Comment by streamofdigits | Hacker News Reader

Comment by streamofdigits | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that from an experimental / observational technologies perspective we have been for many decades now in some sort of "evidence desert" that pushes against fundamental technology boundaries and that is not conducive to solving big "mysteries".

Unifications, re-interpretations, new conceptualizations (new forces etc) are the mental tools through which we solve previous "mysteries" (and create new ones). Right now there are alive more physicists than ever and even a tiny piece of important news could lead to a revolution - in like a couple of years. But what you really want is a firehose of new data points, "a new window". This has not happened and it may not happen for generations (for the attentive reader: gravitational waves are at the very, very edge of the detectable).

As Feynman might say, the Universe doesn't owe us a continuous stream of gee-wow moments

But if I had to bet where the breakthrough might come from I'd say it would probably be cosmology rather than elementary particles...

I've recently heard a rather interesting and optimistic take on this. Since we have had so many brilliant minds looking in so many places for new physics and still have not seen evidence of it, that suggests whenever we do find new physics, it will have to be so bafflingly strange that all these brilliant people could never imagine it. It may very well be a bigger paradigm shift than the jump from classical to modern physics.

Yep, that makes sense. It doesn't give us a timescale for when such a "jump" might happen but suggests that it could be "big" in the context of our heretofore discoveries

My best guess at timescale (following up on the cosmology theme) has to do with our rate of utilizing the inner solar system as a clean and quiet laboratory for ultra sensitive observations and experiments (whether LISA) or extremely sensitive telescopes or any other probes.

So be patient for a few more decades :-)

It seems crazy to say that we have not seen evidence for new physics when the size estimates of dark matter and dark energy account for about 95% of known energy in the observable universe. How is that not evidence for new physics?

If our physical theories cover only about ~5% of what we observe… that seems like a bit of an issue, no matter how accurately they model that 5%.

Neither dark matter nor dark energy are new physics. We don't know exactly what particle or combination of particles is responsible for dark matter, but there's not yet evidence that dark matter actually is composed of something outside the standard model. Dark energy is, despite the name, well explained by general relativity. When people talk about new physics, they're referring to things that change our understanding of how the universe works on a fundamental level. By comparison to biology, these are like newly discovered species - of course they're interesting but our understanding of nature is unchallenged.

IMO, the breakthru will happen once they finish building that super collider that will find glimpses of the tiny 4th dimension (that Kaluza-Klein hypothesis). With that will come a whole new standard model worth of 4d particles and phycists will be busy for another century.

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