LHC experiments see first evidence of a rare Higgs boson decay | Hacker News Reader

LHC experiments see first evidence of a rare Higgs boson decay

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164 pointsbluish2994 comments

I'm an airchair physics person so I'm curious how close my layman understanding of this matches reality... So Higgs particles don't exist under normal conditions, they're just proof that the Higgs field exists and explains how mass exists. When the energy that's perturbing the Higgs field dissipates it does so through other fields perturbing them to create one of their particles and so on.

Sci-Fi or Fact or somewhere in the middle?

Experimental particle physicist here. What you say about Higgs particles "they don't exist under normal condition" is loosely true of all particles in nature in the sense that a particle is nothing but a "quantum" of a "field". Fields pervade all physical space and can vary in time. Particles (or quanta) simply represent a local state of observable things. A field can only do certain things to certain physical states and at a probabilistic level. Notice that fields do things even with the vacuum which is just another state from which particles can be "extracted".

The peculiar experimental challenge about the Higgs field is that it can extract its quanta from certain physical states (certain initial conditions in a particle physics reaction) only at very high energy and with low probability, but that is true also for other particles. Its truly peculiar thing is that the presence of the Higgs field, in addition to the fields of all other particles that we know of, explains why quanta in general have a mass (although this is not clear for neutrinos) through a mechanism where the Higgs field interacts with the quanta of other particles.

Can you think of quanta in a field as like knots in a string?

There's limits to analogies but take a look at a soliton in a wave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=909o_kbCdFg

Solitons are self re-enforcing wave packets in some medium, where the dispersive effects get canceled out. I like to think of field quanta as being similar at a very high handwavy level. Of course the trick with quanta is only certain energy levels are allowed.

I'm not a physics person at all, just wanted to say that's a super cool video and a really neat explanation. Thanks!

Err I meant in a pool but can't edit now doh.

Not really.

A field's normal vibration is like plucking a guitar string. A quantum is like shaking the end of a rope and seeing a ripple fly down it.

A more developed version of this metaphor showed up on Youtube this very week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExhSqq1jysg

(well, the guitar string part isn't very apt. It's more like: two objects are flying connected by a stretchy rope)

The usual metaphor is springs in a mattress:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/08/20/qft/

That excellent writeup reinforced something I've become convinced of: decades of "shut up and calculate" have created gobs of contradictory analogies and false intuitions that pedagogy hasn't caught up to. When I hear:

"In the jargon of field theory, physicists often say that “virtual particles” can briefly and spontaneously appear from the vacuum and then disappear again, even when no one has put enough energy into the field to create a real particle. But what they really mean is that the vacuum itself has random and indelible fluctuations, and sometimes their influence can be felt by the way they kick around real particles."

I can't help but immediately question every jargon word I see, especially "random", "particle" and "wave".

> decades of "shut up and calculate" have created gobs of contradictory analogies and false intuitions that pedagogy hasn't caught up to.

Think its the other way around really.

Decades of contradictory analogies and false intuitions later and "shut up and calculate" is still the best way to understand it.

Metaphors have limited applicability. The applicability of metaphors in quantum field theory that the public is ever exposed to is pretty mich limited to sounding cool and inspiring some awe in the face of all the mistery and complexity.

Im my experience, all terms in physics (like "particle", "wave", "energy") are highly context dependent and most PhDs could spend hours debating what is actually meant in a given case. Such discussions almost never lead to publishable results and are thus considered a waste of time, or leasure at best.

Usually, you just "shut up and calculate". Meanwhile, the calculations are motivated by "intuition", which involves combining known or unknown reasonable approximations with a basic theory. This process is never explained systematically and rather the hope is that it will be absorbed via osmosis by the brighter students.

It turns out, you actually don't need to have a coherent concept of "what a particle is" to perform particle physics experiments and evaluate the data. Sometimes, when pressed, operational definitions can be offered. For example, I've heard a professor say: "a particle is defined as a bump at a given energy in this plot". I'm not sure how ironic that was supposed to sound...

