[HN Gopher] Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
___________________________________________________________________
Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?
Author : mellosouls
Score : 191 points
Date : 2026-02-09 23:31 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's kind of legitimate, but it's kind of sad to see some of the
| smartest people in society just being like "maybe AI will just
| give me the answer," a phrase that has a lot of potential to be
| thought terminating.
| emmelaich wrote:
| That's mentioned in the article too:
|
| > _Cari Cesarotti, a postdoctoral fellow in the theory group at
| CERN, is skeptical about that future. She notices chatbots'
| mistakes, and how they've become too much of a crutch for
| physics students. "AI is making people worse at physics," she
| said._
| yalok wrote:
| this. Deep understanding of physics involves building a
| mental model & intuition how things work, and the process of
| building is what gives the skill to deduce & predict. Using
| AI to just get to the answers directly prevents building that
| "muscle" strength...
| gowld wrote:
| AI chatbots are also making people better at physics, by
| answering questions the textbook doesn't or the professor
| can't explain clearly, patiently. Critical thinking skills
| are critical. Students cheating with chatbots might not have
| put in the effort to learn without chatbots.
| 0x3f wrote:
| I'm quite happy that it might give me, with pre-existing
| skills, more time on the clock to stay relevant.
| jahnu wrote:
| I find the arguments from those who say there is no crisis
| convincing. Progress doesn't happen at a constant rate. We made
| incredible unprecedented progress in the 20th century. The most
| likely scenario is that to slow down for a while. Perhaps
| hundreds of years again! Nobody can know. We are still making
| enormous strides compared to most of scientific history.
| Insanity wrote:
| Although we do have many more people now working on these
| problems than any time in the past. That said, science
| progresses one dead scientist at the time so might still take
| generations for a new golden era.
| ktallett wrote:
| Is it more that even the most dedicated and passionate
| researchers have to frame their interests in a way that will get
| funding? Particle Physics right now is not the thing those with
| the cash will fund right now. AI and QC is the focus.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Well, it's hard to make an argument for a $100 billion collider
| when your $10 billion collider didn't find anything
| revolutionary.
|
| Scaling up particle colliders has arguably hit diminishing
| returns.
| bananaflag wrote:
| It's basically the opposite situation from 150 years ago.
|
| Back then, we thought our theory was more or less complete while
| having experimental data which disproved it (Michelson-Morley
| experiment, Mercury perihelion, I am sure there are others).
|
| Right now, we know our theories are incomplete (since GR and QFT
| are incompatible) while having no experimental data which
| contradicts them.
| Paracompact wrote:
| What about underexplained cosmological epicycles like dark
| matter (in explaining long-standing divergences of
| gravitational theory from observation), or the Hubble tension?
| XorNot wrote:
| This is your regular reminder that epicycles were not an
| incorrect theory addition until an alternative hypothesis
| could explain the same behavior without requiring them.
| Paracompact wrote:
| Sure, but in that regard dark matter is even more
| unsatisfying than (contemporary) epicycles, because not
| only does it add extra complexity, it doesn't even
| characterize the source of that complexity beyond its
| gravitational effects.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Even better, there are the "nightmare" scenarios where
| dark matter can only interact gravitationally with
| Standard Model particles.
| Paracompact wrote:
| Personally--and this is where I expect to lose the
| materialists that I imagine predominate HN--I think we
| are already in a nightmare scenario with regard to
| another area: the science of consciousness.
|
| The following seem likely to me: (1) Consciousness
| exists, and is not an illusion that doesn't need
| explaining (a la Daniel Dennett), nor does it drop out of
| some magical part of physical theory we've somehow
| overlooked until now; (2) Mind-matter interactions do not
| exist, that is, purely physical phenomena can be
| perfectly explained by appeals to purely physical
| theories.
|
| Such are the stakes of "naturalistic dualist" thinkers
| like David Chalmers. But if this is the case, it implies
| that the physics of matter and the physics of
| consciousness are orthogonal to each other. Much like it
| would be a nightmare to stipulate that dark matter is a
| purely gravitational interaction and _that 's that_, it
| would be a nightmare to stipulate that consciousness and
| qualia arise noninteractionally from certain physical
| processes _just because_. And if there is at least one
| materially noninteracting orthogonal component to our
| universe, what if there are more that we can 't even
| perceive?
| im3w1l wrote:
| I've thought about this possibility but come to reject
| it. If mind-matter interactions did not exist, then
| matter could not detect the presence of mind. And if the
| brain cannot detect the mind then we wouldn't be able to
| talk or write about the mind.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Or, the mind is in spectator mode?
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| From a physics point of view should be as every effect is
| caused by previous state. And next tick is always next
| tick, except quantum bacause has some randomness, but
| let's assume it's a seeded randomness.
|
| I think every tick is predictable from previous state.
| Inevitable. Therefore I really like how you put it: mind
| is just spectating.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I don't think there is any mystery to what we call
| "consciousness". Our senses and brain have evolved so we
| can "sense" the external world, so we can live in it and
| react to it. So why couldn''t we also sense what is
| happening inside our brains?
|
| Our brain needs to sense our "inner talk" so we can let
| it guide our decision-making and actions. If we couldn't
| remember sentences, we couldn't remember "facts" and
| would be much worse for that. And talking with our "inner
| voice" and hearing it, isn't that what most people would
| call consciousness?
| tehjoker wrote:
| another one that thinks they solved the hard problem of
| consciousness by addressing the easy problem. how on
| earth does a feedback system cause matter to "wake up"?
| we are making lots of progress on the easy problem though
| dgfl wrote:
| This is not as good a refusal as you think it is. To me
| (and I imagine, the parent poster) there is no extra
| logical step needed. The problem IS solved in this sense.
|
| If it's completely impossible to even imagine what the
| answer to a question is, as is the case here, it's
| probably the wrong question to pose. Is there any answer
| you'd be satisfied by?
|
| To me the hard problem is more or less akin to looking
| for the true boundaries of a cloud: a seemingly valid
| quest, but one that can't really be answered in a
| satisfactory sense, because it's not the right one to
| pose to make sense of clouds.
| Paracompact wrote:
| > If it's completely impossible to even imagine what the
| answer to a question is, as is the case here, it's
| probably the wrong question to pose. Is there any answer
| you'd be satisfied by?
|
| I would be very satisfied to have an answer, or even just
| convincing heuristic arguments, for the following:
|
| (1) What systems experience consciousness? For example,
| is a computer as conscious as a rock, as conscious as a
| human, or somewhere in between? (2) What are the
| fundamental symmetries and invariants of consciousness?
| Does it impact consciousness whether a system is flipped
| in spacetime, skewed in spacetime, isomorphically recast
| in different physical media, etc.? (3) What aspects of a
| system's organization give rise to different qualia? What
| does the possible parameter space (or set of possible
| dynamical traces, or what have you) of qualia look like?
| (4) Is a consciousness a distinct entity, like some phase
| transition with a sharp boundary, or is there no
| fundamentally rigorous sense in which we can distinguish
| each and every consciousness in the universe? (5) What
| explains the nature of phenomena like blindsight or split
| brain patients, where seemingly high-level recognition,
| coordination, and/or intent occurs in the absence of any
| conscious awareness? Generally, what behavior-affecting
| processes in our brains do and do not affect our
| conscious experience?
|
| And so on. I imagine you'll take issue with all of these
| questions, perhaps saying that "consciousness" isn't well
| defined, or that an "explanation" can only refer to
| functional descriptions of physical matter, but I figured
| I would at least answer your question honestly.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is not nearly as profound as you make it out to be:
| a computer program also doesn't sense the hardware that
| it runs on, from its point of view it is invisible until
| it is made explicit: peripherals.
| dgfl wrote:
| You also don't consciously use your senses until you
| actively think about them. Same as "you are now aware of
| your breathing". Sudden changes in a sensation may
| trigger them to be conscious without "you" taking action,
| but that's not so different. You're still directing your
| attention to something that's always been there.
|
| I agree with the poster (and Daniel Dennet and others)
| that there isn't anything that needs explaining. It's
| just a question framing problem, much like the
| measurement problem in quantum mechanics.
| eucyclos wrote:
| I think the old theory of the planes of existence has a
| lot of utility here - if you substitute "the
| dimensionality at which you're analyzing your dataset"
| for the hermetic concept of "planes of existence" you get
| essentially the same thing, at least in lower dimensions
| like one (matter) or two (energy). Mind, specifically a
| human mind, would be a four dimensional under the old
| system, which feels about right. No idea how you'd set up
| an experiment to test that theory though. It may be
| completely impossible because experiments only work when
| they work in all contexts and only matter is ever the
| same regardless of context.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| How can consciousness have information about the material
| world if it doesn't interact with it in any way?
|
| And when your fingers type that you experience qualia,
| are they bullshitting because your fingers have never
| actually received any signals from your consciousness in
| any direct or indirect way?
| jemmyw wrote:
| I don't think any of this is particularly nightmarish.
| Just because we don't yet know how this complex system
| arises from another lower level one doesn't make it new
| physics. There's no evidence of it being new or
| orthogonal physics.
|
| Imagine trying to figure out what is happening on
| someone's computer screen with only physical access to
| their hardware minus the screen, and an MRI scanner. And
| that's a system we built! We've come exceedingly far with
| brains and minds considering the tools we have to peer
| inside.
| Paracompact wrote:
| Knowing how to build a brain is different from knowing
| whether that brain has consciousness in the sense that
| you or I do. The question of consciousness appears to
| demand new/orthogonal physics because according to our
| existing physics, there's no sense in which you or should
| "feel" any differently than a rock does, or a computer
| does, or Searle's room does, or a Chinese brain does, or
| the universe as a whole does, etc.
| squeefers wrote:
| > The question of consciousness appears to demand
| new/orthogonal physics because according to our existing
| physics, there's no sense in which you or should "feel"
| any differently than a rock does,
|
| deepak chopra may interest you
| geysersam wrote:
| That would certainly be a difficult scenario. But it
| doesn't seem very likely. For example, consciousness and
| material systems seem to interact. Putting drugs in your
| blood changes your conscious experience etc.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Yes, but it doesn't even need mysticism or duality.
|
| There's a more straightforward problem, which is that all
| of science is limited by our ability to generate and test
| mental models, and there's been no research into the
| accuracy and reliability of our modelling processes.
|
| Everything gets filtered through human consciousness -
| math, experiment, all of it. And our definition of
| "objective" is literally just "we cross-check with other
| educated humans and the most reliable and consistent
| experience wins, for now."
|
| How likely is it that human consciousness is the most
| perfect of all possible lenses, doesn't introduce
| distortions, and has no limits, questionable habits, or
| blind spots?
| tim333 wrote:
| Yeah - the nightmare situation doesn't exist if you take
| a materialist approach. Maybe that's evidence for it?
| dataflow wrote:
| FYI, _very_ recently (as in this has been in the news the
| past few days, and the article is from December) an
| article was published that suggested we might already
| have experimental evidence for dark matter being
| primordial black holes, though there are reasons to doubt
| it as well. I just posted the article:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46955545
|
| But this might be easier to read:
| https://www.space.com/astronomy/black-holes/did-
| astronomers-...
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Scientific theories are not curve-fitting.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The dark matter theory broadly is that there is amount of
| invisible matter that obeys the laws of Einsteinian gravity
| but isn't otherwise visible. By itself, it has considerable
| experimental evidence. It doesn't resemble Ptolemaic theories
| of planetary motion notably in that doesn't and hasn't
| required regular updating as new data arrives.
|
| It really fits well with the OP comments. Nothing really
| contradicts the theory but there's no deeper theory beyond
| it. Another comment mentioned as "nightmare" of dark matter
| only have gravitational interaction with other matter. That
| would be very unsatisfying for physicists but wouldn't
| something that really disprove any given theory.
| geysersam wrote:
| When you say dark matter theory doesn't require updates
| when new data arrives, it sounds like you don't count the
| parameters that describe the dark matter distribution to be
| part of the theory.
| klipt wrote:
| Doesn't that imply our theories are "good enough" for all
| practical purposes? If they're impossible to empirically
| disprove?
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| If I have to make a guess, we are at the level of pre-
| copernicus in particle physics.
|
| We are finding local maximums(induction) but the
| establishment cannot handle deduction.
|
| Everything is an overly complex bandaid. At some point
| someone will find something elegant that can predict 70% as
| good, and at some point we will realize: 'Oh that's great,
| the sun is actually at the center of the solar system,
| Copernicious was slightly wrong thinking planets make
| circular rotations. We just needed to use ellipses!'
|
| But with particles.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| The sun is not at the center of the solar system. The
| intellectual leap was not to replace earth with the sun.
| Earth does not "revolve around the sun". The intellectual
| leap was to realize that the situation is somewhat
| symmetric -- they both attract each other, and they orbit
| around their center of gravity (which, yes, is in the sun.
| But not because the sun is the center.)
|
| This sounds like a distinction without consequence, but I
| think that's wrong. The sun is not special. It just has a
| lot of mass. If somebody learns: The earth orbits the sun--
| They don't understand how two black holes can orbit each
| other. If somebody learns: The sun and the earth orbit
| their CM -- They will be able to understand that.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| The theories don't answer all the questions we can ask,
| namely questions about how gravity behaves at the quantum
| scale. (These questions pop up when exploring extremely dense
| regions of space - the _very_ early universe and black
| holes).
| light_triad wrote:
| There's still huge gaps in our understanding: quantum
| gravity, dark matter, what happens before planck time,
| thermodynamics of life and many others.
|
| Part of the problem is that building bigger colliders,
| telescopes, and gravitational wave detectors requires huge
| resources and very powerful computers to store and crunch all
| the data.
|
| We're cutting research instead of funding it right now and
| sending our brightest researchers to Europe and China...
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Absolutely not. Newtonian physics was 'good enough' until we
| disproved it. Imagine where we would be if all we had was
| Newtonian physics.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| You would still make it to the moon (so I've heard). Maybe
| you wouldn't have GPS systems?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Newtonian physics is good enough for _almost_ everything
| that humans do. It 's not good for predicting the shit we
| see in telescopes, and apparently it's not good for GPS,
| although honestly I think without general relativity, GPS
| would still get made but there'd be a fudge factor that
| people just shrug about.
|
| For just about anything else, Newton has us covered.
| cozzyd wrote:
| quantum mechanics (also very much not Newtonian) is much
| more important to our day-to-day lives.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Is it?
| nerdsniper wrote:
| Flash memory (quantum tunneling), lasers (stimulated
| emission), transistors (band theory), MRI machines
| (nuclear spin), GPS (atomic transition), LED's (band
| gap), digital cameras (photoelectric effect), ...the list
| does, in fact, go on, and on, and on.
| narcraft wrote:
| Did you intentionally list things that are clearly not
| essential to day-to-day life?
