CERN Confirms Hints of Hypothetical Particle Have Disappeared (arstechnica.com) 205
John Timmer, writing for Ars Technica: Toward the end of last year, the people behind the Large Hadron Collider announced that they might have found signs of a new particle. Their evidence came from an analysis of the first high-energy data obtained after the LHC's two general-purpose detectors underwent an extensive upgrade. While the possible new particle didn't produce a signal that reached statistical significance, it did show up in both detectors, raising the hope that the LHC was finally on to some new physics. This week, those hopes have officially been dashed. Physicists used a conference to release their analysis of the flood of data that came out of this year's run. According to their data, the area of the apparent signal is filled by nothing but statistical noise. The search for new particles in data from the LHC starts with a calculation of the sorts of things we should expect to see at a given energy. The Standard Model, which describes particles and forces, can be used to make predictions of the frequency at which specific particles will pop out of collisions, as well as what those particles will decay into. So, for example, the Standard Model might indicate that two electrons should appear in five percent of the collisions that occur at a specific energy. Looking for new particles involves looking for deviations from those predictions.
Re:Must be hiding (Score:4, Funny)
You're right. And conveniently nobody has ever seen your brain before, so that can only mean one thing.
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Correct, and the reason they spent billions of dollars to find GP's brain and never did was because his brain was on the mushrooms the whole time. You see, there's no missing piece of the puzzle, just a found one that nobody understands. Just because money doesn't solve that doesn't mean the premise is bad.
Re: Must be hiding (Score:1)
This "science" you speak of sounds just like religion. Perhaps dark matter is God? They have some similarities, like you can't show me some if asked.
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Well just think about it: Gravity alone doesn't explain why galaxies, stars, and planets form. Gravity is a very weak force, and it's just too weak of a force for that to happen. A nebula would just forever remain a nebula if all it had was gravity. There's more going on here, we're just not sure what.
The religious take on it is a straight up answer of "Because god did it." The scientific take on it is "If we take existing mathematical models of physics, it looks like the missing variable could be explained
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The scientists that are still clinging to the standard gravitational model are no better than creationists.
Re:Must be hiding (Score:5, Interesting)
No, but seriously. Dark matter, dark energy (with the "dark" meaning that we somehow know it has to be there but we simply cannot find a way to detect it)... it could well mean that we're simply looking in the wrong direction.
I mean, think of Vulcan. The planet. No, not Star Trek. The hypothetical planet that we thought has to be inside the orbit of Mercury because something influenced Mercury's orbit. Something had to be there that caused Mercury to not orbit the sun the way it should. Today we know that relativity caused the error, but a hundred years ago, we didn't know this and the only logical thing we could think of was of course what we observed in the past: Errors in the orbits of planets led before to the discovery of other planets that influenced it, that way we found Neptune (and afaik Uranus was also found mostly because we noticed that Saturn isn't quite moving as it "should"). So the logical conclusion was that of course there had to be another planet inside the orbit of Mercury and the only reason we couldn't see it is of course that the sun is too close that we could detect it.
Turned out that we were wrong.
And, well, we've been looking really hard for that dark matter/energy now and ... well, nothing. Not even a hint that there might and could be something. Maybe we should at least start looking in other directions?
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Maybe we should at least start looking in other directions?
We've been looking in a multitude of different directions. There are whole research groups at universities dedicated to alternative gravity ideas, for example. So far, they've come up even less, as such theories involve some combination of being unable to match actual data, arbitrarily specific to only certain cases, or requiring a lot of arbitrary fitting of parameters lacking any known physical basis. The problem is that looking in a lot of directions isn't a magic bullet, as you could still be missing
Re:Must be hiding (Score:4, Insightful)
Prior to the Mercury controversy, Uranus was found to be moving in ways not described by Newton's theory of gravity. Again, there are two solutions: our description of gravity is wrong, or there is an unseen ("dark") mass pulling on Uranus. In this case, it was dark matter, namely the undiscovered Neptune.
Both modified gravity and dark matter have been solutions to past conflicts between theory and measurement. There's no need to assume there's some conspiracy suppressing this or that idea.
