[whoByFire]

That final paragraph is great

Some theorists agree. Talk of disappointment is “crazy talk,” Arkani-Hamed said. “It’s actually nature! We’re learning the answer! These 6,000 people are busting their butts and you’re pouting like a little kid because you didn’t get the lollipop you wanted?”

[acidbaseextract]

Nima Arkani-Hamed is an amazing speaker, and if you're interested in modern physics I highly recommend watching his talks. A great place to start is his 5 part Messenger lecture series. It starts with the discovery of quantum mechanics, and the last 3 talks all cover different frontiers of fundamental physics today.

http://www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/nima-arkani-hamed-on-f...

Introduction ends and Nima starts about 4 minutes into the first lecture. :)

[arcticfox]

I second this recommendation. "Particle Fever" piqued my curiosity, but watching this series blew my mind. As a non-religious person, the content of the series is about as close as to religion as I will ever find. And as a sports fan, I now have the same anticipation waiting for LHC findings that I do for big games.

Arkani-Hamed has a knack for making things understandable without "pop-sciencing" them, a flair for the dramatic to make them exciting, and a serious background to validate his understanding.

I'm sure he's not for everyone (I'm guessing that physicists that already know the subjects may find him annoying) but for me, the guy is amazing.

[nikofeyn]

i actually find him unlistenable. he says "uh" every two words and has a very choppy way of speaking. he caries a certain amount of arrogance in his speaking as well. it is authorative but too much so.

[noobermin]

I won't comment on the arrogance, but trust me, many scientists have verbal tics or habits that are distracting, including me. We aren't the best at public speaking, we are the best at science.

EDIT: wrote "visual" when I meant "verbal"

[nikofeyn]

well i was mainly commenting on the comment that he's an "amazing speaker". that has a pretty strong connotation. haha.

[maroonblazer]

I take it you're a physicist ;-)

[nikofeyn]

mathematician moonlighting as a software engineer. ;)

[zamalek]

"Particle Fever" (on Netflix) featured scientists threatening to quit if the results weren't the ones that they wanted: possibly one of least scientific perspectives that I have ever witnessed. Science was supposed to be about the wonder of nature, not about being right. I'm extremely happy that science might start moving in that direction again.

[ethbro]

Science may be about the wonder of nature, but having your career's work (and previously respected theory) disproved probably isn't an easy pill to swallow.

[zamalek]

I can see how it's a hard pill to swallow, I just can't bring myself to sympathize. Of all the ways that the universe can possibly operate, we now know that it could be one less way. A life's work working on an incredibly beautiful theory is something to be proud of. Had less competent work been done, this failure might not have been taken seriously.

I would be unbelievably excited about what the future holds. The goals of science cannot hang on how people feel about their careers.

[ethbro]

Precisely! And I imagine the scientific parts of them do.

But as someone with family formerly in university faculty tenure-track (circa-90s), the put-food-on-the-table part of your employment is tied up in politics. Being on the bubble for a tenure position you've worked 6-10 years towards? I would hope the department committee would be proud of my incredibly beautiful but disproved theory...

[eggy]

Nice quote, although like Smolin, and the thoughts expressed in the backreaction.com article [1], I am skeptical of the manner in which physics is being carried out with a potential disregard for the scientific method - lack of experimental evidence - in string theory, and surprisingly in particle physics too.

Funding, and self-motivating research also has proven to be detrimental to research in the social sciences of late, but that seems to be with misapplication of statistical principles, and insufficient peer review, but a whole lot of citations.

[1] http://backreaction.blogspot.co.id/2016/08/the-lhc-nightmare...

[iaw]

Einstein demonstrated, from both sides of the coin, that people prefer things to make sense and be reasonable.

Relativity challenges that. Quantum mechanics challenges that. The seeming lack of naturalness challenges that.

[jomamaxx]

I think disappointment is ok here.

They just spent 24 Billion and 30 years to discover nothing.

So next time they go to the governments of the world and say 'hey give us 24 Billion for the greatest experiment ever' ... what's going to happen?

Maybe we should give it to them, but there likely will be more scrutiny.

[danielmorozoff]

This forms the basis of what's wrong with scientific funding imo. Saying that it's ok to be disappointed because they did not 'discover' is like equating science to a sport and winning a medal- that analogy is fundamentally wrong.

Performing scientific experiments is not about winning first place, it's about creating abstractions/ models in order to achieve deeper insight. As such failing to find that your model is wrong is not like loosing a race. Ex: a bunch of fantastic physics was discovered and described with Newtonian mechanics , though inherently that model is flawed, it took a while to realize it.

[spullara]

Think of it as an experiment to confirm or deny the standard model. So far it is confirming it.

[jomamaxx]

"Think of it as an experiment to confirm or deny the standard model. So far it is confirming it."

I understand that very well.

But most of the Standard Model was well confirmed.

Really what we got was confirmation of Higgs.

The 'non confirmation' of a bunch of interesting theories is not a very big win.

But don't forget the politics of it all: this is bordering on a 'big lose'.

They spent 24 Billion and really didn't get much out of it. There was a lot of hope, maybe even promise, and really - we got the 'lowest outcome' possible.

Ask yourself: would we have spent 24 Billion to 'confirm Higgs'?

Anyhow - I'm glad it was done, and if it were up to me I'd have spent it, knowing the outcome, but the optics of this are bad.

[akiselev]

Ask yourself: would we have spent 24 Billion to 'confirm Higgs'?

Yes. The Higgs field/boson is a fundamental feature of our best theory at the quantum scale and we needed to know whether we are right. Now we have another crucial bound for the theory that will supplant the standard model except now we can waste less time and money with theories that can't explain our results.

We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a large metal can flying at an altitude of 400km essentially to do microgravity research; I think we can afford to spend a tenth of that on a particle accelerator to probe the frontier of high energy physics.

[jomamaxx]

"We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a large metal can flying at an altitude of 400km essentially to do microgravity research;"

This is not true. The space program has countless research opportunities, direct and indirect, with the underlying endeavour of objective of putting people on other planets, which is a pretty big opportunity in of itself.

I'm not sure paying $24 Billion to prove Higgs was worth it. I suggest maybe there were other, much less expensive ways to do that, were we to know up front that was the objective.

It's hard to say how much 'disproving a bunch of theories' is worth.

I suggest that much of theoretical physics is total rubbish speculation, which in some ways is 'ok', but it'd be nice to see some progress. If you add in String Theory to the pile ... it looks really bad for modern theoretical physics. Not much has happened in a very long time ... it seems there have been countless PhD's minted in fiction. Not good.

[akiselev]

This is not true. The space program has countless research opportunities, direct and indirect, with the underlying endeavour of objective of putting people on other planets, which is a pretty big opportunity in of itself.

I'm not talking about the space program, I'm talking about the ISS. What, exactly, are those direct and indirect opportunities? Looking at NASA's own PR material, it boils down to effects of deep space on humans (microgravity and radiation), effects of microgravity on biotechnology, environmental monitoring (which can be done cheaper with satellites), and .... effects of microgravity on everything else. I'm not saying it's not worth it as a human endeavor, but let's not kid ourselves: it was an insanely expensive project just like the LHC that doesn't really seem to have resulted in much.

[hiuwwgiubi]

not "to" discover nothing, they set out to discover something but discovered nothing, they couldn't have known that would be the outcome