Rob Sheldon: What Blekman didn’t say, but Sabine Hossenfelder does, is that there are not “tens of thousands” but rather an infinite supply of wrong theories. That should keep particle physicists employed until at least the 23rd century or until the oceans rise 30 feet, whichever comes first.
Tag: Higgs boson
Rob Sheldon on recent claims of dramatic new Higgs boson findings
Sheldon: This required analysis of thousands of decays and Terabytes of data crunching. So it is a triumph of data analysis to be able to see this rare decay against the more common route to stability, but neither unexpected nor revealing of physics “beyond the standard model”.
Sometimes physicists really have to work at ignoring fine-tuning
At Symmetry: There’s no known underlying reason for these almost exact cancellations, and insisting that “it is the way it is” is unsatisfying.
Sabine Hossenfelder on the future of particle physics
Hossenfelder: The standard model works just fine with that number and it fits the data. But a small number like this, without explanation, is ugly and particle physicists didn’t want to believe nature could be that ugly.
What does it mean to say, in physics, that something like the Higgs boson “exists”?
Sabine Hossenfelder’s view: Realism is a philosophy. It’s a belief system, and science does not tell you whether it is correct.
Particle physicist: Please quit calling the Higgs boson “the God particle”!
As a matter of fact, we don’t often hear the Higgs called the “God particle” now that it’s been clearly identified and given Peter Higgs’s name. That was more common before. It’s almost like something else is bothering Dorigo but we won’t speculate.
Cosmologist: String theory is incompatible with dark energy
Rob Sheldon mentioned a story going the rounds earlier today, about whether dark energy was “even allowed.” Here’s the story, from ScienceDaily: In string theory, a paradigm shift could be imminent. In June, a team of string theorists from Harvard and Caltech published a conjecture which sounded revolutionary: String theory is said to be fundamentally Read More…