A few years ago, I went to a public interview/chat with Rainer Weiss in NYC. He described years of work in which the LIGO team found inventive ways to make their systems more precise. They just kept knocking down orders-of-magnitude. Still, after taking new measurements, they found nothing. No gravitational waves. Then the interviewer asked him if he was discouraged at this point in his career. I loved his response. He said, "No, it was a more meaningful zero."
It is interesting that you bring up LIGO. I actually had a formative experience in my career around a decade ago related to this. I worked on the project for a summer. During that period, I realized that the process of discovery in the dark is one where the seekers have no control over the treasures. I decided not to pursue a career in the field. My lotus of control could not handle dedicating my life's work to chance.
Rainer demonstrated a dedication and passion in that interview that not everyone can meet. I learned that I'm more passionate about effective/real world problem solving than I am about physics.
Those who have a true passion for physics have my complete support and admiration. You're doing great - keep at it :)
I know Ray and this is an accurate retelling of this line, but it's comparing apples to oranges in the context of this thread. He knew LIGO was rapidly approaching the necessary sensitivity to make great discoveries -- a threshold. The LHC experiments may already have the sensitivity necessary to make their great discoveries, and may just be chasing diminishing returns at this point. Big difference.
Stagnation of scientific fields is normal and can last many years. In that time, little anomalies pile up, are swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. To admit anomalies can ruin careers, after all.
Eventually someone (often very young/inexperienced) comes along and upends the field by proposing a different model or doing the experiment whose weight breaks the camels back.
What's new here is the scale of the work. It's not clear how you upend a field where the price of entry is measured in billions of dollars.
>Stagnation of scientific fields is normal and can last many years. In that time, little anomalies pile up, are swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. To admit anomalies can ruin careers, after all.
Could not be more wrong for Particle Physics. An Anomaly could define your career and herald a Nobel Prize. That's exactly what we're looking for. We desperately want to find anomalies, not hide them.
Well that's not the case though: you can upend the field with data from the LHC - after all Einstein didn't do the Michelson-Mauley (how I spelt that right) experiment himself, but Special Relativity was developed out of that result existing.
I think "nightmare" is a bit sensational. The LHC's purpose is not to "find X" it is to take measurements over a novel range of conditions. The new data is what we're after.
Jonathan Ellis is on the record there describing the scenario we find ourselves in now as "the real five-star disaster". (you can get the full article by putting the link into scholar.google.com). And I recall hearing and reading the "nightmare scenario" phrase before that 2007 article.
My thoughts exactly. So this journal is owned by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (cool acronym, that was close). Which according to wikipedia is a non-profit. What motivates an organization like that to produce clickbaity articles like this? I thought money was the primary motivation for such journalistic behavior.
I only have an amateur interest in physics, so I'm sorry if this sounds dumb, but I often think about what if we've reached as far as we can go within the current framework of physics? This is more meta-science than actual science, but what if we made some decisions very early in the development of physics and mathematics and we need to revisit those?
For all terrestrial phenomena that we have observe so far we have a theory of everything.
In order to put matter into a state where it behaves in such a way that you can tell the difference between two competing theories that describe the world, you have to build the LHC. Anything less than that and the theories all are perfectly good at describing what we see.
I think there is a tendency to misunderstand LHC and it's high energies as somehow being "brute force". High energy really just means small structures. It's better to think of it as the worlds best microscope. LIGO is the worlds best ruler. So we're measuring the world and it's matter to an unfathomable precision and we do not see meaningful divergence between theory and experiment.
We know there is more out there, but it's not stuff we can study on earth. That's the single biggest problem.
I think this is correct. My sense is that the assumption of _individuation_ is at the core of logic, which then infects all rational thinking. (We add the predicates to "things", and then forget that we added them!)
If there are no individual things, as quantum field theory seems to suggest, what are numbers counting?
We have found a set of (relatively simple) rules that match (a large part of) reality so well that no matter what we do, we don't seem to be able to get any results that would indicate the rules are wrong or even slightly inaccurate. However, we are almost certain they are wrong, or at least incomplete – but given how well they model reality it would be astonishing if it turned out that we're on a totally wrong track and the actual rules are completely different.
