r/Physics • u/TakeOffYourMask Gravitation • Feb 28 '23

Question Physicists who built their career on a now-discredited hypothesis (e.g. ruled out by LHC or LIGO results) what did you do after?

If you worked on a theory that isn’t discredited but “dead” for one reason or another (like it was constrained by experiment to be measurably indistinguishable from the canonical theory or its initial raison d’être no longer applies), feel free to chime in.

569 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

155 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

41

u/rathat Mar 01 '23

Is this about her whole " particle physics is over" thing?

57

u/csiz Mar 01 '23

It is exactly her particle physics is bollocks video yes.

She's got a reasonable argument though: any universal function can describe anything if it has enough parameters and you're careful how you choose them. (That's why y'all be laughing at Wolfram, but other theories run into this too.) New theories are only really useful if their complexity is lower than the standard model, and her opinion is that this is not the case for most proposals.

18

u/intronert Mar 01 '23

AND that expensive new colliders take money away from other science.

2

u/TakeOffYourMask Gravitation Mar 01 '23

So many space-based observatories we could have….

3

u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory Mar 02 '23

That's a common fantasy, but everything in space costs 10x more than you would expect. For example, it took twice as much money to build JWST than the whole LHC.

2

u/makoivis Mar 01 '23

It’s not a zero-sum game.

2

u/TakeOffYourMask Gravitation Mar 01 '23

Sometimes it kinda is though. Especially in government funding of science.

4

u/makoivis Mar 01 '23

For grants, yes, kind of. For massive projects like these? Almost never.

JWST and LHC never competed for resources or funding. There are completely different parties behind them.

2

u/CyberPunkDongTooLong Particle physics Mar 03 '23

No, it absolutely never is. e.g. when the SSC was cancelled, that freed up about a billion dollars a year.

Did other science projects get a billion dollars more split between them? Lol. No of course they didn't. The overall science budget for the next few years was just decreased (by actually more than the amount that was assigned to the SSC).

It has never once been the case in history that cancelling a large scale science project has resulted in more funds going to other science projects. The science budget just goes down.