My side won the bet . . .

          On 22 August, in Copenhagen, Nina Arkani-Hamed conceded that supersymmetry (super)particles will not soon materialize. Emphasis on the "soon" because that was the bet.

          Yonit Hochberg said:

          Right now, nature is telling us that if supersymmetry is the right theory, then it doesn't look exactly like we thought it would.

SupersymmertyParticles.jpg

          As of this time none of the particles to the right of the dark red line have been detected. While I have never been a fan of supersymmetry (I run with the multiverse crowd.) I have hoped we would reach energies where the standard model would fail dramatically. Perhaps we can push the LHC a little bit more and find some surprises even though I am still skeptical. Maybe the americans should have built the Superconducting Super Collider.
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Deja's picture

I am perfectly cool with that too.

But, congratulations!

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PriceRip's picture

          As part of the "post-classical" generation I learned about Quantum Mechanics (QM) at the same time I learned Classical Physics. That means I didn't come into this field with the same sort of baggage carried by the likes of Einstein. For me QM is not a refinement (or correction) to "a normal understanding of Reality" (read "Physics").
          One important part of this difference is how we understand QM informs us about how real world (Reality) processes unfold to produce our conceptualization of Reality. The recent announcement signals that maybe, just maybe, I am more correct than I had any reason to expect. There are many younger physicists doing this sort of thing in a variety of settings, and I had not formalized my experiences prior to retirement. So, I have decided to construct a series of dialogues/presentations touching on several aspects of my "journey of discovery" and how that has informed my teaching strategies over the past four decades.
          The upshot is: I understand and process particle physics concepts in a way alien to my professors. The challenge I have set for myself is to make this understanding accessible to others. In particular, I expect to expose my granddaughter (if she indicates an interest) to elementary particle physics as her brain develops.

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jwa13's picture

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When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said “How well he spoke”.
When Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said “Let us march”.

Deja's picture

I hope your granddaughter shows an interest. Maybe if you show her things that might pique her curiosity, you can move forward.

My grandfather did that with language, but while teaching me to count to 10 in German, he was so rigid and demanding about the pronunciation and enunciation that 10 was as far as it went. We never got to French. He was fluent in both, even though he never graduated from High School, and learned both during the war.

I was barely four. I could have learned so much from him. Such an amazing man. (Except for the fact he never ate another Italian meal after the war. Ha!)

Just try to make it fun, and remember, she's a child. If she's interested, you'll both likely do great things together.

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PriceRip's picture

          The other day she told her mother, "I want to be an explorer and make discoveries." I did this sort of thing with my daughter, some of her teachers (starting in kindergarten) did not like being corrected by a child.

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Deja's picture

It sounds like she might be a chip off the old block. Excellent, and enjoy this precious time with her!

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My son was told not to say "fart" in class. He's a music teacher now.

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Enjoy every sandwich. (ripwz)

Sorry. I love Big Bang Theory, though I have a sneaking feeling this season will not be good. But, I digress.

I did understand "my granddaughter." So, there's that.

But probably mostly because you posted a video of her and I remember how smart (in an adorable way) she is.

Thank you for trying to educate me.

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PriceRip's picture

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

But I won't tell you who I Slepton.

I'm sort of a multiverse guy myself. I believe the future has already happened at the quantum level and eventually spins out to the macro where we experience it as the present.

The universe may eventually become super symmetrical as a final stage of equilibration, but we won't be around to see it.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

jwa13's picture

Thing about quantum mechanics is, that there is an ascribable probability of ANYTHING happening --

("Ascribable" => "if sufficient profit could be generated, some insurer, somewhere, would place a bet on it ...")

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When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said “How well he spoke”.
When Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said “Let us march”.

PriceRip's picture

          . . . is rather gnarly. One vexing conundrum from some time ago, "Why does gravitational mass appear to be the same as inertial mass?", could be trivially answered if gravitons (G) do not exist and all gravitational interactions are the result of Time-Space curvature. But, then we get stuck with the issue that time at the quantum realm is the same as time at the macro-scale, or so it seems.

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

issue that time at the quantum realm is the same as time at the macro-scale,

except it moves at a too great a rate for us to distinguish cause and effect. At least that's my theory.

Time at the quantum level is a singularity. From our perspective, everything is happening at once.

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jwa13's picture

the only reason that we "believe" that it exists is because ...

we believe that it exists. The equations describing General Relativity and the system of quantum mechanics are expressed in terms of (dx/dt) -- i.e., the change of a particular quantity (energy, mass, poop) through time. There is NO ARITHMETIC SIGN attached to dx/dt in ANY of the equations -- in other words, Time (according to the current mathematics) can move in either direction --

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When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said “How well he spoke”.
When Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said “Let us march”.

