[MisterMashable]

There's a very subtle undertone of negativity in this article about physics. Before I get into, William Bardeen is not in the same league as 'Surfer Dude and his E8 Theory of Everything' which throws basic facts about representation theory out the window, coming up with 'todalay boogus' arguments which amazes auntie, mommie and magazine editors but a real physicist would instantly dismiss.

Bardeen is the real deal. His papers are very interesting and feel a bit like reading Sidney Coleman's papers. If you're interested...

http://arxiv.org/find/hep-th/1/au:+Bardeen_W/0/1/0/all/0/1

Is nature scale invariant? So far the answer is absolutely NO but I strongly advise to wait and see. There are many topics that point to some breakdown in scale or reorganizing what we think of space and distance (dualities in string theory, conformal field theory).

OK, now the important thing I want everyone here to realize. You are living through a GOLDEN AGE of physics. You wouldn't think that based on what all the popular magazines tell you. Here's why...

1. Higgs particle - discovered!

2. Inflation - discovered! Denying this one is like denying the Big Bang itself. The evidence is overwhelming and in fact I would list this as the single greatest scientific discovery of all time. The concurrent discovery of gravity waves, quantum gravity and a real life example of a Hawking process only sweetens the deal.

3. Supersymmetry has basically already been discovered IMHO. They aren't announcing anything at CERN and won't until they have so many sigmas under their belt but trust me, it's coming and truth be told, it isn't really so surprising. SUSY physics has always been rock solid from the beginning. The situation is very similar to that before offical Higgs announcement and before someone went knocking on Andre Linde's front door. Many were extremely confident in the Higgs particle a least a year before the official announcement. The BICEP 2 results were even more glaringly apparent than the Higgs results. Many people were walking around the Earth with 'secret knowledge' that inflation theory was correct even 2 to 3 years before the official announcement.

So you are living through EXTREMELY interesting times but you wouldn't know it with all the big science bashing being thrown around.

[jwuphysics]

I study astrophysics, so I won't be able to say much about SUSY or string theories or conformal field theories. I do agree that we're living in a golden age of physics! But your second and third points, inflation and SUSY-- those are definitely not confirmed. In fact, the primordial gravitational waves from BICEP2 are almost certainly dust contamination signal (e.g., http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5857). The discovery of supersymmetric particles would also be extremely shocking to me, since my institution is heavily involved in CERN LHC experiments, and I haven't heard any hints of a discovery yet. Perhaps you know something that I don't!

[MisterMashable]

Not confirmed in the sense that many in the community are denying the result, which is as it should be. Even considering many models including dust a robust result remains. I think PRL and others are being unreasonably pessimistic but the only way to settle this is for there to be more experiments at different frequencies. Then they can move from the shock and denial phase onto the grieving process. BICEP scooped Planck, big time. It doesn't matter to me but it matters a whole lot to some people and the degree of sour grapes and poor sportsmanship is really stunning. Yes, I am saying a good deal of this is motivated by the tiny team beating the much bigger team though I absolutely disagree with their hypercompetitive interpretation of the whole enterprise of experimental physics. History will tell us that BICEP got lucky, very lucky and they got there first. The dust up is happening on Earth not in space and the latter is certainly much easier to explain away and still have at least a six sigma result. I've read the dust papers with an open mind and none of them add up.

Regarding SUSY, strictly speaking no particles have been directly detected but anomalous currents abound and just about everything seen works perfectly with light SUSY and much better than with the standard model. The dilepton events alone are very compelling. http://www.science20.com/a_quantum_diaries_survivor/a_susy_e... SUSY is in plain view much the way the Higgs was in plain view for about a year before the official announcement. I have no special insider information, just a humble internet connection to download the important papers and a decent knowledge of particle physics. In hind sight, everyone will say 'of course' which always happens. From a theory point of view, SUSY is simply not an option unless there is some spectacularly new theory out there with novel concepts to replace QFT. The Coleman-Mandula theorem is extremely compelling. It basically tells us accept SUSY or find something to replace QFT. Since QFT works and there's no good reason to move on to something else (especially when something else doesn't exist presently and possibly never will), it's a safe bet SUSY must exist somewhere. It just so happens to be light SUSY and we're seeing it at the LHC right now. I think we're presently seeing the equivalent of a COBE picture of SUSY and next year it will sharpen up into a WMAP picture.

