Should we worry about what the LHC is not finding?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20729-should-we-worry-about-what-the-lhc-is-not-finding.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

by mrsebastian • 15 years ago

43 39 15 years ago

newscientist.com

Ronkdar• 15 years ago

Data not backing up hypothesis is not cause for worry. That's just part of science, and the result is still valuable.

The fact that no gravitons have been found below 2 TeV is data from which useful conclusions can be drawn about their nature, if they do exist.

phyllotaxis6• 15 years ago

EDIT- WHY IS THIS STATEMENT DOWNVOTED? REALLY?

There are huge flaws in the art as it is practiced today. They aren't finding what they're looking for because it IS NOT THERE. Go to the following site, and understand the gap between the fantastic but invented idea-chasers that are currently en vogue, and the scientists that are taking measurements and fitting the results to known phenomena.

This will change your view of modern science forever, and I humbly assert that it should.

http://www.electric-cosmos.org/indexOLD.htm

scarmig• 15 years ago

"When confronted by observations that cast doubt on the validity of their theories, astrophysicists have circled their wagons and conjured up pseudo-scientific invisible entities such as neutron stars, weakly interacting massive particles, strange energy, and black holes. When confronted by solid evidence such as Halton Arp's photographs that contradict the Big Bang Theory, their response is to refuse him access to any major telescope in the U.S."

Uh huh.

flatline• 15 years ago

He claims that: all modern physicists are intellectually dishonest; Einstein only conducted thought experiments and GR is therefore unsubstantiated; the author is being persecuted for harboring unpopular ideas. I am not a physicist but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which seems lacking here.

phyllotaxis6• 15 years ago

Flatline, read the site. Read the links. I would never spam this site with wacked out bullshit. Look past personality here and read the science of plasma and electricity explaining, repeatedly, many questions that the popular hypotheses simply don't, at least not without creating mathematically abstract "things" that "must be there, except we can't see them, or measure them, or even prove via experiment that they exist. Dark matter and energy, for example. The plasma explainations DO address these things, and to my critical eyes, very compellingly. Just give it your time, and be objectively critical.

adw• 15 years ago

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html to thread! Falls foul of - at least - points 16, 18 and 24. (Could anyone find any falsifiable predictions, for that matter?)

On a more serious note, the quality of scientific debate on Hacker News is really, really low. Part of it is this community's insistence on contrariness – which comes out in a bunch of weird ways, global warming denialism probably the most prominent – but part of it is a really unattractive arrogant streak which refuses to accept that some issues are just complex. Kind of a Dunning-Kruger effect, really.

(I have no solutions, but it's worth noting).

chc2• 15 years ago

I see little actual science on that site. What concrete claims there are appear mostly to be conspiracy theories and attempts at "logical refutation" that are extremely similar to the kind you'll find on holocaust denial sites.

Moreover, the "electric universe" hypothesis is well-known and widely rejected by those with expertise in the subject matter. We should not simply trust extraordinary claims by some shoddy website that does little to establish its credibility.

phyllotaxis6• 15 years ago

http://www.electric-cosmos.org/Bayes.pdf http://members.cox.net/dascott3/AppendixB.pdf

http://members.cox.net/dascott3/IEEE-TransPlasmaSci-Scott-Au...

http://www.haltonarp.com/articles/faint_quasars_give_conclus...

http://www.haltonarp.com/articles/the_observational_impetus_...

http://www.haltonarp.com/articles/rebuttals

jameskilton• 15 years ago

On the contrary, I remember a quote from some physicist before LHC went live saying something like "if the LHC finds nothing that we've been predicting that will be a more incredible find (than proving the Higgs or Graviton), because that means we're completely wrong".

The LHC not finding particles in the areas we're predicting is simply telling us that our predictions were wrong. Time will tell, the LHC is still relatively new and is producing a metric ton of data. What we find in the next few years will radically change our understanding of the cosmos, I'm sure.

VladRussian• 15 years ago

>What we find in the next few years will radically change our understanding of the cosmos, I'm sure.

every time current "standard model" was incorrect for some fringe/edge cases a new theory was born that included the old "standard model" as an edge case. Lets this chain continue ( i personally feel that monstrosity of superstring theory is an indication that we've reached the breaking point :)

jpallen2• 15 years ago

If the LHC finds nothing it would be interesting but I don't think it would be a good step forward for physics. Of course any step in the right direction is good, but we would have no where to specifically look, and have just blown a lot of funding with no results to show off during the next round of funding.

A much better outcome would be to find something exotic that can spark research in the right direction. At the moment we have many ideas past the standard model but no way to know which to pursue with any seriousness.

