Hey Cancer, quit trying to destroy the universe!

[Cancer]

Roll 3d6 once every million years.  On a 17 or 18, asteroid impact renders extinct all the land-living species whose average adult body mass is 25 kg or larger.

[unclevlad]

16 minutes ago, Cancer said:

Roll 3d6 once every million years.  On a 17 or 18, asteroid impact renders extinct all the land-living species whose average adult body mass is 25 kg or larger.

 

We can only hope we last long enough for the next roll....

[Cancer]

Hey, we're talking about planets, not species here.  Not many large creature species last a million years.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Not with that attitude. 

 

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Here's an idea.

 

 

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

 

[Cancer]

They knew they had more than enough strength to do some pretty cool-looking stunts, but they'd been trained that landing on their back would damage the environmental support in the backpack and had a good chance of killing them (perhaps slowly, but not slowly enough to get them back into the spacecraft; the hatchway was too tight).  Some of the more violent thrashing episodes becomes easier to understand with that context.

[Bazza]

No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent new particles is pointless

Sabine Hossenfelder

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/26/physics-particles-physicists

[Cancer]

Well, she made her point early on.  Particular fundamental problems have existed in subatomic physics, and those were solved by hypothesizing unknown particles; antiparticles in general, the neutrino, the Higgs; she doesn't mention the J/psi but that's another example.  Finding new resonances in the subatomic zoo, while useful for some cross-checks, has not been of such fundamental utility since the discovery of the Higgs.

 

There are fundamental problems now, but they are on a different level.  The Standard Model is incomplete ... but we have not been able to reach regimes to point toward hints of where the incompleteness lies nearest our abilities to explore via experiment.  And as much as theoreticians would like to tell you otherwise, it is experiment that has always guided theory toward more fundamental insight.

 

(If you need an example from a different field, go look at theories about planets and planetary physics from the 1950s.  Limited as we were back then to observations from groundbased telescopes with photographic or simple photoelectric detectors, there was lots we could neither know nor guess in that era.)

 

The phenomenon of whipping up speculative particle models from fragmentary accelerator data is practice by the particle theoreticians for when something real comes.  It's like practices in pro sports.  No one is all that interested in them, but you gotta do those in order to stay in shape for the real deal.

 

 

[DShomshak]

Apart from the Higgs detection, the most challenging recent particle physics experimental results this interested layman has heard about have been negative.

 

After 20 years of increasingly sensitive experiments, proton decay (predicted by attempted Grand Unified Theories) has not been detected. Every year without detection forces theoreticians to revise their estimates for the half-life of the proton, but maybe it's time to consider that protons never decay, and the GUTs are just plain wrong. Re-examine assumptions.

 

Supersymmetry was another big ide pushed by many theoretical physicists. I am not sure how positing supermassive boson counterparts for every fermion, and fermion counterparts to every boson, was supposed to resolve the awkward aspects of the Standard Model, but I'll take their word that it would. Only the Large Hadron Collider is now well into the energy range in which supersymmetry particles were supposed to appear, and they aren't. The theories can always be re-jiggered, but -- again, I hope more theorists are trying to figure out what the next step might be if they accept that supersymmetry is just plain wrong.

 

The failure to detect Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which would have worked so well as dark matter, is aggravating but perhaps should have been expected. For theists, the inability to find anything that fits the needed properties and observations might lead to this hypothesis: "God is just messing with us."

 

The best positive result I've heard of that might point toward new physics is the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. Of course some have suggested, "Aha, undiscovered particles!" But I suspect -- based on, well, nothing but esthetics -- that the truth will turn out to be much stranger.

[Cancer]

The first experiments attempting to see proton decay came along at just the right time to see something unforeseeable, and that was the neutrino burst from supernova 1987A.    At one stroke, those detections told you beyond all doubt that yes, we have the correct general idea about how Type II supernovae work. 