[derefr]

> The discovery of supersymmetric particles would also be extremely shocking to me, since my institution is heavily involved in CERN LHC experiments, and I haven't heard any hints of a discovery yet.

Why does an absence of evidence imply that the arrival of evidence would be shocking? They're doing the experiment because they already believe things are this way and they're trying to get evidence to confirm it. If they disconfirmed it, that'd be surprising.

[lutusp]

> They're doing the experiment because they already believe things are this way and they're trying to get evidence to confirm it.

That's not science, that's confirmation bias. In science, one would want to look for evidence that one's theory is false with as much vigor as a search for evidence that it's true. Science isn't law, and it's not religion.

> If they disconfirmed it, that'd be surprising.

If they falsified their theory while only seeking confirming evidence, yes, that would be surprising. This is why open-minded scientists try to avoid assuming what they should be proving (the real meaning of the expression "beg the question").

[chemunc]

I'm not trying to start an argument here, but wouldn't "assuming what they should be proving" be the same as "hypothesizing?" That's a critical point of the scientific method. You don't really design experiments that can both confirm and refute a theory. When an "open-minded" scientist attempts to perform an experiment to test theory, they aren't personally responsible for subsequent theories and experiments that could disprove their results.

[lutusp]

> wouldn't "assuming what they should be proving" be the same as "hypothesizing?"

No, the expression "assuming what you should be proving" has a special semantic meaning -- it refers to a thought process that uses its conclusion to support its investigation, or takes the preferred outcome as a given from the start, without seriously considering alternative explanations.

Hypothesizing means taking existing theory and extrapolating new untested properties, then presumably investigating whether there is any evidence for the hypothesis.

> You don't really design experiments that can both confirm and refute a theory.

On the contrary, the best experiments have the chance to either confirm or refute a hypothesis. The Michelson & Morley ether experiment is a classic of its kind -- its outcome would either confirm or refute the ether as it was imagined to be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experi...

> When an "open-minded" scientist attempts to perform an experiment to test theory, they aren't personally responsible for subsequent theories and experiments that could disprove their results.

Not so. An open-minded scientist wouldn't pass up the chance to uncover any positive or negative evidence for or against his theory -- both kinds of evidence contribute to our understanding of nature. Remember the story about Bell Labs engineers Penzias and Wilson cleaning bird droppings from their microwave dish? They did that so someone else wouldn't scoop them by discovering that they had been fooling themselves about the source of the noise in their antenna (which ultimately was identified as the cosmic background radiation, now standing as evidence for the Big Bang).

http://www.aps.org/programs/outreach/history/historicsites/p...

The bottom line? Science isn't law, it's not adversarial, there aren't two competing sides, and a responsible scientist maintains an open mind with respect to evidence both for and against his theories.

[differentView]

>They're doing the experiment because they already believe things are this way and they're trying to get evidence to confirm it.

Hypothesizing is one thing, but to believe without evidence is just blind faith.

[derefr]

If you don't have a higher Bayesian prior on the hypothesis than others, how did you select it out of hypothesis-space as something to test? (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Locate_the_hypothesis)

[obruchez]

Isn't faith blind by definition?

[kybernetikos]

No. One of the most commonly used definitions of faith is trust or confidence in a person or thing. Whether or not that trust or confidence is based on evidence or not is a separate matter that is not conveyed by the word.

Even in the case under discussion, that someone might have faith that something is a particular way, and are doing an experiment to confirm it (more likely disprove an alternative), that doesn't mean it's 'blind' as in without reason. People can have a lot of good reasons for believing something is a particular way without having measured it directly yet.

[dllthomas]

"'todalay boogus' arguments which amazes auntie, mommie and magazine editors but a real physicist would instantly dismiss."

For the record, my father was far more amazed by rambling, not entirely coherent speculative physics ideas than my mother or either of my aunts.

[jrussino]

Are there any particular resources that you recommend for a high-level overview of this kind of stuff? I'm an engineer with a solid grasp of classical mechanics and strong math background, but very little exposure to modern physics (basically, anything discovered after 1905) and I would like to be able to read about and appreciate this type of work. Where to start?

