Am I Right To Be Feeling This Way?
Family Life2 mins ago
Is This Article About Particle Physics Fair?
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In as much as it's fair, it's just a general feature of science, or life in general for that matter, that some parts of it are often activity for its own sake. Science is a job, it gets paid money, sometimes in order to make more money there are people who find ways to game the system.
But in that case the "fair" parts are then nothing to do with particle physics as a discipline. So framing it as specifically a particle physics problem is already wrong. Then, the specific stuff she does have to say about it is often radically misrepresenting the picture, or the genuine theoretical motivations for various new particles.
For example, the list of particles she provides, without context, is a little frustrating. I'd have to look more deeply into a few of them, but one could be forgiven for thinking that the point she's making by just listing them is "look how silly these names are". But a couple of the sillier ones are blatantly coming about because the physicists who came up with them were wanting to have a bit of fun. This from the first "Wimpzilla" paper:
// Since the masses of the nonthermal WIMPS are much larger than the mass of thermal wimpy WIMPS, they may be referred to as WIMPZILLAS. In searches for dark matter it may be well to remember that "size does matter". //
Even the name "WIMP" itself is a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun. For a while, there were two main competing ideas about Dark Matter and how it came about. The first school of thought was that space was filled with large, but dark, stars or star-like objects, referred to as "massive compact halo objects", or "MACHOs". The other was that space was filled with small particles, that didn't really clump together, but were still heavy as far as particles go. So these got called "weakly interacting massive particles", or "WIMPs".
Why not have a bit of fun at the same time as doing serious science? Listing the names without context, except apparently to mock, is already a bit of a red flag.
But in that case the "fair" parts are then nothing to do with particle physics as a discipline. So framing it as specifically a particle physics problem is already wrong. Then, the specific stuff she does have to say about it is often radically misrepresenting the picture, or the genuine theoretical motivations for various new particles.
For example, the list of particles she provides, without context, is a little frustrating. I'd have to look more deeply into a few of them, but one could be forgiven for thinking that the point she's making by just listing them is "look how silly these names are". But a couple of the sillier ones are blatantly coming about because the physicists who came up with them were wanting to have a bit of fun. This from the first "Wimpzilla" paper:
// Since the masses of the nonthermal WIMPS are much larger than the mass of thermal wimpy WIMPS, they may be referred to as WIMPZILLAS. In searches for dark matter it may be well to remember that "size does matter". //
Even the name "WIMP" itself is a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun. For a while, there were two main competing ideas about Dark Matter and how it came about. The first school of thought was that space was filled with large, but dark, stars or star-like objects, referred to as "massive compact halo objects", or "MACHOs". The other was that space was filled with small particles, that didn't really clump together, but were still heavy as far as particles go. So these got called "weakly interacting massive particles", or "WIMPs".
Why not have a bit of fun at the same time as doing serious science? Listing the names without context, except apparently to mock, is already a bit of a red flag.
I haven't seen that much of Sabine's channel, but it's important to watch what she says, especially in terms of opinions on the State of the Art in physics, with more than a pinch of salt. I'm not altogether clear as to why this is, but she does tend to seem very disillusioned with the whole thing, and that's a bias that's worth bearing in mind.
Also, there are other parts of her article which are, at best, controversial, for example:
// For example, the currently accepted theory of elementary particles – the Standard Model – doesn’t require new particles; it works just fine the way it is. //
This is simply a weird take. The Standard Model is to particle physics what Newton's Principia was to gravity: it does indeed "work just fine" as far as it goes, but it's also manifestly incomplete, and at times more than a little arbitrary. For example, here's a question that it doesn't answer satisfactorily: Why is a hydrogen atom electrically neutral? Or, put another way, why are protons and electrons equally, but oppositely, charged? In a way it's bizarre: protons are made up of quarks -- two ups and one down, and yes I haven't forgotten about your "intrinsic charm" question but it's difficult to find time to figure out how to answer it properly. But, anyway, protons are made of three quarks, and electrons are not related to quarks at all. And yet these two apparently separate systems come together and manage to balance each other out perfectly. It's a miracle. You might like to think that a "works just fine" theory has something to say about this, but it does not. There is in the Standard Model a parameter (called the hypercharge, if you want to look it up) that sort of does the job, but all the theory has to say about it is that "hey, you choose the value". And so we do, and voila the charges are balanced because they have to be, electrons get -1 unit, up quarks get 2/3 of a unit, and down quarks -1/3, and there we are all sorted.
