What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? [video]
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Specifically, neutrino oscillation is experimentally confirmed, but my understanding is that you can't just bolt it on to the Standard Model without getting inconsistencies unless you make one of the following two changes: Either make neutrinos their own antiparticles, or introduce sterile neutrinos. That seems like a pretty good reason to look for sterile neutrinos!
Also, I have to disagree with what she says about dark matter (or modified gravity, the distinction is irrelevant here -- both presumably introduce new particles); to say "All we need to know is the distribution of it so we can make predictions, who cares what it actually consists of?"... to my mind the point of fundamental physics should be to build a complete model of the laws of physics, and that sort of instrumentalism is just giving up.
(We can also generalize from this to other cases where problems from cosmology or other areas of physics would seem to require explanations from particle physics, e.g., baryogenesis, since the Standard Model doesn't seem to produce enough CP-violation to explain that. I don't think it makes sense to exclude such indirect evidence from other fields when we speak of tests of the standard model.)
None of this is to disagree that there's a lot of work on what Hossenfelder calls "pseudo-problems", which I agree seems to have produce a lot of failed predictions for little reason.
And you are absolutely right about the "who cares" stance. If our estimates of DM and dark energy are right, only 5% or so of total energy in the universe is in SM physics (visible matter). How can we be satisfied with that?
Hossenfelder is pretty clear that internal inconsistencies are real problems. The problems she dismisses as pseudo-problems are attempts to explain the values of free parameters or otherwise try to explain the "origin" of the laws of physics. This doesn't fall under that.
This is begging the question. Of course explaining the values of free parameters is a hopeless endeavor (it's in the name), but we don't actually know which parameters are free. We know which parameters are free in the standard model - but the standard model is just an effective theory. Radical instrumentalists like Hossenfelder might be satisfied with that, but a scientific realist shouldn't be.
But, I'm not sure this really addresses the point? Like, as I see it, the basic question here is, which problems sufficiently require resolution that looking for that resolution is likely to bear fruit? And it's hard to see how "certain particle masses (or other seemingly-free parameters) seem small/large" qualifies. Small or large by what standard? It's a lot smaller/larger than 1? OK, but what's "a lot"? Who's setting the scale here? Ultimately the universe's scale is the only one that matters here, and if we find its numbers unusually "small" or "large" that's just a matter of incorrect expectations on our part!
Like, if you want to say we should be looking for axions or magnetic monopoles on the grounds that a literal zero is suspicious, then, sure, I guess zero is fairly special and suggestive. But I don't see that there's any sense in trying to find explanations for numbers being "unusually small" or "unusually large" when there's nothing but our own expectations to mark these magnitudes as "unusual".
I see what you mean and agree that talking about "small" or "large" fundamental constants doesn't make a whole lot of sense - but that's not what's going on with particle masses or other hierarchy problems.
The effective masses we actually measure are not the (presumably fundamental) bare masses we would measure at infinitely high energies. They're adjusted by, in a very rough sense, the energy content of a particle's interactions with surrounding fields - an electron's effective mass is its bare mass, plus the contribution of its one-loop self-interactions, plus the contribution of its two loop self-interactions, and so on. Naively we would expect those contributions to be mostly uncorrelated, and the effective mass to be of roughly the same order as the highest-weight terms in the perturbation series.
When physicists say that a mass or coupling constant is too small, they mean that it's small compared to the terms in its perturbation series, which means that something is causing them to very nearly cancel out. It's as if we had what we thought was an ordinary random walk (which we would expect to have a magnitude scaling as sqrt(N) after N steps)... that reliably hovered around 3.
Still, clearly the Sterile Neutrino hypothesis was worthy of investigation based on her own reasoning and previous statements.
Scientific community. Via a process of peer-reviewed publications. Not via blog posts and Youtube videos.
I am not sure whether Popper is the right reference.
Karl Popper: "a theory should be considered scientific if, and only if, it is falsifiable." (1)
One of the points I expected when she was showing the graph of predictions and how they shift as we get more data is that while individual theorists may be making testable predictions, the sum total of the field and all the various predictions on offer ends up combining to produce a prediction of essentially everything. The net result is that you don't get much more than that out of the whole process. That's not 100% true; there is still an aspect of exploring what the math landscape permits. But it's much closer to 100% true than we should be comfortable with.
