I don't think there is a correct answer to the question should we build the next particle accelerator. Its an opinion based on the probability of us finding something (also an opinion) and the relative value of that discovery to $20B.
I got a PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1995. My thesis was about the supersymmetric flavor problem, where we tried to infer information about physics we couldn't measure based on the naturalness criteria she criticizes. My thoughts on pursing this: well, I left physics. I thought it was too hard to make any progress. I went into software. I don't have any regrets.
I shouldn't admit this but I occasionaly daydream in a Walter Mitty sort of way about doing great things. I have had a few physics ideas related to things like quantum gravity that I think about occasionally. Just a few months ago I was daydreaming about me pursuing one of these back in graduate school and it being very successfull. I intertrupted my daydream with a thought, "I'm glad that didn't happen. Then I might have stayed in Physics."
So that is my answer to the question about investing my own time in searching for new physics. None the less, I wouldn't say people are crazy because they think there is some value to pursuing physics as is currently being done.
Another interesting story in undergrad I had a thesis supervisor who was working in cosmology, but had a 20 year career in high energy particle physics (5 as a grad student, 10 as a research scientist and 5 as a pre-tenured faculty member). Basically the moment he got tenure he switched from experimental particle to observational cosmology because as he said "I saw the writing on the wall that after the higgs there was no clear direction for high energy and no clear direction for even finding a way out of the aimlessness." I thought it was kind of crazy that he had a multi-year plan for leaving particle, but I guessed it worked out for him he is now reasonably successful and is a leader in both DESI and LSST. I ended up leaving physics entirely.
The current paradigm of particle physics will likely fail after the next accelerator -- everybody abandon ship RIGHT NOW!!Elf!
So since the early seventies there was an interplay between discovery machines, accelerators that prioritize high energy over high precision, and precision experiments. In practice these are proton accelerators, which accelerate to very high energies since protons are heavy, but have the downside that protons are itself very complicated objects, and electron accelerators, that have the opposite trade off, electrons are light and therefore lower energy but are very simple and analyzing the results is therefore very easy.
The way the interplay worked is, that the precision experiments would constrain the parameter space for the next generation of discovery machines, and then the discovery machines would give the next generation of precision experiments a target.
This is to a large extend just research by timetable, and funding agencies love it. Physicists can write a proposal including a list of expected discoveries and funding agencies can then just check that list quarterly.
This paradigm will most likely come to an end after the next accelerator. The next accelerator will be a Higgs factory to measure with very high precision the properties of the Higgs boson.
Now theory did progress a lot in the last four decades, but it closely mirrored this path of experiments and therefore did work within a quite well defined paradigm. That is what she means with "no progress," there was a lot of progress, new calculation techniques, new techniques for model building, the entire effective field theory ideas and so on, but that is all in service of a narrowly defined paradigm.
So it is probably a good idea to start looking for more risky research, because we a pretty sure the boring predictable stuff is coming to an end, but I think that the characterization of "no progress" is a quite unfair characterization of a very fruitful endeavor.
At this point physics seems to be in the business of adding epicycles to a model that does some very good modelling, in an epicyclic way, but cannot possibly be complete as a paradigm.
OP's point is that new paradigms are desperately needed, and it's looking unlikely that we'll get them by building a $20bn thing that bangs the same old rocks together a bit harder.
It doesn't help that people who are smart enough to make a difference don't stay in physics long enough to do what they could do. There's more money and less pressure elsewhere.
Collectively, this is not a good situation to be in. Nothing has more potential to change the future than new physics, and CERN-style HEP seems much less likely to get to Quantum Gravity than a new academic and financial paradigm in fundamental research.
Just a thought: The fact that there is physics beyond current knowledge doesn't necessarily mean that it's achievable to find out about it.
Think about it: Finding confirmation for the Higgs Boson required building a particle accelerator of 27 kilometers. For the larger part of humanities existence it was probably unthinkable to design such an experiment.
What if the next level of yet unknown physics requires building a machine that's as large as the equator? Or larger than anything that can be built on earth?
I think this kind of issue has always been lurking in the shadows for humanity, not only in physics but in other areas as well. While I'm not certain about the historical details, it seems to me that the ancient Greeks were able to dream up mathematical problems, that resisted solution for centuries.
Similarly, the math required to put calculus on a decent theoretical foundation was unknown until more than a century after Newton's time.
