Particle Physicists Continue Empty Promises

hello and welcome back to science without the gobbledygook today i want to tell you how particle physicists are wasting your money i know that's not nice but at the end of this video i think you will understand why i say what i say what ticked me off this time was a comment published in nature physics by cern director general fabiola giannotti and gian g dieser who is head of cern's theory department it's called a command but what it really is is an advertisement it's a sales pitch for the next larger collider for which they need well a few dozen billion euro we don't know exactly because they are not telling us how expensive it would be to actually run the thing when it comes to the question what the new mega collider could do for science they explain a good example of a guaranteed result is dark matter a proton collider operating at energies around 100 tv that's the energy of the plant larger collider will conclusively probe the existence of weakly interacting dark matter particles of thermal origin this will lead either to a sensational discovery or to an experimental exclusion that will profoundly influence both particle physics and astrophysics let me unwrap this for you the claim that dark matter is a guaranteed result followed by weasel words about weakly interacting and thermal origin is the physics equivalent of claiming we will develop a new drug with the guaranteed result of curing cancer followed by weasel words to explain well actually it will cure a type of cancer that exists only theoretically and has never been observed in reality that's how guaranteed this supposed dark matter result is they guarantee to rule out some very specific hypothesis for dark matter that we have no reason to think are correct in the first place what is going on here what's going on is that particle physicists have a hard time understanding that when popper went on about how important it is that a scientific hypothesis is falsifiable he did not mean that a hypothesis is scientific just because it is falsifiable there are lots of falsifiable hypothesis that are clearly unscientific for example youtube will have a global blackout tomorrow at noon central time that's totally falsifiable if you give me 20 billion dollars i can guarantee that i can test this hypothesis of course it's not worth the money why because my hypothesis may be falsifiable but it's unscientific because it's just guesswork i have no reason whatsoever to think that my blackout prediction is correct the same is the case with particle physicist hypothesis for dark matter that you are guaranteed to rule out with that expensive big collider particle physicists literally have thousands of theories for dark matter some thousands of which have already been ruled out can they guarantee that a next larger collider can rule out some more yes what is the guaranteed knowledge we will gain from this well the same as the gain that we have gotten so far from ruling out their dark matter hypothesis which is that we still have no idea what dark matter is we don't even know it is a particle to begin with let us look again at that quote they write this will lead either to a sensational discovery or to an experimental exclusion that will profoundly influence both particle physics and astrophysics no the most likely outcome will be that particle physicists and astrophysicists will swap their current theories for new theories according to which the supposed particles are heavier than expected then they will claim that we need yet another bigger collider to find them what makes me think this will happen am i just bitter or cynical as particle physicists accuse me no i'm just looking at what they have done in the past for example here's an oldie but goldie a quote from a piece written by string theorists david gross and edward whitten for the wall street journal there is a high probability that supersymmetry if it plays the role for suspect will be confirmed in the next decade they wrote this in 1996 well clearly that didn't pan out and because it's so much fun i want to read you a few more quotes but they are a little bit more technical so i have to give you some background first when particle physicists say electroweak scale or tv scale they mean energies that can be tested at the large hadron collider when they say naturalness they refer to a certain type of mathematical beauty that they think a theory should fulfill you see particle physicists think it is a great problem that theories which have been experimentally confirmed are not as beautiful as particle physicists think nature should be they have therefore invented a lot of particles that you can add to the supposedly ugly theories to remedy the lack of beauty if this sounds like a completely non-scientific method that's because it is there is no reason this method should work and it does as a matter of fact not work but they have done this for decades and still have not learned that it does not work having said that here's a quote from geodesi and ratatsi in 1998 that's the same geodesic which is one of the authors of the new nature commentary that i mentioned in the beginning in 1998 he wrote the naturalness or hierarchy problem is considered to be the most serious theoretical argument against the validity of the standard model of elementary particle interactions beyond the tb energy scale in this respect it can be viewed as the ultimate motivation for pushing the experimental research to higher energies higher energies at that time were the energies that have now been tested at the large hadron collider the supposed naturalness problem was the reason they thought the lhc should see new fundamental particles besides the higgs this has not happened we now know that these arguments were wrong in 2004 fabiola giannotti that's the other author of the new nature physics command wrote naturalness arguments opened the door to new and more fundamental physics there are today several candidate scenarios for physics beyond the standard model including supersymmetry technicolor and theories with extra dimensions all of them predict new particles in the tv region as needed to stabilize the higgs mars we note that there is no other scale in particle physics today as compelling as the tv scale which strongly motivates a machine like the lhc able to explore directly and in detail this energy range so she claimed in 2004 that the rhc would see new particles besides the higgs whatever happened to this prediction that they ever tell us what they learned from being wrong not to my knowledge these people were certainly not the only ones who repeated the story here's for example a quote from the particle physicist michael dyne who wrote in 2007 the large hadron collider will either make a spectacular discovery or rule out supersymmetry entirely well you know what it hasn't done either i could go on quite somewhere quoting particle physicists who made wrong predictions and now pretend they didn't but it's rather repetitive i will leave you a link to a quote collection in the info below the video let us instead talk about what this means all these predictions from particle physicists were wrong there is no shame in being wrong being wrong is essential for science but what is shameful is that none of these people ever told us what they learned from being wrong they did not revise their methods for making predictions for new particles they still use the same methods that have not worked for decades neither did they do anything about the evident group thing in their community but they still want more money the tragedy is i actually like most of these particle physicists they are smart and enthusiastic about science and for the most part they're really nice people but look they refuse to learn from evidence and someone has to point it out the evidence clearly says their methods are not working their methods have led to thousands of wrong predictions scientists should learn from failure particle physicists refuse to learn they just ask for more money particle physicists of course are entirely ignoring my criticism and instead call me anti-science let that sink in for a moment they call me anti-science because i say we should think about where to best invest science funding and if you do a risk benefit assessment it is clear that building a bigger collider is not currently a good investment it is both high risk and low benefit we would be better off if we'd instead invest in the foundations of quantum mechanics and astroparticle physics they call me anti-science because i ask scientists to think you can't make up this frankly the way that particle physicists behave makes me feel embarrassed i ever had anything to do with that field thanks for watching see you next week

Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 298,393

Keywords: physics news, science news, particle physics, cern, why has cern not found new particles, why has the lhc not found supersymmetry, why no supersymmetry, naturalness, future circular collider, large hadron collider, lhc, fcc, hossenfelder, what is wrong with particle physics, particle physics crisis, particle physics news, physics

Id: 9qqEU1Q-gYE

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020