from Hacker News

What No New Particles Means for Physics

by ernesto95 on 8/9/16, 8:04 PM with 58 comments

  • by adrianratnapala on 8/10/16, 4:54 AM

    Despite the more upbeat spin, I think the message from Arkani-Hamed is much the same as from Sabine Hossenfelder's "nightmare" post (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12238197).

    Both of them are saying its time to question pre-conceived notions of how to extend the Standard model. And I think both of them are excited about it.

    Rightly so. People are unhappy about the Standard Model because it is insufficiently simple and symmetrical. But 20 orders of magnitude lie between our experiments and the Planck scale, there's probably six levels of symmetry-braking, mess-making emergence between us and the real fundamentals.

  • by whoByFire on 8/10/16, 1:15 AM

    That final paragraph is great

    Some theorists agree. Talk of disappointment is “crazy talk,” Arkani-Hamed said. “It’s actually nature! We’re learning the answer! These 6,000 people are busting their butts and you’re pouting like a little kid because you didn’t get the lollipop you wanted?”

  • by jomamaxx on 8/10/16, 7:39 AM

    Imagine if you spent your whole life supporting some complex idea that is likely now to be BS. And you spread it.

    I'm interested in the psychological aspects of identity.

    I suggest a lot of them have not choice but to continue on believing their mythology. Their sense of self depends on it, and surely their funding does. And getting funding depends on strong sense of self.

    Isn't it amazing that despite their good intentions, that so many of them are hustlers and shysters? I'm not making a direct moral comparison, but a pragmatic one ...

    It would be nice to have some experiments that put String Theory to bed as well, though sadly, these are not even conceivable! The String Theorists careers are protected by the fact their theory cannot be unproven :)

  • by ankurdhama on 8/10/16, 7:00 AM

    This should send a strong message to the scientists who are more passionate about elegant and beauty of mathematics and think that nature is written in mathematics and using mathematics only they can figure out natures secret. I know this has worked couple of times in past where a mathematical theory predicted existence of some entity or phenomena and then it was found to be true through experiments BUT that doesn't mean this trick will always work coz we try to understand nature using the tool of mathematics and nature doesn't give a crap about what we use to understand it.

  • by gumby on 8/10/16, 8:12 AM

    Naturally this topic calls for an xkcd: https://xkcd.com/401/

    And more appropriate to the diphoton bump: https://xkcd.com/1437/

  • by combatentropy on 8/10/16, 4:36 AM

    Stunningly lucid writing. Good job, Natalie Wolchover!

  • by Animats on 8/10/16, 4:44 AM

    What does it mean? Layoffs, probably.

    We may have reached the end of what big accelerators can tell us. Fermilab was shut down in 2011.

  • by 7sigma on 8/10/16, 8:29 AM

    Does anybody know the consequences of this regarding the search for dark matter? Specifically, dark matter particles?

  • by sctb on 8/9/16, 8:44 PM

  • by steve_taylor on 8/10/16, 9:17 AM

    No new particles means that we're going to need a bigger accelerator.