The Embarrassing Nonsense of Particle Physicists - No, we do not need a New Collider

I will talk about another video that should justify the expense of tens of billions of dollars for a new particle collider and it is directed at the general public that means for you the taxpayer because everyone in the world should know how important for your life this new particle collider is and so far by the end of 2022 it has attracted the interest of some 500 people and I think indeed more people should watch it because everyone should know what kind of embarrassing nonsense these people tell you to justify their expenses and I just took the most blatant examples now you can check the original it was offline for two months but now it's online again and yeah get informed how your money as a taxpayer is spent for science welcome to real physics today I'm talking about a new collider no I'm talking about how parting a physicists discuss the necessity of a new collider and I mean it's always fun to listen to these guys but I didn't expect it would turn out that embarrassing now how all came about you know as a member of the German physical Society I get these emails with the announcement and there was an October 6th uh this talk does the world need a new particle collider and why I thought this is for me by Hiroshima urama and followed up by a round table discussion about the necessity of the new collider in which of course every panelist is on the payroll of particle physics institutions so you can already imagine how controversial this debate about the new Collide sorry would pan out but anyway I think it's interesting to listen how these people justify this billion dollar expense and how they react to questions at the end the talk is not online any longer but I let you watch some of the highlights my title today is the Higgs boson particle superhero to begin with mayorama calls the Higgs boson a superhero and Superman and this is one of his slides and uh well I is it really necessary that we resort to this intellectual level if you want to get interested public about fundamental physics I don't know but now let's listen to what he said so what physicists do is actually something very simple we look at the night sky just like a little kid and start wondering some deep or simple questions like how did the universe begin what is its fate what it's made of what are its basic laws why do we exist where do we come from well none of these questions will be answered by a new collider or have anything remotely to do with it and the story today really has to do a lot with this question why do we exist ah was humankind in 2022 didn't know why they exist no not not at all not because of physics results and not because of biology and evolution and all this no no no no but the new particular I will tell you this kind of question used to be part of the philosophy maybe well particular physicists are talking in a minute worse than the worst philosophers about this but again this is highly misleading and this is the picture of the big bang you can actually see it in front of you well apart from this statement being nonsense it's amazing how brazenly these people take all kind of scientific results as if they had contributed to it only hydrogen and helium were made in the big van but for your body you need calcium for your bone iron for blood you need to breathe oxygen where do they came from it turned out that they were actually made in Stars so this is something we have learned rather recently ah this is something we have learned recently I guess this is a result from 1952 the the B squared FH frames paper and again I mean how dare you to assign this result to particle physics has nothing to do with it dust made up elements like oxygen and calcium and iron already in the dust that eventually hit each other stuck with each other developed to build a rock and that's our planet so that's how we came to exist okay quite a ridiculous statement but again they're taking the results of astronomy and and sell it if it was theirs interestingly besides the Hicks he does not mention a single result of particle physics of the last decades probably not to remind the audience from its uselessness and that's what my friends in Japan have done by building this huge water tank called super Cameo Candy and they even managed to take a picture of the center of the sun completely misleading and it has nothing to do with collider physics sorry but one thing you would notice right away is that there's some strange object in this picture galaxies are supposed to be round maybe sometimes a little elliptical but you don't expect to see something this much stretched out but you see many of these things this one is also very stressed out that one is two that one is two how could there be such a strange shaped galaxies how ridiculous they grab a picture of the James Webb Telescope which is a real good science Enterprise and uh talk about gravitational lensing I mean gravitational lensing was discovered in 1979 so what that answers the question of our existence are you kidding me Universe became cold enough that the Higgs boson froze into empty space so it's all right here packed very densely and what's going on here is that when weak Force once they act on somebody then get so much disturbed by this Higgs boson stuck in the universe today and that's why it can't go very far that's why Stars would shine at exactly the right rate so that we can exist this is also news to me I mean not the discoveries of nuclear reactions in the Sun not the Pioneers like Eddington or jeans or whoever explain why stars shine or the Higgs boson does that's really news to me what it also means though is that the particles like electron also don't go very far because they are disturbed by the Higgs boson as well which is the good