
In the foundations of physics we haven't seen progress for the past four decades - apsec112
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/02/maybe-im-crazy.html
======
gpsx
I don't think there is a correct answer to the question should we build the
next particle accelerator. Its an opinion based on the probability of us
finding something (also an opinion) and the relative value of that discovery
to $20B.

I got a PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1995. My thesis was about the
supersymmetric flavor problem, where we tried to infer information about
physics we couldn't measure based on the naturalness criteria she criticizes.
My thoughts on pursing this: well, I left physics. I thought it was too hard
to make any progress. I went into software. I don't have any regrets.

I shouldn't admit this but I occasionaly daydream in a Walter Mitty sort of
way about doing great things. I have had a few physics ideas related to things
like quantum gravity that I think about occasionally. Just a few months ago I
was daydreaming about me pursuing one of these back in graduate school and it
being very successfull. I intertrupted my daydream with a thought, "I'm glad
that didn't happen. Then I might have stayed in Physics."

So that is my answer to the question about investing my own time in searching
for new physics. None the less, I wouldn't say people are crazy because they
think there is some value to pursuing physics as is currently being done.

~~~
ianai
Can you expand on why staying in physics longer would have been detrimental?

~~~
badosu
Not OP, but I have a similar feeling.

I was on my way starting masters on Mathematics when I discovered I would be a
father, I had to find and start a career so that I could make ends meet.

From my perspective I am glad that happened, I was excessively ambitious,
comparing myself with the great ones in the field, measured my self-worth on
regard of my ability to solve problems.

Having to swallow my pride, learn to talk with other people as equals so that
I could provide for my family made me a better person. I am not sure I would
have done this breakthrough isolated on my intellectual bubble, not even
talking about the difficulties of engaging with egos at the academia.

Sometimes I miss the excitement of learning something really difficult or
solving some problem from a new perspective, but I am glad I am mentally
healthier. I am not saying that it's not possible to be healthy and pursue a
high level on Mathematics or other intellectually challenging field, but that
can enable bad patterns for some people.

~~~
mttyng
> bad patterns for some people

I have definitely seen that in other people when I was doing my physics
undergrad. And to some extent, I probably experienced that myself.

I was on the road to starting a Cosmology PhD with incredibly high aspirations
but my (then) girlfriend gave me an ultimatum: physics or me. To be fair, she
was the primary bread winner and a graduate lifestyle would have been an even
greater strain on the relationship. So, I opted for the latter and went into
software. Also, like you, I have no regrets.

I still miss physics incredibly and, you’re right, there is something
exceedingly sexy about solving those (including mathematics here) sorta
problems. I sort of see it as a way to reach across generations and walk the
same paths as the giants have. Anyway, I do find a great amount of joy in
software problems, but nothing beats that first love.

------
yk
The current paradigm of particle physics will likely fail after the next
accelerator -- everybody abandon ship RIGHT NOW!!Elf!

So since the early seventies there was an interplay between discovery
machines, accelerators that prioritize high energy over high precision, and
precision experiments. In practice these are proton accelerators, which
accelerate to very high energies since protons are heavy, but have the
downside that protons are itself very complicated objects, and electron
accelerators, that have the opposite trade off, electrons are light and
therefore lower energy but are very simple and analyzing the results is
therefore very easy.

The way the interplay worked is, that the precision experiments would
constrain the parameter space for the next generation of discovery machines,
and then the discovery machines would give the next generation of precision
experiments a target.

This is to a large extend just research by timetable, and funding agencies
love it. Physicists can write a proposal including a list of expected
discoveries and funding agencies can then just check that list quarterly.

This paradigm will most likely come to an end after the next accelerator. The
next accelerator will be a Higgs factory to measure with very high precision
the properties of the Higgs boson.

Now theory did progress a lot in the last four decades, but it closely
mirrored this path of experiments and therefore did work within a quite well
defined paradigm. That is what she means with "no progress," there was a lot
of progress, new calculation techniques, new techniques for model building,
the entire effective field theory ideas and so on, but that is all in service
of a narrowly defined paradigm.

So it is probably a good idea to start looking for more risky research,
because we a pretty sure the boring predictable stuff is coming to an end, but
I think that the characterization of "no progress" is a quite unfair
characterization of a very fruitful endeavor.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
"No progress" really means "no breakthroughs."

At this point physics seems to be in the business of adding epicycles to a
model that does some very good modelling, in an epicyclic way, but cannot
possibly be complete as a paradigm.

OP's point is that new paradigms are desperately needed, and it's looking
unlikely that we'll get them by building a $20bn thing that bangs the same old
rocks together a bit harder.

It doesn't help that people who are smart enough to make a difference don't
stay in physics long enough to do what they could do. There's more money and
less pressure elsewhere.

Collectively, this is not a good situation to be in. Nothing has more
potential to change the future than new physics, and CERN-style HEP seems much
less likely to get to Quantum Gravity than a new academic and financial
paradigm in fundamental research.

------
hannob
Just a thought: The fact that there is physics beyond current knowledge
doesn't necessarily mean that it's achievable to find out about it.

Think about it: Finding confirmation for the Higgs Boson required building a
particle accelerator of 27 kilometers. For the larger part of humanities
existence it was probably unthinkable to design such an experiment.

What if the next level of yet unknown physics requires building a machine
that's as large as the equator? Or larger than anything that can be built on
earth?

