[jordanpg]

This.

This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the only "success" is a new discovery.

This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded.

What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and public support for additional funding. That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment.

[Coding_Cat]

The issue for particle physics specifically, is that they _hope_ to find something that breaks the theory. But so far, only find confirmations of the current Standard Model. Succesful experiments, yeah, but doing little for pushing our understanding of the universe unfortunately.

The reason why they want to break the standard model is, simplified, two-fold:

1. While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks of the universe and it should therefore describe _everything_.

2. the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing some key insight that is needed to fix it.

Finding something that breaks the standard model could go a huge way to solving both these issues. But the standard model just keeps getting confirmed at higher and higher resolution.

In software terms: it's like you know there's a 1/1000'000 bug _somewhere_ in the software but every single test you write to try and find it passes.

[gaze]

There’s a huge mismatch between people who are science fans and people who are doing physics anywhere near particle physics. It’s quite hard to explain how the field is spinning it’s wheels squared against what people consider scientific progress.

Edison’s “I found 100 things that didn’t work” is a nice parable but it doesn’t work across an entire field.

[morbia]

(former PhD in Particle Physics in QCD here, far from an expert)

> While the theory is incredibly powerful in its domain, we have been unable to unify it with gravity and other theories of matter. This is a problem because it's supposed to be a theory summarizing the fundamental building blocks of the universe and it should therefore describe _everything_.

I think this is a misunderstanding of what the Standard Model is and the scientific process that went into it. It is a model for describing the interactions of electroweak and strong force interactions, and that's it. This is based of years of experimental data and coming up with a consistent theory that fits the data. No one went out to come up with a "theory of everything", missed and ended up with the standard model.

The Standard Model is clearly a low energy effective theory of something more, almost by definition. The problem is we have absolutely no data to drive predictions of higher order theories (which could also turn out to be low energy effective theories themselves). Without data, there is a very real chance that the standard model is the best model we're going to have for particle physics.

> the theory is ugly. It's a mess with many parameters and weird interpretations all shoved together. Physicists don't like this. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but also out of experience. It reminds people of pre-relativity electrodynamics for example. Lorentz had what was essentially a working theory of relativity but it was a mess. People fear the standard model is the new lorentzian relativity, essentially correct but missing some key insight that is needed to fix it.

Ugly is a subjective term. A lot of people talk about stuff like 'naturalness' problems with the standard model, but is that really a problem? Who are we to say what numbers are the natural order of things. Gravity is orders upon orders of magnitude weaker than all the other forces, is that 'natural'?

I think comparing it to Lorentzian aether is a little harsh. If you compare special relativity to Lorentzian relatively, special relativity is just a simpler model (it doesn't need aether). I think it's extremely unlikely at this stage that given only the data we have right now, someone would be able come up with a theory that would be fully consistent with the Standard Model but is simpler and doesn't predict new stuff. It's not impossible, but it is very unlikely.

Actually I think the biggest problem with the Standard Model is how to go from the theory to real predictions. Formulating the lagriangian of QCD is the easy bit, converting that to real predictions (either on the lattice QCD end at large alpha_s or perturbative QCD at small alpha_s) is extremely difficult. It's almost laughably absurd where it is not unheard of for calculations of single processes to take a decade or more.

[jordanpg]

I think a lot of commentary on this thread is losing sight of what the world "model" really amounts to in a scientific context.

It's an abstraction. A bunch of math that just-so-happens to result in accurate predictions. That's all it really is. How the universe really works (putting Tegmark aside) is a separate, ultimately philosophical question.

Much of particle physics is simply exploring the parameter space in which various models might be applicable. In the most exciting case, the model crumples in some new, unexplored region.

The value of bigger accelerators comes down whether the higher energies, in which we have not yet explored, are worth exploring, relative to the cost of doing so. That is certainly debatable.

But it's not a "desert." Nobody knows what higher energies will reveal.

