Physicists Hope to Be Wrong About the Higgs Boson | Hacker News Reader

Physicists Hope to Be Wrong About the Higgs Boson

wired.com

51 pointsqubitcoder17 comments

Thousands of particle physicists dont have much to do than add another decimal place to their measurements of known physics.

Someone said this in 1900 too when classical physics was mostly wrapped up save for a few loose ends like newly discovered radiation

But in this case, we know our physics is wrong. We still don't have a decent theory of quantum gravity.

We just don't know what the solution is.

Most likely, gravitation is an effect which we already know, but at much lower resolution. IMHO, it is similar to Casimir effect, but at much higher frequency, e.g. 1E(1E200) Hz.

Source, please?

It's a very old idea, almost as old as the Higgs mechanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_gravity

Getting it to work is another matter, though.

This other gravity theory sounds a bit better than Sakharov's induced gravity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity

It was the American physicist Albert Michelson (the creator of the beautiful Michelson interferometer design which enabled very precise measurements of the speed of light) who said "it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established . . . An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."

Subsequently, the sentiment of this statement has been misattributed to Lord Kelvin.

Kind of an inflammatory title (but from the original article, so not a complaint about HN). "Physicists hope to learn more about physics from the Higgs Boson" seems more accurate. :)

No, that is not inflammatory. Physicists hoped to be wrong about the standard model since the first PETRA energy upgrade. Just look at this conference summary from 1981: http://lss.fnal.gov/conf/C810824/p1003.pdf (from lss.fnal.gov/conf/C810824/ )

So I predict a new revolution, or phase change, by Christmas 1982. [...] And by a second revolution, I don't just mean already predicted Z's and W's, but evidence anew than Nature's imagination is richer than ours as we cross new frontiers of the unknown. (p. 1004-1005)

They were getting quite desperate about finding physics beyond the standard model by the mid of the decade.

Absolutely. Ellis called the situation we are in a five-star disaster. I heard many even stronger statements privately before the LHC switched on.

stat-athens.aueb.gr/~jpan/Science_Higgs.pdf

Something is seriously FU with scrolling on Wired.com if you zoom in on the article. Please don't re-implement browser / OS features on your own. OK, I'll try to read the article now. Autoplay video ads! I give up.

uBlock works wonders there.

Reading wired.com on mobile is also a shitty experience. The scrolling is stuttery and there is a small delay before the page reacts to any scrolling input. I don't understand how they can fuck up the easy task of displaying some simple text so badly.

Why use mobile with JavaScript enabled? If a site doesn't function, whitelist it.

the chance to spot larger particles never before created in a human-made particle accelerator

smaller, right?

They most likely meant heavier. Most of these particles do not have a size (like the size of a cloud or the sun is kind of arbitrary and ever shifting).

There isn't really a good notion of the size of an elementary particle. What's really being looked for is particles with certain higher (mass) energies. Now, why do we say that higher energies allow us to probe smaller scales? Well, at small scales(/short times), quantum mechanics allows these higher energy particles to play a role, even if there's not enough energy to create an actual particle. The smaller the scale, the more do high energy particles come into the picture. Thus cranking up the energy allows us to see these particles at a larger (detectable) scale than they would usually occur.

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