Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-particle-physics-dead-dying-or-just-hard-20260126/

by mellosouls • 5 months ago

212 395 5 months ago

tehjoker3• 5 months ago

It's kind of legitimate, but it's kind of sad to see some of the smartest people in society just being like "maybe AI will just give me the answer," a phrase that has a lot of potential to be thought terminating.

emmelaich• 5 months ago

That's mentioned in the article too:

Cari Cesarotti, a postdoctoral fellow in the theory group at CERN, is skeptical about that future. She notices chatbots’ mistakes, and how they’ve become too much of a crutch for physics students. “AI is making people worse at physics,” she said.

yalok• 5 months ago

this. Deep understanding of physics involves building a mental model & intuition how things work, and the process of building is what gives the skill to deduce & predict. Using AI to just get to the answers directly prevents building that "muscle" strength...

gowld2• 5 months ago

AI chatbots are also making people better at physics, by answering questions the textbook doesn't or the professor can't explain clearly, patiently. Critical thinking skills are critical. Students cheating with chatbots might not have put in the effort to learn without chatbots.

0x3f• 5 months ago

I'm quite happy that it might give me, with pre-existing skills, more time on the clock to stay relevant.

jahnu• 5 months ago

I find the arguments from those who say there is no crisis convincing. Progress doesn’t happen at a constant rate. We made incredible unprecedented progress in the 20th century. The most likely scenario is that to slow down for a while. Perhaps hundreds of years again! Nobody can know. We are still making enormous strides compared to most of scientific history.

Insanity• 5 months ago

Although we do have many more people now working on these problems than any time in the past. That said, science progresses one dead scientist at the time so might still take generations for a new golden era.

ktallett• 5 months ago

Is it more that even the most dedicated and passionate researchers have to frame their interests in a way that will get funding? Particle Physics right now is not the thing those with the cash will fund right now. AI and QC is the focus.

Legend24402• 5 months ago

Well, it's hard to make an argument for a $100 billion collider when your $10 billion collider didn't find anything revolutionary.

Scaling up particle colliders has arguably hit diminishing returns.

bananaflag2• 5 months ago

It's basically the opposite situation from 150 years ago.

Back then, we thought our theory was more or less complete while having experimental data which disproved it (Michelson-Morley experiment, Mercury perihelion, I am sure there are others).

Right now, we know our theories are incomplete (since GR and QFT are incompatible) while having no experimental data which contradicts them.

Paracompact9• 5 months ago

What about underexplained cosmological epicycles like dark matter (in explaining long-standing divergences of gravitational theory from observation), or the Hubble tension?

XorNot2• 5 months ago

This is your regular reminder that epicycles were not an incorrect theory addition until an alternative hypothesis could explain the same behavior without requiring them.

joe_the_user• 5 months ago

The dark matter theory broadly is that there is amount of invisible matter that obeys the laws of Einsteinian gravity but isn't otherwise visible. By itself, it has considerable experimental evidence. It doesn't resemble Ptolemaic theories of planetary motion notably in that doesn't and hasn't required regular updating as new data arrives.

It really fits well with the OP comments. Nothing really contradicts the theory but there's no deeper theory beyond it. Another comment mentioned as "nightmare" of dark matter only have gravitational interaction with other matter. That would be very unsatisfying for physicists but wouldn't something that really disprove any given theory.

klipt• 5 months ago

Doesn't that imply our theories are "good enough" for all practical purposes? If they're impossible to empirically disprove?

PlatoIsADisease• 5 months ago

If I have to make a guess, we are at the level of pre-copernicus in particle physics.

We are finding local maximums(induction) but the establishment cannot handle deduction.

Everything is an overly complex bandaid. At some point someone will find something elegant that can predict 70% as good, and at some point we will realize: 'Oh that's great, the sun is actually at the center of the solar system, Copernicious was slightly wrong thinking planets make circular rotations. We just needed to use ellipses!'

But with particles.

doctoboggan• 5 months ago

The theories don't answer all the questions we can ask, namely questions about how gravity behaves at the quantum scale. (These questions pop up when exploring extremely dense regions of space - the very early universe and black holes).

light_triad• 5 months ago

There's still huge gaps in our understanding: quantum gravity, dark matter, what happens before planck time, thermodynamics of life and many others.

Part of the problem is that building bigger colliders, telescopes, and gravitational wave detectors requires huge resources and very powerful computers to store and crunch all the data.

We're cutting research instead of funding it right now and sending our brightest researchers to Europe and China...

idiotsecant3• 5 months ago

Absolutely not. Newtonian physics was 'good enough' until we disproved it. Imagine where we would be if all we had was Newtonian physics.

Legend24402• 5 months ago

Typically whenever you look closely at an object with complex behavior, there is a system inside made of smaller, simpler objects interacting to produce the complexity.

You'd expect that at the bottom, the smallest objects would be extremely simple and would follow some single physical law.

But the smallest objects we know of still have pretty complex behavior! So there's probably another layer underneath that we don't know about yet, maybe more than one.

csomar2• 5 months ago

I think the problem is that GR and QFT are at odds with each other? (I am not quite versed in the subject and this is my high-level understanding of the “problem”)

hackingonempty• 5 months ago

Yes, for all practical purposes. This is the position of physicist Sean Carroll and probably others. We may not know what is happening in the middle of a black hole, or very close to the big bang, but here on Earth we do.

"in the specific regime covering the particles and forces that make up human beings and their environments, we have good reason to think that all of the ingredients and their dynamics are understood to extremely high precision"[0]

0: https://philpapers.org/archive/CARCAT-33

recursivecaveat• 5 months ago

Maybe? We seem to be able to characterize all the stuff we have access to. That doesn't mean we couldn't say produce new and interesting materials with new knowledge. Before we knew about nuclear fission we didn't realize that we couldn't predict that anything would happen from a big chunk of uranium or the useful applications of that. New physics might be quite subtle or specific but still useful.

sixo• 5 months ago

The point is not to make better predictions of the things we already know how to predict. The point is to determine what abstractions link the things we don't presently understand--because these abstraction tend to open many new doors in other directions. This has been the story of physics over and over: relativity, quantum theory, etc, not only answered the questions they were designed to answer but opened thousands of new doors in other directions.

colechristensen• 5 months ago

Classical physics was indeed "good enough for all practical purposes" as well at the time... but those didn't include electronics, nuclear power, most all basic understanding of materials, chemistry, and just a tremendous amount of things.

The point being it's not at all clear what we might be missing without these impractical little mysteries that so far are very distant from every day life.

andreareina• 5 months ago

The fundamental theories are good enough in that we can't find a counterexample, but they're only useful up to a certain scale before the computational power needed is infeasible. We're still hoping to find higher-level emergent theories to describe larger systems. By analogy, in principle you could use Newton's laws of motion (1685) to predict what a gas in a room is going to do, or how fluid will flow in a pipe, but in practice it's intractable and we prefer to use the higher-level language of fluid mechanics: the ideal gas law, the navier-stokes equations, etc.

adrian_b5• 5 months ago

The existing theories are extremely far from being good enough for practical purposes.