In a certain sense I've become pessimistic about the possibility of ever assigning a meaningful ontology to objects at that scale. We have models which give results. Some ways of calculating scattering amplitudes make reference to virtual particles at all. I've begun to think that there is no way to understand physics _except_ to become acquainted with the mathematics of it. The analogies are pointless.

I usually think of the Higgs mechanism (that gives mass) like the surface tension on a pond, whereas the Higgs boson would be ripples. It's not perfect (like any analogy).

Also a countertop swivel chair physicist, my understanding is that Higgs bosons are recruited as virtual particles all the time to bestow other particles their mass. So everything is able to consort with the Higgs field at any time without expending energy, because those are only background virtual Higgs, not full fledged particles with a sense of self

You can also create bona-fide Higgs particles, but you have to put in a lot of energy to do it (like the LHC does), and it will proceed to immediately disintegrate into lighter particles, which is what the LHC is observing in detectors

I think that when particles use the Higgs field to get their mass, the virtual particle is only a temporary ripple living on borrowed time, so it can interract with other fields but has to go back to nothing when the interaction is over, like a local variable in a function.

When you have a real Higgs, if it decays into say two photons, then yes you have a wave in the Higgs field dissipating, while equal energy/charge/<other conserved quantities...> waves replace it in other fields

(IANAP. This does not constitute physical advice.)

> Also a countertop swivel chair physicist, my understanding is that Higgs bosons are recruited as virtual particles all the time to bestow other particles their mass.

Physicist here: nope. The coupling between the Higgs field and other particle fields is what creates the phenomona of mass. The Higgs particle is just an excitation of that field.

Virtual particles aren't "real" in the same way that the first order Taylor series of sin(x) being x doesn't max x a real sinusoidal wave. All it does is let you make your calculations "close enough" for your accepted definition of "close enough."

Thanks! So if I understood you right, whatever coupling does to the fields, it's something doesn't involve virtual Higgs, is that right?

Is it fair to say that both virtual Higgs and 'real' Higgs are two types of excitations of that field, except that virtual particles can't be directly observed?

I find the name virtual particles interesting, since they don't seem to be exactly the same kind of ripples as particles, and physicists frequently seem to disagree on how 'real' they are as a matter of interpretation

Virtual particles are calculational tools. They aren’t concrete things the way you’re proposing them to be. They are closer in character to “completing the square” than they are a an actual physical object.

They are great for trying to help human brains make concrete the details of the process. But again they are just artifacts of the way we do our computations.

And the Higgs field is a particularly great example of this. If you shift a sin wave 90 degrees it becomes a cosine wave. If you don’t expand about the lowest energy of the Mexican top hot potential for the Higgs field it creates an entirely different description of the physical phenomena and virtual particles.

> Mexican top hot potential

To save someone else the trouble, no, that wasn't an autocorrect mistake on "Mexican."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_symmetry_breakin...

It's not the "Mexican" bit that looks like a typo; it's the "top hot" part that jumps out.

It's just "Mexican hat" potential. The `hot` was a phone keyboard typo and writing `top` was just a mental typo.

Aren't both virtual and non-virtual particles non-real - in the sense that they are both excitation/waves of/in a field. With virtual particles just being smaller waves.

Another physicist here.

> Also a countertop swivel chair physicist, my understanding is that Higgs bosons are recruited as virtual particles all the time to bestow other particles their mass.

I think you're mixing up two subtle ideas. One is virtual particles, which as lanza explains, is really a name for a step in a calculation. The other is the idea of vacuum expectation value, or vev.

As another commenter mentioned, a particle is (loosely) like a ripple on a pond. The vev tells you how much water there is, even at rest. With a simple harmonic potential (parabola shaped) the vev is the x-coordinate of the turning point (ie. the minimal energy), which we usually put at zero because of symmetry. However, the 'Mexican hat potential' respects the symmetry but has minima that aren't located at zero radius. The Higgs potential is like that, and so the Higgs has a nonzero vev.

