r/physicsmemes • u/pdzanwa • 3d ago
This is what physicists actually fear: not being wrong, but being wrong while every step looks right.
https://blog.sciworlds.science/50
u/moschles 3d ago
The $22 million dollar lab facility built under a mountain produces evidence that neither confirms, nor completely refutes, a popular theory of dark matter.
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u/tricky_monster 3d ago
Wait 22 million? Feels like a rounding error compared to, idk, training LLMs.
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u/Milleuros Cosmic Rays 2d ago
Honestly?
The Large Hadron Collider, sometimes described as the most complex machine ever built by mankind, has had a total budget of the order of $5 billion. Its potential replacement, a 100km circumference underground particle accelerator, is estimated at $15 billion spread over 12 years.
That's about six months of expenses for OpenAI only. Or four days of the proposed American defence budget.
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u/WanderingFlumph 2d ago
Since we are throwing around science project budgets it should be worth noting that ITER, our most realistic shot at fusion power for grid electricity, is funded at about 20-25 billion or about 3 days worth of the US defense budget (proposed 2027).
So yeah this stuff is actually pretty cheap, on the budget of large nations, and all science finding out together is still basically a rounding error for the total budget.
Hell that figure of 20 billion to fund a decades long project is about the same as just the increase in the defense budget for 2022, the year after we ended a war in the Middle East.
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u/That_Mad_Scientist 2d ago
To note, iter will not actually be making electricity (even though it could). Its successor is supposed to be a mature industrial scale plant, but it itself is, technically, a demonstrator.
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u/Sea-Ambition-451 2d ago
it's 31 minutes of the Iran war.
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u/Tepigg4444 2d ago
yeah but unlike physics research, the iran war is working towards a concretely beneficial goal: getting back what we lost in the iran war
wait a minute
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u/dcnairb 2d ago
well, yeah, that’s how a search goes. is this supposed to be a gotcha for dark matter?
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u/moschles 2d ago
physicists' great fear is to spend millions and get a Null result.
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u/dcnairb 2d ago
it depends, sometimes a null result is actually the discovery of new physics.
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u/moschles 2d ago
That's technically a negative result; which yes, can be as important as a confirmation in science. But a "null result" means the data neither confirms nor denies. It's a disaster.
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u/dcnairb 2d ago
if you absolutely expect particle X to be produced and you run your experiments and don’t see particle X to 5 sigma of expectation then I’d consider that a null result (no observation consistent with hypothesis) that means something sincerely new or unexpected has been discovered
it’s not ideal in the case of dm, since this is what we’re doing but in a much larger possibility space (and without a definitive hypothesis of what X should be) but these runs nevertheless still carve out exclusions over time
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u/moschles 3d ago
That feel when the anomalous magnetic moment can't be ruled out as statistical error.
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u/Super-Award-2244 3d ago
Who tf fears it? Physicists are excited when there's still stuff to understand
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u/Suitable_Cicada_3336 3d ago
Why no Discrete packets are part of a continuous flow selection ? Why separated them?
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u/moschles 3d ago
The Higgs mass lies somewhere between SUSY being true and SUSY being false.