Physicists Bummed That Physics Is Pretty Much What They Expected
Great title (no, it’s not The Onion), but not much more than a lead into another story:
At CERN: Down in the Mouth in Paradise
Chalk up another success for the Standard Model. How … ummm … exciting?! Sure, if you’re over 60 and fondly recall the glory days of the 1960s and early ‘70s when the Standard Model became, well the Standard Model. Or if you’re an experimentalist who has dedicated the last 10-30 years to designing, building and operating the extraordinary Large Hadron Collider and Tevatron accelerators (where the discovery was made and confirmed respectively), or their monumental detectors — ATLAS and CMS, CDF and D0. Celebrate away. Drink champagne, toast your successes, wonder over Nobel and lesser (but more broadly shared) prizes. You’ve earned it. But what about the rest of us?
Physics is stagnant because it is a risk-minimized business model. Rigorous derivation contains no internal errors. Bolyai in 1832 dinged Euclid – after 2000 years of intense internal scrutiny – because Euclid’s fifth postulate is incomplete. A founding postulate can only be falsified from the outside.
All the white swans in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the New World do not prohibit Australian black swans. Einstein and quantum mechanics dinged Newton, Otto Stern dinged Dirac, Yang and Lee dinged particle physics. Vacuum isotropy chokes on periodic lattices (arxiv:1109.1963). Two geometric (jpeg) Eötvös experiments falsify the Equivalence Principle. A trace chiral vacuum background, evidenced throughout fermionic matter observations as parity violations, will divergently interact with falling opposite shoes. Ya gotta look.