Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Lubos Motl on New Experimental Physics Results

All babies are being killed and embryos are being aborted these days.
- The Reference Frame.

In other words, beyond the Standard Model physics proposals are being ruled out left and right.

Sabine Hossenfelder at Backreaction likewise bemoans the arrival of the "Nightmare Scenario" in which the LHC is discovering no new physics other than the Higgs boson.  She thinks that there's a moral to the story:
That the LHC hasn’t seen evidence for new physics is to me a clear signal that we’ve been doing something wrong, that our experience from constructing the standard model is no longer a promising direction to continue. We’ve maneuvered ourselves into a dead end by relying on aesthetic guidance to decide which experiments are the most promising. I hope that this latest null result will send a clear message that you can’t trust the judgement of scientists whose future funding depends on their continued optimism.
I agree that particle physics has put too many of its eggs in the same SUSY/string theory basket, and even more on theories that have the same philosophical motivation.

1 comment:

andrew said...

Woit gloats (and reviews other commentaries in the blogosphere)( here.