(1) "New physics" is jargon understood by experts to mean new fundamental physics, i.e., new laws/forces/particles at the base of our theoretical edifice. This does not mean that non-fundamental physics is necessarily less important -- see for instance the late Phillip Anderson's "More is different" [ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393 ] -- but the distinction is real and meaningful. The use of this phrase does not equate physics with HEP physics. The reason you might make that mistake is because...
(2) To my knowledge, every single discovery of new physics in the past half century years has been made with a particle accelerator. I am confident that a new particle accelerator is a lot more likely to discover new physics than building a quantum computer or any other experimental work in quantum information. This, I'm sure, is the consensus view, even among people who put a low credence on the chance that new physics will be found at the next accelerator, or that such an investment is worthwhile.
(3) In my opinion, the strongest argument for pursuing quantum information experiments over HEP is that a departure from quantum mechanics would be more revolutionary than merely finding another set of particles and forces with largely unexplained parameters. In that sense, you need to make the reverse argument to the one you are trying to make, i.e., that quantum information is more fundamental than HEP. But for the very same reason, discrepancies with quantum mechanics are just very, very unlikely to be found.
No accelerators needed.
Bose-Einstein condensates have been observed and used in a variety of situations.
No accelerators needed.
And I could go on.
The point is though, fundamental foundational physics is available and accessible in all the various sub-fields.
You might as well argue that new classes of molecules synthesized by chemists are new physics.
Many people think gravitational wave observations matter.
It would not be surprising if completely new, unanticipated plasma fluid phenomena turn up, when someone looks.
People are still trying to understand superconductivity, and have not needed accelerators thus far.
On the other hand, superconductivity is not a good example. It's a still-confusing phenomenon, but the vast majority of physicists believe to follows directly from the known laws of non-relativistic quantum mechanics.
But you know, whatever. The fact is that we as physicists are fighting over crumbs. We should instead be political outside our circle rather than fighting internally. The fact that our budget is orders of magnitude smaller than the defense budget is insane.
Also-also, there's plenty of tabletop fundamental experiments. Superconducting cavity based axion searches for instance.
> Also-also, there's plenty of tabletop fundamental experiments. Superconducting cavity based axion searches for instance.
Yes, sure, such experiments could find new fundamental physics. (And it should be funded!) But the Bayesian credence the overall field places on this happening is quite low, and certainly much lower than a next generation accelerator. No table-top experiments have found new fundamental physics in many decades.
(Of course, the accelerator is arguably a much worse deal given its extraordinary price.)
Also, are there other forms of experimental physics that don't have much coverage and could shine the light in other directions?
This slow rate is to be compared to vastly faster rate at which new experimental input was rolling in in the '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s.
The HEP people in my own department also seem to believe that anything other than beyond the standard model physics isn't fundamental or isn't pure enough to care about.
As they pushed to higher and higher energies and events with lower and lower cross sections, they're solving problems that matter less and less, and are increasingly less likely to be useful in any way.
Of course, it's still incredibly interesting to know about the fundamental building blocks of the universe, but without a promise of practical applications, or at least a convincing argument that they'll find something interesting with this new collider, I find it really hard to justify the price tag.
Would knowing what physics does at 100TeV be any more valuable to us than a great work of literature? I'm not sure.
I mean, you can say that about people going to the moon, right? What data are they going to get? Something about rocks and the consistency of the moon dust, right? The technologies developed in going to the moon got us so many things we didn't see from the goal.
This is the same for a lot of things around the frontiers of science! More experimental data is beneficial to all levels of science. Look at how many papers have been written in obscure and 'irrelevant' fields of higher mathematics only to -- 40 or 200 years later -- be found extremely relevant and useful?
The point is we don't know. It's not like we can't afford it. If the United States, for example, distributed the defense budget into social care and the sciences, we wouldn't be having a conversation about monetary distribution. It's not inherently mutually exclusive, and it doesn't have to be at the moment, either.
> Would knowing what physics does at 100TeV be any more valuable to us than a great work of literature? I'm not sure.
Those things aren't mutually exclusive.
You tease us with such sweet words, something like Star Trek but more real.
Can you expand on why you think this? I'm not a physicist, but I feel like one shouldn't discount the possibility of useful discoveries. I'd love to hear if there are reasons that's not true.
Is it possible that we might discover something revolutionary at 100TeV that will have gigantic consequences to our daily lives? Sure. But that's like saying that it's possible that there's a treasure chest full of gold buried in your backyard. Yes, if you dug up your back yard it is possible you'll find something amazing and life changing. But for right now, we don't really have any convincing reason to think that's the case, and you'd probably just be spending a lot of effort to dig a big hole in the ground.
Arguing that it'd have good effects like increasing your fitness and "who knows, you might strike gold!" isn't really a convincing argument for me to dig up my yard.
> Arguing that it'd have good effects like increasing your fitness and "who knows, you might strike gold!" isn't really a convincing argument for me to dig up my yard.
What I mean by this is that I don't think that the spin off technologies or discoveries from high energy particle physics research (i.e. the fitness you might gain by digging up your yard) are a valid justification for doing it.