The way the Higgs interacts with fermions implies that the masses are proportional to the Higgs vev.

Rather than it being virtual Higgses, it's more like the particles are swimming in a viscous liquid. Sleek particles aren't bothered and are hardly slowed down at all (these particles have not much mass) and some are not hydrodynamic and have a hard time.

The analogy is imperfect: the viscous soup doesn't provide friction in the way that water does (you can't give your momentum to the vacuum).

As someone else is eluding to, the concept of a virtual particle is kind of a calculation tool, but then so is all of quantum field theory. What you say sounds pretty alright to me: about as close as you can get without just following the math directly.

> So Higgs particles don't exist under normal conditions

Eh. That's like saying fully constructed lego kits don't exist under normal conditions. Yea sure, my normal life conditions don't entail me having just finished putting together a lego rollercoaster. But calling that "normal conditions" is a weird way of describing the situation.

I'm being kinda nitpicky, but as a physicist who understands the phenomena I'd just definitely never say "under normal conditions" here. The LHC just provides more potential interactions in a highly regular way and thus more opportunities to measure it.

The Higgs boson is just heavy and unstable and less probabilistic to be created via most particle interactions.

> So Higgs particles don't exist under normal conditions, they're just proof that the Higgs field exists and explains how mass exists

This Higgs particle doesn't explain how mass exists. The construction that explains how mass works predicts that a Higgs boson exists.

Arm chair physicist however I know how this data is analyzed, so I have something to say:

I think there's a better and perhaps clearer to understand interpretation here: All particles have an invariant mass, inherent to the particle itself, and a momentum, which is, roughly related to velocity in matter and frequency in photons (but not quite!). These together determine the energy a particle has.

Some particles are long-lived and some are short-lived. The Higgs boson is short-lived. In these collisions, it really does exist for a period of time, however, it decays to smaller particles with an total energy that equals the energy of the original Higgs boson. The ATLAS detector detects these long-lived stable particles.

The phenomenon you are attempting to explain is particle decay (why the Higgs boson decays into other particles). I never heard of inter-field energy dissipation as a cause for particle decay, but it seems really interesting. However, I don't really understand what "inter-field energy dissipation" means. They are all very theoretical terms to me.

I am comfortable with hand-waving it as "particles decay because they decay, because that's the way the laws of physics work, and it's allowed because the resulting state is of higher entropy". It seems like it is a phenomenon that is very hard to explain.

This correlates very well with what Matt Strassler says:

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/the-higgs-p...

I'm another armchair physics layman, I'd thought it was something like a "virtual particle" which gets created and destroyed so quickly in the process of performing its very important duties (that is, making sure things act as if they have mass).

The hard part being to isolate it and get it in an "observable" condition where you can actually see it.

I’m an arm chair “arm chair physics layman”, it seems like this will help with defining the meaning of the universe, and will await till this observation is useful enough to have real physicists explain this in layman terms

IIRC the Higgs mechanism only explains some mass, and most of the rest is binding energy at the quark level.

Direct link to papers:

https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/CONFNOTES/ATL...

https://weblib.cern.ch/record/2859713/files/HIG-23-002-pas.p...

Cool research, but it's only 3.4σ so far and this decay is already predicted by the Standard Model.

I thought the whole point of the LHC was to confirm the Standard Model.

That's the new, after-the-fact justification for the project after the original goal, finding new physics, didn't happen.

But to be fair, there was no way to new whether new physics would be found without looking.

I mean at this point in physics everything new has to be a variation of the classical rabbit/duck picture: Essentially the same data points but a different way to explain them that doesn't invalidate the existing findings.

This means we can use any knowledge we can find and we definitly should continue testing promising alternatives — either we find something or we reduce the size of the white spots on the map — which makes exploring them easier.