Also, sometimes it takes a long time between a theoretical proposal to explain a mystery and direct detection. The neutrino was hypothesized in 1930 in order to conserve energy and momentum in beta nuclear decays. It wasn't directly detected until 12 years later in 1942. It took 49 years between the first papers proposing the existence of the Higgs boson and its discovery at the LHC. All we can do is search everywhere and be patient.
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no balls, nothing to your name, etc. which is why you troll unidentifiably - you're a zero.
Hmm, are you describing yourself? As that description fits you perfectly.
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Wow, you are hilarious. As I have said numerous times before, I don't post AC.
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LOL, and I am sure you have a huge cock too, and have supermodels hitting on you all the time.
Grow up little man, your contributions weren't that great, and frankly, they were all plagiarized. As computers is a field that never stops moving forward, it is pretty sad that all you can do is look back at prior contributions you stole from other people's work. I hope one day you are able to come to terms with the waste that is your life.
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Why do you think that was me? What in the content looks like what I would say, and if I were to be saying it, why wouldn't I use my own registered account?
Should we add paranoia to the list of possible conditions you have?
I don't post AC, I see no reason to hide behind AC, I post as Coren22, and nothing else.
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APK, I have done so much more than you, it just makes you look pathetic. Just because I won't rise to the bait of telling you who I am, doesn't mean I have done nothing. I have no desire to be harassed by a psychopath like you, so no, I will not rise to your bait and reveal my identity.
Also, I most definitely have proven you wrong repeatedly, you even agreed to it once by removing one of you points about what makes hosts so awesome (LOL!).
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No one needs to impersonate you to make a fool out of you APK, so quit your idiotic third party posting. I don't post AC, as I never have needed to in order to make a fool out of you.
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Do you perhaps have reading issues? Perhaps you should try rereading the comment you are replying to, after all, every one of your answers is there.
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Cat got your eye APK? I'll answer again. NO. I will not give you the information that you don't need, and that you will only use for harassment. You already call me a mental defective...which I find HILARIOUS, because by your definition, everyone in the world is mentally defective.
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So, now you are resorting to acting like you are me APK? That is truly pathetic. Since I have repeatedly said I don't post as AC, it should be pretty obvious I wouldn't post AC and claim to be me. Poor pathetic APK, can't stand someone pointing out his flaws.
Good luck on the witch hunt, since I won't out myself, you will just have to try and try and try to figure out who I am.
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So, since you think 100% of humans are mentally defective in some way, you must think you are mentally defective as well.
You seem to be misunderstanding what Asperger's Syndrome is if you think it is a mental defect, everything I have read has indicated that the lack of social skills is more than offset by higher intelligence. But I guess since you seem to think you are an expert in everything, you must know more than me about it.
I expect you to post a link to a picture of your medical or psychiatric degre
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See, the thing about intelligence, is it means people can think ahead. I think ahead to when you figure out who I am, and see you pulling a gun on me because I won't back down, and because I dared to prove you wrong. I am smart enough to not desire people like you knowing who I am, which is why I don't offer up my work for you to see.
Since it doesn't matter one iota how much of an expert I am in the subject, your continued interest in my qualifications can only mean that you have murder on the mind.
As far
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Except, I have never impersonated you. Why do you assume that people posting as AC acting like you MUST be me?
You pointed it out, however I have seen no others point out anything of the type. Funny that you would confuse a signed message of your own trying to claim I made a post as you, and one of your third party posts.
I don't need to prove a damn thing to you. I will not out myself to a psychopath.
Funny how you get all caught up in your own logical inconsistencies, and somehow think you have outsmarted
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I am not in Baltimore. Perhaps you should reread the post you pulled that information from.
I will not out myself to a psychopath, I don't need to prove anything. You are the one asking for proof of every little thing, it won't happen, so get over it.
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You are funny.
I am making a point, what you have said does not contradict my point. APK hasn't yet destroyed me, so I can only assume you are APK as well, since he is the only one who ever thinks he destroys me.
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Uh huh. So then why do you feel he has destroyed me? He has yet to actually make a point against anything.