Spin off technologies and discoveries will be found in almost any research endeavour, including other particle physics experiments that aren't just "build another collider, but bigger", they're not a justification for the research, they're a bonus.
Quantum mechanics didn't require $10B (or whatever the equivalent would be in 1930-ish currency) to create. The "inventors" of QM were trying to explain measurements that were already made, quite inexpensively, that did not fit the model of nature that we had at that time.
Basically, the experiments were done, measurements made. Now the theorists were trying to understand what they needed in order to be able to provide a model that fit these results. This required a number of specific mental leaps of faith. Some of these are controversial even today. But they fit the experiments, so the issue for us is one of a mental model.
But ... and this is critical, not all of physics is quantum mechanical. Orbital calculations don't (normally) require QM. Steam engines, heat engines, etc. don't normally require QM.
The objections some of us have with classifying "all of physics being HEP" is that it is not, and the reality is that most physics do not require accelerators. Most new physics won't require accelerators.
A great example from earlier this year is the first sighting of a Majorana fermion[1]. Though this article also makes the mistake of "In particle physics, fermions are a class of elementary particles". Its not in particle (HEP) physics. Its in physics.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/first-majorana-fermion-metal-quant...
Also, look at the military budget and think what is potentially more useful...
That analogy has broken down. It’s not to say that we couldn’t learn something at 100TeV that could be useful or even revolutionary like QM was, but we also don’t really have any reason to believe that right now other than cheery optimism.
I’m all for finding high energy physics, I just don’t think it can justify it’s current budget in the quest for newer bigger colliders at higher and higher energies.
These are all quotidian problems in I guess "condensed matter" physics which are 0) largely unsexy and ignored 1) still largely unsolved, 2) liable to watershed huge, life- and money- saving innovations, while exotic HEP and Low Temp Condensed, are still what most physics students study their way into.
Science, at least from the funding perspective, has always leaned toward what's fashionable -- "nuclear" dominated following WW2, "particle" has had it's moment, and we're moving full force toward "quantum" (& "AI"!)
Scientists seeking funding bend themselves in knots to ensure they include all the key words in their grant applications
If there was no other interesting physics requiring further research, how could those other fields be generating enough papers to fill 4 journals?
And this isn't even counting more recent journals like Phys. Rev. Fluids.
even after decades of massive use ?
Note for the wider audience: 77 K is liquid nitrogen, vastly easier to produce and handle than liquid helium.
(HB is an experimental chef who uses quite a lot of liquid N. Liquid He is probably not indicated for food prep)
These things allow to create warm-dense matter in a laboratory:
Condensed matter physics is, in my opinion, a far more interesting and varied field of study than high energy physics. Not only does it contribute to society in a way high energy physics no longer does, but in many senses it takes on a fundamental character like HEP. Every material in the long wavelength limit acts like its own little universe with its own set of fundamental particles and quantum fields.
The universes Condensed matter physics studies have supersymmetry, Majorana fermions, magnetic monopoles, dualities and any other genuinely interesting physical phenomenon you could want.
What's more is that by understanding the physics of these phenomena, we can create new technologies that really matter.
[1] https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_differen...
Even if you don't, though, there's still cosmology and black hole physics.
One can observe anti-de Sitter spaces in superfluid systems. Is that not more "fundamental" than zoology of particles and their interactions? That has, literally to do with the metric tensor of space. Seems to be a bit more fundamental to me than things interacting in that space.
Put another way, the "fundamental" argument is very weak, and everyone outside of HEP knows this.
Everybody seems to agree with that, yet it seems most Physicists immediately refuse to spend any further thought on it and go back to modeling what happens if you double the number of particles and then crash them at 100 TeV
Where is the innovation/research in this area happening? This is one of those topics that I find very interesting but any attempt to serious inquiry into it tends to result in ridicule from people I know with some expertise in physics and thermodynamics, as though it was just obviously nonsense.
We are generally willing to accept the interpretation, as long as we don't look to closely at it. Once we do, we have to start asking questions of nature as to which (set of) interpretation(s) are more likely correct. As in provides an understandable model, and provides correct calculation capability for predicting features given experiments.
It's not.
When this is pointed out to the people espousing this odd viewpoint, they usually respond with some passive aggressive comment. I've seen/experienced much of this during my time in research.
New physics not requiring an accelerator would include quantum computing; the real stuff of entangled qubits, and the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits. More generally quantum mechanics interpretation and meaning. There are some unsettling things within QM, such as non-locality, and how to understand them.
There are many other examples, just listing 1 for brevity.
Basically, any text that begins with "the set of all physics is HEP physics" such as this article implies, is, pretty much by definition, incorrect.
I recall while the SSC was being built in Texas, that when the NSF asked for more money for researchers not involved in SSC, they were told that physics folks were getting enough. I remember my thesis advisor's grant that I was funded on, getting cut to help fund other things.
Equating the new physics with new HEP physics is, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, not even wrong. We don't need accelerators for most new physics.