The point of an experiment is to find out what you don't already know. The LHC has previously shown low-sigma hints of non-SM physics but nothing has panned out yet. At any rate, the Standard Model has clear gaps in it (quantum gravity, dark matter, etc) so the hope is that the LHC will show hints towards filling them--although it's a long shot. 27 kilometers long, ha!

>The point of an experiment is to find out what you don't already know.

Not necessarily true in physics. Many experiments are done to confirm a theory or to measure a known value more precisely. Both of these intentions are highly valuable.

We've done many experiments to confirm general relativity for example. But obviously, people doing the experiments would like to see a different result than the prediction and win a Nobel Prize.

Among humanity's longest shots. Not quite Voyager or golf on the moon, but formidable.

While that is true afaik a lot of scientist were hoping to find something that is not predicted by the standard model to get new ideas. I don't think that has planned out yet

A well-designed experiment is designed to falsify the conventional theory in favor of a proposed theory.

An experiment designed to confirm is not valuable at all. I can drop an apple over and over again and confirm that it obeys F = mg every time, and learn nothing of value.

Let me restate my point in a more nuanced fashion after also talking to someone irl.

Theories are often parameterized by experimental constants. For the Standard Model, among many others, the mass of the proton is one such parameter. I assert that each different value of the parameter yields a different theory. The Standard Model is an infinite collection of theories parametrized by the proton mass and other parameters.

An experiment that measures the proton mass will falsify all theories in this collection that are outside the value + error bars of the measured proton mass.

There is always falsification in a valuable experiment. If you do another experiment that falsifies already discarded values of the proton mass, people will not pay attention - unless of course, you used some different techniques in your experiment which then increases our belief in the previous falsification.

I think it is somewhat nuanced. In principle you are right, I would even go so far as to say: You cannot confirm a theory with experiment. But every test build to "confirm" a theory, is always also an experiment to falsify every other theory with a different prediction.

Look at the Higgs discovery. The experiments were clearly designed to measure the Higgs and confirm the prediction. But you can state it as "they were designed to falsify the (at that time SM) theory that there is no Higgs".

What is important to remember that a) you cannot absolutely confirm a theory (as in: rule out all others) with a finite series of experiments b) correlation doesn't mean causation c) causation doesn't mean correlation.

That's the same experiment over and over again. Presumably we have done many many different experiments to confirm gravity.

Again, the experiment or observation is designed to falsify a theory, not confirm it. This is true of gravitational experiments as well.

Yes, we have done many experiments or observations to try and falsify various theories of gravity. For instance, Newton's gravity was falsified (as an adequate model of the solar system's dynamics) when we observed that the precision of mercury was not what was predicted by the theory. General relativity predicted that gravitational waves exist, and we observed them, which meant that we were unable to falsify GR using that observation.

But people keep trying. There are now proposals using both quantum mechanics and gravity whereby it is predicted that we can entangle gravity. Experiments are not that far into the future, which will be used to falsify these joint theories of quantum mechanics and gravity.

Oh, I guess I think of "designed to falsify" and "intended to confirm" as two distinct goals.

Why should I, as a taxpayer, want to my government to subsidize this research? I haven’t seen anything useful come out of high energy particle physics in decades.

This is an honest question, not a troll.

I see lots of spin-off technologies coming out of other “big science”. Consider space programs. We see materials technology coming out of space programs. I can even see the PR value in the space program as it appeals to our imagination and sense of exploration. I can even buy into the “time to make sure all our eggs aren’t in one basket” theory of Musk et al for colonization of other planets. And I love that companies are commercializing it rather than leaving it just to governments.

But as a layperson, high energy particle physics seems like (figuratively and literally) pouring money down large holes to satisfy the curiosity of a few researchers. While it’s mildly interesting it’s practically inscrutable and very hard to connect to anything that normal people care about.

