Posted by EvgeniyZh 4 days ago
We(particle physicsts) have been performing similar, and in a lot of ways much more complex analyses using ML tools for decades in production.
Please stop shrouding your new 'golden goose' of AI/ML modelling in mystery it's 'just' massively multi-dimensional regression analyses with all of the problems, advantages and improvements that brings...
Why is there some beef that nature is complex, if you had the same vitriol toward certain other fields we'd be worrying about big-pharma's reproducibility crisis just at the top of the ice-berg of problems in modern science, not that most people are illiterate when it comes to algebra...
They never came close to what they said they needed.
But they now claim they succeeded in finding the Highs Boson.
And the paper setting out the criteria has been memory holed.
I call BS in the Highs Bozo team.
So what’s to be done? There’s only one option:
throw most of that data away in the smartest way
possible, and ensure that the data retained is
processed and stored efficiently.
I thought that was strange. It's like there is too much data and our technology is not up to it so let's throw away everything that we cannot process. Throwing data "in the smartest way possible" did not convince me.[1] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/21/innovations-in-data...
Most of the experiments cannot because of the data acquisition problems.
To give some numbers:
- The LHC has 40M "events" (bunch of collisions) a second.
- The experiments can afford to save around 2000 of them.
This is a factor of 20k between what they collide and what they can afford to analyze. There is just no conceivable way to expand the LHC computing and storage by a factor of 20k.
Valid question would be why they don't just collide fewer protons. The problem is that when you study processes on a length scale smaller than a proton, you really can't control when they happen. You just have to smash a lot and catch the interesting collisions.
So yeah, it's a lot of "throwing away data" in the smartest way possible.
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All that said, it might be a stretch to say the data is "thrown away", since that implies that it was ever acquired. The data that doesn't get saved generally doesn't make it off a memory buffer on a sensor deep within the detector. It's never piped through an actual CPU or assembled into any meaningful unit with the millions of other readouts.
If keeping the data was one more trivial step, the experiments would keep it. As it is they need to be smart about where the attention goes. And they are! The data is "thrown away" in the sense that an astronomy experiment throws away data by turning off during the day.
Though specifically making it an argument about particle physics results in a rather nebulous punching power against something for most of us have very weakly defined.
I might digress but cosmologists deserve focal criticism like this more for the cocksure way they've sold dark matter and the age of the universe. Both the phlogiston and the luminiferous aether was discarded after less contradictory observations than we today have against the former.
The predictions have been revised a few times upwards after not finding a resonance at the predicted lower energies, then they have been proven wrong again and the cycle has been repeated until the actual discovery.
> This bump or resonance is intimately tied to what physicists mean when they say ‘particle’. If you dig a bit deeper, the term resonance is also tied to one of the most elementary physical systems: the simple harmonic oscillator. Sure, when you treat these things quantum mechanically, it gets more sophisticated, but my point is it doesn’t require highfalutin mathematics and quantum field theory to say that we discovered a new particle at the LHC.
Goes on to completely omit this apparently trivial mathematics.
This is all just counting statistics, it actually is that simple. (The resonance equals particle is quite a bit more complex, but for a basic treatment the bump is a particle could probably just be understood as jargon.)
You're being somewhat unfairly downvoted because "now draw the rest of the fucking owl" is a huge problem in modern physics. All too often it turns out that the person teaching owl drawing has never seen an owl, has no idea how to draw any animal, but can explain at length the differences between the various pencil types.
For example, I've never seen a satisfactory definition of what a particle is as defined by modern field theory.
Either you get a hand-wavey "it's an excitement of the field" with zero elaboration, or they talk only about the secondary properties of the particles such as their symmetries.
Imagine explaining cars in one of only two ways, and flat refusing to ever describe them in any other terms:
1. Cars are personal automobiles with three or more wheels.
2. Cars are largely left-right symmetric objects that can fit into a tunnel but not through a sieve. When set into motion they have a decreased longitudinal resistance compared to lateral. If two cars are smashed together a loud siren noise can often be briefly heard after a delay of a few minutes.
Now you know what a car is!
Quantum physics PhD here. It's because, we don't know. We don't have an ontology for quantum mechanics. We don't know what any of the mathematical model "actually is"
It's the same for basically all modern physics. We lack an ontology for it, so no we can't tell you "what it really is". Literally no one knows
But yes, the mathematical model is: a unit of excitation of the quantum field. What that actually is, is totally unknown
I think such attempts are not widely disseminated / taught to young physicists because older / more experienced ones believe that quantum gravity will re-write the situation anyway. { QG itself seems necessary since in General Relativity you "solve for the metric aka solve for time" self-consistently with mass-energy and that very same "time" is the background for QFT (which is what "makes" mass-energy). So, we don't really understand this model element we call "time" - so elemental to all our ideas of dynamics - without QG. Of course, the most direct quantum gravitational phenomena are, at present, at a subtle experimental scale due to the size of 'G'. This need not remain the case -- once we know what to look for - e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_lines were beginning to reveal atomic quantum physics in 1802 almost a full century before Planck's black body work and barely after Benjamin Franklin-ian electrostatics and long before Maxwellian electrodynamics. }
I'm mostly just trying to strike a less hopeless note for jiggawatts and provide some reading material which might be accessible (if, as noted, is probably necessarily preliminary - EDIT and some might say this of all "Science" at all times, of course).
