A New Map of All the Particles and Forces

It would be interesting to see how this looks like for a different planet.

Always wonder how the jesuits beat the Muslim astronomer in Ming and Qing dynasty always assuming they use the geocentric one. Well unlike the dogmatic Dominican the Jesuit has its friend in the court. “In 1618, the Holy Office recommended that a modified version of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus be allowed for use in calendric calculations, though the original publication remained forbidden until 1758” (wiki) only during a few year has the catholic lost its chief astronomer in the court of emperor. (Sadly the few year gap in between Qing emperor got all the Hans Christian believer slaughtered. The notation of looking at the sky is rejected and 3 of the major crimes is the catholic astronomy dared to propose the unacceptable position of Orion component star not fit with the order of the five elements.)

There is no reason to think that a more fundamental theory would be simple or even tractable. We have just got lucky, so far. It is the nature of good luck to falter.

Wolfram is not doing anything original. He just doesn't tell you who he is cribbing from.

I think the history of physics does not support this view. New theories that explain a wider range of phenomena tend to be harder to understand than their predecessors that explain a narrower range of observations. For example, Newtonian mechanics is simpler than relativistic mechanics which is simpler than quantum field theories.

Also, I see nothing that would make fundamental aspects of nature comprehensible for humans. Our cognition evolved to handle classical mechanics without the relativistic or quantum effects that we find bizarre and indeed classical mechanics is roughly where average person's understanding of nature ends.

An alternative view is that there is a survivorship bias at play: we tend to understand the things about the universe that are simple enough for a human mind and remain oblivious to the ones that are too complicated for it.

There is the argument that it might be a mistake to discard complex explanations just because they are not simple. The nature is as it is and doesn't care for our preference of simple explanations.

> Correction: October 23, 2020 The original version of this article stated that left-handed leptons in different generations occasionally interact via the weak force. In fact, though such interactions have been hypothesized, they have not been observed.

Those gaps immediately catch your eye, don't they? Seeing them and thinking "what if there's something we are missing" is exactly what many particle physicists also think. This is why the existence of particles and interactions addressing those gaps have been hypothesized to death and then some. Trying to compare some of these hypothesis with the experiment is a major part of fundamental physics today, second only to measuring the things we know exist more precisely. In many cases the comparison has been performed, and when it has been the conclusion was "if there is something there, then the parameters must be such that our instruments did not measure the effects yet". This is why particle physicists are pushing for better instruments.

what if the absence of the interactions on the right hand side actually contributes to the stability of the universe?

> and gravity?

https://xkcd.com/1489/

Note the mouse-over text :)

Thank you. That is what I was thinking but the different sizes kind of got me.

Thank you for the info.

Great extra info and way to look at it, thank you.

Blue Quarks (are) Matter ?

Physics is weird in the way it attracts vocal, passionate support. People are willing to support projects for tens of billions of dollars not just with no guarantee of useful results, but with a every reason to think that the results won't be useful. The LHC is disappointing in the sense that it didn't turn up anything unexpected, but we knew that the enrgy scale required for unexpected results are much, much, much higher.

We hoped for better, and didn't get it. Billions of dollars is a lot of money to spend on hope.

We spend it because people love the hope that high-energy physics gives. Twentieth century physics had amazing benefits, both practical and intellectual. We could never have dreamed it would be so productive. We crave more.

Scientists know the limitations, but I think that people in general don't. And thats where Hossenfelder comes in, and why she always sounds so sour. She's telling people what the physicists already know and don't want to hear. She's dashing hope.

It's a hope that doesn't need to be dashed. The next LHC could produce something as important as the transistor or as philosophically edifying as the CMB. But is that "could" really worth it?

I believe that if people were really honest they'd spend the money on thousands of much smaller experiments and theoretical projects, rather than putting all of their eggs into one rather dubious basket. But people have a lot of really unjustified faith in that basket -- as jaw-dropping as "20th century physics" was, it's been the 21st century for a really long time, and we haven't gotten jaw-dropping results like that in even longer.

I feel the same way that Hossenfelder seems very sour. I, too, want her to be wrong. But she's not.