There exists a huge number of fundamental quantities that should be calculated from the parameters of the "standard model", but we cannot compute them, we can only measure them experimentally.

For instance, the masses and magnetic moments of the proton, of the neutron and of all other hadrons, the masses and magnetic moments of the nuclei, the energy spectra of nuclei, of atoms, of ions, of molecules, and so on.

The "standard model" can compute only things of negligible practical importance, like the statistical properties of the particle collisions that are performed at LHC.

It cannot compute anything of value for practical engineering. All semiconductor devices, lasers and any other devices where quantum physics matters are not designed using any consistent theory of quantum physics, but they are designed using models based on a great number of empirical parameters determined by measurement, for which quantum physics is only an inspiration for how the model should look like and not a base from which the model can be derived rigorously.

throw_m239339• 5 months ago

I find the idea that reality might be quantized fascinating, so that all information that exists could be stored in a storage medium big enough.

It's also kind of interesting how causality allegedly has a speed limit and it's rather slow all things considered.

Anyway, in 150 years we absolutely came a long way, we'll figure it that out eventually, but as always, figuring it out might lead even bigger questions and mysteries...

csomar2• 5 months ago

If reality is quantized, how can you store all the information out there without creating a real simulation? (Essentially cloning the environment you want stored)

tsimionescu• 5 months ago

Note that "reality" is not quantized in any existing theory. Even in QM/QFT, only certain properties are quantized, such as mass or charge. Others, like position or time, are very much not quantized - the distance between two objects can very well be 2.5pi planck lengths. And not only are they not quantized, the math of these theories does not work if you try to discretize space or time or other properties.

cvoss• 5 months ago

all information that exists could be stored in a storage medium big enough

Why is quantization necessary for information storage? If you're speculating about a storage device external to our universe, it need not be constrained by any of our physical laws and their consequences, such as by being made up of finitely many atoms or whatever. It might have components like arbitrary precision real number registers.

And if you're speculating about a storage device that lives within our universe, you have a contradiction because it's maximum information capacity can't exceed the information content of its own description.

atakan_gurkan• 5 months ago

I disagree, but maybe only because we are using different definitions. For example, we have neutrino oscillations, this requires neutrino mass, which is not part of the standard model of particle physics. In cosmology, there is "lithium problem" (amongst others), which cannot be explained by Lambda-CDM. We know our physical theories are incomplete not only because our mathematical frameworks (GR & QFT) are incompatible (similar to the incompatibility of Maxwell's equations and the Galilean transformations that form the basis of Newtonian mechanics), but also there are these unexplained phenomena, much like the blackbody radiation at the turn of previous century.

T-A7• 5 months ago

neutrino mass, which is not part of the standard model of particle physics

This is getting tiresome...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46956197

Sniffnoy4• 5 months ago

I wouldn't say that we have no experimental data which contradicts them. Rather, we do have experimental data which contradicts them, but no experimental data that points us in the direction of a solution (and whenever we go looking for the latter, we fail).

Consider e.g. neutrino masses. We have plenty of experimental data indicating that neutrinos oscillate and therefore have mass. This poses a problem for the standard model (because there are problems unless the mass comes from the Higgs mechanism, but in the standard model neutrinos can't participate in the Higgs mechanism due to always being left-handed). But whenever we do experiments to attempt to verify one of the ways of fixing this problem -- are there separate right-handed neutrinos we didn't know about, or maybe instead the right-handed neutrinos were just antineutrinos all along? -- we turn up nothing.

T-A7• 5 months ago

the standard model neutrinos can't participate in the Higgs mechanism due to always being left-handed

This again? It's only true if you insist on sticking with the original form of Weinberg's "model of leptons" from 1967 [1], which was written when massless neutrinos were consistent with available experimental data. Adding quark-style (i.e. Dirac) neutrino mass terms to the Standard Model is a trivial exercise. If doing so offends some prejudice of yours that right-handed neutrino can not exist because they have no electric and weak charge (in which case you must really hate photons too, not to mention gravity) you can resort to a Majorana mass term [2] instead.

That question (are neutrinos Dirac or Majorana?) is not a "contradiction", it's an uncertainty caused by how difficult it is to experimentally rule out either option. It is most certainly not "a problem for the standard model".

[1] https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.19.1264

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorana_equation#Mass_term

KolibriFly3• 5 months ago

This era might be one where we have to earn the next clue much more slowly

tim3333• 5 months ago

GR and QFT are incompatible

I did physics at uni and kind of dropped out when it got too hard.

I've long guessed the incompatibility is because the maths is just too hard for human brains, though I'm probably biased there, and we'll get a breakthrough when AI can handle much more complex maths than us. Probably not so long till we find out on that one.

I once tried to write a simplified explanation for why a spin-2 quantum theory naturally results in something like general relativity and totally failed - man that stuff's hard.

jfengel• 5 months ago

The math is hard, but I don't think that's the problem. Hard math eventually succumbs.

I think that even if AI were to find a good unification of GR and QM, we wouldn't be able to test it. We might accept it without additional confirmation if it were sufficiently natural-feeling (the way we accepted Newtonian gravity long before we could measure G), but there's no guarantee that we'd ever be able to meaningfully test it.

We could get lucky -- such a theory might point at a solution to some of the few loose threads we get out of existing collider and cosmological measurements -- but we might not. We could be stuck wishing we had a galaxy-sized collider.

davidw• 5 months ago

It's impossible to tell without opening the box the particle physics is in.

bsder2• 5 months ago

Theoretical physics progresses via the anomalies it can't explain.

The problem is that we've mostly explained everything we have easy access to. We simply don't have that many anomalies left. Theoretical physicists were both happy and disappointed that the LHC simply verified everything--theories were correct, but there weren't really any pointers to where to go next.

Quantum gravity seems to be the big one, but that is not something we can penetrate easily. LIGO just came online, and could only really detect enormous events (like black hole mergers).

And while we don't always understand what things do as we scale up or in the aggregate, that doesn't require new physics to explain.

mhandley2• 5 months ago

Neutrino mass is another anomaly, which is at least slightly easier to probe than quantum gravity: https://cerncourier.com/a/the-neutrino-mass-puzzle/

beezle2• 5 months ago

Please do not conflate the broad "theoretical physics" with the very specific "beyond the standard model" physics questions. There are many other areas of physics with countless unsolved problems/mysteries.

bsder2• 5 months ago

Sure, there are things like "Really, how do superconductors work?", but nobody (mostly) believes that understanding things like that requires "new physics".

And, I think, most people would place that kind of stuff under "solid state physics" anyway.

