{"id":13796,"date":"2024-01-20T17:10:42","date_gmt":"2024-01-20T22:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13796"},"modified":"2024-01-22T10:00:14","modified_gmt":"2024-01-22T15:00:14","slug":"particle-physics-is-not-in-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13796","title":{"rendered":"Particle Physics Is Not In Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a low-rent version of the self-congratulatory program discussed here<\/a>, Bad Boy of Science Sam Gregson has a new video up entitled Particle Physics Is Not In Crisis – but we can make improvements<\/a>. Cliff Burgess plays the Strominger role, explaining that the idea that there’s any problem with what’s going on in particle theory is “a nothing-burger” and “a complete non-issue”. Asked to rank any such problem on a scale of 0-10, he gives the Strominger-esque “.0001”. Martin Bauer goes for “1”.<\/p>\n

The take on the question is much the same as Sean Carroll’s four-hour plus explanation that there is no problem<\/a>, but shorter. It’s similar to Carroll in that no one who thinks there is a problem was invited to participate, or even gets mentioned by name. There’s a repeated reference to mysterious “Twitter influencers”, which I find very confusing because just about the only particle theorists I see spending time on Twitter going on about the state of the field are Bauer and Burgess. They can’t mean me since I’ve so far resisted the temptation to enter Twitter discussions. The idea of trying to have a serious discussion of complex scientific issues in the Twitter format never made any sense to me, and (StringKing aside) I find it hard to think of any tweets by anyone that shed any light on serious issues in this area.<\/p>\n

The more serious part of the program was the discussion among the two HEP experimentalists of the state of their field, which got a 5-6 on the crisis level scale. I wrote about the problem there five years ago<\/a>, and very little has changed, other than that we’re five years closer to the date when there will no longer be an energy frontier machine running anywhere in the world. The underlying problem wasn’t really explained. CERN is working on it, but there is as of now no specific plan with specific budget numbers for what to build next. Maybe I misunderstood, but it seemed that Bauer and others were talking about how the field just needed to convince funding agencies to support budget numbers of order \\$100 billion, which is a pipe dream. <\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: Latest podcast from Sean Carroll<\/a> has nothing to do with the crisis in particle physics, but he starts off anyway with this:<\/p>\n

You may have heard there is a crisis in physics. No, there’s not. I mean, there’s little tiny crises, but that’s the very standard procedure if you’re doing science at the cutting edge, is all sorts of puzzles that we don’t know the answer to. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Little tiny crises” is I guess his version of the Cliff Burgess “.0001” and Andy Strominger “A+++”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a low-rent version of the self-congratulatory program discussed here, Bad Boy of Science Sam Gregson has a new video up entitled Particle Physics Is Not In Crisis – but we can make improvements. Cliff Burgess plays the Strominger role, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-hype"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13796"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13802,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13796\/revisions\/13802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}