~~~
rjf72
There's another, more simple, explanation. We have made some fundamental
mistake which, due to its 'naturalness' was adopted as all but a certainty.
You reach some point that trying to build upon things becomes impossible when
your foundation is fundamentally broken. For an example of times past, just
consider the geocentric vs heliocentric universe issue. The geocentric
universe (that Earth is the center upon which everything else revolves) was
fundamentally built upon a model and assumed to be correct. This means that
any sort of 'weirdness' that emerged from it was not really a problem but
instead just massaged into the model itself.

As a couple of examples of this consider the fact that a geocentric universe
means the planets that orbit us must travel in these really peculiar swirly
type patterns. This happens nowhere else in nature and doesn't really make any
physical sense, but when you assume a model of a geocentric universe it's not
really a problem - you can just massage it into the model. Another example of
a very bizarre oddity that would be seen nowhere else was in things like
Mercury suddenly having to stop and start going backwards in its orbit. Again
this is not seen anywhere else and doesn't really make much of any physical
sense, but if we take a model as reality - then sure, you can massage it into
it. Why not?

These lead to the real problem. Model based science is a really bad idea,
because it's _really_ hard to falsify models. In the case of the geocentric
universe it ultimately required being able to see the starts 'through the eyes
of god'. A good deal of physics today is built around models. And as these
models have absorbed more and more 'oddities' they've started to be seen not
as models but as simple reality whose proof is but a mere formality. And as is
the case with the geocentric universe, you reach some point at which time
further discoveries start to seem ever more elusive. Imagine trying to
research orbital mechanics when you start with the assumption that planets
travel in 'swirlies' and some can even stop and go backwards!

As this articles mentions, modern physics adopted some very substantial
changes to the model of universal thinking in the 70s. And those adoptions
have now, though unproven, become defacto 'reality.' Yet since then, there's
been nothing. And maybe one of the worst problems with models is that they can
be completely wrong but you give you valid answers. For instance you could
(and can) determine the orbital periods and locations of planets using the
geocentric model. And that was done for more than 1500 years! It was
incredibly complex, but it was possible. That, in turn, could then be used as
'proof' of the model's correctness, when in reality it was anything but.

~~~
chr1
Geocentric vs heliocentric universe issue is an interesting example, because
the geocentric version is not actually wrong, the whole point of the general
relativity principle is that it geocentric an equally valid viewpoint.

The trick was understanding that circles+epicycles around earth are in fact
equivalent earth and everything else rotating around some other point. Which
is a relatively easy insight with analytical geometry, but is hard to see
without it, and people noticed it only after they had more detailed data, and
had to describe epicycles for ellipses instead of simple circles.

So if this teaches us something, it is that most likely we already have all
the data that we need, we just need to look at it differently. But to look at
things differently we need more math, and more experiments.

~~~
davrosthedalek
The funny part is, both geocentric and heliocentric is wrong. The sun and the
planets all rotate around the barycenter. None of them is special.

~~~
chr1
The orbits being ellipses instead of circles, center of mass being different
from center of sun, precession because of general relativity effects, are all
small corrections, and as described in Asimov's relativity of wrong suggested
by the sibling comment, they only add detail to the picture. The question of
geocentric vs heliocentric is different, because it is about looking at the
same data in a different way. All the corrections can be added in geocentric
model as well, but everything looks much more complicated in it.

It is very similar to the formulation of classical mechanics in terms of least
action principle. Both formulations make the same predictions, but least
action principle leads to a simpler formulation of quantum mechanics:
Feynman's path integrals.

~~~
davrosthedalek
You need the same corrections in a true heliocentric model as well, they are
just smaller. The true leap in understanding comes when you realize that none
of the objects is special, none of them is the true center, they all follow
the same rules. That's where the simplification of the theory happens.

------
magv
So, yes, aside from the discovery of neutrino mass there was no "fundamental"
progress since the Standard Model -- as in, all the effects we see in current
experiments are accounted for by the theory -- if you know how to calculate
them well enough, which is actually not trivial at all, and has been keeping
physicist busy for the last few decades.

And yes, by scientific standards 20-30B EUR over ~25 years is a large sum,
even though 1B/year is about the current CERN budget, about 1/5 of the current
ESA budget, 1/20 of NASA budget, and 1/500 of the US military budget, etc --
so not that outrageous by other standards.