GMoromisato• 5 months ago

The use of "AI" in particle physics is not new. In 1999 they were using neural nets to compute various results. Here's one from Measurement of the top quark pair production cross section in p¯p collisions using multijet final states [https://repository.ias.ac.in/36977/1/36977.pdf]

"The analysis has been optimized using neural networks to achieve the smallest expected fractional uncertainty on the t¯t production cross section"

jdshaffer• 5 months ago

I remember back in 1995 or so being in a professor's office at Indiana University and he was talking about trying to figure out how to use Neural Networks to automatically track particle trails in bubble chamber results. He was part of a project at CERN at the time. So, yeah, they've been using NNs for quite awhile. :-)

elashri• 5 months ago

Particle identification using NN classifiers was actually on the early success stories of NN. These are pretty standard algorithms in tracking and trigger software in HEP experiments now. There are even standard tools in the field to help you train your own.

What is more interesting currently is things like anomaly detection using ML/NN and foundational models..etc.

BrandoElFollito• 5 months ago

I did my PhD in physics using nn back in 1997. It was not thriving yet, but was quite advanced already.

I remember I used a library (THE library) from a German university which was all the rage at that time.

aatd863• 5 months ago

Isn't it the mathematics that is lagging? Amplituhedron? Higher dimensional models?

Fun fact: I got to read the thesis of one my uncles who was a young professor back in the 90's. Right when they were discovering bosons. They were already modelling them as tensors back then. And probably multilinear transformations.

Now that I am grown I can understand a little more, I was about 10 years old back then. I had no idea he was studying and teaching the state of the art. xD

elzbardico• 5 months ago

Tensors are pretty old in physics; they are a central concept in Einstein's General Relativity.

You can find tensors even in some niche stuff in macroeconomics.

ecshafer• 5 months ago

Tensors are like 200 years old in mathematics. Gauss talked about Tensors.

aatd863• 5 months ago

What was new was not tensors. It was the representation in SU of mesons for photon-photon collisions. But even saying that is skimming the surface. I can't read beyond the knowledge gap.

gowld2• 5 months ago

Information content of the article:

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 completed the Standard Model of particle physics, but the field has since faced a "crisis" due to the lack of new discoveries. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has not found any particles or forces beyond the Standard Model, defying theoretical expectations that additional particles would appear to solve the "hierarchy problem"—the unnatural gap between the Higgs mass and the Planck scale. This absence of new physics challenged the "naturalness" argument that had long guided the field.

In 2012, physicist Adam Falkowski predicted the field would undergo a slow decay without new discoveries. Reviewing the state of the field in 2026, he maintains that experimental particle physics is indeed dying, citing a "brain drain" where talented postdocs are leaving the field for jobs in AI and data science. However, the LHC remains operational and is expected to run for at least another decade.

Artificial intelligence is now being integrated into the field to improve data handling. AI pattern recognizers are classifying collision debris more accurately than human-written algorithms, allowing for more precise measurements of "scattering amplitude" or interaction probabilities. Some physicists, like Matt Strassler, argue that new physics might not lie at higher energies but could be hidden in "unexplored territory" at lower energies, such as unstable dark matter particles that decay into muon-antimuon pairs.

CERN physicists have proposed a Future Circular Collider (FCC), a 91-kilometer tunnel that would triple the circumference of the LHC. The plan involves first colliding electrons to measure scattering amplitudes precisely, followed by proton collisions at energies roughly seven times higher than the LHC later in the century. Formal approval and funding for this project are not expected before 2028.

Meanwhile, U.S. physicists are pursuing a muon collider. Muons are elementary particles like electrons but are 200 times heavier, allowing for high-energy, clean collisions. The challenge is that muons are highly unstable and decay in microseconds, requiring rapid acceleration. A June 2025 national report endorsed the program, which is estimated to take about 30 years to develop and cost between $10 and $20 billion.

China has reportedly moved away from plans to build a massive supercollider. Instead, they are favoring a cheaper experiment costing hundreds of millions of dollars—a "super-tau-charm facility"—designed to produce tau particles and charm quarks at lower energies.

On the theoretical side, some researchers have shifted to "amplitudeology," the abstract mathematical study of scattering amplitudes, in hopes of reformulating particle physics equations to connect with quantum gravity. Additionally, Jared Kaplan, a former physicist and co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, suggests that AI progress is outpacing scientific experimentation, positing that future colliders or theoretical breakthroughs might eventually be designed or discovered by AI rather than humans.

tasty_freeze5• 5 months ago

Here is one fact that seems, to me, pretty convincing that there is another layer underneath what we know.

The charge of electrons is -1 and protons +1. It has been experimentally measured out to 12 digits or so to be the same magnitude, just opposite charge. However, there are no theories why this is -- they are simply measured and that is it.

It beggars belief that these just happen to be exactly (as far as we can measure) the same magnitude. There almost certainly is a lower level mechanism which explains why they are exactly the same but opposite.

PaulHoule4• 5 months ago

If it wasn't the case then matter wouldn't be stable.

libraryofbabel2• 5 months ago

Is that actually true, if the charges differed at the 12th decimal place only? That’s non-obvious to me.

tasty_freeze5• 5 months ago

Agreed (well, assuming the delta is more than a small fraction of a percent or whatever). But this is begging the question. If they are really independent then the vast, overwhelming fraction of all possible universes simply wouldn't have matter. Ours does have matter, so it makes our universe exceedingly unlikely. I find it far more parsimonious to assume they are connected by an undiscovered (and perhaps never to be discovered) mechanism.

Some lean on the multiverse and the anthropic principle to explain it, but that is far less parsimonious.

jiggawatts3• 5 months ago

An interesting early theory of gravity was: "What if opposite charges attract slight more strongly than identical charges repel each other?"

If you tally up the forces, the difference is a residual attraction that can model gravity. It was rejected on various experimental and theoretical grounds, but it goes to show that if things don't cancel out exactly then the result can still leave a universe that would appear normal to us.

wvbdmp• 5 months ago

Aren’t things like this usually explained by being the only viable configuration, or is that not the case here?

throwup2382• 5 months ago

Or why the quarks that make up protons and neutrons have fractional charges, with +1 protons mixing two +2/3 up quarks and one -1/3 down quark, and the neutral neutron is one up quark and two down quarks. And where are all the other Quarks in all of this, busy tending bar?

david-gpu• 5 months ago

They have fractional charges because that is how we happen to measure charge. If our unit of charge had been set when we knew about quarks, we would have chosen those as fundamental, and the charge of the electron would instead be -3.

Now, the ratios between these charges appear to be fundamental. But the presence of fractions is arbitrary.

Paracompact9• 5 months ago

Technically, the charge of a proton can be derived from its constituent 2 up quarks and 1 down quark, which have charges 2/3 and -1/3 respectively. I'm not aware of any deeper reason why these should be simple fractional ratios of the charge of the electron, however, I'm not sure there needs to be one. If you believe the stack of turtles ends somewhere, you have to accept there will eventually be (hopefully simple) coincidences between certain fundamental values, no?