 

It happens -- rarely -- that a new technology gives you a result out of the clear blue sky that is that unambiguous about a deeply mysterious problem.  The confluence of LIGO and VIRGO and the Fermi and INTEGRAL spacecraft, followed by just about every top-grade telescope of every wavelength band in detecting GW170817 and settling on a site for r-process nucleosynthesis was another.  I don't begrudge my particle physics comrades a nickel, even though they themselves are frustrated that their efforts haven't done as much as they hoped within their own bailiwick.  After all, we astronomers gave them (via the solar neutrino problem) the key case for nailing down neutrino flavor oscillations, which was a stunning and unforeseen result in itself.

 

Now, if only we knew what GRB080319B was, and why it beckoned to Arthur C Clarke a few hours before his passing...

[Bazza]

The chance for any successful grand unified theory of physics…is zero. It’s design precludes any GUT from realistically getting off the ground. 

[Old Man]

36 minutes ago, Bazza said:

The chance for any successful grand unified theory of physics…is zero. It’s design precludes any GUT from realistically getting off the ground. 

 

Congratulations sir, here is your Nobel Prize in Physics®.

[Bazza]

Cheers…I would like to thank the Academy, the Nobel committee, as well as my middle school science teacher Brother Burn. 
 

And my music teacher was Brother Bible. 

[BoloOfEarth]

18 hours ago, DShomshak said:

The failure to detect Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which would have worked so well as dark matter, is aggravating but perhaps should have been expected. For theists, the inability to find anything that fits the needed properties and observations might lead to this hypothesis: "God is just messing with us."

 

Though you do have to appreciate the naming of those particles, having the acronym WIMPs.  I'm reminded of Grant Ward:  "It means someone really wanted our initials to spell out "S.H.I.E.L.D."."

[Cancer]

It pays in this context to recall that around the same time that the WIMP acronym was coined (in the 1980s, IIRC), another one was coined as well, MACHOs, which stands for MAssive Compact Halo Objects.  MACHOs are (by assumption) stellar-mass objects but dark, so seeing them is challenging.  While WIMPs presumably would be present everywhere in the Universe, MACHOs as initially hypothesized are present in galaxies only, being the end product of some processes in stellar evolution or perhaps star formation.

 

(There is no reason to say that the existence -- or nonexistence -- of one sort of the two objects rules out (or in) the other, BTW.)

 

MACHOs in our galaxy can be searched for with groundbased optical telescopes on Earth, and at least two such observing programs were operated (and may still be going).  The technique is to stare at a piece of sky (both looked at the same place, through a "window" towards the galactic center) and look for gravitational lensing events.  One such project ran in the 1990s; the other was started about the same time but is still going, I think.  (There may be a third such project as well.)  They found some, but not enough of them to "Be The Dark Matter" that is responsible for the too-rapid rotation of the galactic disk.

 

WIMPs, if they exist, would be too diffuse to cause gravitational lensing of sources within our galaxy.

 

Both of them, however, could be dark matter that is seen in the lensing by galaxies and galaxy clusters.  See the book Einstein's Telescope by Evalyn Gates for a readable discussion of that.

 

[Bazza]

On 10/11/2022 at 10:38 AM, DShomshak said:

The failure to detect Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which would have worked so well as dark matter, is aggravating but perhaps should have been expected. For theists, the inability to find anything that fits the needed properties and observations might lead to this hypothesis: "God is just messing with us."

 

I'm not sure what theism has to do with the first sentence here. Can you elaborate? 

[DShomshak]

Yeah, that was a bit more of a jump than I intended. I'll try to fill in the blanks.

 

I gather that attempts to explain dark matter using stuff that's known to exist have not gone well. As Cancer says, gravitational lensing studies haven't found enough MACHOS. IIRC there are also arguments that if there was enough normal matter in the universe to supply the needed gravity, this would have altered the proportions of helium and lithium produced in the very early universe, though such arguments are well beyond my Physics 101 level of understanding. Simulations assuming "hot dark matter" don't generate a recognizable universe, so that rules out neutrinos. And so on. So theoretical physicists have become steadily more speculative. WIMPS were one such. (There was an experiment to detect them, based on the premise that once in a very rare while two WIMPs would collide and make particles that could be detected... though it's beyond me how you know what to look for, when you don't know the masses or other properties of the WIMPs.) Or swarms of quantum black holes that are individually too small to be detected through gravitational lensing. Or let's try modifying gravity so it works differently on the necessary scales.