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'd argue flash memory and transistors certainly are.
| momoschili wrote:
| this kind of distinction is quite stupid in general as
| plenty of things that we rely on for day-to-day
| activities such as our houses, desks, chairs, beds,
| shoes, clothes, etc are all based on Newtonian/classical
| mechanics. Basically everything that we use which existed
| pre-transistor strictly speaking only required classical
| physics.
| cozzyd wrote:
| I mean sure, but the transistor is pretty important to
| the way I live my life now!
| momoschili wrote:
| I'd argue so is the bed you sleep in every night, and the
| roof over your head. Best not to take those for granted,
| as I don't think the transistor would last so long if it
| wasn't sheltered from the environment.
|
| The argument is that these kind of distinctions between
| how "classical" and "quantum" physics affects our lives
| is just a pointless endeavor that even academics don't
| waste their time with.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Oh sure, nothing major. Just transistors, lasers, MRI,
| GPS,nuke power, photovoltaics, LEDs, x-rays, and pretty
| much anything requiring maxwells equations.
|
| Nothing major.
| z3phyr wrote:
| Microchips? A lot of quantum physics is applied here from
| the top of my mind.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Quantum mechanics is relevant to humanity because we
| build things which are very small. General relativity is
| not, because we're more or less incapable of actually
| doing things on a scale where it matters.
| chuckadams wrote:
| General relativity is pretty relevant to GPS satellites.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Typically whenever you look closely at an object with complex
| behavior, there is a system inside made of smaller, simpler
| objects interacting to produce the complexity.
|
| You'd expect that at the bottom, the smallest objects would
| be extremely simple and would follow some single physical
| law.
|
| But the smallest objects we know of still have pretty complex
| behavior! So there's probably another layer underneath that
| we don't know about yet, maybe more than one.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| I agree, and I think that your claim is compatible with the
| comment that you are responding to. Indeed, perhaps it's
| turtles all the way down and there is systematic complexity
| upon systematic complexity governing our universe that
| humanity has been just too limited to experience.
|
| For a historical analogy, classical physics was and is
| sufficient for most practical purposes, and we didn't need
| relativity or quantum mechanics until we had instruments
| that could manipulate them, or that at least experienced
| them. While I guess that there were still macroscopic
| quantum phenomena, perhaps they could have just been
| treated as empirical material properties without a
| systematic universal theory accounting for them, when
| instruments would not have been precise enough to explore
| and exploit predictions of a systematic theory.
| adrianN wrote:
| The experiments that lead to the invention of quantum
| theory are relatively simple and involve objects you can
| touch with your bare hands without damaging them. Some
| are done in high school, eg the photoelectric effect.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| Whereas I did hedge my point regarding macroscopic
| quantum phenomena, I think that the quantum nature of the
| photoelectric effect would have been harder to discern
| without modern access to pure wavelength lighting. But
| you could still rely on precise optics to purify mixed
| light I suppose. But without even optics it should be
| even harder.
| adrian_b wrote:
| All the 19th century experiments that desired
| monochromatic light, including those that have
| characterized the photoelectric effect, used dispersive
| prisms, which separated the light from the Sun or from a
| candle into its monochromatic components. These are
| simple components, easily available.
|
| This allowed experiments where the frequency of light was
| varied continuously, by rotating the prism.
|
| Moreover, already during the first half of the 19th
| century, it became known that using gas-discharge lamps
| with various gases or by heating certain substances in a
| flame you can obtain monochromatic light corresponding to
| certain spectral lines specific to each substance. This
| allowed experiments where the wavelength of the light
| used in them was known with high accuracy.
|
| Already in 1827, Jacques Babinet proposed the replacement
| of the platinum meter standard with the wavelength of
| some spectral line, as the base for the unit of length.
| This proposal has been developed and refined later by
| Maxwell, in 1870, who proposed to use both the wavelength
| and the period of some spectral line for the units of
| length and time. The proposal of Babinet has been adopted
| in SI in 1960, 133 years later, while the proposal of
| Maxwell has been adopted in SI in 1983, 113 years later.
|
| So there were no serious difficulties in the 19th century
| for using monochromatic light. The most important
| difficulty was that their sources of monochromatic light
| had very low intensities, in comparison with the lasers
| that are available today. The low intensity problem was
| aggravated when coherent light was needed, as that could
| be obtained only by splitting the already weak light beam
| that was available. Lasers also provide coherent light,
| not only light with high intensity, thus they greatly
| simplify experiments.
| epsilonsalts wrote:
| Yeah that's the outcome theorized by Godel.
|
| Incompleteness is inherent to our understanding as the
| universe is too vast and endless for us to ever capture a
| holistic model of all the variables.
|
| Godel says something specific about human axiomatic
| systems, akin to a special relativity, but it generalizes
| to physical reality too. A written system is made physical
| writing it out, and never complete. Demonstrates that our
| grasp of physical systems themselves is always incomplete.
| drdeca wrote:
| Godel's incompleteness says almost nothing about this. I
| wish people wouldn't try to apply it in ways that it very
| clearly is not applicable to.
|
| An environment living in Conway's Game of Life could be
| quite capable of hypothesizing that it is implemented in
| Conway's Game of Life.
| mastermage wrote:
| Now the question is are we in Conways Game of Life?
| bananaflag wrote:
| Indeed, as I think I commented before here, this kind of
| self-reference is exactly what makes Godel's proof work.
| longfacehorrace wrote:
| That's not what they were saying.
|
| Systems can hypothesize about themselves but they cannot
| determine why the rules they can learn exist in the first
| place. Prior states are no longer observable so there is
| always incomplete history.
|
| Conway's Game of Life can't explain its own origins just
| itself. Because the origins are no longer observable
| after they occur.
|
| What are the origins of our universe? We can only guess
| without the specificity of direct observation.
| Understanding is incomplete with only simulation and
| theory.
|
| So the comment is right. We would expect to be able to
| define what is now but not completely know what came
| before.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| > You'd expect that at the bottom, the smallest objects
| would be extremely simple and would follow some single
| physical law.
|
| That presupposes that there's a bottom, and that each
| subsequent layer gets simpler. Neither proposition is
| guaranteed, indeed the latter seems incorrect since quantum
| chromodynamics governing the internal structure of the
| proton is much more complex than the interactions governing
| its external behavior.
| csomar wrote:
| I think the problem is that GR and QFT are at odds with each
| other? (I am not quite versed in the subject and this is my
| high-level understanding of the "problem")
| hackingonempty wrote:
| Yes, for all practical purposes. This is the position of
| physicist Sean Carroll and probably others. We may not know
| what is happening in the middle of a black hole, or very
| close to the big bang, but here on Earth we do.
|
| "in the specific regime covering the particles and forces
| that make up human beings and their environments, we have
| good reason to think that all of the ingredients and their
| dynamics are understood to extremely high precision"[0]
|
| 0: https://philpapers.org/archive/CARCAT-33
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| ER=EPR says something completely shocking about the nature
| of the universe. If there is anything to it, we have almost
| no clue about how it works or what its consequences are.
|
| Sean Carroll's own favorite topics (emergent gravity, and
| the many worlds interpretation) are also things that we
| don't have any clue about.
|
| Yes there is stuff we can calculate to very high precision.
| Being able to calculate it, and understanding it, are not
| necessarily the same thing.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| Maybe? We seem to be able to characterize all the stuff we
| have access to. That doesn't mean we couldn't say produce new
| and interesting materials with new knowledge. Before we knew
| about nuclear fission we didn't realize that we couldn't
| predict that anything would happen from a big chunk of
| uranium or the useful applications of that. New physics might
| be quite subtle or specific but still useful.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| All the stuff we have access to?
|
| There isn't even a general physical theory of window glass
| -- i.e. of how to resolve the Kauzmann paradox and define
| the nature of the glass transition. Glass is one of man's
| oldest materials, and yet it's still not understood.
|
| There's also, famously, no general theory for
| superconducting materials, so superconductors are found via
| alchemical trial-and-error processes. (Quite famously a
| couple of years ago, if you remember that circus.)
|
| Solid-state physics has a lot of big holes.
| sixo wrote:
| The point is not to make better predictions of the things we
| already know how to predict. The point is to determine what
| abstractions link the things we don't presently understand--
| because these abstraction tend to open many new doors in
| other directions. This has been the story of physics over and
| over: relativity, quantum theory, etc, not only answered the
| questions they were designed to answer but opened thousands
| of new doors in other directions.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Classical physics was indeed "good enough for all practical
| purposes" as well at the time... but those didn't include
| electronics, nuclear power, most all basic understanding of
| materials, chemistry, and just a tremendous amount of things.
|
| The point being it's not at all clear what we might be
| missing without these impractical little mysteries that so
| far are very distant from every day life.
| andreareina wrote:
| The _fundamental_ theories are good enough in that we can 't
| find a counterexample, but they're only useful up to a
| certain scale before the computational power needed is
| infeasible. We're still hoping to find higher-level emergent
| theories to describe larger systems. By analogy, in principle
| you could use Newton's laws of motion (1685) to predict what
| a gas in a room is going to do, or how fluid will flow in a
| pipe, but in practice it's intractable and we prefer to use
| the higher-level language of fluid mechanics: the ideal gas
| law, the navier-stokes equations, etc.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The existing theories are extremely far from being good
| enough for practical purposes.
|
| There exists a huge number of fundamental quantities that
| should be calculated from the parameters of the "standard
| model", but we cannot compute them, we can only measure them
| experimentally.
|
| For instance, the masses and magnetic moments of the proton,
| of the neutron and of all other hadrons, the masses and
| magnetic moments of the nuclei, the energy spectra of nuclei,
| of atoms, of ions, of molecules, and so on.
|
| The "standard model" can compute only things of negligible
| practical importance, like the statistical properties of the
| particle collisions that are performed at LHC.
|
| It cannot compute anything of value for practical
| engineering. All semiconductor devices, lasers and any other
| devices where quantum physics matters are not designed using
| any consistent theory of quantum physics, but they are
| designed using models based on a great number of empirical
| parameters determined by measurement, for which quantum
| physics is only an inspiration for how the model should look
| like and not a base from which the model can be derived
| rigorously.
| jhrmnn wrote:
| This depends very much on what "practical purposes" are.
| For almost all conceivable technology, relativistic quantum
| mechanics for electrons and light, ie QED, is sufficient
| fundamental theory. This is unlike before quantum
| mechanics, when we basically didn't have fundamental laws
| for chemistry and solid-state physics.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The vast majority of useful things cannot be computed
| with QED from fundamental principles. You cannot compute
| even simple atomic energy spectra.
|
| The fundamental laws of chemistry have not been changed
| much by quantum physics, they just became better
| understood and less mysterious. Quantum mechanics has
| explained various cases of unusual chemical bonds that
| appeared to contradict the simpler rules that were
| believed to be true before the development of quantum
| physics, but not much else has practical importance.
|
| Solid-state physics is a much better example, because
| little of it existed before quantum physics.
|
| Nevertheless, solid-state physics is also the most
| obvious example that the current quantum physics cannot
| be used to compute anything of practical value from first
| principles.
|
| All solid-state physics is based on experimentally-
| measured parameters, which cannot be computed. All
| mathematical models that are used in solid-state physics
| are based on guesses about how the solutions could
| behave, e.g. by introducing various fictitious averaged
| potentials in equations, like the Schroedinger equation,
| and they are not based on computations that use primary
| laws, without guesses that do not have any other
| justification, except that when the model is completed
| with the experimentally-measured values for its
| parameters, it can make reasonably accurate predictions.
|
| Using empirical mathematical models of semiconductor
| materials, e.g. for designing transistors, is perfectly
| fine and entire industries have been developed with such
| empirical models.
|
| However, the fact that one must develop custom empirical
| models for every kind of application, instead of being
| able to derive them from what are believed to be the
| universal laws of quantum physics, demonstrates that
| these are not good enough.
|
| We can live and progress very well with what we have, but
| if someone would discover a better theory or a
| mathematical strategy for obtaining solutions, that could
| be used to compute the parameters that we must now
| measure and which could be used to model everything that
| we need in a way for which there would be guarantees that
| the model is adequate, then that would be a great advance
| in physics.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| What are you talking about? The spectra of hydrogen is
| very well understood and a text book example for students
| to calculate.
|
| We use spectra to test QED calculations to something like
| 14 digits.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The hydrogenoid atoms and ions, with a single electron,
| are the exception that proves the rule, because anything
| more complex cannot be computed accurately.
|
| The spectrum of hydrogen (ignoring the fine structure)
| could be computed with the empirical rules of Rydberg
| before the existence of quantum physics. Quantum physics
| has just explained it in terms of simpler assumptions.
|
| Quantum physics explains a great number of features of
| the atomic spectra, but it is unable to compute anything
| for complex atoms with an accuracy comparable with the
| experimental measurements.
|
| The QED calculations with "14 digits" of precision are
| for things that are far simpler than atomic spectra, e.g.
| for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron, and even for
| such things the computations are extremely difficult and
| error-prone.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > The fundamental laws of chemistry have not been changed
| much by quantum physics, they just became better
| understood and less mysterious. Quantum mechanics has
| explained various cases of unusual chemical bonds that
| appeared to contradict the simpler rules that were
| believed to be true before the development of quantum
| physics, but not much else has practical importance.
|
| Um, false? The fundamentals of chemistry are about
| electron orbitals (especially the valence ones) and their
| interactions between atoms to form molecules. _All_ of my
| college chemistry courses delved somewhat into quantum
| mechanics, with the biggest helping being in organic
| chemistry. And modern computational chemistry is
| basically modeling the QED as applied to atoms.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Lattice-QCD can, by now, actually calculate the masses of
| the proton, neutron from first principles pretty
| accurately.
|
| This is of course a brute-force approach. We currently
| lack, in all fields, theory for emergent properties. And
| the mass of the proton definitely is such.
| adrian_b wrote:
| There have been claims about this, starting with "Ab
| Initio Determination of Light Hadron Masses" (Science,
| 2008).
|
| Nevertheless, until now I have not seen anything that
| qualifies as "computing the masses".
|
| Research papers like that do not contain any information
| that would allow someone to verify their claims.
| Moreover, such papers are much more accurately described
| as "fitting the parameters of the Standard Model, such as
| quark masses, to approximately match the measured
| masses", and not as actually computing the masses.
