Telephysangelists should also start questioning the 5% of what they do understand. All we hear about is DM/DE as if the underlying assumptions that lead us to believe they exist must, at any cost, be true. It reeks of more lost decades of scientific discovery to me, but then again I'm just a bystander.
As a fellow bystander I agree. The problem with science in this age being built on such a massive foundation of knowledge seems to be that it is very counter productive to the radical breakthroughs that in my humble opinion are a major avenue of scientific discovery
DM/DE are just two of the simplest theories that can explain the observations (galaxy rotation/accelerating expansion). The "underlying assumptions" are those measurements, and these are being retaken and questioned every year, even though they're held at high confidence.
I don’t think that’s true. The ideas of Dark Energy and Dark Matter are the best explanations for actual observations. There is no pressure to believe that they must exist. They are just the best we have right now and competing theories must be able to be confirmed by observations which they usually fail at.
The blue is dark matter. The pink is normal matter.
It's thought that the two clumps of blue+pink there passed through each other. But the blues went right through each other, undisturbed, while the normal pink stuff formed a shockwave.
>most of the mass in the cluster pair is in the form of two regions of dark matter, which bypassed the gas regions during the collision. This accords with predictions of dark matter as only weakly interacting, other than via the gravitational force.
There is no "time" prescribed for developing scientific theories. There is no plan here. They take exactly as much as they need to be developed, not any shorter nor any longer. It can be days, months, years, decades, centuries, millennias. Or more. They can take zero large failures, 5 large failures, 1000 large failures.
There is a plan. They are looking for particles which supersymmetry says they should find. They haven't found them. Supersymmetry needs supporting evidence but they're running out of places to look.
Well they believed they would see supersymmetric particles at older colliders as well. The problem now is that the Higgs mass anchors the valid range for "natural" supersymmetric models. Last I checked most of those where ruled out now. That still leaves the problem that the Higgs mass is unexplained. So the obvious step is to do Higgs precision measurements, which is what they intend to do with electron-positron colliders tuned to the Higgs mass.
That is kind of my point. Thinking you can plan a successful confirmation of a theory is just bollocks and pure arrogance. It will either work or not, no way of knowing. We should still fund it.
>Well they believed they would see supersymmetric particles at older colliders as well.
Yes and no. It is important to understand that theoretical predictions with regard to particle accelerators are often massaged into making predictions that seem to coincidentally help justify the cost of the next big accelerator to politicians and nations.
Is there anything that would cause adherents to accept that it is a failed theory? All of the false predictions so far apparently haven't moved the needle much. After a while it starts to seem more like Aristotelian natural philosophy rather than modern empirical science.
It would be different if this belief was pushed by a few isolated theorists, but it's the major focus of the field and they will likely ask for billions of dollars of new public investment for accelerators to continue the goose chase, with no promising leads from any of the previous experiments.
It seems more like Copernican epicycles in complexity and accuracy to me. Hopefully, the mathematical complexity will lead somewhere interesting even if it’s not GUT. There are so many possible solutions (and data so difficult to get) that it’s more like a game than a theory.
I think it's going to come down to the new grad students. Eventually, they're going to look at the lack of results in string theory and decide to work on something else for their career. And then, eventually, the ones working on it will die off. Science progressing one funeral at a time, as the saying goes.
Of course it can. But all the physics people aren't pursuing it in order to find an interesting mathematical construct. (That's what math people are for.)
This feels very much like the situation when a person's job is really no longer necessary but either way they come up with ridiculous scenarios just not to be fired.
It is not possible for an un-falsified theory to be a failed theory. Instead, among theories there is only more interesting and less interesting. It is up to each researcher to individually decide which theory they think is the most interesting, on the basis of what is the most promising. There is no scientific basis for doing that, because by definition we are talking about trying to guess which theories future evidence will support.
Some people argue that since so much of the supersymmetric theory parameter space has been ruled out, that this reflects negatively on supersymmetry as a whole. However you must understand that this is exactly the kind of non-empirical argument that some stringers get so much flak for deploying. Nobody knows what the prior distribution should be over parameter space and it is not possible to do something like applying a uniform distribution, because if you do something as simple as algebraically re-arrange the parameters the uniform distribution over the new parameters will not be equal to the uniform distribution over the old parameters.
