Sabine Hossenfelder's Scathing Video On the State of Particle Physics (youtube.com) 162
Long-time Slashdot reader flashflood writes:
Science educator Sabine Hossenfelder is a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. But Hossenfelder's latest YouTube video expounds upon the sorry state of particle physics, and in the process also has some interesting sidenotes on dark matter.
Hossenfelder criticises what has become the standard operating procedure of particle physicists, whereby they routinely predict the existence of particles that violate the Standard Model. Eventually, the postulated particles are experimentally falsified, at which time physicists move on to even more fanciful predictions.
Hossenfelder is pessimistic about the future of the field if particle physicists continue to behave in the same manner going forward. Hossenfelder also notes that in the past 50 years, only a handful of predictions have been validated, and all these were necessary elements of the Standard Model.
Hossenfelder criticises what has become the standard operating procedure of particle physicists, whereby they routinely predict the existence of particles that violate the Standard Model. Eventually, the postulated particles are experimentally falsified, at which time physicists move on to even more fanciful predictions.
Hossenfelder is pessimistic about the future of the field if particle physicists continue to behave in the same manner going forward. Hossenfelder also notes that in the past 50 years, only a handful of predictions have been validated, and all these were necessary elements of the Standard Model.
Almost fully agree (Score:5, Insightful)
The only slight disagreement I have is how can you be absolutely sure that the prediction won't be validated by experiment until you test it.
Re:Almost fully agree (Score:4, Interesting)
True, but if you pollute the pipe with garbage you also block other researchers from doing actual, relevant work.
I think the point is scientists should stop wanting to have a research facility named after them...
Some of us have stopped already... (Score:5, Funny)
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Why not? Scientists are allowed humor these days, you know :D.
Also just can't help mentioning Fermilab ;).
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Why not? Scientists are allowed humor these days, you know :D.
Also just can't help mentioning Fermilab ;).
That was the base of the Axion. Named after detergent.
Re:Some of us have stopped already... (Score:4, Insightful)
actually i have it on pretty clear authority that bosons were named after bozo the clown
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On the contrary, I think even the average citizen understands that Mooreons are pretty nearly everywhere.
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True, but if you pollute the pipe with garbage you also block other researchers from doing actual, relevant work.
OK, and how should we know which research is relevant? Who will decide?
At the moment grant selection is a very gruel process with ~10% success for NIH [nih.gov]. Grant applications are reviewed, discussed and awarded by peers - it's not perfect, biases happen - as in any human endeavor, but if there is a better way, for sure the scientific community would be grateful to hear about it.
On the other note, from what I heard in physics all the low hanging fruits have been picked, and to make any more progress one needs to
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"gruel" -> "grueling" - sorry
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True, but if you pollute the pipe with garbage you also block other researchers from doing actual, relevant work.
OK, and how should we know which research is relevant? Who will decide?
The money will decide. This is a bit like the old Charlie Brown, Lucy and the Football. When the cost of building the next super instrument that will solve the fundamental issues of particle physics gets to be more expensive than can be put up with, it will come to a screeching halt.
And all these changes to the model are showing us that the model is getting pretty damn creaky.
So CERN now wants to build a 100 kilometer Future Circular Collider. Cost in the double digit billions (not taking into accoun
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how can you be absolutely sure that the prediction won't be validated by experiment until you test it
Some proposed mechanisms to explain unresolved issues in the Standard Model are at predicted energy levels much too high for even the Future Circular Collider to reach, so they literally cannot be validated by experiment. When even the prediction says the energy is too high to reach, you can't hope to accidentally find evidence for it at lower energy levels.
You'll have to hope that things like a bigger collider can somehow accidentally find something that the LHC can't, that isn't predicted by any model.
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Some proposed mechanisms to explain unresolved issues in the Standard Model are at predicted energy levels much too high for even the Future Circular Collider to reach, so they literally cannot be validated by experiment.
Sounds like a good way to lobby for funding to (a) build new equipment to test your hypotheses and (b) keep you employed until that equipment has been built. /cynical
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how can you be absolutely sure that the prediction won't be validated by experiment until you test it
Some proposed mechanisms to explain unresolved issues in the Standard Model are at predicted energy levels much too high for even the Future Circular Collider to reach, so they literally cannot be validated by experiment.
Ahh, that's for the proposed Ludicrous Circular collider to investigate. The diameter of the inner solar system, powered by zero point energy.
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Re: Almost fully agree (Score:5, Insightful)
If I am understanding you correctly, you are asking how do you know which experiments are not worth doing when there is any chance that one could actually end up having a correct prediction. Of course, this cannot be proven.