The two theorems apply to logical systems which prove facts about the natural numbers. While this is an incredibly broad class of things, it doesn't include physical theories like quantum mechanics.
This is a completely unjustified insinuation against physics and physicists. While there may be a few exceptions in the form of certain individuals, in general, nothing is being held back, and if the answers are not satisfactory, it is because no satisfactory answer has yet been found. I have found physicists usually eager to a fault to talk about physics.
To make sense of it requires some work on your part, of course, but it would be utterly unreasonable to fault physicists for being unable to put everything they collectively know in terms that are immediately clear to everyone whose education on the topic ended at high school.
Lets' assume the Higgs boson doesn't exist. A large group of scientists has spent 10 billion dollars of public tax payer money to create an experiment that will prove it's existence. It cost them many years to do, decades, and most scientists have staked their entire career on the outcome of the experiment. Turns out, they were wrong, and the particle doesn't exist.
Those scientists now have two options: 1) Being thruthful about the non-discovery, thereby suiciding their own careers (and income!), evoking the wrath of the taxpayer, and basically becoming the laughing stock of the scientific community. 2) Just make some shit up for a while and go on and enjoy your pension which is only a couple of years away.
What would you do?
Every search for BSM physics has returned a negative result. You can look at hundreds of arxiv papers by the two collaborations (CMS and ATLAS) that exclude large portions of parameters spaces (masses of hypothesized particles, strengths of interactions etc.) for these BSM models. If anything was found, it would be a breakthrough of enormous magnitude and would also provide justification for the next collider.
So, people have been truthful about the non-discovery of ideas that were extremely dominant in the high-energy community. This did not make them a laughing stock within the scientific community because every serious scientist understands how discovery works and the risk of working at the cutting-edge is that your ideas might be wrong. No one that I know of "made some shit up" in evidence at the LHC.
What do tenured faculty do? They either keep working on the stuff or pivot to other stuff. They are tenured - sure, some lose grant money but I know multiple physicists (very famous too) who have been working on other topics including non-physics problems.
The main criticism is whether we need these extremely expensive experiments in an era of global economic and political uncertainty. The usual argument from the physicists is that (a) we need these to advance the cutting edge of our knowledge (which might have unknown future benefits), and (b) these programs result in many side-benefits like large-scale production of superconducting magnets, thousands of highly trained scientists who contribute to other industries etc.
Whether this is a valid argument needs to be decided by the citizenry eventually. By the way, (via Peter Woit's blog) Michael Peskin recently gave a talk on the next-generation of colliders, the technologies involved and what theory questions have to be answered before making the case for funding - https://bapts.lbl.gov/Peskin.pdf
Kinda kills my thought experiment though, but I guess that's the point. Thanks.
See also the number of experiments conducted to try and observe things like dark matter candidates with various properties. All those experiments are in competition to either show presence or absence, and absence is just as important because it's proving that you made an incredibly sensitive detector and have used that to show that a particular possibility really wasn't the right one.
By writing this it seems like you are under the impression that no science happened until they discovered or "non-discovered" the particle. But that is of course wrong.
No, not at all.
Instead what they are doing is insisting that we build an even bigger particle accelerator.
The scientist calling bullshit that can back it up gets in history books. The others eventually lost credibility.
So I (and pretty much all scientists I'e ever worked with) would call it a failure.
By your implication, nuclear fusion researchers would have "found" it decades ago. But since reality wins in the end, and scientists are generally not pathological liars, they did not. They continue to advance the field.
There's ample other cases demonstrating the flaws in your story. Bad scientists don't tend to last long under the gaze of reality.
"A new Tuskegee? Unethical human experimentation and Western neocolonialism in the mass circumcision of African men"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dewb.12285?...
> Just make some shit up
Is that how it works in the scientific community? I'm not actively involved, but I feel like publishing my findings, one way or another, would require explaining how I arrived at them in a manner that would be reproducible (and thus, verifiable to an extent) by others. What am I missing?
Not asking rhetorically, by the way. I'm just genuinely curious.
You also don't really seem to understand how scientists view science. When something that nobody expects DOES happen, and similarly, when scientists expect very very much to see something and clearly do not, both of those outcomes are exciting for scientists.
Predicting something from a model or theory and then having it be confirmed very successfully sure is great for that theory or model, but is the most BORING outcome for the scientists working on it.
Confirming someone else's fairly successful and well developed model is rarely how you gain money or fame in science.
If you did, you'd know that most people aren't there for "the income", but because they enjoy advancing physics.
Yes, sure, if there's a non-discovery, physicists will move on to the next best thing which is "... can we still learn something new about how the universe works?" They won't "just make some shit up".
Counter-point: non-discoveries do happen all the time, and we can look how they turned out. Nuclear fusion has been failing for decades, and scientists "making shit up" is extremely rare. In 40 years one team tried making shit up (cold fusion) and got wrecked by the scientific community.
I never claimed people are choosing a career in physics research for the money, I just used the argument of having to choose to lose ones income. Also, I can't help but notice though that, when ascended high enough on the academic ladder, the income isn't a joke either.
I would be much more worried about errors in methodology than falsifications.
I agree that income is a joke but... more than seven figures as in eight? That's quite a lot.