thing because if this exposure is not there what happens is that electrons inside any atoms will start moving the speed of light and instantly disappear and you can see I'm old enough to have a picture with Einstein in color which is hard to believe but anyway and so what happens here is that we or evaporate in a nanosecond too you would get evaporated in another second yes of course I mean this is complete fantasy but he he talks to you as if the LHC had saved personally you from Annihilation yeah and the superhero Higgs boson did all this I mean what it actually did it saved product physics um getting their funding cut so he continued to talk in this bold manner as if the new collider would explain all these problems and solve all these interesting questions well of course all these pompous talking annoyed me quite a bit and that's why I asked the question why haven't these problems been already solved by all the collider projects of the past including the LHC I remember the very same promises given 20 years ago we have a question online which is referring back to the problems in in itself is that why haven't these open questions already been solved by the collider projects of the past including the LHC the question says you know I remember hearing some of these questions being asked 20 years ago and they're still not answered so why is that what's the case and actually a motherboard rephrases the question a little bit if you listen carefully he says questions not promises but actually these were promises listen to another theoretical physicist Michio Kaku 12 years ago 10 billion euros the work of over 5 000 physicists of over 16 years and the Machine is finally Opera operating what do you do for us because we're going to unravel the secret of the Big Bang whatever it came from what happened before creation what happened before Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 and also maybe even answer Eternal questions like time is time travel possible are there other dimensions are there parallel universes we can get hints glimmers of these Cosmic questions with this machine do you think we can figure out what happened before the Big Bang you think we can figure out whether or not time travels possible because what they're doing on the French Swiss border that's right and maybe our universe is a bubble of some sort and there are other bubbles out there other expanding and Contracting these other bubbles mean to you these are other universes where perhaps it could be other laws of physics I mean this is huge this is greater than the copernican revolution that's what the Large Hadron so you're putting this up there with Sir Isaac Newton gravity you're putting that over Thomas evidence in in electromagnetism that's right you're putting that up there with Albert Einstein and E equals MC Square was for the nuclear power right that's what you're writing about today in the Wall Street Journal we're talking about unifying all the forces of nature there are four forces that make the world move each time a force was unraveled it unleashed the Industrial Revolution the electric Revolution and now the nuclear Revolution and now we have a super force a super force that we're going to try to unravel which created the universe yeah no comments so far uh Kaku is another Japanese theoretical physicist in the thinking tradition that you become an Einstein once you have white uncammed hair physics professors who are conducting these experiments in Europe it could have been happening here at home and you're suggesting there's a bit of a brain drain from the United States I'm glad that we avoided that kind of brain drain into Europe but uh listen now what mayurama has to say well at least for the exposure we just basically just met him it was discovered 10 years ago that's a very brief um uh the uh a period in the history of science so there's still a lot we haven't understood about this uh new superhero all we just have discovered the superhero so we need to study more of it and we need to talk to him and we get more information by the way I added this questions what is the genuine expectation besides we will observe fantastic confirmation of our model or even more exciting a deviation from it but that's obviously this was too hard though but it was did not ask the question on the other questions like dark matter and antimatter if we were lucky we might have seen some glimpse of answers in the past experiments but nature wasn't so generous to us so they are still weighted uh waiting to be discovered and understood so we have to keep trying and in this case there's no guarantee that the next generation of colliders actually answers those questions but at least I see a good chance and of course we have a good chance to see the Undiscovered particles in the next collider experiment of course let's also listen what the others have to say the Higgs could Decatur dark matter and when it was discovered basically it was possible that nearly all of them we only I mean the way the Higgs boson was observed was in a very very rare Decay what a rare Decay the Hicks was discovered in the two Photon Channel which is the most dirty channel so to speak because literally every particle and antiparticle decays into two photons versus nothing special and of course the reasoning was uh why it was so hilarious that they they argued that the Higgs has been discovered because they argue that are we perfectly know which kind of particles Decay into two photons and there are billions of decays and one in 100 billion decays is not explainable by our model so this must have been the expose on decay can I answer that question yeah go ahead Jesse well I it's fun for me to answer that question because I was just explaining it on the Blackboard over here um and you maybe you can't really