I can give you a concrete example to illustrate the fallacy of trying to measure the "volume" of the ruled-out parameter space. Suppose there is a grain of rice somewhere on a chessboard, and you are trying to find it by asking a person who can see the board whether the grain is in zone 1, zone 2, and so on. You count all the way up to zone 63, and the person who can see the board says "no" to every query. You conclude that if the grain is not on 63/64ths of the board it is unlikely to be on the board at all. Later, you happen to walk in to the room with the chessboard, only to discover that the man in the room had drawn a weird grid that mapped zones 1 through 63 to different parts of square A1, and mapped 64 to the entire rest of the board.
>Is there anything that would cause adherents to accept that it is a failed theory?
The way it is supposed to work is adherents of a theory give it up if it can't make empirical predictions and another theory comes along that can.
However at present we don't have a alternative theory that is doing that, so string theorists are free to hang onto their theory, in spite of the lack of empirical proof.
Of course, many string theorists nowadays say that empirical proof is not necessary for proving a theory. That would seem to imply that if an alternative theory made a number of correct predictions that string theory can't, that would not be a reason for abandoning string theory.
What they mean is time is running out for mass media to make money (by selling ads) talking about supersymmetry and string theory. Science and physical theories are timeless - they already existed before there were any humans, and they would continue to exist even after the sun explodes.
What are the alternatives for understanding the nature of quark interactions? As I see it, string theory first developed in order to try to simplify the process of calculating the possible different interacting paths. The fact that string theory can directly describe particles is convenient, but seems like an instance of the Microcosm Principle [0] wherein quantum particles can be described as collections of quantum particles. We could drop all of this, but then we would have to return to the problem of worldsheets another way, right?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 73.9 ms ] threadTelephysangelists should also start questioning the 5% of what they do understand. All we hear about is DM/DE as if the underlying assumptions that lead us to believe they exist must, at any cost, be true. It reeks of more lost decades of scientific discovery to me, but then again I'm just a bystander.
The blue is dark matter. The pink is normal matter.
It's thought that the two clumps of blue+pink there passed through each other. But the blues went right through each other, undisturbed, while the normal pink stuff formed a shockwave.
>most of the mass in the cluster pair is in the form of two regions of dark matter, which bypassed the gas regions during the collision. This accords with predictions of dark matter as only weakly interacting, other than via the gravitational force.
There is a plan. They are looking for particles which supersymmetry says they should find. They haven't found them. Supersymmetry needs supporting evidence but they're running out of places to look.
Yes and no. It is important to understand that theoretical predictions with regard to particle accelerators are often massaged into making predictions that seem to coincidentally help justify the cost of the next big accelerator to politicians and nations.
It would be different if this belief was pushed by a few isolated theorists, but it's the major focus of the field and they will likely ask for billions of dollars of new public investment for accelerators to continue the goose chase, with no promising leads from any of the previous experiments.
Some people argue that since so much of the supersymmetric theory parameter space has been ruled out, that this reflects negatively on supersymmetry as a whole. However you must understand that this is exactly the kind of non-empirical argument that some stringers get so much flak for deploying. Nobody knows what the prior distribution should be over parameter space and it is not possible to do something like applying a uniform distribution, because if you do something as simple as algebraically re-arrange the parameters the uniform distribution over the new parameters will not be equal to the uniform distribution over the old parameters.
I can give you a concrete example to illustrate the fallacy of trying to measure the "volume" of the ruled-out parameter space. Suppose there is a grain of rice somewhere on a chessboard, and you are trying to find it by asking a person who can see the board whether the grain is in zone 1, zone 2, and so on. You count all the way up to zone 63, and the person who can see the board says "no" to every query. You conclude that if the grain is not on 63/64ths of the board it is unlikely to be on the board at all. Later, you happen to walk in to the room with the chessboard, only to discover that the man in the room had drawn a weird grid that mapped zones 1 through 63 to different parts of square A1, and mapped 64 to the entire rest of the board.
Quite to the contrary, I was arguing that a uniform distribution over parameter space was impossible to define.
The way it is supposed to work is adherents of a theory give it up if it can't make empirical predictions and another theory comes along that can.
However at present we don't have a alternative theory that is doing that, so string theorists are free to hang onto their theory, in spite of the lack of empirical proof.
Of course, many string theorists nowadays say that empirical proof is not necessary for proving a theory. That would seem to imply that if an alternative theory made a number of correct predictions that string theory can't, that would not be a reason for abandoning string theory.
I mean, yes, technically correct.
[0] https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/12/the_microcosm_p...