
It’s not such a problem that the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found new physics - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/64/the-unseen/fine-tuning-is-just-fine
======
ThePhysicist
I think the high expectations are mostly a result of us making so tremendous
(from our point of view) progress in the understanding of the universe in the
last 100 years. There's no reason that nature should make it so easy for us to
discover new laws of physics in the future though, especially since our
technology is still quite limited (e.g. we can't produce very high energy
particles and can't control quantum systems very precisely yet).

It is said that at the beginning of the 20. century many physicists thought
that there wasn't that much more to discover and that most of the theories had
been worked out already. There were a few areas where "weird" phenomena were
observed (notably in electrodynamics and atom theory) but many people were
confident that these would eventually be resolved with the existing theories.
Fast forward 20 years and two completely new fields of physics (quantum
mechanics and relativity) were discovered.

Personally I still think that we've just scratched the surface of the laws of
the universe and it's not impossible that we'll have another wave of theories
that will make our current understanding of physics seem hopelessly outdated
by the end of the century. And in fact there are some areas where "weird"
stuff seems to happen, dark energy or dark matter is a good example for this.
I'd be really disappointed if we already discovered everything there is as
well in terms of the laws of physics, I mean how boring would that be?

~~~
yoodenvranx
> Personally I still think that we've just scratched the surface of the laws
> of the universe and it's not impossible that we'll have another wave of
> theories that will make our current understanding of physics seem hopelessly
> outdated by the end of the century.

I hope that this the case, otherwise humanity will die on this planet. If
there are no new physics then there is no faster-than-light travel and
escaping earth will be pretty much impossible.

~~~
A2017U1
With a constant 1g acceleration up until near the speed of light you can cross
the observable universe in a human lifetime.

To the other side of the galaxy it would be 12 years

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_ac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_acceleration#Ship_reference_frame)

~~~
jerf
And what does modern physics say is necessary to maintain a constant 1g
acceleration for years at a time?

~~~
pacala
A ball of iron the size of Earth. I'll show myself out now.

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walrus1066
It's a problem, because we are no closer to answering questions like:

\- what is dark matter (the stuff which makes up 97% of the universe!)

\- what is dark energy (I.e. Why is the universe expanding at an accelerating
rate?)

\- what happens inside a black hole?

\- what happened at the big bang?

\- how does gravity work at the quantum scale?

The Standard Model has nothing to say on these, it is fundamentally
incomplete. I fear we won't answer these questions within my lifetime, sure,
we may get tantalising hints from astronomy, but not direct observation in
experiment.

This is troubling for theoretical physics, it needs guidance by experimental
physics. But all these super-smart theories to supersede the SM cannot be
verified by experiment right now.

~~~
aaaaaaaaaab
Errata:

* _purported_ dark matter

* _purported_ dark energy

* _purported_ black holes

* _purported_ big bang

~~~
codethief
I wouldn't put dark energy, black holes and the big bang on a level with dark
matter.

Dark energy is just a name for what's otherwise known as cosmological
constant. Yes, some people might believe that it's unnatural for the
cosmological constant to be as small as it is and others might believe that it
should really follow from a proper quantum theory, so there are definitely a
bunch of open questions. But that doesn't change the fact that it's there.

The same thing goes for the Big Bang and black holes. We have absolutely no
reason to believe they don't exist. (To the contrary, we have every reason to
believe so.)

Dark matter, however, is just _one_ possible (and comparatively speculative)
explanation for various experimental deviations from theoretical predictions,
regarding among others the stellar velocity distribution within galaxies,
gravitational lensing and structure formation.

------
hnhg
A few responses here highlight a very common problem in science: namely that
people don't appreciate negative results as much as positive ones.

We've generally bemoaned (forgive me for not bothering to find examples but
they're there) how difficult it is to get negative results published in
scientific journals but we're exhibiting exactly the same attitude that leads
to this in many comments here.

~~~
robertAngst
This is entirely why I find engineering far more trustworthy than 'science' in
2018.

Academia has a professor who wants to prove their idea is true. They rig up an
experiement to prove their idea is true. They teach a kid how to collect the
data. Then wow, they proved it true! Discovery? No.

Engineering- prove your idea works and dont stop until the problem goes away.

~~~
andybak
> Then wow, they proved it true!

I don't know of any reputable scientists that would claim to "prove" anything.
Popper rather put an end to that.

~~~
um_ya
It would be improper to say it doesn't revolve around certain outcomes though.
I know a few guys in college that would get free money and travel to some
remote part of the world to "research" climate change. It was pretty much a
paid vacation for them. If you were studying how the climate followed cycles
and it may have less to do with what humans are doing, you wouldn't get the
funding.

~~~
andybak
I think there's a lot of bullshit in academia but it's not so much about the
engineering vs science distinction being made here as it is about any
situation where people can play the game.

I think any large organisation will have it's fair share of bullshit and
people playing the system. It's hard to align incentives with outcomes.

~~~
robertAngst
Producing unverified researching is different than releasing a product.

One gets checked by customers, the other gets... reported?

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coldtea
It is a problem when the whole premise of funding it and how it was sold to
the public and politicians was that it will find new physics...

~~~
skybrian
This is what I expected the article to be about, but it's more interesting
than that.

~~~
cygx
And so far, not a single comment in this discussion is concerned with the
actual topic of the article, fiine-tuning and naturalness.

~~~
coldtea
Sometimes the subject at large is more exciting than the article.

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jbakhos
I posit this hypothesis that does away with both dark matter and also dark
energy. I posit that at a distance of approximately 1.5 million light-years
gravity becomes slightly repulsive, gradually increasing with distance to
achieve a peak repulsion, and then decreasing with distance to zero.

Thus, cosmological expansion is caused by galaxies pushing against each other,
and galactic rotation can be explained by the fact that each galaxy is
surrounded by a "womb" of dust, gas, and other galaxies, and this "womb"
pushes with repulsive gravity upon the outer stars of a galaxy to keep them in
orbit at a higher speed than expected.

I give a cosmological / mathematical justification for this behavior in my
Reddit article:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MyTheoryIs/comments/87pcgq/what_dar...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MyTheoryIs/comments/87pcgq/what_dark_matter_is/)

At the bottom, in the responses, I explain how General Relativity can be
adjusted so as to retain time dilation while rejecting curved space and
retaining flat, 3D, Euclidean space.

------
kgwgk
“The LHC hasn’t seen anything new besides the Higgs. This means the laws of
nature aren’t “natural” in the way that particle physicists would have wanted
them to be. The consequence is not only that there are no new particles at the
LHC. The consequence is also that we have no reason to think there will be new
particles at the next higher energies – not until you go up a full 15 orders
of magnitude, far beyond what even futuristic technologies may reach.

“So what now? What if there are no more new particles? What if we’ve caught
them all and that’s it, game over? What will happen to particle physics or,
more to the point, to particle physicists?”

[http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-
is-c...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-is-
coming.html)

------
umollis
I would say it is a problem, because it has costed us a lot of money.

~~~
DavidNielsen
And yet we also gained a lot of value we did not expect, such as the World
Wide Web.

You cannot predict the true value of basic research in a straight forward
manner so let’s just stop. This is about extending our understanding of the
universe. We will find ways to use that knowledge and ways to enrich our lives
because of it in due course of time.

~~~
liftbigweights
> And yet we also gained a lot of value we did not expect, such as the World
> Wide Web.

Did berners lee even work on the LHC? I know he worked at CERN, but didn't
realize he took part in the creation of the LHC.

