
What No New Particles Means for Physics - ernesto95
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160809-what-no-new-particles-means-for-physics/
======
adrianratnapala
Despite the more upbeat spin, I think the message from Arkani-Hamed is much
the same as from Sabine Hossenfelder's "nightmare" post (discussed at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197)).

Both of them are saying its time to question pre-conceived notions of how to
extend the Standard model. And I think both of them are excited about it.

Rightly so. People are unhappy about the Standard Model because it is
insufficiently simple and symmetrical. But 20 orders of magnitude lie between
our experiments and the Planck scale, there's probably six levels of symmetry-
braking, mess-making emergence between us and the real fundamentals.

~~~
kkylin
Yup! Always good to remember that the hydrogen atom is "only" about 10 orders
of magnitude smaller than us meter-scale objects, and what's going on with
atoms took a long time to figure out.

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whoByFire
That final paragraph is great

 _Some theorists agree. Talk of disappointment is “crazy talk,” Arkani-Hamed
said. “It’s actually nature! We’re learning the answer! These 6,000 people are
busting their butts and you’re pouting like a little kid because you didn’t
get the lollipop you wanted?”_

~~~
jomamaxx
I think disappointment is ok here.

They just spent 24 Billion and 30 years to discover _nothing_.

So next time they go to the governments of the world and say 'hey give us 24
Billion for the greatest experiment ever' ... what's going to happen?

Maybe we should give it to them, but there likely will be more scrutiny.

~~~
spullara
Think of it as an experiment to confirm or deny the standard model. So far it
is confirming it.

~~~
jomamaxx
"Think of it as an experiment to confirm or deny the standard model. So far it
is confirming it."

I understand that very well.

But most of the Standard Model was well confirmed.

Really what we got was confirmation of Higgs.

The 'non confirmation' of a bunch of interesting theories is not a very big
win.

But don't forget the politics of it all: this is bordering on a 'big lose'.

They spent 24 Billion and really didn't get much out of it. There was a lot of
hope, maybe even promise, and really - we got the 'lowest outcome' possible.

Ask yourself: would we have spent 24 Billion to 'confirm Higgs'?

Anyhow - I'm glad it was done, and if it were up to me I'd have spent it,
knowing the outcome, but the optics of this are bad.

~~~
akiselev
_Ask yourself: would we have spent 24 Billion to 'confirm Higgs'?_

Yes. The Higgs field/boson is a fundamental feature of our best theory at the
quantum scale and we needed to know whether we are right. Now we have another
crucial bound for the theory that will supplant the standard model except now
we can waste less time and money with theories that can't explain our results.

We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a large metal can flying at an
altitude of 400km essentially to do microgravity research; I think we can
afford to spend a tenth of that on a particle accelerator to probe the
frontier of high energy physics.

~~~
jomamaxx
"We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a large metal can flying at an
altitude of 400km essentially to do microgravity research;"

This is not true. The space program has countless research opportunities,
direct and indirect, with the underlying endeavour of objective of putting
people on other planets, which is a pretty big opportunity in of itself.

I'm not sure paying $24 Billion to prove Higgs was worth it. I suggest maybe
there were other, much less expensive ways to do that, were we to know up
front that was the objective.

It's hard to say how much 'disproving a bunch of theories' is worth.

I suggest that much of theoretical physics is total rubbish speculation, which
in some ways is 'ok', but it'd be nice to see some progress. If you add in
String Theory to the pile ... it looks really bad for modern theoretical
physics. Not much has happened in a very long time ... it seems there have
been countless PhD's minted in fiction. Not good.

~~~
akiselev
_This is not true. The space program has countless research opportunities,
direct and indirect, with the underlying endeavour of objective of putting
people on other planets, which is a pretty big opportunity in of itself._

I'm not talking about the space program, I'm talking about the ISS. What,
exactly, are those direct and indirect opportunities? Looking at NASA's own PR
material, it boils down to effects of deep space on humans (microgravity and
radiation), effects of microgravity on biotechnology, environmental monitoring
(which can be done cheaper with satellites), and .... effects of microgravity
on everything else. I'm not saying it's not worth it as a human endeavor, but
let's not kid ourselves: it was an insanely expensive project just like the
LHC that doesn't really seem to have resulted in much.

------
jomamaxx
Imagine if you spent your whole life supporting some complex idea that is
likely now to be BS. And you spread it.

I'm interested in the psychological aspects of identity.

I suggest a lot of them have not choice but to continue on believing their
mythology. Their sense of self depends on it, and surely their funding does.
And getting funding depends on strong sense of self.

Isn't it amazing that despite their good intentions, that so many of them are
hustlers and shysters? I'm not making a direct moral comparison, but a
pragmatic one ...

It would be nice to have some experiments that put String Theory to bed as
well, though sadly, these are not even conceivable! The String Theorists
careers are protected by the fact their theory cannot be unproven :)

~~~
lawpoop
This is one of the reasons why I'm in favor of basic income. People who get
degrees in mathematics or physics can do their work uninhibited by the
politics of getting funding.

