What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? (This is why I lost faith in science.)

If you follow the news about

particle

physics

then you know that they come in three types: either they haven't found

what

they were looking for or they have thought of something new to look for and then report that they haven't found it or it's something so boring that you don't even finish from reading the headline how come

particle

physicists constantly make

wrong

predictions and

what

will happen next? That's what we'll talk about today. The list of things that particle physicists said should exist but that no one has ever seen is very long. There are no supersymmetric particles, no proton decay, no weak Dark Matter particles, no axioms, no sterile neutrinos, so So, there is as much evidence for any of them as there is for Bigfoot, although Bigfoot probably would have given me more insights, some particle physicists even predicted non-particles and such. nor were they found it has been

going

on like

this

for 50 years since the 1970s in the 1970s particle

physics

completed what is now called the standard model the standard model of particle physics compiles all the fundamental particles of which it is made matter and its interactions when the model was completed not all of these particles had yet been measured, but one after another it was experimentally confirmed that W and that the bosons were discovered in 1983 at CERN, the top quark was discovered in 1995 at the formula and the last one was the Higgs boson, which was founded soon in 2012.

It was the final nail in the coffin of the standard model. There are no more particles left to search for, but particle physicists believe there would be more to find. In fact, I'm guessing most of them still believe

this

today or at least tell you they already believe it. In the 1970s, they said the standard model wasn't good enough because it brings together three different fundamental forces: the electromagnetic, the strong and weak nuclear. Particle physicists wanted them to unify into a single force. Why, because better theories that combine these three forces would be called Grand Unified Theories.

You obtain them by postulating a greater symmetry than the standard model. Grandian fighting theories, for short, reproduced the summit model at the range at which it had been tested. already, but it led to deviations in untested ranges, I would say that at that time it was reasonable to attempt Grant's unification because the principles of symmetry had worked well in physics in the past, the standard model itself was born from the principles of symmetry and , although Einstein himself did, that guy again did not use symmetry arguments, today we understand his theories as realizations of certain symmetries, but this time more symmetries did not work.

The grand unified theories made a prediction which is that one of the constituents of atomic nuclei, the proton, is unstable to begin with. In the 1980s, experiments looked for proton decay, they didn't see it, this ruled out several models for Grant's unification, but you can make those models more complicated so they are still compatible with observations, that's what the particle physicists and that's where the problems began. It was the Axion, the standard model contains about two dozen numbers that must be determined through experiments. One of them is known as the Theta parameter. Experimentally it has been found to be zero or so small that it is indistinguishable from zero.

If it were not zero, then strong nuclear energy. force would violate a symmetry known as CP symmetry, that the Theta parameter is zero or very small, it is known as the strong CP problem, it is actually not a problem because the standard model works fine by simply setting the stutter parameter to zero, but Particle physicists I don't like small numbers, it's a feeling I'm sure most of us have experienced when looking at our bank statements, but particle physicists are a little more tolerant, accepting small numbers if there is a mechanism that allows them. small, the standard model has no such mechanism.

That is why to make the small theater parameter acceptable, particle physicists added a mechanism to the standard model that forced the parameter to be small, but one consequence of this modification was the existence of a new particle to which Frank Wilcheck named Axion in 1978. on the axis of symmetry of the mechanism and the name of an American laundry detergent because the Axion particle was a particularly clean solution, unfortunately the Axion turned out not to exist, if the Axion existed, neutron stars This argument, the Axion, was experimentally discarded almost as quickly as it was introduced in 1980, but physicists did not abandon the Axion, as with Grant's unification, they changed the theory so that it raised the experimental constraints under which the new type of Axion was introduced. 1981 and was originally called the harmless Axion, back then it was for someone called The Invisible Axion, but nowadays the Axion is often simply captured.

Many experiments have searched and continue to search for these invisible axioms. None were detected, but physicists are still searching for their invisible friends. By the way, we will verify that he invented another particle in 1982 which he called Femalon. No one discovered that another misconception that particle physicists came up with in the 1970s is supersymmetry. Supersymmetry postulates that all particles in the standard model have an associated particle. The idea was dead on arrival because those associated particles have the same masses as the standard motor particles to which they belong. If they existed, they would have appeared in the first particle colliders, so they did not have supersymmetry.

Therefore, the supersymmetry was immediately modified so that the pair of supersymmetric particles would have much larger masses. High energies are needed to produce heavy particles, so large particle colliders would be needed to see those heavy supersymmetric particles. The first supersymmetric models made predictions that were tested in the 1990s at the Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN those predictions were falsified supersymmetry was then modified again to prevent the falsified processes from occurring. The Tevatron was supposed to find them at the next larger collider, which didn't happen; then they were supposed to appear at the Large Hadron Collider and that didn't happen either.