|
| The published results of hadron masses are not much more
| accurate than you could compute mentally, without using
| any QCD, much less Lattice QCD, by estimating approximate
| quark masses from the composition in quarks of the
| hadrons and summing them. What complicates the mass
| computations is that while the heavy quarks have masses
| that do not vary much, the effective masses of the light
| quarks (especially u and d, which compose the protons and
| neutrons) vary a lot between different particles. Because
| of this, there is a very long way between a vague
| estimate of the mass and an accurate value.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I find the idea that reality might be quantized fascinating, so
| that all information that exists could be stored in a storage
| medium big enough.
|
| It's also kind of interesting how causality allegedly has a
| speed limit and it's rather slow all things considered.
|
| Anyway, in 150 years we absolutely came a long way, we'll
| figure it that out eventually, but as always, figuring it out
| might lead even bigger questions and mysteries...
| csomar wrote:
| If reality is quantized, how can you store all the
| information out there without creating a real simulation?
| (Essentially cloning the environment you want stored)
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Note that "reality" is not quantized in any existing theory.
| Even in QM/QFT, only certain properties are quantized, such
| as mass or charge. Others, like position or time, are very
| much _not_ quantized - the distance between two objects can
| very well be 2.5pi planck lengths. And not only are they not
| quantized, the math of these theories does _not_ work if you
| try to discretize space or time or other properties.
| cvoss wrote:
| > all information that exists could be stored in a storage
| medium big enough
|
| Why is quantization necessary for information storage? If
| you're speculating about a storage device external to our
| universe, it need not be constrained by any of our physical
| laws and their consequences, such as by being made up of
| finitely many atoms or whatever. It might have components
| like arbitrary precision real number registers.
|
| And if you're speculating about a storage device that lives
| within our universe, you have a contradiction because it's
| maximum information capacity can't exceed the information
| content of its own description.
| atakan_gurkan wrote:
| I disagree, but maybe only because we are using different
| definitions. For example, we have neutrino oscillations, this
| requires neutrino mass, which is not part of the standard model
| of particle physics. In cosmology, there is "lithium problem"
| (amongst others), which cannot be explained by Lambda-CDM. We
| know our physical theories are incomplete not only because our
| mathematical frameworks (GR & QFT) are incompatible (similar to
| the incompatibility of Maxwell's equations and the Galilean
| transformations that form the basis of Newtonian mechanics),
| but also there are these unexplained phenomena, much like the
| blackbody radiation at the turn of previous century.
| T-A wrote:
| > neutrino mass, which is not part of the standard model of
| particle physics
|
| This is getting tiresome...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46956197
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| I wouldn't say that we have no experimental data which
| contradicts them. Rather, we do have experimental data which
| contradicts them, but no experimental data that points us in
| the direction of a solution (and whenever we go looking for the
| latter, we fail).
|
| Consider e.g. neutrino masses. We have plenty of experimental
| data indicating that neutrinos oscillate and therefore have
| mass. This poses a problem for the standard model (because
| there are problems unless the mass comes from the Higgs
| mechanism, but in the standard model neutrinos can't
| participate in the Higgs mechanism due to always being left-
| handed). But whenever we do experiments to attempt to verify
| one of the ways of fixing this problem -- are there separate
| right-handed neutrinos we didn't know about, or maybe instead
| the right-handed neutrinos were just antineutrinos all along?
| -- we turn up nothing.
| T-A wrote:
| > the standard model neutrinos can't participate in the Higgs
| mechanism due to always being left-handed
|
| This again? It's only true if you insist on sticking with the
| original form of Weinberg's "model of leptons" from 1967 [1],
| which was written when massless neutrinos were consistent
| with available experimental data. Adding quark-style (i.e.
| Dirac) neutrino mass terms to the Standard Model is a trivial
| exercise. If doing so offends some prejudice of yours that
| right-handed neutrino can not exist because they have no
| electric and weak charge (in which case you must really hate
| photons too, not to mention gravity) you can resort to a
| Majorana mass term [2] instead.
|
| That question (are neutrinos Dirac or Majorana?) is not a
| "contradiction", it's an uncertainty caused by how difficult
| it is to experimentally rule out either option. It is most
| certainly not "a problem for the standard model".
|
| [1]
| https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.19.1264
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorana_equation#Mass_term
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's trivial to add a matrix to account for neutrino
| masses, but that doesn't explain their origin.
|
| That is not a trivial problem at all. It certainly has not
| been solved, and it's possible experiments will say "Both
| the current ideas are wrong."
| T-A wrote:
| > It's trivial to add a matrix to account for neutrino
| masses
|
| The matrix you are thinking of is presumably the PMNS
| matrix [1]. It's equivalent to the CKM matrix for quarks
| [2]. The purpose of both is to parametrize the mismatch
| between flavor [3] and mass eigenstates, not "to account
| for neutrino masses" or "explain their origin".
|
| As far as the standard model is concerned, neutrino
| masses and quark masses all originate from Yukawa
| couplings [4] with the Higgs field. Adding such terms to
| Weinberg's original model of leptons is very much a
| trivial exercise, and was done already well before there
| was solid evidence for non-zero neutrino masses.
|
| > it's possible experiments will say "Both the current
| ideas are wrong."
|
| Assuming that by "Both current ideas" you mean Dirac vs
| Majorana mass, those are the only available relativistic
| invariants. For both to be wrong, special relativity
| would have to be wrong. Hopefully I don't need to explain
| how extraordinarily unlikely that is.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontecorvo%E2%80%93Maki
| %E2%80%...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabibbo%E2%80%93Kobayas
| hi%E2%8...
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavour_(particle_physics)
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukawa_coupling
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| Thanks Lord Kelvin
| KolibriFly wrote:
| This era might be one where we have to earn the next clue much
| more slowly
| tim333 wrote:
| >GR and QFT are incompatible
|
| I did physics at uni and kind of dropped out when it got too
| hard.
|
| I've long guessed the incompatibility is because the maths is
| just too hard for human brains, though I'm probably biased
| there, and we'll get a breakthrough when AI can handle much
| more complex maths than us. Probably not so long till we find
| out on that one.
|
| I once tried to write a simplified explanation for why a spin-2
| quantum theory naturally results in something like general
| relativity and totally failed - man that stuff's hard.
| jfengel wrote:
| The math is hard, but I don't think that's the problem. Hard
| math eventually succumbs.
|
| I think that even if AI were to find a good unification of GR
| and QM, we wouldn't be able to test it. We might accept it
| without additional confirmation if it were sufficiently
| natural-feeling (the way we accepted Newtonian gravity long
| before we could measure G), but there's no guarantee that
| we'd ever be able to meaningfully test it.
|
| We could get lucky -- such a theory might point at a solution
| to some of the few loose threads we get out of existing
| collider and cosmological measurements -- but we might not.
| We could be stuck wishing we had a galaxy-sized collider.
| tim333 wrote:
| It might explain some of the many physics observations that
| we don't have explanations for like why do we have the
| particles we have and why those properties.
| davidw wrote:
| It's impossible to tell without opening the box the particle
| physics is in.
| bsder wrote:
| Theoretical physics progresses via the anomalies it can't
| explain.
|
| The problem is that we've mostly explained everything we have
| easy access to. We simply don't have that many anomalies left.
| Theoretical physicists were both happy and disappointed that the
| LHC simply verified everything--theories were correct, but there
| weren't really any pointers to where to go next.
|
| Quantum gravity seems to be the big one, but that is not
| something we can penetrate easily. LIGO just came online, and
| could only really detect enormous events (like black hole
| mergers).
|
| And while we don't always understand what things do as we scale
| up or in the aggregate, that doesn't require _new physics_ to
| explain.
| mhandley wrote:
| Neutrino mass is another anomaly, which is at least slightly
| easier to probe than quantum gravity:
| https://cerncourier.com/a/the-neutrino-mass-puzzle/
| beezle wrote:
| Please do not conflate the broad "theoretical physics" with the
| very specific "beyond the standard model" physics questions.
| There are many other areas of physics with countless unsolved
| problems/mysteries.
| bsder wrote:
| Sure, there are things like "Really, how do superconductors
| work?", but nobody (mostly) believes that understanding
| things like that requires "new physics".
|
| And, I think, most people would place that kind of stuff
| under "solid state physics" anyway.
| squeefers wrote:
| oh i dont know, being able to predict the path of a
| particle seems pretty basic to me, and it cannot be done
| for any given particle.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| The use of "AI" in particle physics is not new. In 1999 they were
| using neural nets to compute various results. Here's one from
| _Measurement of the top quark pair production cross section in
| p-p collisions using multijet final states_
| [https://repository.ias.ac.in/36977/1/36977.pdf]
|
| "The analysis has been optimized using neural networks to achieve
| the smallest expected fractional uncertainty on the t-t
| production cross section"
| jdshaffer wrote:
| I remember back in 1995 or so being in a professor's office at
| Indiana University and he was talking about trying to figure
| out how to use Neural Networks to automatically track particle
| trails in bubble chamber results. He was part of a project at
| CERN at the time. So, yeah, they've been using NNs for quite
| awhile. :-)
| elashri wrote:
| Particle identification using NN classifiers was actually on
| the early success stories of NN. These are pretty standard
| algorithms in tracking and trigger software in HEP
| experiments now. There are even standard tools in the field
| to help you train your own.
|
| What is more interesting currently is things like anomaly
| detection using ML/NN and foundational models..etc.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I did my PhD in physics using nn back in 1997. It was not
| thriving yet, but was quite advanced already.
|
| I remember I used a library (THE library) from a German
| university which was all the rage at that time.
| aatd86 wrote:
| Isn't it the mathematics that is lagging? Amplituhedron? Higher
| dimensional models?
|
| Fun fact: I got to read the thesis of one my uncles who was a
| young professor back in the 90's. Right when they were
| discovering bosons. They were already modelling them as tensors
| back then. And probably multilinear transformations.
|
| Now that I am grown I can understand a little more, I was about
| 10 years old back then. I had no idea he was studying and
| teaching the state of the art. xD
| elzbardico wrote:
| Tensors are pretty old in physics; they are a central concept
| in Einstein's General Relativity.
|
| You can find tensors even in some niche stuff in
| macroeconomics.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Tensors are like 200 years old in mathematics. Gauss talked
| about Tensors.
| aatd86 wrote:
| What was new was not tensors. It was the representation in SU
| of mesons for photon-photon collisions. But even saying that
| is skimming the surface. I can't read beyond the knowledge
| gap.
| aatd86 wrote:
| SO(3)*, not SU
| gowld wrote:
| Information content of the article:
|
| The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 completed the Standard
| Model of particle physics, but the field has since faced a
| "crisis" due to the lack of new discoveries. The Large Hadron
| Collider (LHC) has not found any particles or forces beyond the
| Standard Model, defying theoretical expectations that additional
| particles would appear to solve the "hierarchy problem"--the
| unnatural gap between the Higgs mass and the Planck scale. This
| absence of new physics challenged the "naturalness" argument that
| had long guided the field.
|
| In 2012, physicist Adam Falkowski predicted the field would
| undergo a slow decay without new discoveries. Reviewing the state
| of the field in 2026, he maintains that experimental particle
| physics is indeed dying, citing a "brain drain" where talented
| postdocs are leaving the field for jobs in AI and data science.
| However, the LHC remains operational and is expected to run for
| at least another decade.
|
| Artificial intelligence is now being integrated into the field to
| improve data handling. AI pattern recognizers are classifying
| collision debris more accurately than human-written algorithms,
| allowing for more precise measurements of "scattering amplitude"
| or interaction probabilities. Some physicists, like Matt
| Strassler, argue that new physics might not lie at higher
| energies but could be hidden in "unexplored territory" at lower
| energies, such as unstable dark matter particles that decay into
| muon-antimuon pairs.
|
| CERN physicists have proposed a Future Circular Collider (FCC), a
| 91-kilometer tunnel that would triple the circumference of the
| LHC. The plan involves first colliding electrons to measure
| scattering amplitudes precisely, followed by proton collisions at
| energies roughly seven times higher than the LHC later in the
| century. Formal approval and funding for this project are not
| expected before 2028.
|
| Meanwhile, U.S. physicists are pursuing a muon collider. Muons
| are elementary particles like electrons but are 200 times
| heavier, allowing for high-energy, clean collisions. The
| challenge is that muons are highly unstable and decay in
| microseconds, requiring rapid acceleration. A June 2025 national
| report endorsed the program, which is estimated to take about 30
| years to develop and cost between $10 and $20 billion.
|
| China has reportedly moved away from plans to build a massive
| supercollider. Instead, they are favoring a cheaper experiment
| costing hundreds of millions of dollars--a "super-tau-charm
| facility"--designed to produce tau particles and charm quarks at
| lower energies.
|
| On the theoretical side, some researchers have shifted to
| "amplitudeology," the abstract mathematical study of scattering
| amplitudes, in hopes of reformulating particle physics equations
| to connect with quantum gravity. Additionally, Jared Kaplan, a
| former physicist and co-founder of the AI company Anthropic,
| suggests that AI progress is outpacing scientific
| experimentation, positing that future colliders or theoretical
| breakthroughs might eventually be designed or discovered by AI
| rather than humans.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Here is one fact that seems, to me, pretty convincing that there
| is another layer underneath what we know.
|
| The charge of electrons is -1 and protons +1. It has been
| experimentally measured out to 12 digits or so to be the same
| magnitude, just opposite charge. However, there are no theories
| why this is -- they are simply measured and that is it.
|
| It beggars belief that these _just happen_ to be exactly (as far
| as we can measure) the same magnitude. There almost certainly is
| a lower level mechanism which explains why they are exactly the
| same but opposite.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If it wasn't the case then matter wouldn't be stable.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Is that actually true, if the charges differed at the 12th
| decimal place only? That's non-obvious to me.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Yes because matter would have a residual charge that would
| massively overpower gravity even at that small a
| discrepancy.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| To be devil's advocate maybe there is a surplus deficit
| of 1-part-in-10^12 in electrons relative to protons.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Agreed (well, assuming the delta is more than a small
| fraction of a percent or whatever). But this is begging the
| question. If they are really independent then the vast,
| overwhelming fraction of all possible universes simply
| wouldn't have matter. Ours does have matter, so it makes our
| universe exceedingly unlikely. I find it far more
| parsimonious to assume they are connected by an undiscovered
| (and perhaps never to be discovered) mechanism.
|
| Some lean on the multiverse and the anthropic principle to
| explain it, but that is far less parsimonious.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Also note that _the proton is not an elementary particle_
| so it is really a question of "are the various quarks
| really 1/3, 2/3 of an electron charge".
|
| Crackpots have found thousands of formula that try to
| explain the ratio of the proton to electron mass but there
| is no expectation that there is a simple relationship
| between those masses since the proton mass is the sum of
| all sorts of terms.
| gsf_emergency_6 wrote:
| Crackpots are downstream of the "physics community"
| awarding cultural cachet to certain types of questions --
| those with affordances they don't necessarily "deserve"--
| but not others.
