The looming crisis for particle physics.....

[Michael]

I strongly believe that LHC was a *wonderful* project and it was fantastically successful in terms of discovering the the Higgs Boson, thoroughly testing the standard particle physics model, as well as testing a range of non-standard particle models. By any scientific standards, LHC has been a really great and worthwhile project.

The problem for particle physics however is that the standard particle physics model passed every single test at LHC with flying colors, whereas all the non-standard models that were proposed which were expected to show up at LHC didn't show up at all, and nothing particularly "new" and exciting was found. These experiments have created a crisis in particle physics in terms of justifying the building of the next generation of particle colliders. It makes justifying the expense rather difficult. Since the standard particle physics model is now complete, there's no guarantee that a new collider will find anything new that we don't already know. That has become a serious problem. This recent article by Sabine Hossenfelder pretty much sums up where things stand in the world of particle physics.

Backreaction: The Multiworse Is Coming

Fact is, we presently have no evidence – neither experimental nor theoretical evidence – that a next larger collider would find new particles. The absolutely last thing particle physicists need right now is to weaken their standards even more and appeal to multiversal math magic that can explain everything and anything. But that seems to be exactly where we are headed.

 

[David Kent]

It is all a waste of money.

 

[Kaon]

I strongly believe that LHC was a *wonderful* project and it was fantastically successful in terms of discovering the the Higgs Boson, thoroughly testing the standard particle physics model, as well as testing a range of non-standard particle models. By any scientific standards, LHC has been a really great and worthwhile project.

The problem for particle physics however is that the standard particle physics model passed every single test at LHC with flying colors, whereas all the non-standard models that were proposed which were expected to show up at LHC didn't show up at all, and nothing particularly "new" and exciting was found. These experiments have created a crisis in particle physics in terms of justifying the building of the next generation of particle colliders. It makes justifying the expense rather difficult. Since the standard particle physics model is now complete, there's no guarantee that a new collider will find anything new that we don't already know. That has become a serious problem. This recent article by Sabine Hossenfelder pretty much sums up where things stand in the world of particle physics.

Backreaction: The Multiworse Is Coming

Maybe for the academics (professionals who devote their life to the Standard,) but not for those of us know know physics and have no obligation to lie.

But, then again hasn't academia always floated to the next best idea on a certain time scale - despite the knowledge being existent in modernity?


The key to making sure you can stay on a defined progressive line instead of a random path (even in the case of mistakes) is to rigorously based everything on the fundamentals of mathematics. Somewhere along the line the standard model stopped that.

 

[Michael]

It's definitely a dilemma.

 

[Michael]

Three years after its discovery, physicists are still fascinated by the Higgs boson’s secrets

What Now?
The Higgs was, in a way, the end of the line. At the heart of particle physics is what’s known as the Standard Model: a group of 17 elementary particles and the rules for how they should interact. Up until the Higgs discovery, physicists had observed 16 of these particles—and the field was desperate for a 17th that would push the model in new directions. But the Higgs turned out to be totally ordinary. It acted just like the model said it would act, obeyed every theorized rule.

The physicists, in other words, had done too good of a job with their predictions. “With the Higgs, we thought we had touched the bottom,” says Andre David, a CMS research physicist leading the effort to characterize the boson.

The 2015 article goes on to speculate about future experiments, but alas in the three years since that article was published, they've still found nothing at LHC (or anywhere else) to suggest that there's anything beyond the standard particle physics model.

 

[Kaon]

No one is looking for the Higgs at CERN; that is clearly a cover. I am not going to say what CERN is used for, but they aren't using 1/3 of Geneva power supply to crash proton beams into each other and discover the fundamental particle for mass. (Hint: you would find the wave FIRST, then a particle analogue.) It is amazing that they have been telling the public that; there are more elegant laboratory methods to test subatomic particles for composite particles, and to test those for elementary particles.

But people choose their gods, and how they offer to them - even if they don't realize it, or deny it.

 

[Michael]

I have to admit that I have some sympathy for those who've spent their whole careers in search of exceptions and extensions to the standard particle physics model. It has to be demoralizing to find out that everything that you've written about and speculated about during your career hasn't born any scientific fruit.

Like everyone else, I also have a natural scientific curiosity to know what else might be out there.

On the other hand, it's frankly rather difficult to simply 'assume' that the standard particle physics model is wrong and spend many billions of dollars building an improved collider simply based on pure scientific curiosity. It could easily end up being a complete waste of time and money to do such a thing.

Unfortunately there just isn't a lot of promise in the 'naturalness arguments' to date, and the 'fine tuning' argument gets tougher to swallow based on the energy level needs of any new particles at higher energy states.

So what does one do if they're a reasonably young particle physicist? Call it a done deal, accept the standard model as complete, and find a new career path?

 

[sfs]

No one is looking for the Higgs at CERN; that is clearly a cover. I am not going to say what CERN is used for, but they aren't using 1/3 of Geneva power supply to crash proton beams into each other and discover the fundamental particle for mass.

 

[RealityCheck01]

...
So what does one do if they're a reasonably young particle physicist? Call it a done deal, accept the standard model as complete, and find a new career path?

A "reasonably young particle physicist" would not be ignorant enough to accept the Standard Model as complete because they know that it is not.

Although the Standard Model is believed to be theoretically self-consistent[2] and has demonstrated huge successes in providing experimental predictions, it leaves some phenomena unexplained and falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions. It does not fully explain baryon asymmetry, incorporate the full theory of gravitation[3] as described by general relativity, or account for the accelerating expansion of the Universe as possibly described by dark energy. The model does not contain any viable dark matter particle that possesses all of the required properties deduced from observational cosmology. It also does not incorporate neutrino oscillations and their non-zero masses.

They would also be worried about a model that has "19 numerical constants whose values are unrelated and arbitrary".

The primary purpose of a next generation LHC would be to measure properties more accurately such as the mass of the Higgs boson. The LHC has ruled out the simplest versions of supersymmetry but there is a (IMO remote) possibility that more complex supersymmetry would appear in a higher energy machine.

Sabine Hossenfelder wrote in her latest blog post

Of course there could be something new. I am all in favor of building a larger collider and just see what happens. But please let’s stick to the facts: There is no reason to think a new discovery is around the corner.

 

[sfs]

A "reasonably young particle physicist" would not be ignorant enough to accept the Standard Model as complete because they know that it is not.

True. On the other hand, he or she might figure that the prospects of getting beyond the SM within the foreseeable future are too dim to be worth spending one's career on. That's what I did nineteen years ago, anyway, and became a geneticist.