If the pattern Kuhn shows in The Structure of a Scientific Revolution holds, one might presume at some time a crisis will emerge which will influence the development of higher resolution tools and techniques and with them more evidence. The "nightmare" seems like exactly what is outlined as a predictable error in the model - it'll be interesting to see what happens.
Perhaps one such decision is that matter is fundamental. There are increasingly substantial cases being made that this is now holding us back in physics, and that we need to consider that consciousness is fundamental, and matter is only a consequence of it. See, for example Hoffman's The Case Against Reality.
"Science" doesn't care about individual careers or generations (in that case of physicists) who are left with "nothing else" to discover (fundamentally) and are simply "condemned" to pass the torch (determining values and uncertainties as best as possible). It's a brutal selection process if viewed from an individual lens which can consciously participate for say at best only 3 generations.
The institutionalized systems - which themselves carry an often underappreciated (in the field itself) or overexaggareted (outside the field) intertia - we now have in place to best approximate "science" are still left with a lot of headroom for optimization.
One of the many corners overlooked handwavingly imhv are for example the attempts to raise scientific literacy (critical thinking, formulating (theoretical) and testing (practical) hypotheses) in the societies overall, the fertile humus, so to speak. Because of the massive shifts/societal changes actually the reverse seems to be happening in the last decades in an accelerating speed. Decentralizing science could help here and is a legitimate concern in the case of the LHC as an example of a highly centralized research model. I find the struggle for a sweet spot appropriate, here.
That being said, it is still possible that we just find ourselves at a local low (at the current level of the LHC) with some arising anomalies but by just pushing the energies a little farther this let's us get out of the hole, again.
So, nobody is arguing to shut the LHC altogether, but depending on what we find, the next "Future Circular Collider" to be built on top of it might simply not be "worth" it in the foreseeable future.
There are more fundamental considerations to be made. For example, the small scale structures of the universe might just be too small to be observable by experimental means. As in, not just practically too small (too difficult to build experiments for it), but fundamentally not possible to observe due to their mathematical structure.
There are already a lot of things in quantum physics particularly that we can't observe directly. For example, there's no such thing as observing separate quarks - if you separate two quarks too much the binding energy between them pops another set of quarks into existence. But you can infer their existence indirectly "via math" basically.
However it's easily possible that the more fundamental structures of the universe are bound in such a way that you can't even observe them indirectly, even if you had access to machines that could produce the energies required.
because there is some precedent for superluminal neutrinos (I saw an experiment at Los Alamos National Labs that was trying to measure the neutrino mass by observing tritium decay and their best fit estimate for the mass was imaginary, although consistent with zero.) Also if "SERN" was like it is in
This feels like that Futurama episode where Farnsworth discovers the last particle and descends into panic, realising he has nothing else to do. However, in my opinion, asking why there's nothing else is also a valid question to consider, even if we suspect there's something more to what we've seen so far.
Also, perhaps it'd be a tad bit more accurate to rephrase it `particle physicists`, not `physicists` -- even though it's totally exaggerated anyways.
This attitude ("nightmare") is backwards. What is this clinging to sunk costs of money and career time? The point is not for scientists to figure out how to extend the life of their big toy; the point is to delve into the many, many unexplained mysteries such as a the true nature of what we call "gravity", harmless methods to observe intercellular activity during diet or substance interventions (not with markers after biopsy or necropsy), how to convert ocean water to drinking water without getting the project cancelled by those who cannot bear to countenance the death of a single marine life form, and on and on.
Truly Max Plank wrote well, when he penned, "A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."[0]
It was easy picking the low hanging fruit in the physics world decades if not hundreds of years ago, in some case's you merely had to pick up the fruit that had fallen off the tree!
James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way.
Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments?
What if we build a $200 billion collider that finds nothing?
What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?
That could be a line out of Asimov. "And so eventually the entire economy was exclusively focused on the construction of larger and larger particle accelerators. There was no room for anything else. Medical research was stopped. Movies stopped being made.Improving the lot of mortals was abandoned as a policy. The only thing that mattered to the 30 billion humans alive was to build and pay for the next accelerator."
Obviously an extreme extrapolation. But what if? Should we just ... give up on particle physics?
> James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way.
> Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments?
That's a bit disingenuous. At the time, GR was an unconfirmed theory not unlike, say, String Theory is today. Except it only took a couple of years to confirm by experiment.