|
| (I use quotes because those are emergent concepts)
|
| Same as "hacker community" deciding that AI is worth
| FOMO'ing about
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Well, I'm not sure I believe that "hierarchy problems" in
| HEP are real, but I do think the nature of the neutrino
| mass is interesting (we _know_ it has a mass so it is a
| something and not a nothing) as is the nature of dark
| matter, the matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the non-
| observation of proton decay. That article has nothing to
| say about non-accelerator "big science" in HEP such as
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande
|
| which targets many of those questions.
|
| As for the "hacker community" I think AI is really
| controversial. I think other people find the endless spam
| of slop articles about AI more offensive than I do. It's
| obvious that these are struggling to make it off the
| "new/" page. The ones that offend me are the wanna-be
| celebrity software managers [1] who think we care what
| they think about delivering software that almost works.
|
| [1] sorry, I liked DHH's industry-changing vision behind
| Ruby-on-Rails, but his pronunciations about software
| management were always trash. You might make the case
| that Graham worked with a lot of startups so his essays
| _might_ have had some transferable experience but they
| didn 't. Atwood and Spolsky, likewise. Carmack is the one
| exception, he's a genius
| gsf_emergency_6 wrote:
| Carmack is the Midwestern middle middle-class
| (culturally) dropout amongst them. Classic
| jiggawatts wrote:
| An interesting early theory of gravity was: "What if opposite
| charges attract slight more strongly than identical charges
| repel each other?"
|
| If you tally up the forces, the difference is a residual
| attraction that can model gravity. It was rejected on various
| experimental and theoretical grounds, but it goes to show
| that if things don't cancel out _exactly_ then the result can
| still leave a universe that would appear normal to us.
| wvbdmp wrote:
| Aren't things like this usually explained by being the only
| viable configuration, or is that not the case here?
| throwup238 wrote:
| Or why the quarks that make up protons and neutrons have
| fractional charges, with +1 protons mixing two +2/3 up quarks
| and one -1/3 down quark, and the neutral neutron is one up
| quark and two down quarks. And where are all the other Quarks
| in all of this, busy tending bar?
| david-gpu wrote:
| They have fractional charges because that is how we happen to
| measure charge. If our unit of charge had been set when we
| knew about quarks, we would have chosen those as fundamental,
| and the charge of the electron would instead be -3.
|
| Now, the ratios between these charges appear to be
| fundamental. But the presence of fractions is arbitrary.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > If our unit of charge had been set when we knew about
| quarks, we would have chosen those as fundamental, and the
| charge of the electron would instead be -3.
|
| Actually, I doubt it. Because of their color charge, quarks
| can never be found in an unbound state but instead in
| various kinds of hadrons. The ways that quarks combine
| cause all hadrons to end up with an integer charge, with
| the 2/3 and - 1/3 charges on various quarks merely being
| ways to make them come out to resulting integer charges.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Isn't charge quantized? Observable isolated charges are
| quantized in units of e. You can call it -3 and +3 but that
| just changes the relative value for the quanta. The
| interesting question is still why the positive and neutral
| particles are nonelementary particles made up of quarks
| with a fraction of e, the math made possible only by
| including negatively charged ones (and yet electrons are
| elementary particles).
| Paracompact wrote:
| Technically, the charge of a proton can be derived from its
| constituent 2 up quarks and 1 down quark, which have charges
| 2/3 and -1/3 respectively. I'm not aware of any deeper reason
| why these should be simple fractional ratios of the charge of
| the electron, however, I'm not sure there needs to be one. If
| you believe the stack of turtles ends somewhere, you have to
| accept there will eventually be (hopefully simple) coincidences
| between certain fundamental values, no?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you have to accept there will eventually be (hopefully
| simple) coincidences between certain fundamental values, no?_
|
| No. It's almost certainly not a coincidence that these
| charges are symmetric like that (in stable particles that
| like to hang out together).
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > coincidence
|
| Nice
| Paracompact wrote:
| Whence your confidence? As they say in math, "There aren't
| enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of
| them." If we assume the turtle stack ends, and it ends
| simply (i.e. with small numbers), some of those numbers may
| wind up looking alike. Even more so if you find anthropic
| arguments convincing, or if you consider sampling bias
| (which may be what you mean by, "in stable particles that
| like to hang out together").
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if you find anthropic arguments convincing_
|
| Which makes every constant fair game. Currently, we don't
| have a good process for explaining multiple universes
| beyond divine preference. Hence the notion that a random
| number settled on mirror whole sums.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I'm aware of the charge coming from quarks, but my point
| remains.
|
| > you have to accept there will eventually be (hopefully
| simple) coincidences between certain fundamental values, no?
|
| When the probability of coincidence is epsilon, then, no.
| Right now they are the same to 12 digits, but that undersells
| it, because that is just the trailing digits. There is
| nothing which says the leading digits must be the same, eg,
| one could be 10^30 times bigger than the other. Are you still
| going to just shrug and say "coincidence?"
|
| That there are 26 fundamental constants and this one is just
| exactly the same is untenable.
| Paracompact wrote:
| If you imagine the universe is made of random _real_
| fundamental constants rather than random _integer_
| fundamental constants, then indeed there 's no reason to
| expect such collisions. But if our universe starts from
| discrete foundations, then there may be no more satisfying
| explanation to this than there is to the question of, say,
| why the survival threshold and the reproduction threshold
| in Conway's Game of Life both involve the number 3. _That
| 's just how that universe is defined._
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Why do you assume the two have to be small integers?
| There is nothing currently in physics which would
| disallow the electron to be -1 and the proton to be
| +1234567891011213141516171819. The fact they are both of
| magnitude 1 is a huge coincidence.
| Paracompact wrote:
| I'm not assuming they have to be small integers--I'm
| saying that _if_ the universe is built on discrete rather
| than continuous foundations, then small integers and
| coincidences at the bottom-turtle theory-of-everything
| become much less surprising. You 're treating the space
| of possible charge values as if it's the reals, or at
| least some enormous range, but I consider that unlikely.
|
| Consider: in every known case where we have found a
| deeper layer of explanation for a "coincidence" in
| physics, the explanation involved some symmetry or
| conservation law that _constrained_ the values to a small
| discrete set. The quark model took seemingly arbitrary
| coincidences and revealed them as consequences of a
| restrictive structure. auntienomen 's point about anomaly
| cancellation is also exactly this kind of thing. The
| smallness of the set in question isn't forced, but it is
| plausible.
|
| But I actually think we're agreeing more than you
| realize. You're saying "this can't be a coincidence,
| there must be a deeper reason." I'm saying the deeper
| reason might bottom out at "the consistent discrete
| structures are sparse and this is one of them," which is
| a real explanation, but it might not have the form of yet
| another dynamical layer underneath.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| Sparsity != symmetry.
|
| It's simple to say "Ah well, it's sparse" that doesn't
| mean anything and doesn't explain anything.
|
| Symmetries are equivalent to a conserved quantity. They
| exist because something else is invariant with respect to
| some transformation and vice versa. We didn't discover
| arbitrary constraints we found a conserved quantity & the
| implied symmetry.
|
| "There are integers", "the numbers should be small" all
| of these are nothing like what works normally. They
| aren't symmetries. At most they're from some anthropic
| argument about collections of universes being more or
| less likely, which is its own rabbit hole that most
| people stay away from.
| jaybrendansmith wrote:
| Perhaps only visible matter is made up of particles with
| these exactly matching charges? If they did not match,
| they would not stay in equilibrium, and would not be so
| easily found.
| thegabriele wrote:
| I like this survivorship bias, "evolution" works in
| everything why not in the shaping of the "costants" of
| the universe as we know it?
| IsTom wrote:
| If they were, I'd assume that there wouldn't be anyone in
| the universe to observe that.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| And why does this hole fit my shape perfectly? Asked the
| puddle.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| You seem to be contradicting yourself, having already
| said:
|
| >I'm aware of the charge coming from quark
|
| So it's not +huge_number because the number of quarks
| involved is small. Sure we still don't understand the
| exact reason, but it's hardly as surprising that, uh,
| charge is quantized...
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think I agree with you. It could be just a matter of
| static bias or some other fairly simple mechanism to
| explain why these numbers are the same.
|
| Imagine an object made of only red marbles as the 'base
| state'. Now you somehow manage to remove one red marble:
| you're at -1. You add a red marble and you're at +1. It
| doesn't require any other marbles. Then you go and measure
| the charge of a marble and you and up at some 12 digit
| number. The one state will show negative that 12 digit
| number the other will show positive that 12 digit number.
|
| Assigning charge as being the property of a proton or an
| electron rather than one of their equivalent constituent
| components is probably a mistake.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Shrugging and calling it a coincidence is generally not an
| end state when figuring out how something works.
| auntienomen wrote:
| There does appear to be a deeper reason, but it's really not
| well understood.
|
| Consistent quantum field theories involving chiral fermions
| (such as the Standard Model) are relatively rare: the charges
| have to satisfy a set of polynomial relationships with the
| inspiring name "gauge anomaly cancellation conditions". If
| these conditions aren't satisfied, the mathematical model
| will fail pretty spectacularly. It won't be unitary, can't
| couple consistently to gravity, won't allow high and low
| energy behavior to decouple,..
|
| For the Standard Model, the anomaly cancellation conditions
| imply that the sum of electric charges within a generation
| must vanish, which they do:
|
| 3 colors of quark * ( up charge 2/3 - down charge 1/3) +
| electron charge -1 + neutrino charge 0 = 0.
|
| So, there's something quite special about the charge
| assignments in the Standard Model. They're nowhere near as
| arbitrary as they could be a priori.
|
| Historically, this has been taken as a hint that the standard
| model should come from a simpler "grand unified" model.
| Particle accelerators and cosmology hace turned up at best
| circumstantial evidence for these so far. To me, it's one of
| the great mysteries.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| So they _have_ to cancel, or we don 't have a universe?
| ("Have to" not because we need electrical neutrality for
| large-scale matter - though we do need that - but because
| you can't build a quantum field that doesn't explode in
| various ways without it.)
| auntienomen wrote:
| There's always some risk of confusing the model with the
| reality, but yeah, if you have chiral fermions
| interacting through gauge fields and gravity, the charges
| have to say satisfy all of the anomaly cancellation
| conditions (there's about half a dozen) or the model will
| be inconsistent.
| elfly wrote:
| Well yes, but the coincidence that Quarks have charges of
| multiples of another particle, that is not made up of quarks,
| should rise your brow, shouldn't it?
|
| Like we could accept coincidences if at the bottom is all
| turtles, but here we see a stack of turtles and a stack of
| crocodiles and we are asking why they have similar
| characteristics even if they are so different.
| rjh29 wrote:
| One argument (while unsatisfying) is there are trillions of
| possible configurations, but ours is the one that happened to
| work which is why we're here to observe it. Changing any of
| them even a little bit would result in an empty universe.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| There's a name for that: the Anthropic principle. And it is
| _deeply_ unsatisfying as an explanation.
|
| And does it even apply here? If the charge on the electron
| differed from the charge on the proton at just the 12th
| decimal place, would that actually prevent complex life from
| forming. Citation needed for that one.
|
| I agree with OP. The unexplained symmetry points to a deeper
| level.
| krzat wrote:
| I find the anthropic principle fascinating.
|
| I was born to this world at a certain point in time. I look
| around, and I see environment compatible with me: air,
| water, food, gravity, time, space. How deep does this go?
| Why I am not an ant or bacteria?
| GordonS wrote:
| Presumably your parents weren't ants?
| squeefers wrote:
| > There's a name for that: the Anthropic principle. And it
| is deeply unsatisfying as an explanation.
|
| i feel the same about many worlds
| andyfilms1 wrote:
| For a given calculation on given hardware, the 100th digit of a
| floating point decimal can be replicated every time. But that
| digit is basically just noise, and has no influence on the 1st
| digit.
|
| In other words: There can be multiple "layers" of linked
| states, but that doesn't necessarily mean the lower layers
| "create" the higher layers, or vice versa.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| This is "expected" from theory, because all particles seem to
| be just various aspects of the "same things" that obey a fairly
| simple algebra.
|
| For example, pair production is: photon +
| photon = electron + (-)electron
|
| You can take that diagram, _rotate it_ in spacetime, and you
| have the direct equivalent, which is electrons changing paths
| by exchanging a photon: electron + photon =
| electron - photon
|
| There are similar formulas for beta decay, which is:
| proton = neutron + electron + (-)neutrino
|
| You can also "rotate" this diagram, or any other Feyman
| diagram. This very, _very_ strongly hints that the fundamental
| particles aren 't actually fundamental in some sense.
|
| The precise _why_ of this algebra is the big question! People
| are chipping away at it, and there 's been slow but steady
| progress.
|
| One of the "best" approaches I've seen is "The Harari-Shupe
| preon model and nonrelativistic quantum phase space"[1] by
| Piotr Zenczykowski which makes the claim that just like how
| Schrodinger "solved" the quantum wave equation in 3D space by
| using complex numbers, it's possible to solve a slightly
| extended version of the same equation in 6D _phase space_ ,
| yielding matrices that have properties that match the Harari-
| Shupe preon model. The preon model claims that fundamental
| particles are further subdivided into preons, the "charges" of
| which neatly add up to the observed zoo of particle charges,
| and a simple additive algebra over these charges match Feyman
| diagrams. The preon model has issues with particle masses and
| binding energies, but Piotr's work neatly sidesteps that issue
| by claiming that the preons aren't "particles" as such, but
| just mathematical properties of these matrices.
|
| I put "best" in quotes above because there isn't anything
| remotely like a widely accepted theory for this yet, just a few
| clever people throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0223
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > This is "expected" from theory, because all particles seem
| to be just various aspects of the "same things" that obey a
| fairly simple algebra.
|
| But again, this is just observation, and it is consistent
| with the charges we measure (again, just observation). It
| doesn't explain why these rules must behave as they do.
|
| > This very, very strongly hints that the fundamental
| particles aren't actually fundamental in some sense.
|
| This is exactly what I am suggesting in my original comment:
| this "coincidence" is not a coincidence but falls out from
| some deeper, shared mechanism.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > this is just observation
|
| Sure, but that's fundamental to observing the universe from
| the inside. We can't ever be sure of anything other than
| our observations because we can't step outside our universe
| to look at its source code.
|
| > It doesn't explain why these rules must behave as they
| do.
|
| _Not yet!_ Once we have a a theory of everything (TOE), or
| just a better model of fundamental particles, we _may_ have
| a satisfactory explanation.