Physicists continued to change and demand those super-symmetric models so that they did not conflict with new data. The reason particle physicists liked supersymmetry, apart from the fact that it is clearly abbreviated to Susi, was that they themselves stated what is known as the hierarchy problem, that's the thing. of why the mass of the Higgs boson is so much smaller than the Planck mass, one can well say why not and, in fact, there is no reason why the mass of the Higgs boson should not be the constant of the nature, it is one of those three parameters in the standard model.

This means you can't predict it, you just go and measure it. Supersymmetry doesn't change anything about it. The mass of the Higgs boson is still a free parameter in the supersymmetric extensions of the standard model and you still can't predict it. Supersymmetry, therefore, does not. explains the mass of the Higgs boson you measure it and that starts then there are all kinds of Dark Matter particles one type that is particularly popular is called massive particles that interact weekly weak for short experiments have been looking for weak since the 1980s and have not found them found Every time an experiment came back empty-handed, particle physicists claimed that the particles interacted a little more weakly and said they needed a better detector.

There are more experiments where I have looked for all kinds of other particles they contain only to not find them. there are headlines about this literally every two weeks the panda x40 experiment looked for light fermionic dark matter they didn't find it the stereo experiment looked for sterile neutrinos they didn't find them CDX didn't find weak light Hess didn't find any evidence of weak annihilation the microscope experiment didn't find the fifth force an experiment called Sensai did not find dark matter sub GV and so on the pattern is this particle physicists invent particles they make predictions for those invented particles and when these predictions are falsified they changed the model and made new predictions they say it is good

science

because These hypotheses are falsifiable.

I'm afraid most believe this, but just because the hypothesis is falsifiable doesn't mean it's good

science

and no, no, Dad didn't say that a hypothesis that is falsifiable is also scientific he said that a hypothesis that is scientific is also testable in case If you are a particle physicist here is a diagram that should serve as an example tomorrow you will receive a thousand dollars from my friend the prince of Nigeria falsifiable but it is not scientific, the best way to see that what particle physicists are doing is not good science is to notice that it is not working.

Good scientists should learn from their failures, but particle physicists have been making the same mistake for 50 years, but why not? working, I will try to illustrate this with a simple sketch. If you understand the next two minutes, you can outsmart most particle physicists, and you don't want to miss that opportunity. You think you have a bunch of data and you fit a model to If the model is this curve, you can think of the model as an algorithm with input parameters if you want or just as a set of equations that you solve by hand. Either way, it's a lot of mathematical assumptions if you make a more complicated model by adding the more assumptions you can fit the data the better, but the more complicated the model becomes, the less useful it will eventually be.

The model is more complicated than the data at this point. you can adjust anything and the model is completely useless. This is called overfitting. The model is one that strikes a balance between the simplicity of the model and the precision of the fit. Let's assume it's this one. If you get new data and the data doesn't agree with what was previously your best model, then you improve the model. This is normal scientific practice. and this is probably what particle physicists think they are doing, but it is not what they are doing. The current best model is the standard model and all the data agree with it, so there is no reason to change it.

This is what they are doing. Instead, let's imagine that this curve is the standard model and this is all the existing data and imagine that we have a particle physicist, let's call him Bob. Bob says that's fine, but we haven't reviewed the model here and he says that he could make this model more complicated so that the curve is inserted this way or that or any other way. I'll pick this one, call it my prediction and hey, I'll post it on PRL. Why do I predict it? Because I can, because you see, my model agrees with all the data.

This prediction could be correct, true, and it is falsifiable, therefore I am a good scientist and all of Bob's friends with all their different predictions say the same thing, they are all good scientists, each and every one of them and as a result From all that good science, they get any possible prediction, then they do an experiment with the data they receive and if you only knew it, they agree with the standard model and Bob and all his friends say, "Well, don't worry, we'll update our prediction." now that the deviations are in this range where we have not measured it yet we need larger experiments and I will also write a new article about it what is the problem with that procedure the problem is that those models with all their different predictions are unnecessarily complicated they should never have been proposed are not scientific hypotheses, they are invented stories like that of my friend the prince of Nigeria who would send you money tomorrow although if you send me a hundred dollars today I will talk to him again.

