I had a great conversation this evening with a marine biologist studying the recent collapse of a 100,000 sq km California kelp forest. The grants for the science of ecosystem stewardship are in the 10k-50k$ range.
Over the past few years, something killed over 5 billion giant starfish and “science” has no idea what did it. Without the starfish, the sea urchin population exploded, turning kelp forest into desert.
I love the LHC. But we need to seriously grow the science pie and prioritize the science of ecosystem collapse and management. There simply aren’t enough trained scientists.
---
[..] we do not have a fixed pot of money that we sit down and say, “What is the best way we can spend this on research?”
It’s not like there’s a fixed number of dollars and we say, “Okay, biology gets so many and chemistry gets so many, and particle physics gets so many.” This is a lesson that has been beaten home over and over again when we’ve had an expensive science project that people have campaigned against on the theory that the money could be better spent elsewhere, and the project gets cancelled, and guess what, the money does not get spent on science at all ’cause there’s no rule that the amount of money spent on science has to be fixed
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The amount of money that goes into these unuseable results is just sad. This and astrophysics of remote galaxies.
Either we have a breakthrough that shakes physics and that leads to brand new discoveries that further shake engineering, or it is a waste of time. Between ~1870 and ~1950 we had a fireworks of discoveries that wee shaking our view of the world. And explained transistors.
Today? Nothing special except for a bunch of people and PhD students.
We are just starting to scratch the surface of biology - this is where we need to invest. Solid state physics could be another one. But not particle physics with their crazy energies that are completely unreachable outside of an accelerator.
For context, I have a PhD done in CERN. If I were to choose again, I would bo for bioinformatics or biophysics.
Funding needs to come first then extra scientists if budgets permit. The problem in immunology as far as I can see from a close onlooker perspective is there is less and less funding. Staff get by on meagre wages, hoping to hold onto their role as budgets get cut and grants get smaller.
Kinda sad when the government wastes millions in the funding of worthless R&D projects. I've never been more disappointed to see that such a huge portion of the whitepapers in my field aren't worth the paper they're printed on. They have also spent like $40M on certain rounds of funding to groups and it doesn't go anywhere as anyone in industry can clearly see that the projects are completely useless and don't solve any kind of real industry problem besides getting large amounts of cash.
To grow the science pie you need to shrink the military pie. To shrink the military pie you need to make profiting off of science much more lucrative than profiting off of slaughter.
Is the 10k-50k "grants for the science of ecosystem stewardship" refers to the sum of all grants to the "the science of ecosystem stewardship", or just that marine biologist got for his particular study? Is there only his team doing study in this field or there are other teams doing similar ones got separate grants?
I always wonder if the implicit telos of modern science is space colonization (leave this planet behind), and what the ramifications of that mindset is. Is this a dogma that can be challenged?
We've still barely scratched the surface of ecological sciences
Such a thing sounds disasterous. Was a private campaign organized for donations? I think you'd have a better chance convincing private citizens at this point than any government.
What changed to make a slew of new discoveries possible? Is it pure
chance like Bitcoin mining? If so, what's the chance of discovering
nothing for years and then, like London buses, three all come along at
once?
What are the implications of a new "particle zoo"? Can I do anything
with these, like build new atoms, or use them to detect something?
The change is the gradual accumulation of statistics. These are relatively rare events. The LHC has been running, high-energy proton-proton collisions have been occurring, and the LHCb detector in this case has been measuring them. The statistics increase, and eventually the characteristic peaks of short-lived resonances can be identified above the noise of "background" collisions.
I think the goal of this work is to understand the nature of the strong force. Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is pretty difficult as far as quantum field theories go, its strongly-coupled, meaning making first-principles predictions of what to expect is really tough. Its a huge computational effort being run on some of the biggest computers on the planet (lattice QCD).
We observe that all the hadrons in experiment are "colour singlets" meaning that the colour charge of QCD is hidden. These are usually three-quark states (protons, neutrons, etc) or quark-antiquark states (pions, kaons, etc). There are many other ways of making "colour singlets". For example, these tetra and pentaquark combinations. There are also "hybrids" made of a gluon and some combination of quarks. There is some evidence on both experimental and theoretical sides for at least a few of these hybrids. Glueballs are also possible, states made entirely of gluons, but there is only really theoretical evidence for these so far in specific limits. We just don't know if they exist in reality.
Everything is made of this stuff. Most of the mass around us comes from the strong interactions. It's important to understand it.
Think of it like taking series of blurry photos of an unknown object. A single photo just looks like a blob, but accumulate enough of them and apply some algorithmic magic and eventually the picture sharpens.
When particles are collided and the result measured, there's probably lots of noise in the data. In a single picture, a single pixel (datapoint) tells you nothing. But capture enough results, and you can begin to filter the noise out, revealing patterns underneath.