JumpCrisscross2• 5 months ago

you have to accept there will eventually be (hopefully simple) coincidences between certain fundamental values, no?

No. It’s almost certainly not a coïncidence that these charges are symmetric like that (in stable particles that like to hang out together).

tasty_freeze5• 5 months ago

I'm aware of the charge coming from quarks, but my point remains.

you have to accept there will eventually be (hopefully simple) coincidences between certain fundamental values, no?

When the probability of coincidence is epsilon, then, no. Right now they are the same to 12 digits, but that undersells it, because that is just the trailing digits. There is nothing which says the leading digits must be the same, eg, one could be 10^30 times bigger than the other. Are you still going to just shrug and say "coincidence?"

That there are 26 fundamental constants and this one is just exactly the same is untenable.

idiotsecant3• 5 months ago

Shrugging and calling it a coincidence is generally not an end state when figuring out how something works.

auntienomen2• 5 months ago

There does appear to be a deeper reason, but it's really not well understood.

Consistent quantum field theories involving chiral fermions (such as the Standard Model) are relatively rare: the charges have to satisfy a set of polynomial relationships with the inspiring name "gauge anomaly cancellation conditions". If these conditions aren't satisfied, the mathematical model will fail pretty spectacularly. It won't be unitary, can't couple consistently to gravity, won't allow high and low energy behavior to decouple,..

For the Standard Model, the anomaly cancellation conditions imply that the sum of electric charges within a generation must vanish, which they do:

3 colors of quark * ( up charge 2/3 - down charge 1/3) + electron charge -1 + neutrino charge 0 = 0.

So, there's something quite special about the charge assignments in the Standard Model. They're nowhere near as arbitrary as they could be a priori.

Historically, this has been taken as a hint that the standard model should come from a simpler "grand unified" model. Particle accelerators and cosmology hace turned up at best circumstantial evidence for these so far. To me, it's one of the great mysteries.

elfly• 5 months ago

Well yes, but the coincidence that Quarks have charges of multiples of another particle, that is not made up of quarks, should rise your brow, shouldn't it?

Like we could accept coincidences if at the bottom is all turtles, but here we see a stack of turtles and a stack of crocodiles and we are asking why they have similar characteristics even if they are so different.

rjh29• 5 months ago

One argument (while unsatisfying) is there are trillions of possible configurations, but ours is the one that happened to work which is why we're here to observe it. Changing any of them even a little bit would result in an empty universe.

libraryofbabel2• 5 months ago

There’s a name for that: the Anthropic principle. And it is deeply unsatisfying as an explanation.

And does it even apply here? If the charge on the electron differed from the charge on the proton at just the 12th decimal place, would that actually prevent complex life from forming. Citation needed for that one.

I agree with OP. The unexplained symmetry points to a deeper level.

andyfilms1• 5 months ago

For a given calculation on given hardware, the 100th digit of a floating point decimal can be replicated every time. But that digit is basically just noise, and has no influence on the 1st digit.

In other words: There can be multiple "layers" of linked states, but that doesn't necessarily mean the lower layers "create" the higher layers, or vice versa.

jiggawatts3• 5 months ago

This is "expected" from theory, because all particles seem to be just various aspects of the "same things" that obey a fairly simple algebra.

For example, pair production is:

    photon + photon = electron + (-)electron

You can take that diagram, rotate it in spacetime, and you have the direct equivalent, which is electrons changing paths by exchanging a photon:

   electron + photon = electron - photon

There are similar formulas for beta decay, which is:

   proton = neutron + electron + (-)neutrino

You can also "rotate" this diagram, or any other Feyman diagram. This very, very strongly hints that the fundamental particles aren't actually fundamental in some sense.

The precise why of this algebra is the big question! People are chipping away at it, and there's been slow but steady progress.

One of the "best" approaches I've seen is "The Harari-Shupe preon model and nonrelativistic quantum phase space"[1] by Piotr Zenczykowski which makes the claim that just like how Schrodinger "solved" the quantum wave equation in 3D space by using complex numbers, it's possible to solve a slightly extended version of the same equation in 6D phase space, yielding matrices that have properties that match the Harari-Shupe preon model. The preon model claims that fundamental particles are further subdivided into preons, the "charges" of which neatly add up to the observed zoo of particle charges, and a simple additive algebra over these charges match Feyman diagrams. The preon model has issues with particle masses and binding energies, but Piotr's work neatly sidesteps that issue by claiming that the preons aren't "particles" as such, but just mathematical properties of these matrices.

I put "best" in quotes above because there isn't anything remotely like a widely accepted theory for this yet, just a few clever people throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0223

tasty_freeze5• 5 months ago

This is "expected" from theory, because all particles seem to be just various aspects of the "same things" that obey a fairly simple algebra.

But again, this is just observation, and it is consistent with the charges we measure (again, just observation). It doesn't explain why these rules must behave as they do.

This very, very strongly hints that the fundamental particles aren't actually fundamental in some sense.

This is exactly what I am suggesting in my original comment: this "coincidence" is not a coincidence but falls out from some deeper, shared mechanism.

smnplk• 5 months ago

There are layers science can not access.

f30e3dfed1c9• 5 months ago

Well OK then! Let's tell all the physicists they can close up shop now. They might not have realized it, but they're done. All their little "theories" and "experiments" and what not have taken them as far as they can go.

jacquesm6• 5 months ago

By observing the discrepancies between theories we are accessing those layers. Whether we can access them with instruments is a different matter but with our minds we apparently can.

cozzyd4• 5 months ago

As soon as charge is quantized, this will happen. In any quantization scheme you will have some smallest charge. There are particles with charge +2 (the Delta++, for example), but ... anything that can decay while preserving quantum numbers will decay, so you end up with protons in the end. (ok, the quarks have fractional charge but that's not really relevant at scales we care about QED)

If the question is, why is quantum mechanics the correct theory? Well, I guess that's how our universe works...

andyferris• 5 months ago

The hint from quantum field theory (and things like lattice gauge theory) is that charge emerges from interesting topological states/defects of the underlying field (by "interesting topological shapes" I mean - imagine a vortex in the shape of a ring/doughnut). It's kind of a topological property of a state of the photonic field, if you will - something like a winding number (which has to be an integer). Electric charge is a kind of "defect" or "kink" in the photonic field, while color charge (quarks) are defects in the strong-force field, etc.

When an electron-positron pair is formed from a vacuum, we get all sorts of interesting geometry which I struggle to grasp or picture clearly. I understand the fact that these are fermions with spin-1/2 can similarly be explained as localized defects in a field of particles with integer spin (possibly a feature of the exact same "defect" as the charge itself, in the photonic field, which is what defines an electron as an electron).

EDIT:

However, there are no theories why this is -- they are simply measured and that is it.