And yes again, there are multiple cheaper experiments with a more certain
outcome. For example the Japanese Hyper-Kamiokande neutrino detector will
provide enough data to solve neutrino mass hierarchy problem at the cost of
~2B EUR; or the space-based LIGO successor, LISA, which will improve over
LIGO's ability to detect gravity waves by half of a dozen orders of magnitude
for about 1B EUR or so.

And yet, those experiments can not bring more understanding into the
"fundamental" physics -- i.e. to find a breach in the Standard Model. Only two
kinds of experiments can:

1) cheap detectors constructed to test special classes of SM extensions (e.g.
detectors like ALPS, which consist of a laser pointing at a wall to search for
e.g. axions) -- if by some luck the particular extension turns out to be true;

2) a collider with higher energies like FCC, CLIC or ILC.

Now, there's no shortage of the cheap experiments, but up till now they've
only excluded certain classes of "beyond standard model" theories, while
confirming the SM even more. We'll probably continue building these in the
forseeable future, but overall it doesn't seem likely that we'll find anything
here.

So if you want any progress in the "fundamental" physics -- there doesn't seem
to be a way without a bigger collider to show deviation from the SM. Without
such an experiment, all people are left with is speculation, and that is how
you get the string theories, supersymmetries, and the dreaded "naturalness"
criteria, which the author of the article dislikes so much.

~~~
cryptonector
Right, there is a reason to build ever-larger colliders. The question is: is
it worth the cost? And, really, what's the opportunity cost? If a new collider
costs ten times what experiments like Hyper-Kamiokande cost, if building a new
collider would crowd out the smaller experiments, then maybe it's not worth
it.

But before we had better reasons to want to build larger colliders: to observe
more of the SM particle zoo. Utimately it was to observe the Higss boson. If
the SM has run out of predictions we can only test with bigger colliders, and
the only reason left to build bigger colliers is to test SM more finely, or to
hope for a break in the SM, well, these reasons aren't quite as compelling. I
think this is TFA's author's argument, and I don't think it's wrong.

We might still decide to build a bigger collider, but we should admit that the
arguments for it are not that compelling.

------
x3tm
We have here someone who doesn't/never work/ed on HEP but on something so
remote from it that I would find it hard to even call it physics sometimes.
She goes on a sudden crusade against HEP and all its (prominent) practitioners
who spent years working on it. She uses some facts we all agree on
(uncertainty about the future, etc.) then twists them in a way that makes it
look as if the whole HEP community is part of a huge conspiracy to deceive the
public. Our truth warrior then courageously exposes them in her ... blog. BS.

On the other side how the hell can she justify her salary and grants to
taxpayers? Why isn't she doing some biology or something? It's all so
incoherent.

I used to read her when she was less crazy. But I really can't stand her
anymore ... it's just too much.

It's all very strange. Two of the most popular and active bloggers in HEP are
totally crazy and politically extreme (although in opposite extremes).
Blogging seems to be an unhealthy activity for physicists.

~~~
pc
This is an ad hominem attack that doesn't really help us understand whether
the core substance of her argument is _true_ , which is what really matters.

~~~
Panoramix
Here are some thorough debunkings of this line of reasoning

[https://twitter.com/srrappoccio/status/1087839488557105153](https://twitter.com/srrappoccio/status/1087839488557105153)

[https://twitter.com/jbbeacham/status/1087836008585019392](https://twitter.com/jbbeacham/status/1087836008585019392)

~~~
Barrin92
I don't see a thorough debunking to be honest. The first commentor points to
the practical results of particle accelerators. The Vox article (and the blog
author) acknowledge this fully. But all examples that are given are the result
of past accelerators, where we had reasonable expectations to find new
technology because we were still exploring the standard model. This is not the
case for a larger accelerator, and this is Hossenfelders point.

The second commenter follows a similar logic. He doesn't seem to engage the
point that we don't expect the discovery of something new, he seems to suggest
that scientists should build bigger accelerators simply because we can.

But he must know that this is not how science works. Chemists don't just
simply perform all imaginable chemical reactions just to completely map the
space of chemistry. We allocate scarce resources like time and money to
experiments that, according to our best models, may yield promising results.
We have ideas for experiments like this in physics, they just happen to not
involve a larger accelerator. Scientists are not blind cartographers.

~~~
tensor
That is not at all how science works. Models yield predictions about the
world, not "results" as you suggest. We design experiments to test if those
predictions, and thus the models, are correct. Often, new "results" are found
when a model fails, and that is why we test boundary conditions.

There is no way of predicting which line of work is likely to yield new
physics as you suggest there is.

------
ThePhysicist
Well, maybe it isn’t worth spending another 20B on a new particle accelerator,
but if so how should we continue? Smashing particles together at high energies
is at least a proven strategy that has yielded results in the past and I
personally don’t know how we would do high energy physics without them? Maybe
we could think of finding ways to investigate naturally occurring particles at
those high energies (e.g. via cosmic radiation) but that seems more sci-fi
than reality and also won’t cost less than 20B I would argue.

Also, not making progress for 40 years is not really long, we just tend to
view everything relative to our own lifespan and we were also pretty spoiled
with the marvelous discoveries we made in the last 100 years, but it’s
entirely possible that we have now worked out all the “easy” stuff and that
making further progress will take 1000s of years (though I think that’s
unlikely).

