Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "Is it particle physics or a fairytale? PART 1 | Sabine Hossenfelder, Gavin Salam, Bjørn Ekeberg" video.

Not a bad comparison, except that a mass marathon would be even better. LHC took like 30 years and tens of thousands of "runners". I think we are getting close to the era of centennial projects that will require two, three or even four generations of scientists. It's a bit frightening, actually.
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@ZigSputnik You haven't heard of it, yet? The guy has been going around on the internet with that nonsense using a dozen different accounts for years. ;-)
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She didn't get funding because she never delivered anything of importance. I want to be a famous person who brings peace to earth. So what? So nothing. I can't do that any more than Sabine can come up with important physics. There is a difference between wanting and doing and in science you only get paid for doing, not for wanting. ;-)
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What we "have learned" is brand new. We are generating tons of new data at LHC and other facilities, neutrino and dark matter experiment etc. that was not available in the past. It just happens that we had the basics already figured out in the late 1920s to the 1960s. That's what happens when your theoretical physicists know how to do their jobs... they are ahead of the experiments by decades. It's a sign of success, not failure. ;-)
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@Thomas-gk42 I read her physics papers. There are worthless for all I can tell. She hasn't produced anything of value in theory and she sure doesn't know how to work an experiment. Why would I waste money on her books? I already know what I am NOT dealing with: a first rate physicist. :-)
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@Thomas-gk42 Yes, as an experimental physicist I know what that means. It means that it doesn't matter how right you are as a theorist, until somebody does an experiment that proves you right you will never get the physics Nobel. Theoretically you still have a shot at the Fields medal... if your name is Edward Witten. If your name is Sabine, then you can't even get tenure. ;-)
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Salam is a working theorist for all I can tell. He has recent publications (with others and first author) on arxiv. Sabine used to be one but she worked herself out of the field by publishing meaningless drivel papers. There is no there, there, for all I can tell. Ekeberg is just an author. No trail of papers on arxiv and I don't care to look elsewhere. It's not worth my time. There is a consensus in the community: we need data. What nobody can tell you is where that data is supposed to come from. We lack workable accelerator technology options that would reduce the price/TeV by at least one or two orders of magnitude and we can't solve the problem by throwing a trillion dollars at it using current technology. This isn't rocket science, but it's very similar to rocket science: the field is mature. Elon Musk can build a rocket that is a tad larger and more capable than the Saturn V was, but not much more than that. Nobody will be building a direct to orbit fusion drive torch ship that can travel to Jupiter in two weeks anytime soon, but that fantasy is exactly the equivalent of the kind of accelerator that high energy physics might need to take the next (serious) step. Should we shut the field down because of that? Of course not. That's just Karen's, forgive me, Sabine's wet dream.
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@Aiel-Necromancer SpaceX just landed a Startship, kid. You need to stop drinking. ;-)
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@Aiel-Necromancer Elon is the head engineer at SpaceX. You need to stop drinking. :-)
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The chemical scale can be understood as being "set" by a couple of things: the speed of light, Planck's constant, epsilon_zero, the electron charge, the electron mass. None of that really matters as the values of these constants depend on our choices of physical units. They are only "uneven" numbers in SI units, which are really engineering choices. Set c=1, h=1, m_e=1 etc. and you will find that the only "constant" that remains is the fine structure constant which is the famous 1/137. That is the only "unexplained" mystery here. What sets that? We don't know. We don't know what sets the ratios between electron and proton masses, either, because for that we would have to know what sets the interaction strength of quantum-chromodynamics. There are, in total, something like 21 such ratios in the current standard model of high energy physics and if supersymmetry exists, then there could be dozens, if not hundreds more of such free parameters in the low energy effective field theory.
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Most physicists I know are hard atheists. We are certainly looking for funding but nobody is looking for god in the physics department. ;-)
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Sabine Hossenfelder is the Karen of physics. ;-)
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The funders of science are the taxpayers, kid. Start paying your taxes and we talk. ;-)
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Engineers can't even remember the definition of energy, kid. ;-)
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All money is debt, but there is no debt collector for this debt. You need to learn some macroeconomics theory. ;-)
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Only if gravity is a conventional force, which it doesn't seem to be. People need to stop talking about the Planck length as some miraculous solution to all the problems they don't understand. It's not. It's not even a solution to the most trivial problems we have in quantum field theory, right now.
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@ZigSputnik A trivial problem of QFT is that all of its predictions are asymptotic, interaction-free plane waves at infinity, i.e. elements of the free theory. If we turn interaction on, then scattering happens everywhere, i.e. there are no free states, at all. Over an infinite distance the universe is always completely opaque. You can't solve that with some high energy cutoff scale because it doesn't happen at high energy. It happens at all energies and at all scales.
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Yes, we did, but why were you not paying attention in school when we explained it to you? :-)
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@koenraad4618 Dude, self-anointed physics geniuses like you are a dime a dozen. Your kind has been hanging around every physics department of the world forever. :-) There is no such thing as "the Coulomb field". There are only people who don't understand physics and are in desperate need of attention. ;-)
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Probably not at the LHC. There are plans for Higgs factories, but finding a Higgs multiplet is not going to drive the theory. It's already accounted for. What you are asking is basically the same as the question if one can discover nuclear physics by developing more precise analytic methods in organic chemistry. One can not and that's that.
