The Standard Model Is Not Enough, New LHC Study Shows
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswitha...a44b81170b
EXCERPTS: The Universe, according to our best understanding, just doesn’t add up. Wherever we look — from tiny subatomic scales all the way up to planetary, galactic, or even cosmic ones — we find that everything is overwhelmingly made of matter, rather than antimatter. We have a remarkable story of how our Universe came to be the way it is today: the hot Big Bang, as well as an understanding of how the particles that exist in our Universe behave: according to the rules of the Standard Model. But they can’t explain the Universe we know we actually inhabit.
The laws of physics, as we know them, aren’t perfectly symmetric between matter and antimatter, instead displaying subtle but important differences. These differences are [...] In a fascinating new paper, the LHCb collaboration has made the best measurement ever of one of the key parameters needed to create a Universe filled with matter. Here’s what we’ve learned...
[...] Why would you care about whether these individual symmetries are conserved or violated? Because violating these symmetries is a necessary ingredient for creating a Universe that has different amounts of matter and antimatter in it. Back in 1968, Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov realized that even in a Universe that starts off with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, you can wind up with more matter than antimatter so long as you meet three conditions...
[...] It’s a particularly good test of the Standard Model to make these measurements, because with multiple particles (and antiparticles) decaying in multiple different ways, you could have decay parameters that don’t lead to a consistent picture. There are more possible transitions than there are free parameters, and that’s why doing experiments are so important: your theory makes predictions, but only by experimenting can you test just how good your theory is.
[...] It’s vital, as the LHC currently undergoes its high-luminosity upgrade and the world agonizes over whether to build a new, more powerful collider, to remember what’s at stake. We’re trying to understand the most fundamental components of our Universe: how they behave, what they are, and where they come from. The way we do that is through direct experimental tests. While on the one hand, we know the Universe must have gotten its matter somehow (just as it must’ve gotten its dark matter, somehow), the other hand has yet to reveal exactly where it came from.
The Standard Model continues to be mind-bogglingly successful at predicting what the full suite of these experiments should deliver, but has so far failed to reveal a hint as to how these big mysteries might be resolved. We know the Standard Model can’t be all there is to the Universe, but it works so thoroughly well with each test we throw at it. Each piece of new data we collect is a chance to stumble upon the place where it finally breaks down; an incremental step towards an inevitable revolution. The only question is whether we’ll give up before we get there... (MORE - details)
The next large collider is a bad investment
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/1...-make.html
Particle Physicists Continue To Make Empty Promises - Sabine Hossenfelder
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9qqEU1Q-gYE
EXCERPTS: What ticked me off this time was a comment published in Nature Physics, by CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti and Gian Giudice, who is Head of CERN's Theory Department. It’s called a comment, but what it really is is an advertisement. It’s a sales pitch for their next larger collider for which they need, well, a few dozen billion Euro. We don’t know exactly because they are not telling us how expensive it would be to actually run the thing. When it comes to the question what the new mega collider could do for science, they explain:
“A good example of a guaranteed result is dark matter. A proton collider operating at energies around 100 TeV [that’s the energy of the planned larger collider] will conclusively probe the existence of weakly interacting dark-matter particles of thermal origin. This will lead either to a sensational discovery or to an experimental exclusion that will profoundly influence both particle physics and astrophysics.”
Let me unwrap this for you. The claim that dark matter is a guaranteed result, followed by weasel words about weakly interacting and thermal origin, is the physics equivalent of claiming “We will develop a new drug with the guaranteed result of curing cancer” followed by weasel words to explain, well, actually it will cure a type of cancer that exists only theoretically and has never been observed in reality. That’s how “guaranteed” this supposed dark matter result is. They guarantee to rule out some very specific hypotheses for dark matter that we have no reason to think are correct in the first place. What is going on here?