They came together most likely because they were detected in the same/similar analysis.
There are probably hundreds of analysis performed in parallel on the LHCb data sets, by different sub-groups of the collaboration, looking at different reactions / channels etc. It could also be that they grouped several results together because they are similar. There is always an internal review process, and committee meetings (for the final "go ahead, publish") can impose a granularity on the time of release. Could also be that the paper is already on the arXiv for days, and this is just the common press release.
Is it possible, even it principle, that some of these exotic hadrons could be long-lived (let alone stable)?
They're probably interesting to study on their own, but the engineering instinct is to want to build something out of them, or use them as tools, which seems pretty hard if they disintegrate in a quintillionth of a second!
Discovers? Or invents? I've only studied particle physics at undergrad level but strikes me that these tetraquarks and pentaquarks could be combinations never created by any [other] natural process.
By my understanding, the LHC isn't doing anything different from what's happening in the upper atmosphere every microsecond, when solar rays are hitting the Earth; except that the LHC is much lower energy than some of those collisions.
There are cosmic rays of almost arbitrary energy, collisions like the ones at LHC are happening all the time in the universe. So surely these particles will have been created before somewhere else.
To quote Alan Watts, "There is no end to the minuteness that you can unveil through physical investigation. For the simple reason that the investigation itself is what is chopping things into tiny little pieces. And the sharper you can sharpen your knife, the finer you can cut it. And the knife of the intellect is very sharp indeed. And with the sophisticated instruments that we can now make, there’s probably no limit to it."
It's almost as if we're looking at a continuous functions that can generate an infinite number of discrete segments.
It may need clarifying that "exotic hadron" simply and specifically means "hadron with more than three quarks." What's being reproted is finding new particles belonging to a family that already has several known members.
So if atoms are composed of electrons, protons, and in turn electrons, protons are composed of these particles, can we potentially drill down a bit deeper into these hadrons, might they be composed of further sub particles yet unknown to science yet?
As far as we know, both leptons (electrons, positrons, muons, taus) and quarks are fundamental, i.e. not composed out of other particles (also, they are pointlike, i.e. they have no extend). That's not true for protons (which are made out of quarks and gluons. It's a little bit complicated because of vacuum polarization, but if you count a certain way, you'll find it's composed out of two up and one down quark). They also have a measurable size.
These new particles are also made from quarks (4 for the tetra quark and 5 for the pentaquark), and they also have a size.
The colorfulness of quarks hints at non trivial internal structure, and given the number of colors, quarks probably consist of three somethings, bound together in a complex dynamically stable motion.
Allright, at high energy, the LHC manages to observe some particule configuration never seen before.
Anything to "milk" something interesting from those?
Given that all of these exotic particles that are apparently discovered are extremely short-lived (at the limits of human technology to even register them) is it possible that scientists are radically misinterpreting the meaning of these experiments and finding particles where there's some other force or phenomena being observed? I'm very skeptical that it's apparently just smaller and smaller particles all of the way down, and every time they get bigger and badder technology to collide atoms, they tell us that they coincidentally discover new particles. What if everything here about reality is being misinterpreted?
Here's an analogy that might not make sense to everybody, but to me, this feels a bit like the famous memes from the Chernobyl movie. "3.6 Roentgen. Not great, Not terrible." where the real answer about the radiation exposure was radically different. Some the people tasked with coming up with that 3.6 answer might not have had a bad intent, but they were at the limits of their technology to provide an answer and radically misinterpreted what they were seeing partially because of that.
Are these really new particles? It appears to me these are quarks in different combinations. I ask because this hadron collider machine needs to show amazing results but this announcement seems kind of forced.
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|3 years ago|reply
Over the past few years, something killed over 5 billion giant starfish and “science” has no idea what did it. Without the starfish, the sea urchin population exploded, turning kelp forest into desert.
I love the LHC. But we need to seriously grow the science pie and prioritize the science of ecosystem collapse and management. There simply aren’t enough trained scientists.
[+] [-] ithkuil|3 years ago|reply
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/06/13/ama-...
--- [..] we do not have a fixed pot of money that we sit down and say, “What is the best way we can spend this on research?”
It’s not like there’s a fixed number of dollars and we say, “Okay, biology gets so many and chemistry gets so many, and particle physics gets so many.” This is a lesson that has been beaten home over and over again when we’ve had an expensive science project that people have campaigned against on the theory that the money could be better spent elsewhere, and the project gets cancelled, and guess what, the money does not get spent on science at all ’cause there’s no rule that the amount of money spent on science has to be fixed ---
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|3 years ago|reply
Either we have a breakthrough that shakes physics and that leads to brand new discoveries that further shake engineering, or it is a waste of time. Between ~1870 and ~1950 we had a fireworks of discoveries that wee shaking our view of the world. And explained transistors.
