Imagine you go to a zoology convention. The primary speaker talks about her 3D mannequin of a 12-legged purple spider that lives within the Arctic. There’s no proof it exists, she admits, nevertheless it’s a testable speculation, and he or she argues {that a} mission needs to be despatched off to go looking the Arctic for spiders.
The second speaker has a mannequin for a flying earthworm, nevertheless it flies solely in caves. There’s no proof for that both, however he petitions to go looking the world’s caves. The third one has a mannequin for octopuses on Mars. It’s testable, he stresses.
Kudos to zoologists, I’ve by no means heard of such a convention. However nearly each particle physics convention has classes identical to this, besides they do it with extra maths. It has turn out to be widespread amongst physicists to invent new particles for which there isn’t a proof, publish papers about them, write extra papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the speculation be experimentally examined. Many of those exams have really been finished, and extra are being commissioned as we converse. It’s losing money and time.
Because the Eighties, physicists have invented a complete particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas, axions, flaxions, erebons, accelerons, cornucopions , large magnons, maximons, macros, wisps, fips, branons, skyrmions, chameleons, cuscutons, planckons and sterile neutrinos, to say just some. We even had a (fortunately short-lived) fad of “unparticles”.
All experiments searching for these particles have come again empty-handed, particularly those who have regarded for particles that make up darkish matter, a kind of matter that supposedly fills the universe and makes itself noticeable by its gravitational pull. Nevertheless, we have no idea that darkish matter is certainly product of particles; and even whether it is, to clarify astrophysical observations one doesn’t must know particulars of the particles’ behaviour. The Giant Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of these particles both, although, earlier than its launch, many theoretical physicists have been assured it could see a minimum of a number of.
Discuss to particle physicists in personal, and lots of of them will admit they don’t really imagine these particles exist. They justify their work by claiming that it’s good follow, or that each every so often one in all them by accident comes up with an concept that’s helpful for one thing else. A military of typewriting monkeys might also generally produce a helpful sentence. However is that this a superb technique?
Experimental particle physicists know of the issue, and attempt to distance themselves from what their colleagues in idea growth do. On the similar time, they revenue from it, as a result of all these hypothetical particles are utilized in grant proposals to justify experiments. And so the experimentalists hold their mouths shut, too. This leaves folks like me, who’ve left the sphere – I now work in astrophysics – as the one ones ready and prepared to criticise the state of affairs.
There are various components which have contributed to this unhappy decline of particle physics. Partly the issue is social: most individuals who work within the subject (I was one in all them) genuinely imagine that inventing particles is sweet process as a result of it’s what they’ve realized, and what all their colleagues are doing.
However I imagine the most important contributor to this pattern is a misunderstanding of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which, to make a protracted story quick, calls for {that a} good scientific concept must be falsifiable. Particle physicists appear to have misconstrued this to imply that any falsifiable concept can be good science.
Previously, predictions for brand spanking new particles have been appropriate solely when including them solved an issue with the present theories. For instance, the at present accepted idea of elementary particles – the Customary Mannequin – doesn’t require new particles; it really works simply effective the way in which it’s. The Higgs boson, alternatively, was required to resolve an issue. The antiparticles that Paul Dirac predicted have been likewise obligatory to resolve an issue, and so have been the neutrinos that have been predicted by Wolfgang Pauli. The trendy new particles don’t clear up any issues.
In some circumstances, the brand new particles’ activity is to make a idea extra aesthetically interesting, however in lots of circumstances their function is to suit statistical anomalies. Every time an anomaly is reported, particle physicists will shortly write lots of of papers about how new particles allegedly clarify the remark. This behaviour is so widespread they actually have a identify for it: “ambulance-chasing”, after the anecdotal technique of legal professionals to observe ambulances within the hope of discovering new purchasers.
Ambulance-chasing is an efficient technique to additional one’s profession in particle physics. Most of these papers go peer evaluation and get printed as a result of they aren’t technically unsuitable. And since ambulance-chasers cite one another’s papers, they’ll every rack up lots of of citations shortly. But it surely’s a foul technique for scientific progress. After the anomaly has disappeared, these papers will turn out to be irrelevant.
This process of inventing particles after which ruling them out has been occurring so lengthy that there are literally thousands of tenured professors with analysis teams who make a residing from this. It has turn out to be typically accepted follow within the physics group. Nobody even questions whether or not it is sensible. A minimum of not in public.
I imagine there are breakthroughs ready to be made within the foundations of physics; the world wants technological advances greater than ever earlier than, and now isn’t the time to idle round inventing particles, arguing that even a blind hen generally finds a grain. As a former particle physicist, it saddens me to see that the sphere has turn out to be a manufacturing unit for ineffective tutorial papers.
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Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist on the Frankfurt Institute for Superior Research, Germany. She is creator of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Information to Life’s Largest Questions and creator of the YouTube Channel Science With out the Gobbledygook.
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