We are feeling around in the dark, looking for evidence to send us in a new direction. There is no nice model to guide us where to look for empirical evidence, just lots of theories, some predicting new particles. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built with two main goals: to find the Higgs boson, predicted by the standard model of particle physics, and to search for new phenomena needed to explain some of the fascinating details of our universe for which we have at present no explanation, such as dark matter. Particle physics is a great deal more than just inventing and searching for new particles, or “bump hunting” as we call it. ![]() ![]() Professor of astronomy and astrophysics, University of Chicago Instead, it’s to rationally consider the possibilities, investigate their consequences, decide which experiments to construct and carry out, and ultimately to learn as much as we can about our universe. The point of these investigations isn’t to be right all of the time. No one would expect every suspect in a criminal case to eventually be found guilty either. Of course, most of the particles that my colleagues and I speculate about will not turn out to be real, and that’s fine. ![]() These are not the characteristics of a theory that “works just fine the way it is”. Furthermore, most of the matter in our universe consists of dark matter, which is not described by the standard model. The standard model predicts that neutrinos should be massless (they aren’t), that the neutron’s electric dipole moment should be large (it’s undetectably small), and that there should be equal abundances of matter and antimatter in our universe (there are not). Hossenfelder’s claim that the standard model “works just fine the way it is” is simply not true. I wonder how many of these discoveries would never have been made if physicists had taken Hossenfelder’s advice about their approach to science. Most recently, the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012, having been proposed a half-century earlier. Similarly, positrons, pions, neutrinos, quarks and so on were each hypothesised by physicists well before they were observed in any experiment. The neutron was proposed in 1920 and discovered a dozen years later. In fact, we develop and propose new theories and new particles because there are real puzzles and open questions that our best current theory, the standard model, cannot address. ![]() Sabine Hossenfelder argues that particle physicists are far too eager to speculate about new particles, suggesting that this is done for reasons of career advancement, rather than a sincere desire to advance our understanding of the universe. Reader in cosmology, Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics What we’re testing are the principles themselves, not the particles while some of them might really exist, others are simply straw men to help us formulate useful tests. There is general disagreement about what works best, but many of the hypothetical particles mentioned in the article have been designed with useful functions in mind – breaking cherished principles of the standard model for instance, or adding new features to it. It would of course be tremendously tedious to rule out every last outlandish possibility (Hossenfelder’s octopuses on Mars, for example), and so we need a set of principles to guide us on where to look. Every impossibility proved gets us closer to a deeper understanding of the real universe it’s just as important to know that faster-than-light travel is impossible as it is to understand that light is made up of photons, for instance. Nature has an infinite capacity to surprise, and our scientific forebears learned long ago to take nothing for granted. While we’d all like to revolutionise our respective fields by discovering a new particle or otherwise, in reality, winnowing out the impossible – the particles that don’t exist – is an equally important, if painstaking, function of science. Sabine Hossenfelder ( No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent new particles is pointless, 26 September) has missed the point of a big part of particle physics, and indeed fundamental research as a whole.
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