…says physicist Sabine Hossenfelder.

Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission should be sent off to search the Arctic for spiders.

The second speaker has a model for a flying earthworm, but it flies only in caves. There’s no evidence for that either, but he petitions to search the world’s caves. The third one has a model for octopuses on Mars. It’s testable, he stresses.

Kudos to zoologists, I’ve never heard of such a conference. But almost every particle physics conference has sessions just like this, except they do it with more maths. It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis be experimentally tested. Many of these tests have actually been done, and more are being commissioned as we speak. It is wasting time and money.

Since the 1980s, physicists have invented an entire particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas, axions, flaxions, erebons, accelerons, cornucopions, giant magnons, maximons, macros, wisps, fips, branons, skyrmions, chameleons, cuscutons, planckons and sterile neutrinos, to mention just a few. We even had a (luckily short-lived) fad of “unparticles”.

All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter, a type of matter that supposedly fills the universe and makes itself noticeable by its gravitational pull. However, we do not know that dark matter is indeed made of particles; and even if it is, to explain astrophysical observations one does not need to know details of the particles’ behaviour. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of those particles either, even though, before its launch, many theoretical physicists were confident it would see at least a few.

Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist. They justify their work by claiming that it is good practice, or that every once in a while one of them accidentally comes up with an idea that is useful for something else. An army of typewriting monkeys may also sometimes produce a useful sentence. But is this a good strategy?

Full article

Bubblecar said:

…says physicist Sabine Hossenfelder.

Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission should be sent off to search the Arctic for spiders.

The second speaker has a model for a flying earthworm, but it flies only in caves. There’s no evidence for that either, but he petitions to search the world’s caves. The third one has a model for octopuses on Mars. It’s testable, he stresses.

Kudos to zoologists, I’ve never heard of such a conference. But almost every particle physics conference has sessions just like this, except they do it with more maths. It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis be experimentally tested. Many of these tests have actually been done, and more are being commissioned as we speak. It is wasting time and money.

Since the 1980s, physicists have invented an entire particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas, axions, flaxions, erebons, accelerons, cornucopions, giant magnons, maximons, macros, wisps, fips, branons, skyrmions, chameleons, cuscutons, planckons and sterile neutrinos, to mention just a few. We even had a (luckily short-lived) fad of “unparticles”.

All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter, a type of matter that supposedly fills the universe and makes itself noticeable by its gravitational pull. However, we do not know that dark matter is indeed made of particles; and even if it is, to explain astrophysical observations one does not need to know details of the particles’ behaviour. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of those particles either, even though, before its launch, many theoretical physicists were confident it would see at least a few.

Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist. They justify their work by claiming that it is good practice, or that every once in a while one of them accidentally comes up with an idea that is useful for something else. An army of typewriting monkeys may also sometimes produce a useful sentence. But is this a good strategy?

Full article

At what point can you call out these particles for not existing.
What iteration of a collider that’s exponentially more powerful than the one before it as it was the one before it, etc and it returns nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_particles

Hypothetical particles

Graviton

Particles predicted by supersymmetric theories

chargino
gluino
gravitino
Higgsino
neutralino
photino
sleptons
sneutrino
squarks
wino, zino

The others appear to be hypothetical

irrelevant argument though, given that all this shit is just mathematical formalism

is the push to develop mathematical formalism to model particle behaviours pointless

well no

Particles that do exist

Quarks

up
down
charm
strange
top
bottom

Leptons

electron
electron neutrino
muon
muon neutrino
tau
tau neutrino

Bosons

Quasiparticles
photon
W boson
Z boson
gluon
Higgs boson

Composite particles

Hadrons
Baryons
Mesons

Atomic nuclei

Atoms

Molecules

Ions

Quasiparticles

Quasiparticles are effective particles that exist in many particle systems. The field equations of condensed matter physics are remarkably similar to those of high energy particle physics. As a result, much of the theory of particle physics applies to condensed matter physics as well; in particular, there are a selection of field excitations, called quasi-particles, that can be created and explored. These include:

• Anyons are a generalization of fermions and bosons in two-dimensional systems like sheets of graphene that obeys braid statistics.
• Dislons are localized collective excitations of a crystal dislocation around the static displacement.
• Excitons are bound states of an electron and a hole.
• Hopfions are topological solitons which are the 3D counterpart of the skyrmion.
• Magnons are coherent excitations of electron spins in a material.
• Phonons are vibrational modes in a crystal lattice.
• Plasmons are coherent excitations of a plasma.
• Plektons are theoretical kind of particle discussed as a generalization of the braid statistics of the anyon to more than two dimensions.
• Polaritons are mixtures of photons with other quasi-particles.
• Polarons are moving, charged (quasi-) particles that are surrounded by ions in a material.
• Skyrmions are a topological solution of the pion field, used to model the low-energy properties of the nucleon, such as the axial vector current coupling and the mass.

