Why Particle Physics is Stuck in a Dead End

wants to stay I don't know how many of you believe that the Higgs boson was the discovery of the century but what is sure that Einstein derocker Schrodinger would have considered this discovery as ridiculous they would never have believed that such a model with so many unexplained parameters reflecting anything fundamental so I'm going to argue that particle physics as practice since 1930 is a futile enterprise in its entirety we shall look more in detail I think there are seven deadly sins of particle physics first of all over helming complication good physics is simple and the true revolutions in physics always simplify the laws of nature Maxwell's electrodynamics was a revolution because the electrodynamic constants and the speed of light were condensed in one formula eliminating one constant of nature so did the planck constant h simplify the laws of nature and newton's theory of gravitation condensed dozens of unexplained parameters into one gravitational constant particle physics is going the other way around it produced 17 2153 parameters if you count the masses so I always have that the standard model is a tremendous simplification okay but only because a nonsensical production of particles had taken place in the 1960s sorry but who believed that hundreds of elementary particle could reflect anything fundamental if you think about elementary laws of nature so the progress in particle physics is like two steps back and one step forward I don't think this is real progress even more irritating the suppression of basic problems none of the great riddles that have brought that the founding fathers of physics have solved to this day and please don't tell me that the Higgs bosons say something about the origin of mass we don't understand that mass ratio of proton and electron 1836 and now we understand it's a ratio of couplings to the Higgs field I think it's better for physics not to have such kind of progress to summarize the standard model says nothing about the contradictions of electrodynamics it says nothing about how to compute the masses it says nothing how to compute mass ratios nothing about life times nothing about the fine-structure constant nothing about the relation to gravity nothing about the origin of spin of radioactivity nothing about the nature of space-time and inertia a model that says nothing about all these fundamental questions is crap how did kind all came about after the groundbreaking findings of the last at the beginning of the last century around 1930 physics physicists changed from understanding to describing the gave up understanding and they started to describe nature this was a paradigm shift and that's where the search for the fundamental laws of nature stopped and it transformed into the high tech in the the high-tech sports we practiced to this day every Thomas Kuhn it's pretty clear that science does not work this way the steady increase of science and the increase of anomalies leads always to a crash but never to a true breakthrough I think we have symptoms of a kuhnian crisis in physics this might seem pretty general as an argument so I will become I try to become more concrete the model of particle physics is yesterday's Nobel Prizes today's background that's the way it works somebody told me I think this is a thoroughly foolish strategy it's thoroughly foolish because if you do enough triggering filtering and removing backgrounds there's always a signal left okay and I think by the way there is there's pretty much reason to suspect that by doing all this filtering triggering and analyzing data on the computational levers there might be our defaults affecting the analysis I cannot prove that who can so let's assume for the moment that everything is done properly everything is under control the backgrounds are removed properly and everything works fine then still the whole enterprise is a foolish strategy because going to higher energies producing more data filtering more extensively and measuring tinier and tinier signals is a process that may continue indefinitely I think it's a hamster wheel and it has turned several times in the history of particle physics and it seems that it continues to churn and I always want because why people don't write realize how much theoretical assumptions enter the back door of these so-called experience I mean we are declaring the nail signals of two extra photons as a Higgs boson and what you call a W boson is essentially a fast electron and something that is missing that's be sorry no top quark and no W boson has ever seen a detector because they don't live long enough and it's bizarre also the underlying theoretical model physics for hundred years physicists don't understand beta decay how the protein transforming into the neutral we call this nicely Isis beam and we don't really understand the relation of weak of the weak interaction to the strong interaction and we have invented a term that is called strangeness but can anybody in the room explain to me how these two entirely entirely metaphorical terms having to be the axis of a coordinate system about all the reasoning about symmetries is based I think this is pretty bizarre God created everything but number wait and measure particle physics doesn't predict any number anyway we have Isis pin we have strangeness we have botanist that we had top Ness but to call objects with these labels particles just psychologically displaces how much distanced one has from reason to call this particles I think that any reasonable scientist has to have some doubts about the model but obviously there is one good argument in favor of the standard model thousands of physicists would not deal with a theoretical model of reality if it was baloney and I bet that unconsciously this is the strongest argument you have for the solid model and it's profoundly flawed it has been disproved many times in history because in big communities there is groupthink just think about economics and I think also this business has to become too big to fail so let me skip this and just one of my favorite common opinions I like to challenge the some standard model is precisely tested it's interesting if you ask five different people who get five different answers what's the most precise test is there is no precision in particle physics the detector has a precision of six percent and this is a poor accuracy even if you do your best I don't deny that you can even do your best at superior accuracy with respect to many other fields of physics and no precision test whatsoever would come out of that and we are going to what we going to discover next door maybe the next accelerator second third or Susie Hicks or versions lightest supersymmetric particle fourth quad generation and so on mini black holes extra dimensions gravity on your face that's what the string theory second tells you I don't think this is science actually you're predicting that your next Collider will show something but I'll tell you something true science the truth discoveries sooner or later he'll saw was transformed into useful technology there would be no digital cameras without phantom mechanics no cell phones without Maxwell and no GPS receiver work without Jane Stein general relativity but there is no way even to think about a useful application of a W boson or Higgs or a quark now I'm not joking about making this up because it would be a real independent test but this model hasn't proved hasn't justified its usefulness and its correctness outside the narrow field of the academic environment and this is a problem mr. lone Tigger yeah I think I think at this point we're it's we risk to walk into pseudoscience that worked with Bruce G Carlton calls some besides that might be kept alive by endless transfusions of cash in technology and I think that as fundamental questions are regarded the money the money is wasted at the moment come up with an alternative mr. onizuka before you criticize that's always what I hear but sorry it's impossible because the results are phrased in a language that anticipates the notion of the notion of the of the model and I think that really nobody can over be the complexity of of the experiment there's no way to check the result and there is not a single bubble chamber photography not a single collision data of which anyone outside the community can make sense that has to be on the Internet and the fact that it's not it's a scandal in the 21st century and of course there are two objectives first of all no no you know you have to be an expert to understand the data we have to be an expert you understand the data and this data our detector dependent know the laws of nature not detective dependent and it's your business to make it transparent accessible and formulate it in a language which is without prejudice second objection we do our best but we can hand we can't handle more data it's impossible there's not enough disk space if you pile up the DVDs on top of them off they are okay sorry but who told you to build an experiment too big which produces way more data than can reasonably analyze sorry but whose fault is it that Collider physics has grown to a nonsensical size you don't have enough disk space so let's be more humble put the LAPD data on the Internet put the Gargamel later and on the Internet just go back in history until you have enough disk space okay I would love to see the Gargamel dude I would love to be PC data I would love to see later month's neutrino experiment on the internet I would love to be hosted this collision experiment if not to anyone else I think this is your business to the taxpayer you owe to the taxpayer thanks for your patience any comments got there that's what makes it different from we this right first we try and then yeah I mean you're perfectly correct that's how science actually works and that's how it's described by Thomas Kuhn because people tend to collect data to to to fit their parameters to the data but it's not that the true progress to true progress is in here think about geocentric astronomy think about the epicycles think about how many parameters those guys collected and it was not the progress in refining the epicycles that led her physics revolution but it was some guy who thought that the planets might turn around the Sun not the earth now first of all yeah first 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 in a 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 epicycles let it be it's okay that's how science is

Channel: Unzicker's Real Physics

Views: 40,569

Rating: 4.4960318 out of 5

Keywords: Particle Physics (Field Of Study), Higgs Boson (Idea)

Id: 0NOaYu-AxsI

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 31 2014