What Sabine seems to be saying is that the current razor for determining whether or not some postulate may end up uncovering new discoveries is by the use of falsifiability. That is, to make an assertion that you can prove to be false by finding an exception.
I think what Sabine is saying is there is a subtle but important difference between falsifiability as a characteristic of good science and falsifiability as a goal for science.
What she is saying is that the current state of particle physics has become directed entirely by falsifiability - namely, the entire field is being directed by groups of people making assertions that exist only to justify expensive, resource wasting experimentation.
This in contrast to other forms of risk in scientific experimentation, where the goal is based on something other than mere falsifiability. Of course, determining this difference is impossible unless you are actually working in the field.
I think her point is not so much that she alone feels this way, but that after talking to lots of particle physicists, and careful scrutiny of their work, the particle physicists themselves are starting to admit that the whole field is being directed this way.
So basically, her statements cannot be generalized to science in general, though it serves as a warning.
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That may be so, but quantum physics and relativity are currently in conflict, so either the standard model or general relativity is wrong. But both have passed every test of them that has been made. Probably the real answer is some deeper theory, but nobody's developed it yet. (Well, I have an aged friend who believes he has, but he hasn't been able to use it to predict things like the speed of light or the rest mass of a proton...so I'm suspecting huge overconfidence. He believes that the universe *is*
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> everything in it is finite and discrete
Given that space-time is quantized into Planck Length and Planck Time and Scientists haven't been able to measure anything even remotely close to those scales it seems reasonable that the universe is digital.
You may want to ask your friend and see what he has to say about:
* Could the universe be both Finite and Infinite?
* Could it be finite at the micro and infinite at the macro?
* Could it be toroidal shaped?
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Sorry, he's "ag`ed". Not exactly senile (quite), but his attitudes and answers are pretty much frozen and inflexible. If he hasn't already thought of the answer to a question, he won't think of it now...or even acknowledge that the question exists.
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> What she is saying is that the current state of particle physics has become directed entirely by falsifiability ...
The ENTIRE modus operandi of Science is Truth by Subtraction. When you remove enough falsehoods what you hope remains is the Truth, or at least a good approximation of it.
The problem is these dogmatic Scientists are closed-minded about Truth by Addition because it isn't "Science". No Shit, Sherlock. That is it strength! The strength of one system is the weakness of the other and versa.
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The Cult of Science is anyone saying "Science is the ONLY way to learn truth."
I've never heard a scientist say that. Have you? I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone say it.
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> What she is saying is that the current state of particle physics has become directed entirely by falsifiability ...
The ENTIRE modus operandi of Science is Truth by Subtraction. When you remove enough falsehoods what you hope remains is the Truth, or at least a good approximation of it.
Her example is that just because something is falsifiable, does not make it scientific.
The example was something like "A nigerian Prince will give me a million dollars tomorrow.
Very falsifiable, when tomorrow rolls around, and no million dollars shows up.
But not at all science.
So scientist makes a prediction based on complicating a model, in order to shore up a discrepancy, and we have to build a 10 billion dollar collider to falsify it. Yup falsifiable. Really questionable as science though.
The
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So scientist makes a prediction based on complicating a model, in order to shore up a discrepancy, and we have to build a 10 billion dollar collider to falsify it. Yup falsifiable. Really questionable as science though.
Interesting definition. So do you consider the entire periodic table of elements as being questionable science?
The lowly neutron matches your definition perfectly.
Come back with the proof of neutron decay, and I'll be happy to fund more along this line. In the meantime, we could probably jury rig endless predictions and tests to massage phlogiston theory as well.
Present day particle physics is very orthodox and it's adherents get upset if you question any of it. In my field at least, we stop digging when we find ourselves in a deep hole - not redefine the hole and everything around it. Then hop in the hole again.
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The ENTIRE modus operandi of Science is Truth by Subtraction.
It's really not. For a very good explanation of why falsifiability is incomplete as a philosophy of science, read the first few chapters of David Deutsch's "The Beginning of Infinity" (the whole book is well worth your time; you'll probably end up reading it more than once). I'll try to summarize briefly.
Science is about generating and testing hypotheses. Falsifiability is a pre-requisite for a good hypothesis, but it's insufficient. As UnknownSoldier pointed out with his Nigerian prince example, it's ver
Yes...and No (Score:5, Interesting)
The main efforts in particle physics are around trying to do _exactly_ what she states we should be doing: finding ways to extend the Standard Model to make it consistent with known data. For example, she holds up proton decay as an example of bad science because it is based on GUT symmetries but if you ignore the theorists and look at the universe you'll see that it is made of protons and neutrons (baryons) without any anti-baryons in sight. Hence, if the universe started as pure energy there has to be some process that can create a baryon without creating an anti-baryon (called baryon number violation). This is one of the three Sakharov conditions for the Big Bang and the Standard Model has no way to do this. If baryon number is violated then one likely consequence is that protons may decay. So you can choose to see looking for proton decay as pursuing one special theoretical GUT model or as doing a more general search to see if any process exists that violates baryon number since the available data suggest something out there can do this.