|
| For example, if the theory ends up being something vaguely
| like Wolfram's "Ruliad", then we may be able to point at
| some aspect of very trivial mathematical rules and say:
| that "the electron and proton charges pop out of that
| naturally, it's the only way it can be, nothing else makes
| sense".
|
| We can of course never be totally certain, but that type of
| answer may be both good enough and the best we can do.
| smnplk wrote:
| There are layers science can not access.
| f30e3dfed1c9 wrote:
| Well OK then! Let's tell all the physicists they can close up
| shop now. They might not have realized it, but they're done.
| All their little "theories" and "experiments" and what not
| have taken them as far as they can go.
| albatross79 wrote:
| We're already in the realm of virtual particles,
| instantaneous collapse, fields with abstract geometric
| shape and no material reality, wave particle duality,
| quantized energy etc. The project of physics was to
| discover what the universe was made of. None of these
| things can answer that. If intelligibility was the goal, we
| lost that. So in an important sense, they might as well
| have closed up shop. If you're interested in the specific
| value of a certain property to the nth decimal place, there
| is work to do, but if you're interested in the workings of
| the universe in a fundamentally intelligible sense, that
| project is over with. What they're doing now is making
| doodles around mathematical abstractions that fit the data
| and presenting those as discoveries.
| paganel wrote:
| > Let's tell all the physicists they can close up shop now.
|
| Yes, that's part of the plan. I mean, not to _all_ the
| physicists, just to those whose work doesn 't bring in
| results anymore, and it hasn't for 30 to 40 years now. At
| some point they (said physicists) have to stop their work
| and ask themselves what it is that they're doing, because
| judging by their results it doesn't seem like they're doing
| much, while consuming a lot of resources (which could have
| been better spent elsewhere).
| jacquesm wrote:
| By observing the discrepancies between theories we _are_
| accessing those layers. Whether we can access them with
| instruments is a different matter but with our minds we
| apparently can.
| cozzyd wrote:
| As soon as charge is quantized, this will happen. In any
| quantization scheme you will have some smallest charge. There
| are particles with charge +2 (the Delta++, for example), but
| ... anything that can decay while preserving quantum numbers
| will decay, so you end up with protons in the end. (ok, the
| quarks have fractional charge but that's not really relevant at
| scales we care about QED)
|
| If the question is, why is quantum mechanics the correct
| theory? Well, I guess that's how our universe works...
| andyferris wrote:
| The hint from quantum field theory (and things like lattice
| gauge theory) is that charge emerges from interesting
| topological states/defects of the underlying field (by
| "interesting topological shapes" I mean - imagine a vortex in
| the shape of a ring/doughnut). It's kind of a topological
| property of a state of the photonic field, if you will -
| something like a winding number (which has to be an integer).
| Electric charge is a kind of "defect" or "kink" in the photonic
| field, while color charge (quarks) are defects in the strong-
| force field, etc.
|
| When an electron-positron pair is formed from a vacuum, we get
| all sorts of interesting geometry which I struggle to grasp or
| picture clearly. I understand the fact that these are fermions
| with spin-1/2 can similarly be explained as localized defects
| in a field of particles with integer spin (possibly a feature
| of the exact same "defect" as the charge itself, in the
| photonic field, which is what defines an electron as an
| electron).
|
| EDIT:
|
| > However, there are no theories why this is -- they are simply
| measured and that is it.
|
| My take is that there _are_ accepted hypotheses for this, but
| solving the equations (of e.g. the standard model, in full 3D
| space) to a precision suitable to compare to experimental data
| is currently entirely impractical (at least for some things
| like absolute masses - though I think there are predictions of
| ratios etc that work out between theory and measurement - sorry
| not a specialist in high-energy physics, had more exposure to
| low-energy quantum topological defects).
| RupertSalt wrote:
| > interesting topological states/defects of the underlying
| field
|
| eddies in the space-time continuum?
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Is he?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| What?
| quchen wrote:
| (Note the post you've replied to mentioned electrons and
| _protons_, not positrons.)
| empath75 wrote:
| > something like a winding number (which has to be an
| integer). Electric charge is a kind of "defect" or "kink" in
| the photonic field, while color charge (quarks) are defects
| in the strong-force field, etc.
|
| Quark's don't have integer charge
| franktankbank wrote:
| Redefine the down quark charge as the fundamental unit and
| you lose nothing.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > you lose nothing
|
| For some reason electrons have charge -3 then, that
| coincides with the proton charge for no good reason.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Right, but then you have the questions of 1) why do
| leptons have (a multiple of) the same fundamental unit as
| quarks, and 2) why does that multiple equal the number of
| quarks in a baryon, so that protons have a charge of
| exactly the same magnitude as electrons?
|
| I mean, I guess you could say that charge comes from (or
| _is_ ) the coupling of the quark/lepton field to the
| electromagnetic field, and therefore if it's something
| that's quantized on the electromagnetic side of that,
| then quarks and leptons would have the same scale. I'm
| not sure that's the real answer, much less that it's
| proven. (But it might be - it's a long time since my
| physics degree...)
| franktankbank wrote:
| > it's a long time since my physics degree...
|
| me too, just addressing that a fraction might as well be
| an integer with some redefinition of the fundamental
| charge.
| phkahler wrote:
| Have you seen this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
| 281322004_The_elect...
|
| Or any of the more recent work that references it?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Is this the same idea behind Williamson & Van der Mark's
| electron model?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYyrgDEJLOA
| phkahler wrote:
| I'm convinced there are some semi-classical explanations that
| just haven't been figured out.
|
| Electrons are helically moving photons:
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281322004_The_elect...
|
| That's some interesting/wacky stuff, but there has been more
| research to improve those calculations - like deriving the
| electron charge and magnetic moment.
|
| Personally I like the idea that a proton is somehow literally
| an electron and 3 up quarks (a neutron gets 2 electrons and 3
| up quarks). I am not a physicist though, so I'm sure there are
| reasons they "know" this is not the case.
|
| I find it fascinating that some physicists say wave functions
| are somehow "real" and then we've got Jacob Barandes saying you
| don't even need wave functions to do the computations of QM:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oWip00iXbo
|
| IMHO there is a lot of exploration to be done without particle
| accelerators.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Maybe it's time for physicists to switch to agile? Don't try to
| solve the theory of the Universe at once; that's the waterfall
| model. Try to come up with just a single new equation each
| sprint!
| ggm wrote:
| I am sure others will say it better, but the cat-in-the-box
| experiment is a shockingly bad metaphor for the idea behind
| quantum states and observer effect.
|
| I will commit the first sin, by declaring without fear of
| contradiction the cat actually IS either alive or dead. it is not
| in a superposition of states. What is unknown is our knowledge of
| the state, and what collapses is that uncertainty.
|
| If you shift this to the particle, not the cat, what changes?
| because if very much changes, my first comment about the
| unsuitability of the metaphor is upheld, and if very little
| changes, my comment has been disproven.
|
| It would be clear I am neither a physicist nor a logician.
| sliken wrote:
| Along similar lines, the double-slit experiment, seems simple.
| Two slits let light though and you get bands where they
| constructively or destructively interfere, just like waves.
|
| However I still find it crazy that when you slow down the laser
| and one photon at a time goes through either slit you still get
| the bands. Which begs the question, what exactly is it
| constructively or destructively interfering with?
|
| Still seems like there's much to be learned about the quantum
| world, gravity, and things like dark energy vs MOND.
| ggm wrote:
| I had a conversation about this in HN some months back. It's
| a surprisingly modern experiment. It demanded an ability to
| reliably emit single photons. Young's theory may be 1800 but
| single photon emission is 1970-80.
|
| (This is what I was told, exploring my belief it's always
| been fringes in streams of photons not emerging over repeated
| applications of single photons and I was wrong)
| lefra wrote:
| To get single photons, you just need to stack up enough
| stained glass infront of a light source. That's been
| acheivable for aeons (the photon will go through at random
| time though).
|
| The difficult part is single photon _detectors_, they're
| the key technology to explore the single-photon version of
| Young's experiment (which originally showed that light has
| wave-like properties).
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| The most simple answer here is the "fields are real,
| particles are excitation patterns of fields." And that's
| generally the practical way most physicists think of it today
| as I understand it.
|
| If I make the equivalent of a double slit experiment in a
| swimming pool, then generate a vortex that propagates towards
| my plywood slits or whatever, it's not really surprising that
| the extended volume of the vortex interacts with both slots
| even though it looks like a singular "particle."
| el_nahual wrote:
| And yet if you place a detector at the slits to know which
| slit the single photon goes through, you get no
| interference pattern at the end.
| squeefers wrote:
| > However I still find it crazy that when you slow down the
| laser and one photon at a time goes through either slit you
| still get the bands.
|
| why does nobody mention the fact the photon doesnt keep going
| through the same hole? like why is it randomly moving through
| the air in this brownian way? the laser gun doesnt move, the
| slit doesnt move, so why do different photons end up going
| through different holes?
| BalinKing wrote:
| There are various theories about what's _actually_ happening in
| quantum mechanics. Some theories have hidden variables, in
| which case the issue is simply one of measurement (i.e. there
| really is an "objectively correct" value, but it only _looks_
| to us like there isn 't).[0] However, this is not known to be
| the case, and many theories _really do_ claim that position and
| momentum fundamentally cannot both be well-defined at once.
| (The "default" Copenhagen interpretation is in the latter
| camp; AFAIK it's convenient in practice, and as a result it's
| implicitly assumed in introductory QM classes.)
|
| [0] Well, and the hidden variables are non-local, which is a
| whole 'nother can of highly non-intuitive worms.
| ggm wrote:
| I'm not qualified to say. But, because of inductive
| reasoning, I have some concern that underneath the next level
| of "oooh we found the hidden variable" will be a Feynman
| moment of saying "yea, thats defined by the as-yet unproven
| hidden-hidden variables, about which much conjecture is being
| made but no objective evidence exists, but if you fund this
| very large machine...."
| plomme wrote:
| Well you are in luck because that was the point of
| Schroedingers cat; it was constructed to show the impossibly
| odd implications of quantum mechanics.
|
| From the wikipedia page: "This thought experiment was devised
| by physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1935 in a discussion with
| Albert Einstein to illustrate what Schrodinger saw as the
| problems of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg's philosophical
| views on quantum mechanics."
| mhandley wrote:
| One interesting gap in the standard model is why neutrinos have
| mass: https://cerncourier.com/a/the-neutrino-mass-puzzle/
| beezle wrote:
| I never liked that the physics community shifted from 'high
| energy' particle physics (the topic of the article) to referring
| to this branch as just 'particle physics' which I think leaves
| the impression that anything to do with 'particles' is now a dead
| end.
|
| Nuclear physics (ie, low/medium energy physics) covers diverse
| topics, many with real world application - yet travels with a lot
| of the same particles (ie, quarks, gluons). Because it is so
| diverse, it is not dead/dying in the way HEP is today.
| grebc wrote:
| What's the saying... if your only tool is a collider?
| mattlangston wrote:
| Experimental particle physicist here. It's just hard.
|
| I measured the electron's vector coupling to the Z boson at SLAC
| in the late 1990s, and the answer from that measurement is: we
| don't know yet - and that's the point.
|
| Thirty years later, the discrepancy between my experiment and
| LEP's hasn't been resolved.
|
| It might be nothing. It might be the first whisper of dark matter
| or a new force. And the only way to find out is to build the next
| machine. That's not 'dead', that's science being hard.
|
| My measurement is a thread that's been dangling for decades,
| waiting to be pulled.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| What would the cost of the "next machine" be? Is it going to be
| tens of billions or can we make progress with lesser money. If
| it is going to be tens of billions, then maybe we need to
| invest in engineering to reduce this cost, because it's not
| sustainable to suspend thirty years, tens of billions for every
| incremental improvement.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of
| billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips
| that ultimately enabled you to type this comment on your
| phone/computer. The return on that investment is obvious.
|
| But it is not just about making money: The entire field of
| radiation therapy for cancer _exists_ and continues to
| improve because people figured out ways to control particle
| beams with extreme precision and in a much more economical
| way to study particle physics. Heck, commercial MRIs exist
| and continue to improve because physicists want cheaper,
| stronger magnets so they can build more powerful colliders.
| What if in the future you could do advanced screening quickly
| and without hassle at your GP 's office instead of having to
| wait for an appointment (and possibly pay lots of money) at
| an imaging specialist center? And if they find something they
| could immediately nuke it without cutting you open? We're
| talking about the ultimate possibility of Star Trek level
| medbays here.
|
| Let the physicists build the damn thing however they want and
| future society will be better off for sure. God knows what
| else they will figure out along the way, but it will
| definitely be better for the world than sinking another
| trillion dollars on wars in the middle east.
| brazzy wrote:
| > This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs
| tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the
| microchips that ultimately enabled you to type this comment
| on your phone/computer.
|
| No. These two cases are _absurdly_ different, and you 're
| even completely misunderstanding (or misrepresenting) the
| meaning of the "tens of billions of dollars" figure.
|
| Microchips were an incremental improvement where the
| individual increments yielded utility far greater than the
| investment.
|
| For particle physics, the problem is that the costs have
| exploded with the size of facilities to reach higher
| energies (the "tens of billions of dollars" is for _one_ of
| them) but the results in scientific knowledge (let alone
| technological advances) have NOT. The early accelerators
| cost millions or tens of millions and revolutionized our
| undestanding of the universe. The latest ones cost billions
| and have confirmed a few things we already thought to be
| true.
|
| > Let the physicists build the damn thing and future
| society will be better off for sure.
|
| Absolutely not.
| Iulioh wrote:
| I'm torn between "yes, these experinets are way too
| expensive and the knowlage is too niche to be really
| usefull" and "We said this about A LOT and we found
| utility in surprising ways so it could be a gamble worth
| taking"
|
| That's the problem with cutting edge reaserch....you
| don't even know if you will ever needed it or if a
| trilion dollar industry is waiting for just a number to
| be born
| brazzy wrote:
| Yes, we don't really know. But at some point the gamble
| is just too big.
|
| Because the costs aren't just numbers. They represent
| hundreds or thousands of person-years of effort. You're
| proposing that a large number of people should spend
| their entire lives supporting this (either directly as
| scientists, or indirectly through funding it) - and maybe
| end up with nothing to show for it.
|
| And there's the opportunity costs. You could fund
| _hundreds_ of smaller, yet still substantial scientific
| efforts in many different fields for the cost of just one
| particle accelerator of the size we _think_ is sufficient
| to yield some new observations.
