The h Bar

bolbteppa

00:02

@EmilioPisanty @JohnRennie @vzn the same anti-science now gets promulgated to the largest print media audience one could ask for nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/…

"And if particle physicists have only guesses, maybe we should wait until they have better reasons for why a larger collider might find something new"

Imagine painting theoretical physics as a bunch of guesses in the NYT

"the only reliable prediction they had for the L.H.C. was that of the Higgs boson" I mean my god

The idea that this was a reliable prediction is simply shocking, using this as a tool to enhance anti-science even more so

vzn

@bolbteppa lol (interesting! but...) think its your own pov that is looking increasingly strident and not in line with "circumspect" science.

bolbteppa

I think this is a lesson, like 2016 was, that simply ignoring this kind of stuff doesn't make it go away any more

Jake Rose

@bolbteppa it’s hard to blame people not trained in physics for not understanding physics. I’ve only been an undergraduate for a year and a half, and already I consider my physics before hand massively misinformed by pop culture. I think you should more so complain about the people whose job it is to inform the journalists..

Not that I don’t find it irritating as you do

vzn

@bolbteppa seems theres some major stuff youre ignoring.

bolbteppa

@JakeRose like the writer of this piece who is a theoretical physicist

Jake Rose

00:11

@bolbteppa I’ll admit I hadn’t read the post

just assumed it’s general tooic

but yeah I agree then

bolbteppa

Just to be clear, one could be against the building of this thing, the problem is using anti-science arguments like implying particle physics is a bunch of guesswork, or this totally not anti-science 20 year great 'pause' backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/… on particle physics the author called for

Jake Rose

@bolbteppa yes I agree. I’m overall quite against it, but for different reasons and not the anti science arguments

bolbteppa

Or anti-science conspiracies like "Unfortunately, particle physicists have not been very forthcoming with this information"

Jake Rose

My current maths lecturer is a particle physicist I wonder what he works on

bolbteppa

I mean that sentence alone is stunning

@JakeRose working on misleading you with guesses apparently :p

Jake Rose

00:16

Christopher is a member of the High Energy Physics research group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. His current research interests include lattice QCD, hadronic physics and strong interaction phenomenology. He is part of the Hadron Spectrum Collaboration, an international collaboration of lattice theorists investigating the spectroscopy and properties of hadrons using lattice QCD.

I wish I knew what those words meant

their descriptions are always so hard to read unless you’re a specialist in the field already

or maybe they’re not hard if you’re not an undergrad :/

bolbteppa

It's all standard model stuff

Basically once you do qft in part III those words will start to make sense :p

called for considering*

Jake Rose

@bolbteppa did you go Cambridge?

bolbteppa

Everybody knows what part III is haha

Jake Rose

@bolbteppa fair enough, won’t ask further

pffft not true

nobody outside of cam knows

bolbteppa

Part III of the Mathematical Tripos

Part III of the Mathematical Tripos (officially Master of Mathematics/Master of Advanced Study) is a one-year Masters-level taught course in mathematics offered at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge. It is regarded as one of the hardest and most intensive mathematics courses in the world and is taken by approximately 200 students each year. Roughly one third of the students take the course as a fourth year of mathematical study at Cambridge (after Parts IA, IB, and II), whilst the remaining two thirds take the course as a one-year course. == History == The Smith's Prize Examination...

Jake Rose

00:27

and even then the people inside cam usually don’t either

bolbteppa

'It is regarded as one of the hardest and most intensive mathematics courses in the world and is taken by approximately 200 students each year'

Jake Rose

unfortunately I don’t take the mathematics tripos

Im a natsci

@bolbteppa I don’t think all that many people still know of it in passing knowledge

or what the course entails ;)

bolbteppa

Could still get onto Part III since there's a heavy theoretical physics side of it

Jake Rose

mhm, rare though. Most people stick with physics.

@bolbteppa requires permission from the mathematics faculty too

id be worried the difference in maths abilities would hold me back

or at least the difference in formal trisnjng

training*

bolbteppa

There are three things you can apply to, pure, applied or stats and be judged accordingly

The math level will get you though, need to be prepping for it now haha

Jake Rose

00:40

I do want to pure theory so maybe I should consider it

(will delete this - did you do nastci? If so was the maths taught in part II good enough for the swalping to maths? And can you do pure physics all through the year for the masters?)

bolbteppa

You want to be doing courses like damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/bg268 damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/stcs/fcm.html if you can, should talk to someone to find out about your situation, have no idea what it is, but the earlier you ask around the more likely it is

Jake Rose

Oh crap

thought I could delete messages after a while

currenly doing Double physics and mathematics

in the natsci tripos

im gonna ask my maths supervisor and see if she knew anyone that did it, she specialised in quantum after the mathematics tripos so I’m guessing she must know somthing

bolbteppa

phy.cam.ac.uk/students/teaching/PhysicsCourseHandbook1819.pdf

(Page 31) Still get to do the part III qft/aqft but then do other stuff instead of having more courses in things like strings and the standard model

Jake Rose

Yeah, there’s more practical based theory in the physics course

mhmmill have to ask round

bolbteppa

"The trouble is, a “prediction” in particle physics is today little more than guesswork. (In case you were wondering, yes, that’s exactly why I left the field.)"
In the olden days, i.e. like 2-3 years ago, people would see a sentence like this and recognize what was going on

vzn