Particle theorists and cosmologists have plenty of theories. But deciding which one describes reality best can only be done by data, no two ways about it. And yes, since most low hanging fruits have been found, experiments become harder and harder. Not to say more and more expensive.
Your conclusion is correct though, that at some point a society has to decide whether they can afford further progress.
Perhaps we also haven't found a theory as convincing as Einstein's GR because the math isn't there yet. GR was discovered shortly after differential geometry was formulated, and without it it would have been impossible. Similarly with Newton's theory and calculus.
So maybe what we need is the right breakthrough in math?
And how much time Maxwell or Einstein spent on their research and how much time on chasing grants and tenure positions? Were they required to publish X papers a year, target assigned by some university manager? Were they forced to amuse and be nice for their students, so they will look good on yearly teacher's assessment?
If building and paying for bigger and bigger accelerators would be the only things that matters for humanity, it wouldn't be that bad. First, servicing the accelerator is a major source of employment to the economy. I think it is a much better way to spend money than maintaining all the militaries in the world. Second, such a project will require a lot of highly educated personnel to run it, so it'll require a considerable investment in education.
>Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over
There are plenty of theories generated by theoretical physicists using pen and paper. The problem is that we can't reach the energy scales necessary to test those theories.
>What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?
That's the problem with colliders now. We don't actually know if there are any interesting physics happening at energy scales that are within human reach. Maybe the next 'interesting' threshold can only come about from a galaxy-size collider - so $1 trillion collider isn't going to do squat for you.
>Should we just ... give up on particle physics?
I think we did. There was an article recently about how a next-gen collider to replace the LHC will cost on the order of $100 billion. No one is going to spend that kind of money, so we're done with collider physics for the next few decades.
> James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way.
They also had quite solid experimental anomalies they were trying to explain.
Black body radiation was an anomaly. Radioactivity was an anomaly. Photelectric effect was an anomaly. Mercury's orbit and rotation were anomalies.
Particle physics isn't done, but colliders probably are. Terrestrial particle physics is effectively rudderless since there are no anomalies left for them to probe.
It looks like it's going to be LIGO and the Webb to point to our new headings.
What's being overlooked in that number is that the money doesn't just disappear, it's going towards production of better electronics and sensors, funding research labs and universities, feeding back into other fields. Plus, it pays for researchers and PhDs who also contribute back to the system, often working on tangetially related projects in the process (eg the internet being a result of a need to better share data from CERN to researchers). The question to be asked should be if all that is comparable to the investment, which I think it is.
There is an existential angst amongst particle physicists because they all understand that they are the thoroughbred pets of the scientific world. Even if they find something, it doesn't matter, because they are working in energy regimes that are not reachable in the ordinary physics of the universe as it exists today. Even the discovery that the Higgs Boson as a lighter mass than predicted, while intellectually intriguing doesn't matter outside the very small circle of high energy and theoretical physicists. In many ways, their field is already dead - they just haven't acknowledged it yet.
>because they are working in energy regimes that are not reachable in the ordinary physics of the universe as it exists today.
This isn't accurate. Actually because of the higher energies (> 10 orders of magnitude) naturally found throughout the universe one could argue to concentrate more on collecting data of those relatively ubiquitous events in the observable universe instead of going through the route in obtaining some little fractions of that energy on earth.
Current "records" [0]
>Fastest Fermilab proton: 980 GeV; 99.999954% the speed of light; 299,792,320 m/s.
Fastest LHC proton: 7 TeV; 99.999990% the speed of light; 299,792,455 m/s.
Fastest LEP electron (fastest terrestrial accelerator particle): 105 GeV; 99.9999999988% the speed of light; 299,792,457.9964 m/s.
Fastest cosmic ray proton: 5 × 10^10 GeV [!!!]; 99.999999999999999999973% the speed of light; 299,792,457.99999999999992 m/s.
Yeah, that's a general attitude. I highly doubt that it's true, but most people seem to believe it.
Just because you found the problem on a very high energy setting, it doesn't mean that the changes in theory you will get only impact very high energies. It may also impact low energy events that are naturally rare or events that have some consequence you can take out of the accelerator.
All that you know is that the immediate consequence of the finding won't matter. But new findings often have more consequences than the immediate ones.
