Despite the more upbeat spin, I think the message from Arkani-Hamed is much the same as from Sabine Hossenfelder's "nightmare" post (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197).
Both of them are saying its time to question pre-conceived notions of how to extend the Standard model. And I think both of them are excited about it.
Rightly so. People are unhappy about the Standard Model because it is insufficiently simple and symmetrical. But 20 orders of magnitude lie between our experiments and the Planck scale, there's probably six levels of symmetry-braking, mess-making emergence between us and the real fundamentals.
Yup! Always good to remember that the hydrogen atom is "only" about 10 orders of magnitude smaller than us meter-scale objects, and what's going on with atoms took a long time to figure out.
And that is assuming that the high-energy limit is the fundamental scale. This is plausible, but by no means necessary. Maybe the truly fundamental scale is at an intermediate energy - and if you go past this to ever higher energies, you get more and more emergent artifacts, just like you get at lower energies.
We'll probably have to part with some basic assumption (like the one above) if we want to make further progress in fundamental physics.
Some theorists agree. Talk of disappointment is “crazy talk,” Arkani-Hamed said. “It’s actually nature! We’re learning the answer! These 6,000 people are busting their butts and you’re pouting like a little kid because you didn’t get the lollipop you wanted?”
Nima Arkani-Hamed is an amazing speaker, and if you're interested in modern physics I highly recommend watching his talks. A great place to start is his 5 part Messenger lecture series. It starts with the discovery of quantum mechanics, and the last 3 talks all cover different frontiers of fundamental physics today.
I second this recommendation. "Particle Fever" piqued my curiosity, but watching this series blew my mind. As a non-religious person, the content of the series is about as close as to religion as I will ever find. And as a sports fan, I now have the same anticipation waiting for LHC findings that I do for big games.
Arkani-Hamed has a knack for making things understandable without "pop-sciencing" them, a flair for the dramatic to make them exciting, and a serious background to validate his understanding.
I'm sure he's not for everyone (I'm guessing that physicists that already know the subjects may find him annoying) but for me, the guy is amazing.
i actually find him unlistenable. he says "uh" every two words and has a very choppy way of speaking. he caries a certain amount of arrogance in his speaking as well. it is authorative but too much so.
I won't comment on the arrogance, but trust me, many scientists have verbal tics or habits that are distracting, including me. We aren't the best at public speaking, we are the best at science.
"Particle Fever" (on Netflix) featured scientists threatening to quit if the results weren't the ones that they wanted: possibly one of least scientific perspectives that I have ever witnessed. Science was supposed to be about the wonder of nature, not about being right. I'm extremely happy that science might start moving in that direction again.
Science may be about the wonder of nature, but having your career's work (and previously respected theory) disproved probably isn't an easy pill to swallow.
I can see how it's a hard pill to swallow, I just can't bring myself to sympathize. Of all the ways that the universe can possibly operate, we now know that it could be one less way. A life's work working on an incredibly beautiful theory is something to be proud of. Had less competent work been done, this failure might not have been taken seriously.
I would be unbelievably excited about what the future holds. The goals of science cannot hang on how people feel about their careers.
Precisely! And I imagine the scientific parts of them do.
But as someone with family formerly in university faculty tenure-track (circa-90s), the put-food-on-the-table part of your employment is tied up in politics. Being on the bubble for a tenure position you've worked 6-10 years towards? I would hope the department committee would be proud of my incredibly beautiful but disproved theory...
Nice quote, although like Smolin, and the thoughts expressed in the backreaction.com article [1], I am skeptical of the manner in which physics is being carried out with a potential disregard for the scientific method - lack of experimental evidence - in string theory, and surprisingly in particle physics too.
Funding, and self-motivating research also has proven to be detrimental to research in the social sciences of late, but that seems to be with misapplication of statistical principles, and insufficient peer review, but a whole lot of citations.
This forms the basis of what's wrong with scientific funding imo. Saying that it's ok to be disappointed because they did not 'discover' is like equating science to a sport and winning a medal- that analogy is fundamentally wrong.
Performing scientific experiments is not about winning first place, it's about creating abstractions/ models in order to achieve deeper insight. As such failing to find that your model is wrong is not like loosing a race. Ex: a bunch of fantastic physics was discovered and described with Newtonian mechanics , though inherently that model is flawed, it took a while to realize it.
"Think of it as an experiment to confirm or deny the standard model. So far it is confirming it."