Especially with the repeated history, the very repeated history, of some specific hypothesis being falsified (such as SUSY) and the reaction being to just move the goalposts. Again, individually, each such action may be justified, but taken as a collection of all of them, it becomes difficult to distinguish from the way that you can easily justify breaking the world into earth/air/water/fire elements; every time an observation seems to contradict a previous theory you just adjust the 4 elements theory to fit. It's the same basic procedure that kept such theories aloft for centuries when we now easily recognize them as just absolute garbage. Not just because we have better theories, but because when approached with a modern scientific mindset such things can be annihilated easily, being obviously wrong and false even if you don't have a better theory immediately on hand to replace it.
She detailed her point with the Higgs boson. There was an internal inconsistency and the Standard Model needed the Higgs boson.
There may be different point of views: your particle is random but mine is a great idea and cleans up the theory.
But I actually thought when listening to her talk: isn't it fine thinking about and looking for particles in the next energy range.
(we spend money for so many stupid things, 50 * 10^9 Euros (next accelerator) is not so much money related to 500 million people)
a theory should be considered scientific if, and only if, it is falsifiable.
a theory should be considered scientific if it is falsifiable
a theory should be considered scientific only if it is falsifiable
On this case, it means that to be a theory, it has to be falsifiable, and anything that is falsifiable, is a theory.
I'm honestly curious if ChatGPT will help in this regard. Working with ChatGPT on physics/math problems allows one to get immediate knowledgable feedback on any idea - you can even have ChatGPT write out a semi-broken version of complex derivations if you just want to see if anything interesting comes out of the idea.
I'm
An AI that uses transformers for language understanding and then adds something more like our frontal cortex might be useful, through.
I imagine the same would hold with physics. Part of research is reading and understanding other papers. If ChatGPT made you 10x better at that, it would help your research.
The things that will be built on GPT, you might be able to trust. But a language model can't be checking your particle physics work. A language model barely does simple arithmetic correctly. This is not some sort of temporary aberration; even human language models can't do arithmetic correctly. We do that elsewhere.
Though at this point, which is easier between "societal UBI" and "changing how science is funded" is anybody's guess. Nominally, it ought to be the latter, but it may actually be more entrenched....
Get it together people! Quantum Gravity, I want some answers!
* https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/
* https://aeon.co/essays/imre-lakatos-and-the-philosophy-of-ba...
* https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Imre_Lakatos
> The difference between a progressive and a degenerative research programme lies, for Lakatos, in whether the recent changes to its auxiliary hypotheses have achieved this greater explanatory/predictive power or whether they have been made simply out of the necessity of offering some response in the face of new and troublesome evidence.
https://sabinehossenfelder.com/research-2/
"Sabine is currently an external member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy in Munich, Germany."
1) Obtaining grants to continue study in any field of science is greatly improved if you are iterating on an established idea that is already understood. Getting a grant on a completely novel idea outside of the mainstream field of thoughts is going to be much harder. Along with this is the reality that government grants are managed by a revolving door of industry and university insiders which is both a terrible and great thing. On one hand you don't want lobotomized bureaunaughts making uninformed decisions on which researchers to support. On the other hand your knowledgable staff on granting agencies are going to be the ~top of a given field and as such will weed out non-mainstream ideas for funding as "they already know" that a new line of thought to be foley.
2) While governments freely waste taxpayers money, they still do it strategically. After Hiroshima the world understood how important it is to keep a close eye on the physics community. Every country with a viable nuclear program must continue to engage in this game of useless increments in particle physics. Making progress is not what is important, what is truly important is that a country has its own base of physics knowledge and active development so that should another physics breakthrough happen elsewhere then they have a chance of recreating it on their own within a short enough window for it to make a difference. If you didn't already have physicists engaged in their craft then you would be 5-10 years behind the curve of any post-nuclear-physics breakthrough. The same game is played in many other fields of science...
https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/what_it_means_to_be...