Get it? Because they’re not pointlike?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Particles that do exist

Quarks

up
down
charm
strange
top
bottom

Leptons

electron
electron neutrino
muon
muon neutrino
tau
tau neutrino

Bosons

Quasiparticles
photon
W boson
Z boson
gluon
Higgs boson

Composite particles

Hadrons
Baryons
Mesons

Atomic nuclei

Atoms

Molecules

Ions

Quasiparticles

Quasiparticles are effective particles that exist in many particle systems. The field equations of condensed matter physics are remarkably similar to those of high energy particle physics. As a result, much of the theory of particle physics applies to condensed matter physics as well; in particular, there are a selection of field excitations, called quasi-particles, that can be created and explored. These include:

• Anyons are a generalization of fermions and bosons in two-dimensional systems like sheets of graphene that obeys braid statistics.
• Dislons are localized collective excitations of a crystal dislocation around the static displacement.
• Excitons are bound states of an electron and a hole.
• Hopfions are topological solitons which are the 3D counterpart of the skyrmion.
• Magnons are coherent excitations of electron spins in a material.
• Phonons are vibrational modes in a crystal lattice.
• Plasmons are coherent excitations of a plasma.
• Plektons are theoretical kind of particle discussed as a generalization of the braid statistics of the anyon to more than two dimensions.
• Polaritons are mixtures of photons with other quasi-particles.
• Polarons are moving, charged (quasi-) particles that are surrounded by ions in a material.
• Skyrmions are a topological solution of the pion field, used to model the low-energy properties of the nucleon, such as the axial vector current coupling and the mass.

Atoms are made up of

Protons
Neutrons
Electrons

Protons and neutrons are, in turn, made of quarks

dv said:

Get it? Because they’re not pointlike?

Correct.

I’m more interested in the particles that pop in and out of existence.

Cymek said:

Bubblecar said:

…says physicist Sabine Hossenfelder.

Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission should be sent off to search the Arctic for spiders.

The second speaker has a model for a flying earthworm, but it flies only in caves. There’s no evidence for that either, but he petitions to search the world’s caves. The third one has a model for octopuses on Mars. It’s testable, he stresses.

Kudos to zoologists, I’ve never heard of such a conference. But almost every particle physics conference has sessions just like this, except they do it with more maths. It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis be experimentally tested. Many of these tests have actually been done, and more are being commissioned as we speak. It is wasting time and money.

Since the 1980s, physicists have invented an entire particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas, axions, flaxions, erebons, accelerons, cornucopions, giant magnons, maximons, macros, wisps, fips, branons, skyrmions, chameleons, cuscutons, planckons and sterile neutrinos, to mention just a few. We even had a (luckily short-lived) fad of “unparticles”.

All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter, a type of matter that supposedly fills the universe and makes itself noticeable by its gravitational pull. However, we do not know that dark matter is indeed made of particles; and even if it is, to explain astrophysical observations one does not need to know details of the particles’ behaviour. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of those particles either, even though, before its launch, many theoretical physicists were confident it would see at least a few.

Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist. They justify their work by claiming that it is good practice, or that every once in a while one of them accidentally comes up with an idea that is useful for something else. An army of typewriting monkeys may also sometimes produce a useful sentence. But is this a good strategy?

Full article

At what point can you call out these particles for not existing.
What iteration of a collider that’s exponentially more powerful than the one before it as it was the one before it, etc and it returns nothing.

I think they are close to getting to that point.

“All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed”

Seems a very weird thing to say. Obviously several of the predicted particles have been discovered. Higgs boson, W boson, antihydrogen, tau neutrino.

dv said:

“All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed”

Seems a very weird thing to say. Obviously several of the predicted particles have been discovered. Higgs boson, W boson, antihydrogen, tau neutrino.

were they able to manually handle them

SCIENCE said:

dv said:

“All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed”

Seems a very weird thing to say. Obviously several of the predicted particles have been discovered. Higgs boson, W boson, antihydrogen, tau neutrino.

were they able to manually handle them

Most amusing

Ill Just leave these here

Team of physicists finds signs of pentaquark states and new matter

LHCb discovers three new exotic particles: the pentaquark and the first-ever pair of tetraquarks

dv said:

“All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed”

Seems a very weird thing to say. Obviously several of the predicted particles have been discovered. Higgs boson, W boson, antihydrogen, tau neutrino.

She’s referring to the ones she listed above.

Later she adds:

>The Higgs boson, on the other hand, was required to solve a problem. The antiparticles that Paul Dirac predicted were likewise necessary to solve a problem, and so were the neutrinos that were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli. The modern new particles don’t solve any problems.

Bubblecar said:

dv said:

“All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed”

Seems a very weird thing to say. Obviously several of the predicted particles have been discovered. Higgs boson, W boson, antihydrogen, tau neutrino.

She’s referring to the ones she listed above.

Later she adds:

>The Higgs boson, on the other hand, was required to solve a problem. The antiparticles that Paul Dirac predicted were likewise necessary to solve a problem, and so were the neutrinos that were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli. The modern new particles don’t solve any problems.

Right but that’s basically saying “of the complete list of particles that have been proposed, none have been discovered yet apart from all the ones that have been discovered.” It’s not a very profound observation.

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

dv said:

“All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed”

Seems a very weird thing to say. Obviously several of the predicted particles have been discovered. Higgs boson, W boson, antihydrogen, tau neutrino.

She’s referring to the ones she listed above.

Later she adds:

>The Higgs boson, on the other hand, was required to solve a problem. The antiparticles that Paul Dirac predicted were likewise necessary to solve a problem, and so were the neutrinos that were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli. The modern new particles don’t solve any problems.

Right but that’s basically saying “of the complete list of particles that have been proposed, none have been discovered yet apart from all the ones that have been discovered.” It’s not a very profound observation.

A bit more than that. She’s saying there was a worthwhile reason to propose those particles, which she thinks is missing from most of the more recent proposals.

No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent discover new particles is pointless.

Corrected.

And “shhhh”.