Comment by mnl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mnl | Hacker News Reader

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The thing is we didn't know whether the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking involved the Higgs or something else. But we knew that there would be particles associated to electroweak symmetry breaking at TeV scale because of a unitarity bound, among other reasons (as happens with this particular kind of dark matter at 100 TeV that Sabine dishonestly calls "weasel words").

Something had to happen at that scale, the Higgs wasn't guaranteed. Sabine gets experimental physics backwards because no one planned the LHC to confirm the Higgs, but to know whether the Higgs existed and if it didn't what did instead. My money was mostly on it not showing up; many physicists were convinced it wouldn't, then it was there but we couldn't know beforehand.

There's a scientific case for making precision measurements of it, as was done with the electroweak bosons for very good reasons that she dismisses without showing any kind of understanding about the research she wants to shut off.

Were there other theories that explained why the elementary particles have mass except for the Higgs?

Regardless, the point stands: we knew that something is missing from the Standard model, and we knew that it must exist in a very precise range of energy. If it didn't exist there, it could have called into question the whole SM.

In contrast, we don't know that there must be some kind of dark matter at the 100TeV scale. We know that one particular type that we have thought about could exist, but we have other candidates as well, and there are ways that the 100TeV prediction could also be moved to higher energy levels.

Meanwhile, we don't even know if dark matter is a kind of matter or a modification of the force of gravity or a problem with approximations of Einstein's equations used in practice etc.

Sure, for instance EWSB by strong dynamics such as Technicolor. Here's a well known review from back in the day: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0203079

I'm not sure we're done with composite models. There are more exotic alternatives and then the fact remains that neutrino masses aren't in the SM.

I consider pretty hopeless to keep thinking that you can modify GR like plasticine in all the instances in which putting amounts of matter that doesn't radiate works (maybe it works because it's there and its effects on other stuff is how you "see" it). It has the appeal of making some people feel like they can call a whole profession or several a bunch of crooks, and that's pretty much what it has going for it outside of the scientists working in earnest on it.

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