Other areas of science... how do humans think? Can we cure pain without killing people?
Physics experienced an incredible series of lucky breaks over the past few centuries, but each breakthrough doesn't come with a schedule for when the next one will arrive, and we never know when the next one will be a real stumper. We don't know if it will take a month, a year, or a century.
On the other hand, the double-slit experiment doesn't take any expensive equipment, and if things had gone differently, could easily have gone un-noticed until 2019. My bet is there are other experiments like double-slit which will be equally revolutionary and dirt cheap and everyone will be kicking themselves for not discovering them sooner.
> What if the next level of yet unknown physics requires building a machine that's as large as the equator? Or larger than anything that can be built on earth?
Then we need to fund that engineering.
That's part of the argument. Will a bigger collider really be the best use of funds?
Pouring enormous sums at, for example, the solid-state physics of superconductors and figuring out how to make an actual room temperature superconductor could advance many things simultaneously. (For example: room temp superconductors probably enable fusion at reasonable scales--and fusion at decent sizes gates most megascale engineering projects. Another example: quantum computers have several open questions about them that may mean that they never achieve generality--we should probably probe that intensely).
Nobody is saying to never build another collider. But the real question is "Do we have a good reason to build another collider right now? Or should we shunt that money elsewhere in physics?"
So what? If we don't take steps forward we will never get anywhere. We can only operate with the best capabilities and knowledge available to us today.
$20B is nothing compared to the world's GDP. If there aren't more compelling research projects of similar magnitude in fundamental physics, then we should build it. Of course, I'm not qualified to make that judgment, but I think we have good reason to trust that smart and reputable people are working hard to make the right call.
We should always be investing a proportion of our accumulated wealth and resources into exploring the unknown and making scientific discovery.
So, yes, aside from the discovery of neutrino mass there was no "fundamental" progress since the Standard Model -- as in, all the effects we see in current experiments are accounted for by the theory -- if you know how to calculate them well enough, which is actually not trivial at all, and has been keeping physicist busy for the last few decades.
And yes, by scientific standards 20-30B EUR over ~25 years is a large sum, even though 1B/year is about the current CERN budget, about 1/5 of the current ESA budget, 1/20 of NASA budget, and 1/500 of the US military budget, etc -- so not that outrageous by other standards.
And yes again, there are multiple cheaper experiments with a more certain outcome. For example the Japanese Hyper-Kamiokande neutrino detector will provide enough data to solve neutrino mass hierarchy problem at the cost of ~2B EUR; or the space-based LIGO successor, LISA, which will improve over LIGO's ability to detect gravity waves by half of a dozen orders of magnitude for about 1B EUR or so.
And yet, those experiments can not bring more understanding into the "fundamental" physics -- i.e. to find a breach in the Standard Model. Only two kinds of experiments can:
1) cheap detectors constructed to test special classes of SM extensions (e.g. detectors like ALPS, which consist of a laser pointing at a wall to search for e.g. axions) -- if by some luck the particular extension turns out to be true;
2) a collider with higher energies like FCC, CLIC or ILC.
Now, there's no shortage of the cheap experiments, but up till now they've only excluded certain classes of "beyond standard model" theories, while confirming the SM even more. We'll probably continue building these in the forseeable future, but overall it doesn't seem likely that we'll find anything here.
So if you want any progress in the "fundamental" physics -- there doesn't seem to be a way without a bigger collider to show deviation from the SM. Without such an experiment, all people are left with is speculation, and that is how you get the string theories, supersymmetries, and the dreaded "naturalness" criteria, which the author of the article dislikes so much.
We have here someone who doesn't/never work/ed on HEP but on something so remote from it that I would find it hard to even call it physics sometimes. She goes on a sudden crusade against HEP and all its (prominent) practitioners who spent years working on it. She uses some facts we all agree on (uncertainty about the future, etc.) then twists them in a way that makes it look as if the whole HEP community is part of a huge conspiracy to deceive the public. Our truth warrior then courageously exposes them in her ... blog. BS.
On the other side how the hell can she justify her salary and grants to taxpayers? Why isn't she doing some biology or something? It's all so incoherent.
I used to read her when she was less crazy. But I really can't stand her anymore ... it's just too much.