~~~
coldtea
> _Smashing particles together at high energies is at least a proven strategy
> that has yielded results in the past and I personally don’t know how we
> would do high energy physics without them?_

Isn't that a little cyclical? Why should we do "high energy physics" as
opposed to just physics? Aren't there other ways to come at fundamental
particles than smashing things together and seeing what happens?

> _Also, not making progress for 40 years is not really long_

Compared to the previous 100 years rate of progress, which was the baseline,
it is huge.

~~~
philwelch
> Compared to the previous 100 years rate of progress, which was the baseline,
> it is huge.

That's kind of cherry-picking, isn't it? 1850-1950 basically rewrote the sum
of human knowledge when it comes to physics. That isn't a "baseline", it's a
major breakthrough.

~~~
coldtea
> _That 's kind of cherry-picking, isn't it? 1850-1950 basically rewrote the
> sum of human knowledge when it comes to physics. That isn't a "baseline",
> it's a major breakthrough._

And we're at the end of the sigmoid curve of that breakthrough...

~~~
philwelch
Exactly. So maybe it makes sense to reallocate some resources to concrete
applications of what we already know, but it still isn't fair to expect basic
research to make the same kind of progress today that it made in the 1900's
(the decade, not the century).

------
tim333
If you look at the history of science over the last 2000 years or so, new
insights have popped up from time to time in a rather random way. There isn't
really a reason to expect them regularly thought that doesn't mean we
shouldn't stop looking.

~~~
j45
Agreed. In the meantime, because we don't have understanding about something
yet, it doesn't mean understanding does not exist because we don't understand
it.

Many of the brightest phds in today's society are working on platforms to
gather and retain people's attention to get clicks on ads. Maybe this is part
of the reason.

Reaching children with education who don't have access to it will bring more
of this random forward progress.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan)

~~~
noir_lord
With all the technology we have now and the web and where it's gotten to it
_amazes_ me that education hasn't been revolutionised.

Example, I was interested in doing a BSc/B.Eng in software engineering online
only (in the UK) and it was silly how difficult it was to find out basic
details and pricing.

~~~
j45
This is an area I'm working in. It's interesting why education disruption has
been delayed, but that is finally starting to get on the radar.. :

\- Academia believes they own knowledge, curriculum and delivery, when they
are losing relevancy in all 3. They haven't kept up.

\- The rate of change in society has surpassed academias ability to keep up.
Calculus and traditional topics do not change every 2-3 years, but disruption
does.

\- The 2000 year old model of lectures and seats in butts is changing with, or
without institutions. Recording lectures and surrounding it with questions is
the height of what we have, and hasn't changed since the 90's.

\- Academics largely are not competent with technology but try to implement
it, or oversee it. Academics also don't professionally learn how to teach,
unlike teachers. As a result, teachers of k-12 students are more tech literate
than their post secondary lifers, and the wave of k-12 students heading
towards post secondarys that have a worse digital learning experience than
their schools.

\- Employers hire competency and not just education alone. Curriculum is
outdated often by the time it's released in more and more industries.

\- While self directed learning is growing into many professions, instruction
needs to evolve. I don't believe instructors can be replaced, but they need
new and better digital supports.

~~~
nafey
According to Bryan Caplan (writer The Case against Education) the value that
academic institutions provide is not necessarily knowledge but ranking the
students in order of their perceived competency for jobs.

As far as that remains true I see little to no hope for any displacement of
"The Academy" from its current position of significance.

~~~
j45
There is some question whether for emerging or rapidly evolving positions
employers hire competencies over academic badges.

Wise institutions are working on this but the average rate at which they react
may be a challenge.

------
breatheoften
I don't have any sense for how much the author is contributing to any
discussions of worth -- but I do struggle with the phrase 'foundations of
physics'. To me 'foundation of' invites comparison to similar uses in other
domains -- in math where it tends to concern the nature of argument, or to
computer science where it concerns mechanisms for accomplishing defined goals
efficiently or reasoning about program performance/semantics, or to
engineering where it concerns such things as stacking rocks and balancing
forces so as to ensure that a given way of stacking is probably capable of
lasting for a certain amount of time.

But why exactly should 'high energy physics' be considered more 'foundational'
than other domains of physical observation? Particle physics pursues
description of effects that can occur at very small sizes - but are there
_really_ such tight linkages from the observational domain of particle physics
to observable 'larger scale' physics such that one truly deserves to be
labeled 'foundational' for the other?