Today? Nothing special except for a bunch of people and PhD students.
We are just starting to scratch the surface of biology - this is where we need to invest. Solid state physics could be another one. But not particle physics with their crazy energies that are completely unreachable outside of an accelerator.
For context, I have a PhD done in CERN. If I were to choose again, I would bo for bioinformatics or biophysics.
[+] [-] Gareth321|3 years ago|reply
It just doesn't pay enough. Society doesn't place enough value on these roles.
[+] [-] ssss11|3 years ago|reply
Funding needs to come first then extra scientists if budgets permit. The problem in immunology as far as I can see from a close onlooker perspective is there is less and less funding. Staff get by on meagre wages, hoping to hold onto their role as budgets get cut and grants get smaller.
Very sad state of affairs.
[+] [-] 7thaccount|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pishpash|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c789a123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiveturkey42|3 years ago|reply
We've still barely scratched the surface of ecological sciences
[+] [-] iuiz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsiaajdsdaa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
What changed to make a slew of new discoveries possible? Is it pure chance like Bitcoin mining? If so, what's the chance of discovering nothing for years and then, like London buses, three all come along at once?
What are the implications of a new "particle zoo"? Can I do anything with these, like build new atoms, or use them to detect something?
[+] [-] chicX|3 years ago|reply
I think the goal of this work is to understand the nature of the strong force. Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is pretty difficult as far as quantum field theories go, its strongly-coupled, meaning making first-principles predictions of what to expect is really tough. Its a huge computational effort being run on some of the biggest computers on the planet (lattice QCD).
We observe that all the hadrons in experiment are "colour singlets" meaning that the colour charge of QCD is hidden. These are usually three-quark states (protons, neutrons, etc) or quark-antiquark states (pions, kaons, etc). There are many other ways of making "colour singlets". For example, these tetra and pentaquark combinations. There are also "hybrids" made of a gluon and some combination of quarks. There is some evidence on both experimental and theoretical sides for at least a few of these hybrids. Glueballs are also possible, states made entirely of gluons, but there is only really theoretical evidence for these so far in specific limits. We just don't know if they exist in reality.
Everything is made of this stuff. Most of the mass around us comes from the strong interactions. It's important to understand it.
[+] [-] hypertele-Xii|3 years ago|reply
When particles are collided and the result measured, there's probably lots of noise in the data. In a single picture, a single pixel (datapoint) tells you nothing. But capture enough results, and you can begin to filter the noise out, revealing patterns underneath.
[+] [-] davrosthedalek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenwoo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legohead|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://bigthink.com/hard-science/large-hadron-collider-econ...
[+] [-] adregan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tux3|3 years ago|reply
They're probably interesting to study on their own, but the engineering instinct is to want to build something out of them, or use them as tools, which seems pretty hard if they disintegrate in a quintillionth of a second!
[+] [-] FabHK|3 years ago|reply
Is this big news that could lead physics out of its long stasis? Or "just" relatively small details?
[+] [-] croes|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30516078
[+] [-] layer8|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Koshkin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsimionescu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davrosthedalek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] GartzenDeHaes|3 years ago|reply
It's almost as if we're looking at a continuous functions that can generate an infinite number of discrete segments.
[+] [-] peteradio|3 years ago|reply
LHCb refers to the specific detector and group responsible for measurements related to b-quark.
[+] [-] macspoofing|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OseArp|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_hadron
[+] [-] mrlonglong|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davrosthedalek|3 years ago|reply
These new particles are also made from quarks (4 for the tetra quark and 5 for the pentaquark), and they also have a size.
[+] [-] akomtu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] centilliard|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vri4ih/e...
[+] [-] drexlspivey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sylware|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alberto7|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logicalmonster|3 years ago|reply
Here's an analogy that might not make sense to everybody, but to me, this feels a bit like the famous memes from the Chernobyl movie. "3.6 Roentgen. Not great, Not terrible." where the real answer about the radiation exposure was radically different. Some the people tasked with coming up with that 3.6 answer might not have had a bad intent, but they were at the limits of their technology to provide an answer and radically misinterpreted what they were seeing partially because of that.
[+] [-] benreesman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davrosthedalek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] immmmmm|3 years ago|reply
still the desert otherwise, a higgs and nothing else :(
[+] [-] numlock86|3 years ago|reply
Does this in some way (maybe even indirect) help us with solving any of the environmental challenges we are facing right now?
[+] [-] therealbilly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alberth|3 years ago|reply
I see CERN is using “home.cern”.
Google has “.google” but I’m not sure what the root is since they have many.
What’s the convention for the root of a companies branded TLD?
[+] [-] sph|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkr-hn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnands|3 years ago|reply