Fundamental research has a funny way of producing results in other areas. To name just one example, the World Wide Web was developed at CERN.

The other thing is that you never know exactly what will and won’t have applications later on. General relativity seemed pretty useless until we had GPS; number theory had no practical use for thousands of years until asymmetric cryptography was invented. Even within particle physics, neutron scattering is now a fundamental part of material science, and I’m sure there are many more similar examples. I can’t tell you exactly what CERN’s current research will result in, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it eventually finds a use. (Or has already, in fact.)

I hate the “web was invented at CERN” trope. Yes, it’s trivially true, but TBL was standing on the shoulders of giants. When HTTP came along, we already had gopher. We already had HyperCard. SGML was already a thing. We already had FTP. Lots of us already had shell internet accounts; many more had CompuServe or AOL.

The web was inevitable at that point in time, and would have taken a similar shape and happened in very short order regardless of whether CERN ever existed.

With the exception of HyperCard, all those other “giant” technologies were also developed at research institutions whose purpose has been questioned many times: UMN (Gopher), IBM Research (SGML), MIT (FTP).

That the Web was “inevitable” doesn’t mean that it would have happened without public research support. The public, open web exists b/c of academics and industrial researchers hacking on a weird global network infrastructure funded primarily by governments.

The same thing is happening now with AI: academic and industrial research labs have been incubating these ideas for decades, and you can paint OpenAI as irrelevant (Google invented the Transformer architecture!) but someone makes these things happen each time they happen.

Sure, we could have had the web without CERN — but would we have had the web without any of these research institutions?

You’re shifting the goal posts though. The question wasn’t about funding research, it was specifically about high energy physics.

Am I, though? The grantparent post was about fundamental research producing results in other areas, and then the parent post complained that the invention of the Web would have happened with or without CERN.

I don't think anyone is really arguing that we needed a high energy physics lab in order to invent the Web -- and I'm pointing out that those other inventions that didn't happen at CERN also happened in fundamental research labs of various types.

That can be said about almost every discovery or achievement in history of humanity. And exactly this is why humanity always in one form or another keep doing research. And people who do something get the credit. No one is saying that relativity was going to be formulated if Einstein did no do it (Actually people were close and of course he got some help).

A couple of centuries ago, Newton summarize all this when we he said that he did all that because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. This is true today like it was in 17th century.

That’s like saying the Renaissance was nothing special because they were just building on the work of other people. Congratulations, you just described the entirety of human invention. Someone had to be first and there is a reason it was CERN. When you throw money at brilliant people sometimes they come up with brilliant solutions to mundane problems.

The web wasn’t a significant jump though over HyperCard, gopher, etc. It was nothing like the leap forward that TCP/IP brought us.

Put another way, the internet today is completely usable for transferring data across the globe in an instant without Tim’s contribution.

The web is not what makes the internet good.

If the web is used as a justification for cern, cern is a huge waste of money because that’s a trivial invention.

There's a page for that!

https://science.osti.gov/hep/Benefits-of-HEP

tl;dr - HEP particle detectors and medical imaging detectors share a lot of technology.

I'm happy that part of the taxes I pay go to LHC. I whish a larger part of it would go there (or to any science really).

In percentages whatever taxes go to science in general in the EU is tiny (compared to the US or China). What goes to LHC is pretty much insignificant on an EU taxes scale.

Sabine Hossenfelder, who is a theoretical physicist and science communicator seems to share your opinion. She is not very kind to the current state of research in particle physics.

Not really because it doesn't have any application, but because particle physicists don't really know what they are looking for, and take up funding from more promising branches of physics.

Edit: For clarification, I have no opinion on that matter. I think her argument is interesting, that's why I mentioned it here, but this is not an endorsement. I don't have the qualifications to make an endorsement anyways.

Yes, and most of the physics world is very tired of her grandstanding contrarianism every single time something interesting happens in particle physics, but because people here are also highly biased towards reflexive contrarianism these posts always show up. It's extremely tiresome.