 

Okay, some of these are marginally testable, but the more ad-hoc the proposals, the more I think of how the properties of the luminiferous ether got steadily more contradictory. And when the proposed dark matters become even more otherwise-undetectable, I get impatient and mutter, "Yeah, but legions of angels moving the stars and galaxies would also explain the observations." Because the proposals seem less and less like science, and more like miracles clad in technobabble.

 

It isn't just dark matter. I'm annoyed by physicists making confident pronouncements about multiverses, string theory, what dark energy means for the fate of the universe, and similar speculations. As one of my friends puts it, they've slid from theoretical physics to theological physics. A faith that they can slip the surly bonds of observation and experiment to encompass the universe (and more!) by pure math.

 

Arguing for divine intervention wouldn't be scientific either, but it might be more honest. Not that the "God of the Gaps" hypothesis has a great track record either...

 

Or just admit that at this point, we don't know, and don't even know how to find out.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Old Man]

1 hour ago, DShomshak said:

 

Okay, some of these are marginally testable, but the more ad-hoc the proposals, the more I think of how the properties of the luminiferous ether got steadily more contradictory. And when the proposed dark matters become even more otherwise-undetectable, I get impatient and mutter, "Yeah, but legions of angels moving the stars and galaxies would also explain the observations." Because the proposals seem less and less like science, and more like miracles clad in technobabble.

 

As a frustrated SF writer I love dark energy for precisely this reason.  It could be anything.  It could be the luminiferous ether.  It could be the souls of the damned.  It could be the effect of parallel universes in contact with ours.  It could be the sum total of all consciousness in existence. 

 

 

1 hour ago, DShomshak said:

 

It isn't just dark matter. I'm annoyed by physicists making confident pronouncements about multiverses, string theory, what dark energy means for the fate of the universe, and similar speculations. As one of my friends puts it, they've slid from theoretical physics to theological physics. A faith that they can slip the surly bonds of observation and experiment to encompass the universe (and more!) by pure math.

 

The universe obviously does follow logic and mathematics, it's just a question of getting the math that explains one part of it to mesh with the math that explains the other part.  "Encompassing the universe by pure math" is literally what Einstein and others did--create mathematical models of the universe that were then verified (or not) by experiment.  Otherwise there is nothing to use to guide your experiments.

[Cancer]

And as Einstein once said, A theoretician's most important tool is his wastebasket.  A mathematically beautiful theory need not be correct.

[Bazza]

5 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Yeah, that was a bit more of a jump than I intended. I'll try to fill in the blanks.

 

I gather that attempts to explain dark matter using stuff that's known to exist have not gone well. As Cancer says, gravitational lensing studies haven't found enough MACHOS. IIRC there are also arguments that if there was enough normal matter in the universe to supply the needed gravity, this would have altered the proportions of helium and lithium produced in the very early universe, though such arguments are well beyond my Physics 101 level of understanding. Simulations assuming "hot dark matter" don't generate a recognizable universe, so that rules out neutrinos. And so on. So theoretical physicists have become steadily more speculative. WIMPS were one such. (There was an experiment to detect them, based on the premise that once in a very rare while two WIMPs would collide and make particles that could be detected... though it's beyond me how you know what to look for, when you don't know the masses or other properties of the WIMPs.) Or swarms of quantum black holes that are individually too small to be detected through gravitational lensing. Or let's try modifying gravity so it works differently on the necessary scales.

 

Okay, some of these are marginally testable, but the more ad-hoc the proposals, the more I think of how the properties of the luminiferous ether got steadily more contradictory. And when the proposed dark matters become even more otherwise-undetectable, I get impatient and mutter, "Yeah, but legions of angels moving the stars and galaxies would also explain the observations." Because the proposals seem less and less like science, and more like miracles clad in technobabble.

 

It isn't just dark matter. I'm annoyed by physicists making confident pronouncements about multiverses, string theory, what dark energy means for the fate of the universe, and similar speculations. As one of my friends puts it, they've slid from theoretical physics to theological physics. A faith that they can slip the surly bonds of observation and experiment to encompass the universe (and more!) by pure math.