PriceRip's picture

          This irritating (to certain crowd) problem has been around for some time. How's that for schlepping meta-language ‽ So, while, as you suggest, it might "move" in "both" directions or perhaps as /users/Not Henry Kissinger pointed out maybe everything is happening at once. The question, I think, is not yet settled. But, I feel confident in stating: The solution will not be constrained to "From our perspective".

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People had to figure out a way to know when to show up for a blind date. Or plant crops or something. The only accurate calendars are in nature, not the pieces of paper on our desks.

The Egyptian calendar, the first sane one, was based on the annual flooding of the Nile and was accurate. The Greeks and Romans both messed up the Egyptian calendar. (Before that, the Roman calendar was a holy mess.) The most accurate calendar is the Iranian one, which is lunar.

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PriceRip's picture

          The concept of year, day, hour, et cetera are certainly constructs and only have meaning through our measurement techniques. The decay rates of elementary particles and other fundamentally stochastic processes that we do not directly perceive, I am not so sure I would assert they are constructs.

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the one Egyptians noticed coincided with the Nile flooding its banks--are visible. At least, they are visible if you don't live in a smog-filled city as I always have.

But, does something that goes on, be it decay of particles or the setting of the sun actually have anything to do with what we call time? And, does it matter? As I said, we needed some concept to govern our survival behaviors. We came up with time. It worked. We're still here.

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PriceRip's picture

          Anything before the development of even a rudimentary understanding of quantum mechanics has very little to offer. Time is not well described without a modern point of view. Even the notion of periodicity is a human construct because it is inevitably tied to a measurement/observation with inherent experimental uncertainty. As I stand on the first floor of a building my flow through time is different from your flow through time as you stand on the fourth floor of that same building. All processes (starting from the most fundamental) experience this "time distortion" and we have only known this to be true for about 100 years.

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And, we are still here. The crops got planted and harvested. The species did not starve. The monthly mortgage on the hut got paid in a timely manner and foreclosure was avoided. We are still using the Egyptian calendar, although, instead of watching for that star to hit its sweet New Year/Nile flood spot, someone or something somewhere adjusts a nanosecond every now and again; and et voilà! our calendar is as accurate as the Egyptians made their calendar by looking up at the sky 5000 years ago (or was it 5000 B.C.?)

[video:https://youtu.be/oAjSWZQNXLU?t=106]

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

I think the flaw lies in its not properly accounting for time dilation between objects of different momenta.

I believe we have a spectrum of observable time limited by an object's relative momentum to our own.
Anything with too big a momentum (like a black hole) time appears to stand still. Anything with too small a momentum (like an atom), and time appears to move infinitely fast.

Thus, we can only observe the movement of time if the object we are observing has a momentum within a limited range. Time dilation narrows this range further, effectively squaring the differences as the change in time rate is experienced both toward the object and coming from it.

To your point, I'm not convinced that time flows in all directions. There is a progressive continuum, but it is only observable in objects whose rates of time are sufficiently similar to our own that we may observe time moving.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

PriceRip's picture

I think the flaw lies in its not properly accounting for time dilation between objects of different momenta.

          I haven't encountered a case (recently) that did not have a proper accounting for time dilation between one object moving relative to another. Any such example would, I hope, occur as the result of an approximation. I know several astrophysicists that (because of calculational budgetary constraints) choose to simplify their simulation models.

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

I haven't encountered a case (recently) that did not have a proper accounting for time dilation between one object moving relative to another.

if they are doing it wrong?

Time Dilation can be confirmed for objects in our the local area (satellites don't fall out of orbit, etc.) but the farther out you get the trickier it gets.

TD is determined not just by linear motion but also by distance from the center of momentum of each object (in a spinning sphere that would be its axis of rotation). Yet scientist can't even confirm distances more than four light years from earth (and even then only by using parallax dead reckoning, not by redshift or other light frequency-based methods.). If they can't judge distances between non-local objects with any certainty, how do they confirm the relative time dilation between them?

TD is also affected by the rate of spin of the object (the greater the spin, the slower the time rate). I am not aware that astrophysicists even take spin of objects into account in their estimations.

Basically, it's my belief that current methods underestimate the amount of TD, and that this is the reason everything appears overly redshifted to absurd levels.

That is what I mean when I say GR has a static view of time. We impose our own local time rate on the Universe and expect it to conform, and when it doesn't we come up with all sorts of wild theories about the shape of the Universe to justify our ignoring the differences in time rates and the interaction of those time rates between the objects. It's like being in a fun house and not realizing all the mirrors are misshaped.