The video is also hypocritical in parts. For example, she claims that dark matter might not be new particles but instead modified gravity. However, the modified gravity models are getting more and more complex as they try to avoid getting ruled out by more and more observed phenomena, particularly the bullet cluster where there is a gravitational field where there is no matter but she is on an anti-particle physics rant so that gets ignored and she does _exactly_ what she is complaining particle physicists do.
Her understanding of the hierarchy problem is also seriously flawed. The problem here arises because if the Standard Model is correct then the Higgs mass we see is the result of a sum of quantum corrections where the terms are all on the order of 10^36 and yet just by random chance happen to cancel out when added together (some terms are negative) to give a result of order 10^4. That could happen just by chance as she says but it is roughly the same odds as the same person winning the UK national lottery 5 times in a row. I think we all know that if that actually happened there would be a very thorough investigation to see if they were cheating...so why is it strange that we would not investigate the hierarchy problem to see if nature is "cheating" somehow too?
The problem we have in particle physics today is that while we have clear data to show that there must be more than just the Standard Model out there we have no data that gives any hint as to what that new physics is and none of the serious models to date seem to work. Given that her job title is "research fellow" and not "YouTube star" she might like to consider spending less time on making ranting videos and more time coming up with models that address the inconsistencies she is most concerned about. It is always much more effective to lead by example than by video rant...although it is also much harder.
Re:Yes...and No (Score:4, Insightful)
However, this is the sideline to the main show: nobody would fund new experiments and accelerators to do this and it is not without use because when you do have a new collider you do not want to miss something just because no theorist thought to predict it.
She addresses this very point in the video as one of the common objections to her arguments that she gets from people.
The main efforts in particle physics are around trying to do _exactly_ what she states we should be doing: finding ways to extend the Standard Model to make it consistent with known data.
No, that's not what she's saying at all. She literally says physicists are making extensions to the Standard Model almost at random. They make slight changes, surprised that they can't find evidence for them, then repeat the cycle.
The video is also hypocritical in parts. For example, she claims that dark matter might not be new particles but instead modified gravity.
It's a short video, so she doesn't lay out her full opinion on the issue. From her other videos and writings, she thinks it's probably a mixture of some modified gravity, and some dark matter model.
The complaint she makes elsewhere is that physicists are too hung up on the idea that it must be one or the other, instead of working together to see if it's both.
none of the serious models to date seem to work.
Uh, that's precisely her point.
Sideline Activities vs Main Event (Score:5, Insightful)
She addresses this very point in the video as one of the common objections to her arguments that she gets from people.
Yes, she does but you miss my point. I agree with her that these sorts of searches are not a good enough reason to build a new experiment which is why nobody build experiments specifically to do that. We build experiments to go after the big inconsistencies and then, having got an experiment that is collecting lots of data also use it to rule out the crazier models. This is a sideline to the main aim of the experiment, something that she seems to completely miss.
She literally says physicists are making extensions to the Standard Model almost at random.
Yes and again my point is that this is the sideline to the main event. The main reason we build new experiments is to do _exactly_ what she is saying. We did not build the ATLAS experiment to look for esoteric models of new physics we built it to see if the Higgs was there something she said herself was the sort of thing we should be doing. However, having built it for that why would you not also use the data you are now collecting to look for other things? That's my point: she is confusing the activity on the sidelines for the main reason we build experiments.
The complaint she makes elsewhere is that physicists are too hung up on the idea that it must be one or the other, instead of working together to see if it's both.
Well, what do you think is more likely: that there is an undiscovered new particle out there or that there is a new particle plus we got gravity wrong as well? This is an example of exactly what she says not to do - making things more complicated to get around the fact that data has ruled out the simple model. So it seems to be ok to do this for her but we are wrong when we do it....that looks like hypocrisy to me!
Uh, that's precisely her point.
Yes, but one to which she offers no solution or suggests a better approach to solve. She's supposed to be a research fellow so if she thinks we are doing things wrong then she should show us how to do it right not waste her time making YouTube video rants.
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Terminate the employ of any particle physicist proposing anything that is literally impossible to prove by experiment.
