Re: MIT physicists just found a way to see inside atoms

Am 27.10.25 um 11:43 schrieb Martin Brown:

Reminds me at Sabine Hossenfelder's YouTube channel. She claims that physics has not made any serious progress in the last

No wonder she does not make a lot of friends and falls victim to endless ad hominem attacks.

And the one significant finding, the Higgs, was predicted > 40 years ago.

Cheers, Gerhard

Alexander Unzicker wrote a book on CERNism called THE HIGGS FAKE HOW PARTICLE PHYSICIST FOOLED THE NOBEL COMMITTEE:

... the worst thing about the standard model of particle physics is the stalling in the intellectual progress of humankind it has caused. We need to get rid of that junk to evolve further. ... The prototypical example of an unhealthy theory was [epicycles]. ... the epicycle theory has become a synonym of thoughtless complication. But there was "evidence" that supported it, even fairly precise evidence. ... Particle physicists never think of the precision of medieval astronomy when they repeat their gospel of the "excellent agreement with the data" of the standard model.

Hossenfelder's my heroine. Her brilliant brain dazzles dullards.

The have been so many predictions of potentially significant findings that it is a little surprising that the Higgs particle is the only only example that you can think of that came true.

I found the empirical proof that neutrino's oscillate between lepton states - electron, muon or tau - thus explaining the solar neutrino deficit, to be pretty significant.The first prediction goes back to

We had a post here a month or so ago when somebody used the ten fold way to predict eight very heavy dark matter candidates, two with two thirds of the electron/proton charge and the other six with one third, so the ambition does still seem top be there.

Am 27.10.25 um 16:29 schrieb Bill Sloman:

Oh, I remember the super-c fast neutrinos. I once made some fun of it when someone made sloppy experiments. After the fact I learned that a guy from Gran Sasso was present whose job had been to clean that up...

Oooohps!

Gerhard

To be fair, they did eventually do the thorough checking of every step in the timing process that did find where the mistake had been introduced.

Going public with such a surprising result before doing a very thorough check was a little unwise, but humans are fallible, and while the scientific method does catch a lot of these sorts of mistakes before publication, it certainly doesn't catch all of them.

The neutrino's changing lepton number in flight was a lot more strange.

All to your own complete satisfaction.

The problems that cleverer people see don't seem to worry you.

Not actually true.

Around 1890 space was supposed to be filled with "ether". The Michelson-Morley ether drift experiment put paid to that.

It explains it well enough to keep you happy. Not all that well - but you are easily satisfied.

Perhaps.

The average mammalian species lasts about 10 million years. Evolving a brain that could do general purpose language seems to have taken about

There could be. Until we find something, it's just idle speculation.

I thought UF_6 is a gaz? If it at all disassociate in water, I expect it to decompose.

T Hooft (nobel price winner and an important contributor to the standard model considers the virtual particle vacuum a mere phenomological description. Most physicist are not satisfied with the standard model, and crave for a deeper insight.

It was not. It was not complicated more than necessary. It works as a prediction, so a sound model. It shares a treat with the standard model that one wants to have a deeper understanding.

It is easy to notice this, and very hard to come up with progress beyond the standard model. Particularly string theory is able to explain everything, like epicycles.

String theory ignores reality in the same manner epicycles ignore planetary motion around the Sun. String theory exemplifies the creeping and crawling of Aristotle and Plato as posited by Poe's EUREKA. What's needed now is intuitively imaginative insight. A new model to both predict and mirror reality in the manner of Kepler.

"When UF6 is exposed to moist air, it reacts with the water in the air to produce UO2F2 (uranyl fluoride) and HF (hydrogen fluoride) both of which are highly corrosive and toxic."

In damp air it fumes HF and at STP is a bright yellow solid despite what Wiki says about being a clear white crystalline material. I think it is that colour because of UO2 impurities in production grade material.

Am 27.10.25 um 16:29 schrieb Bill Sloman:

In the WIKI entry for that book, following your link:

Sabine Hossenfelder, in a review written a year later and titled "The Trouble With Physics: Aftermath" alludes to the book's polarising effect on the scientific community. She explores the author's views as a contrast in generations, while supporting his right to them.[7] Hossenfelder believes that Smolin's book attempts to restore the relation physics once had with philosophy, quoting him as follows:

Philosophy used to be part of the natural sciences – for a long time. For long centuries during which our understanding of the world we live in has progressed tremendously. There is no doubt that times change, but not all changes are a priori good if left without further consideration. Here, change has resulted in a gap between the natural sciences where questioning the basis of our theories, and an embedding into the historical and sociological context used to be. Even though many new specifically designed interdisciplinary fields have been established, investigating the foundations of our current theories has basically been erased out of curricula and textbooks.[8]

Gerhard