Apologies for taking the conversation off on a tangent, but you seem passionate about this.

[auxbuss]

The short course, 'From the Big Bang to Dark Energy'[0], is an excellent introduction.

[0] https://www.coursera.org/course/bigbang

[evanb]

Do you have any rumors or specific knowledge (even if it's not something you'll share) regarding SUSY? They found missing energy? A new plethora of resonances? Higgsinos or sfermions? Something more exotic?

[nilaykumar]

By the end of the last run, the people I talked to at CERN were fairly certain that there's no SUSY in the current dataset and that SUSY will likely not be found during the upcoming run. But perhaps the people I talked to are simply of a different persuasion.

[evanb]

Hi Nilay!

-- Evan from TQHN.

[MisterMashable]

The dilepton events are the best evidence yet IMO

[AtmaScout]

Thanks for your post and link. I recently watched Particle Fever on Netflix and became extremely fascinated with the field. A lot of the information you posted is touched on in the documentary. It is mostly focused around CERN and the years leading up to the Higgs particle discovery. There are also great interviews with David Kaplan and Nima Arkani-Hamed.

You've likely seen it but if not you might enjoy it.

[dandrews]

Surfer Dude and his E8 Theory of Everything ... 'todalay boogus' arguments which amazes auntie, mommie and magazine editors but a real physicist would instantly dismiss.

I suppose you're referring to Lisi? Neither he nor E8 were even mentioned in the article. You're both OT and unnecessarily unpleasant.

[MisterMashable]

Well there is no way Lisi's E8 theory can fit gravity and the standard model at the same time. At first glance the group structure seems to allow it but the actual group representation (which are the actual particles allowed if one wishes to construct such a theory) don't allow it. I'm totally fine if someone wants to pursue this area of research the problem is the MAGAZINES have printed his theory as though it were a valid contender or alternative to string theory or some other theory. Lisi's theory isn't. If it were a plane, it never got off the ground, it blew up on the runway. A recent TIME magazine special issue features this broken 'theory'. It's deeply misleading and shows a lack of concern about misleading the public. Loop quantum gravity, simplicial quantum gravity, and causal sets etc. are all examples of broken theories that just don't work. Just so you know there ARE valid alternatives to superstring theory regarding unification or physics beyond the standard model. Alain Connes non-commutative gravity, superconformal field theories, Kac Moody algebras, twistor gravity, twistor string theory, plain old N=8 D=4 supergravity is a contender, SO(10), SU(5), MacDowell Mansouri gravity, matrix models,... I could list more. These theories aren't broken, they actually work. Those are the kinds of things the public deserves to hear and read in the magazines.

[angersock]

So, erm, what does that buy us?

I'm just an engineer, so I'm not sure I see the utility in any of that--sorry to sound closed-minded, but am genuinely curious.

[21echoes]

The road from theoretical physics to engineering is a very long one, so it's very hard to predict exactly what this would buy us. Relativity, for instance, spent a long time with no concrete engineering benefit, but now it allows GPS to be much more accurate by adjusting for the time dilation on GPS satellite clocks. As we get closer and closer to the mysteries at the heart of the universe, I think it's safe to say that the engineering benefit will be both more arcane and more powerful.

[redraga]

A lot of discoveries do not have immediate uses and some might indeed never have any applications. But discoveries can spurn others in unexpected ways. The most famous example of course if the WWW which came out of CERN, a pure physics research institution. Cryptography is another example that has had a profound impact on information security. But the most compelling reason, at least to me, is we investigate because we can! That is just human nature.

[xenophonf]

Basic research is the foundation of all engineering. You can't design things without understanding how the universe works. If you need examples, look no further than to particle physics, which has had a huge influence on medical imagery since at least the fluoroscope.

[kazinator]

All things hitherto designed have been designed without a complete and truthful understanding of the universe. If we go back in history, we find examples of useful inventions that were produced amid a rather poor understanding. Levers and inclined planes were produced without knowing anything about basic arithmetic, let alone physics.

[nilaykumar]

It doesn't buy you anything, just as fine art and music do not buy you anything.