That's hardly explanatory. There are, I suppose, two ways out: firstly, it could just be indeed a miracle, a quirk of our universe that follows because this sort of thing would be essential to life as we know it (a sort of Anthropic Principle, again if you want to look it up). The second is that this hints at a more fundamental explanation.
Here's a fun fact: if magnetic monopoles exist, then electric charge is not arbitrary at all, but gets fixed to specific values, which would precisely resolve this arbitrariness. It's true that nobody has detected fundamental monopoles, despite the suggestion being around for almost a century. But that gap between prediction and discovery isn't necessarily unusual: the Higgs boson was predicted around 50 years before it was discovered. And, moreover, the body of theoretical evidence supporting monopoles goes far beyond the relatively simple "it solves quantisation of charge" argument above.
Take, also, dark matter. We know this exists. We also have good reason to suspect that it's not the MACHOs, ie large but dark "stars", but rather some variation of WIMP. However, the key here is the WI of "WIMP", which stands for "weakly interacting". There's sort of a nasty Catch-22 here: the very reason that we know Dark Matter exists is also the very reason we will struggle to detect it or deduce its nature. It doesn't interact with light, at all. It's not normal matter. The only remaining forces are gravity -- which allows you to know a thing is there -- and the weak force, which is, well, kind of weak. The expectation is that Dark Matter then interacts only extremely rarely, if at all, with normal matter via the weak force. But if that's the overview, how do you know what to look for, or where to look? And this is where the multiple theories come in.
I'm running out of space in this text box, so I'll continue in the next one.
Also, there are other parts of her article which are, at best, controversial, for example:
// For example, the currently accepted theory of elementary particles – the Standard Model – doesn’t require new particles; it works just fine the way it is. //
This is simply a weird take. The Standard Model is to particle physics what Newton's Principia was to gravity: it does indeed "work just fine" as far as it goes, but it's also manifestly incomplete, and at times more than a little arbitrary. For example, here's a question that it doesn't answer satisfactorily: Why is a hydrogen atom electrically neutral? Or, put another way, why are protons and electrons equally, but oppositely, charged? In a way it's bizarre: protons are made up of quarks -- two ups and one down, and yes I haven't forgotten about your "intrinsic charm" question but it's difficult to find time to figure out how to answer it properly. But, anyway, protons are made of three quarks, and electrons are not related to quarks at all. And yet these two apparently separate systems come together and manage to balance each other out perfectly. It's a miracle. You might like to think that a "works just fine" theory has something to say about this, but it does not. There is in the Standard Model a parameter (called the hypercharge, if you want to look it up) that sort of does the job, but all the theory has to say about it is that "hey, you choose the value". And so we do, and voila the charges are balanced because they have to be, electrons get -1 unit, up quarks get 2/3 of a unit, and down quarks -1/3, and there we are all sorted.
That's hardly explanatory. There are, I suppose, two ways out: firstly, it could just be indeed a miracle, a quirk of our universe that follows because this sort of thing would be essential to life as we know it (a sort of Anthropic Principle, again if you want to look it up). The second is that this hints at a more fundamental explanation.
Here's a fun fact: if magnetic monopoles exist, then electric charge is not arbitrary at all, but gets fixed to specific values, which would precisely resolve this arbitrariness. It's true that nobody has detected fundamental monopoles, despite the suggestion being around for almost a century. But that gap between prediction and discovery isn't necessarily unusual: the Higgs boson was predicted around 50 years before it was discovered. And, moreover, the body of theoretical evidence supporting monopoles goes far beyond the relatively simple "it solves quantisation of charge" argument above.
Take, also, dark matter. We know this exists. We also have good reason to suspect that it's not the MACHOs, ie large but dark "stars", but rather some variation of WIMP. However, the key here is the WI of "WIMP", which stands for "weakly interacting". There's sort of a nasty Catch-22 here: the very reason that we know Dark Matter exists is also the very reason we will struggle to detect it or deduce its nature. It doesn't interact with light, at all. It's not normal matter. The only remaining forces are gravity -- which allows you to know a thing is there -- and the weak force, which is, well, kind of weak. The expectation is that Dark Matter then interacts only extremely rarely, if at all, with normal matter via the weak force. But if that's the overview, how do you know what to look for, or where to look? And this is where the multiple theories come in.
I'm running out of space in this text box, so I'll continue in the next one.
it works just fine the way it is. Standard Model
Oh god even I know it doesnt
1973 Walter Grant Scott ( yeah right the hedge fund thingey worf £200 bn or something) was doing his PhD and admitted that the Standard Model was outmoded as he wrote ( these things do happen) and that another model was needed not soon ( 1975) but now (1973).