[Koshkin]

> It's an abstraction. A bunch of math that just-so-happens to result in accurate predictions. That's all it really is. How the universe really works (putting Tegmark aside) is a separate, ultimately philosophical question.

But philosophy is not knowledge, and it is in fact math that is the only form our knowledge can have in this area, whether we like it or not.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Physics is based on metaphor not math. We take common experiences like space, distance, speed, temperature, "energy", quantify them with other stable experiences we can use as reference units, then select the operations on them which happen to have predictive value. The operations have become more abstract over time, but they're still more complex variations on the same underlying concepts - for example generalising 3D Euclidean space to the abstract ideal of a set of relationships in a mathematical space defined by some metric.

There's nothing absolute about either the math or the metaphor. Both get good answers in relatively limited domains.

One obvious problem is that reality may use a completely different set of mechanisms. Physics is really pattern recognition of our interpretation of our experience of those mechanisms. It's not a description of reality at all. It can't be.

And if our system of metaphors is incomplete - quite likely, because our experiences are limited physically and intellectually - we won't be able to progress past those limits in our imagination.

We'll experience exactly what we're experiencing now - gaps between different areas of knowledge where the metaphors are contradictory and fail to connect.

[Koshkin]

This is all wrong, unfortunately, and that’s because it is based on a wrong premise. Experience and knowledge are two different things, and whether we are capable of experiencing certain aspects of reality or not, math is how we know things. In the areas we cannot experience directly the ability to form mathematical images and ideas can even be thought of, if you will, as an extension of our ability to “see.”

[tresqotheq]

>Physics is based on metaphor not math. We take common experiences like space, distance, speed, temperature, "energy", quantify them with other stable experiences we can use as reference units, then select the operations on them which happen to have predictive value.

If you experience pushing this object that feels to weigh 1kg with a force that feels like 1 N, you are going to experience seeing it accelerate at 1m/s^2.

[jordanpg]

My point is that there is nothing magical about this model or that model.

HEP experimentation is just exploring parameter space and seeing if our models hold up.

[Coding_Cat]

I think we probably agree on the core issue, I just kept things a bit too brief.

There are people who feel like I described, and there are people who disagree to varying degrees (physicists, amitrite?). But I do think we all kind-of agree that we'd prefer to find experimental results that break the standard model vs proving it right now, but it seems unlikely we're going to find that smoking gun anytime soon. The model is an attempt at fitting data and like you said it works in the regime it was designed for, but it can't be _the_ theory of everything. It would be great if it broke somehow so we could investigate _why_ and drive new avenues of research based on that which might be more promising in resolving gravity and the other forces (or the anti-matter mystery, or shed some light on what dark-matter is)*

As the OP said, it's still good science if we prove that the current theory holds up, but no one is really happy with it at this point because everyone knows it's not going to be the final unified theory that we all want to see

---- * personaly I have a gut feeling those three are going to be resolved in rapid succesion if they're ever solved

[Certhas]

The author correctly reports a scientific debate inside of science amongst scientists.

Particle Physicists can pretend this is just a political problem all they want, but if more and more other physicists are convinced the field is entering a desert there will be no new accelerator. Maybe even more importantly, if students learn about the true state of the field they will chose more interesting things to study.

Human time and effort is limited, and scientists don't go around and devote hundreds of thousands of person years to rule out random hypothesis. Effort at LHC level is only devoted because there is a very very good reason to band together to get this done that convinced many other scientists (who in turn helped convince funding bodies). LHC has been a huge success on its own terms, but its results are simultaneously a massive problem for particle physics as it stands right now.

Not a problem for science, just a problem for the field of particle physics, which will need to adjust to the current reality rather than holding out for more data.

[ncmncm]

Expectation is that a new collider 10x as powerful and expensive would not be anywhere near big enough to test current hypotheses.

There is plenty left to investigate in solid-state and superfluid physics. You don't need (much of) a collider for those.

[jerf]

The problem isn't that "finding nothing" isn't progress. The problem is that "finding nothing" is terrible progress-per-dollar.