tell yeah so so you know I'm I'm a professor at MIT and I have students who come into my office who ask you know why is it that I should focus on doing calculations I like so much explained because I'm a professor at MIT and I'm so smart that the students come into my office and I explain to them all these difficult calculations and you can estimate how much Precision you need in order to answer some of the questions that Hitachi was talking about and this back of the envelope thing that's on this board here was explaining why if you don't do better than 10 accuracy then you really can't address these deep fundamental questions are you saying that you need 10 accuracy what a spectacular Insight I can't believe it 10 I tell you something there was a time when party good physicists had fairly precise results such as the Nobel Prize in 1976-14 and Richter not that everyone endorsed that there's something significant but at least it's some decent curfew and if you look at the Higgs Discovery it's a very very pure acurity on the other hand around six percent and now you're saying that the next collider will only have a 10 percent accuracy that means you're free to interpret any kind of fantasy particle into such an experimental mess if it's only 10 percent I would love for it to be different I would love for Big Ideas to have big manifestations no comments so far from the next question I give it a little bit of context because recently uh Sabine Hassan Felder had exposed the empty promises of productivity physicists in a very nice video and here's one slide with a quote of janotti a good example of a guaranteed result is dark matter a proton collider operating at energy is around to 100 direct turn volt will conclusively probe the existence of weekly interacting Dark Matter particles of thermal origin this will lead either to essential Discovery or to an experimental exclusion that will profoundly influence both particle physics and astrophysics and the husband Felder commented no the most likely outcome is that particle physicists will swap their current theories for new theories According to which the supposed particles are still heavier than expected and then they will tell you they need a new collider to find them so my question was referring to this critique obviously there have been a lot of wrong predictions in the past how do you counter Sabine houses critique that particle physicists refused to learn from their errors back to this business of new particles though we've had and and just to elaborate on it a little bit more we we've had every every time there's a new Collider the theorist will tell us we've got to find all these new particles the only one they've really been right about has been the Higgs right which is part of the standard model so are we are we are we flogging a dead horse here are we refusing to learn from our mistake Butterworth did not mention hostenfella but it seems that she understood that someone had exposed her empty parameters and she is hit look no no no no no you can't say this okay John sorry can I can I say something here so I mean of course when you discover a new particle of course this is a lot a big satisfaction it's a glamorous thing you get the headlines or the newspaper yeah the headlines are important take a machine like a collider like let and hitoshi mentioned it in in stock lab did not discover any new particle and these are hardly a machine an accelerator collider it has really had such a profound impact on our understanding of fundamental physics it has put the standard model on solid experimental grounds to put the standard model on solid grounds whatever that means what we want to do is to improve our knowledge is to make step forward my next question was rather a mockery that question but everyone agreed it was a good question there was one question which actually was explicitly addressed to Fabiola in fact which was if the standard model is on Solid Ground why is everyone excited about deviations from it Fabiola yeah okay so because simply because the standard model cannot explain everything we see and everything we have understood so we thought she was mentioned in that matter we don't understand that matter is no single particle in the standard model that can that has all the good properties of that for that matter you don't understand Dark Energy we don't understand the matter antimatter asymmetry so the standard model works very well it's predictional very well demonstrated all the particles predicted by the standard model have been discovered but it's not a complete Theory yeah this is the usual or willing double speak I really didn't understand in particular physics they say how the standard metal is so fantastic tested it's unsolid ground it predicts everything and wonderful on the one hand side on the other side it's incomplete we need to go beyond we need to explain dark matter we need extensions we are excited if something else that contradicts the standard model is discovered so what do you want at the at the very end I mean this is particularly interesting in the context of the two Nobel prizes in 2013 and 2015. look at this this is the official statement of the noble committee and you have the discovery of the Higgs bosons this discovery is a milestone for particle physics and a tremendous success for the standard model because it ultimately confirmed the standard model and it's validity when we can't believe in it okay and then two years later between the oscillation contradicting the standard Bond is a major milestone for elementary particle physics which represents compelling evidence for the incompleteness of the standard model and means that the standard model is wrong 2015 you get a noble for it because it's around 2013 you get a noble because it's so fantastic I I just don't get this