4 November 2012

6 billion dollars of R&D - more than for the iPhone

Look at http://arxiv.org/year/hep-th/11 and similar pages for other years. Then look at http://arxiv.org/year/hep-ph/11 and similar pages. There are now 8000 preprints on high energy particle physics per year.

My friend, a businesswoman working in a technology company, told me that a paper can be taken to mean 1/3 of a person year of effort, on average. Which makes a total of 2700 person-years. Let me correct this downwards to 2000 and multiply by 30. That makes 60 000 person-years of effort in the past 30 years. 60 000 person-years of effort and no result at all on unification. Could a statistics be more damning about the collective failure of particle physicists?

My business friend says that one person-year of research is worth more than 100 000 $. That makes the effort of the last 30 years worth more than $ 200 million a year, or $ 6 billion! (My friend says that interests would need to be included, which would triple the amount.)

6 billions wasted. My head is spinning. These physicists have wasted 6 billions and still did not succeed! My friend tells me that the worst R&D disaster she knew was the failed development of the Airbus 350 (first generation), which cost 2 billion and led to nothing.

3 times as bad as Airbus. That is damning. But wait, she said, there is another comparison: Not even the iPhone has this much of R&D effort inside it. And there are differences: the iPhone works. Unification does not. Plus: the iPhone satisfies a need and is useful to people, whereas unification ...

Help! What is going on here? We are feeding thousands of physicists who do not succeed? Since decades? They really give particle physics a bad name. Each of them. Unbelievable, isn't it?









27 comments:

  1. Clara,

    I could not agree with you more. Thirty years of abysmal failures in theoretical HEP leading nowhere. Thousands of worthless papers and wasted grants, tens of unproductive conferences with tens of self-delusional speakers.

    Where are the leading figures of supersymmetry, grand unified theories, string theories, extra-dimensions, loop quantum gravity, deformed Special Relativity and on and on? Why don't we see Witten, Polchinski, Greene, Gross, Arkani-Hamed, Randall, Susskind, Smolin, Kostelecky, Weinberg and many others take a stand, admit failure and propose solutions to move forward?
    Likewise, why don't we see prominent bloggers such as Motl, Gibbs, Hossenfelder and others take a stand and honestly discuss these failures?

    Shifman is right. It starts to look like a lost generation of theorists.

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  2. Why we do not see the professors admitting failure is clear: they need their salary. In older times we would call such people "corrupt". Nowadays we call them "particle physics professors".

    Why we do not see most bloggers admitting failure (well, Woit does)? They live from their blog or are professors.

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  3. No need to worry about money paid to physicists. Big portion of these money was invested in Apple since many physicists bought iPhones. Raising government spendings is one of the two instruments of fiscal policy.

    It is also needless to expect from someone to admit failure. What for? It would not help anyone with "proposing solutions to move forward".

    What is really sad is that arxive.org, being the most popular source for reading scientific papers, imposed restricitons for submissions by "non-mainstream" physicists. They require endorsement from those who post 8000 useless preprints each year.

    Do you have any strategy, Clara? I mean, can you propose any constructive actions that would help with finding that "asian female with fresh idea"?

    ReplyDelete
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    1. "It is also needless to expect from someone to admit failure. What for? It would not help anyone with "proposing solutions to move forward""

      True scientists are always humble and honest. Toward the end of his life, Einstein admitted failure to produce a unified field theory and maintained that his mistakes were valuable lessons for the young physicists following in his path.

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    2. Einstein was male and did not respect women. He was an unfaithful husband. For a young (or old) woman, there is not much to learn from him.

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  4. Yes, there is a way: tell all women that men have failed and that they are unable to solve the problem.

    Whenever men fail, women have to jump in. So: tell all the women you know!

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  5. I talked to my wife and secretary. They are both female and asian. They encourage me to switch from business ro physiscs and try to solve the problem. Just like you, Clara, they proposed very simple and effective solution.

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  6. But thinking and working like a female will be hard for you.

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  7. Does it mean that I shouldn't follow their recommendation? Remember: they are women too...

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    Replies
    1. What "simple and effective solution" did they propose?

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  8. In my opinion, a distinction must be drawn between one’s professional and personal life. I agree that Einstein may not have been a good example in his personal relationships, but this has not diminished his stature as a brilliant and honest scientist.
    Do you sincerely believe that sex discrimination is the root cause of stagnation in theoretical particle physics?

    Cheers,

    Ervin Goldfain

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    Replies
    1. A good question! I believe that discrimination against different ideas is the root cause.

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    2. I agree with Clara. The list of "fixed ideas" is to your right. This is how physics industry works: students follow their supervisors in developing their "fixed" ideas and make no attempts to questioning the "root" assumptions. In all modern textbooks on particle physics you will find "fixed ideas" only. After 10-20 years of working in this manner former students become supervisors. And it goes on and on. So I have 2 recommendations to the young physicists:

      1. Do not follow your supervisor
      2. Read old books only

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    3. An interesting observation: the famous Russian school of string theory is lead by a woman (Irina Arefiyeva) and followed by many women.

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  9. If anyone wants a sample of how SUSY fans are in denial, check out Strassler's blog:

    http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/11/14/why-theories-dont-go-into-hospitals/

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    Replies
    1. Boring... That's not about physics. That's kind of indulgence for all those who failed to do the right physics. But the fundamental idea of SUSY is still correct: there has to be a kind of relationship (they call it symmetry) between electromagnetic and spinorial fields of electron, otherwise this particle cannot be stable. They tried to use group theory approach to establish such relationship, but it didn't work. There is nothing to discuss here.