My take is that there _are_ accepted hypotheses for this, but solving the equations (of e.g. the standard model, in full 3D space) to a precision suitable to compare to experimental data is currently entirely impractical (at least for some things like absolute masses - though I think there are predictions of ratios etc that work out between theory and measurement - sorry not a specialist in high-energy physics, had more exposure to low-energy quantum topological defects).

RupertSalt• 5 months ago

interesting topological states/defects of the underlying field

eddies in the space-time continuum?

quchen• 5 months ago

(Note the post you’ve replied to mentioned electrons and _protons_, not positrons.)

empath75• 5 months ago

something like a winding number (which has to be an integer). Electric charge is a kind of "defect" or "kink" in the photonic field, while color charge (quarks) are defects in the strong-force field, etc.

Quark's don't have integer charge

phkahler2• 5 months ago

Have you seen this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281322004_The_elect...

Or any of the more recent work that references it?

ndsipa_pomu2• 5 months ago

Is this the same idea behind Williamson & Van der Mark's electron model?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYyrgDEJLOA

phkahler2• 5 months ago

I'm convinced there are some semi-classical explanations that just haven't been figured out.

Electrons are helically moving photons: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281322004_The_elect...

That's some interesting/wacky stuff, but there has been more research to improve those calculations - like deriving the electron charge and magnetic moment.

Personally I like the idea that a proton is somehow literally an electron and 3 up quarks (a neutron gets 2 electrons and 3 up quarks). I am not a physicist though, so I'm sure there are reasons they "know" this is not the case.

I find it fascinating that some physicists say wave functions are somehow "real" and then we've got Jacob Barandes saying you don't even need wave functions to do the computations of QM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oWip00iXbo

IMHO there is a lot of exploration to be done without particle accelerators.

aleph_minus_one6• 5 months ago

Electrons are helically moving photons

How do you explain that electrons have a rest mass, but photons don't (otherwise photons couldn't move with the speed of light according to special relativity)?

meindnoch2• 5 months ago

Maybe it's time for physicists to switch to agile? Don't try to solve the theory of the Universe at once; that's the waterfall model. Try to come up with just a single new equation each sprint!

ggm3• 5 months ago

I am sure others will say it better, but the cat-in-the-box experiment is a shockingly bad metaphor for the idea behind quantum states and observer effect.

I will commit the first sin, by declaring without fear of contradiction the cat actually IS either alive or dead. it is not in a superposition of states. What is unknown is our knowledge of the state, and what collapses is that uncertainty.

If you shift this to the particle, not the cat, what changes? because if very much changes, my first comment about the unsuitability of the metaphor is upheld, and if very little changes, my comment has been disproven.

It would be clear I am neither a physicist nor a logician.

sliken• 5 months ago

Along similar lines, the double-slit experiment, seems simple. Two slits let light though and you get bands where they constructively or destructively interfere, just like waves.

However I still find it crazy that when you slow down the laser and one photon at a time goes through either slit you still get the bands. Which begs the question, what exactly is it constructively or destructively interfering with?

Still seems like there's much to be learned about the quantum world, gravity, and things like dark energy vs MOND.

ggm3• 5 months ago

I had a conversation about this in HN some months back. It's a surprisingly modern experiment. It demanded an ability to reliably emit single photons. Young's theory may be 1800 but single photon emission is 1970-80.

(This is what I was told, exploring my belief it's always been fringes in streams of photons not emerging over repeated applications of single photons and I was wrong)

jasonwatkinspdx• 5 months ago

The most simple answer here is the "fields are real, particles are excitation patterns of fields." And that's generally the practical way most physicists think of it today as I understand it.

If I make the equivalent of a double slit experiment in a swimming pool, then generate a vortex that propagates towards my plywood slits or whatever, it's not really surprising that the extended volume of the vortex interacts with both slots even though it looks like a singular "particle."

squeefers16• 5 months ago

However I still find it crazy that when you slow down the laser and one photon at a time goes through either slit you still get the bands.

why does nobody mention the fact the photon doesnt keep going through the same hole? like why is it randomly moving through the air in this brownian way? the laser gun doesnt move, the slit doesnt move, so why do different photons end up going through different holes?

BalinKing• 5 months ago

There are various theories about what's actually happening in quantum mechanics. Some theories have hidden variables, in which case the issue is simply one of measurement (i.e. there really is an "objectively correct" value, but it only looks to us like there isn't).[0] However, this is not known to be the case, and many theories really do claim that position and momentum fundamentally cannot both be well-defined at once. (The "default" Copenhagen interpretation is in the latter camp; AFAIK it's convenient in practice, and as a result it's implicitly assumed in introductory QM classes.)

[0] Well, and the hidden variables are non-local, which is a whole 'nother can of highly non-intuitive worms.

ggm3• 5 months ago

I'm not qualified to say. But, because of inductive reasoning, I have some concern that underneath the next level of "oooh we found the hidden variable" will be a Feynman moment of saying "yea, thats defined by the as-yet unproven hidden-hidden variables, about which much conjecture is being made but no objective evidence exists, but if you fund this very large machine...."

plomme• 5 months ago

Well you are in luck because that was the point of Schroedingers cat; it was constructed to show the impossibly odd implications of quantum mechanics.

From the wikipedia page: “This thought experiment was devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 in a discussion with Albert Einstein to illustrate what Schrödinger saw as the problems of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg's philosophical views on quantum mechanics.”

codethief2• 5 months ago

What is unknown is our knowledge of the state, and what collapses is that uncertainty.

Unless you believe in a hidden-variables theory, this is provably false, though, see Bertlmann's Socks etc.

mhandley2• 5 months ago

One interesting gap in the standard model is why neutrinos have mass: https://cerncourier.com/a/the-neutrino-mass-puzzle/

beezle2• 5 months ago

I never liked that the physics community shifted from 'high energy' particle physics (the topic of the article) to referring to this branch as just 'particle physics' which I think leaves the impression that anything to do with 'particles' is now a dead end.

Nuclear physics (ie, low/medium energy physics) covers diverse topics, many with real world application - yet travels with a lot of the same particles (ie, quarks, gluons). Because it is so diverse, it is not dead/dying in the way HEP is today.

grebc• 5 months ago

What’s the saying… if your only tool is a collider?

mattlangston3• 5 months ago

Experimental particle physicist here. It's just hard.

I measured the electron's vector coupling to the Z boson at SLAC in the late 1990s, and the answer from that measurement is: we don't know yet - and that's the point.

Thirty years later, the discrepancy between my experiment and LEP's hasn't been resolved.

It might be nothing. It might be the first whisper of dark matter or a new force. And the only way to find out is to build the next machine. That's not 'dead', that's science being hard.

My measurement is a thread that's been dangling for decades, waiting to be pulled.

sashank_1509• 5 months ago

What would the cost of the “next machine” be? Is it going to be tens of billions or can we make progress with lesser money. If it is going to be tens of billions, then maybe we need to invest in engineering to reduce this cost, because it’s not sustainable to suspend thirty years, tens of billions for every incremental improvement.

sigmoid105• 5 months ago

This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips that ultimately enabled you to type this comment on your phone/computer. The return on that investment is obvious.