Instead, we need to realize that every object in the Universe runs at its own unique time rate, and that this rate interacts with our own in a geometrically distorting way. Until we do, we will continue to mistakenly bend space, when we should be bending time.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

PriceRip's picture

          Different choices of words, similar vision. I like to use the analogy of hiking in the Wallowa Mountains of NE Oregon. Having traveled via different routes, we are looking at the same high lake but from slightly different locations.
          Trying not to sound pedantic: Dark Matter and Dark Energy are tools used by astrophysicists to nudge the models to deal with some of the issues you have highlighted.
          From my point of view, the critical part of the construct is that Gravitons (G) do not exist. If Gs exist then the discussion of Reality becomes enormously complex.

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

Yeah. I'm not trying to reinvent anything. Just looking at it from the perspective where time is not a constant. Everything seems to make a lot more sense that way, at least to me, and it also as you say does away with the need for 'dark' stuff to make up for the apparent distortions.

I also don't think there are Gravitons. If anything is a construct, it's Gravity, which simply describes the apparent effect of motion but doesn't really explain the processes of why objects move the way they do. Gravity is kind of a catchall for things we don't understand. (Like 'gravitational lensing. We don't know why there is a more pronounced red shift around distant galaxies, so we just blame it on gravity.)

The idea of Gravity is like the idea God. When scientists don't understand why something happens we just ascribe it to Gravity and that seems to satisfy people as self evident, when of course it is anything but.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

PriceRip's picture

          . . . did a nice job of dealing with . . .

. . . the perspective where time is not a constant.

          Nolan did a very smart thing, he hired Kip Thorne as the film's technical adviser. There were many critics (particularly online) that panned the film for its lack of realism. But that was because they are not part of the cognoscenti.
          So while we will disagree about many details this particular observation will not be a source of said disagreement.
          For those that have grown weary of my ramblings, I could suggest Gravitation, by Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler. However, it is a rather dense tome for those ill prepared for same.

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jwa13's picture

when they are available -- much simpler to manage. Stochastic simulations tend to get really ugly, really fast -- and, in light of Chaos Theory can tend to wander away from a "reasonable" solution --

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When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said “How well he spoke”.
When Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said “Let us march”.

PriceRip's picture

          The problem for mathematicians is that mathematics provides, at best, a classical approximation to Reality.

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LapsedLawyer's picture

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"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-- John Lennon

Hawkfish's picture

I've never been a fan of the block universe and the idea that the flow of time is an illusion. If that were true, then the illusion would just be a physical structure at each point on my world line, but that doesn't explain why I experience "now".

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the future is not determined. Lee Smolin makes a good (and very different) argument for this, and the implications are pretty wild. A preferred frame of reference is one, and a modification of GR called "Shape Dynamics" is another. SD sounds a lot like the Doctor's explanation of how the inside of the TARDIS is bigger than the outside(!)

I never like Everett-Wheeler much. To me, it smacked of confusing the math for reality. We are going to do that because we are human and limited, but we need not go overboard. Before I ran into Smolin and his Perimeter Institute gang, I tended towards John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation.

Strangely enough, Cramer also wrote a SciFi novel called Einstein's Bridge that featured the TI, time travel and two physicists who had to go back in time to force Bush I to cancel the SCSC so that super-nasty aliens wouldn't use it to cross from another reality and destroy the earth. Not a literary masterpiece, but very thought provoking (and the aliens were quite creepy!)

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We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg

PriceRip's picture

          I too think "time is an illusion" as in simply another static dimension is not very helpful:

I've never been a fan of the block universe and the idea that the flow of time is an illusion.

Working out particle interactions pretending that time is a static dimension allows enough creative thinking to "get the calculations done", so there is that. Which flows into the fact that it is too easy "[confuse] the math for reality". I think there is a problem with taking interpretations of QM too seriously.
          I would like to see more effort to stop using the [Fill In The Blank] Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. When N. David Mermin wrote his paper The Ithaca Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics he made a point of writing "I myself have never met an interpretation of quantum mechanics I didn’t dislike." That was one of the few statements of his I never argued about.

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jwa13's picture

and maybe you should be paying just a leetle bit more attention to dark matter/dark energy --

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When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said “How well he spoke”.
When Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said “Let us march”.

PriceRip's picture

          The Standard Model might be quite complete without the supersymmetry bit. That is still an open question.
          It is not clear that the Gravity/Dark Matter/Energy family of interactions are quantum mechanical like the Elecro-Weak/Strong family of interactions. If this be the case and the former family is really all about TimeSpace curvature, then solving this mystery will be quite different from particle physics.

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sojourns's picture

you have to clean it up.

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"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

but this guy does, and he's awesome:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rjbtsX7twc]

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

PriceRip's picture

          When I arrived at Arizona State University I was a bit surprised to find an a cappella group composed of physics graduate students. Sometime before they went to Nam they staged an elaborate dinner for the faculty and (in period costume) sang medieval madrigals. When they returned from their various tours of duty they preferred to perform rather silly songs in more of a Monty Python vein, as out of tune as possible.

          They were part of the ћ (that's h-bar) club so they became known as the title of this missive.

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