Just to pick a domain out of a hat, when modeling things like electromagnetic
potentials in material science, actively investigated theoretical models are
coarse grained so far beyond the scale of the probing done in particle physics
that I have wonder how much are the 'foundational' theories and the larger
scale ones ever really expected/required to be consistent with each other ...?

If 'foundational' isn't a statement about the direction of the consistency
requirements the components of argument - then what exactly is it a statement
about?

~~~
jakeinspace
As long as you hold onto the assumption that all physical phenomena on the
macro scale can in a (perhaps not useful) sense be explained reductively by
particle/field physics of some sort, it's clear that poking at the
particle/field/whatever substrate is more foundational than studying high
level emergent phenomena. That isn't to say that high-energy particle physics
is the best or only avenue of fundamental exploration; obviously, much of the
last century's advancements came from cosmology.

There's nothing wrong with studying condensed matter physics, and there is a
huge amount to learn. But I don't see a conceivable way in which discoveries
made by studying complex behavior closer to our scale will help solve quantum
gravity or dark matter.

Then again, if humanity were one big game of Civilization, I'd be directing my
tech tree towards engineering and applied physics research at the moment: we
probably don't need any more fundamental physics to build sustainable fusion
reactors.

~~~
roenxi
> But I don't see a conceivable way in which discoveries made by studying
> complex behavior closer to our scale will help solve quantum gravity or dark
> matter.

In the main I only see reason and balanced in this post, but this particular
statement is a bit risky. Historically, big breakthroughs in the sciences
happen when new measurement techniques become available or existing
measurement techniques are refined to produce a "significantly" greater level
of accuracy.

A breakthrough in our understanding of reality could come from anywhere that
anyone pushes the bounds of what we can measure; which admittedly is probably
the folk with the budget for a big particle accelerator, but one could imagine
a path for almost anybody to make a contribution. One of the take-aways of the
whole quantum vs classical business is that just because the evidence seems to
be converging on a well respected model doesn't mean that the evidence is
actually going to converge.

~~~
jakeinspace
I definitely agree with you and mathgenius that mathematical techniques and
technological progress created while investigating macroscopic behavior may be
useful for making breakthroughs in "fundamental" physics. There is certainly
precedent for that sort of thing. Perhaps complexity theory will have some
significant impact on physics this century, who knows. But it's unclear
whether there's anything that pure mathematics or mathematical analogies to
the macro world can tell us about how gravity and quantum mechanics are
unified, or any of the other big open questions at the bottom.

------
Animats
Lee Smolin, who's a well-respected physicist, says similar things. He's
especially critical of string theory, which lacks support from experimental
evidence.

There is experimental progress in physics, but it seems to be at the low
energy end. Down near absolute zero, where quantum mechanics dominates. Many
of the stranger predictions of quantum mechanics have been confirmed
experimentally. Useful applications, such as quantum cryptography, are
emerging. That's where the action is.

~~~
sien
Peter Woit is another theoretical physicist who says similar things.

Both Smolin's book 'The Trouble with Physics' and Woit's 'Not Even Wrong' are
well worth a read.

~~~
amai
If you like these books, then you might also like Unzicker book "Bankrupting
physics". But be aware that there are very good arguments, that all these
books are pure crackpottery: [https://motls.blogspot.com/2013/07/shmoits-face-
german-compe...](https://motls.blogspot.com/2013/07/shmoits-face-german-
competitor.html)

------
mycall
"When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the
opposite direction appears to have lost his mind." \- C. S. Lewis

$20 billion spent is a lot of high tech jobs being made. I'm for it. Think how
much we spend on wars.

~~~
reasonablemann
Sure, but is this the best way to spend that money?

~~~
peteradio
Does it have to be the best?

~~~
Barrin92
Obviously not, but even many physicists are suggesting that the 20 billion
could be spend better.

------
davrosthedalek
Maybe it's me, but I would give more thought to her arguments if she wouldn't
mention her book in /every/ post. She is really trying to sell it hard.

~~~
high_derivative
I think her tone is quite antagonising and I am not sure if it is intentional:

" No one wants to live in a world where the little German lady with her oh-so
rational arguments ends up being right. Not even the German lady wants that.
Wait, what did I say? I must be crazy."

This is meant to sound self-deprecating (I think) but in the context of the
articles comes across as arrogant to me because clearly she thinks she is not
the little lady, and others are irrationally ignoring her superior insights.
Could be a cultural artefact but it makes her articles uncomfortable to read
for me.

~~~
Smaug123
For what it's worth, I (British) think it sounds fine. It's the sort of thing
I can imagine myself or a number of my friends saying. Very probably a
cultural thing.

------
zyxzevn
Compared to a software product, the scientists have build a product that
contains many modules that all link together via complex maths. What is still
missing is refactoring: making things simple again and removing unnecessary
parts.