It's all very strange. Two of the most popular and active bloggers in HEP are totally crazy and politically extreme (although in opposite extremes). Blogging seems to be an unhealthy activity for physicists.
Well, maybe it isn’t worth spending another 20B on a new particle accelerator, but if so how should we continue? Smashing particles together at high energies is at least a proven strategy that has yielded results in the past and I personally don’t know how we would do high energy physics without them? Maybe we could think of finding ways to investigate naturally occurring particles at those high energies (e.g. via cosmic radiation) but that seems more sci-fi than reality and also won’t cost less than 20B I would argue.
Also, not making progress for 40 years is not really long, we just tend to view everything relative to our own lifespan and we were also pretty spoiled with the marvelous discoveries we made in the last 100 years, but it’s entirely possible that we have now worked out all the “easy” stuff and that making further progress will take 1000s of years (though I think that’s unlikely).
>Smashing particles together at high energies is at least a proven strategy that has yielded results in the past and I personally don’t know how we would do high energy physics without them?
Isn't that a little cyclical? Why should we do "high energy physics" as opposed to just physics? Aren't there other ways to come at fundamental particles than smashing things together and seeing what happens?
>Also, not making progress for 40 years is not really long
Compared to the previous 100 years rate of progress, which was the baseline, it is huge.
If you look at the history of science over the last 2000 years or so, new insights have popped up from time to time in a rather random way. There isn't really a reason to expect them regularly thought that doesn't mean we shouldn't stop looking.
I don't have any sense for how much the author is contributing to any discussions of worth -- but I do struggle with the phrase 'foundations of physics'. To me 'foundation of' invites comparison to similar uses in other domains -- in math where it tends to concern the nature of argument, or to computer science where it concerns mechanisms for accomplishing defined goals efficiently or reasoning about program performance/semantics, or to engineering where it concerns such things as stacking rocks and balancing forces so as to ensure that a given way of stacking is probably capable of lasting for a certain amount of time.
But why exactly should 'high energy physics' be considered more 'foundational' than other domains of physical observation? Particle physics pursues description of effects that can occur at very small sizes - but are there _really_ such tight linkages from the observational domain of particle physics to observable 'larger scale' physics such that one truly deserves to be labeled 'foundational' for the other?
Just to pick a domain out of a hat, when modeling things like electromagnetic potentials in material science, actively investigated theoretical models are coarse grained so far beyond the scale of the probing done in particle physics that I have wonder how much are the 'foundational' theories and the larger scale ones ever really expected/required to be consistent with each other ...?
If 'foundational' isn't a statement about the direction of the consistency requirements the components of argument - then what exactly is it a statement about?
As long as you hold onto the assumption that all physical phenomena on the macro scale can in a (perhaps not useful) sense be explained reductively by particle/field physics of some sort, it's clear that poking at the particle/field/whatever substrate is more foundational than studying high level emergent phenomena. That isn't to say that high-energy particle physics is the best or only avenue of fundamental exploration; obviously, much of the last century's advancements came from cosmology.
There's nothing wrong with studying condensed matter physics, and there is a huge amount to learn. But I don't see a conceivable way in which discoveries made by studying complex behavior closer to our scale will help solve quantum gravity or dark matter.
Then again, if humanity were one big game of Civilization, I'd be directing my tech tree towards engineering and applied physics research at the moment: we probably don't need any more fundamental physics to build sustainable fusion reactors.
She is not claiming that high energy physics is foundational. The foundations of physics are the main theories on top of which the whole edifice is built. In physics, these foundations include the Theory of Relativity and the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
We know that the foundations are incomplete because the Standard Model cannot be combined with General Relativity, although there is overwhelming empirical evidence in favor of both. They also fail to predict Dark Energy and Dark Matter. So we know that there is something foundational we don't know. One of the hopes of finding out what this is is to gather more empirical data (also allowing one to put many hypothesis to the test along the way). On the side of the Standard Model, high particle physics provides the theoretical and experimental framework to gather more such empirical data, that being the purpose of the particle accelerators. The author is lamenting that these efforts did not produce the results we were hoping for, and that they did not lead to any breakthrough on the foundational mysteries.
I do not quite agree with your foundations of Computer Science. For me, these are the theoretical constructs that give sense to everything else, for example Turing Machines and the main results on Turing Machines. Perhaps also Lambda Calculus, or at least combinatory logic and so on.