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| > Absolutely not
|
| Engineers not being able to fathom that by building this
| huge-ass and complicated machines to answer questions
| about the fundamentals of nature, other problems are
| solved or new things are invented that improve and change
| our life will never not be funny to me
| brazzy wrote:
| Just as funny as armchair science enthusiasts not being
| able to fathom that research budgets are limited and it
| makes sense to redirect them into other, more promising
| fields when a particular avenue of research is both
| extremely expensive _and_ has shown diminishing returns
| for decades.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| Does targeting research towards 'more promising' fields
| actually produce greater economic returns?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| The field of Elon Musk has been promising shit for years,
| what do you think?
| danparsonson wrote:
| Well we definitely have a lot more Elon Musk now
| verzali wrote:
| To be fair, he has delivered a lot of (bull)shit
| brazzy wrote:
| Given that you can do a lot more research in different
| fields at the same time for the amount of money the next
| bigger particle accellerator would cost, the answer is
| very likely yes.
| SmirkingRevenge wrote:
| Not a physicist, but I think building state of the art
| particle accelerators probably requires doing a lot of
| research in many different fields
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ok, which field? How much money will be needed? What
| potential experiments are lined up in those fields that
| need money to go forward?
|
| Particle physics has told us a lot about the base nature
| of our model and the affirmation of the standard model.
| The fruits of these labors still take decades to make
| their mark on our world.
|
| And, we still are working on those other things at the
| same time too. It turns out with 8 billion people on the
| planet and modern technology we can get an absolute
| fuckload done at once.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is no way to answer that - we have limited
| money/people/time. Whatever we fund - we will get
| whatever the returns are - but there is no way to know
| what we don't have because we didn't fund some other
| thing. Even if in a few years we fund that other thing -
| what we get out of those funds is influenced by the other
| things we already know and so whatever we get out of it
| also shows the results of the other research that we
| already have.
|
| The only exception is if some research reveals nothing.
| Though this isn't a useful claim: "it doesn't work" still
| revealed something.
| XorNot wrote:
| The more important question is, are you content with
| simply dismantling any progress in accelerator science at
| all for the next century? Because the LHCs successors
| won't be online till the 2050s at least. If you don't
| fund them now though and start the work, then no one does
| the work, no one studies the previous work (because
| there's no more grant money in it) and the next
| generation of accelerator engineers and physcists doesn't
| get trained and the knowledge and skill base withers and
| literally dies.
|
| Because the trade off of no new accelerators is the
| definite end of accelerator science for several
| generations.
| whatever120 wrote:
| Real scientists don't call others armchair scientists,
| it's just belittling. Do you resort to ad hominem because
| you feel like your argument is not strong enough, so you
| have to try to attack the person as well?
| eviks wrote:
| This is a pretty common mistake - why not invest directly
| in trying to solve those problems instead of hoping to
| learn something by chance from different activities?
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Absolutely not.
|
| I'd not be so sure about that. Doing this research will
| probably allow us to answer "it works but we don't know
| exactly why" cases in things we use everyday (i.e. li-ion
| batteries). Plus, while the machines are getting bigger,
| the understood tech is getting smaller as the laws of
| physics allows.
|
| If we are going to insist on "Absolutely not" path, we
| should start with proof-of-work crypto farms and AI
| datacenters which consume county or state equivalents of
| electricity and water resources for low quality slop.
| brazzy wrote:
| That "probably" is really more of a "maybe" given the
| experience with the current big accelerators, and
| _really_ needs to be weighed against the extreme costs -
| and other, more promising avenues of research.
|
| > If we are going to insist on "Absolutely not" path, we
| should start with proof-of-work crypto farms and AI
| datacenters which consume county or state equivalents of
| electricity and water resources for low quality slop.
|
| Who exactly is the "we" that is able to make this
| decision? The allocation of research budgets is
| _completely_ unrelated to the funding of AI datacenters
| or crypto farms. There is no organization on this planet
| that controls both.
|
| And if you're gonna propose that the whole of human
| efforts should somehow be organized differently so that
| these things can be prioritized against each other
| properly, then I'm afraid that is a much, MUCH harder
| problem than any fundamental physics.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >and other, more promising avenues of research.
|
| Which are? Just asking for the purposes of this
| discussion.
| bl0rg wrote:
| > The latest ones cost billions and have confirmed a few
| things we already thought to be true.
|
| Yes, but we had hopes that it would lead to more. And had
| lead to more, something only known to be false in
| hindsight, who knows where that would have ended us up?
| What if it upended the standard model instead of
| reinforcing it?
|
| > Absolutely not.
|
| What are we supposed to do then? As humans, I mean. No
| one knows why we're here, what the universe really is
| like. We have some pretty good models that we know are
| wrong and we don't know what wonders the theoretical
| implications of any successor models might bring. That
| said, do we really need to motivate fundamental research
| into the nature of reality with a promise of technology?
|
| I'm not arguing for mindlessly building bigger
| accelerators, and I don't think anyone is - there has to
| exist a solid line of reasoning to warrant the effort.
| And we might find that there are smarter ways of getting
| there for less effort - great! But if there isn't,
| discrediting the venue of particle accelerators due to
| their high upfront cost as well as historical results
| would be a mistake. We can afford it, and we don't know
| the future.
| tokai wrote:
| >I'm not arguing for mindlessly building bigger
| accelerators, and I don't think anyone is
|
| But you are and they are. Just by the comments here its
| clear that even suggesting not to use untold billions on
| maybe pushing theoretical physics a little forward is
| meet with scorn. The value proposition either, in
| knowledge or technology, is just not well argued anymore
| besides hand waving.
| bl0rg wrote:
| No, I'm not and neither is anyone else. It's common sense
| that we should explore options that require less effort,
| just as one would in any project. I'm saying that we
| can't discredit huge particle accelerators due to, in the
| grandest scheme of things, a small economic cost and past
| results of a different experiment.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Or, you know, we have read the physics case and are of
| the opinion that it's worth it. Have you?
| brazzy wrote:
| > Yes, but we had hopes that it would lead to more. And
| had lead to more, something only known to be false in
| hindsight, who knows where that would have ended us up?
| What if it upended the standard model instead of
| reinforcing it?
|
| Sure, but it didn't. Which is knowledge that _really_
| should factor into the decision to build the next, bigger
| one.
|
| > What are we supposed to do then? As humans, I mean.
|
| Invest the money and effort elsewhere, for now. There are
| many other fields of scientific exploration that are very
| likely to yield greater return (in knowledge and utility)
| for less. You could fund a hundred smaller but still
| substantial intiatives instead of one big accelerator.
| And be virtually guaranteed to have an exciting
| breakthrough in a few of them.
|
| And who knows, maybe a breakthrough in material science
| or high-voltage electrophysics will substantially reduce
| the costs for a bigger particle accelerator?
| bl0rg wrote:
| > Which is knowledge that really should factor into the
| decision to build the next, bigger one.
|
| It was always factored in, and of course it would be in
| any next iteration.
|
| > Invest the money and effort elsewhere, for now. There
| are many other fields of scientific exploration that are
| very likely to yield greater return (in knowledge and
| utility) for less. You could fund a hundred smaller but
| still substantial intiatives instead of one big
| accelerator. And be virtually guaranteed to have an
| exciting breakthrough in a few of them.
|
| I agree with this to a large extent. I'm just not against
| particle accelerators as a venue for scientific
| advancement and in the best of worlds we could do both.
| brazzy wrote:
| I'm not against them in principle either. Just at this
| time, at this cost, at this state of development in the
| field.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >> Yes, but we had hopes that it would lead to more. And
| had lead to more, something only known to be false in
| hindsight, who knows where that would have ended us up?
| What if it upended the standard model instead of
| reinforcing it?
|
| >Sure, but it didn't. Which is knowledge that really
| should factor into the decision to build the next, bigger
| one.
|
| Not this week, no. And if, _next week_ (or next year or
| next decade) we resolve some of the most significant
| problems in modern physics, any expenditures in those
| fields were a waste?
|
| You've repeatedly bashed particle physics based on your
| perception of a lack of progress vis-a-vis the costs, and
| claimed that other fields should be prioritized. Which
| fields? What would you hope to gain from those fields?
|
| Is there no room for basic research that attempts to
| validate the bases (Standard Model, Quantum Field Theory,
| the marriage of the former with General Relativity, etc.)
| of modern physics? If not why not? Our models are
| definitely wrong, but they're measurably _less_ wrong
| than previous models.
|
| Should we not continue to hone/probe those models to find
| the cracks in the theories underpinning those models? If
| we don't, how will we solve these extant issues?
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| > I'm not arguing for mindlessly building bigger
| accelerators, and I don't think anyone is
|
| You sure about that?
|
| The GP whose position you're defending wrote this:
|
| > Let the physicists build the damn thing however they
| want and future society will be better off for sure.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| >Microchips were an incremental improvement where the
| individual increments yielded utility far greater than
| the investment.
|
| You should look up how modern EUV lithography was
| commercialised. This was essentially a big plasma physics
| puzzle. If ASML hadn't taken on a ridiculous gamble
| (financially on the same order of magnitude as a new
| collider, esp. for a single colpany) with the research,
| Moore's law would have died long ago and the entire tech
| industry would be affected. And there was zero proof that
| this was going to work beforehand.
| varjag wrote:
| EUV lith would have absolutely been achieved if LHC
| wasn't ever built.
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| Lhc mastered high vacuum, high precision lens from zeiss,
| precision lasers, specialized magnets which are needed by
| euv lith.
|
| So would have been delayed.
| varjag wrote:
| High vacuum in enormous volumes maybe. Otherwise it was
| certainly a problem solved decades ago.
|
| Not sure what role of EUV optics was in LHC. But Zeiss
| would develop you anything on the frontier of optics if
| you have deep enough pockets.
|
| The rest I don't know enough to comment on, but as far as
| technology goes both LHC and EUV lithography are bespoke
| systems. Seriously doubt there is any path dependency.
| Huge part of LHC cost were earthworks and precision
| construction of complex machinery at enormous scale.
| chuckadams wrote:
| EUV uses mirrors rather than lenses, and the precision
| surfaces on those are something that more likely came out
| of space programs. But honestly, I have no problem with
| throwing a few billion at basic science that might go
| nowhere. It's a drop in the ocean compared to war and
| corporate welfare.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| >> Let the physicists build the damn thing and future
| society will be better off for sure.
|
| > Absolutely not.
|
| And what do YOU mean, "absolutely not"? You have no more
| say in what happens than anyone else unless you're high
| level politician, who would still be beholden to their
| constituents anyway.
|
| And yet big science, like particle accelerators, STILL
| gets funding. There's plenty to go around. Sure, every
| once in a while a political imperative will "pull the
| plug" on something deemed wasteful or too expensive and
| maybe sometimes that's right. But we STILL have particle
| physics, we STILL send out pure science space missions,
| there are STILL mathematicians and theorists who are paid
| for their whole careers to study subject matter that has
| no remotely practical applications.
|
| Not everything must have a straight-line monetary ROI.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Absolutely not.
|
| A statement that certain needs some backing.
|
| You might say that the statement you were replying to
| also needs some backing, but they did give some, although
| you believe it was incorrect.
|
| It just seems that "absolutely not" goes against the
| conventional wisdom that knowledge for knowledge sake
| will lead to some greater return than was expended on
| getting that knowledge somewhere down the road which
| really is one of the main underlying ideas of Western
| Civilization since before Newton.
|
| Absolutely not means future society will not be better
| off! That seems to be a big weird absurdly pompous and
| conceited statement to make unless you have a time
| machine, or at least a big mess of statistics that can
| show that scientific advances in physics for a
| significant amount of time has failed to provide a return
| value on existence, although I would think that does not
| rise to the promise of "absolutely not".
| accidentallfact wrote:
| I'm so sick of this "good guy approach". It didn't give us
| progress, it gave us those like Watt and Intel, highly
| celebrated bullshiters who stopped being relevant as soon
| as their IP deadlock expired.
|
| I suppose the only solution is undeground science. Do
| enough progress in silence, dont disseminare the results,
| unless the superiority becomes so obvious that an armed
| resistance becomes unthinkable.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Why can't some of these trillion dollar companies invest
| back in the quantum tech that got them there, if it's so
| certain there will be benefits? Why not Apple and Nvidia
| fund the next particle collider, and give something back to
| society instead of letting tax payers fund it so
| billionaires can privatize the profits?
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Do you want the results of the research be open and
| available to all, or should it become IP of nvidia or
| apple?
| boringg wrote:
| I think your starting premise is obviously false and
| where are you getting that billionaires are privatizing
| the profits from the particle collider (sounds like a
| talking point). No one can guarantee that there are
| benefits - we can surmise that there are but there are
| still massive risks associated with large form science
| experiments.
|
| Government has always been the backbone of basic science
| research - no one else can reasonably bear the risk and
| the advances are public domain.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Fundamental physics research has an extremely profitable
| returns ratio, but it takes decades to amortize. This
| does not work with capitalist corporations who only care
| about immediate profits. Even for governments this is a
| difficult sell, but at least they don't have to soothe
| shareholders every quarter. Generational projects take a
| different kind of economic thinking.
| butlike wrote:
| Is that just because there's shareholder anxiety with the
| unknown on if their investment will "be vested" by the
| time they need to pull it out for retirement?
|
| If that's the case it seems like it might be shrewd for
| younger investors to buy into physics research on a 15-20
| year timeline?
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Unfortunately, younger people usually have neither the
| money nor the foresight for this.
| parineum wrote:
| > Why not Apple and Nvidia fund the next particle
| collider, and give something back to society instead of
| letting tax payers fund it so billionaires can privatize
| the profits?
|
| Where do you think that tax money comes from?
|
| Apple and Nvidia are creating the economies that produce
| tax revenue at every step of the way.
| bigfudge wrote:
| Yeah, except corporations don't pay tax like they did in
| the 50s and 60s...
| awkwardleon wrote:
| I believe the point was these companies benefited greatly
| and specifically from basic research funded by the
| government: they should therefore "give back" in kind (vs
| simply contributing to the tax base and relying on a
| government to figure out what to fund). The reality is
| these companies care only about shareholder value, and
| the current US administration has been terminating grants
| and cutting funding in basic research. I think it's fair
| to question, in this environment, what these companies'
| ethical responsibilities really should be.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at
| Fairchild did not require tens of billions of dollars.
| Sherman Fairchild invested 1.3 million and the treacherous
| eight each put in $500. Fairchild did have the right to
| purchase the firm for $3 million, which of course he
| exercised. Similarly, Shockley's lab was funded by a $1
| million grant in the 50s.
|
| There is a lot of handwaving going on here to justify the
| incredibly cheap, mostly privately funded investments that
| launched the computer generation with the massively
| expensive, extremely gradual gains we are making now with
| particle accelerators. Part of it is that people just can't
| imagine how little was invested in R&D to get these
| stunning results, given how much we have to invest today to
| get much less impressive results, so they just assume that
| semiconductors could not have been invented without tens of
| billion dollars of research.
|
| There is diminishing returns, just as a 90nm process is
| really all you need to get 90% of the benefits of
| computerization -- you can drive industrial automation just
| fine, all the military applications are fine, etc. But to
| go from a 90nm process to a 3nm process is an exponential
| increase in costs. In a lot of fields we are at that tail
| end where costs are incredibly high and gains are very low,
| and new fields will need to be discovered where there is
| low hanging fruit, and those fields will not require "tens
| of billions" of dollars to get that low hanging fruit.
|
| Even with particle accelerators, SLAC cost $100 million to
| build and generated a massive bounty of discoveries,
| dwarfing the discoveries made at CERN.
|
| To pretend that there is no such thing as a curve of
| diminishing returns, and to say that things have always
| been this way is to not paint an accurate picture of how
| science works. New fields are discovered, discoveries come
| quickly and cheaply, the field matures and discoveries
| become incremental and exponentially more expensive. That's
| how it works. For someone who is in a field on the tail end
| of that process, it's not good history to say "things have
| always been this way and have always cost this much".
