Comments by "Brent Jacobs" (@br3nto) on "What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? (This is why I lost faith in science.)" video.

@fkeyvan did you even listen to her? She said the Higgs was a necessary refinement of the standard model and therefore it is science to look for it. She advocating for doing work that is necessary. It does seem like a waste of money to go looking for things that aren’t necessary. It’s probably also a waste of many smart people’s time to look for unnecessary things, when their attention could be focused on more productive problems.
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@Annou7la I think you missed Sabine’s main points. She’s not saying the standard model is the final law of nature, or there aren’t problems with it. She says, valid reasons to change the model are to address internal inconsistencies, and to resolve where the model doesn’t fit the data. She then addresses how fixing pseudo problems add undue complexity to the model that already works. She doesn’t say there isn’t new physics to be found. This is my point now… it seems the pseudo problems are those things that irritate us humans. They don’t feel right. Like the free variables. So we like to work on them to alleviate that irritation. I think it only makes sense to work on them if it will provide greater utility than the time and effort required. Knowing something for the sake of knowing something has very little utility.
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@NuclearCraftMod Sorry, I thought that was one of the points Sabine said, that the Higgs was required to fix something in the model. I’ll be more general. Sabine’s points were: only make a model more complex when there are internal inconsistencies, or when it doesn’t match new data, and don’t solve pseudo problems. It makes sense from my perspective. Of the things you listed, they might all not be pseudo problems and fit into the first two categories. I can’t judge that. My final point was my own though… it’s nice to research for the sake of research, but discoveries should have some positive utility to society, or at least to the company/companies doing the research, besides just knowing the answer. It’s like, at work I can’t build just any software. I may have a burning desire to know or build or test some new thing, but I have to build software that contributes greater utility than the effort I put in and the resources I used. Eg it may be better to keep an existing manual process than to automate it. This is the same as or similar to: don’t work on pseudo problems, and only fix internal inconsistencies or to address where it doesn’t fit the data. But I accept it’s also rarely black and white.
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