If Hossenfelder wants to advance a different research agenda she is free to do so. If enough other people agree she will get her funding. She doesn't need to continuously trash other people's genuine work where the bulk of the field does in fact think this is worthwhile, and her characterizations of particle physicists as villains wasting money is past my line.

She's a great educator outside of that behavior however.

To be honest, I indeed find that her attitude towards particle physicists goes beyond her usual sarcasm.

Being cold and sarcastic is her style, no one is spared, including herself. You may or may not like this style, I personally like it, but for particle physics it borders on hate. I mean, her arguments have merit, that's why I posted that but it is true that it makes me a bit uncomfortable. Personal reasons? Conflict of interest? Something irrational? Or maybe particle physics are indeed villains, I mean, the LHC makes a pretty good not-so-secret lair :)

> "You may or may not like this style, I personally like it, but for particle physics it borders on hate. I mean, her arguments have merit, that's why I posted that but it is true that it makes me a bit uncomfortable."

My understanding is that she is a particle physicist who wants to understand the contradiction between gravity and quantum mechanics, and I feel like you are mixing passion vs. hate. Or you only see the hate and not the passion. She hates that they are wasting so many decades and hundreds of billions of dollars because of stupid reasons like sunk cost fallacy or because of people putting bad faith arguments to continue dead end research paths. I feel like she hates it so much because she loves the science of it and wants to see it resolved, and that she might not get to see it because they are wasting so much time and money. It's like the ones who hate the star wars sequels. Many people might be cold and sarcastic about them but the ones who truly hate them are the fans of star wars.

The problem is the vast majority of the physics world disagrees with her on the material points, so her allegations of bad faith and stupidity are themselves incredibly bad faith behavior.

> the vast majority of the physics world disagrees with her on the material points

Maybe it's true I don't know

> so her allegations of bad faith and stupidity are themselves incredibly bad faith behavior.

Even if the first thing is true, this other thing doesn't follow from it.

It's true, otherwise she would get the funding she demands. Grant money is, in most countries, but certainly Germany and the US, distributed based on ratings of other physicists. The fact that HEP continues to get funding is a reflection of the consensus in the field.

Incidentally, this is exactly what I've seen described as the strength of the fragmented US science funding strategy.

The US has the National Science Foundation, but that is only a portion of our basic science budget. Basically every government agency -- each branch of the military, the NIH, the DOE, the Department of Agriculture -- also funds science research independently, and for any given field there are six or twelve major funding agencies you could apply for a grant with.

And each of these funding agencies has different people evaluating and they are all appointed and operate independently, and appointed so far down the chain of command that it's hard to tie their appointment to a particular President or Congress.

This means that you occasionally get oddballs who will throw money at stupidly heterodox notions, but even when that happens they don't control all the funding for the agency, let alone any of the funding for any of the other agencies. And hey, sometimes some of the weird stuff they'll fund turns out to be interesting.

Hmm, for NP and I think also for HEP, it's essentially only two: NSF and DOE. That's not so different from Germany, where it's BMBF and DFG. That's at least for the main stream grants. There is little money from private foundations (Moore foundation for example).

She has the credentials of a reputable source and most of her claims seem to have some support. I've learned a lot from watching her.

But... I believe she's chasing money and popularity through leaning into the YouTube algorithm and social media strategies. Her video titles are clickbaity and much of her content injects elements of controversy - controversy drives conversation and sharing, gonna go viral! I think of her much like Michio Kaku, someone with vast knowledge but you can't take what they say completely at face value because they seem to be willing to mildly stretch the truth, speculate slightly irresponsibly, speak on subjects outside their area of expertise, and generally use a little poetic license in order to say something that captures the public's attention. To be fair to Michio Kaku he did suck me into reading popular theoretical physics and inspire me to read other sources like Sean Carroll and Leonard Susskind who tell it a bit straighter.