But it is not just about making money: The entire field of radiation therapy for cancer exists and continues to improve because people figured out ways to control particle beams with extreme precision and in a much more economical way to study particle physics. Heck, commercial MRIs exist and continue to improve because physicists want cheaper, stronger magnets so they can build more powerful colliders. What if in the future you could do advanced screening quickly and without hassle at your GP's office instead of having to wait for an appointment (and possibly pay lots of money) at an imaging specialist center? And if they find something they could immediately nuke it without cutting you open? We're talking about the ultimate possibility of Star Trek level medbays here.

Let the physicists build the damn thing however they want and future society will be better off for sure. God knows what else they will figure out along the way, but it will definitely be better for the world than sinking another trillion dollars on wars in the middle east.

raverbashing• 5 months ago

The next machine is not necessarily a longer LHC

There are talks of a Muon collider, also there's a spallation source being built in Sweden(?) and also of an electron 'Higgs factory' (and while the LHC was built for the Higgs boson it is not a great source for it - it is built as a generic tool that could produce and see the Higgs)

ForgotIdAgain• 5 months ago

I think that engineering progress made while building those machines are maybe more relevant for practical technical development than the discovery they make.

toast02• 5 months ago

Spending tens of billions every thirty years is pretty sustainable actually.

"Fundamental Research" may or may not pan out, but the things that happen along the way are often valuable... I don't think there's any practical applications related to generating Higgs Bosons, but it's interesting (at least for particle physicists) and there's a bunch of practical stuff you have to figure out to confirm them.

That practical work can often generate or motivate industrial progress that's generally useful. For example, LHC generates tons of data and advances the state of the art in data processing, transmission, and storage; that's useful even if you don't care about the particle work.

snowwrestler2• 5 months ago

In the scope of international cooperation, tens of billions of dollars is not very much money. For context, the U.S. economy generates $10 billion every ~3 hours. One private company, Google, spends $10 billion in about 2 weeks.

So look at it this way. Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money, and they’ll spend 30 years advancing engineering to probe the very fabric of reality. And everything they learn will be shared with the rest of humanity for free.

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Uehreka• 5 months ago

There are people in this thread saying tens of billions isn't that much in the long term (I'd agree) but there's a bigger point that comes into play whatever the price: The universe doesn't care if exploring it is expensive. You can't make a "that's not sustainable" argument to the universe and have it meet you half way. And that's who you're arguing against: not the scientists, the universe. The scientists don't decide how expensive future discoveries will be.

kakacik• 5 months ago

Its a clickbait article name (from otherwise good place), of course its not dead... we are now getting understanding of all things we don't know yet, discrepancies like yours, unified theory and so on.

Everybody knows we are not there yet and how the final knowledge set will look like, if its even possible to cover it (ie are quarks the base layer or we can go deeper, much deeper all the way to planck scales? dynamics of singularities etc)

hippich• 5 months ago

Is it hard as in:

1) we know what to do, but it is expensive

2) we don't know what to do exactly, but many more people involved can increase search speed, so just need more people

3) it is purely sequential problem, and therefore it takes a lot of time

samus• 5 months ago

A combination to some degree. Scientists yearn to stumble upon something hitherto unexplainable that requires a new theory or validates or definitely rules out some of the more fringe theories.

While other natural sciences often suffer from an abundance of things that "merely" need to be documented, or where simulation capability is the limit, particle physics is mostly based on a theoretical framework from the middle of the 20th century that has mostly beth explored.

Getting ahead in particle physics comprises measuring many arcane numbers to as high precision as possible until something doesn't line up with existing theories or other measurements anymore. More people could help with brainstorming and measuring things that don't require humongous particle accelerators.

KolibriFly3• 5 months ago

So, if the answer were obvious or quick, it wouldn't be worth building machines that take decades to design

orbifold• 5 months ago

I guess we will find out in 20+ years once the next electron positron collider at CERN has been build

htx80nerd• 5 months ago

"It might be the first whisper of dark matter"

Come now.

mattlangston3• 5 months ago

Fair - that sounds hyperbolic. But my point is specific: if the weak mixing angle is shifted from the Standard Model value, one of the standard explanations is a heavier cousin of the Z boson mixing in.

Many of those models naturally include a dark matter candidate. I didn't mean to imply 'we found dark matter' — it's that the theories which could explain the discrepancy often come with one attached.

alpineidyll3• 5 months ago

But.. are you saying your vector coupling isn't explained by the existing standard model, that the measurement lacked sufficient resolution, or that existing calculations don't agree with your measurement?

mattlangston3• 5 months ago

Good question. It's mostly the third — but let me unpack that.

The Standard Model predicts a specific value for the weak mixing angle, which determines the electron's vector coupling. My measurement at SLAC, along with other SLD measurements, consistently preferred a slightly different value than what LEP (the European competitor experiment) found using a different technique.

The key word there is "different technique." SLD used a polarized beam of electrons — a completely novel approach at the time — which gave us direct access to the left-right asymmetry without needing to untangle final-state effects. LEP extracted the same parameter from b-quark forward-backward asymmetry. Two fundamentally different methods probing the same physics, with different systematic exposures, giving different answers.

Both experiments had good resolution. We spent enormous effort characterizing the systematics, and they're small compared to the statistical uncertainty. But the two most precise determinations of this parameter disagreed at roughly the 3-sigma level — and that disagreement has never been explained. The world average splits the difference, and the Standard Model prediction is consistent with that average, so you could say "the SM is fine" if you squint. But nobody knows why the two experiments don't agree with each other.

It could be an unidentified systematic error in one experiment. It could be that something beyond the Standard Model is subtly shifting one measurement and not the other. That ambiguity is exactly what makes it a "dangling thread" rather than a resolved question.

GlibMonkeyDeath• 5 months ago

It's hard. Particle physics faces the problem that in order to dig down to ever smaller scales, ironically, ever larger experiments are needed. We've pretty much built large enough colliders for our current understanding. No one really knows how much more energy would be needed to expose something new - it might be incremental, within current technical reach, or it might be many orders of magnitude beyond our current capabilities. The experiments have become expensive enough that there isn't a lot of appetite to build giant new systems without some really good reason. The hard part is coming up with a theory to justify the outlay, if you can't generate compelling data from existing systems.

Physics advances have been generally driven by observation, obtained through better and better instrumentation. We might be entering a long period of technology development, waiting for the moment our measurements can access (either through greater energy or precision) some new physics.

