First sentence from the article:
The Finnish government has announced the conversion of its rail network from Russian gauge (1,524 mm) to European standard (1,435 mm).
The really annoying thing is that it's too close for "simple" dual gauge rails (e.g. 1435 + 1000); 1435 + 1524 is possible and in fact exists (e.g. the one single SE-FI railway bridge that exists is dual guage: https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=gauge&lat=65.8273204537081...), but AFAIK it's expensive because the mounts interfere and need to be quite custom.
Even if you were to 4-rail every line, you'd potentially run into loading gauge issues (you would have to offset the current centre of the bogies, go too far one way and you collide with platforms, too far the other way and you collide with oncoming trains)
Bleh, but kinda confirms my point too. I do think there are some 3-rail setups in other border regions though? I should check… then again it doesn't matter that much if it's 3 or 4.
As for the loading gauge, yes, of course. On the plus side, this is Finland, most of the lines is in the middle of nowhere and single track even. Maybe the best option for them is to just build 1435 in parallel whereever possible, and just merge where not otherwise practical (bridges, tunnels, populated areas & stations). I don't even think it's that infeasible considering Finland's layout. I'd wager there are only a handful of specific locations that need expensive work.
> I have no idea how it came to that conclusion with those thoughts lol.
"There’s no specific reason why the reported Chain-of-Thought must accurately reflect the true reasoning process; there might even be circumstances where a model actively hides aspects of its thought process from the user." [1]
> There hasn't been a significant new particle discovery, but none was expected other than Higgs
The word "expected" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
At least one kind of Higgs had to be found unless the mass generation mechanism of the Standard Model and all its proposed extensions (MSSM etc) was categorically wrong; the LHC was designed to cover the entire mass range where it had to be. In that sense, the Higgs was strictly expected.
But if you had asked a bunch of phenomenologists "What new thing do you expect to be found first at the LHC?", most would have gone for one or more superpartners. The Higgs' hierarchy problem [1] was believed to require electroweak-scale SUSY, which in turn implied the existence of electroweak-scale supersymmetric partners to the known SM particles. Those would have been easier to find than the Higgs, so they would have shown up earlier in the data, before there was enough of it to also discern a Higgs bump.
You could argue that superpartners were not expected with the same degree of certainty as some kind of Higgs, but the absence of any sign of SUSY was a big disappointment, and the beginning of the end for what had become the dominating scenario for Beyond Standard Model physics.
One of the problems we have is that we are generally inculcated by our educational system to just think "science is good", without asking how good. But when we're talking about things like massive supercolliders, which cost things that start looking less like "a grant from the National Science Foundation" and more like "the entire economic output of a small country for a couple of decades", we need to ask whether we're getting enough science bang for our science buck, because not even science is actually immune to that question.
The LHC is honestly pretty questionable on that front. One can debate what was expected, but what is perhaps easier to wrap your mind around is certainly the LHC would have been immensely more valuable if it had found all sorts of supersymmetric particles, right?
Personally I think the most potent criticism of building yet another, even larger collider is just that such a collider requires essentially strangling the entire rest of the field for decades on end, and indeed, at this level of expense, strangling neighboring fields for decades on end, to fund something that doesn't have a terribly clear through-line on its value, on any dimension, practical or purely scientific. It's almost like "let's build a larger collider" is just a reflex at this point. There's a lot of interesting things bubbling on the fringe right now, and I don't mean the crazy fringe, I mean the scientific fringe. Maybe we should take a bit of a break from particle colliders for a bit and put some money into those things for a while.
We don't have infinite money, and we don't have guaranteed money; pouring vast, vast quantities of money into a new collider could well inhibit future research monies. It is still important to think about not whether we "should" spend the money in this or that way, because that always produces more "yes" answers than we actually have money for. The question is, is this the best way to spend money? And given the staggering amount we're talking, it's a high bar for this to be "best". Personally I'd really rather see at least a decade or so of just spreading things around a bit more, rather than pouring all of that into what is essentially a single project.
Additionally, while you're talking about budget in a practical manner, spending money on science to discover science isn't something that people outside of science generally love spending money on. I am nearly certain that part of the hope for people spending that kind of money on the LHC is not only might they discover something amazing but that it might also be practically useful to someone else.
There are other scientific fields that produce much more tangible results that the finite funding could go to. Even something like materials science which could not only produce more useful discoveries but could also make the next collider cheaper.