Of course, discussion of what would be good or bad doesn't matter much. It will find what it finds (or doesn't)

felipemnoa• 15 years ago

>>and have just blown a lot of funding with no results to show off during the next round of funding

On the contrary, now we can stop wasting man hours on incorrect theorems and start looking for the right ones. This is really interesting because it means that the universe is much different than we imagined.

eru• 15 years ago

I don't think an outcome that would lead to less funding for this kind of physics would be necessarily bad.

hammock2• 15 years ago

Gravitons are the kookiest theoretical particle I have ever heard of. I had an intuition that they were kooky and contrived when I first heard of them as a child, and now that I know more about them and gravity, I have even more disbelief in them. Why people still believe in them I will never know.

Here's the latest thing I have seen, btw: http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785 Pop science interpretation of it: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.html

starwed• 15 years ago

You know what I'll never know? Why people think they know better than the scientific community after reading a few pop science articles.

If you have a single issue with gravitons that can be expressed mathematically, show us.

hammock2• 15 years ago

I didn't say I knew better than "the scientific community" (whomever they are, since there is not a huge amount of consensus around gravitons), I just said I have a lot of doubts. I could be wrong.

neutronicus• 15 years ago

How are they different from photons? Or gluons?

Anyways, I saw a Freeman Dyson talk once where he explained that if you were to set up a detector with the cross-sectional area of the Earth, and point it at the sun for the age of the Earth, you would be expected to detect 4(!) gravitons, due to their weak interactions with matter. He was convinced we would run into our inability to continue to test predictions long before we hammered out a decent unification theory.

kamagmar2• 15 years ago

Standard gravitons are already constrained to be almost massless, so i'm guessing the article is referring to Randall-Sundrum type massive gravitons in 5D.

jessriedel2• 15 years ago

Why does their detectability depend on the mass? My understanding is that both the standard and Randall-Sundrum gravitons can only be identified through missing energy; neither are possible to directly detect through any feasible experiment. Does the low upper bound on the mass constrain the cross-section?

kamagmar2• 15 years ago

I believe the main RS discovery channel is looking for a p pbar -> graviton -> e+ e- resonance, where p is a parton (i.e., quark or gluon).

powertower• 15 years ago

> At the same time, there is no sign yet of gravitons particles that transmit gravity and are essential...

I never understood how you can explain gravity as 1) a bending of space-time caused by mass and then 2) pretend it's a force transmited by "gravitons".

If 1) is true then it's an effect (phenomena), not a cause (force). If 2) is true than it's a cause (force), not an effect (phenomena).

jpallen2• 15 years ago

Don't worry, neither do physicists. When people talk about 'quantum gravity' they mean some theory which unites curving of space with the idea of gravity being 'quantised' in particles. Only string theory does this consistently (and here the curvature manifests itself as a background of gravitons), but string theory isn't really a serious competitor for physics beyond the standard model.

lmkg• 15 years ago

Well, it just could be another form of duality, like wave-particle duality. You'd think waves and particles are mutually exclusive too, but nature disagrees.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the two characterizations come from two different branches of physics that to date have still not been fully reconciled. (General) relativity is based on a mathematical conception of space-time where gravity can be modeled by mass bending space. Quantum mechanics models all long-distance forces between particles as local interactions with a mediator particle that represents the force. These two theories have trouble getting along together for a number of reasons (look up "quantum foam"), plus we really have no way of telling if these models are a faithful representation of reality, or are just mathematically equivalent to something totally different.

alphaBetaGamma• 15 years ago

The way physicists understand this is that the curved space-time view of gravity is an approximation that is only valid when you have a lot of gravitons. In that situation you do not see individual gravitons but only the aggregate effect of the ‘sea’ of gravitons you are in.

This is similar to e.g. fluid dynamics, which is only valid at scales much larger than the atomic scale. But if you look close enough, you will see effects that are not consistent with viewing a fluid as a continuum of matter (e.g. minute specks of dust moving randomly because they are hit by individual atoms).

Florin_Andrei3• 15 years ago

That's because a true theory of gravity is still missing. On one hand, we have an approximate high-scale view due to relativity, on the other hand quantum theory says there should be some particles called gravitons that are the carriers of this force.

Both these views should become approximations of the real theory of gravity, if and when it's created.

ristretto• 15 years ago

That's actually good news; I mean, it reminds the Michelson-Morley experiment, right?

stcredzero• 15 years ago

The picture in the article is eerily reminiscent of scenes from certain movies. (Probably because of the rule of thirds, and the left-to-right directional bias of western audiences.)

http://www.firsttvdrama.com/funstuff/tarkin/dsgun.jpg

http://www.starwars.com/img/theclonewars/guide/episode002/il...

Should we worry about what the LHC is not finding?

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