
Musings on the Current Status of High Energy Physics - ArtWomb
https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.00101
======
BrandoElFollito
I have a PhD in physics, and left academia for industry (20 years ago).

One of the reasons was that physics today (or at least at that time) was
dealing with exotic stuff, away from everyday life. It was not the time of
Planck or Curie where within 30 years physics was boiling hot, with key
discoveries almost everyday. Just look at the picture from the Solvay
confrence where you see names of people you read about in a high school book.

I would hope we are in a stage like in the late XIX century, where everything
seemed to be known in physics, with some tiny things still needing an
explanation : the Michelson Morley experiment, the uv catastrophe etc.

~~~
bjornsing
I got out with just an MSc, for pretty much the same reason. You know physics
has lost a lot of steam[1] when the perhaps leading theoretical physicist of
our time, Leonard Susskind, regularly gives talks about... how he knew Richard
Feynman.

Regarding your hope: I very much doubt we’ll get to experience the following
stage in our lifetime.

1\. It’s amazing to think just how much steam: just as an example, you could
argue that physicists determined the outcome of WWII, and with it the whole
path of civilization.

~~~
redis_mlc
> you could argue that physicists determined the outcome of WWII

If you're referring to the A-bomb, no. Germany was defeated without it, and
the Japanese military didn't really care if civilians were turned to ashes.

You could argue that a combination of events ended the Pacific War, including
starvation, no fuel, Russians advancing in the north, the destruction of the
Japanese navy by the USA, the destruction of the Japanese army in
Manchuria/Russian border, plus the A-bomb.

The Japanese Emperor was a world-class marine biologist and understood the
A-bomb in general terms, but had very little influence over the military. He
did a radio broadcast and survived retaliation from the military, so he does
get credit for that.

Hitler and the Japanese military were die-hard end-of-the-world types.
Important to realize when dealing with other tyrants. For them, there is no
Plan B or surrender.

~~~
credit_guy
> > you could argue that physicists determined the outcome of WWII If you're
> referring to the A-bomb, no. Germany was defeated without it, and the
> Japanese military didn't really care if civilians were turned to ashes.

Germany was defeated, but the USSR was on a roll.

Without the A-bomb, there’s a decent chance the Soviet Union would’ve pushed
the Anglo-Americans out of the continental Europe.

~~~
Koshkin
That would have been WWIII.

------
btrettel
> the giant resonance mode. In this mode each novel idea, once it appears,
> spreads in an explosive manner in the theoretical community, sucking into
> itself a majority of active theorists, especially young theorists.
> Naturally, alternative lines of thought by and large dry out. Then, before
> this given idea bears fruit in the understanding of natural phenomena (due
> to the lack of experimental data and the fact that on the theory side
> crucial difficult problems are left behind, unsolved), a new novel idea
> arrives, the old one is abandoned, and a new majority jumps onto the new
> train.

Reminds me of Jamie Zawinski's "CADT Model" of software development. There
seems to be a dynamic in many fields where fixing known problems or finishing
a project doesn't seem important to many people.

~~~
gameswithgo
sounds like a decent simulated annealing or genetic algorithm search. which
seems fine. smart people trying different ideas for a while.

~~~
btrettel
I'm in favor of trying many different ideas, _for a while_ , i.e., when a
problem is new. But at a certain point you need to address issues that are
viewed as critical. In the academic fields that I'm familiar with, I don't see
that occur as frequently as people try new ideas that don't obviously address
the most critical issues. These new ideas typically do address _some_ issues
but they might be regressions in some areas, ignore other important issues, or
address the issues they focus on poorly.

In software development you have bug trackers. In scientific research you have
review articles. These are useful tools that should be used to guide new work.
Otherwise you're not doing simulated annealing or whatnot, you're just doing
an inefficient random search.

------
robochat42
I love reading about high energy physics and this isn't the first account from
a high energy theorist which excludes weariness at the lack of progress over
the last decades. We can hope that someone has a breakthrough that unlocks a
new era of high energy physics. Maybe the neutrino masses hold the key or new
symmetries will be found. Maybe a small alteration will make an old idea
viable. So many promising ideas have been shot down: Grand Unified Theories
looked for proton decays, axions looked for light spontaneously going through
solid walls and supersymmetry searched for new particles. Nothing was found.

As an ex-physicist with a more experimental background in condensed matters,
the real discussions and theories are way beyond me though. Just look at this
paragraph from the article:

"Assume we consider two-dimensional Schwinger model with one massless Dirac
fermion of charge 2 [18]. More exactly, in addition to the dynamicalcharge-2
fermion, there is a heavy probe charge-1 fermion whose mass can be viewed as
tending to infinity. Next, assume that in this model we compactify the spatial
dimension on a circle of circumference L, i.e. impose either periodic or
antiperiodic boundary conditions on the fermion fields. Then one can show that
this model has two discrete Z2 symmetries – one 0-form and another 1-form.
These two global Z2 symmetries have generators which do not commute with each
other [18]. Thus, only one of these symmetries can be implemented,the other
one must be spontaneously broken. Hence, the ground state is doubly
degenerate. In other words, we observe in this example (see Appendix on page
15 and also [17]) the power of the mixed anomalies – the prediction of the
projective action of the symmetries and the ground state degeneracy. This is a
strong result at strong coupling. Sorry for the pun... After [12, 13, 14] a
large number of non-trivial applications has been worked out.Many relevant
references can be found in [18, 19]."

My hope is that there will be a revolution in accelerator technology. The LHC
is a triumph of collaborative engineering but maybe the next accelerator will
be based upon different principles such as wakefield acceleration or
miniaturized accelerators. Or we could find different ways of testing high
energy physics, more subtle than smashing two particles together!

~~~
mnowicki
What, you don't even know how to 'compactify the spatial dimension'?

~~~
Koshkin
You jest, but I've seen the compactification (using periodic boundary
condition) mentioned - and explained - in a popular science book about quantum
mechanics.

~~~
alexgmcm
Which book? I did a Master's in Physics but a while ago so it'd be nice to
read something somewhat technical (but not too much).

~~~
Koshkin
An intro to QM by A.Zagoskin. It is indeed somewhat more technical than most
pop-science books.

------
kristianp
Does it make sense to build the FCC, when it costs so much money and doesn't
necessarily have enough energy to discover any new physics, at 10x the energy
of the LHC?

Maybe it makes more sense to start working towards producing microscopic black
holes in space, where results about quantum gravity can be gained [1].

[0] [https://www.technologyreview.com/f/612766/cern-wants-to-
buil...](https://www.technologyreview.com/f/612766/cern-wants-to-build-a-
particle-collider-thats-four-times-bigger-than-the-lhc/)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803](https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803) , Are
Black Hole Starships Possible