If a new accelerator had a good chance of determining something unknown, it could be a worthwhile investment.
I believe they got a lot of good data about the proton, it helped with that...it's just a good instrument in general. There's other virtues. And you think a particle isn't good enough? Realize how important the electron was to you eg reading this? There's still time for more work.
But like the age of discovering new continents is passed, now it's subtler things. Like the time when the center of Africa was unknown, but the Americas and Australia and Antartica were known.
Kind of happy right now that I didn't decide to dedicate my life to this when I was in my 20s and went off and did something else. I would have been awfully frustrating to spend 30 years in a quest to find nothing new.
Hopefully at some point someone cracks open the desert, but I'm somewhat skeptical that it'll happen through the high energy frontier.
My bet is that quantum computation and decoherence is where it'll be.
It wouldn't surprise me or sadden me if particle physicists don't make any new fundamental discoveries or real theoretical breakthroughs for the next millennium.
They also probably only have 20-30 years to show something if they ever want to build another, bigger and more expensive particle accelerator.
I really thought I'd see meaningful progress on harmonizing quantum mechanics and relativity or some of these other "big" problems in fundamental physics but now I'm not so sure.
This by the way is a good reason not to dump tens of billions into a successor to the LHC. We simply don't know what we're looking for. Despite a number of significant upgrades we still haven't found anything that breaks the Standard Model. I mean we've disproven a lot and that means something but we should still have an idea what we're looking for.
I'd love to know what making new space (ie what makes the universe expand) actually means. At one point I thought space might be discreet (eg at the Planck length) but that's not how that works.
What is time? What is space? What really is mass? What is a force? These are things we can describe the effects of but not really what they are. It would be deeply disappointing if there was a fundamental limit to our understanding that would prohibit a deeper explanation, which actually seems like a possibility.
[+] [-] yt-sdb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adverbly|3 years ago|reply
Rainer demonstrated a dedication and passion in that interview that not everyone can meet. I learned that I'm more passionate about effective/real world problem solving than I am about physics.
Those who have a true passion for physics have my complete support and admiration. You're doing great - keep at it :)
[+] [-] pinko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|3 years ago|reply
Love it.
[+] [-] Barrera|3 years ago|reply
Eventually someone (often very young/inexperienced) comes along and upends the field by proposing a different model or doing the experiment whose weight breaks the camels back.
What's new here is the scale of the work. It's not clear how you upend a field where the price of entry is measured in billions of dollars.
[+] [-] adamsmith143|3 years ago|reply
Could not be more wrong for Particle Physics. An Anomaly could define your career and herald a Nobel Prize. That's exactly what we're looking for. We desperately want to find anomalies, not hide them.
[+] [-] XorNot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasil|3 years ago|reply
Anything requiring the resources of the LHC or more will be far from spontaneous.
https://www.livescience.com/magnetic-higgs-relative-discover...
[+] [-] noslenwerdna|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SassyGrapefruit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Certhas|3 years ago|reply
Look at the 2007 article linked in the article above:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.315.5819.1657
Jonathan Ellis is on the record there describing the scenario we find ourselves in now as "the real five-star disaster". (you can get the full article by putting the link into scholar.google.com). And I recall hearing and reading the "nightmare scenario" phrase before that 2007 article.
[+] [-] blueplanet200|3 years ago|reply
The LHC in that regard has fell short.
[+] [-] soheil|3 years ago|reply
My thoughts exactly. So this journal is owned by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (cool acronym, that was close). Which according to wikipedia is a non-profit. What motivates an organization like that to produce clickbaity articles like this? I thought money was the primary motivation for such journalistic behavior.
[+] [-] adtac|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Certhas|3 years ago|reply
Consider the following:
For all terrestrial phenomena that we have observe so far we have a theory of everything.
In order to put matter into a state where it behaves in such a way that you can tell the difference between two competing theories that describe the world, you have to build the LHC. Anything less than that and the theories all are perfectly good at describing what we see.
I think there is a tendency to misunderstand LHC and it's high energies as somehow being "brute force". High energy really just means small structures. It's better to think of it as the worlds best microscope. LIGO is the worlds best ruler. So we're measuring the world and it's matter to an unfathomable precision and we do not see meaningful divergence between theory and experiment.