[...] The tragedy is I actually like most of these particle physicists. They are smart and enthusiastic about science and for the most part they’re really nice people. But look, they refuse to learn from evidence. And someone has to point it out: The evidence clearly says their methods are not working. Their methods have led to thousands of wrong predictions. Scientists should learn from failure. Particle physicists refuse to learn... (MORE - details)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswitha...a44b81170b
EXCERPTS: The Universe, according to our best understanding, just doesn’t add up. Wherever we look — from tiny subatomic scales all the way up to planetary, galactic, or even cosmic ones — we find that everything is overwhelmingly made of matter, rather than antimatter. We have a remarkable story of how our Universe came to be the way it is today: the hot Big Bang, as well as an understanding of how the particles that exist in our Universe behave: according to the rules of the Standard Model. But they can’t explain the Universe we know we actually inhabit.
The laws of physics, as we know them, aren’t perfectly symmetric between matter and antimatter, instead displaying subtle but important differences. These differences are [...] In a fascinating new paper, the LHCb collaboration has made the best measurement ever of one of the key parameters needed to create a Universe filled with matter. Here’s what we’ve learned...
[...] Why would you care about whether these individual symmetries are conserved or violated? Because violating these symmetries is a necessary ingredient for creating a Universe that has different amounts of matter and antimatter in it. Back in 1968, Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov realized that even in a Universe that starts off with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, you can wind up with more matter than antimatter so long as you meet three conditions...
[...] It’s a particularly good test of the Standard Model to make these measurements, because with multiple particles (and antiparticles) decaying in multiple different ways, you could have decay parameters that don’t lead to a consistent picture. There are more possible transitions than there are free parameters, and that’s why doing experiments are so important: your theory makes predictions, but only by experimenting can you test just how good your theory is.
[...] It’s vital, as the LHC currently undergoes its high-luminosity upgrade and the world agonizes over whether to build a new, more powerful collider, to remember what’s at stake. We’re trying to understand the most fundamental components of our Universe: how they behave, what they are, and where they come from. The way we do that is through direct experimental tests. While on the one hand, we know the Universe must have gotten its matter somehow (just as it must’ve gotten its dark matter, somehow), the other hand has yet to reveal exactly where it came from.
The Standard Model continues to be mind-bogglingly successful at predicting what the full suite of these experiments should deliver, but has so far failed to reveal a hint as to how these big mysteries might be resolved. We know the Standard Model can’t be all there is to the Universe, but it works so thoroughly well with each test we throw at it. Each piece of new data we collect is a chance to stumble upon the place where it finally breaks down; an incremental step towards an inevitable revolution. The only question is whether we’ll give up before we get there... (MORE - details)
The next large collider is a bad investment
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/1...-make.html
Particle Physicists Continue To Make Empty Promises - Sabine Hossenfelder
EXCERPTS: What ticked me off this time was a comment published in Nature Physics, by CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti and Gian Giudice, who is Head of CERN's Theory Department. It’s called a comment, but what it really is is an advertisement. It’s a sales pitch for their next larger collider for which they need, well, a few dozen billion Euro. We don’t know exactly because they are not telling us how expensive it would be to actually run the thing. When it comes to the question what the new mega collider could do for science, they explain:
“A good example of a guaranteed result is dark matter. A proton collider operating at energies around 100 TeV [that’s the energy of the planned larger collider] will conclusively probe the existence of weakly interacting dark-matter particles of thermal origin. This will lead either to a sensational discovery or to an experimental exclusion that will profoundly influence both particle physics and astrophysics.”
Let me unwrap this for you. The claim that dark matter is a guaranteed result, followed by weasel words about weakly interacting and thermal origin, is the physics equivalent of claiming “We will develop a new drug with the guaranteed result of curing cancer” followed by weasel words to explain, well, actually it will cure a type of cancer that exists only theoretically and has never been observed in reality. That’s how “guaranteed” this supposed dark matter result is. They guarantee to rule out some very specific hypotheses for dark matter that we have no reason to think are correct in the first place. What is going on here?
[...] The tragedy is I actually like most of these particle physicists. They are smart and enthusiastic about science and for the most part they’re really nice people. But look, they refuse to learn from evidence. And someone has to point it out: The evidence clearly says their methods are not working. Their methods have led to thousands of wrong predictions. Scientists should learn from failure. Particle physicists refuse to learn... (MORE - details)