News from the LHC

[Nephew Twiddleton]

I was kind of hoping this would kick String Theory in the nuts, but because ST is a "God in the Gaps" argument (i.e. the theory itself is currently untestable), they're still chugging along, saying that the HB supports ST.

Still, chalk up another point for the Standard Model.

It sounds like String Theory is a religion.

Religion's easier to understand. 

[LMNO]

Pretty much.  They extrapolate on the existing numbers, and form wild 10-dimensional models.  There was an attempt to test one of the predictions it makes about entaglement, but a brief search couldn't find if there have been any results so far.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I really don't get String Theory stuff. I mean, what's wrong with "some things are very small, and other things are very big, and nobody is really sure which is which" as a model? Why do we need eleventy billion dimensions? Is any of this getting us any closer to teleporters and flying cars, for fuck's sake? Why are physicists not asking the TOUGH QUESTIONS?

[E.O.T.]

Teleporters and warp drives nao or god particles can gtfo 

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Quantumz. I think the problem is thta people are trying to make sense of a universe that has two sets of seemingly conflicting rules depending on how big you are. I dont understand it though.

  not sure if thats the right emote.

[P3nT4gR4m]

The impression I get is that physicists think that there must be something wrong with the models unless they remove the conflict and get them to tie up so, in essence, one or both of the models has a mistake in it. Kinda like how Newtonian physics works great for building bridges and stuff but sucks at predicting where mars is going to be. Is this a fair assessment?

And more importantly - will there be teleporters?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

The impression I get is that physicists think that there must be something wrong with the models unless they remove the conflict and get them to tie up so, in essence, one or both of the models has a mistake in it. Kinda like how Newtonian physics works great for building bridges and stuff but sucks at predicting where mars is going to be. Is this a fair assessment?

And more importantly - will there be teleporters?

a) Kinda like Euclid?

b) I want to know that too. More importantly I want FTL NOW.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Also, that was the emote I was going for. Now that I can see it.

[Igor]

The impression I get is that physicists think that there must be something wrong with the models unless they remove the conflict and get them to tie up so, in essence, one or both of the models has a mistake in it. Kinda like how Newtonian physics works great for building bridges and stuff but sucks at predicting where mars is going to be. Is this a fair assessment?

Yeah, exactly.

And more importantly - will there be teleporters?

Probaby not. :/
I mean, teleporters seem to require suicide, right? You have to dissolve yourself in one place and then transmit the "blueprints" of your body to be reconstituted elsewhere. The dissolved body is still dead.


As for string theory, as far as I can tell, it seems to have become more an area of maths than physics. Mathematicians love it, it apparently has lots of interesting structures and tie-ins to other obscure topics in abstract maths. The idea of actually testing it against reality seems to have taken a back seat.

Hopefully the Higgs boson discovery is just the start of a lot more concrete results for theoreticians to examine. For a very long time (like 20 years?) Theory has been racing way ahead of Experiment. And so Theory kind of lost the run of itself. These new Experiments will hopefully bring it back to a more practical level.

[AFK]

Brief sidebar.  Looks like Stephen Hawking lost a $100 bet upon the discovery of the Boson:  http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/05/12587515-higgs-big-loser-why-stephen-hawking-is-such-a-bad-gambler?lite

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Quantumz. I think the problem is thta people are trying to make sense of a universe that has two sets of seemingly conflicting rules depending on how big you are. I dont understand it though.

Sounds like America.

[LMNO]

The impression I get is that physicists think that there must be something wrong with the models unless they remove the conflict and get them to tie up so, in essence, one or both of the models has a mistake in it. Kinda like how Newtonian physics works great for building bridges and stuff but sucks at predicting where mars is going to be. Is this a fair assessment?

And more importantly - will there be teleporters?

Not so much a mistake, it's more like the Standard Model is a jigsaw puzzle that has a bunch of pieces missing, and physicists have been guessing at what shapes the missing pieces are.  The Higgs Boson is one of those missing pieces, and it fits the puzzle really well.  The String Theorists got bored of the puzzle, and started playing Pictionary instead.

[Telarus]

Quantumz. I think the problem is thta people are trying to make sense of a universe that has two sets of seemingly conflicting rules depending on how big you are. I dont understand it though.

Sounds like America.

[Bu🤠ns]

The impression I get is that physicists think that there must be something wrong with the models unless they remove the conflict and get them to tie up so, in essence, one or both of the models has a mistake in it. Kinda like how Newtonian physics works great for building bridges and stuff but sucks at predicting where mars is going to be. Is this a fair assessment?

And more importantly - will there be teleporters?

Not so much a mistake, it's more like the Standard Model is a jigsaw puzzle that has a bunch of pieces missing, and physicists have been guessing at what shapes the missing pieces are.  The Higgs Boson is one of those missing pieces, and it fits the puzzle really well.  The String Theorists got bored of the puzzle, and started playing Pictionary instead.

So what's the next piece or pieces of the puzzle? Dark matter?

[LMNO]

The big one would be gravity as per general relativity.  But yeah, dark matter is somewhere in there.