If you're still having trouble with that concept, peer into the alternate universe where the LHC actually provided enough data to nail down the Theory of Everything. Now that would be some progress-per-dollar to celebrate.

There's a contingent of people who just don't want to think about "how much" progress something is making and want to live in a fantasy world where building a multi-billion dollar particle collider that finds nothing is exactly the same as a $50,000 experiment that finds nothing. I don't know that I'm terribly interested in trying to argue y'all out of that belief. But I can say with great confidence that no matter how good it may make you feel, if you go on to argue about how vital it is to spend another 5x times as much money to build another particle collider that we have no reason to believe will find anything new, you will continue to be marginalized and find your influence waning to apparently no effect.

But in the faint hope of maybe convincing you, consider that there is no infinite money fountain, and even if you just can't process that fact, there certainly aren't an infinite amount of physicists. What is so vital about another particle accelerator that we must dedicate thousands of professional careers to it despite the lack of solid reason to hope anything will come of it? Why not let them do something else? I submit it's all Availability Heuristic. You see and apprehend the particle accelerator, so it must be a good idea. You don't see the thousands upon thousands of other things you're trading away for it, so they don't factor in.

But given the current big fat zero rational reason to build another, it is very easy to build a model in which those other experiments will actually be the ones that make the difference somehow. Probably by some long, convoluted chain we can't imagine now; I doubt there's a bench experiment that we just haven't done that will nail down quantum gravity. But there's a lot of other interesting paths. Quantum computers, for instance, just by their nature, tend to probe the limits of quantum theory in a way nothing else can. Something very interesting could come out of that. Dark matter detectors could produce something. Someone might actually work a theory down into something that can be tested.

[thingification]

I think these are two distinct things:

> The problem isn't that "finding nothing" isn't progress. The problem is that "finding nothing" is terrible progress-per-dollar.

> if you go on to argue about how vital it is to spend another 5x times as much money to build another particle collider that we have no reason to believe will find anything new, you will continue to be marginalized and find your influence waning to apparently no effect.

The first part is fine if by it you mean you think the physics-practitioner-theory of the collider advocates (a theory about what next research steps might be fruitful, not a theory of physics) is now implausible to you. On the other hand if you just think something like "We expect the future (of physics) to be 'like' the past (not making progress)", then that isn't an explanatory statement and is unrelated to whether we should fund a future collider. If you know what you're going to find in an experiment, you're not setting out to discover something new, so there is no such "future will be like the past" principle here.

The second really is an argument not to fund a future collider because it comes with an explanation: what good theory (of physics, this time) do we have that predicts we'll find new tests, or new problems? If there's no very good theory, new tests or new problems might come from other experiments instead, especially if they're a lot cheaper so we can do more of them. Personally I guess that it's a good argument you make here in this second part, but what do I know?

[SkyBelow]

What are the alternatives? Better weapons, better ad targeting systems, better gambling hidden behind a veneer of gaming on mobile? We can look at where our government and our society currently allocates money and find that the allocations looks bad enough that even building a bigger particle accelerator that might not find anything is an improvement overall. As a singular species, I think we would be better for going down that route given the average of what would be given up.

Problem is that humanity is not unified for our own betterment, so that ends up being a bad metric to judge actions upon. I think you are right in the outcome, it would mean losing influence, and even if we get funding it'll likely be diverted from the areas we least want it diverted from. You're probably right and I find that unsatisfactory.

[jerf]

Sorry, are you seriously proposing that either we fund new particle accelerators or we're just going to build weapons/ads/gambling systems, and there are no other choices?

I want to be clear that this is your claim before I spend any more time on it.

[SkyBelow]

No. I'm pointing out that our current system is already spending money on far more wasteful things, thus it should be possible to fund accelerators by taking away from the things that are an outright detriment to humanity than the things that are, at worst, only useless.

I even point out that the reality is likely if we fund particle accelerators, it will likely be diverted from places we don't want it to be diverted from, like other research spending.