Rury• 5 months ago

It's just hard. I mean... it could very well be, that there's so many deeper layers underneath what we know in particle physics, but from our scale, also so infeasible to build something to analyze and decompose the nuanced behavior happening at that level, to the point that it's practically impossible to do so. Just like it is impossible to split an atom with your bare hands...

albatross7912• 5 months ago

Why are we even trying to look deeper? To fit our mathematical curves better? Abstract spacetime, fields, virtual particles, wave function collapse, quantized energy, wave particle duality, etc. This is all BS. And I'm not disputing the theories or the experimental results. These concepts are unintelligible. They are self contradictory. They are not even abstractions, they are mutually exclusive paradigms forced together into a bewilderment. I'm not disputing that the math fits the observations. But these are not explanations. If this is what it's come to, all we can expect from here on is to better fit the math to the observation. And in the end, an equation that tells us nothing about what we really wanted to know, like "what is it really"? Nobody is going to be satisfied with an equation, so why are we still funding this enterprise, for better lasers to kill bad guys?

drdeca14• 5 months ago

The universe is not obligated to appeal to your aesthetic tastes in its innermost functioning.

Maybe you aren’t going to be satisfied with the sort of complicated mathematics which appears to be correct (or, on the right track).

If you have complaints about the aesthetics of how the universe works, take it up with God.

Personally, I think there is a lot of beauty to be found in it.

I’ll admit that there are a few parts that go against my tastes (I don’t like needing to resort to distributions instead of proper functions), but that’s probably just intellectual laziness on my part.

squeefers16• 5 months ago

The universe is not obligated to appeal to your aesthetic tastes in its innermost functioning.

This is truly a copout. When science faulters in explaining the world we get answers like this. His argument isnt with the universe, but with out own scientific theories. If you dont want your theories about the physical world to explain physical world, then be an engineer. Science explains the world, engineers use those theories. QM has large gaps and doesnt actually explain much, but I guess the universe doesnt care whether our theories are wildly off the mark or not.

albatross7912• 5 months ago

It's not a matter of taste. This is like going to a restaurant, expecting a delicious meal, and being brought a dish with a fancy name made out of the actual menu itself. Would anyone go back there to eat?

WantonQuantum2• 5 months ago

I find quite a lot of it very satisfying. For example, the deep mathematical symmetries of gauge theory and how they relate to the observed forces of the universe is truly amazing.

The excellent Arvin Ash has a very accessible video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paQLJKtiAEE

squeefers16• 5 months ago

maybe thats the problem. satisfaction isnt understanding. string theory is exciting maths, but fits nothing in reality. maybe scientists should go back to explaining reality instead of whatever this current paradigm is

threethirtytwo9• 5 months ago

All of science is getting harder as the easiest discoveries are all pretty much behind us.

LLMs were a breakthrough I didn't expect and it's likely the last one we'll see in our lifetime.

iterance2• 5 months ago

Specific fields may not advance for decades at a time, but we are hardly in a scientific drought. There have been dramatic advances in countless fields over the last 20 years alone and there is no good reason to expect such advances to abruptly cease. Frankly this is far too pessimistic.

threethirtytwo9• 5 months ago

I don't understand what is wrong with pessimism. That's not a valid critique. If someone is pessimistic but his description of the world matches REALITY, then there's nothing wrong with his view point.

Either way this is also opinion based.

There hasn't been a revolutionary change in technology in the last 20 years. I don't consider smart phones to be revolutionary. I consider going to the moon revolutionary and catching a rocket sort of revolutionary.

Actually I take that back I predict mars as a possible break through along with LLMs, but we got lucky with musk.

selfmodruntime• 5 months ago

The additional irony here is that LLMs are a tool that is likely forever damned to regurgitate knowledge of the past, with the inability to derive new information.

threethirtytwo9• 5 months ago

This is not true at all. Just query any LLM and ask it for new information. Literally ask it to create something that doesn't exist.

It will give it to you.

kingstnap2• 5 months ago

It depends on what you mean, specifically on your distance metric.

If you mean nearest neighbours search like autocorrect then LLMs are extrapolative.

You can easily generate combinations not seen before. I mean you can prove this with parametric prompting.

Like "Generate a poem about {noun} in {place} in {language}" or whatever. This is a simplistic example but it doesn't take much to come up with a space that has quadrillion of possibilities. Then if you randomly sample 10 and they all seem to be "right" then you have proven it's not pure neighbour recall.

Same is true of the image generators. You can prove its not memorizing because you can generate random varients and show that the number of images realizable is more than the training data possibly contains.

If you mean on the underlying manifold of language and ideas. Its definitely interpolation, which is fundamentally a limitation of what can be done using data alone. But I know this can be expanded over iteration (I have done experiments related to this). The trick to expanding it actually running experiments/simulation on values at the boundry of the manifold. You have to run experiments on the unknown.

8note• 5 months ago

famous last words before quantum physics hit

tariky• 5 months ago

To my uneducated eye it looks like they are stuck in limbo for 120 years. Nothing practical has been create based on those theories. It is just words and calculations spinning in circles.

I wish those people focus on practical real world physics. So we all can enjoy new innovations.

WantonQuantum2• 5 months ago

The device you used to make this comment relies heavily on quantum effects to make efficient transistors. The necessary theoretical understanding of semiconductors did not exist 120 years ago.

jacquesm6• 5 months ago

Nothing practical has been create based on those theories.

Ever used GPS?

A CD player?

A laser?

Semiconductors?

gary_02• 5 months ago

Einstein laid the theoretical foundations for lasers in 1917, and it took over 40 years of "impractical" scientific work before the first functioning laser was built. It took decades more for them to become a cheap, ubiquitous technological building-block. The research is still continuing, and there's no reason to assume it will stop eventually bearing fruit (for the societies that haven't decimated their scientific workforce, anyways). Look at the insanity required to design and build the EUV lasers in ASML's machines, which were used to fabricate the CPU I'm using right now, over a century after Einstein first scribbled down those obscure equations!

potamic• 5 months ago

You're right. If you were educated, you would have learnt about the numerous applications of particle physics in modern technologies.

padjo2• 5 months ago

You should probably invest in your education so.

Razengan• 5 months ago

Maybe this is all we can learn from home and we need to get out more.

benreesman• 5 months ago

It is almost always the case that when progress stops for some meaningful period of time that a parochial taboo would need violating to move forwards.

The best known example is the pre- and post-Copernican conceptions of our relationship to the sun. But long before and ever since: if you show me physics with its wheels slipping in mud I'll show you a culture not yet ready for a new frame.

We are so very attached to the notions of a unique and continuous identity observed by a physically real consciousness observing an unambiguous arrow of time.

Causality. That's what you give up next.

mastermage3• 5 months ago

the fuck you mean giving up causality?

fatbird• 5 months ago

This is a common framing of the Copernican revolution, and it's wrong.

Copernicus was proposing circular orbits with the sun at the center instead of the earth. The Copernican model required more epicycles for accurate predictions than the considerably well-proven Ptolemaic model did, with the earth at the centre.

It wasn't until Kepler came along and proposed elliptical orbits that a heliocentric solar system was obviously a genuine advance on the model, both simpler and more accurate.

