Pointless?

[XFool]

No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent new particles is pointless

The Guardian

In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for exist – they do it because their colleagues are doing it

Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany. She is author of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions and creator of the YouTube Channel Science Without the Gobbledygook.

[odysseus2000]

No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent new particles is pointless

The Guardian

In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for exist – they do it because their colleagues are doing it

Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany. She is author of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions and creator of the YouTube Channel Science Without the Gobbledygook.

Particle is a loaded term. In many cases one is talking about resonances in the spectroscopy of existing quark systems or in interaction resonances between two or more particles at a particular centre of mass energy. Theory has postulated many things such as the z0, W+/- bosons, Higgs boson etc with characteristic decay components and these have been found more or less as described, although the quality of the data for many of them was not great, at least for the initial discovery.

Things have got more iffy as much of the experimental work has been at Cern, with two experiments and the physicists on each supposedly not talking to those on the other and using different detectors and such to try and eliminate systematic errors. `Had the super conducting super collider been built the experimental situation would have been clearer.

Within in Particle Physics, there is the camp that argues the Standard Model is the greatest achievement of Human science and those who argue that it is wrong in so many ways that it needs to be abandoned and a new model created. For example the Standard model gets many things wildly wrong and can't explain many others. Standard model lovers like to use these troubles as a justification for their continued research and funding:

https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/articl ... nt-explain

There are many competing models that e.g. include quantum-gravity and such but most (all?) of these have other issues and folk have stuck with the standard model.

I don't follow Hossenfelder but her video are often flagged to me and have the typical youtube click bait like titles as does the Guardian headline. I imagine that to keep subscriber all the science youtube channels have to keep using click bait or supporters go else where to folk who are using click bait lures.

There are many in science who would like to see the funding for particle physics cut and re-distributed to their own pet interests. This has happened before as e.g. the UK abandoning, to a good approximation although not entirely, nuclear structure research, and sending the money to biophysics. The nuclear physicists who lost their funding where not happy, but one can argue that the money was better used in biophysics which has expanded and now has huge practical applications. E.g. I am told that the Moderna Covid vaccine was developed on AI systems and tested on AI human models within 4 days, and declared safe. Whether this is really what happened and whether long term it will be seen as safe is not clear as the government and science groups went out of their way to avoid any discussion of how they could say that the vaccines were safe and how they were developed so quickly.

It is unfortunate that science involves these sniping wars between its various disciplines and within them too, but it has always been like this and it will likely intensify as AI is brought into science and solves problems such as the recent success of alphafold for protein folding that had bested human researchers. It is imho only a short time before AI is unleashed into many aspects of science and who knows what it will discover and which lines of research it will show to be challenged or that will become obsoleted.

No human chess or go player can beat AI machines, but humans still have competitions to see who is the best human chess player that are self funded. Science is expensive and if AI shows it can out perform humans then the rational for many human science endeavours may cause their funding to be cut. The politicians might rejoice that they get better science for less money, but it is only a matter of time before AI is deployed to improve the running of countries and from there who knows what happens.

Regards,