Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR:<p>> "I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so a lot of people still work on it, most of them don’t like me. But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics, and everything quantum, quantum information, quantum computing, quantum metrology, and so on, which is why that’s what I mostly talk about these days."<p>The popular science literature is also full of string theory this and god particle that, and it's really not very satisfying or illuminating. If people want to get into this general subject, I'd recommend instead Stephen Hawking's compendium of classic papers on quantum physics, with commentary, "The Dreams That Stuff is Made Of."
I feel like this was too much a diatribe on why supersymmetry is not a good solution and didn't spend enough time on evaluating what the actual implications are of this result holding.
I really think this paper should be more widely known, because it's eye opening: <a href="https://physicsdetective.com/something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-qed/" rel="nofollow">https://physicsdetective.com/something-is-rotten-in-the-stat...</a><p>It made me realize QED is the equivalent of a million lines spaghetti codebase that's been continually built upon, fudge after fudge since the 40s, while being sold as the best thing ever, the ultimate model of reality, etc. While it really started as a temporary solution like a bash script that should've been replaced by something more elegant... many decades ago. And now we are in this mess.
I'm a physicist, but was never smart enough to grok particle physics. Today I work on measurement instruments.<p>Still, I think breaking the standard model is a good thing. It means there's more physics to be discovered.<p>Like Tolstoy said about happy families, successful physics theories are boring. In fact, if a fundamental theory is too successful, physicists start to get restless. The people who have a problem with breaking the standard model are those who were looking for a perfect final theory, or who wasted their time looking for its philosophical implications.
space time covered this well a few days back--<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Q4UAiKacw&ab_channel=PBSSpaceTime" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Q4UAiKacw&ab_channel=PBSSp...</a>
I just started watching (and enjoying) Sabine's YouTube channel after one of her posts were shared on HN the other week.<p>I am surprised to find so many people here have negative opinions on Sabine. I've probably seen a dozen videos about the double slit experiment but her explanation about it (and why the other videos were not precise/accurate) was really eye opening for me as a layman. Also her explanations about delayed observer not being as "weird" as people claim was also very helpful in demystifying quantum weirdnesses.<p>She seems like a competent physicist with strong opinions that are grounded in some basis - can someone elaborate why they don't like her points of view? Are they problematic scientifically or do they just not like her style of rhetoric?
What implications would this discovery have if the evidence for it was overwhelming? The article talks about super-symmetry, but couldn't it be also possible that we get out of it just some small revisions to the standard model?
It is not my field, but the post, the video, has all the markings I see of outrage influencers on youtube: acting like they know better than everyone else, making broad swipes and claims, posting monetized videos with exaggerated eye popping photo covers, and the whole "I used to be them but saw the light and left schtick.", claims of scientists lying, without the honesty of naming names. Well, I'd rather get this kind of review from a review article in a solid journal than this tabloid.
One of the things that should be mentioned in videos like this is just how much data these particle experiments produce nowadays, or how long it takes to analyze it all, and even to write the programs to do that analysis. These things produce so much data, so fast, that the high performance computing setups needed to run particle physics are extremely interesting of their own right.<p>Now, I'm not saying that Sabine Hossenfelder should go into detail about <i>that</i>, but that she should mention the gargantuan amounts of data involved because that alone should be enough to cause people to wonder just how solid these results are.
No. Particle physics has shown a clear need for a clean next gen e/p collider. The author unfortunately got caught up in the grind of the field and not the context or big picture. And frankly this is exemplified by the US having an even stronger publish or perish attitude. Almost nobody ever in the field has used the phrase "god particle", at least in Europe. Thats yet another american contribution I'm sorry.<p>Fine, leave the field, thats your prerogative, and do whats best for you. But please get back down off a soapbox and stop attacking the field that trained, educated and gave you the knowledge you have.
Other recent discussions on the subject fwiw:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30955033" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30955033</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977931" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977931</a>
This is the tldr for me:<p>"the mean value of the new measurement isn’t so different from earlier data analyses. The striking thing about this new analysis is the small error bar. That the error bar is so small is the reason why this result has such a high statistical significance. They quote a disagreement with the standard model at 6.9 sigma. That’s well above the discovery threshold in particle physics which is often somewhat arbitrarily put at 5 sigma."<p>"What did they do to get the error bar so small? Well for one thing they have a lot of data. But they also did a lot of calibration cross-checks with other measurements, which basically means they know very precisely how to extract the physical parameters from the raw data, or at least they think they do. Is this reasonable? Yes. Is it correct? I don’t know. It could be. But in all honesty, I am very skeptical that this result will hold up. More likely, they have underestimated the error and their result is actually compatible with the other measurements."<p>I think it's great that someone can tell me about the nature of the difference in the mass and whether it's likely to hold up under more scrutiny (no). I believe Sabine's judgement here as other small discrepancies have disappeared in the past.
> Those physicists who said otherwise were either incompetent or lying or both, the rest knew it but kept their mouth shut, and now they hope you’ll forget about this and give them money for a bigger collider.<p>This, coming from a physicist, shows how corrupt aademic physics has become. Academic physics is nothing more than old school scholasticism.<p>> Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science.<p>Another sign of scholasticism. You just write commentary on commentary to earn academic points.<p>> They never admitted to having made false statements, accidentally or deliberately, and they never gave us any reason to think it wouldn’t happen again. I quite simply don’t trust them.
> but to borrow a German idiom, don’t eat the headlines as hot as they’re cooked.<p>I'm German and I have never heard this before, but I like it.