The LHC “nightmare scenario” has come true

I always thought that the LHC "nightmare scenario" referred to accidential creation of a black hole... Well, looks like different people have different ideas of what a "catastrophe" means :)

TL;DR: All the hype and rumours about a new discovery at the LHC [1][2][3][4] that looked like a particle outside of the standard model was for naught. As the LHC detectors gathered and processed more data, the &quot;diphoton bumps&quot; turned from interesting anomalies to statistically insignificant noise [5].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11893164" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11893164</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11250931" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11250931</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9420043" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9420043</a><p>[4] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;potential-new-particle-shows-up-at-the-lhc-thrilling-and-confounding-physicists1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;potential-new-part...</a><p>[5] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;hope-for-new-particle-fizzles-at-the-lhc1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;hope-for-new-parti...</a>

My favorite non-serious pet theory is that we live in simulation created by intelligent beings. It&#x27;s supposed to be cool and mathematically beautiful only little below atom level and up. When we dig into deeper energy levels we start do detect artifacts that make no sense because they are implementation details revealed where model breaks down.<p>We would be virtual scientist detecting features in physics simulation software that builds the world he is living in.

Some commenters on the article discussed condensed matter physics as a potentially more viable path of inquiry for understanding underlying physics theory than high energy particle collision experiments.<p>I&#x27;m no expert here and don&#x27;t understand the dichotomy, such as it were, here. Also, how are condensed matter physics contributing to fundamental theories of the universe today? I&#x27;ve heard a lot more of condensed matter physics in specific areas (eg superconductivity), but not often heard it discussed in relation to fundamental physics. But I&#x27;m pretty uninformed here, overall.<p>Does anyone with more expertise here have a quick breakdown of what these commenters mean?

I&#x27;ve never understood the desire for beauty in a theory of everything. Reality clearly <i>isn&#x27;t</i> beautiful through and through, but at its corners it is awfully complex and arbitrary. If anything, reality is much like the outcomes of an evolutionary process, a mere hack of various mechanisms that happen to give rise to the relatively stable patterns we experience. Of course, fundamental research needs the optimism that we can compress all of that in ever smaller formulae, but I think there is no unambiguous evidence that we should actually expect that to be possible. The most striking piece of counter evidence is actually the kind of reality we experience in the first place. Imagine a universe in which its inhabitants would be able to figure out its fundamental principles. These inhabitants would likely immediately conquer all available space and use it to maximize the reward signals that evolution has equipped them with and thus transform everything into something completely different from the world we are experiencing. A universe with a reality like ours and that is fully understandable at the same time is thus (together with various other assumptions) a logical impossibility.

About 3 years ago, I had the chance to continue in particle physics for my Ph.D. specifically working for a CMS group. However, I felt SUSY had no real evidence then, and looking specifically at the &quot;ground breaking&quot; search that the group was undertaking, amongst others, and the pitiful results they had, I betted against SUSY and switched groups.<p>It looks like my bet was right. I miss the math in HEP but I feel somewhat justified. I&#x27;m not sure what this means for HEP going forward. May be scientists can move the goalposts but will funders be as sympathetic?

The OP made a side-comment about &#x27;idea of naturalness&#x27; being a philosophical tenet. That&#x27;s a problem because science claims to be philosophically neutral, which is impossible.<p>Science looks for a system which can exist without supernatural intervention, but the creation of time&#x2F;space&#x2F;matter doesn&#x27;t fit within those constraints.<p>Admittedly that is a philosophical or even theological take, but at least it&#x27;s honest.

Professor Matt Strassler has had excellent coverage of the events at LHC, including detailed explanations. For anyone interested in reading: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;profmattstrassler.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;profmattstrassler.com&#x2F;</a>

I reached this level of disillusionment 2 years into my theoretical particle physics Ph.D. program and dropped out to do software engineering... when this guy was graduating from High School in 1995. To me it has been obvious for a very long time that the standard model is pretty damn close which means we are in a pretty shitty energy regime for discovering anything new. I agree that astronomical observations are really the only way forward.

All these comments about click bait vs. not and how the nightmare scenario isn&#x27;t what the commenter expected, yet no one mentions what it actually is!<p>The answer: confirming the Higgs boson, but no other new physics that would narrow things beyond what we&#x27;ve been exploring for the past fifty years.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1489&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1489&#x2F;</a>

It&#x27;s not so hard to think about fitness and reproduction on a metaverse. When a Universe succeeds in creating one black hole, its singularity creates a new universe inheriting physical laws from parent but maybe distortions can happen in space giving rise to mutated memetic material. String theory research shows how distortion happens in six-dimensional circular Calabi-Yau shapes that might augment our three-dimensional extended space dimensions. Universes explode, grow and die, but the laws of those universes able to generate black holes live on in their offpring.<p>Presumably the capacity of a universe&#x27;s laws to cluster matter lead both to black holes and to enough planets that life is more likely, so that our existence correlates with good universe fitness. Other universes might do pretty badly with getting stuff to stick together.