What irks me the most is that she left the usual way of discourse in science. Write papers (even pre-prints), cite your sources, so that the scientific community (many of whom don't want to have a youtube channel) can answer. But she is peddling her books and amplifies her opinion with youtube, which, without proper context, leaves people suspicious of the scientific community at large.

> she left the usual way of discourse in science

...

> cite your sources

Well, OK <https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/search_result?query=hossenfeld...>.

> (even pre-prints)

Well, OK <https://arxiv.org/a/hossenfelder_s_1.html> (a longer list, with two this year; imho there's decent qg phenomenology in there amid the foundations of physics stuff).

Lots of paper-writing paper-citing theoretical physicists have written pop-sci books they'd like you to buy (or at least read). Some even amplify their opinions with youtube, sometimes even "robustly". Many offer up opinions on matters in which they have little or even no expertise. (As an abrasive example I offer theoretical physicist, cosmologist, book-writer, podcast/vlogger and sex-pest Lawrence Krauss.)

I am fairly sure you know this, so I don't know why you single out Hossenfelder in particular. If it's because she's popular on HN, I'd rather it be her than a depressingly large number of comparable publicly visible physicists who happen to advocate more generous research funding strategies but who keep reminding colleagues, staff, students and other victims that they are awful human beings.

Please compare the topics of her papers with the topics of her videos, especially with those that stir the controversy. There are papers on these topics, but from what I see, at least 5 years old. But my point was not that the she doesn't write papers -- she is doing more, which is the problem, and the "more" is not only outreach (which is a good thing), but feels to me like polemic arguments against people in the field who are not of her opinion.

In this thread, I did at no point compare her to any other blogger. Please do not read this an endorsement of these others. I singled her out only in the sense that she was the topic of the thread. There are certainly worse people in the world.

> compare the topics of her papers with the topics of her videos

I did that but did not say so explicitly:

>> opinions on matters in which they have little or no expertise

especially when the opinions are delivered with excessive confidence and/or without nuance.

I take your point that some apparent

> stir the controversy

videos particularly in the last year <https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwgQsqtH9H5c4IXKj82g-...> at least support the notion that some of the point of her YouTube enterprise is to focus on in-the-news topics far from her own academic publication record. For those videos, I think "explain" is a poor choice of verb.

To me, polemic arguments against people in the field (and importantly doing physics sufficiently close to her own research area) who are not of her opinion on directly relevant matters is less annoying than commentary critical of physicists (let alone scientists in other fields) who I think are less adjacent to her expertise than she appears to believe they are, considering differences in choice of journals or even where in the arxiv category taxonomy authors' preprints are placed (underlining this, c.f. §§4.1 & 5.2 of her own 2018 preprint in physics.soc-ph <https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04647>; her own research in qg phenomenology is interdisciplinary (as are many of her forays away from that area) but not so broad as to include putting or even obviously considering preprints on bioRxiv, which was almost 5 years old at the time of that paper).

> I singled her out only in the sense she was the topic of the thread

Ok, I think that's fair.

However I don't think the implication that she no longer "write[s] papers (even pre-prints), [or] cite[s her] sources" is justified.

Sabine Hossenfelder is the worst science communicator ever.

That's overstating it, for example basically all university PR departments wildly distort local results in their attempts to hype them up. And especially in nutrition its a freaking wild west out there, so many completely contradictory results being put forward as certain every year, no way she's the worst.

You might find a specific section of science communication where she is worst, but the general competition is very fierce.

On the topic of spending big money on science - it would be so awesome if we built a huge observatory on the far side of the moon. I feel like we can do some really interesting radio astronomy there, or at least copy what JWST and Hubble does but with fewer constraints, being on a large, if unstable, physical body.

As far as tax money, basic science feels like a large but very slow and unpredictable ROI

Well, I think that trying to understand fundamental physics questions contains some value at large for society which is hard to quantify. But even if you don't believe in that, you could think of this research as buying an option on the case that one of these experiments does end up revealing something that's revolutionary.