Another example: in modern Biology, the concept of "imperfect replicator" is foundational. If you remove that piece, the whole edifice crumbles into stamp collecting.
Lee Smolin, who's a well-respected physicist, says similar things. He's especially critical of string theory, which lacks support from experimental evidence.
There is experimental progress in physics, but it seems to be at the low energy end. Down near absolute zero, where quantum mechanics dominates.
Many of the stranger predictions of quantum mechanics have been confirmed experimentally. Useful applications, such as quantum cryptography, are emerging.
That's where the action is.
Lots of high tech jobs come from war too. Great strides in physics came directly from war funding. Huge areas of tech (gps) came from the preparation for war.
I think her tone is quite antagonising and I am not sure if it is intentional:
" No one wants to live in a world where the little German lady with her oh-so rational arguments ends up being right. Not even the German lady wants that. Wait, what did I say? I must be crazy."
This is meant to sound self-deprecating (I think) but in the context of the articles comes across as arrogant to me because clearly she thinks she is not the little lady, and others are irrationally ignoring her superior insights. Could be a cultural artefact but it makes her articles uncomfortable to read for me.
Compared to a software product, the scientists have build a product that contains many modules that all link together via complex maths.
What is still missing is refactoring: making things simple again and removing unnecessary parts.
While many of the modules have been tested separately, certain combinations may not work as proclaimed. I find this problem already with the physics of the sun. So many things are way off normal physics. I have seen models that do not exist anywhere else. Predicted values are 10^6 order off. These things need retesting and the modules likely need to be redesigned.
But just stating that something might be off, already triggers many scientists. They see it as an attack on "their" science. This is clearly an attack on the messenger. Usually mixed with logical fallacies. So there is a real problem with the involved scientists as well. They do not want to see errors in their system, as it hurts their status. And there is the real problem with science. The ones involved do not want to admit that there might be something wrong.
If I would tell programmers that something might be wrong with one combination of modules, they are (more) often happy to look into it. So scientists, be more like programmers.
I think the issue with fusion is similar to the arguments made by the lady in OP. Yes, fusion is under-funded but partly because people doubt that it's possible at all. OTOH, there are definitely people who have seriously good proposals for further fusion projects e.g. [1].
We are doing it. Expected cost of cost of building ITER is now well in excess of 20B and keeps rising. It's not speeding anything up; first plasma not expected until 2025.
Well but how about a cutting edge silicon fab that gave the entire world a powerful device that fits in one's pocket to access all of human knowledge, instantaneously? For 20B? Add to this the fact that technology is powered by science and you get a very different picture.
Why is it I generally only ever hear this argument (or some variant of it, e.g. starving children) when discussing a proposed scientific endeavour? Why not trim the US military budget by 10% and generate 3x as much revenue, you could house 1.2 million homeless for that price.
With $20 billion, you could house 400,000 homeless people for three or four years, not forever. And that's assuming they need only rent and not mental health or other services.
Either there is a loophole in physics or there is not. By 'loophole' I mean 'some of the physics we don't yet know, has useful applications such as faster than light travel or unbounded computation, that could potentially be tapped by terrestrial civilization'. (As opposed to the alternative state of affairs where the Standard Model suffices to describe everything that will ever happen in our solar system.)
The expected value of research in fundamental physics is much greater if there is a loophole than if there is not.
Proposal: we should try to figure out what qualities the as yet unknown physics must have, conditional on a loophole existing. Then we should proceed on the assumption that it does indeed have those qualities, in order to maximize expected utility.
Interesting idea, though I would say if it’s measurable then we can’t rule out an application somewhere down the line no matter how esoteric the knowledge might seem now.
I don't really understand what she's suggesting. It is easy to be sceptic, and just saying that "ya'll just wasting money". And to be honest 20b on a collider is a tiny dent on budgets we spend on, say, military.
In general, it would be quite interesting to see how many scientists, technologists and mathematicians are working on which problems. For the latter group, I've seen estimates that there are less than 350,000 researchers worldwide.
Is there any chance that we could reach new physics with a linear collider instead of a circular collider?
If there is, then I have an idea to get funding. Build it above ground along the US/Mexican border, so that it could also serve as the wall President Trump wants built.