Several of the most successful theories of the last century were the result of serendipity (in addition to a lot of hard work): The two examples that spring to mind are Michelson and Morley sharing their negative results with the community; Penzias and Wilson not taking noise for an answer. Is it possible that there are fundamental discoveries hidden in decades of high-energy physics data records, simply waiting for the right interpretation, or are the statistic properties of this data sets so well understood that their analysis is &quot;done&quot;?

I can sympathize with people hoping for a more &quot;useful&quot; result in light of what avenues this closes down, but c&#x27;mon, any reliable scientific result is a good thing. We don&#x27;t get to pick what the results are going to be but they are the only way forward.<p>As a curious bystander, it seems like some folks may have gotten a false sense of how difficult these next steps will be, after the recent and astounding success of mechanics and relativity. We could see another &quot;extended&quot; period where new observations are insufficient to support a better theory, and if so we have to be OK with that (but keep looking to make progress if at all possible).

The &quot;nightmare&quot; seems to be that the LHC only confirms the standard model without giving clues on how to extend physics further. I&#x27;ve got a hunch that a future breakthrough may come from AI, that combining general relativity and quantum mechanics is a bit much for unaided human brains and deep mind style computer systems may do better at spin-2 stuff in odd numbers of dimensions than us lot.

This isn&#x27;t a failure. It&#x27;s just the result of a bunch of experiments. What would be worse is if the scientific community was unable to raise funds for such large experiments due to fear of failure. It&#x27;s ok, we tried something, now we know to try something else.

Only 3 years between conclusive evidence for the Higgs Boson - a Nobel Prize-winning discovery, and the culmination of a 40 year search - and the nightmare scenario that <i>all they&#x27;ve discovered is the Higgs Boson</i>.<p>Oh well, perhaps they&#x27;ll build an Even Larger Hadron Collider?

The physics is insufficient. We&#x27;re asking the wrong question because there isn&#x27;t one grand theory. In a multiverse we&#x27;ll just see our place as we always have, the right set of answers to be asking the questions.

It&#x27;s strange that physicist are so unwilling to explore radically different theories. Our understanding of particle physics is less than a century old. The theory of phlogiston, which was unequivocally wrong, last longer.<p>Naturalness probably spawns from mathematical constants, most of which are around 1. [1] This also assumes the dimensional analysis is correct, or that certain values are not derived.<p>Also, have all of the easy physic experiments been done? Seems like physics is only being explored at high energies in expensive set-ups. Some of the biggest discoveries of 100 years ago were done with relatively cheap set-ups, see the Gold Foil Experiment.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mathematical_constants_and_functions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mathematical_constants_and_fun...</a>

Interesting personal note for me is that C.N. (Frank) Yang told me over dinner 15 years ago about his &quot;The Party&#x27;s Over&quot; prediction. Only now do I know what he meant! (And I guess he was right)

Since I&#x27;m now reading The Wheel of Osheim by Mark Lawrence, I was expecting to something completely different from this article.

I am more and more on board with the Lee Smolin &quot;singular universe&quot; concept. To me it&#x27;s very analogous to the Darwinian revolution in biology. Physicists are still pre-Darwin, unable to understand why the universe looks so &quot;un-natural&quot;. It&#x27;s the watchmaker analogy for physical laws and constants, and the answer is the laws look so well-tuned because the laws and particles themselves &quot;evolved&quot; and tuned themselves into the stable universe we see.

Title: LHC nightmare<p>First paragraph: &quot;I finished highschool in ...&quot;<p>Second paragraph: &quot;Little did I realize&quot;<p>Third paragraph: &quot;Since I entered physics&quot;<p>Fourth paragraph: &quot;During my professional career&quot;<p>Fifth paragraph: &quot;When I look at&quot;<p>Sixth paragraph: &quot;For the last ten years you’ve been told that the LHC must see some new physics besides the Higgs because otherwise nature isn’t “natural” - [...]. I’ve been laughed at when I explained that I don’t buy into naturalness&quot;<p>Seventh paragraph: &quot;The idea of naturalness&quot;<p>Eighth paragraph: &quot;we’ve entered what has become known as the “nightmare scenario” for the LHC: The Higgs and nothing else.&quot;<p>Ah, the article starts in the eighth paragraph. Summary: read paragraphs 8 and the last, 9.

The more we know the more we know how much we do not know...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iIlWDljtlN4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iIlWDljtlN4</a>

Arrival of sophons confirmed.

I was expecting a large scale coolant leak of helium flooding the work areas, a quench.

&quot;It has left them without guidance, lost in a thicket of rapidly multiplying models&quot; I can&#x27;t help but think if JavaScript fatigue.

I don&#x27;t know about everyone else, but when I read &#x27;The LHC &quot;nightmare scenario&quot; has come true&#x27; I expected a black hole, or reality being sucked down a pinpoint wormhole. Maybe those are the same thing.

Wow. Really have to agree with the click bait thing here.<p>Also, this article takes forever to get to the point - I was able to skip most of the content until like 75% the way through the thing.

If it had created a black hole, I doubt we&#x27;d read about it. Wouldn&#x27;t it oscillate about the earths centre, and swallow it within a few seconds?