It cost you (assuming an average taxpayer) less than 20 bucks and is the only way humanity will get at a specific kind of knowledge.

But more importantly you aren't subsidizing it, you are paying for it outright. Subsidizing would suggest that there is some other revenue stream, whereas this kind of research would simply not exist without taxpayer money.

You are subsidizing oil, you are subsidizing solar, you are subsidizing medical research and satellite launches and weapons research. You are not subsidizing fundamental research.

Deep science is "we don't know what we don't know" sort of thing.

Quantum computers?

Faster space travel?

Long distance communication?

Understanding deep space imaging?

Etc

Nuclear physicist here, but HEP and NP have large overlap in the non-physics output. Have you been to a doctor lately? Pretty much all imaging technology is HEP/NP based (except sonogram). Proton therapy. Heavy ion radiation therapy.

The answer is: We don't know.

We don't know what there, the only way to find out is to experiment.

This is true for all fundamental science - you don't know in advance that it's there, you have to just see what happens when you try things.

Our future technological improvement hinges on basic research. We can certainly iterate and improve technology, but the amount of improvement is always bound to hit a physical limit sooner or later. Doing basic research will actually move the physical limit.

I'm never truly sure about how to answer these questions. "Why go to space?" "Why try to visit Mars or Venus when we have so many problems at home?"

As the other posts have stated there are so many exciting discoveries that have led to new technologies, but I've had a handful of in person conversations about this. And those answers don't seem to resonate.

I get it though. Some of these seem so far off, many don't produce results, and money sinks especially if they're tax payer dollars. It's just not possible to 100% fund the winners - that's just not how discovery works.

You seem to have a very incorrect view of things. Probably biased to press-friendliness.

For an example, materials technology gets way more inputs from high-energy physics than from space programs.

High-energy is one of the very few fundamental frontiers we have to push for discovering new things. (And we are certain what we know is broken somehow.) So, IMO, it's really, really important. I'm firmly on the camp that is against investing in higher-energy accelerators right now, but from that to "high-energy is useless" there are light-years of distance.

Dude, the LHC is basically just European tax money, you wanna go after Fermilab for your taxes.

For a more HN flavour answer, look at all this shiny list: https://knowledgetransfer.web.cern.ch/entrepreneurship/curre...

Modern lithography, the technologies that allow us to build microchips, owes its existence to very advanced particle physics research. That alone is colossal, our having incredibly powerful computers in our pockets, desks and data centers wouldn't have happened without that research.

Because this sort of research was started by a stupid letter by a Physicist to the US president: work on nuclear fission now because ... probably a huge bomb can be made with this process.

That physicist was Leo Szilard ... and he was right. Not researching it at any point would probably have lead to the US ceasing to exist by now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szilard_lette...

Congress still puts huge amounts of cash into researching this. Because both potential outcomes: large-scale controlled energy production, and bombs, would have huge consequences in just about any aspect of our lives. Positive and negative.

Basic research always feels that way for many decades or even centuries.

How do you think we got to where we are today?

I suggest that you watch Particle Fever, a beautiful documentary about the LHC. If you have already seen it, watch it again with an open mind.

Fun fact: the Higgs boson is the only particle in the Standard Model that has inherent mass.

Practically by definition, no?

Reminded me of one of my favorite kurzgesagt videos, "Vacuum decay": https://youtu.be/ijFm6DxNVyI

I've once read that almost every electro-magnetic interaction involving a photon also involves a Z boson, but given that it's massive, it decays very quickly. Is this true?

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph... has some understandable math showing how this happens, more or less. Note that it's at the _end_ of a series called “Fields and Their Particles, With Math”, so you may want to skim it and then skip back closer to the beginning.

Aside: what is the shared url doing with 3 slashes?

https://www.interactions.org/press-release/lhc-experiments-s...

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