 

Arguing for divine intervention wouldn't be scientific either, but it might be more honest. Not that the "God of the Gaps" hypothesis has a great track record either...

 

Or just admit that at this point, we don't know, and don't even know how to find out.

 

Dean Shomshak

Hi Dean

 

I’ve come across both in physics and other science disciplines similar, you may call it, criticisms, so you are not the only one who feels this way. One phrase (like yourself, I’m sure) I have referred to it as it “ad hoc hypothesis”, that is: unproven theories are extended to other unsubstantiated theories to the point that as there is no experiment(s) to validate these theories. This is resulting in an ‘idealist’ science and an experimental ‘realist’ science, with the former dominating the later. 

 

Regarding your statements: : “more like miracles clad in technobabble” & “they've slid from theoretical physics to theological physics”. I do like the phrase “theological physics” but it raises issues for me. If I’m reading you correctly, it seems that your issue would be that science doesn’t have a firm ontology or a more robust epistemology to differentiate these theories and/or scientists are making philosophical pronouncements without philosophical training.  

 

I’ve come across three mentions in different texts to a “dark matter/dark energy”. One is from the footnote to a Gnostic apocalypse (vision quest) referring back to Pseudo-Dionysius as his “dark ray”. Another is in the Celtic Christian tradition to the darkness of creation between fiat lux and the light of the sun, which would be a “dark light”. And the third is with reference to Pythagoras. These would be best to be seen as qualities and ontologically vertical to quantity (like form is to matter). I remember you wrote a Hero sourcebook with the Kabbalah and if I were to speculate further, I’d suggest these three references may be similar to the “dark light” before Keter or the essence of Da’at (remembering the congruence between them).

 

If I find some videos I’ll send them too you.

[DShomshak]

Well, I wouldn't say the problem is with science as such, as with certain scientists who, as you say, link untestable theory to untestable theory in webs of speculation. Though some of this may be an artifact of science journalism: Wild-ass guesses about possible solutions to problems make better stories than careful explanations of the problems themselves.

 

I do respect theoreticians who try to make testable predictions. Like, several years ago Scientific American ran an article by a theoretical physicist working on multiverse theory and inflationary cosmology -- the idea that the Big Bang never stopped banging and is is still eternally spitting out new universes. He links it with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: His hypothesis is that these are the same thing. Which sounds very handwavey, but he says the existence of these parallel universes should produce subtle but detectable effects on the structure of our observable universe -- something astronomers can actually look for to confirm or falsify the theory. So I think he's still doing real science and not just playing with math.

 

(I am aware of the arrogance of an interested layman offering judgments about what counts as "real science." What the heck, it's the internet. Mouthing off about subjects in which one has no expertise is part of the fun.)

 

Dean Shomshak

[Ternaugh]

19 hours ago, Cancer said:

And as Einstein once said, A theoretician's most important tool is his wastebasket.  A mathematically beautiful theory need not be correct.

 

Mathematics!

 

 

[Bazza]

10 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Well, I wouldn't say the problem is with science as such, as with certain scientists who, as you say, link untestable theory to untestable theory in webs of speculation. Though some of this may be an artifact of science journalism: Wild-ass guesses about possible solutions to problems make better stories than careful explanations of the problems themselves.

I acknowledge your point, however from my experience of looking into the formation of science it is an issue of science itself. I know of two scientists that have been critical of quantum mechanics, and I’ll try to find them for you, as this may assist you to understand my perspective. 

 

10 hours ago, DShomshak said:

I do respect theoreticians who try to make testable predictions. Like, several years ago Scientific American ran an article by a theoretical physicist working on multiverse theory and inflationary cosmology -- the idea that the Big Bang never stopped banging and is is still eternally spitting out new universes. He links it with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: His hypothesis is that these are the same thing. Which sounds very handwavey, but he says the existence of these parallel universes should produce subtle but detectable effects on the structure of our observable universe -- something astronomers can actually look for to confirm or falsify the theory. So I think he's still doing real science and not just playing with math.