Funny that you think it makes me mentally disturbed though, as it is exactly the same behavior that APK did in accusing me of posting as an AC acting like him. So, you believe APK is mentally disturbed?
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More attacks, no responses to the actual criticism, and exactly the same style. Yup, another APK troll.
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You poor dear, you had to go back a month ago to find somewhere that I lost my temper with your act and insulted you, you poor poor dear.
If you can't handle being insulted, perhaps you should stop participating in the open internet. I hear there are some great kiddie areas of the Internet where people can't insult you.
APK, you attack constantly, if you can't take it back, it just shows that you don't belong here. Who is it that constantly calls me a mental defective? Who constantly insults my experience
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You can't handle the truth!
God, grow up little one, you haven't exposed a damn thing, and your constant attacks just prove you don't even have the capacity to. Just like this post, you can't even comprehend what I write, so you flip out and claim you have won yet again...despite not winning anything!
I hide behind a fake name, but at least I stand behind my name, you post as AC and act like third parties. You have no accountability to what you post, and you use other's posting history as some kind of attac
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So that means APK is losing right? Since he posts like 10 times to every one of my replies...cool, thanks for the update.
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You are so funny.
Yeah, I work at Burger King (which is how it is spelled and formatted), that's why I know more about computer networks than you apparently, and why I have been able to show you why your solution is terrible? I must be a severely overqualified fry cook.
At least I can type...and properly use a computer.
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So, how do you get around the massive performance hit of using hosts files vs DNS? When do you plan on shifting over to DNS...the 33 year old technology that was designed to replace hosts files? You know, the technology that uses intelligent branching tree algorithms instead of parsing the whole hosts file?
Perhaps you should really try to fix your shit before bitching about how bad I am at technology. You seem to think that shouting me down will suddenly make DNS never have been invented to fix the issue
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So in other words, rather than answer the question, you choose to go on a wild tangent? Good to see you can stay on subject.
Why would you be comparing hosts to a dnscache in the local OS? That isn't DNS, it is caching used for reducing lookups to the DNS server.
You also can't compare the "mass" of web pages, as they would be IDENTICAL. Adblock also removes ads, but I was specifically speaking to a DNS server with the same entries, which would therefore have the exact same web page loading "mass".
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I well know my ignorance in physics and astronomy, so I don't put too much stock in my own opinions, and neither should others. Still... The current speculation on dark matter remind me greatly of the incredibly complex equations and calculations some ancient scientists and mathematicians invented to explain orbital mechanics of a geocentric universe, with the earth as the center of the celestial heavens... and they almost got everything worked out that way. It wasn't until the heliocentric model was est
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Dark matter is a very simple theory. There's stuff that has mass that interacts in very limited ways, if at all, electromagnetically. No complicated calculations required. It explains assorted anomalies in gravitational lensing, galactic rotation speed curves, and matches up with some theory on the mass composition of the Universe. You could call it a place holder, in the sense that we don't know much of anything other than that it's matter and it's dark, but those are some important properties.
It's
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Heliocentricity didn't fix everything. Heliocentricity combined with elliptical orbits (thank you, Kepler!) did.
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And, well, we've been looking really hard for that dark matter/energy now and ... well, nothing. Not even a hint that there might and could be something. Maybe we should at least start looking in other directions?
Dude. You're about 30 or 40 years too late. All the other places are where they looked first. Just more stars we can't see. More non-luminous matter such as Jupiters scattered around to make up the mass. A modified theory of gravitation. Neutrinos flying around the universe. All the logical stuff that would be equivilent to another planet inside Mercury's orbit was looked at first and has been disproven. The idea of dark matter that only interacts via gravity is the other direction and currently the one tha
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People HAVE seen mine, I must be the most intelligent person around here.
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you think the moon landings were a hoax
I met my first real "moon landing was a hoax" guy not long ago and it blew my mind. This guy was by all accounts a normal person, but that little part of his brain where rationality gets suspended had metastasized into full-blown disbelief and there was NO way to convince this clod that the Moon landings really happened.
Explaining to him about the laser reflector left on the Moon that he himself could hit from his own backyard with a couple grand in off-the-shelf laser gear didn't do it. Photos didn't do it
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How can any dashslot reader still post retarded nonsense like this?