While many of the modules have been tested separately, certain combinations
may not work as proclaimed. I find this problem already with the physics of
the sun. So many things are way off normal physics. I have seen models that do
not exist anywhere else. Predicted values are 10^6 order off. These things
need retesting and the modules likely need to be redesigned.

But just stating that something might be off, already triggers many
scientists. They see it as an attack on "their" science. This is clearly an
attack on the messenger. Usually mixed with logical fallacies. So there is a
real problem with the involved scientists as well. They do not want to see
errors in their system, as it hurts their status. And there is the real
problem with science. The ones involved do not want to admit that there might
be something wrong.

If I would tell programmers that something might be wrong with one combination
of modules, they are (more) often happy to look into it. So scientists, be
more like programmers.

------
reasonablemann
Would throwing 1000 particle scientists and 20B at fusion speed up it's
progress?

~~~
est31
I think the issue with fusion is similar to the arguments made by the lady in
OP. Yes, fusion is under-funded but partly because people doubt that it's
possible _at all_. OTOH, there are definitely people who have seriously good
proposals for further fusion projects e.g. [1].

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4)

~~~
maxxxxx
I have never heard that people think fusion is impossible. It looks more like
a flight to the moon appeared around 1960. You know it’s possible but there is
a lot of engineering needed to make it happen.

~~~
mhh__
The problem is it's not even known whether the engineering problems can be
attacked at all, unlike the Apollo program where even though a large amount of
work (Breadth rather than depth this time) it was an iterative evolution of
past programs.

~~~
maxxxxx
In 1960 they had no idea how rendezvous in space or a lot of other things
would work but they knew they would figure it out with enough time and money .
From whatever I have heard about fusion I have never heard about doubts about
feasibility. It’s about trying out different things and getting experience
since the knowledge in plasma physics is so thin.

------
tiemand
It’s got to be those bloody Sophons blocking progess!

~~~
magnusdeus123
Can you believe it, I opened this up and Ctrl+F'ed 'sophon' to see if I'd be
the first one. Glad to see someone else beat me to it.

~~~
sylens
Ha, same

------
AnonymousRider
Try telling a homeless Veteran that it was worth $20 billion to prove the
Higgs mechanism. We could house 400,000 homeless for that price.

~~~
crazygringo
Or why don't we do both. It isn't either/or. Taxes can be raised, especially
on the ultra-wealthier.

~~~
YjSe2GMQ
If you're talking about the income tax idea by AOC it'll only boost taxes by
0.3%, assuming no tax dodging:

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.economist.com/leaders/2019/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.economist.com/leaders/2019/02/02/how-
to-tax-the-rich)

------
rwallace
Wild idea:

Either there is a loophole in physics or there is not. By 'loophole' I mean
'some of the physics we don't yet know, has useful applications such as faster
than light travel or unbounded computation, that could potentially be tapped
by terrestrial civilization'. (As opposed to the alternative state of affairs
where the Standard Model suffices to describe everything that will ever happen
in our solar system.)

The expected value of research in fundamental physics is much greater if there
is a loophole than if there is not.

Proposal: we should try to figure out what qualities the as yet unknown
physics must have, conditional on a loophole existing. Then we should proceed
on the assumption that it does indeed have those qualities, in order to
maximize expected utility.

~~~
dasil003
Interesting idea, though I would say if it’s measurable then we can’t rule out
an application somewhere down the line no matter how esoteric the knowledge
might seem now.

~~~
rwallace
Rule out absolutely, no, but we can say some kinds of physics are much more
_likely_ to be applicable than others. And what matters is applicability by
terrestrial civilization. 'This could be applicable, but only by a
civilization capable of building Dyson spheres' is irrelevant to us, because
if we get to that point, we will already have made it past the Great Filter.

------
madhadron
Sabine Hossenfelder has received an incredible amount of shit that she
absolutely doesn't deserve, including in this comment thread.

What she's talking about is all stuff that's well known in the physics
community. She is willing to say it publicly.

------
Svoka
I don't really understand what she's suggesting. It is easy to be sceptic, and
just saying that "ya'll just wasting money". And to be honest 20b on a
collider is a tiny dent on budgets we spend on, say, military.

------
kiba
How many particle physicists are we throwing at this problem?

~~~
johnchristopher
I heard that to get interesting data we are actually supposed to throw them
very fast against each other.

------
tzs
Is there any chance that we could reach new physics with a linear collider
instead of a circular collider?

If there is, then I have an idea to get funding. Build it above ground along
the US/Mexican border, so that it could also serve as the wall President Trump
wants built.

------
ggm
I didn't read every comment, I skimmed as many as I could. A question: _how
much of the hate /distain/put-down/vituperation is because she's a she and not
a he?_

Seriously. I read at least three comments suggesting arcs of her argument are
held by physicists with the requirements between the legs. Is it just how she
says it, or is it because she has a vulva?

------
mylons
this is a core part of the plot to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-
Body_Problem_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-
Body_Problem_\(novel\)) \-- a fantastic read which introduced me to a lot of
Chinese perspective and history i never received elsewhere.

------
losvedir
She says:

> _But the problems that theoretical particle physicists currently try to
> solve do not require solutions. The lack of unification, the absence of
> naturalness, the seeming arbitrariness of the constants of nature: these are
> aesthetic problems._

What are some examples of problems that _do_ "require solutions"?

