I only have an amateur interest in physics, so I'm sorry if this sounds dumb, but I often think about what if we've reached as far as we can go within the current framework of physics? This is more meta-science than actual science, but what if we made some decisions very early in the development of physics and mathematics and we need to revisit those?
For all terrestrial phenomena that we have observe so far we have a theory of everything.
In order to put matter into a state where it behaves in such a way that you can tell the difference between two competing theories that describe the world, you have to build the LHC. Anything less than that and the theories all are perfectly good at describing what we see.
I think there is a tendency to misunderstand LHC and it's high energies as somehow being "brute force". High energy really just means small structures. It's better to think of it as the worlds best microscope. LIGO is the worlds best ruler. So we're measuring the world and it's matter to an unfathomable precision and we do not see meaningful divergence between theory and experiment.
We know there is more out there, but it's not stuff we can study on earth. That's the single biggest problem.
We used to make gasoline by heating oil very very hot and separating it. As long as you can keep it away from oxygen we don’t explode.
But now we have catalysts that allow us to get more gas from the same oil, and with less heat. Less energy for a bigger gain.
Big, hot, smashy, explodey things are good for a proof of concept, but for a practical application we want to make them smaller and lower energy (per unit) then scale them up huge (more units) and keep the energy down (magnitude + per unit).
Can you make these particles in a different environment? Can you move some of the embodied energy into a material? Can you reuse that material? All of these are good questions. If we answer them then the next LHC maybe doesn’t have to be an order of magnitude bigger and power hungry in order to see over the next horizon. Maybe 2x would do it.
At issue here is the fact that what physicists need to conduct experiments is not more data, but different data. To study higher energy levels, more energetic particles are needed. Generating more particles at similar energy levels and producing more data is not without value, and has been the work of the last few years at the LHC, but is considered unlikely to turn up surprises since it’s data about particles at a similar energy level to previous runs.
Now that you mention this, would an accelerator in space need walls? Could you make it from a series of big circles (maybe solenoids?) at distances of a million kilometers apart or so? Neptune's orbit is about 15 billion km long, so, you'd need about 15k of such loops. In free fall they would just go around the Sun, so you'd only need to maintain their perfect alignment with some minute adjustments.
Is there some reason to think that the only way to get higher energy collisions is by scaling the accelerators? Is there any possibility that we may be able to get to higher energies with earth-scale experiments?
The limiting factor is the strength of magnetic fields you can achieve. The more momentum the particles have, the stronger a field you need to bend them into a circular orbit. The attainbale strength is determined by material properties and there is nothing to suggest that we can get orders of magnitude improvement here. The improvements have been quite linear for decades, see the figure here:
And you eventually run into rather fundamental problems of tearing your atoms apart with the magnetic field you create. But I am not up to speed on how close we actually are to these limits.
Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are possible candidate. For example, Oh-My-God particle had energy of a baseball traveling at 100 km/h. 40 million times higher than particle energies of terrestrial accelerators.
For the effort it would be easier to build one around the Earth. Double it up as a driveable highway, rail and electrical infrastructure (and then you can use solar power sold on a global market where one side is always in daylight).
It won't be surprising if we eventually do. A particle accelerator beyond Earth has been often discussed, and recently a paper[0] even sketched such a project for Moon.
Hollywood has vastly overplayed the actual density of asteroid fields. It’s kind of disappointing.
If you build something in a vacuum then you don’t necessarily need a single continuous piece to create a vacuum. If you specced an accelerator a million miles in diameter, the diameter matters from a standpoint of whether we can accelerate the particle sideways fast enough to keep it in the track, but they are also saying they need 3.1 million miles of accelerator hardware. They are implying they can’t lay it out as a crazy straw, but is that because of the lateral acceleration, the interaction between the coils, or the limits of manufacturing?
What if you built a collider in a spherical arrangement, accelerating in three dimensions at once, but 1/3 the diameter? What if the accelerator were broken into sections to dodge asteroids, with a cumulative segment length that added up to the desired total? What if you laid it out like a Spirograph? What if you laid it out like a truncated Spirograph (just bits of the outer circumference)? What if you laid it out like a 3 dimensional truncated Spirograph?
I think this is correct. My sense is that the assumption of _individuation_ is at the core of logic, which then infects all rational thinking. (We add the predicates to "things", and then forget that we added them!)
If there are no individual things, as quantum field theory seems to suggest, what are numbers counting?
What a great video. Thanks! Professor Tong specifically talks about the subject of this article (LHC coming up with bupkis), but five years ago. Seems like he may be being vindicated a little here.