I recommend people to be much more interested on whether she is actually right or not, instead of whether the views that she opposes are simply bad.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that very few people actually hold all of those bad ideas as true (I'm met more than one, so they exist). But the normalized speech of the area surely did, and for quite a long time (I believe it's changing). And that's what reaches students and news, not the detailed opinion of individuals.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2023/02/whats-going-wrong-i...
So silly of her to move it behind a paywall.
You don't provide any information for evaluation, all we know is that you think you heard it too often. And why make a disparaging comment about her on top of that, without any substance added?
I would not have added a comment if I didn't find it disturbing how much attention your mean comment gets. Another person even saying they cannot "stand her" - of course also without anything of substance added. I hate adding my own comment along this mean-spirited, substance-free and OT thread, but I don't want to say nothing either.
If you dislike the topic, just don't click. Easy. Or, provide some real meat for the discussion, not an expression of personal dislike, especially not of the person, unless they actually did something despicable worthy of such dislike.
I think they're complaining about Sabine making another video where she repeats the same unsubstantiated complaints. And they were disappointed because they are interested in novel critique of particle physics, and were let down.
In what way? Her line of reasoning was easy to follow and she gave some specific examples. Given the length and medium I felt it was substantial, certainly enough for a rebuttal. What's missing?
That funding could go towards thousands of research proposals that aren't suffering from diminishing returns.
This is simply not true, as a quick perusal of any proposal for a future collider will show: they all start with motivational statements, not with "it is a truth universally acknowledged we need another" as you claim.
What you are thinking of is ballistic missile defence, now that's a self-serving boondoggle.
They are pseudo motivations "justified" by appeals to pseudo problems. They are pseudo problems for exactly the reasons Hossenfelder discusses in this video and in her book.
Glad you asked. The Higgs boson was just the thing I needed for my new Tesla and, thanks to LHC, I now always carry a spare in the trunk. But in all honesty it's slightly off-center and I am hoping that a new larger accelerator will provide a particle that precisely fills the bill.
I concur with your last point.
What a weird comment. They're not substantiated at all, the whole video is literally substantiating her position, and does it quite well IMO.
I have some concerns about the dark matter point but I think she is more or less right and I think it sucks to be competing for funding with work that's not well-directed.
Of course, she thinks spending on other work is not well directed, but others think spending it on her work is not well directed. While I think that maybe we just fund all (because really, it's not that much money -- for her group, we probably talk about a couple of shot-down balloon kind of money [Sidewinder is >300k], for several years worth of research), we do not live in that world.
I want to note, though, that this "controversy", is very important for her book sales. I am not convinced that these books actually bring the field forward.
Maybe address one or two of her actual points and try to refute them?
No, because the vested interests have blinders on because they're invested in current paradigms. They could get stuck trying to find a local optimum rather than the global optimum we actually want. External objective assessments are sometimes needed, and Sabine is making a good case that particle physicists need a wake up call to get out of their rut. She won't convince the currently entrenched interests, but hopefully she's convincing graduate students that will start gaining influence over the next decade.
The argument she lays out in this video is exactly such an assessment. She is an external agent because she's not working in particle physics. Plenty of other physicists are in the same position and can impartially evaluate the state of particle physics and where funding for basic science research should go.
What are the objective reasons to justify the expense of yet larger particle accelerators at this point? It's literally just for the hell of it, all the low hanging fruit has long since been plucked. There are no theoretical reasons to expect to find anything. Empirically, we haven't found anything surprising in numerous previous accelerators. The Higgs was expected and justified the LHC. If the Higgs had not been found, then there would have been a decent argument for a larger accelerator, but that's not the world we live in.
The colossal funds that would go towards a larger accelerator could fund literally thousands of scientific experiments that aren't suffering from diminishing returns. We'd be better off funneling that money towards wakefield accelerators, for instance.
Additionally: The relative attribution of funds is decided by funding agencies, by reviewing the individual fields and asking for input from these fields, using panels that span fields. The finer contribution in the field then depends on experts in the field.
It's also not true that money is fungible in that way. Especially for bigger projects like this, without such a project, the money just wouldn't be there.
And if you don't trust the in-field experts to distribute the money, why do you believe that out-field experts, who directly would profit from the diverted funding (if the money would be a zero sum game), are neutral?
I'm aware. She hasn't worked in HEP in quite some time as she's been focusing on cosmology and quantum foundations.