[+] [-] gpsx|7 years ago|reply
I got a PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1995. My thesis was about the supersymmetric flavor problem, where we tried to infer information about physics we couldn't measure based on the naturalness criteria she criticizes. My thoughts on pursing this: well, I left physics. I thought it was too hard to make any progress. I went into software. I don't have any regrets.
I shouldn't admit this but I occasionaly daydream in a Walter Mitty sort of way about doing great things. I have had a few physics ideas related to things like quantum gravity that I think about occasionally. Just a few months ago I was daydreaming about me pursuing one of these back in graduate school and it being very successfull. I intertrupted my daydream with a thought, "I'm glad that didn't happen. Then I might have stayed in Physics."
So that is my answer to the question about investing my own time in searching for new physics. None the less, I wouldn't say people are crazy because they think there is some value to pursuing physics as is currently being done.
[+] [-] mycorrhizal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianai|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yk|7 years ago|reply
So since the early seventies there was an interplay between discovery machines, accelerators that prioritize high energy over high precision, and precision experiments. In practice these are proton accelerators, which accelerate to very high energies since protons are heavy, but have the downside that protons are itself very complicated objects, and electron accelerators, that have the opposite trade off, electrons are light and therefore lower energy but are very simple and analyzing the results is therefore very easy.
The way the interplay worked is, that the precision experiments would constrain the parameter space for the next generation of discovery machines, and then the discovery machines would give the next generation of precision experiments a target.
This is to a large extend just research by timetable, and funding agencies love it. Physicists can write a proposal including a list of expected discoveries and funding agencies can then just check that list quarterly.
This paradigm will most likely come to an end after the next accelerator. The next accelerator will be a Higgs factory to measure with very high precision the properties of the Higgs boson.
Now theory did progress a lot in the last four decades, but it closely mirrored this path of experiments and therefore did work within a quite well defined paradigm. That is what she means with "no progress," there was a lot of progress, new calculation techniques, new techniques for model building, the entire effective field theory ideas and so on, but that is all in service of a narrowly defined paradigm.
So it is probably a good idea to start looking for more risky research, because we a pretty sure the boring predictable stuff is coming to an end, but I think that the characterization of "no progress" is a quite unfair characterization of a very fruitful endeavor.
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|7 years ago|reply
At this point physics seems to be in the business of adding epicycles to a model that does some very good modelling, in an epicyclic way, but cannot possibly be complete as a paradigm.
OP's point is that new paradigms are desperately needed, and it's looking unlikely that we'll get them by building a $20bn thing that bangs the same old rocks together a bit harder.
It doesn't help that people who are smart enough to make a difference don't stay in physics long enough to do what they could do. There's more money and less pressure elsewhere.
Collectively, this is not a good situation to be in. Nothing has more potential to change the future than new physics, and CERN-style HEP seems much less likely to get to Quantum Gravity than a new academic and financial paradigm in fundamental research.
[+] [-] vasili111|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwomp|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hannob|7 years ago|reply
Think about it: Finding confirmation for the Higgs Boson required building a particle accelerator of 27 kilometers. For the larger part of humanities existence it was probably unthinkable to design such an experiment.
What if the next level of yet unknown physics requires building a machine that's as large as the equator? Or larger than anything that can be built on earth?
[+] [-] analog31|7 years ago|reply
Similarly, the math required to put calculus on a decent theoretical foundation was unknown until more than a century after Newton's time.
Other areas of science... how do humans think? Can we cure pain without killing people?
Physics experienced an incredible series of lucky breaks over the past few centuries, but each breakthrough doesn't come with a schedule for when the next one will arrive, and we never know when the next one will be a real stumper. We don't know if it will take a month, a year, or a century.
[+] [-] xamuel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|7 years ago|reply
Then we need to fund that engineering.
That's part of the argument. Will a bigger collider really be the best use of funds?
Pouring enormous sums at, for example, the solid-state physics of superconductors and figuring out how to make an actual room temperature superconductor could advance many things simultaneously. (For example: room temp superconductors probably enable fusion at reasonable scales--and fusion at decent sizes gates most megascale engineering projects. Another example: quantum computers have several open questions about them that may mean that they never achieve generality--we should probably probe that intensely).
Nobody is saying to never build another collider. But the real question is "Do we have a good reason to build another collider right now? Or should we shunt that money elsewhere in physics?"