First, that is not her point and second, nobody I know in particle physics does that. You are thinking about String Theory.
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Terminate the employ of any particle physicist proposing anything that is literally impossible to prove by experiment.
First, that is not her point and second, nobody I know in particle physics does that. You are thinking about String Theory.
Out of curiosity - do you think the present model is correct? and will be considered correct for the future?
To my semi educated eye, it looks pretty darn creaky. As well, I don't think that constant efforts to prove it correct - which always end with "We need to spend more money!" are going to pan out in the long run.
After all, much of human physics progress has been based on what our minds come up with, not a cascade of increasingly expensive particle accelerators.
I know I drone on money, but the p
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Out of curiosity - do you think the present model is correct?
I look at the current Standard Model (plus neutrino oscillations which are extra but easily added) much like I look at Newtonian mechanics. It's a model that works really well in all the myriad different ways we have tested it but it is also a model that we know cannot explain all the phenomena we observe.
The key difference is that we can test Newtonian mechanics in situations where it no longer works which is why we know it gets replaced by relativity and quantum mechanics. We have yet to test the Stan
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Terminate the employ of any particle physicist proposing anything that is literally impossible to prove by experiment. They've been handed free money for bad ideas for much too long.
Well, there goes string theory!
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"... science stands for knowledge gained from rational argument borne out by evidence."
Evidence, derived from experimentation, must be the final arbiter of any theory.
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No viewpoint held by anybody even tangentially related to this area is sturdy enough not to be picked to death just like this. It's the nature of living on the edge.
If you can build something unassailable to such a deconstruction, you've solved the problems under discussion.
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As a particle physicist, I would say that some of her criticism is valid in some cases but there is also a lot going on that she happily ignores or is completely ignorant of. It is certainly true that there is a paper mill of theorists predicting wacky new models that do not really address any problems and then experimentalists going and looking for them. However, this is the sideline to the main show: nobody would fund new experiments and accelerators to do this and it is not without use because when you do have a new collider you do not want to miss something just because no theorist thought to predict it.
Okay - I'm not a particle physicist - I'm in Electromagnetics. Sell me on the FCC. Given the ongoing need for larger and larger particle colliders, does in not make sense to build one even bigger so when you come to me and say we the FCC is too small for what we found, we need one a thousand kilometers in diameter - shouldn't we just admit the inevitable and build them even bigger? It's a dead lock that the FCC will be too small in a couple years.
But given that money is not infinite, sell me on the need
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A good strategy, sorry, my background is in chemistry, would be to keep testing predictions of the model you have now to see where it stops working, then come up with a new model to explain the new phenomenon.
That's literally what they are doing, and your argument even acknowledges this, but then you dismiss their choices as "seemingly at random". If they're covering new ground, then at worst their work has the chance to discover something "at random".
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Fuck off from one of the constituents.
It's just a race to look at stuff now, no more
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It's just a race to look at stuff now, no more.
So you think the path to scientific progress is to close your eyes? Maybe hold your hands over your ears, too?
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It's just a race to look at stuff now, no more.
So you think the path to scientific progress is to close your eyes? Maybe hold your hands over your ears, too?
You're slippery sloping this really badly.
The idea that a person who thinks a particular field of study is too expensive is holding their hands over their eyes and ears is pretty specious.
You could use the same argument for not funding cold fusion. Some might think so. https://www.asme.org/topics-re... [asme.org]
At what level do you support particle physics? The upcoming FCC at 10 Billion (before the likely cost overruns, plus an estimated billion per annum to operate. Do you support say a trillion dollars f
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At what level do you support particle physics? The upcoming FCC at 10 Billion
Pocket change compared to the amount of money we're giving to healthy corporations so they can be more profitable.
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At what level do you support particle physics? The upcoming FCC at 10 Billion
Pocket change compared to the amount of money we're giving to healthy corporations so they can be more profitable.
You did a whataboutism there, which supports what you think is showing the badness of something else.
If B happens, it is okay because A happens, B is okay, therefore A is as well.
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You did a whataboutism there, which supports what you think is showing the badness of something else.
Actually, I think spending money on science is good, and giving money to shitlords is bad. You seem to think spending money on science is bad. If you want to complain about people wasting money, go complain orders of magnitude more about the people wasting orders of magnitude more, or admit you don't actually give a fuck about the money — you're just angry and/or jealous.
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You did a whataboutism there, which supports what you think is showing the badness of something else.
Actually, I think spending money on science is good, and giving money to shitlords is bad. You seem to think spending money on science is bad.
I spent 34 years of my life doing research, and you think I believe spending money on research is bad? Allow me to elucidate what I said.
