, ‘Oh, boy, after the Higgs discovery we learned nothing new.’”
The whole article is about how the upgrade to the LHC will give more precision and more data. Even if it was whining, critiquing and bickering over the status quo very much a cornerstone of science. Your annoyance looks like something coming from a place of dogmatism..
AFAICS that is not one of the options; there are mysteries and contradictions whose explanations remain to be discovered. But maybe we can't discover more using the LHC (which I doubt).
I once had a vision -- yes, a vision, something deep came to me as I laid half-awake -- that after a few dozen turtles the actual ground was made of jackstraw[1]. It rested on a firm tangle.
I've always felt since then that the world and the universe themselves are made of contradictions. That some contradictions are fundamental, and this is why since Socrates we've always been so focused on finding contradictions. Because maybe we can find the ones we can't pick apart.
In logic, it's said that from a contradiction you can validly deduce any proposition.
The idea that contradictions are fundamental is horrifying; it implies that any attempt to reason about the world is doomed. I don't know how it would affect me if I believed that. I hope you have a good therapist!
At what price?
If you need high energy, pure vacuums and ultra low temps, surely space is where such experiments should be conducted on bigger scales in future to push it further?
In any case - how much of that $1000 is attributed to the research and development of the wheel in Ancient Mesopotamia?
How much is attributed to the discovery of electricity, and to General Relativity?
If we weren't attempting to get answers to fundamental questions we'd still be living in caves.
Are you actually interested in discussing the topic at hand?
My point is that all technology is built on prior discoveries and all matter of other factors that produce the civilisation, that produces doohickies, to look up cat memes.
I'm a nonexpert who has some vague idea of how these things work.
There's two kinds of accelerator: circular and linear. In either case, you have a tube, often underground, a bunch of accelerator components along the tube, and a detector component. I believe but I am not sure that a key advantage of the circular one is that you can accelerate the particles in the beam as they take multiple loops around the tube. The disadvantage is that when charged particles turn they lose energy by emitting electromagnetic radiation, and the whole point of the accelerator is to stuff these particles full of energy to make interesting collisions. This is mitigated by having higher-radius accelerators, which is the key reason we build things like the Large Hadron Collider and make it so very large in the first place, instead of just trying to add stronger stuff at existing accelerators.
So what do you intend to do in space?
The quasi-achievable near term might see a linear accelerator that consists of two components orbiting and firing particle beams into a third (the detector) because we are obviously not orbiting the mass of the LHC in the near term, and we're not orbiting anything that's rigid and also substantially larger than a rocket payload. It will no doubt be tricky to align the beams, as the orbits are ellipses and the beams need to be approximately straight lines (or close enough, blah blah spacetime). But the fundamental problem is that you're going to need to do all your acceleration all at once, at the accelerators, which immediately negates any possible advantages you could possibly have from space.
Perhaps you could do something very clever with an orbit-sized circular accelerator with accelerators spaced at intervals around the planet. You'd need a lot of launches of some intense equipment (I believe the Earth-based accelerator components are giant supercooled magnets). You'd also need an energy source, lots of engineering prowess to get everything in good working order (LHC bringup was very hands-on) except any adjustments will have to be done in orbit, and then when it's running you'd face the problem of LOLmaintenance.
I'm going to be honest, I'm more skeptical about this than about the Mars colony.
The fundamental problem is that collider physics relies on being able to create collisions of exactly known quantity as your input (eg in the LHC's case, proton-proton collisions at a 14TeV centre of mass energy). If you don't control the input, you can't extract any information about the output you detect, in the same way that you can't create a simulation of snooker by looking at the balls on the table, without knowing how they were set up before being hit.
The other problem is that to probe the frontier of particle physics, you need truly immense statistics to get enough of the incredibly rare collisions. Think bunches of hundreds of billions of protons colliding tens of millions of times per second. The upshot is that you'd not only need to build the detectors in space (which are thousands of tonnes with extremely precise electronics that need whole server farms plugged directly into them to process the terabits of data coming out each second), but you'd also need to build the entire collider in space too.
Even then it's a rather pointless endeavour, since the colliders require a colder temperature and higher vacuum than even interstellar space, nevermind within the solar system.
https://home.cern/science/engineering/cryogenics-low-tempera...
> The LHC's cryogenic system requires 40,000 leak-tight pipe seals, 40 MW of electricity – 10 times more than is needed to power a locomotive – and 120 tonnes of helium to keep the magnets at 1.9 K.
Launch cost per kg aside for the detectors and basic framework, space is the best place for pushing the boundaries of high energy physics experiments in the future.
This is fundamentally wrong. We know the Standard Model is not the final theory of Physics so there are still things to discover.
Note, of course, that the same could be true in a coincidentally-generated universe, as well as a deistic or theistic one (the latter two being effectively indistinguishable from a Simulation).
Which may not fit with any hypothetical Simulator's goals, anyway.
Most games don't feature an absolutely perfect Newtonian physics engine. The physics is just a means to an end, not the fundamental point of the whole endeavor.
It also appears to give us exactly enough computational power to build quantum computers, but not any more than that. That seems like a pretty inconvenient choice for us and the simulators.
I'm not personally all that convinced by the Simulation Hypothesis, but I recognize it's a legitimate possibility.
... right alongside the possibility that base reality doesn't have a fully consistent physics system. So far assuming reality works has panned out pretty well, but we can't be sure that will just always be true.
edit: I have no dog in the fight, but I do appreciate the concept of "Art for Art's sake." To me, the LHC embodies the physics equiv of that statement.