>even if we get funding it'll likely be diverted from the areas we least want it diverted from

Note I even end by saying the poster is probably right, for as much as I don't like that they are (not meant as a negative to the poster, but to how humanity currently allocates our resources).

[arcticfox]

Unfortunately the "weapons are a waste" opinion has taken a severe hit since February.

[weego]

That feels like a false dichotomy.

This is pushing forward research into theory, even with highly positive results it's completely unknown whether any of those results actually result in any progress for the human race other than knowledge, and at a base cost of €21 billion that knowledge comes with a huge opportunity cost.

We face so many tangible risks right now that €21 billion invested elsewhere into things that will likely produce meaningful advances to our problems that the question of 'is spending this much money disproving philosophical arguments justifiable right now?' should rightly be being asked.

[SkyBelow]

Isn't the false dichotomy that if we spend €21 billion on a particle accelerator then we must take it from other research into advancing humanity instead of taking it from other areas that don't provide benefit to humanity as a whole (though they do provide benefit to some groups at equal or greater cost to others).

>'is spending this much money disproving philosophical arguments justifiable right now?' should rightly be being asked.

In light of all the expenditures we are already making elsewhere, I don't see how many of those can be justified but this one not.

[bluGill]

Okay, we need to take that money from somewhere. There is only so much labor on the planet, and that is what the money is buying in the end. (I'm including corruption in labor here) Some labor is more valuable than others, and we can debate how much we want to spend, but in the end if we have someone do X they could do Y instead. Sometimes Y is sit around doing nothing, sometimes it is valuable.

The problem here is we don't know what will be discovered and if it will be useful. Cheap Science Fiction FTL without all the time dilation - very valuable. Add half a decimal point to our models - probably can't be used for anything and so less valuable than a game. I have no idea, I just picked unlikely two extremes.

[louloulou]

Better to just create trillions out of nothing and use them to buy financial assets, now that's a good use of money!

(https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/app/html/index.en.h...)

[R0b0t1]

Well, if you spend the 21 billion on health research and life extension, you can live to see spending 21 billion on physics research.

[supportengineer]

Huge fleets of space telescopes

Multiple gravity wave detectors

[Koshkin]

These I'm afraid will only confirm what we already know.

[simne]

Really? What about quark stars/planets, long bursts?

-Telescopes gives us lot of confirmations, but also they, especially largest, constantly feed us data about new, unknown things.

[roywiggins]

It's like going treasure-hunting and demonstrating to everyone's satisfaction that there is definitely no treasure where you looked. It doesn't tell you very much about 1) if the treasure you're hunting really exists (there's many more places it could be), or 2) what exactly the treasure consists of.

It's technically more information, but it's not very much information.

eg, what did we learn from the underwater hunt for MH370? not a lot, millions were spent to still have no clue where the thing is. It's not just political to say that the hunt failed in an important way.

[atx42]

My take is we were asking the wrong questions, and now we know that, so hopefully we can figure out the right questions.

[brazzy]

> This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded.

The probem is, as far as I know, that there is an effectively infinite space of supersymmetry hypotheses. Ruling one of those out is pretty worthless success.

[anticristi]

> If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment.

Sadly, that achievement -- public support for trillions in military expenditures -- belongs to a not-so-Western government invading a wanna-be-Western government.

[SkyBelow]

>That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment.

Is it solvable? Humans are notoriously bad at certain things and investing in things that aren't showing interesting results is one of them. How many companies will cut something that prevents problems because they don't see problems?

If you want to solve this, you would need to do it the same way the MIC has solved military funding, by ensuring continued funding of science is necessary for politicians to be re-elected. But that borders close enough to corruption I'm not sure the scientists who need the funding will be agreeable to it, to say nothing of the difficulty engineering this.

[robertlagrant]

> If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment.

We just need, occasionally, a belligerent something to do something to remind us of why experimental particle physics is needed in its equivalent of peace-time.

[osigurdson]

A new discovery over some time period is a reasonable expectation. For example, if we discover nothing in the next 1000 years we would have to conclude that there is no longer any point in trying.