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All you need is empty space and electricity. NEXT! :-)
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@clay-tw5gc From a physicist's perspective it is. The remainder is basically electrical engineering. Accelerators differ very little from other electrical power facilities. The core elements are similar to what's in your microwave, just far more powerful, and then there are lots and lots of high voltage power supplies. None of that is rocket science. The physics is really just energy input and empty space. You would be surprised how few people are employed worldwide to develop these technologies. It's a handful here and there at high energy physics facilities around the world. That's all it takes. ;-)
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@clay-tw5gc There are no particles. There are only quanta of energy. We have been teaching this in high school for over 40 years now. All the properties of these energy exchanges are inherent in the Poincare group, which is the symmetry of empty space. Some of this was already known like 90 years ago, with the entire picture emerging about 60 years ago. You are asking questions of the deep past, scientifically speaking. ;-)
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@clay-tw5gc The only "thing" that "exists" at "the extremely small level" is a three dimensional metric manifold with a locally additive property called "energy". Everything else follows from that. There are two remaining problems that need to be solved here: 1) What causes this metric structure (the three effective dimensions are kind of a given because in all other dimensions this construction leads to inconsistencies or nothing) and 2) What selects the low energy world that we are seeing from the infinity of possible high energy solutions to Poincare symmetry? These two questions are equally open in all versions of theory that we know about, right now, even if we look at "not even wrongs" like string theory. Question 2) might be a little easier to attack than question 1).
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@clay-tw5gc Energy is energy. It's not localized. Never was, never will be. It's the ability of a system to perform work on another system. A system is an arbitrary subset of spacetime. Whether a system has energy or not is unknown and unknowable... until it transfers that energy to us... which may or may not be a good thing. Too much energy is going to give us a bad day. ;-) The only reason why people have invented the "particle" thing is because they can't think straight. They always imagine "things" where there are none (the psychologists seem to think that's a remnant of our fears of predatory animals waiting for us in the bushes...). It's the same reason why we invented gods and religions. There is nothing in the sky, but people had to fill it with bullshit. There is nothing in the physical vacuum, either, but people have to fill it to the brim with "particles". Don't be like other people. Be smarter. Let go of the fear of being eaten by things that aren't there. ;-)
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@wout123100 No, humanity didn't need the discussion in the video any more than we needed your senseless comment in this thread. ;-)
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We never asked you to trust anything in science. Quite the contrary, we asked you to LEARN, so you didn't have to trust. What did you do? Binge drinking, mostly. :-)
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Yes, we told you all of that in high school. Sound of one hand clapping. ;-)
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The cost of high energy physics is negligible. In the US it's approx. $1.2 billion a year. That's one part in 700 (!) of the US defense budget or one part in 5000 of the total US budget. ;-)
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We didn't find any particles, so far. What people are calling particles are actually quanta of energy. ;-)
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We are doing mostly something else right now: neutrino, dark matter and high energy astrophysics. Will these lead to new approaches? Probably not. These experiments are orthogonal to what can be done at accelerators. That's why we had to build accelerators to begin with.
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Depends what you mean by WIMP. We have not found certain kinds of WIMPs. That doesn't rule out other kinds. The problem with the standard model is that it predicts too much. We can come up with all kinds of fields that have all kinds of properties. We can certainly come up with fields that would be nearly undetectable at thermal energies but still gravitate (try to detect thermal neutrinos... good luck with that!). That's a bad way of doing science, of course. That's why we need high energy machines because at high enough energy even the weakest of interaction becomes a major effect. We wouldn't even have to find WIMPs. We could end up with observations beyond e.g. 10TeV that would actually rule out WIMPs of the kind that cosmologists would like to see. So that would actually be a boon for modified gravity. Science is empirical. Without actual observations there is no science. There can only be theology and philosophy and both are useless.
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Awh, Dude, your intellectual laziness is feeling really sorry for itself today. ;-)
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The scientific method starts with observation and experiment. Can you show me an observational or experimental paper by Sabine? I am not aware that she ever wrote one. ;-)
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@Thomas-gk42 Witten's results can not be experimentally verified except maybe on model systems. I do believe to have read that some of the methods he has come up with are applicable to magnetism, so we might get predictions about spin systems that can't be (or have not been been) achieved with other methods. So, no, I would not expect him to get the Nobel, at least not directly for his work on string theory. The Fields medal was awarded for the importance of his work to pure mathematics (the mathematicians have their own search for . There are examples of mathematicians like Villani who have gotten the Fields medal for mathematical work that is important to physics, so the mathematicians are quite open to such cross-pollination. I read Sabine's work on foundations of quantum mechanics. It's obtuse nonsense. She simply doesn't understand quantum mechanics. Even if she did, her work compares to Witten's like first grader's algebra compares to partial differential equations. Even I can understand all she did on QM, while I am usually lost after the third sentence in Witten's papers. :-)
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CERN takes almost no land. It's mostly underground. Neither was LHC expensive. It's not even 10% of the cost of the ISS or the Shuttle program. Elon Musk might be spending more money on Starship, right now, than was needed to construct and operate LHC. :-)
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