We have found a set of (relatively simple) rules that match (a large part of) reality so well that no matter what we do, we don't seem to be able to get any results that would indicate the rules are wrong or even slightly inaccurate. However, we are almost certain they are wrong, or at least incomplete – but given how well they model reality it would be astonishing if it turned out that we're on a totally wrong track and the actual rules are completely different.
If the pattern Kuhn shows in The Structure of a Scientific Revolution holds, one might presume at some time a crisis will emerge which will influence the development of higher resolution tools and techniques and with them more evidence. The "nightmare" seems like exactly what is outlined as a predictable error in the model - it'll be interesting to see what happens.
I don't think that's what the book says, just that solving problems with the new framework is what makes it popular enough with the next generation.
More specificity or higher resolution is not implied, though it can happen after the paradigm has shifted as a new set of niches are waiting to be explored and filled.
I do believe that's precisely what it says: science adopts a new paradigm with a comprehensive view which predicts most cases, at some point the threshold is reached through normal science where a model falls apart, failing to predict given effects, and probity for answers surrounding that requires new tools (or techniques), which are developed to study the "unpredicted" effects mentioned above and a more comprehensive understanding is developed. At this point there may be a challenge to the paradigm, which yes, may be overturned upon favorable comportment.
See phlogiston. If we fairly assume that measurements are multidimensional and thus techniques to observe new dimensions can be conferred to have increased resolution...
But I'd absolutely concede that I may have misread. But I do believe Kuhn was fairly explicit in detailing this process. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I think your reading is about right, though I'm not sure about your application of it to the current situation. The "crisis" being discussed today in physics is quite different from the ones Kuhn describes--in some ways it is the opposite situation. For Kuhn, as you note, the crisis comes when existing theoretical models prove completely inadequate to make sense of new data, so the old model has to be largely thrown out and a new paradigm built in its place.
Today's crisis in physics (if that's what it is) seems to be that, even though our existing model seems incomplete for theoretical reasons (lack of harmonization between models, for example), it continues to fit all the empirical data we have been able to generate. Really, we are hoping to stumble upon a new paradigm, but we can't seem to make it happen.
Indeed, AFAIK part of the progress, even while their are no discoveries being made, is in having a better-calibrated detector. In part, better statistics yield better calibration.
Perhaps one such decision is that matter is fundamental. There are increasingly substantial cases being made that this is now holding us back in physics, and that we need to consider that consciousness is fundamental, and matter is only a consequence of it. See, for example Hoffman's The Case Against Reality.
I'm not a physicist; but the GP mentioned consciousness as an alternative to matter as the fundamental "substance".
Well, I've come across that idea before; in certain kinds of Buddhism, consciousness is considered fundamental, the senses are created by consciousness, and the material world is projected by consciousness through the senses.
Well, this was explained to me in the context of a particular type of tantric Buddhism; but actually the basic idea is common across most mainstream Buddhism. Most schools teach that the universe is cyclical, and is completely destroyed at the end of an era, before being recreated ex-nihilo. The creation process is started with the appearance of Brahma, who then hallucinates the rest of the universe into existence.
So in that model, it is consciousness, not matter that is fundamental, because the material world cannot come into existence without consciousness.
...so you're just using "Brahma" to refer to the computer that is running the simulation that is the universe. And when the simulation becomes aware of its own condition, it becomes conscious?
This is just rephrasing of the symulation hypothesis in mystical terms and is just as useless as the symulation hypothesis itself (regardless if it's "true" or not).
There's some valuable deeper stuff in hindu and buddhist philosophies, but this set of ideas isn't it (neither valuable nor actually deep, just "exotic" sounding to an extent).
> ...so you're just using "Brahma" to refer to the computer that is running the simulation that is the universe.
That "Brahma" isn't a computer; the model doesn't suggest that the universe is a simulation. You seem to have wedged in an interpretation that is fundamentally materialist, which sort of misses the point; according to this model, consciousness is fundamental. That is what was being discussed.
I agree that it's "mystical" to postulate that consciousness is fundamental; but it's equally mystical to assume that matter is fundamental.
In the Buddhist tradition where I learned this, the Brahma story was just that - a myth. But they treated the "consciousness is fundamental" thing as a core teaching, they elaborated it, and the practices grew out of that view. The tradition was a practice tradition; they shunned metaphysical speculation, and "philosophy" was generally treated as another technique for breaking-down conceptual thought.
This wasn't something you were supposed to believe, or reason about; it was presented as a way of seeing the world (a "view") that was useful in Buddhist practice. In the same tradition, we were taught that all views are provisional.
I was just answering the OP's question about what "fundamental" means in this context. I am not advocating for the view that consciousness is fundamental. I happen to take the view that consciousness exists, and is not an emergent phenomenon; but I don't have a philosophical system built around that idea. It's just that I can't see how the subjective experience of consciousness can emerge from what amounts to a system of levers and gears.
