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- Hacker News
- I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all.
It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.
- Yep. This would backfire spectacularly for people just want to know what's going on. They would just dump the article in the llm and ask, 'what problem is this article about'by gloryjulio
- Yeah, Quanta articles are way too long. They could get to the point in one quarter of the length.by pmontra
- > I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all.
Someone who writes a sentence like that is in no position to comment on writing style.
by jibal - You dislike that people write for audiences other than yourself.by wuliwong
- This “data driven” science approach sure looks like empiricism from a distance. What am I missing?by cobbzilla
- The beauty of untestable abstractions upon abstractions? That even stay around when refuted -by 21asdffdsa12
- I think it describes the methods needed to obtain and process a large amount of data in a field where getting a small amount of data is expensive and requires incredible hardware.by teamonkey
- Out of my depth really, but I believe the "data driven" approach probably refers to some sort of renormalization.
What renormalization does is your theory produces all sort of infinities but you know there is mechanism that eliminates them but your theory is not able to calculate how that happens and the exact degree so you go out look at real numbers and then tweak your model to predict the correct values .
I may be glossing over misrepresenting stuff but that is the gist of it I think. As far as I understand physists don't love this, Feynman and company had reservations (not objections mid you), but it works and allows you to do additional useful work.
- The framing that there is some unknown particle affecting the results is probably an understatement. Probably there are a LOT of unknown 'forces' affecting the results. Look at the size of the machine, the aging components, the number of components involved, the amount of software required, surely all of that is affecting the results.
Are humans even capable of building perfectly reliable systems?
by jongjong - My gut reaction is that the probable cause of the discrepancy is ultimately "someone calculated something wrong." It's not like particle physics experiments actually generate something directly measurable like the muon's magnetic moment; you instead get an indirect result that you have to calculate to the value you're trying to measure. And half of the constants in that calculation are themselves from reported results in other experiments, which similarly returned indirect results that are dependent on correct results from other experiments... and it's not hard to imagine that the result of "value X is A" depends on an assumption that "value X is B" somewhere in the calculation tree.by jcranmer
- You would probably be very surprised about just how much work is put in to characterizing these things. My graduate work was on another experiment (though our postdoc worked on one of the earlier g−2 experiments mentioned here!), but we literally had man-years of work sunk into measuring one thing about the experiment, one number, as accurately as possible and with valid error bars.
That was not the only thing about the apparatus, just one of the most important, but the point is: we cared, we cared a lot, and we cared a lot about a lot of things.
- That's the best part about science.
- I am a bit sick of this narrative. That science can make mistakes is in no shape or form, one of its strengths. It is a weakness of the process.
The lipstick putting can be exposed by simply asking if you would not prefer a version of the scientific method that is never wrong.
by qsera - It's good for the world but terrible for the practitioners in academia. Imagine you are in your last year of your PhD and then something new comes out and completely invalidates/obsoletes your results. Cough natural language processing PhDs during COVID when GPT-3 came around..by storywatch
- I remember reading the Three Body Problem, and thinking to myself: this is implausible. If scientists started getting weird results, they'd be thrilled, not suicidal!by pavel_lishin
- Worst Feynman diagrams ever.
- I bet on a loose cable as explanation for the difference.
See
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/loose-cable-blamed-speed...
by amai - If old results do not add up then I can see two immediate reasons:
- The new results are wrong. That's why there is a difference.
- The old results were wrong. In this case all involved scientists should be very much ashamed to have helpfully participated in worshipping wrongness and fakery.
A third option could be partial wrongness, but I group this into the second case. In the modern era I no longer buy into honesty of scientists at all times. Case in point: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258 - bacterium growing via arsenic. Totally fabricated, hence lateron "retracted" (originally published in 2010).
by shevy-java - There is a fourth option, something has changed in between the old and new expirements.
This has happened before in other settings, disappearing polymorphs are a real thing.
- I bet you that old results still add up in the parallel universe in which the muon mystery has not yet been solved!by kazinator
- Reality is probabilistic, not branching. Before measurement, multiple outcomes are possible; after collapse, only one becomes real.by gbriel
- I was thinking someone must have fixed a bug in the simulation (in which we live) between when the old results were generated and now.
Only 1/2 :-)
by allenrb - 9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science.
The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be.
Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically)
But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum.
Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime.
I thank scientists, but I do not envy them.
- > The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions
I understand where you're coming from but this is a very cynical take. String theory is a strawman compared to the empirical "discoveries" of items like black holes or the Higgs boson.
by dieselgate - How do you feel about Aristotelian realism? Makes more sense to me than nominalism/conceptualism ever has.by stbede
- > The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions.
This statement itself predicades on a Platonic realist metaphysics! Indeed, what is the ideal against which things are judge right and wrong? I think the psychological roots of Enlightenment rationality run deep in the West, making it brutally hard to usurp.
That said, I think we can go a long way in this one case by just throwing out the "wrong" judement and laser focusing on the particulars of utility that science provides. One zoomed-out facet sees it as a collaborative effort as squeezing out repeatable processes, a la Popper et al.
by xelxebar - From what I've read, a problem with the Copernican model was that it assumed circular orbits. Galileo insisted on this as well. It doesn't matter what orbits what, if you've got the shape of the orbits wrong.
Oddly enough the Catholic astronomers were willing to accept a model that had the sun going around the earth, and the planets around the sun. What settled matters for them was Newtonian physics, which provided a way to detect whether the earth was rotating or not. That was what caused them to eventually lift their ban on Copernicus. Newtonian physics also eliminated the question of whether anything in the solar system is justifiably the center of the cosmos.
by analog31 - The difference with the Copernican stuff is that you can fly a satellite (e.g. Voyager) to the edge of the solar system, look back, and see the planets orbiting the sun. There is no sane way to put the earth in the center once you do that. If I do a push up the Earth moves beneath me but no reasonable person says I'm pushing the Earth away. Hence I feel heliocentrism is simply an observable fact. It's not a mathematical convenience. It's a fact you can see with a camera. The relativism or perspective argument is irrelevant because as we established you have to be very unreasonable to describe a picture of a huge ass sun that hardly moves with small planets zooming around it as earth centric.
On the other hand nobody has observed any particle or ever will, we only see effects of particles (cloud chamber trails, other particles, radiation, etc). This makes it very different for the traditional "seeing is believing" claim. In this case you actually possible to argue it's a mathematical convenience. It's possible to say we are stuck in the pre Copernican age in QM, we're modelling these things in such a complicated way, maybe one day we will see aha we got it all backwards, electrons are actually made of trapped light, or some crazy theory will come out... And I can't blame string theorists and physicists in general for trying.
Take for example quarks. QCD actually forbids naked quarks. That means you can never observe one on its own. How's that for a falsifiable scientific theory? Yet it is very successful in all its predictions. So obviously the Popperian "falsifiability" is too simple a criteria for science.
by podocarp - Glad I didn’t spend the last ten years on that problem! As my CERN advisor suggested :)by lokimedes