> A condensed matter physicist cannot evaluate the field, the same way as a particle physicist cannot evaluate the field of CM.
They absolutely can evaluate whether a field lacks any prospects or real problems to solve.
> It's also not true that money is fungible in that way. Especially for bigger projects like this, without such a project, the money just wouldn't be there.
The money just drying up is frankly better than wasting it on a fruitless endeavour, which just discredits research as a whole.
> And if you don't trust the in-field experts to distribute the money, why do you believe that out-field experts, who directly would profit from the diverted funding (if the money would be a zero sum game), are neutral?
There are many ways to approach this, use your imagination and consider how science could be funded freed from its current shackles. A certain percentage of funds can be earmarked for particle physics, but that doesn't mean a new collider should get most of it. You can separate the decision of how much funding a sub field gets from how much of that funding goes to specific projects in that sub field, and each decision could be made by different sets of people, as but one example.
This is an outstanding non-reply! Is this how you actually think reasoning works, or are just getting replies from ChatGPT?
Seems to know her shit and doesn’t seem to hate it.
Of course if you follow this to its logical conclusion you eventually hit "become a scientist, work with the material, form your own opinion", but well, a little bit more aggregation and summary would be of service to me.
I guess what Hossenfelder offers me is content above the quality bar of most science journalism, on that spectrum.
The one that comes to mind is when talking about fusion she said the output energy of the reaction * efficiency must be > input energy which seems perfectly logical. Except the input energy doesn’t all disappear much of it ends up in the plasma which in a steady state is then converted at some efficiency to electricity again. This is why Q is considered independently of the total power used by the facility which goes on to invalidate much of the rest of the video.
I don’t know if that was intentional oversimplification or a mistake on her part, but it makes me question the accuracy of her videos on other topics.
Dr Becky is a fantastic science communicator that is clearly very passionate and optimistic about her field
One of the take aways I've got from what I've seen of academia (whether this applies to Sabine or not) is that you'd be surprised how disconnected a senior academic is from the current state of their field. Not that they're ignorant of the latest findings (though, again, you'd be surprised how little time they have actually read papers unless they have to), but they're often not doing actual research at all, not reading the latest papers as widely as a good postdoc would be, and see the field through older often outdated (though sometimes still valuable) lenses, and can be very distracted by their other responsibilities. A young excited researcher is genuinely looking out for the future of their field, and, IMO, I think you can see that Dr Becky
But the bigger issue is that all she's saying is that there is a problem (which everyone in the field knows) but doesn't offer any solution.
Note for example the bit about how there are many possible choices for what thing to test next, but only a finite amount of resources to do the tests which makes how one chooses what to try next a very important factor.
What modification does she propose to ensure it is done better? None! She just says "do it better", possibly thinking that is helpful advice?
So in summary these days Hossenfelder is being _exactly_ as helpful as the college that rolls in to your office, and, while filming for tiktok, glances at your screen and tells you to fix that stubborn segfault you have been struggling to debug for the last three hours.
The solution is to stop pretending there's a problem to solve when there isn't. That's literally what she's saying.
The obvious corollary is, "work on real problems instead of pseudo problems and stop trying to take funding away from people working on real problems".
It seems perfectly obvious that we've passed the point of diminishing returns and it's time to focus on other things until we have a compelling reason to revisit this.
Who decides about the money?
I would give every scientist a yearly budget to distribute to Research Organisations / Research Projects. Let's try democracy instead of oligarchy (and maybe ending up in populism or anarchy).
Your claim that this advantage exists is based on an assumption that you've accurately evaluated the likelihood that the people who were rejected would not have been able to do the research. I don't think you have reliable data to draw such a conclusion. As such, I don't accept this claim to advantage.
However, I do agree that some plausibility metric relating the funding requested to the difficulty of the proposed research would be valuable to weed out overly ambitious projects. Moonshot programs can then rely on the lottery.
Coincidentally just came across this thread which discusses exactly how much of a fiction this is:
https://twitter.com/ThomasVanRiet2/status/162540854754145894...
This happens to anyone who goes into a highly specialized, close-knit academic field; has a private disagreement with their field; and subsequently goes public.