When a person engages in whataboutism, it's like people are doing Research, well, what about money spent on something else?
A person who is interested in funding research, is not necessarily interested in corporate welfare. A Person who is interested in funding corporate welfare is not necessarily interested in funding research. A person might be interested in fundin
The Particle Desert (Score:4, Interesting)
A good strategy, sorry, my background is in chemistry, would be to keep testing predictions of the model you have now to see where it stops working
Yes, that would be nice but the only place that we know for absolute certain that the Standard Model breaks down is at the Planck scale which is about 10^18 GeV. The highest energy accelerator can currently reach 10^4 GeV and even the ulta high energy neutrinos the experiment I work on looks for so far top out around 10^7 GeV if you are happy with one event per year or less.
However, there are many reasons to expect that some of the missing puzzle pieces should become evident well before the Planck scale but there is no absolutely compelling data to say at what exact energy. This huge gap in energy used to be referred to as the "particle desert". We are pretty certain that there are oases of new physics in it but so far we have been chasing mirages. However, the only choices we have at the moment are to either continue investigating until one promising sign turns out to be an oasis or to give up trying to cross the desert and go home.
Re:The Particle Desert (Score:4, Insightful)
You have a theory that works for now, but you suspect it is going to break at some point, but it is too expensive and too difficult to get to that point.
It's not that we suspect, we know for absolute certain it will break down eventually because the Standard Model cannot explain gravity. The problem is that it may break down well before that and in a range that we could reach...but it would take a lot of money and effort to reach that hypothetical energy range and it is hard to justify that effort and expense without some degree of certainty that you will see something there.
I think the problem she wants to point out is that at the moment the arguments to keep pushing this research are wrong ones
Yes, but that is where she is wrong. The arguments she holds up are NOT the ones pushing the research. The arguments pushing the research are exactly the ones she says should be pushing it. What she fails to understand is that we can do far more with a new experiment than just the one main thing it was built to do - we can look for many other different models as well as the main raison d'etre. It would have been a criminal waste of money if we just built ATLAS, looked for nothing other than the Higgs boson and then, once it was found turned it off and said well that's why we built it and now we found it there is no need to keep looking for anything else that might be there. Testing the extra stuff is basically a freebie that you get with building the experiment for the main physics you came to do.
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But this is what she said, there is no reason to look for a unified theory, not at this point,
You are confusing things. Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) are trying to unify the strong and electroweak forces that are already in the Standard Model. This is not the same as including quantum gravity. We know that gravity exists and, at the energies where its quantum effects become important, we have no model that works. GUTs are something that might exist and might be how nature created baryons without anti-baryons in the Big Bang but nature may do things differently so the existence of GUTs is unclear, u
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I almost fully agree with her criticism, especially the part where scientists make their models just because they can. The only slight disagreement I have is how can you be absolutely sure that the prediction won't be validated by experiment until you test it.
Exactly. There are times when assuming is validated as the only logical way forward, especially when working in a field that is still largely unknown (we don't exactly call it "dark matter" because we know what it is and we're just fans of the color black).
That said, there's also something to be said about living in a corrupt world full of clickbait attention whores spreading half-truths for profit. Were the profit streams getting a little boring in the dimming spotlight of particle physics to create this
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I almost fully agree with her criticism, especially the part where scientists make their models just because they can. The only slight disagreement I have is how can you be absolutely sure that the prediction won't be validated by experiment until you test it.
Yes. The problem is as she ends her video presentation. They will keep coming up with new complications that cost a huge amount, and no one wants to fund it.
Securing employment (Score:3)
However, we must remember that being a particle physicist is first and foremost a job, like any other. Those in the field have to earn a living and that requires they perform research. If that requires them to postulate new, exotic particles that "need" to be discovered in order to create a GUT, then so be it.
Although as Hossenfelder says, there is no fundamental principle of nature that demands a single, unified theory.
Maybe the real problem is that there are sources of funding available for this work? Ones that seem unaware that every search for particles outside the standard model (for the past 50 years) have failed. But at least with that failure, those involved in the search have managed to make a career out of it.
Re:Securing employment (Score:5, Interesting)
Differently today's predictions are in the nice-to-have category. It would be nice to have supersymmetric particles, because then we could reduce the number of 26 (theoretical) dimensions in String theory down to 11 (theoretical) dimensions. It would be nice to find WIMPs, because then, (theoretical) Dark Matter would be the same as normal matter, just not as easy to detect. It would be nice to observe Proton decay, because then you could get rid of that nasty conservation of the number of baryons in the Standard Model. It would be nice to observe magnetic monopoles, because then you would get a way to decay protons etc.pp..
