[In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the
particles they are paid to search for exist – they do it because
their colleagues are doing it]
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NO ONE IN PHYSICS DARES SAY SO, BUT THE RACE TO INVENT NEW PARTICLES
IS POINTLESS  
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Sabine Hossenfelder
September 26, 2022
The Guardian
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_ In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles
they are paid to search for exist – they do it because their
colleagues are doing it _

‘The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of the particles
theoretical physicists have hypothesised, even though many were
confident it would.’ A technician works on the LHC, near Geneva,
Switzerland. , Laurent Gilliéron/AP

 

Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about
her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic.
There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable
hypothesis, and she argues that a mission should be sent off to search
the Arctic for spiders.

The second speaker has a model for a flying earthworm, but it flies
only in caves. There’s no evidence for that either, but he petitions
to search the world’s caves. The third one has a model for octopuses
on Mars. It’s testable, he stresses.

Kudos to zoologists, I’ve never heard of such a conference. But
almost every particle physics conference has sessions just like this,
except they do it with more maths. 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. Many
of these tests have actually been done, and more are being
commissioned as we speak. It is wasting time and money.

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. We even had a (luckily short-lived)
fad of “unparticles”.

All 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.
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. The Large Hadron
Collider
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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.

Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit
they do not actually believe those particles exist. 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. An army of typewriting monkeys may also sometimes
produce a useful sentence. But is this a good strategy?

Experimental particle physicists know of the problem, and try to
distance themselves from what their colleagues in theory development
do. At the same time, they profit from it, because all those
hypothetical particles are used in grant proposals to justify
experiments. And so the experimentalists keep their mouths shut, too.
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.

There are many factors that have contributed to this sad decline of
particle physics. 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.

But I believe the biggest contributor to this trend is a
misunderstanding of Karl Popper’s philosophy
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which, to make a long story short, demands that a good scientific idea
has to be falsifiable. Particle physicists seem to have misconstrued
this to mean that any falsifiable idea is also good science.

In the past, predictions for new particles were correct only when
adding them solved a problem with the existing theories. For example,
the currently accepted theory of elementary particles –
the Standard Model
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new particles; it works just fine the way it is. The Higgs boson, on
the other hand, was required to solve a problem. 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
modern new particles don’t solve any problems.

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. Each time an anomaly is reported, particle
physicists will quickly write hundreds of papers about how new
particles allegedly explain the observation. 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.

Ambulance-chasing is a good strategy to further one’s career in
particle physics. Most of those papers pass peer review and get
published because they are not technically wrong. And since
ambulance-chasers cite each other’s papers, they can each rack up
hundreds of citations quickly. But it’s a bad strategy for
scientific progress. After the anomaly has disappeared, those papers
will become irrelevant.

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. It has become
generally accepted practice in the physics community. No one even
questions whether it makes sense. At least not in public.

I believe there are breakthroughs waiting to be made in the
foundations of physics; the world needs technological advances more
than ever before, and now is not the time to idle around inventing
particles, arguing that even a blind chicken sometimes finds a grain.
As a former particle physicist, it saddens me to see that the field
has become a factory for useless academic papers.

_SABINE HOSSENFELDER is a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for
Advanced Studies, Germany. She is author of Existential Physics: A
Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions and creator of the
YouTube Channel Science Without the Gobbledygook._

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