> I agree that it's "mystical" to postulate that consciousness is fundamental; but it's equally mystical to assume that matter is fundamental.
Sure using "matter" like this without defining it is equally mystical. That's why we'd take 'computation' to be "fundamental" or 'the wave function'. "Matter" is just a higher level emergent property of what we perceive.
> I happen to take the view that consciousness exists, and is not an emergent phenomenon
OK, now I see why my viewpoint would sound so "off" to you, we're probably on different extremes of the thinking spectrum :) I don't discard you're viewpoint, it's just so so so so far from mine:
I take most of what we label "reality" to be emergent properties from some kind of fundamental computation (and by "computation" I don't imply a "computer" like we know, just "math that `can run`") whose math is probably too complicated and strange for us to intuitively understand (we can just hope to get to calculate better approximations of it). I don't just see consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. I see matter as an emergent phenomenon. And also space-time itself as an emergent phenomena inside our emergent consciusnesses. The "fundamental" could just very well be something like the simplest celular automaton with non-periodict behavior or maybe something too strange for our ape-minds to ever be able to comprehend (or too simple to understand how it could be the basis - there could be enough complexity/structure in just 'the distribution of all the prime numbers' or 'the digits of pi' to contain our entire universe with its infinite past and future "inside of it").
And to clarify, "simulation" is also quite generalizable - a simulation is just something that runs as an informational phenomenon on top of some physical substrate, but is fully independent of that susbstrate to the extent that it could be "ported" from that substrate to another completely different substrate that just happens to also preserve the subset of mathematical laws required for the computation. Eg. "software" that can be "ported" so it's independent of the actual nature of the hardware. Digital/discrete (as opposed to analogical) computation gives you this magical "divorce" of computation from substrate. It doesn't have to be something like our current day software running on something like our computers - any kind of "portable discrete/digital computation" is "a simulation".
> a simulation is just something that runs as an informational phenomenon on top of some physical substrate
A simulation is a simulation of something; it's by definition not the reality being simulated. If you want to say you can have a simulation without simulating something, that "reality" is itself a simulation, then we're into turtle territory; this simulation models that simulation, which models another simulation, all the way down.
That path leads to solipsism, which I think is a stultifying view. It's a view that I once entertained, but eventually rejected.
It’s not particularly exotic; it’s phenomenology aka continental philosophy.
(Many kinds of Buddhism known to the west are actually repackaged European philosophy; this was intentionally done in Asia so it’d be easier to sell back to us.)
> Many kinds of Buddhism known to the west are actually repackaged European philosophy
Schopenhauer was interested in eastern philosophy. There is certainly a thread of Buddhist thought in some European philosophy.
I don't think it's at all reasonable to suggest that Asian Buddhists (in Asia) deliberately produced a formulation of Buddhism to appeal to Western tastes. Rather, Buddhist teachers in the West tried to find a way of presenting Buddhism without the cultural baggage.
The kind of Buddhism that I learned was largely mediaeval or earlier in its origins. Even 19thC developments in (e.g.) Tibetan Buddhism had little impact at the time on European philosophy; those developments were largely concerned with points of doctrine that flew over the heads of European thinkers.
So I'm not sure what kinds of Buddhism "known to the West" are actually repackaged European philosophy. Nichiren? "Soft" vipassana? I don't really agree that there has been much pollination of Eastern Buddhist thought from European philosophy.
Thai Theravada and Japanese Zen (and State Shinto) were reinvented in the 1800s to look more European and incorporate Romanticism because they knew if Europeans showed up and you didn't have a European-style religion, they'd declare you savages and colonize you. It more or less worked.
That didn't happen in Tibet, although it modernized later with a marketing campaign resulting in everyone vaguely associating the Dalai Lama with "compassion" and "ethics".
Thanks for the link. I've read his first article; I will read on.
My training was entirely in a Tibetan tradition. In 19thC Tibet, there were significant changes happening; but they were largely to do with ecumenicalism and the endless sectarian conflicts over minute points of doctrine.
"Rockstar" Tibetan lamas were certainly a thing. I was told once that, if you ask your teacher whether it would be good to attend a talk by visiting lama X, the least-favourable response would be along the lines of "He has many followers".
I'm aware that the cyclical universe is from the vedas; a lot of what passes for Buddhist metaphysics is pre-Buddhist. The Buddha didn't care much for metaphysical pronouncements; he was more a meditation teacher than a cosmologist.
So I didn't mean to claim that these ideas were Buddhist in origin; I just learned of them from Buddhists.