~~~
mycorrhizal
From physics, it seems like cosmology has a whole bunch. What the heck is dark
matter made out of? Why is the the expansion of the universe accelerating?
These seem qualitatively different than the "aesthetic problems" she points
to.

------
fallingfrog
I feel like there is probably some new physics out there, maybe entropic
gravity or something, since there are still some big mysteries out there.
(Dark energy etc)

That said, I would be very surprised if we discovered anything with as much
practical use as say, quantum physics or electricity or thermodynamics.

~~~
wsgeorge
> That said, I would be very surprised if we discovered anything with as much
> practical use as say, quantum physics or electricity or thermodynamics.

History keeps proving that we will.

~~~
fallingfrog
I mean hey, maybe I’m wrong but I have a bachelors in physics and this is what
I’m seeing ahead. Verifying the speed of light is easy; you just need a
rotating mirror and a laser or bright light. Showing that electrons have a
charge can be done with oil drops. But the Higgs boson took, let’s just say a
bit more effort, and while I think it’s good that we are looking for new
particles there is no practical application of the Higgs. Just saying. The low
hanging fruit is gone and what’s left may or may not be useful.

------
XorNot
Well one solution would be to start aggressively funding the LHC's successor,
since in lieu of some better places to go looking for new behaviors we're
going to need a higher energy particle accelerator if nothing comes up.

------
qlogic
"...the greatest physicists such as Einstein, Dirac of Schrödinger would have
considered the “discovery” of the Higgs particle ridiculous."

[https://www.amazon.com/Higgs-Fake-Particle-Physicists-
Commit...](https://www.amazon.com/Higgs-Fake-Particle-Physicists-
Committee/dp/1492176249)

------
nyc111
But who will be making the decision to build the next accelerator?

------
giorgioz
The article is far from constructive criticism. In the end is blaming the
general current approach but it does not offer any alternative solution. It's
easy to say 'you are not doing it right' unless you can do it right.

------
m0llusk
Quantized space and Quantized inertia both have interesting potential and both
involve reframing existing ideas.

------
sinuhe69
What has dark matter anything to do with the standard model? Dark matter is
just a hack for Einstein relativity theory.

~~~
maxander
Dark matter is a stuff that exists, we’re pretty sure, and some explanations
for what it is would involve expansions for the standard model; seeing if one
of those explanations is right is therefore a (supposedly) promising avenue
for post-standard model physics.

~~~
sinuhe69
Maybe one should read more before downgrading other people’ comment as
nonsense. Excerpts from Wikipedia (text in square brackets are my): Dark
matter is a _hypothetical_ form of matter that is thought to account for
approximately 85% of the matter in the universe...[ _speaks the existence of
dark matter existence is not proven, is not even part of the standard model!_
]

[...]

Its presence is implied in a variety of astrophysical observations, including
gravitational effects that cannot be explained unless more matter is present
than can be seen.

[…]

The primary evidence for dark matter is that calculations show that many
galaxies would fly apart instead of rotating, or would not have formed or move
as they do, if they did not contain a large amount of unseen matter.[2] Other
lines of evidence include observations in gravitational lensing,[3] from the
cosmic microwave background, from astronomical observations of the observable
universe's current structure, from the formation and evolution of galaxies,
from mass location during galactic collisions,[4] and from the motion of
galaxies within galaxy clusters. [ _so mismatch in gravitational effect with
Einstein General Relativity is the only reason why people think there “must”
be dark matter out there. Imagining dark matter would help to keep Einstein
General Relativity correct in its current form, in other words it’s a HACK!_ ]

[…]