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I thought String Theory suggested only 11 dimensions, not 26. Or are you accounting for the various types of String Theory?
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This drives me nuts. A theory is just a model. It's not a status that is somehow achieved. Models make testable predictions we call hypotheses. Capitalization is just a stylistic choice. It doesn't signify anything about the veracity of the model.
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I thought String Theory suggested only 11 dimensions, not 26. Or are you accounting for the various types of String Theory?
Increased due to inflation. /s
Re:Securing employment (Score:4, Interesting)
The real problem is that differently from the 1930ies to the 1950ies, we don't have a good idea what exactly is missing in our models. As she stated: the anti-particles were necessary, because if you create a relativistic version of Schroedinger's Equation, you get squared expressions for charge and mass, hinting at a second solution with the charges reversed. The neutrinos were necessary to explain the missing energies during Beta decay ...
In my opinion in this case her bias is shown:
- the Dirac's (!) equation for electron having solution for a mysterious anti-electron is OK - now, because we know it exists, but checking for a particle fulfilling the only one not observed in nature symmetry is not OK
- proposing a ghostly not detectable particle to explain beta decay is OK (because we found it), but another ghostly particle to explain extra gravity we observe is not OK
Kind of bias, verging on hypocrisy.
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The electroweak force was confirmed by experiments already in the 1970ies. So physicists already knew that electromagnetism and the weak force are different aspects of the fundamental concept, but th
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I watched the video and there isn't much to criticise about it.
However, we must remember that being a particle physicist is first and foremost a job, like any other. Those in the field have to earn a living and that requires they perform research. If that requires them to postulate new, exotic particles that "need" to be discovered in order to create a GUT, then so be it.
Although as Hossenfelder says, there is no fundamental principle of nature that demands a single, unified theory.
This is an extremely naive and ignorant view of the "why" of GUT.
Physicists are trying to create the GUT because that's how great advances in physical theory were obtained, again and again, in the short few hundreds of years of history of physical science. The following were the great advances that came from (1) trying to unify apparently different forces in nature into one, or (2) turn an existing theory to become consistent with another, or (3) trying explain an observation of nature:
- Newton's theory of
What's her solution? (Score:5, Interesting)
So what did she propose? All particle physicist should just go look for another job?
Even if that happens, the problem that caused dark matter to be suggested won't go away, what astronomers observed didn't fit with what we know about gravity, so what's her solution? The Standard Model still did not include gravity, i.e. it is incomplete, so what's her solution to that? Why are there 3 families of similar particles in the model and not 4?
The various particles, supersymmetry, dark matter, etc, were not proposed as a job program for particle physics, they were proposed to answer questions that couldn't be answered otherwise. If anyone could have answered those questions without proposing new, unobserved particles, sure, go ahead and earn your Nobel prize.
Or, should we simply give up and call for the end of particle physics? Or shall we treat particle physics as chemistry, simply take all known fundamental particles as god given and never ask "is there more?", nor ask "why they are that way?"
It is so easy to criticize other people for simply not succeeding at something. It is much more difficult to actually succeed at it to show that other people were doing it wrong. What she did was only the former, how about she go to have a try at the latter if she is so sure everyone was doing it wrong?
Re: What's her solution? (Score:2)
I think that her point is merely to provide a warning. An entire field of study can exist to merely maintain the status quo (after all, preserving the knowledge is just as important as creating new knowledge.)
I believe she just wants people to understand experimental particle physics better and go in with both eyes open. Itâ(TM)s like the stock market: Itâ(TM)s important to understand that the valuations are based on nothing real, yet that doesnâ(TM)t prevent entire economies, industries, and
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Re:What's her solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
The various particles, supersymmetry, dark matter, etc, were not proposed as a job program for particle physics, they were proposed to answer questions that couldn't be answered otherwise.
No, her argument was that they were proposed to fix imagined problems created by new models that had no justification.
So what did she propose?
She proposed to focus on the actual hard questions that arise from the current model. She proposed not to waste time on questions that only exist because of hypothetical extensions to the model that were not driven by evidence.
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The various particles, supersymmetry, dark matter, etc, were not proposed as a job program for particle physics, they were proposed to answer questions that couldn't be answered otherwise.
No, her argument was that they were proposed to fix imagined problems created by new models that had no justification.
The problems are not imagined and some were well known since 1990s, being ignorant of them doesn't make them go away.
See another post above for very good explanation https://science.slashdot.org/c... [slashdot.org]
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Honestly, with what we know, I don't understand why we are so fond of the idea that there's weakly interacting undiscovered particles that don't share the distribution of baryonic matter that explains the matter discrepancy.