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  10. Veltman calls supersymmetry "nonsense". And the stability argument you quote makes no sense.

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    1. Why not? Electron fielf is the source of it's own EM field, which in turn affects the source. They need to be balanced. Balance means relationship. That's very simple.

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    2. Murod,

      It's quite obvious that you are deeply confused.

      The problem of electron self-reaction has NOTHING to do with supersymmetry. It has been successfully resolved by modern quantum electrodynamics and renormalization theory.

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    3. It has not been resolved at all. It just has been swept under the carpet. Self-energy of the electron cannot be identified using QED. Attempts to use QED lead to infinities, and renormalization is used only to get rid of them. It is similar to using Keppler laws in order to identify the rotational energy of Earth (when Earth is considered as material point). If you will consider that radius of Earth is 0, then you will immediately obtain that it's angular velocity is infinite (given that you know that rotational energy is finite and non-zero).

      As for supersymmetry - of course I know that it has never been used for solving electron's self-energy problem. But SUSY was aiming at establishing relationship between fermions and bosons, which is needed for solving the problem.

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    4. Murod,

      Please get the facts straight, you continue to mix things up.

      The original objections by Dirac to the Renormalization Group (RG) program have long been refuted by the enormous success of QED, the understanding of critical phenomena in statistical physics and the development of RG in QFT through the work of Feynman, Tomonaga, Gell-Man, Low, Fisher, Wilson, Callan, Symanzik and others. Contrary to your claims, there are precision tests of QED that would have been impossible without first solving the electron self-energy problem (see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_tests_of_QED)

      It is true that SUSY may play a role in contributing quantum corrections to the anomalous magnetic of muons and tau-leptons, but this is far from being obvious at this time. On the contrary, the absence of low scale SUSY is a preliminary indication that superpartners are irrelevant to this problem.

      Delete
  11. Dear Anonymous,

    Let's make it clear:

    1. When you say "solving electron self-energy problem" you probably mean that for the class of problems where identifying the self-energy of the electron IS NOT THE ULTIMATE OBJECTIVE, the divergent self-energy terms were isolated and replaced by the value of self-energy (i.e. mass) known from experiment. Do you agree with that?

    2. Any attempts of identifying electron's self-energy (mass) from QED theory lead to failure. That means that the problem of IDENTIFICATION OF SELF-ENERGY cannot be solved using QED. That is why precision tests of QED do not include electron's mass measurements, because QED prediction about electron mass value is either INFINITY (before renormalization) or NOTHING (after renormalization). Correct me if I'm wrong.

    3. No doubt SUSY is wrong. But establishing relationship between fermions and bosons is still necessary to solve the problem of IDENTIFICATION OF ELECTRON'S SELF-ENERGY. Renormalization doesn't help. Higgs boson doesn't help. New idea is needed.

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    Replies
    1. Murod,

      I urge you to get your facts straight before posting comments.

      In QFT “self-energy” is unphysical. It is a singular quantity and it cannot be measured. By contrast, what is typically referred as “mass” is a renormalized and measurable parameter having finite observational values. It is also a quantity that runs with the Renormalization Group scale. In this context, your identification of “self- energy” with “mass” is misleading.

      It is however correct to state that the renormalized electron mass is zero in the Standard Model (SM). In fact all particles must be massless in the SM Lagrangian to comply with local gauge invariance and preserve consistency of the SM. Masses arise in the SM only after the introduction of the scalar doublet in the Lagrangian and the conventional Higgs mechanism of symmetry breaking.

      As it is well known, the SM is incomplete since, among other things, it cannot predict particle masses (the electron included). To claim that some unknown relationships between gauge bosons and fermions solve the problem of predicting particle masses is an empty proposition, unless you can provide compelling analytical evidence that this is the case. In order for you to do so, you need to develop a theory that is consistent with both the spin-statistics and the Coleman-Mandula theorems.

      Please be advised that I am no longer interested in continuing this conversation and this is my last reply.

      Delete
  12. The following statements can now be added to Clara's list of "Fixed Ideas":

    - “mass” is a measurable parameter, and it's quantity runs with the Renormalization Group scale.
    - identification of “self- energy” with “mass” is misleading (E is not equal to mc^2)

    (I realize that Clara can write without being told by others what she can write or do on her own blog.)

    But I agree with you, Annonimous, that "claiming that some unknown relationships between EM field (not gauge bosons!) and fermions solve the problem of predicting particle masses is an empty proposition".

    Let's stop empty talks and be constructive. I will develop the "compelling analytical evidence" . It is also important to set the deadline. Let it be by March 1, 2013.

    Cheers,

    Murod (asian male businessman with some background in physics).

    P.S.: by the way, the reference to Coleman-Mandula theorem is irrelevant, because the theory does not HAVE to be a gauge theory. Clara: another statement for the list of fixed ideas: Only gauge theories are allowed.


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  14. My list of fixed ideas above only contains wrong ones.

    If you think that E is not mc^2, for zero speed, there are two options: either you have data, then you can travel to Stockholm. Or you have no data, then you can travel to your therapist.

    The same is valid for "interactions do not need to be gauge theories".

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