![]() In this story they’re not the problem, they’re the solution. LHC experimentalists have blown huge holes in that bandwagon, in some sense by doing exactly what Hossenfelder complains about (looking for evidence of badly motivated theories of new particles). Pre-LHC, the most influential theorists in the world heavily promoted dubious SUSY extensions of the SM, making these arguably the dominant paradigm in the field. Another huge advance for the field has been the careful investigation of the new energy range opened up by the LHC, shooting down a lot of bad theory. The discovery of the Higgs was a huge advance for the field, and the on-going effort to study its properties in detail is important. The LHC has been a huge success so far, with the old claims that it was going to see extra dimensions an embarrassment which doesn’t change the science that has happened. All of these activities are valuable and well-justified. ![]() Money is being spent on running the LHC at high luminosity (CERN) and studying neutrinos (US), as well as studying the possibilities for going to higher energy. At the present time though, no one is spending money on building a new energy frontier machine any time soon. For more on the current debate about this, see here. Yes, one can find people who have used bad theory to make bad arguments for building a new machine, but I don’t think those have been of much significance. What I most disagree with her about though is her treatment of HEP experiment and experimentalists. In attacking bad model building in particle physics, I think she’s going after a small group of stragglers, not the center of theoretical activity (which has problems much more worth discussing). ![]() Most influential theorists have (quietly) agreed with her that particle physics is dead. The bad theory activity she points to has been going on for decades, but in recent years it seems to me to be a lot less popular. ![]() An opinion piece by Sabine Hossenfelder appeared yesterday in the Guardian, which takes a similar point of view on the current fate of extensions of the SM, but I strongly disagree with a lot of what she has to say. I’ll post slides after the talk tonight, one theme of which will be the failure of a series of attempts to extend the Standard Model, all of which were started in the mid-1970s (GUTs, SUSY, string theory). On Saturday I’ll try to find some way to get to the HTLGI Festival in London despite a national rail strike, where I’ll give a talk on Saturday and be on two panel discussions Sunday. Heading to Oxford today, this evening I’ll give a talk there on Unified Theories of Physics. ![]()
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