Seems like the i
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It's been investigated a lot, and as far as I know, no modified gravity model has been able to explain everything that the particle model explains. It won't really be settled unless and until such a particle is discovered, but so far the theory that best matches the evidence is dark matter particles. It seems like continuing to pursue more and more complicated MOND theories in an effort to make them match observations is similar to what she is criticizing.
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One thing I don't understand is how we have an undiscovered particle that only weakly interacts with gravity, but does not appear to exhibit the clumping behavior expected due to gravitational interactions.
Now I know there are theories - that perhaps it hasn't had time to clump, or that it has some anti-clumping properties, or arguments that there are signs th
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It's true that neither of them is perfect, but from what I've heard (IANA astrophysicist) dark matter particles come closer.
does not appear to exhibit the clumping behavior
I'm not sure exactly what that means. Observations are consistent with more dark matter in and around galaxies than in the voids between them, are they not?
The pursuit of the 'Meaning of Life' (Score:2)
Noone wants to admit it's what Monty Python proposes at the end of the film of that name, articulated in this clip...
https://youtu.be/asOFi1W228M [youtu.be]
I enjoy her videos (Score:2)
It's decent stuff. And her humour... good lord... There's vermouth dry, then popcorn dry... then Sabine dry. I won't write off a whole field on her say so, but she usually makes a pretty decent case for her disillusionment. I take it as one voice among many, but better than average.
Re:I enjoy her videos (Score:5, Informative)
"And her humour... good lord... There's vermouth dry, then popcorn dry... then Sabine dry"
I think it's mostly the result of being German, but sober.
But have you seen her music channel? It's......something else
https://www.youtube.com/@Sabin... [youtube.com]
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Thanks from the bottom of my heart for that. Totally made my day.
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That's awesome. Thank you.
New theory of everything required (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a significant gap between what the Standard Model predicts for our universe and what the astronomers observe. The obvious issues are matter/antimatter disparity and dark matter/energy. So you can see why physicists might want to look for holes in the Standard Model.
The standard model does a great job of predicting the behaviour of our known particles and has predicted several new ones with the correct energies. Spectral lines from distant galaxies indicate that it is also generally applicable. So it really does a great job of describing particle physics.
Unfortunately, it doesn't explain everything. The outstanding cosmological issues don't look like they will be resolved by looking for ever more exotic states of matter. These questions will probably requre a paradigm shift, not just some fiddling around in the dark corners of our existing model. We need another Newton, or Bohr or Einstein. Unfortunately, they only come along every few generations so it might not happen soon.
Just my thoughts,
Keith.
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I think the days of the individual genius propelling the field forward are done, no matter how far off the chart their intelligence manifests. The problems are officially too hard. It'll be teams that achieve the next breakthroughs, perhaps with a nominal figurehead. If the Nobel Prize in scientific categories is to be awarded honestly, the ceremony will go on for a while.
Perverted incentives (Score:2)
This stupidity is one of the things that "publish or perish" creates. Of course nobody wants to lose their jobs. Particle physics has gotten hard enough that actual original research is very hard to come by. Hence people invent it.
She makes a good point, time to look elsewhere (Score:2)
https://youtu.be/d-hPmjjjC-I [youtu.be]
Professional Shitposter (Score:2)
Her schtick is apparently to shit on everybody with an experimental model outside the Standard Model, even those that recover the Standard Model, because it's not the Standard Model.
And then not address anything that's not predicted by the Standard Model.
And then complain that progress isn't being made.
She's created a no-win situation for Physics and a successful grift for herself.
And no, it's not because she's a woman that she just wants to have something she can always complain about - some of her critics
Re:"Science educator" (Score:5, Insightful)
You are wrong.
First, she published a lot and is still publishing, so she is certainly doing.
Second, it's a good tradition in academia that the people doing research are also teaching. This makes them better at communicating, as they constantly need to explain complex ideas to people which weren't exposed to them earlier.
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You cannot seriously argue that particle physicists should not take a step back and re-examine the whole enterprise as it is currently being carried out, when they keep churning out minor variants of failed predictions.
Re: "Science educator" (Score:2)
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Currently with the LHC, we could probably churn out model after model after model about new physics in that energy range. It would be cheap because the LHC is already built, so testing a new tweak of a model is like mass manufacturing that drives marginal costs down. "cost / model -> 0 as model -> infinity"
It would still be wasted money and effort if t
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Personally, I'm not so much worried about the cost as I am about the potential lack of meaningful progress. As a side effect, it could be cheaper.
