First collisions at the LHC with unprecedented Energy! (Ask a particle physisicist)

[Alex K]

The conference isn't over yet, maybe something interesting still comes out...

[account_inactive]

Good luck!

[SteelCurtain]

Is it really bad for physics, though? Doesn't it just mean that our current understanding is closer to reality? Or by bad for science, do you mean 'a lot of excitement just disappeared?'

[Excited Penguin]

So..I'm thinking...bad?

Yes, it means that any one of us could disappear into nonexistence at any moment, even the next second, if we're one of the extremely unlucky ones in this cosmos.

[Excited Penguin]

Is it really bad for physics, though? Doesn't it just mean that our current understanding is closer to reality? Or by bad for science, do you mean 'a lot of excitement just disappeared?'

I don't see how that follows. If a new particle was discovered, science would advance, there's no reason to celebrate that our current understanding appears to be closer to reality, when there's reason to believe it could be even closer.

[Minimalist]

Yes. Haha, no

let's take it step by step.

Go slowly.  Remember my age.

[SteelCurtain]

I don't see how that follows. If a new particle was discovered, science would advance, there's no reason to celebrate that our current understanding appears to be closer to reality, when there's reason to believe it could be even closer.

True, it only appears to be closer. My point is that I don't think it's a blow, it may only be a neutral discovery. This isn't a hindrance to the advancement of science, it just means it won't advance in this particular direction.

It must be a blow to certain physicists who really thought that that original data was more than an anomaly. But I don't think it's a blow to science in general.

[Excited Penguin]

I don't see how that follows. If a new particle was discovered, science would advance, there's no reason to celebrate that our current understanding appears to be closer to reality, when there's reason to believe it could be even closer.

True, it only appears to be closer. My point is that I don't think it's a blow, it may only be a neutral discovery. This isn't a hindrance to the advancement of science, it just means it won't advance in this particular direction.

It must be a blow to certain physicists who really thought that that original data was more than an anomaly. But I don't think it's a blow to science in general.

Yeah, I agree with that. Now I don't know why we were arguing.

[SteelCurtain]

Were we?

[Alex K]

In principle, you should be right... but here's the fear everyone has right now -

Before the Higgs particle was discovered, we knew not only that our understanding of nature was incomplete, but also that new phenomena, be it a Higga boson or something else taking its place, had to appear at the energy range which the LHC could probe - simply because the theory without the Higgs boson breaks down at a point that was within range of experiments, so anything would have been a discovery. This was informally called the "no lose theorem" for the LHC.

Now that they have found something that looks just like the Higgs boson, the theory is mathematically complete.

Now, there are several open questions left, most notably what is dark matter made of, and also, why is there matter but no antimatter. The big question is now - do these phenomena have answers that can be discovered in a man made lab like the LHC or are they so far removed that you'd need a collider the size of the moon to investigate them? There is no guarantee that nature is set up in a way that we can glimpse these things, unlike with the higgs. A new boson would have been a signal - new physical phenomena are indeed accessible to man! It would have cracked the window to these questions wide open. Now, we're back to the place where there might be no new discoveries in the forseeable future.

I don't see how that follows. If a new particle was discovered, science would advance, there's no reason to celebrate that our current understanding appears to be closer to reality, when there's reason to believe it could be even closer.

True, it only appears to be closer. My point is that I don't think it's a blow, it may only be a neutral discovery. This isn't a hindrance to the advancement of science, it just means it won't advance in this particular direction.

It must be a blow to certain physicists who really thought that that original data was more than an anomaly. But I don't think it's a blow to science in general.