I understand that very well.
But most of the Standard Model was well confirmed.
Really what we got was confirmation of Higgs.
The 'non confirmation' of a bunch of interesting theories is not a very big win.
But don't forget the politics of it all: this is bordering on a 'big lose'.
They spent 24 Billion and really didn't get much out of it. There was a lot of hope, maybe even promise, and really - we got the 'lowest outcome' possible.
Ask yourself: would we have spent 24 Billion to 'confirm Higgs'?
Anyhow - I'm glad it was done, and if it were up to me I'd have spent it, knowing the outcome, but the optics of this are bad.
Ask yourself: would we have spent 24 Billion to 'confirm Higgs'?
Yes. The Higgs field/boson is a fundamental feature of our best theory at the quantum scale and we needed to know whether we are right. Now we have another crucial bound for the theory that will supplant the standard model except now we can waste less time and money with theories that can't explain our results.
We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a large metal can flying at an altitude of 400km essentially to do microgravity research; I think we can afford to spend a tenth of that on a particle accelerator to probe the frontier of high energy physics.
"We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a large metal can flying at an altitude of 400km essentially to do microgravity research;"
This is not true. The space program has countless research opportunities, direct and indirect, with the underlying endeavour of objective of putting people on other planets, which is a pretty big opportunity in of itself.
I'm not sure paying $24 Billion to prove Higgs was worth it. I suggest maybe there were other, much less expensive ways to do that, were we to know up front that was the objective.
It's hard to say how much 'disproving a bunch of theories' is worth.
I suggest that much of theoretical physics is total rubbish speculation, which in some ways is 'ok', but it'd be nice to see some progress. If you add in String Theory to the pile ... it looks really bad for modern theoretical physics. Not much has happened in a very long time ... it seems there have been countless PhD's minted in fiction. Not good.
This is not true. The space program has countless research opportunities, direct and indirect, with the underlying endeavour of objective of putting people on other planets, which is a pretty big opportunity in of itself.
I'm not talking about the space program, I'm talking about the ISS. What, exactly, are those direct and indirect opportunities? Looking at NASA's own PR material, it boils down to effects of deep space on humans (microgravity and radiation), effects of microgravity on biotechnology, environmental monitoring (which can be done cheaper with satellites), and .... effects of microgravity on everything else. I'm not saying it's not worth it as a human endeavor, but let's not kid ourselves: it was an insanely expensive project just like the LHC that doesn't really seem to have resulted in much.
Imagine if you spent your whole life supporting some complex idea that is likely now to be BS. And you spread it.
I'm interested in the psychological aspects of identity.
I suggest a lot of them have not choice but to continue on believing their mythology. Their sense of self depends on it, and surely their funding does. And getting funding depends on strong sense of self.
Isn't it amazing that despite their good intentions, that so many of them are hustlers and shysters? I'm not making a direct moral comparison, but a pragmatic one ...
It would be nice to have some experiments that put String Theory to bed as well, though sadly, these are not even conceivable! The String Theorists careers are protected by the fact their theory cannot be unproven :)
This is one of the reasons why I'm in favor of basic income. People who get degrees in mathematics or physics can do their work uninhibited by the politics of getting funding.
This should send a strong message to the scientists who are more passionate about elegant and beauty of mathematics and think that nature is written in mathematics and using mathematics only they can figure out natures secret. I know this has worked couple of times in past where a mathematical theory predicted existence of some entity or phenomena and then it was found to be true through experiments BUT that doesn't mean this trick will always work coz we try to understand nature using the tool of mathematics and nature doesn't give a crap about what we use to understand it.
My understanding is that math doesn't predict anything. What actually happens is that a few hundred PhD candidates every year try and extrapolate from current data to viable new models - of which there are many.
Once in a while someone gets lucky and makes a guess that happens to match experimental reality. But it's more like a lottery than a demonstration of the predictive power of maths. They get a career and possibly a Nobel prize, and all the many, many people who made equally plausible predictions that happened not to match experimental reality are quietly forgotten.
Game changers like Einstein and Newton turn up occasionally, but they're very rare. We're desperately in need of one now, but the current academic system would probably exclude someone like Einstein. ("Works in a patent office" won't get you into Nature.)
The problem now is it's getting harder and more expensive to test new possibilities. The Standard Model is obviously incomplete, SUSY doesn't seem to be working out, there are a lot of loose ends, but it's hard to sell funding bodies on bigger accelerator designs if there's no serious prospect of finding new stuff.