There are only two justifications for making a more complicated model, the first is if it is already has data that requires it, we can call this an inconsistency with the data, the second is if the model does not work correctly, makes several predictions that contradict each other or no prediction at all, we can call this an internal prediction. inconsistency and that's what goes

wrong

in particle physics. They have no justification for making the standard model more complicated when they do. However, it doesn't work because that's not how science works. If you change a good model, then that change should be an improvement.

It's not a complication. I think the reason they don't realize what they're doing is that they've invented all these pseudo-problems that complicated models are supposed to solve, like the lack of unification or some parameters being small. These are not real problems. because they don't prevent them from making predictions with the standard model, they are just aesthetic misgivings. In fact, if you look at the list of unsolved problems in the foundations of physics on Wikipedia, most of the problems on the list are pseudoproblems.I have a list of real problems from pseudo-problems that I'll link to in the information below, and there are some real problems in the fundamentals of physics, but they're hard to solve and particle physicists don't seem to like working on them. in them. but then I repeat myself, I have been giving many talks about this, it has not made me friends among particle physicists, but it is not that I am against particle physics, I like particle physics, that is why I talk about those problems, it bothers me that we are not here.

Progressing, there are some common answers I get from particle physicists. The first is to simply deny that anything is wrong because they are writing so many articles and holding so many conferences, or argue that sometimes it just takes a little time. a long time to find evidence for a new prediction, for example, it took more than 30 years from the neutrino hypothesis to its confirmation, it took half a century to directly detect gravitational waves, etc., but both objections are beside the point.The problem is not It's just that it's taking a long time, the problem is that particle physicists make all these wrong predictions and think that everything stays the same.

The next objection they usually raise is that yes, there are all these wrong predictions, but that's not the case. The only thing that matters is that we haven't tested the standard model in this or that range and we should. The problem with this argument is that there are thousands of possible tests we could do in physics and they all cost money sometimes. With lots of money we must decide which tests are the most promising and most likely to lead to progress. That's why we need good predictions about where something new can be found, and why all those wrong predictions are a problem that particle physicists are familiar with.

Of course, predictions are important because that's why they always claim that some new experiment will be able to rule out this or that particle, even though they usually don't mention that there was no reason to think those particles existed in the first place, other than in what. other discipline of science we excuse thousands of erroneous predictions by saying that it doesn't matter? Another common response I get from particle physicists is that it doesn't matter that all those models are wrong because we know why they're working on it. You might stumble upon something else that's interesting and possible, but it's not a good strategy for knowledge discovery, as I've said several times, in fact it doesn't work, and if that's really the motivation for your work, then I think They should put this in their project proposals.

Hey, I don't actually think those particles I'm talking about here exist, but please give me money anyway because I'm smart and maybe while I'm writing useless articles I'll have a good idea. about something completely different, I'm sure another objection that particle physicists often raise is that this assumption worked in the past, but if you look at past predictions about the foundations of physics that turned out to be correct and that not simply confirm an existing theory, then they were those who made a necessary change to the theory, the Higgs boson, for example, is necessary for the standard model to work.

The empty particles predicted by The Rock are necessary to make quantum mechanics compatible with special relativity. Neutrinos were necessary to explain the observations, it takes three generations of quarks to explain CP violation, etc., but the physicists who made those predictions didn't always know that it doesn't matter, the point is that we can learn from this, he tells us. That a good strategy is to focus on the necessary changes in a model, those that resolve an inconsistency with the data or an internal inconsistency. One last objection I want to mention usually comes not from particle physicists but from people in other fields who think we need all these models to explain darkness. matter, but that is mixing two different things, we need dark matter or a modification of gravity to explain the observations in astrophysics and cosmology, but if it is dark matter, then the only thing we need to explain the observations is how the mass is distributed, the data is about the particles.

If they exist, they are unnecessary, what particle physicists do is guess at these unnecessary details, they assume, for example, that those particles will be produced in some particle collider, which then does not happen, so what will happen to physicists? of particles if you extrapolate from their past behavior to the future then the best prediction of what will happen is nothing they will continue to do the same thing they have been doing for the last 50 years they will still not work governments realize that particle physics is consuming a lot of money nothing in return the funding will collapse people will leave in the end many people are intimidated by physics, don't do it, it's not magic and if you didn't understand it in school, maybe the way they teach it in school school was not the right approach for you if you want to try a new learning approach take a look at shiny courses, who have sponsored this video, shiny has a great variety of courses on science and maths, it's a fresh and fun method To learn something new or refresh long-standing knowledge, all of their courses come with interactive visualizations so you really get a feel for what's

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