Is it particle physics or a fairytale? PART 2 | Sabine Hossenfelder, Gavin Salam, Bjørn Ekeberg

Sabine is correct. ROI is important in any decision on what to fund. Bigger colliders are offering little in the way of guarantees on what will be found and/or how that could lead to applied benefits.

Sabine : How large should be your particle collider?? Particle physicists : YES.

"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence." Charles Bukowski

Gavin actually conviced me that a new particle collider is NOT a good investment

Anyone else get the vibe that Gavin Salam speaks like a snakeoil salesman trying to rope us into buying his next multitrillion euro collider?

Sabine is one of my favorite minds of today. Along with Sean Carroll, I find these two worthy of their criticisms and their support of theories. Sabine has a great sense of humor, and that is something to be said about a top mind, as it shows invention and understanding and a window into truth. Gr8! Peace ☮💜Love

An important argument that is missing in my poiny of view is the following. It is about the scale at which we extend the energy range of our experiments. We may extende de range by a factor of 2 or 3 or maybe 10 (hugely expensive). That may sound like a lot. However, energy scale we are probing is not at all close to the natural scale for particle physics, which is the Planck scale (10^28eV(. This is about 20 orders of magnitude higher than the scale we currently probe physics on. So in that respect this is a puny extension of the search range. The fact that we have discovered all kinds of particles in this extremely low energy range (compared to the planck scale) is because all the particles we have seen so far are fundamentally massless particles. The only reason they have mass is because of their interaction with the Higgs field. But there is no guarantee or even indication that we should find further particles in this range. And extending our search to the full range would require building an accelerator as large as the galaxy. So this is a fundamentally hopeless pursuit.

For almost a hundred years physicists have been excusing their existence by pretending they solved The Cosmological Constant, even though they haven't. They sure have written a lot of peer-reviewed papers though. It only took 1 year of James Webb Telescope for astronomers to start rethinking their theories because they found galaxies that shouldn't exist. The difference is, they found something.

So the possibility is that there is a flaw to the model rather than trying to find the particles.

Despite being rather polite, the tension during this conversation was palpable. I really wish Gavin could concede at least one of Sabine's points regarding how a bigger collider is not a good investment, YET. There is really no disagreement fundamentally, it is a matter of what is the best of money right now. All physicists like bigger colliders, more energy is always more fun. It would be great to spend some of that money and brain power trying to understand wavefunction collapse, consciousness, quantum computing, etc. Go back to a collider when we have room temperature superconductors at least.

Sabina mam is second Marie Curie of this planetary environment.

As a non-physicist who's interested in it, there are three areas in the fundamentals which need more research: - the measurement problem in quantum mechanics: how can we experimentally probe it? - quantization of gravity (and will this give insight into the dark matter hypothesis) - what on earth is up with neutrino masses?

In research, there are really only two questions: 1. What do you want? 2. How much money do you have?

A good investment has a return on that investment. And a newer bigger collider has an unknown return on investment. I'm with Sabine on this one. I am convinced we can do better than the standard model.

Diminishing returns vs theories of wave-particles or wave-resonances theories.

Also consider what happened with the SSC. When I was in school particle physics was quite popular because we were going to learn all these new things, and everyone would get a job with the SSC. Then congress not only cancelled it (when costs kept soaring, and what it could do kept shrinking) and of course went too far and reduced our participation in other efforts like the accelerators at CERN. We ended up with particle physicists teaching high school science or waiting tables - or a bit later and worst of all - working in quantitative finance. This business of attracting bright people in physics and math departments the world over to focus in a particular area based on a newer bigger collider is a real effect and acts over decades. This is yet another thing that must be properly and realistically considered when making a decision.

In 2020, China graduated 1.38 million engineers. India graduated 1.2 million. In the same year, the US graduated 198,000 engineers + software developers. Moreover, 20% of US degrees are in business. After adding law, you can see how we've abandoned STEM for the black arts of management. Scientific literacy is necessary, and as a (now retired) scientist, I think this is a mistake.

If the only way to go forward in physics is higher energies, physics is at its end. Science will not end, because physics is not everything (even if physicists like to think so). But as humans we can not afford to go to higher energies, the costs in Ressource (money and people) is much too high. Especially as the expected outcome for humankind is minuscule compared to the effort. I think there are other ways to go forward in physics except higher energies. Physics has simply to go for it.

I just have a high school education. But always try and learn a bit. I always notice when sabine talks she silences a room.

Sabine is all about efficiency and fast progress. I like her train of thought and her solid logic!