there are many pieces that are missing and so we are trying to make the next step next step and look for the theory a more general theory for which the standard model is just a part but it can explain everything possibly four the scientist who does fundamental research that is confronted with the fact that if you look to the energy density of the universe that you are able to explain five percent and the rest is Stark I think that's reason enough right if if the document happens to be in this energy range I think that the biggest question that if we had an answer I could die happy is what is the nature of dark matter and now of course everyone reiterates blah blah blah we need to go beyond where there is dark matter in the universe they don't understand anything about the Dark Matter here's a good point uh someone who really understands something about Dark Matter says the following Robert Sanders in his book The Dark Matter problem physicists know that the rotation curves of galaxies are flat they don't know anything about the regularity of rotational curves or global scale relations and aren't very interested in learning about them okay if you really understand something about Galaxy Dynamics as Sanders does you know that you're not going to solve this problem with a single invented particle okay you may hope for three or four or five particles but this is even even a bigger mess and then Sandra says the real problem is that dark matter is not falsifiable the Ingenuity and Imagination of theoretical physicists can always accommodate any astronomical non-detection by inventing new possible Dark Matter candidates this just sufficient to invent some candidate particle and then you demand a new collider and we must build it and we must look for it this is a nonsensical never-ending hamster wheel at a certain point I realized I was practically the only one asking questions so of course I took the opportunity and asked another one to everyone concretely which result do you expect besides surely something interesting what do you what do you hope it will really reveal and what do you think it will reveal but but it was took only the first boat so the answers were surely something interesting listen at the time when Einstein did his work on general relativity I mean everybody was very happy with Newtonian mechanics right how can you compare Einstein's theoretical struggle to understand a very specific quantitative anomaly with this messing around with the standard model without no theoretical idea and just playing with higher energies one should add a comment of rigid Feynman here on Theory building correct theories of physics are perfect things and a replacement Theory must be a new perfect thing not an imperfection added onto an old perfect thing this is the essence of Revolution the replacement of the old with the new not the adding of more crap onto the old and this is exactly what the standard model does adding more crap onto the old let's also listen what the others have to say another answer she is cute I'll try to add a bit on maybe from the experimental side as as as you mentioned in the future we continue to run for for for for more than a decade and we'll have much more statistics it will collect much more data statistics is interesting okay yeah then I added that physics is a quantitative science and you should you should make quantitative predictions and it was a little bit late I admit and and of course nobody would come out with a number and but but the word explained and of course of course there are numbers behind Okay that was the last question I think we should do that there was one I just have to add there was one that came in while you were all talking which was is anyone physics is a quantitative Sciences anyone actually going to give a number on anything there are numbers one question unfortunately I forgot and I would really like to ask these questions which result would falsify the standard model I don't think there is a good answer to that time ago I had an argument with a particle physicist who said that she was so excited to find new anomalies in the standard model thing first thing I don't I don't believe that you really create the anomalies these are all buried in some tension that will probably soon drop out but there is no really tension or really problem created I don't think that the standard model is falsifiable there is no result that could not be digested by some neat extension this is the first thing and the second thing is I mean if you're happy working on the happy Cycles Let It Be it's okay thank you anyway so this question answer session finished and uh yeah as I said I was the only person interested in the results of particle physics obviously in this talk and then if you look at the participants we have here something like 95 online participants and you if you look at this picture I counted 25 in the lecture hall so let me know if you have arrive at another number so you have roughly 100 people interested in the results of this new collider and if you put this into perspective to the cost of several tens of billions of dollars I mean the question is how many people who are not get paid for it are really interested in this stuff what these people are doing that is the question if you want to go deeper into this I recommend my book I argue that the Higgs boson is not the discovery but a group think driven Wishful interpretation of an experimental mess nobody understands and nobody can check if you enjoyed the video don't forget to like it and if you're interested in real fundamental physics subscribe to this channel foreign

Channel: Unzicker's Real Physics

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Id: _oa71iB_Z4Q

Length: 26min 35sec (1595 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 01 2023