Great examples you got, because those two did very little of the "here's a theory, let's see what it can explain" the GP is taking about, and focused basically on "here's some weird data, let's get a theory for explaining it".
I am not against mathematics. It is the most powerful representation tool mankind has ever developed. What I feel weird about is that idea that we can come up with few simple and so called fundamental equations that can explain all of the universe. I think this idea is more like the axioms idea in mathematics i.e a set of basic truths from which every other possible truth can be discovered through inference. It feels like getting infatuated with a tool rather than focusing on the problems.
Maxwell's equations can be written as one equation with geometric algebra, □A =J/(c є0) If the math comes out ugly we can just macro our way to prettier math and stick complicated things behind simple looking symbols. I don't think this is a predisposition in the initial search as much as aesthetics on making the form of work pleasant regardless of what you start with. But then, maybe it's even more than aesthetics, truth and reality seem to have an (unreasonable?) simplicity to them, so maybe there's objective beauty in simplicity; I don't see the point in intentionally seeking out ugly formalisms for ugly's sake especially when we've had so much success with simple and elegant.
I think it's mostly a matter of Occam's Razor, Kolmogorov Complexity, the pigeonhole principle, etc.
There aren't many clean, simple equations (relatively speaking), compared to long, ugly ones.
Each time you make an equation longer, you have a huge variety of choices for the new bits; if we take "ugliness" to include things like asymmetry, arbitrary constants, lack of relationships between the parts, etc. then there are more ugly equations than beautiful ones.
It's more practical to look for simple, pretty laws since there are far fewer of them to try. Once we've exhausted them, we can try making things a little uglier, and seeing if that works; and keep incrementing.
After all, if you have enough epicycles you can explain any motion you like (since you're basically taking a fourier transform)
Fermilab was not shut down in 2011. I believe the tevatron was shutdown in 2011, but research on site continues, and the "Proton Improvement Plan", which involves upgrading the accelerators, started in 2011 and is ongoing.
In terms common on this site, Fermilab "pivoted" around 2011 to neutrino physics. After they got most of the possible results out of the Tevatron project, they switched their focus to something with a better cost to discovery ratio.
Most of the exotic particles created in colliders are unstable and decay quite quickly into lighter particles, so they're not good candidates for dark matter. Which lighter particles are produced depends on properties of the initial particle, since quantities like electric charge are conserved (the initial particle's charge must equal the sum of the decay products' charges).
Supersymmetry predicts a new form of conserved charge called "R" charge; since none of the light particles we've seen has R charge, any heavy particles with R charge cannot decay into them, and hence some of those particles (the lightest ones) will be stable.
If such heavy, stable particles were common, they could make up the dark matter we've inferred exists.
The problem is, each time a collider fails to find any of these heavy supersymmetry particles, the theory gets shuffled around and a new prediction is made with a higher mass. The mass range investigated by the LHC is now so large that it's difficult to shuffle around supersymmetry any more, and it might be time to consider it falsified.
Is there a widely agreed limit on how heavy dark matter particles must be?
I remember some Starts with a Bang post that said they must me "warm" particles, and heavy ones couldn't accumulate enough energy for matching. But I've never seen anybody else alk about it.
This is not a dupe. This article has more information than the other. Both discuss the same topic. I'd classify them as "Related discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197 (307 points, 3 days ago, 199 comments)"
Does this Quanta article contain significant new information to be discussed? If so we'll unmark this one as a dupe and restore it. Otherwise it meets the criteria for a dupe which is: a specific topic having had significant discussion within the last year.
I think that the difference between the article is very big.
The quanta article discuss what they have saw in December and what they have saw now, in the section "The Bump that went away". Also that and why they expect to see a new particles due to supersimetry in the section "Missing Pieces".
The Backreaction article discuss more about the influence of the lack of a experimental evidence of an unknown particle in the physics community, i.e. that without an experimental guidance is difficult to choose between the different theoretical approach, and some ideas for future research.
Both of them are saying its time to question pre-conceived notions of how to extend the Standard model. And I think both of them are excited about it.
Rightly so. People are unhappy about the Standard Model because it is insufficiently simple and symmetrical. But 20 orders of magnitude lie between our experiments and the Planck scale, there's probably six levels of symmetry-braking, mess-making emergence between us and the real fundamentals.