I tried not to respond to recent "duh dark matter obviously isn't a thing" posts, but Christmas Jesus humping a granite yarmulke, this idiocy has to stop.
Meta moderators take note, this ignorance will be troll or overrated. And this is why: Fundamental misunderstanding, or intentional ignorance deserves no consideration. Argue about what it is, what it means.. but don't argue that it doesn't exist, unless you have a NObel quality replacement
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Argue about what it is, what it means.. but don't argue that it doesn't exist, unless you have a NObel quality replacement.
I totally agree. Dark matter and dark energy are just placeholder names we use to describe things that have observable effects, but which we don't understand. There's something holding galaxies together, and there's something accelerating the expansion of space.
It's not unreasonable to presume that "some kind of matter we can't see" accounts for the extra gravity holding galaxies together, since the presence of matter causes gravity.
It's also not unreasonable to presume that "some kind of energy we can't se
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http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic0701/ [spacetelescope.org]
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~rjm/cosmos/ [caltech.edu]
http://www.space.com/14176-dark-matter-biggest-map-unveiled.html [space.com]
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The LHC exists for an evil purpose and must be stopped before Satan and his demons are released back into the world to torment mankind.
You're too late you fool; Hillary already won the nomination, so the LHC's mission is already complete.
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Have you seen the size of her ass? That aint no lie son.
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Ok, go ahead and pray. Preferably all day. That way you'll at least not get into the way of anyone doing something useful.
Just ... please kneel somewhere out of the way if possible.
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No its the Sophones (Score:1)
Value of CERN (Score:3)
I'm not trolling - my question is sincere. If CERN never discovers new particles, does it still add value scientifically? For example, pinning down what we do know with greater precision? Or is the only value in discovering something entirely new?
Re:Value of CERN (Score:5, Informative)
Well, they already did discover one new particle. The one they call the Higgs.
If they never again find anything new with LHC, that will at least direct theoretical physicists to new directions by invalidating all the theories that rely on new particles.
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The one they call the Higgs.
They call it Mister Higgs!
Re:Value of CERN (Score:5, Insightful)
To quote Wernher von Braun, it's not a failure as long as we get data.
If the data is "nope, doesn't work", we still learned something.
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CERN already worked by confirming the Higgs Boson as well as a host of other ideas. The rest is just gravy and largely highly theoretical physics just waiting to be either disproved or confirmed. Either result is good.
Re:Value of CERN (Score:5, Informative)
By excluding the existence of particles with certain properties, LHC eliminates some theories and that has real scientific value. In a sense the "value" of the measurements is in how different they are from theory. If LHC had NOT see a Higgs boson, that in many ways would have been more interesting than their having see one. Since the most widely accepted theories predicted a Higgs, showing that it didn't exist (within the range of expected properties) would have been very interesting. That would be similar to the Michelson Morley experiment which expected to find the "ether" but didn't.
It turns out that LHC saw the Higgs, but so far nothing else new. Since that was expected, it is not very exciting but its still useful science.
The great majority of science experiments find was was expected. The are good experiments, but its the few lucky ones that find a surprise that are most interesting.
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I would disagree on one point, that it was expected to find a Higgs boson, and nothing else new. This situation makes the hierarchy problem a real and serious thing. Most theories out there expect something new to appear near the weak scale, i.e. within reach of the LHC.
The beautiful thing about the diphoton excess which is now gone is that it was such a weakish-scale new physics signal nobody had been expecting. Alas.
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Agreed, but do they have enough data yet to rule out super-symmetry (for example)? I'm not a particle physicist, so I don't understand how significant the limit on cross sections in this energy range is.
Re:Value of CERN (Score:5, Informative)
The CMS experiment which I am on - only one of the several LHC experiments - went to just this conference being mentioned with ~80 new analyses. These analyses are measurements of particle properties to a greater precision, or explorations of previously unknown territory. Many of these will later be turned into papers and add on the already >400 journal papers by our experiment. Even neglecting the Higgs boson discovery, the scientific output and acquired new knowledge from the LHC has already been immense.
