What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? (This is why I lost faith in science.)
Sabine Hossenfelder | 21:44 | 759K subscribers | 683K views | February 11, 2023
Posted on 02/21/2023 1:35:09 PM PST by SunkenCiv
What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? (This is why I lost faith in science.)
Sabine Hossenfelder | 21:44 | 759K subscribers | 683K views | February 11, 2023
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Once the Higgs boson was detected, the Standard Model was pretty much complete but there were some nagging loose ends that still hadn’t been tied up.
The question that really blew physicists minds was, “Why is the cosmological constant 127 orders of magnitude smaller than the theoretical calculation?”.
One solution that worked perfectly on paper was the notion that there was another symmetry similar to those of the Standard Model particles but acting between fermions (massive particles with spin 1/2) and bosons (massless particles with spin 1).
If every fermion had a boson super partner and every boson had a fermion super partner, the combination of their quantum states would almost zero out the cosmological constant to the value observed. The problem was that nobody had ever seen these super partners in existing experiments, so the expectation was that, like the Higgs, we just needed a more powerful tool to see the lightest ones to confirm the theory. To everyone’s disappointment the LHC was not able to confirm supersymmetry (and advance string theory) at least so far.
I don’t see this as a problem, it just eliminates one possible explanation.
Hossenfelder should consult with Sherlock Holmes who knew that deductive reasoning works by eliminating the possible so that what remains must be the truth.
There is a similar phenomenon in the education field.
Phonics worked. But just saying so didn’t get grant money, nor get you published in major journals. You needed to come up with a new theory. It didn’t matter if it was crap.
She is a brilliant gem...
I’ve been following her lectures, music, and her views of fundamental physics for years...
Popper famously said, "It's impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood."
Makes a fine tagline.
In fewer words, particle physicists have discovered all the particles there are and they are just wasting money proposing new particles that don’t exist.
Bad science but it does pull down govt research grants to colleges, right? That’s all the big gov lefties care about anyway.
Thanks for posting the transcript.
OK. I went through the whole thing. Even stopped to re-read. I’m still left with the nagging question, SO WHAT?
No.
I like it!
That is the risk when using byte arithmetic.
Pope John Paul II ruined physics. (Or, more precisely, the aversion to Pope John Paul II ruined physics.) He pointed out to Stephen Hawking how physics had proven Creation; the Big Bang pointed to an ultimate cause which, whether you believe in Christ or not, was inescapably name-able as “God.” From there, Hawking et al were determined to undermine the Big Bang.
The problem is that the universe is so incredibly unlikely; supersymmetry, oscillating universes, the multiverse, an infinite breadth of so many dimensions requiring so many universes (inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf^inf)... all of these were created to undermine Pope John Paul’s understated, “we told you so.” Proving that the universe is inevitable, rather than created, has required in creating a maddeningly complex universe. Supersymmetry makes the required complexity a little more internally coherent, and therefore a little simpler. The problem is that this has turned the disbelief in religion into a religion in itself.
I understand.
Ping physics
Bingo, We have a Winner!
Einstein~ Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler
Love Doctor Professor Hossenfelder. Been a follower for a long time. She has also done some music videos that are so bad that they are good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_0laAhvHKE&t=27s
You are right - it’s so bad it’s good!
:^)
Particle Physics is grant money being given to prove a theory versus conduct experiments to observe results, discover facts, and create new theories. Science is now political, not science.
“Ernest Lawrence, a pure experimentalist, reacted to the famous theta-tau puzzle almost instantaneously... After Lynn had explained the puzzle in some detail, Ernest said, “You mean to tell me that all these particles have very nearly the same mass and the same half-lives and yet they aren’t the same particle?” Lynn said the theorists had reasons why the particles couldn’t be the same. Ernest said, “Don’t you worry about it — the theorists will find a way to make them all the same.” And that, of course, is what Lee and Yang finally did, but long after Ernest had disposed of the problem in his characteristically intuitive way.” — Luis Walter Alvarez (from his memoir “Alvarez”)
“There is a limit beyond which progress can not be made. The differences in the limiting capacities of the last steps of the pyramid are enormous” — Luis Walter Alvarez
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