[+] [-] dwaltrip|7 years ago|reply
$20B is nothing compared to the world's GDP. If there aren't more compelling research projects of similar magnitude in fundamental physics, then we should build it. Of course, I'm not qualified to make that judgment, but I think we have good reason to trust that smart and reputable people are working hard to make the right call.
We should always be investing a proportion of our accumulated wealth and resources into exploring the unknown and making scientific discovery.
[+] [-] magv|7 years ago|reply
And yes, by scientific standards 20-30B EUR over ~25 years is a large sum, even though 1B/year is about the current CERN budget, about 1/5 of the current ESA budget, 1/20 of NASA budget, and 1/500 of the US military budget, etc -- so not that outrageous by other standards.
And yes again, there are multiple cheaper experiments with a more certain outcome. For example the Japanese Hyper-Kamiokande neutrino detector will provide enough data to solve neutrino mass hierarchy problem at the cost of ~2B EUR; or the space-based LIGO successor, LISA, which will improve over LIGO's ability to detect gravity waves by half of a dozen orders of magnitude for about 1B EUR or so.
And yet, those experiments can not bring more understanding into the "fundamental" physics -- i.e. to find a breach in the Standard Model. Only two kinds of experiments can:
1) cheap detectors constructed to test special classes of SM extensions (e.g. detectors like ALPS, which consist of a laser pointing at a wall to search for e.g. axions) -- if by some luck the particular extension turns out to be true;
2) a collider with higher energies like FCC, CLIC or ILC.
Now, there's no shortage of the cheap experiments, but up till now they've only excluded certain classes of "beyond standard model" theories, while confirming the SM even more. We'll probably continue building these in the forseeable future, but overall it doesn't seem likely that we'll find anything here.
So if you want any progress in the "fundamental" physics -- there doesn't seem to be a way without a bigger collider to show deviation from the SM. Without such an experiment, all people are left with is speculation, and that is how you get the string theories, supersymmetries, and the dreaded "naturalness" criteria, which the author of the article dislikes so much.
[+] [-] x3tm|7 years ago|reply
On the other side how the hell can she justify her salary and grants to taxpayers? Why isn't she doing some biology or something? It's all so incoherent.
I used to read her when she was less crazy. But I really can't stand her anymore ... it's just too much.
It's all very strange. Two of the most popular and active bloggers in HEP are totally crazy and politically extreme (although in opposite extremes). Blogging seems to be an unhealthy activity for physicists.
[+] [-] ThePhysicist|7 years ago|reply
Also, not making progress for 40 years is not really long, we just tend to view everything relative to our own lifespan and we were also pretty spoiled with the marvelous discoveries we made in the last 100 years, but it’s entirely possible that we have now worked out all the “easy” stuff and that making further progress will take 1000s of years (though I think that’s unlikely).
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
Isn't that a little cyclical? Why should we do "high energy physics" as opposed to just physics? Aren't there other ways to come at fundamental particles than smashing things together and seeing what happens?
>Also, not making progress for 40 years is not really long
Compared to the previous 100 years rate of progress, which was the baseline, it is huge.
[+] [-] sandworm101|7 years ago|reply
And telescopes to study objects like quazars that too are just sitting there demoing high energy physics 24/7.
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breatheoften|7 years ago|reply
But why exactly should 'high energy physics' be considered more 'foundational' than other domains of physical observation? Particle physics pursues description of effects that can occur at very small sizes - but are there _really_ such tight linkages from the observational domain of particle physics to observable 'larger scale' physics such that one truly deserves to be labeled 'foundational' for the other?
Just to pick a domain out of a hat, when modeling things like electromagnetic potentials in material science, actively investigated theoretical models are coarse grained so far beyond the scale of the probing done in particle physics that I have wonder how much are the 'foundational' theories and the larger scale ones ever really expected/required to be consistent with each other ...?
If 'foundational' isn't a statement about the direction of the consistency requirements the components of argument - then what exactly is it a statement about?
[+] [-] jakeinspace|7 years ago|reply
There's nothing wrong with studying condensed matter physics, and there is a huge amount to learn. But I don't see a conceivable way in which discoveries made by studying complex behavior closer to our scale will help solve quantum gravity or dark matter.
Then again, if humanity were one big game of Civilization, I'd be directing my tech tree towards engineering and applied physics research at the moment: we probably don't need any more fundamental physics to build sustainable fusion reactors.