Although the existence of dark matter is generally accepted by the scientific
community, some astrophysicists, intrigued by certain observations that do not
fit the dark matter theory, argue for various modifications of the standard
laws of general relativity, such as modified Newtonian dynamics,
tensor–vector–scalar gravity, or entropic gravity. These models attempt to
account for all observations without invoking supplemental non-baryonic
matter. [ _means without the need for the hypothetical, non-observable dark
matter. And because the standard model can not explain gravity, dark matter or
modified gravity theory has nothing to do with the standard model as stated in
my original comment_ ]

~~~
maxander
For what it's worth, I didn't downvote you- but you should realize the gap
between what your Wikipedia source says and what you originally asserted. Yes,
Wikipedia is right that the existence of dark matter isn't _proven_ , and it's
also true that there's no proven connection to the Standard Model; it's _also
true_ , as I said, that scientists are pretty sure that it does exist (the
alternate theories are widely regarded as long shots.) And if it exists, this
novel form of matter would need to be fit into the Standard Model somewhere,
since that is intended to describe all forms of matter.

Incidentally, I also think you're getting your history of science confused;
the "cosmological constant" term Einstein used to make relativity consistent
with his belief in a static, non-expanding universe was a "hack" (he himself
wound up admitting it was unjustified.) But that's entirely unrelated to dark
matter. Similar modern theories to the cosmological constant have been termed
"dark energy," but the use of the word "dark" in both doesn't imply a real
connection- it simply means that they each haven't been directly observed.

------
scarejunba
This person writes like cranks write: self-aggrandizing for the most part. I
don’t know enough about HEP that I’m going to just treat it as a crank text.

------
SagelyGuru
Maybe my (ex) university was right to close down its Physics Department
decades ago, after all. They timed it well, soon after all those predictions
started going all wrong. The decision was taken by accountants and at that
time I never thought that they were that clever but maybe the market forces
understand it better than we do?

------
buboard
That blog keeps rambling on about the same old thing over and over. Maybe the
author is crazy. What is being proposed here, to abandon all physics research
because it has become hard? And in the end constant nagging is not fruitful to
anything, unless the author can reasonably argue for a new line of research.

As an aside, Physics is not even suffering from true scientific issues such as
reproducibility and direction of research.

~~~
Barrin92
>That blog keeps rambling on about the same old thing over and over. Maybe the
author is crazy. What is being proposed here, to abandon all physics research
because it has become hard? And in the end constant nagging is not fruitful to
anything, unless the author can reasonably argue for a new line of research.

she did just that in the NYT piece that is also linked to in the blog post.

 _" And there are other avenues to pursue. For example, the astrophysical
observations pointing toward dark matter should be explored further; better
understanding those observations would help us make more reliable predictions
about whether a larger collider can produce the dark matter particle — if it
even is a particle.

There are also medium-scale experiments that tend to fall off the table
because giant projects eat up money. One important medium-scale project is the
interface between the quantum realm and gravity, which is now accessible to
experimental testing. Another place where discoveries could be waiting is in
the foundations of quantum mechanics. These could have major technological
impacts."_

There really is no argument in favour of why building a new, extremely
expensive accelerator is reasonable. We don't expect to find anything at those
energy levels, it is pure guesswork.

~~~
buboard
i believe astronomy is not underfunded, with projects like JWT. now she might
be right about medium scale projects but one would have to see the budget for
it. Research directions is a difficult matter, and as evidenced by recently
identified problems with medicine and biology reserach, having a ton of
medium-sized projects instead of a few megaprojects is not necessarily more
fruitful.

------
dfilppi
The only scientific pursuit worth pursuing is the transfer of the human mind
to a machine host. Once that is done, we'll have forever to do everything
else, including interstellar travel.

------
plutonorm
Imho we need to be facing up to the implications of quantum mechanics. All of
this brain power going into particle physics should be going into the most
baffling and fundamental discovery ever made. We need to experiment the f __*
out of the phenomena and take seriously the implications.

~~~
kakarot
> the most baffling and fundamental discovery ever made

...Which is?

~~~
klyrs
A baguette

------
stanfordkid
Physicists don't have any imagination to break past certain assumptions (e.g
wave function collapse is random)

I liked Stephen Wolframs ideas around cellular automata and network based
structures -- it seems that if we could look at physics as more of an
information transfer problem -- paired with network optimization and
information storage optimization, on a network: this is where real progress
will be made. There have been theories around emergent spacetime from
thermodynamic processes that were abandoned and IMO need to be re-
investigated.

I highly doubt that wave function collapse is just completely random. We just
don't see the structure that is creating the "random" distributions we
observe.

~~~
obastani
This is far from a new idea, and is called the "hidden-variable theory" [1].
In fact, it has been mathematically proven that locality and hidden variables
are fundamentally incompatible in the context of quantum mechanics.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-
variable_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory)

~~~
chr1
Wolframs idea [1] is that space is a network, and closeness of points is
determined by the links in the network. A particle is an extra structure that
is connected to some of the nodes in the network, so if two particles are
connected to nodes far way in the network, but also have several links between
each other, they won't have enough links to change the structure of the space,
but will be connected enough to affect each other in the Bell test.

I'd say this resolves the hidden variable and locality conflict beautifully,
by changing the concept of locality to something much simpler than the
infinite continuum. And it is also somewhat similar to ER=EPR [2] hypothesis
Susskind talks about. But unfortunately it is only a vague idea so far.

[1] [https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/what-is-spacetime-
re...](https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/what-is-spacetime-really/)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY5D7ZgWuXc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY5D7ZgWuXc)