I tried looking for the Scientific American article and came up empty handed. If you can find it I can offer specific comment. From your description I’d suggest that it is more philosophy of science, than science. Further I wonder how one could falsify the multi-worlds theory, as by its definition, there could always be a world that proves it. It seems to be circular reasoning, and would amount disprove a negative. Thirdly the usage of “eternal” amounts to a red herring as eternity is essentially without quantity and thus unmeasurable. how can you falsify an unmeasurable entity?  
 

Eternity, likewise aeviternity are thus issues dealt with in philosophy, specifically Scholasticism (Cf: Scholarly paper by: Henryk Anzulewicz, . "Aeternitas - aevum - tempus. The Concept of Time in the System of Albert the Great". The Medieval Concept of Time: Studies on the Scholastic Debate and Its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy. Ed. Pasquale Porro. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001.)

 

10 hours ago, DShomshak said:

(I am aware of the arrogance of an interested layman offering judgments about what counts as "real science." What the heck, it's the internet. Mouthing off about subjects in which one has no expertise is part of the fun.)

 

Dean Shomshak

Likewise*. I overcome this by reading good scholarship & those considered authorities.
 

*@Cancer & @Pariah stop laughing. 

[DShomshak]

21 hours ago, Bazza said:

I tried looking for the Scientific American article and came up empty handed. If you can find it I can offer specific comment. From your description I’d suggest that it is more philosophy of science, than science. Further I wonder how one could falsify the multi-worlds theory, as by its definition, there could always be a world that proves it. It seems to be circular reasoning, and would amount disprove a negative. Thirdly the usage of “eternal” amounts to a red herring as eternity is essentially without quantity and thus unmeasurable. how can you falsify an unmeasurable entity?  

Fortunately, I photocopy articles that interest me. It's in Scientific American, June 2017; author Yasunori Nomura.

 

In the introduction, he quotes Alan Guth, one of the founders of inflationary cosmology, on one of the admittedly philosophical problems that have developed with it: "In an eternally inflating universe, anything that can happen will happen; in fact, it will happen an infinite number of times." You'd have to ask Dr Guth about his knowledge of Scholastic philosophy. 😂 Nomura simply notes that a theory that gives equal probability to every possible event in the multiverse "tells you nothing about what will go on in our specific world."

 

Nomura's own two-sentence summary of his theory is that "The multiverse and quantum many worlds are really the same thing -- superposition -- occuring at vastly different scales. In this new picture, our world is only one of all possible worlds that are allowed by the fundamental principles of quantum physics and that exist simultaneously in probability space."

 

Perhaps his most important claim, though, is that his theory is testable. It predicts a slight negative curvature of space. Current measurements suggest space is flat within current limits of measurement, but that precision could well be improved by two orders of magnitude in the near future. Detecting any negative curvature will support the theory (though not prove it conclusively). "Conventional" inflationary cosmology also predicts negative curvature of space, but "many orders of magnitude smaller than we can hope to measure." Positive curvature, of any degree, would falsify his theory (and, perhaps, all inflationary theories: Nomura says they demand that all universes have negative curvature.)

 

Nomura admits that some of the further implications of his theory, such as time being a local illusion within the universe, are "speculative." But I give him credit for laying out an observation that would make his theory just plain wrong, without trying to patch it.

 

Nomura's article makes a good double feature with another article from earlier that year,February 2017, by Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt, and Abraham Loeb. Steinhardt is one of the early architects of inflationary cosmology, but he's now calling bullpucky on it, based both on the observations from the Planck satellite and the broader point that a theory which predicts everything and anything, predicts nothing. The authors make some tart comments about "non-empirical science" suggest it's time to seek other approaches to cosmology. And wow, they set the cat among the pigeons! The next issue featured an angry letter signed by dozens of cosmologists who thought the critique of inflationary theory was most unfair. Nomura was among the signatories.

 

If I really cared, I might spend a few years trying to work up the math and physics chops to at least venture an informed opinion as to who's just blowing smoke. As it is, I'm only at the make-popcorn-and-watch-the show level of interest. I'll look into it again if I think of a novel way to use the theories for gaming.

 

Dean Shomshak