[+] [-] TelmoMenezes|7 years ago|reply
We know that the foundations are incomplete because the Standard Model cannot be combined with General Relativity, although there is overwhelming empirical evidence in favor of both. They also fail to predict Dark Energy and Dark Matter. So we know that there is something foundational we don't know. One of the hopes of finding out what this is is to gather more empirical data (also allowing one to put many hypothesis to the test along the way). On the side of the Standard Model, high particle physics provides the theoretical and experimental framework to gather more such empirical data, that being the purpose of the particle accelerators. The author is lamenting that these efforts did not produce the results we were hoping for, and that they did not lead to any breakthrough on the foundational mysteries.
I do not quite agree with your foundations of Computer Science. For me, these are the theoretical constructs that give sense to everything else, for example Turing Machines and the main results on Turing Machines. Perhaps also Lambda Calculus, or at least combinatory logic and so on.
Another example: in modern Biology, the concept of "imperfect replicator" is foundational. If you remove that piece, the whole edifice crumbles into stamp collecting.
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
There is experimental progress in physics, but it seems to be at the low energy end. Down near absolute zero, where quantum mechanics dominates. Many of the stranger predictions of quantum mechanics have been confirmed experimentally. Useful applications, such as quantum cryptography, are emerging. That's where the action is.
[+] [-] sien|7 years ago|reply
Both Smolin's book 'The Trouble with Physics' and Woit's 'Not Even Wrong' are well worth a read.
[+] [-] amai|7 years ago|reply
"I don't believe that there exists a competent physicist who doesn't agree that Lee Smolin is a hardcore crackpot"
https://motls.blogspot.com/2013/04/lee-smolin-time-reborn.ht...
[+] [-] mycall|7 years ago|reply
$20 billion spent is a lot of high tech jobs being made. I'm for it. Think how much we spend on wars.
[+] [-] reasonablemann|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waynecochran|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davrosthedalek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] high_derivative|7 years ago|reply
" No one wants to live in a world where the little German lady with her oh-so rational arguments ends up being right. Not even the German lady wants that. Wait, what did I say? I must be crazy."
This is meant to sound self-deprecating (I think) but in the context of the articles comes across as arrogant to me because clearly she thinks she is not the little lady, and others are irrationally ignoring her superior insights. Could be a cultural artefact but it makes her articles uncomfortable to read for me.
[+] [-] _Microft|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zyxzevn|7 years ago|reply
While many of the modules have been tested separately, certain combinations may not work as proclaimed. I find this problem already with the physics of the sun. So many things are way off normal physics. I have seen models that do not exist anywhere else. Predicted values are 10^6 order off. These things need retesting and the modules likely need to be redesigned.
But just stating that something might be off, already triggers many scientists. They see it as an attack on "their" science. This is clearly an attack on the messenger. Usually mixed with logical fallacies. So there is a real problem with the involved scientists as well. They do not want to see errors in their system, as it hurts their status. And there is the real problem with science. The ones involved do not want to admit that there might be something wrong.
If I would tell programmers that something might be wrong with one combination of modules, they are (more) often happy to look into it. So scientists, be more like programmers.
[+] [-] reasonablemann|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] est31|7 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
[+] [-] Stevvo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiemand|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magnusdeus123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnonymousRider|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YjSe2GMQ|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hatboat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perl4ever|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwallace|7 years ago|reply
Either there is a loophole in physics or there is not. By 'loophole' I mean 'some of the physics we don't yet know, has useful applications such as faster than light travel or unbounded computation, that could potentially be tapped by terrestrial civilization'. (As opposed to the alternative state of affairs where the Standard Model suffices to describe everything that will ever happen in our solar system.)
The expected value of research in fundamental physics is much greater if there is a loophole than if there is not.
Proposal: we should try to figure out what qualities the as yet unknown physics must have, conditional on a loophole existing. Then we should proceed on the assumption that it does indeed have those qualities, in order to maximize expected utility.
[+] [-] dasil003|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madhadron|7 years ago|reply
What she's talking about is all stuff that's well known in the physics community. She is willing to say it publicly.
[+] [-] Svoka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiba|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7373737373|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|7 years ago|reply
If there is, then I have an idea to get funding. Build it above ground along the US/Mexican border, so that it could also serve as the wall President Trump wants built.