'Papers' as a measure of value (Score:2)
As a sceptic about the value of CERN, my problem is that it feels like there's little of long term value likely to be found by it, compared with what the same expenditure could achieve in other scientific fields that are far less well financed. It's 'sexy' to be looking at the origins of the universe and ever more fundamental particles but...
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Considering what money is wasted on pointless things like the iraq war ($1.1 trillion), this is just peanuts (the LHC had a budget of $9bn). Or take the rio olympics, with a budget of $9.7 billion.
What scientific fields do deserve funding more than physics in your eyes?
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You're assuming that somebody made the decision that a choice was made to spend the money on the Iraq war instead of science, and had the Iraq war not been fought the money would have went towards something else and that on that list of something elses, science was next on the list.
I'd argue that the total public science spending is more zero sum in the short and near term, that over any given period of time there was only a relatively fixed amount of money to spend on science. My guess is, though, that th
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Which is more valuable, understanding how the universe works or producing money for a business? I'd say the former.
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Could've said the same about Einsteins theories and in fact the same things were said: we have a perfectly good model with Newton, this just adds more complexity for a hypothetical, at that point largely undiscovered, giant universe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
However as GPS eventually showed, you don't need space larger than our own solar system to use either theory of relativity. Within 100 years, people will laud these discoveries at CERN for their "Chinese toys" like we do Einstein for ours.
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I'm not trolling - my question is sincere. If CERN never discovers new particles, does it still add value scientifically?
Yes, it does. Sometimes pure research doesn't produce positive results, but that doesn't mean it doesn't produce useful information.
If you lose your keys, and after searching your home for a couple of days you determine they definitely aren't there, have you gained anything? Yes, you have. You now have the knowledge that you need to look elsewhere.
Sometimes that's how research works. It's guaranteed to produce results, but not necessarily the results you want.
OT: "Related links" is giving some odd suggestions (Score:1)
#1: The Case Against Algebra [slashdot.org]
Okay, algebra, math, CERN, tenuous but I'll give it a pass. Throw in "the case against" and "rethinking our earlier observations at CERN" and it's a definite maybe.
#2: Bill Nye: Climate Change Denial Is 'Running Out of Steam,' Thanks To Millennials [slashdot.org]
The "we/they were wrong" angle is much weaker here, weak fail.
#3: Neil deGrasse Tyson Says It's 'Very Likely' The Universe Is A Simulation [slashdot.org]
Er, no. Fail.
#4: Utah Governor: 'Porn Is a Public Health Crisis' [slashdot.org]
Er, other than "scientific data
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By the way, anyone know what's up with the "sdsrc=popbyskidbtmprev" at the end of the "related suggestion" links?
I would guess that the "sdsrc" is a key that stands for "slashdot source" and the "popbyskidbtmprev" is a code that indicates the clicked link came form the "related stories" list.
A couple thoughts (Score:2)
Have they checked the couch, really really carefully? A lot of times when I can't find something, it ends up being under one of the couch cushions. It probably fell out of their pocke when they were watching TV.
And then sometimes when I can't find something in the house, it'll turn out I left it in the car - usually right there on the front passenger seat. Maybe they were busy bringing in groceries and forgot they had the particle in the car.
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Have they checked the couch, really really carefully? A lot of times when I can't find something, it ends up being under one of the couch cushions. It probably fell out of their pocke when they were watching TV.
It's possible that one of their wives stumbled across it and didn't realize it was THE dark matter they were looking for, so she threw it out or put it in a closet somewhere.
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A fan of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot"! Good luck with that!
CERN: only working elevator in a derelict building (Score:3)
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you're clueless
None of the widely acknowedged unknown questions in physics means the "ground is shaky". Just that better models and experiments to verify them are needed and that is what is being done. Even experiments to look at "unpopular alternatives" are funded and done, such as for "fifth force", quantization of space, antigravity by antimatter, etc.
General Relativity and quantum mechanics are the two most useful models of reality we have, and various means are being explored to either unify them or
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You are confused, models of reality are *useful* or they are not. QM and GR are very useful under most conditions in this universe, and a better model might have both as limits of conditions that apply to the majority of the universe