There was no taboo being preserved by rejecting Copernicus's model. The thinkers of the day rightfully saw a conceptual shift with no apparent advantage and several additional costs.

kubanczyk2• 5 months ago

The thinkers of the day rightfully saw a conceptual shift with no apparent advantage and several additional costs.

I'm holding a big fat Citation Needed banner. Seemingly none of these "thinkers of the day" took it far enough to write down the thoughts.

While at it, were the "thinkers of the day" fond of the idea of Ptolemy's equant?

raincole• 5 months ago

It's easy to give up existing concepts. It's called being a crackpot and you can find thousands of papers doing that online.

indymike• 5 months ago

I'm not sure the crackpot is what we're talking about here. We're talking about something tht violates the prevailing opinion in a way that can be verified, and results a change in what we know to be true. The crackpot is mostly the result of a very aspirational world view, and usually under the hood has bias and error that is often quite obvious.

kubanczyk2• 5 months ago

Yes. But crackpots are still vital.

Let me put it this way. Once upon a time people didn't know about solar eclipse. But then a day came when a certain somebody was instantly promoted to a Lead Staff Senior Astronomer, just because they predicted to the hour that the sun is going to disappear.

Well, but think about the field just one day before that:

- maybe 10 theories that said "it's just a reformulation/refactoring, nothing to see here, all business as usual, no new predictions, very safe for the author",

- maybe 100 crackpot theories. Undoubtedly, unashamedly crackpot, with wild predictions all over. Of which 99% were in fact pure trash, so, retrospectively, people were rightfully considering them trash. Yet 1 was the key to progress.

gary_02• 5 months ago

I'm pretty sure quantum mechanics already forgoes conventional causality. Attosecond interactions take place in such narrow slices of time that the uncertainty principle turns everything into a blur where events can't be described linearly. In other words, the math sometimes requires that effect precedes cause. As far as we can tell, causality and conservation of energy is only preserved on a macroscopic scale. (IANAQP, but I'm going off my recollections of books by people who are.)

codethief2• 5 months ago

As far as we can tell, causality and conservation of energy is only preserved on a macroscopic scale.

Depends on how big a scale you pick:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy#General...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_horizon

mastermage3• 5 months ago

Its probably just very hard, in my opinion as a physicist

AIorNot• 5 months ago

Curious what everyone thinks about this physicists idea

- the universe as a Neural Network (yes yes moving the universe model paradigm from the old Clockwork to machine to computer to neural network)

I found it interesting and speculative but also fascinating

See video here:

https://youtu.be/73IdQGgfxas?si=PKyTP8ElWNr87prG

AI summary of the video:

This video discusses Professor Vitaly Vanchurin's theory that the universe is literally a neural network, where learning dynamics are the fundamental physics (0:24). This concept goes beyond simply using neural networks to model physical phenomena; instead, it posits that the universe's own learning process gives rise to physical laws (0:46).

Key takeaways from the discussion include: • The Universe as a Neural Network (0:00-0:57): Vanchurin emphasizes that he is proposing this as a promising model for describing the universe, rather than a definitive statement of its ontological nature (2:48). The core idea is that the learning dynamics, which are typically used to optimize functions in machine learning, are the fundamental physics of the cosmos (6:20). • Deriving Fundamental Field Equations (21:17-22:01): The theory suggests that well-known physics equations, such as Einstein's field equations, Dirac, and Klein-Gordon equations, emerge from the learning process of this neural network universe. • Fermions and Particle Emergence (28:47-32:15): The conversation delves into how particles like fermions could emerge within this framework, with the idea that useful network configurations for learning survive, similar to natural selection. • Emergent Quantum Mechanics (44:53-49:31): The video explores how quantum behaviors, including the Schrödinger equation, could emerge from the two distinct dynamics within the system: activation and learning. This requires the system to have access to a "bath" or "reservoir" of neurons. • Natural Selection at the Subatomic Scale (1:05:10-1:07:34): Vanchurin suggests that natural selection operates on subatomic particles, where configurations that are more useful for minimizing the loss function (i.e., for efficient learning) survive and those that are not are removed. • Consciousness and Observers (1:15:40-1:24:09): The theory integrates the concept of observers into physics, proposing a three-way unification of quantum mechanics, general relativity, and observers. Consciousness is viewed as a measure of learning efficiency within a subsystem (1:30:38).

pjmlp2• 5 months ago

As CERN Alumni, this isn't easy, the data is endless, processing it takes take, usually everything is new technology, and also needs to be validated before being put into use.

Thousands of people have worked on bringing LHC up during a few decades before, Higgs came to be, across all engineering branches.

This stuff is hard, and there is no roadmap on how to get there.

alt227• 5 months ago

Higgs came to be

Did it? I thought the whole point was that the data that came from LHC showed that it was inconclusive and needed a bigger more powerful machine to prove it. Happy to be proved wrong.

pjmlp2• 5 months ago

I am out of CERN since 2004, and only return there during Alumni related events, not keeping up with has happened with Higgs during the last years.

franktankbank3• 5 months ago

Is this some mandella effect going on? No, they discovered the Higgs and did rough measurements.

nephihaha2• 5 months ago

When the model appears to have massive problems, maybe it's time to go back and revise it.

squeefers16• 5 months ago

or if youre micho kaku, just parrot it on low grade tv shows and public appearances because its easier to gain notoriety than to do science

nephihaha2• 5 months ago

Yes, that too LOL. He really is a grifter. But he is entertaining on TV and has that eccentric professor look about him.

Heinz Wolff used to fill a similar role on British TV.

sprash• 5 months ago

It is obviously not dead but it should be dead: Almost all of the technical and economic progress made in the last century was achieved with macroscopic quantum effects. Particle physics spends a lot of energy and material resources to measure microscopic effects. The priorities are esentially inverted. At this point it is not even about discovery. Experiments are relegated to precision measurements. What practical use will it be if we know the mass/charge distribution/polarizability of some particles more precicely by a few percent? About nothing.

KolibriFly3• 5 months ago

This feels less like a story about particle physics "failing" and more like a story about a field running out of easy leverage

davrosthedalek8• 5 months ago

Exactly. The field has been a tik-tok between times of discovery and times of precision. We are now just swinging back from a discovery period. The next machine will be first a precision machine and then upgraded to be a discovery machine again.

kachapopopow2• 5 months ago

None of the comments seem to mention that it's also really really really really really expensive.

layer82• 5 months ago

That depends on what you compare it to.

kdavis• 5 months ago

Almost anything, i.e. the next generation accelerator[1] at CERN is about 15B CHF which is about 20B USD.

[1] https://home.cern/science/accelerators/future-circular-colli...

kachapopopow2• 5 months ago

"quite literally everything else", well you got iter etc but those are on the same spectrum. It's rare that military projects in the US get that kind of funding.

JackFr• 5 months ago

Maybe a dumb question here, but how would they discover a dark matter particle, if dark matter is basically invisible to us except for its gravitational effects?

Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?

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