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Do we need TDD for particle physics so CI could run tests on what experiments break when merging a theory



Yes. This would be extremely helpful for experimentalists who spend a lot of their time pointing out, for example, that one's new theory can't violate the equivalence principle by very much at all. Similarly, it would be helpful for people planning new experiments to know whether or not their proposed experiment will probe new ground (i.e. CERN's anti-hydrogen experiments are of intense value for spectroscopic studies, but existing experiments [1] show that antimatter, at the 10^-8 level or better, obeys the equivalence principle and therefore will reliably fall in every experiment of which CERN is capable.).

As a sibling comment points out, it is difficult to implement the markup that spans the space of all possible theories. Kostelecky's parametric Standard Model Extension offers one avenue to do so.

One could implement such a test as a checklist, too, which might already make a difference.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.2442.pdf


Are you volunteering to write the YAML for it? =) Should be pretty much trivial! Exercise left to the reader.


That's done by hand. I guess you could automate it. Maybe we'll see that some time in the next century.




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