It has become generally accepted practice in the physics community. This procedure of inventing particles and then ruling them out has been going on so long that there are thousands of tenured professors with research groups who make a living from this. After the anomaly has disappeared, those papers will become irrelevant. But it’s a bad strategy for scientific progress. And since ambulance-chasers cite each other’s papers, they can each rack up hundreds of citations quickly. Most of those papers pass peer review and get published because they are not technically wrong. This behaviour is so common they even have a name for it: “ambulance-chasing”, after the anecdotal strategy of lawyers to follow ambulances in the hope of finding new clients.Īmbulance-chasing is a good strategy to further one’s career in particle physics. Each time an anomaly is reported, particle physicists will quickly write hundreds of papers about how new particles allegedly explain the observation. In some cases, the new particles’ task is to make a theory more aesthetically appealing, but in many cases their purpose is to fit statistical anomalies. The modern new particles don’t solve any problems. The antiparticles that Paul Dirac predicted were likewise necessary to solve a problem, and so were the neutrinos that were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli. The Higgs boson, on the other hand, was required to solve a problem. For example, the currently accepted theory of elementary particles – the Standard Model – doesn’t require new particles it works just fine the way it is. In the past, predictions for new particles were correct only when adding them solved a problem with the existing theories. Particle physicists seem to have misconstrued this to mean that any falsifiable idea is also good science.
Partly the problem is social: most people who work in the field (I used to be one of them) genuinely believe that inventing particles is good procedure because it’s what they have learned, and what all their colleagues are doing.īut I believe the biggest contributor to this trend is a misunderstanding of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which, to make a long story short, demands that a good scientific idea has to be falsifiable. There are many factors that have contributed to this sad decline of particle physics. This leaves people like me, who have left the field – I now work in astrophysics – as the only ones able and willing to criticise the situation. And so the experimentalists keep their mouths shut, too. At the same time, they profit from it, because all those hypothetical particles are used in grant proposals to justify experiments. But is this a good strategy?Įxperimental particle physicists know of the problem, and try to distance themselves from what their colleagues in theory development do. An army of typewriting monkeys may also sometimes produce a useful sentence. They justify their work by claiming that it is good practice, or that every once in a while one of them accidentally comes up with an idea that is useful for something else. Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of those particles either, even though, before its launch, many theoretical physicists were confident it would see at least a few. However, we do not know that dark matter is indeed made of particles and even if it is, to explain astrophysical observations one does not need to know details of the particles’ behaviour. We even had a (luckily short-lived) fad of “unparticles”.Īll experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter, a type of matter that supposedly fills the universe and makes itself noticeable by its gravitational pull. Since the 1980s, physicists have invented an entire particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas, axions, flaxions, erebons, accelerons, cornucopions, giant magnons, maximons, macros, wisps, fips, branons, skyrmions, chameleons, cuscutons, planckons and sterile neutrinos, to mention just a few. Many of these tests have actually been done, and more are being commissioned as we speak. It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis be experimentally tested. But almost every particle physics conference has sessions just like this, except they do it with more maths.
Kudos to zoologists, I’ve never heard of such a conference.
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