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ankurdhama
This should send a strong message to the scientists who are more passionate
about elegant and beauty of mathematics and think that nature is written in
mathematics and using mathematics only they can figure out natures secret. I
know this has worked couple of times in past where a mathematical theory
predicted existence of some entity or phenomena and then it was found to be
true through experiments BUT that doesn't mean this trick will always work coz
we try to understand nature using the tool of mathematics and nature doesn't
give a crap about what we use to understand it.

~~~
aleksei
Mathematics has also been used extensively to correctly model experimental
observations. But what would you propose instead of mathematics?

~~~
jomamaxx
"But what would you propose instead of mathematics?"

It's not that we shouldn't use math, but I suggest that when using Math we are
predisposed to want clean, simple equations that explain everything.

~~~
Jach
Maxwell's equations can be written as one equation with geometric algebra, □A
=J/(c є0) If the math comes out ugly we can just macro our way to prettier
math and stick complicated things behind simple looking symbols. I don't think
this is a predisposition in the initial search as much as aesthetics on making
the form of work pleasant regardless of what you start with. But then, maybe
it's even more than aesthetics, truth and reality seem to have an
(unreasonable?) simplicity to them, so maybe there's objective beauty in
simplicity; I don't see the point in intentionally seeking out ugly formalisms
for ugly's sake especially when we've had so much success with simple and
elegant.

------
gumby
Naturally this topic calls for an xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/401/](https://xkcd.com/401/)

And more appropriate to the diphoton bump:
[https://xkcd.com/1437/](https://xkcd.com/1437/)

~~~
pepve
Or this one: [https://xkcd.com/1489/](https://xkcd.com/1489/)

~~~
chriswarbo
The diphoton bump made me think of
[https://xkcd.com/955/](https://xkcd.com/955/)

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combatentropy
Stunningly lucid writing. Good job, Natalie Wolchover!

------
Animats
What does it mean? Layoffs, probably.

We may have reached the end of what big accelerators can tell us. Fermilab was
shut down in 2011.

~~~
benley
Fermilab was not shut down in 2011. I believe the tevatron was shutdown in
2011, but research on site continues, and the "Proton Improvement Plan", which
involves upgrading the accelerators, _started_ in 2011 and is ongoing.

------
7sigma
Does anybody know the consequences of this regarding the search for dark
matter? Specifically, dark matter particles?

~~~
chriswarbo
Most of the exotic particles created in colliders are unstable and decay quite
quickly into lighter particles, so they're not good candidates for dark
matter. _Which_ lighter particles are produced depends on properties of the
initial particle, since quantities like electric charge are conserved (the
initial particle's charge must equal the sum of the decay products' charges).

Supersymmetry predicts a new form of conserved charge called "R" charge; since
none of the light particles we've seen has R charge, any heavy particles with
R charge cannot decay into them, and hence some of those particles (the
lightest ones) will be stable.

If such heavy, stable particles were common, they could make up the dark
matter we've inferred exists.

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightest_Supersymmetric_Partic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightest_Supersymmetric_Particle)

The problem is, each time a collider fails to find any of these heavy
supersymmetry particles, the theory gets shuffled around and a new prediction
is made with a higher mass. The mass range investigated by the LHC is now so
large that it's difficult to shuffle around supersymmetry any more, and it
might be time to consider it falsified.

~~~
marcosdumay
Is there a widely agreed limit on how heavy dark matter particles must be?

I remember some Starts with a Bang post that said they must me "warm"
particles, and heavy ones couldn't accumulate enough energy for matching. But
I've never seen anybody else alk about it.

------
sctb
Related discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197)

~~~
gus_massa
This is not a dupe. This article has more information than the other. Both
discuss the same topic. I'd classify them as "Related discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197)
(307 points, 3 days ago, 199 comments)"

~~~
sctb
Does this Quanta article contain significant new information to be discussed?
If so we'll unmark this one as a dupe and restore it. Otherwise it meets the
criteria for a dupe which is: a specific topic having had significant
discussion within the last year.

~~~
gus_massa
I think that the difference between the article is very big.

The quanta article discuss what they have saw in December and what they have
saw now, in the section "The Bump that went away". Also that and why they
expect to see a new particles due to supersimetry in the section "Missing
Pieces".

The Backreaction article discuss more about the influence of the lack of a
experimental evidence of an unknown particle in the physics community, i.e.
that without an experimental guidance is difficult to choose between the
different theoretical approach, and some ideas for future research.

Total different articles.

~~~
sctb
Thanks—we've restored this submission.

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steve_taylor
No new particles means that we're going to need a bigger accelerator.

~~~
ajuc
At some point bigger accelerator doesn't help. It just creates bigger and
bigger black holes.

~~~
T-A
That point is a factor 10^14 away.