Since the two things are intimately interrelated, you should care. We have to figure out either how to make them cheaper or how to fund them in order to continue making fundamental scientific discoveries.
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You're not worried about their wanting to build a new collider at $23B?
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If there were physics to be explored at that energy range, like how the LHC was in the right energy range for proposed models of the Higgs and SUSY, then it would be scientifically stupid to ignore it.
But we don't. Current models put new physics at energy ranges far beyond the next collider, so there's no research value to it. THEN $23B would be waste.
Re: Hi, actual physicist here (Score:2)
Re:Hi, actual physicist here (Score:5, Interesting)
Look, I agree that Michio Kaku has gone off the deep end, I haven't heard him say or write a coherent sentence about physics in the last couple of years.
But Sabine Hossenfelder? You may not agree with what she says, but she's always well thought out and coherent, and she comes across as very sincere. She also attempts to be as clear as possible in what she's saying, avoiding any kind of obfuscation. Putting her on the same level as Michio Kaku, or calling what she does quackery, is just ignorant. Btw. personally I agree with some of her takes, but not all of them. I think she's a very valuable perspective to have in physics, especially because she challenges orthodoxy in an intelligent manner.
Can you actually offer a substantive critique of what she's saying? (Since I was critical of Michio Kaku here, I can give you an example of a substantive criticism of what he's saying: he likes to conflate the multiverse with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, although they are completely different things.) Or are you just lashing out because deep down you suspect that she might be onto something and you don't want your own world view to collapse?
Re:Hi, actual physicist here (Score:4, Insightful)
But Sabine Hossenfelder? You may not agree with what she says, but she's always well thought out and coherent, and she comes across as very sincere. She also attempts to be as clear as possible in what she's saying, avoiding any kind of obfuscation.
Very good point. Definitely not fair to dismiss her out of hand as quackery. She does seem to have a bit of an agenda, though. Useful as one perspective, not so useful as the only perspective.
Can you actually offer a substantive critique of what she's saying?
Hmm ... well, firstly she starts of by titling the video as "What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? (This is why I lost faith in science.)" First sentence good (although that's definitely not all that's going on wrong), second sentence bad. She should have a second look at her own Euler diagram in the video illustrating "some A are B". But I suppose "This is why I lost faith in some scientists." would not sound as catchy.
Secondly, you get a bit of a credibility hit when you're only presenting the negative results in a field. Letting aside the fact that in any research field there will be a number of failed models and thus negative results, the bias of showing negatives without any qualification (say, by distinguishing them using some sort of metric that describes the distance of the proposed failed theory from the SM) looks a lot like cherry picking. Especially since the (few and disproportionately visible) positive results presented are kind of glossed over. True, finding a novel decay mode or a new unstable quark combination is not as flashy as finding the Higgs, but last time I checked (and it's been quite a while, since HEP is not my main concern or too adjacent to it, so feel free to correct me) our understanding of the strong interaction is not as complete as we'd like. So presenting the field the way she does makes it seem that it's "all are wackos" instead of "there are wackos" - and we're back to Euler diagrams and that dash of dishonesty.
Lastly, her suggestion of directions for moving forward is ... frankly, bad. Not entirely bad, but the "reasonable" kind of bad. It only covers incremental changes, which have their place, but anyone looking at the history of Physics can see that major advances have been made in discontinuous leaps. Which means a certain level of risk-taking is needed in approving research choices. And sadly we don't have a consistent approach for walking this particular tight rope, otherwise for instance the string theory field would look rather different from what it is today. So yes, it's a hard problem, which is not limited to HEP. And, as the saying goes, for every hard problem there's (at least) a solution that is simple, clear and wrong.
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She did a bit of clickbait with the title, to be sure.
"Secondly, you get a bit of a credibility hit when you're only presenting the negative results in a field."
A truly balanced examination of this topic would take substantially a longer, and almost nobody would watch it. She had a point to make, and she detailed why she felt that way. She wasn't writing a paper for submission.
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IIUC, the substantial criticism is that she's not proposing any other way to work on the problem. Saying "we need new theories, better theories" doesn't count as substantial. Yeah, it's correct, but so what.
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If you see "Sabine Hossenfelder" please feel free to disregard as absolute quackery! Same with Michio Kaku.
Also please take this stupid shit off /. Ok thanks!
Great argument there; I'm convinced.
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If we're going by Appeal to Authority fallacies, my brother has a PhD in Astrophysics and a published paper on neutron stars collisions. He showed me Sabine's channel and is a great fan of hers.
Your turn.
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Ah, a closet authoritarian.
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Nice assertion. Can you provide a cite?