We know there is more out there, but it's not stuff we can study on earth. That's the single biggest problem.
[+] [-] Agamus|3 years ago|reply
If there are no individual things, as quantum field theory seems to suggest, what are numbers counting?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVQfWC_evg
http://www.katabane.com/mt/ontology.html
[+] [-] Sharlin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brnaftr361|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rightbyte|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tejohnso|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dav_Oz|3 years ago|reply
The institutionalized systems - which themselves carry an often underappreciated (in the field itself) or overexaggareted (outside the field) intertia - we now have in place to best approximate "science" are still left with a lot of headroom for optimization.
One of the many corners overlooked handwavingly imhv are for example the attempts to raise scientific literacy (critical thinking, formulating (theoretical) and testing (practical) hypotheses) in the societies overall, the fertile humus, so to speak. Because of the massive shifts/societal changes actually the reverse seems to be happening in the last decades in an accelerating speed. Decentralizing science could help here and is a legitimate concern in the case of the LHC as an example of a highly centralized research model. I find the struggle for a sweet spot appropriate, here.
That being said, it is still possible that we just find ourselves at a local low (at the current level of the LHC) with some arising anomalies but by just pushing the energies a little farther this let's us get out of the hole, again. So, nobody is arguing to shut the LHC altogether, but depending on what we find, the next "Future Circular Collider" to be built on top of it might simply not be "worth" it in the foreseeable future.
[+] [-] fartsucker69|3 years ago|reply
There are already a lot of things in quantum physics particularly that we can't observe directly. For example, there's no such thing as observing separate quarks - if you separate two quarks too much the binding energy between them pops another set of quarks into existence. But you can infer their existence indirectly "via math" basically.
However it's easily possible that the more fundamental structures of the universe are bound in such a way that you can't even observe them indirectly, even if you had access to machines that could produce the energies required.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|3 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/science/cern-hadron-colli...
spins it the other way. Personally I am amused by this old scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...
because there is some precedent for superluminal neutrinos (I saw an experiment at Los Alamos National Labs that was trying to measure the neutrino mass by observing tritium decay and their best fit estimate for the mass was imaginary, although consistent with zero.) Also if "SERN" was like it is in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate_(TV_series)
superluminal neutrinos would be something they'd definitely cover up.
[+] [-] lemursage|3 years ago|reply
Also, perhaps it'd be a tad bit more accurate to rephrase it `particle physicists`, not `physicists` -- even though it's totally exaggerated anyways.
[+] [-] ezekiel68|3 years ago|reply
Truly Max Plank wrote well, when he penned, "A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."[0]
[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190829150642.h...
[+] [-] Terry_Roll|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Victerius|3 years ago|reply
Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments?
What if we build a $200 billion collider that finds nothing?
What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?
That could be a line out of Asimov. "And so eventually the entire economy was exclusively focused on the construction of larger and larger particle accelerators. There was no room for anything else. Medical research was stopped. Movies stopped being made.Improving the lot of mortals was abandoned as a policy. The only thing that mattered to the 30 billion humans alive was to build and pay for the next accelerator."
Obviously an extreme extrapolation. But what if? Should we just ... give up on particle physics?
[+] [-] mr_mitm|3 years ago|reply
> Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments?
That's a bit disingenuous. At the time, GR was an unconfirmed theory not unlike, say, String Theory is today. Except it only took a couple of years to confirm by experiment.
Particle theorists and cosmologists have plenty of theories. But deciding which one describes reality best can only be done by data, no two ways about it. And yes, since most low hanging fruits have been found, experiments become harder and harder. Not to say more and more expensive.
Your conclusion is correct though, that at some point a society has to decide whether they can afford further progress.
Perhaps we also haven't found a theory as convincing as Einstein's GR because the math isn't there yet. GR was discovered shortly after differential geometry was formulated, and without it it would have been impossible. Similarly with Newton's theory and calculus.
So maybe what we need is the right breakthrough in math?
[+] [-] yread|3 years ago|reply
Physicists keep coming to the head of the university with new requests for buying expensive machines. At some point it's one too many and he exclaims:
"Can't you be more like the mathematicians? They need just pens, paper and a paper bin! Or the philosophers?! They need just pens and paper."