Sabine wouldnt get very far if she did that in medicine/medical research
He changed to hedge funding.
Oh god even I know it doesnt
1973 Walter Grant Scott ( yeah right the hedge fund thingey worf £200 bn or something) was doing his PhD and admitted that the Standard Model was outmoded as he wrote ( these things do happen) and that another model was needed not soon ( 1975) but now (1973).
Sabine wouldnt get very far if she did that in medicine/medical research
He changed to hedge funding.
// But if that's the overview, how do you know what to look for, or where to look [in order to find Dark Matter]? And this is where the multiple theories come in.//
The first answer is that you don't know. No clue at all. But that's defeatist. So the second answer is that you start to theorise, and propose various scenarios for what Dark Matter could be. Maybe it's a particle that also happens to solve this other problem (eg quantisation of charge or whatever). Maybe it's more likely to interact with one type of quark than another. Maybe it's always produced in our detectors in pairs. And so on, and on. And you have to scrabble around in the dark (pun intended) in order to get a handle on trying to find something, which, again, we *know* exists in some way.
Eh, are there some people who make a living writing five papers a year on their pet model where clearly just one would do the job? Sure. Whatever keeps them happy and busy, I guess. But, even so, to criticise that is to confuse the practice for the motivation. The motivations for such exploratory studies are very solid, and in this regard the comparison with "inventing" animals in zoology is facile. And, even then, it's wrong. The better analogy would be if you had observed some large species like a sperm whale, noticed that, while clearly a meat-eating animal, it didn't seem to eat large fish, and then deduced the existence of some other, smaller species that it fed on. And, hey presto, you've deduced the existence of krill. Presumably, you'd have to find the thing to realise that it was a small shrimp rather than a small fish, and no doubt before finding it there'd be room for all sorts of wild speculations about what the prey-creature was. But the point is that there's a clear gap in the food chain, and it has to be filled somehow. Theories with new particles are, in a sense, doing the same job and coming from the same place.
* * * *
Anyway, end of rant. But my basic point is that, where she's right, it's a criticism that can be levelled at science in general (although then only an, admittedly industrious, minority); and where she's wrong, it comes from her own biases about physics, and particle physics. And so at the very least the article should be read in that context.
The first answer is that you don't know. No clue at all. But that's defeatist. So the second answer is that you start to theorise, and propose various scenarios for what Dark Matter could be. Maybe it's a particle that also happens to solve this other problem (eg quantisation of charge or whatever). Maybe it's more likely to interact with one type of quark than another. Maybe it's always produced in our detectors in pairs. And so on, and on. And you have to scrabble around in the dark (pun intended) in order to get a handle on trying to find something, which, again, we *know* exists in some way.
Eh, are there some people who make a living writing five papers a year on their pet model where clearly just one would do the job? Sure. Whatever keeps them happy and busy, I guess. But, even so, to criticise that is to confuse the practice for the motivation. The motivations for such exploratory studies are very solid, and in this regard the comparison with "inventing" animals in zoology is facile. And, even then, it's wrong. The better analogy would be if you had observed some large species like a sperm whale, noticed that, while clearly a meat-eating animal, it didn't seem to eat large fish, and then deduced the existence of some other, smaller species that it fed on. And, hey presto, you've deduced the existence of krill. Presumably, you'd have to find the thing to realise that it was a small shrimp rather than a small fish, and no doubt before finding it there'd be room for all sorts of wild speculations about what the prey-creature was. But the point is that there's a clear gap in the food chain, and it has to be filled somehow. Theories with new particles are, in a sense, doing the same job and coming from the same place.
* * * *
Anyway, end of rant. But my basic point is that, where she's right, it's a criticism that can be levelled at science in general (although then only an, admittedly industrious, minority); and where she's wrong, it comes from her own biases about physics, and particle physics. And so at the very least the article should be read in that context.
It is complete nonsense.
Firstly, the LHC was built in the hope of observing a Higg's Boson and it was found.
Not finding a particle that is expected from the Standard Model at the available energies would be considered at least as important as finding one because it would suggest the model is wrong. Quantum Mechanics is all about statistics and something not turning up when it probably should would be a big deal.
Something unexpected being found would trigger a revolution.
Firstly, the LHC was built in the hope of observing a Higg's Boson and it was found.
Not finding a particle that is expected from the Standard Model at the available energies would be considered at least as important as finding one because it would suggest the model is wrong. Quantum Mechanics is all about statistics and something not turning up when it probably should would be a big deal.
Something unexpected being found would trigger a revolution.
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