Only if you have a finite set of theories. If you have infinitely many theories that could explain a phenomenon, eliminating some swath of them brings you 0 new information, in information theoretical terms. The problem with SUSY and String theory and other similar physical theories is that they have many free parameters that can have any value that hasn't yet been ruled out by experiment. So if you build a collider twice as large and find nothing, you'll find that your parameter that today has possible range [n, +Inf) will now be known to have range [2n, +Inf). That doesn't actually mean anything at all, though. That doesn't actually tell you anything: you'll need infinitely more experiments to know what's the value of that parameter.
In addition, they're absolutely correct, some subset of particle researchers were wish-casting for SUSY stuff.
In addition, there's a significant substantive difference between "$X was defined and built for discovering $Y" and "some subset of $X hoped for proof of their theory $Y via $Z being discovered" -- there was also some subset that hoped for proof of string theory, or innumerable other things.
In general they're right and know their stuff if they're able to have this detailed of a take, but the actual claim "The word "expected" is doing a lot of work.", is doing a lot of work. And I was there. In a graduate physics lab with multiple faculty members on the LHC before it opened, including a big SUSY fan who thought that'd be a bank shot on a bank shot outcome, maybe. Hoped for by some? Yes. Expected by a majority? Absolutely not.
Experimenters always were more skeptical; I hypothesized asking phenomenologists for a reason. I like Adam Falkowski's description of what it was like in [1] (about the end of dedicated SUSY working groups at CERN):
the existence of SUSY was almost a fact for a bulk of researchers working on the topic. This certainly was reflected in hiring practices, and you had a large group of top researchers whose entire publication list was tied to supersymmetry
I don't disagree but you choosing contrarianism to show you're clever and know a lot here (which worked!) made it sound like CERN was expecting a SUSY particle or whatever (which it wasn't)
I contribute to discussions when I have the time and think I have something relevant to say. HN is hardly the right place to show off about physics, and trying to do so anonymously would be particularly pointless.
> made it sound like CERN was expecting a SUSY particle
That's not what I wrote. My point was explicitly about expectations on the theory side.
That video made sense. Using the information from a prior graphic showing that the entire map is made from the perspective of the earth, the video then places that data in one of the arms of the theoretical Milky Way where the earth is meant to be located, and clearly shows a lack of data in the direction of the center of the Milky Way. That tracks with anything I'd imagine the results to look like
Yes, but said model contradicts the typical understanding of dark energy. So I think the takeaway is not that 'this new model is how the universe works', but rather that 'our typical understanding of dark energy is inconsistent with what we are observing.'
Huh - if all you read was Wiki’s content “above the fold”, it would seem pretty conclusively debunked. But once you expand the actual evidence it’s far more mixed. There does not appear to be any consensus at all.
Yeah, in almost all observations / readings the axis is there. There's just no explanation for it, and most people shrug it off as a data inconsistency or error with the measurement. But this measurement / data is the same that we base the big bang theory upon. The CMB is actually the biggest proof for the big bang theory. And the axis of evil is starring us right in the eye.
That's why they call it like that, it's an unexplainable evil anomaly that challenges the scientific worldview. And that is also why scientists generally don't look at it or even want to talk about it. Because as a scientists you can't do much with it except being confused and weirded out.
I'm very curious if there will be new discoveries or theories that would explain it.
Reading into it a bit more, it seems like essentially the idea is you can take a sort of 2D Fourier Transform of the CMB, and the 4th and 8th terms of this series are generally aligned with the solar system’s axis.
It’s interesting, but not quite a slam dunk unless I’m missing something – across all the terms in the series, some of them would be sure to generally align with our axis right?
I'm not familiar with these techniques, but from what I understand there is a very small chance, like somewhere around 0.01 or lower, that this aligns so perfectly with the solar system. So it would be a bad explanation to say it is coincidental.
The first sattelite to make a map of the CMB was COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) in the early 90's. The Axis of Evil was first observed there, but it was expected to be a measurement error / problem with the instrumentsation, and that it would go away with the next sattelite.
Then in the 2000's with WMAP sattelite, the Axis of Evil was still there. Scientists were very confused, but still they thought there must be something wrong with the measurement and / or the interpretation of the data. So still the hope was that this might finally disappear with the next sattelite, Planck, in the 2010's.
But the Planck observations still had the Axis of Evil in them. And since Planck there hasn't been any major sattelite that measures the CMB.
Assuming that you are referring to the Arxiv, they can't:
https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html