[+] [-] piokoch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Andrew_nenakhov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|3 years ago|reply
There are plenty of theories generated by theoretical physicists using pen and paper. The problem is that we can't reach the energy scales necessary to test those theories.
>What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?
That's the problem with colliders now. We don't actually know if there are any interesting physics happening at energy scales that are within human reach. Maybe the next 'interesting' threshold can only come about from a galaxy-size collider - so $1 trillion collider isn't going to do squat for you.
>Should we just ... give up on particle physics?
I think we did. There was an article recently about how a next-gen collider to replace the LHC will cost on the order of $100 billion. No one is going to spend that kind of money, so we're done with collider physics for the next few decades.
[+] [-] treyhuffine|3 years ago|reply
Do we lack theories that can be conceived on pen and paper just the ability to test any of them?
[+] [-] bsder|3 years ago|reply
They also had quite solid experimental anomalies they were trying to explain.
Black body radiation was an anomaly. Radioactivity was an anomaly. Photelectric effect was an anomaly. Mercury's orbit and rotation were anomalies.
Particle physics isn't done, but colliders probably are. Terrestrial particle physics is effectively rudderless since there are no anomalies left for them to probe.
It looks like it's going to be LIGO and the Webb to point to our new headings.
[+] [-] dotnet00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcroll|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lokimedes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anticristi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brometheus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walnutclosefarm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dav_Oz|3 years ago|reply
This isn't accurate. Actually because of the higher energies (> 10 orders of magnitude) naturally found throughout the universe one could argue to concentrate more on collecting data of those relatively ubiquitous events in the observable universe instead of going through the route in obtaining some little fractions of that energy on earth.
Current "records" [0]
>Fastest Fermilab proton: 980 GeV; 99.999954% the speed of light; 299,792,320 m/s.
Fastest LHC proton: 7 TeV; 99.999990% the speed of light; 299,792,455 m/s.
Fastest LEP electron (fastest terrestrial accelerator particle): 105 GeV; 99.9999999988% the speed of light; 299,792,457.9964 m/s.
Fastest cosmic ray proton: 5 × 10^10 GeV [!!!]; 99.999999999999999999973% the speed of light; 299,792,457.99999999999992 m/s.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/08/23/cosm...
[+] [-] marcosdumay|3 years ago|reply
Yeah, that's a general attitude. I highly doubt that it's true, but most people seem to believe it.
Just because you found the problem on a very high energy setting, it doesn't mean that the changes in theory you will get only impact very high energies. It may also impact low energy events that are naturally rare or events that have some consequence you can take out of the accelerator.
All that you know is that the immediate consequence of the finding won't matter. But new findings often have more consequences than the immediate ones.
If a new accelerator had a good chance of determining something unknown, it could be a worthwhile investment.
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|3 years ago|reply
But like the age of discovering new continents is passed, now it's subtler things. Like the time when the center of Africa was unknown, but the Americas and Australia and Antartica were known.
[+] [-] lamontcg|3 years ago|reply
Hopefully at some point someone cracks open the desert, but I'm somewhat skeptical that it'll happen through the high energy frontier.
My bet is that quantum computation and decoherence is where it'll be.
[+] [-] tablespoon|3 years ago|reply
They also probably only have 20-30 years to show something if they ever want to build another, bigger and more expensive particle accelerator.
[+] [-] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
This by the way is a good reason not to dump tens of billions into a successor to the LHC. We simply don't know what we're looking for. Despite a number of significant upgrades we still haven't found anything that breaks the Standard Model. I mean we've disproven a lot and that means something but we should still have an idea what we're looking for.
I'd love to know what making new space (ie what makes the universe expand) actually means. At one point I thought space might be discreet (eg at the Planck length) but that's not how that works.
What is time? What is space? What really is mass? What is a force? These are things we can describe the effects of but not really what they are. It would be deeply disappointing if there was a fundamental limit to our understanding that would prohibit a deeper explanation, which actually seems like a possibility.
[+] [-] red_trumpet|3 years ago|reply
That's how models work. Even a unifying theory would not satisfyingly answer those questions.
[+] [-] whatever1|3 years ago|reply
Sometimes hypotheses can be generated incrementally and this is what 99.9% of the scientists are capable of doing.
It seems that probably we have hit that wall in particle physics and we need a Giant to smash it and take us to the next level.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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