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Duh. The first cyclotron was built for, like, a 1000
| bucks. Many of the following colliders were also
| ridiculously cheap by comparison. But in the same way the
| semiconductor industry now spend billions on EUV research
| to keep making progress, particle physics spends billions
| on colliders. But when you account for real GDP growth,
| collider costs have actually been stagnating for decades.
| raverbashing wrote:
| The next machine is not necessarily a longer LHC
|
| There are talks of a Muon collider, also there's a spallation
| source being built in Sweden(?) and also of an electron
| 'Higgs factory' (and while the LHC was built for the Higgs
| boson it is not a great source for it - it is built as a
| generic tool that could produce and see the Higgs)
| ForgotIdAgain wrote:
| I think that engineering progress made while building those
| machines are maybe more relevant for practical technical
| development than the discovery they make.
| api wrote:
| Better superconductors here. Would you like a $20 MRI down
| at your local drug store to detect cancer at early stage 1?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| The problem isn't the cheaper MRI. The problem is the
| expert that needs to interpret the results. Detecting
| millions of cancers that don't actually exist doesn't
| help anybody.
| api wrote:
| This is a problem domain AI is good at. Have AIs do
| first-pass, then when they flag something an actual
| doctor reviews it. Then if they concur it goes to your
| doctor, who knows you, who can review it.
| toast0 wrote:
| Spending tens of billions every thirty years is pretty
| sustainable actually.
|
| "Fundamental Research" may or may not pan out, but the things
| that happen along the way are often valuable... I don't think
| there's any practical applications related to generating
| Higgs Bosons, but it's interesting (at least for particle
| physicists) and there's a bunch of practical stuff you have
| to figure out to confirm them.
|
| That practical work can often generate or motivate industrial
| progress that's generally useful. For example, LHC generates
| tons of data and advances the state of the art in data
| processing, transmission, and storage; that's useful even if
| you don't care about the particle work.
| ajam1507 wrote:
| You could say the same thing about the world wars or porn.
| Any human pursuit taken to an extreme can produce knock-on
| effects, that isn't an argument in a vacuum to continue to
| fund any one area.
| toast0 wrote:
| Spending tens of billions every 30 yesrs on world wars
| would be pretty awesome. Much better than what we
| currently spend.
|
| Porn seems to be sustainably self funding; no need for
| government stimulus.
| ajam1507 wrote:
| > Porn seems to be sustainably self funding; no need for
| government stimulus.
|
| Only because you haven't seen the plans for the Large
| Hardon Collider
| snowwrestler wrote:
| In the scope of international cooperation, tens of billions
| of dollars is not very much money. For context, the U.S.
| economy generates $10 billion every ~3 hours. One private
| company, Google, spends $10 billion in about 2 weeks.
|
| So look at it this way. Let's take a bunch of the smartest
| people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of
| Google money, and they'll spend 30 years advancing
| engineering to probe the very fabric of reality. And
| everything they learn will be shared with the rest of
| humanity for free.
|
| Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Let's take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train
| them for decades, give them a month of Google money
|
| Unpopular opinion: Google makes an insane amount of money,
| so they can afford this salary. The CERN (or whatever your
| favourite research institute is), on the other hand, is no
| money-printing machine.
| alphawhisky wrote:
| Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a
| step towards cold fusion. The second we're able to
| understand and capture this energy, money literally
| doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free
| energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental
| market value perspective. I'll continually preach that we
| need to plan for this economically as a species because
| none of our current government or economic systems will
| survive the death of scarcity.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > The second we're able to understand and capture this
| energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy
| means infinite free energy[.]
|
| Similar statements were already claimed about nuclear
| fission power plants in the 70s.
| pixl97 wrote:
| And your point is? Sometimes we make predictions that
| take hundreds of years to be turned into products.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| My point is that you shouldn't believe in marketing
| claims that are obviously too good to be true, like
|
| > The second we're able to understand and capture this
| [cold fusion] energy, money literally doesn't exist.
| Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would
| also abolish money from a fundamental market value
| perspective.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean obviously this statement is false as we live in a
| finite section of the visible universe.
|
| This said beyond the marketing there is a reality that if
| cold fusion did show up that there is a singularity event
| that occurs that making predictions past that point will
| almost always fail as the world would change very
| rapidly.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a
| step towards cold fusion.
|
| Is it?
|
| You are assuming cold fusion is possible. We don't know
| that. It might be one more step before we finally prove
| it is never possible.
|
| You are also assuming that cold fusion is something this
| path of research will lead us to. However this might be a
| misstep that isn't helpful at all because it doesn't
| prove anything useful about the as yet unknown physical
| process that cold fusion needs.
|
| We just don't know, and cannot know at this point.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Takes like this are an optical illusion meant to create the
| idea that there is an insane amount of money freely
| floating around that is just being hoarded.
|
| But just like that money is generated, it's also all spent.
|
| So the actual hard part is deciding what not to spend money
| on so we can build some crazy physics machines with a
| blurry ROI instead.
| Uehreka wrote:
| There are people in this thread saying tens of billions isn't
| that much in the long term (I'd agree) but there's a bigger
| point that comes into play whatever the price: The universe
| doesn't care if exploring it is expensive. You can't make a
| "that's not sustainable" argument to the universe and have it
| meet you half way. And that's who you're arguing against: not
| the scientists, the universe. The scientists don't decide how
| expensive future discoveries will be.
| kakacik wrote:
| Its a clickbait article name (from otherwise good place), of
| course its not dead... we are now getting understanding of all
| things we don't know yet, discrepancies like yours, unified
| theory and so on.
|
| Everybody knows we are not there yet and how the final
| knowledge set will look like, if its even possible to cover it
| (ie are quarks the base layer or we can go deeper, much deeper
| all the way to planck scales? dynamics of singularities etc)
| hippich wrote:
| Is it hard as in:
|
| 1) we know what to do, but it is expensive
|
| 2) we don't know what to do exactly, but many more people
| involved can increase search speed, so just need more people
|
| 3) it is purely sequential problem, and therefore it takes a
| lot of time
| samus wrote:
| A combination to some degree. Scientists _yearn_ to stumble
| upon something hitherto unexplainable that requires a new
| theory or validates or definitely rules out some of the more
| fringe theories.
|
| While other natural sciences often suffer from an abundance
| of things that "merely" need to be documented, or where
| simulation capability is the limit, particle physics is
| mostly based on a theoretical framework from the middle of
| the 20th century that has mostly beth explored.
|
| Getting ahead in particle physics comprises measuring many
| arcane numbers to as high precision as possible until
| something doesn't line up with existing theories or other
| measurements anymore. More people could help with
| brainstorming and measuring things that don't require
| humongous particle accelerators.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Scientists _yearn_ to stumble upon something [that]
| definitely rules out some of the more fringe theories
|
| The existing measurements at CERN ruled out a lot of the
| "more natural" variants of string theory. Until now this
| insight has not lead to a big scientific breakthrough.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| So, if the answer were obvious or quick, it wouldn't be worth
| building machines that take decades to design
| orbifold wrote:
| I guess we will find out in 20+ years once the next electron
| positron collider at CERN has been build
| htx80nerd wrote:
| >"It might be the first whisper of dark matter"
|
| Come now.
| mattlangston wrote:
| Fair - that sounds hyperbolic. But my point is specific: if
| the weak mixing angle is shifted from the Standard Model
| value, one of the standard explanations is a heavier cousin
| of the Z boson mixing in.
|
| Many of those models naturally include a dark matter
| candidate. I didn't mean to imply 'we found dark matter' --
| it's that the theories which could explain the discrepancy
| often come with one attached.
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| It's hard. Particle physics faces the problem that in order to
| dig down to ever smaller scales, ironically, ever larger
| experiments are needed. We've pretty much built large enough
| colliders for our current understanding. No one really knows how
| much more energy would be needed to expose something new - it
| might be incremental, within current technical reach, or it might
| be many orders of magnitude beyond our current capabilities. The
| experiments have become expensive enough that there isn't a lot
| of appetite to build giant new systems without some really good
| reason. The hard part is coming up with a theory to justify the
| outlay, if you can't generate compelling data from existing
| systems.
|
| Physics advances have been generally driven by observation,
| obtained through better and better instrumentation. We might be
| entering a long period of technology development, waiting for the
| moment our measurements can access (either through greater energy
| or precision) some new physics.
| Rury wrote:
| It's just hard. I mean... it could very well be, that there's so
| many deeper layers underneath what we know in particle physics,
| but from our scale, also so infeasible to build something to
| analyze and decompose the nuanced behavior happening at that
| level, to the point that it's practically impossible to do so.
| Just like it is impossible to split an atom with your bare
| hands...
| albatross79 wrote:
| Why are we even trying to look deeper? To fit our mathematical
| curves better? Abstract spacetime, fields, virtual particles,
| wave function collapse, quantized energy, wave particle duality,
| etc. This is all BS. And I'm not disputing the theories or the
| experimental results. These concepts are unintelligible. They are
| self contradictory. They are not even abstractions, they are
| mutually exclusive paradigms forced together into a bewilderment.
| I'm not disputing that the math fits the observations. But these
| are not explanations. If this is what it's come to, all we can
| expect from here on is to better fit the math to the observation.
| And in the end, an equation that tells us nothing about what we
| really wanted to know, like "what is it really"? Nobody is going
| to be satisfied with an equation, so why are we still funding
| this enterprise, for better lasers to kill bad guys?
| drdeca wrote:
| The universe is not obligated to appeal to your aesthetic
| tastes in its innermost functioning.
|
| Maybe _you_ aren't going to be satisfied with the sort of
| complicated mathematics which appears to be correct (or, on the
| right track).
|
| If you have complaints about the aesthetics of how the universe
| works, take it up with God.
|
| Personally, I think there is a lot of beauty to be found in it.
|
| I'll admit that there are a few parts that go against my tastes
| (I don't like needing to resort to distributions instead of
| proper functions), but that's probably just intellectual
| laziness on my part.
| squeefers wrote:
| > The universe is not obligated to appeal to your aesthetic
| tastes in its innermost functioning.
|
| This is truly a copout. When science faulters in explaining
| the world we get answers like this. His argument isnt with
| the universe, but with out own scientific theories. If you
| dont want your theories about the physical world to explain
| physical world, then be an engineer. Science explains the
| world, engineers use those theories. QM has large gaps and
| doesnt actually explain much, but I guess the universe doesnt
| care whether our theories are wildly off the mark or not.
| albatross79 wrote:
| It's not a matter of taste. This is like going to a
| restaurant, expecting a delicious meal, and being brought a
| dish with a fancy name made out of the actual menu itself.
| Would anyone go back there to eat?
| WantonQuantum wrote:
| I find quite a lot of it very satisfying. For example, the deep
| mathematical symmetries of gauge theory and how they relate to
| the observed forces of the universe is truly amazing.
|
| The excellent Arvin Ash has a very accessible video about it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paQLJKtiAEE
| squeefers wrote:
| maybe thats the problem. satisfaction isnt understanding.
| string theory is exciting maths, but fits nothing in reality.
| maybe scientists should go back to explaining reality instead
| of whatever this current paradigm is
| drdeca wrote:
| Your conception of an "explanation of reality" is deeply
| flawed.
| squeefers wrote:
| you can correctly predict reality whilst having
| absolutely know idea how it works (ie the path of a
| photon in the double slit experiment).
| drdeca wrote:
| Sometimes nature tells us that the questions we are
| inclined to ask, are flawed questions.
|
| The "What path did the photon take?" question is one of
| those times. The answer to the question is Mu.
|
| Similar to the questions "How much phlogiston is there in
| iron?" or "Does sulphur have more earth than air, or more
| air than earth?".
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| All of science is getting harder as the easiest discoveries are
| all pretty much behind us.
|
| LLMs were a breakthrough I didn't expect and it's likely the last
| one we'll see in our lifetime.
| iterance wrote:
| Specific fields may not advance for decades at a time, but we
| are hardly in a scientific drought. There have been dramatic
| advances in countless fields over the last 20 years alone and
| there is no good reason to expect such advances to abruptly
| cease. Frankly this is far too pessimistic.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| I don't understand what is wrong with pessimism. That's not a
| valid critique. If someone is pessimistic but his description
| of the world matches REALITY, then there's nothing wrong with
| his view point.
|
| Either way this is also opinion based.
|
| There hasn't been a revolutionary change in technology in the
| last 20 years. I don't consider smart phones to be
| revolutionary. I consider going to the moon revolutionary and
| catching a rocket sort of revolutionary.
|
| Actually I take that back I predict mars as a possible break
| through along with LLMs, but we got lucky with musk.
| tehjoker wrote:
| genetic technology and computing technology have been the
| biggest drivers for a while. i do think it is remarkable to
| video call another continent. communication technology is
| disruptive and revolutionary though it looks like chaos. ai
| is interesting too if it lives up to the hype even
| slightly.
|
| catching a rocket is very impressive, but its just a lower
| cost method for earth orbit. it does unlock
| megaconstellations tho
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| Yeah none of those are step function changes. Video
| calling another continent is like a tiny step from TV.
| Yeah I receive video wirelessly on my tv not that amazed
| when I can stretch the distance further with a call that
| has video. Big deal.
|
| AI is the step function change. The irony is that it
| became so pervasive and intertwined with slop people like
| you forget that what it does now (write all code) was
| unheard of just a couple years ago. ai surpassed the
| hype, now it's popular to talk shit about it.
| incr_me wrote:
| A step in which function are you talking about, exactly?
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| If you want it stated precisely, the function is human
| cognitive labor per unit time and cost.
|
| For decades, progress mostly shifted physical constraints
| or communication bandwidth. Faster chips, better
| networks, cheaper storage. Those move slopes, not
| discontinuities. Humans still had to think, reason,
| design, write, debug. The bottleneck stayed human
| cognition.
|
| LLMs changed that. Not marginally. Qualitatively.
|
| The input to the function used to be "a human with
| training." The output was plans, code, explanations,
| synthesis. Now the same class of output can be produced
| on demand, at scale, by a machine, with latency measured
| in seconds and cost approaching zero. That is a step
| change in effective cognitive throughput.
|
| This is why "video calling another continent" feels
| incremental. It reduces friction in moving information
| between humans. AI reduces or removes the human from
| parts of the loop entirely.
|
| You can argue about ceilings, reliability, or long term
| limits. Fine. But the step already happened. Tasks that
| were categorically human two years ago are now
| automatable enough to be economically and practically
| useful.
|
| That is the function. And it jumped.
| iterance wrote:
| My critique is not due to pessimism, it is due to
| afactuality. Breakthroughs in science are plenty in the
| modern era and there is no reason to expect them to slow or
| halt.
|
| However, from your later comments, it sounds as though you
| feel the only operating definition of a "breakthrough" is a
| change inducing a rapid rise in labor extraction /
| conventional productivity. I could not disagree more
| strongly with this opinion, as I find this definition
| utterly defies intuition. It rejects many, if not most,
| changes in scientific understanding that do not directly
| induce a discontinuty in labor extraction. But admittedly
| if one restricts the definition of a breakthrough in this
| way, then, well, you're probably about right. (Though I
| don't see what Mars has to do with labor extraction.)
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| That's only one dimension. The step function is
| multidimensional. My critique is more about the Euclidean
| distance between the initial point and the end point.
|
| To which AI is the only technology that has enough
| distance to be classified as a "breakthrough".
| andrewflnr wrote:
| You imply your view "matches REALITY", then fall back to
| "Either way this is also opinion based." Nicely played. But
| the actual reality is that scientific discovery is
| proceeding at least as fast as it ever has. These things
| take time. 20 years is a laughably short time in which to
| declare defeat, even ignoring the fact that genetic and
| other biological tech has advanced leaps and bounds in that
| time. There's important work happening in solid state
| physics and materials science. JWST is overturning old
| theories and spawning new ones in cosmology. There's every
| reality-based reason to believe there will be plenty of big
| changes in science in the next 20 years or so.
| layer8 wrote:
| > If someone is pessimistic but his description of the
| world matches REALITY, then there's nothing wrong with his
| view point.
|
| A description that matches reality is realist, not
| pessimist.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| Technically this is true. Practically speaking most
| realists are perceived to be pessimists. There are tons
| of scientific studies to back this up as well. People who
| are judged to be pessimistic experimentally have more
| accurate perceptions of the real world.
|
| This means that most people who you would term as
| "realists" are likely optimists and not realists at all.
| j-krieger wrote:
| The additional irony here is that LLMs are a tool that is
| likely forever damned to regurgitate knowledge of the past,
| with the inability to derive new information.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| This is not true at all. Just query any LLM and ask it for
| new information. Literally ask it to create something that
| doesn't exist.
|
| It will give it to you.
| kingstnap wrote:
| It depends on what you mean, specifically on your distance
| metric.
|
| If you mean nearest neighbours search like autocorrect then
| LLMs are extrapolative.
|
| You can easily generate combinations not seen before. I mean
| you can prove this with parametric prompting.
|
| Like "Generate a poem about {noun} in {place} in {language}"
| or whatever. This is a simplistic example but it doesn't take
| much to come up with a space that has quadrillion of
| possibilities. Then if you randomly sample 10 and they all
| seem to be "right" then you have proven it's not pure
| neighbour recall.
|
| Same is true of the image generators. You can prove its not
| memorizing because you can generate random varients and show
| that the number of images realizable is more than the
| training data possibly contains.
|
| If you mean on the underlying manifold of language and ideas.
| Its definitely interpolation, which is fundamentally a
| limitation of what can be done using data alone. But I know
| this can be expanded over iteration (I have done experiments
| related to this). The trick to expanding it actually running
| experiments/simulation on values at the boundry of the
| manifold. You have to run experiments on the unknown.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| It is interpolation but that is what human thinking is as
| well. Interpolation is so broad it can cover agi
| conceptually.
|
| But I get it, the interpolation you're talking about is
| limited. But I think you missed this insight: human
| interpolation is limited too. In the short term everything
| we do is simply recombination of ideas as you put it.
|
| But that's the short term. In the long term we do things
| that are much greater. But I think this is just an
| aggregation of small changes. Change the words in a poem
| 5000 times: have the LLM do the same task 5000 times. Let
| it pick a random word. The result is wholly original. And I
| think in the end this what human cognition is as well.
| 8note wrote:
| famous last words before quantum physics hit
| tariky wrote:
| To my uneducated eye it looks like they are stuck in limbo for
| 120 years. Nothing practical has been create based on those
| theories. It is just words and calculations spinning in circles.
|
| I wish those people focus on practical real world physics. So we
| all can enjoy new innovations.
| WantonQuantum wrote:
| The device you used to make this comment relies heavily on
| quantum effects to make efficient transistors. The necessary
| theoretical understanding of semiconductors did not exist 120
| years ago.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Nothing practical has been create based on those theories.
|
| Ever used GPS?
|
| A CD player?
|
| A laser?
|
| Semiconductors?
| gary_0 wrote:
| Einstein laid the theoretical foundations for lasers in 1917,
| and it took over 40 years of "impractical" scientific work
| before the first functioning laser was built. It took decades
| more for them to become a cheap, ubiquitous technological
| building-block. The research is still continuing, and there's
| no reason to assume it will stop eventually bearing fruit
| (for the societies that haven't decimated their scientific
| workforce, anyways). Look at the insanity required to design
| and build the EUV lasers in ASML's machines, which were used
| to fabricate the CPU I'm using right now, over a century
| after Einstein first scribbled down those obscure equations!
| jacquesm wrote:
| I sincerely wonder how someone that is unaware of any of
| this finds their way onto HN, but at the same time it is an
| educational opportunity. 'nothing practical' indeed...
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| In addition, lasers were long believed to be a scientific
| novelty without any real world use.
| potamic wrote:
| You're right. If you were educated, you would have learnt about
| the numerous applications of particle physics in modern
| technologies.
| padjo wrote:
| You should probably invest in your education so.
| Razengan wrote:
| Maybe this is all we can learn from home and we need to get out
| more.
| benreesman wrote:
| It is almost always the case that when progress stops for some
| meaningful period of time that a parochial taboo would need
| violating to move forwards.
|
| The best known example is the pre- and post-Copernican
| conceptions of our relationship to the sun. But long before and
| ever since: if you show me physics with its wheels slipping in
| mud I'll show you a culture not yet ready for a new frame.
|
| We are so very attached to the notions of a unique and continuous
| identity observed by a physically real consciousness observing an
| unambiguous arrow of time.
|
| Causality. That's what you give up next.
| mastermage wrote:
| the fuck you mean giving up causality?
| fatbird wrote:
| This is a common framing of the Copernican revolution, and it's
| wrong.
|
| Copernicus was proposing circular orbits with the sun at the
| center instead of the earth. The Copernican model required more
| epicycles for accurate predictions than the considerably well-
| proven Ptolemaic model did, with the earth at the centre.
|
| It wasn't until Kepler came along and proposed elliptical
| orbits that a heliocentric solar system was obviously a genuine
| advance on the model, both simpler and more accurate.
|
| There was no taboo being preserved by rejecting Copernicus's
| model. The thinkers of the day rightfully saw a conceptual
| shift with no apparent advantage and several additional costs.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| > The thinkers of the day rightfully saw a conceptual shift
| with no apparent advantage and several additional costs.
|
| I'm holding a big fat Citation Needed banner. Seemingly none
| of these "thinkers of the day" took it far enough to write
| down the thoughts.
|
| While at it, were the "thinkers of the day" fond of the idea
| of Ptolemy's equant?
| raincole wrote:
| It's easy to give up existing concepts. It's called being a
| crackpot and you can find thousands of papers doing that
| online.
| indymike wrote:
| I'm not sure the crackpot is what we're talking about here.
| We're talking about something tht violates the prevailing
| opinion in a way that can be verified, and results a change
| in what we know to be true. The crackpot is mostly the result
| of a very aspirational world view, and usually under the hood
| has bias and error that is often quite obvious.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Yes. But crackpots are still vital.
|
| Let me put it this way. Once upon a time people didn't know
| about solar eclipse. But then a day came when a certain
| somebody was instantly promoted to a Lead Staff Senior
| Astronomer, just because they predicted to the hour that the
| sun is going to disappear.
|
| Well, but think about the field just one day _before that_ :
|
| - maybe 10 theories that said "it's just a
| reformulation/refactoring, nothing to see here, all business
| as usual, no new predictions, very safe for the author",
|
| - maybe 100 crackpot theories. Undoubtedly, unashamedly
| crackpot, with wild predictions all over. Of which 99% were
| in fact pure trash, so, retrospectively, people were
| _rightfully_ considering them trash. Yet 1 was the key to
| progress.
| gary_0 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure quantum mechanics already forgoes conventional
| causality. Attosecond interactions take place in such narrow
| slices of time that the uncertainty principle turns everything
| into a blur where events can't be described linearly. In other
| words, the math sometimes requires that effect precedes cause.
| As far as we can tell, causality and conservation of energy is
| only preserved on a macroscopic scale. (IANAQP, but I'm going
| off my recollections of books by people who are.)
| mastermage wrote:
| Its probably just very hard, in my opinion as a physicist
| AIorNot wrote:
| Curious what everyone thinks about this physicists idea
|
| - the universe as a Neural Network (yes yes moving the universe
| model paradigm from the old Clockwork to machine to computer to
| neural network)
|
| I found it interesting and speculative but also fascinating
|
| See video here:
|
| https://youtu.be/73IdQGgfxas?si=PKyTP8ElWNr87prG
|
| AI summary of the video:
|
| This video discusses Professor Vitaly Vanchurin's theory that the
| universe is literally a neural network, where learning dynamics
| are the fundamental physics (0:24). This concept goes beyond
| simply using neural networks to model physical phenomena;
| instead, it posits that the universe's own learning process gives
| rise to physical laws (0:46).
|
| Key takeaways from the discussion include: * The Universe as a
| Neural Network (0:00-0:57): Vanchurin emphasizes that he is
| proposing this as a promising model for describing the universe,
| rather than a definitive statement of its ontological nature
| (2:48). The core idea is that the learning dynamics, which are
| typically used to optimize functions in machine learning, are the
| fundamental physics of the cosmos (6:20). * Deriving Fundamental
| Field Equations (21:17-22:01): The theory suggests that well-
| known physics equations, such as Einstein's field equations,
| Dirac, and Klein-Gordon equations, emerge from the learning
| process of this neural network universe. * Fermions and Particle
| Emergence (28:47-32:15): The conversation delves into how
| particles like fermions could emerge within this framework, with
| the idea that useful network configurations for learning survive,
| similar to natural selection. * Emergent Quantum Mechanics
| (44:53-49:31): The video explores how quantum behaviors,
| including the Schrodinger equation, could emerge from the two
| distinct dynamics within the system: activation and learning.
| This requires the system to have access to a "bath" or
| "reservoir" of neurons. * Natural Selection at the Subatomic
| Scale (1:05:10-1:07:34): Vanchurin suggests that natural
| selection operates on subatomic particles, where configurations
| that are more useful for minimizing the loss function (i.e., for
| efficient learning) survive and those that are not are removed. *
| Consciousness and Observers (1:15:40-1:24:09): The theory
| integrates the concept of observers into physics, proposing a
| three-way unification of quantum mechanics, general relativity,
| and observers. Consciousness is viewed as a measure of learning
| efficiency within a subsystem (1:30:38).
| pjmlp wrote:
| As CERN Alumni, this isn't easy, the data is endless, processing
| it takes take, usually everything is new technology, and also
| needs to be validated before being put into use.
|
| Thousands of people have worked on bringing LHC up during a few
| decades before, Higgs came to be, across all engineering
| branches.
|
| This stuff is hard, and there is no roadmap on how to get there.
| alt227 wrote:
| > Higgs came to be
|
| Did it? I thought the whole point was that the data that came
| from LHC showed that it was inconclusive and needed a bigger
| more powerful machine to prove it. Happy to be proved wrong.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I am out of CERN since 2004, and only return there during
| Alumni related events, not keeping up with has happened with
| Higgs during the last years.
| franktankbank wrote:
| Is this some mandella effect going on? No, they discovered
| the Higgs and did rough measurements.
| nephihaha wrote:
| When the model appears to have massive problems, maybe it's time
| to go back and revise it.
| squeefers wrote:
| or if youre micho kaku, just parrot it on low grade tv shows
| and public appearances because its easier to gain notoriety
| than to do science
| nephihaha wrote:
| Yes, that too LOL. He really is a grifter. But he is
| entertaining on TV and has that eccentric professor look
| about him.
|
| Heinz Wolff used to fill a similar role on British TV.
| sprash wrote:
| It is obviously not dead but it should be dead: Almost all of the
| technical and economic progress made in the last century was
| achieved with macroscopic quantum effects. Particle physics
| spends a lot of energy and material resources to measure
| microscopic effects. The priorities are esentially inverted. At
| this point it is not even about discovery. Experiments are
| relegated to precision measurements. What practical use will it
| be if we know the mass/charge distribution/polarizability of some
| particles more precicely by a few percent? About nothing.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| This feels less like a story about particle physics "failing" and
| more like a story about a field running out of easy leverage
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Exactly. The field has been a tik-tok between times of
| discovery and times of precision. We are now just swinging back
| from a discovery period. The next machine will be first a
| precision machine and then upgraded to be a discovery machine
| again.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| None of the comments seem to mention that it's also really really
| really really really expensive.
| layer8 wrote:
| That depends on what you compare it to.
| kdavis wrote:
| Almost anything, i.e. the next generation accelerator[1] at
| CERN is about 15B CHF which is about 20B USD.
|
| [1] https://home.cern/science/accelerators/future-circular-
| colli...
| padjo wrote:
| So roughly half the the annual budget of ICE?
| bloggie wrote:
| About a third of Madoff's fund, a little over a month of
| Google AI spend, about nine months of Ozempic sales. Fun!
| kachapopopow wrote:
| "quite literally everything else", well you got iter etc but
| those are on the same spectrum. It's rare that military
| projects in the US get that kind of funding.
| JackFr wrote:
| Maybe a dumb question here, but how would they discover a dark
| matter particle, if dark matter is basically invisible to us
| except for its gravitational effects?
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