alt Hacker NewsExperimental particle physicist here. It's just hard.
I measured the electron's vector coupling to the Z boson at SLAC in the late 1990s, and the answer from that measurement is: we don't know yet - and that's the point.
Thirty years later, the discrepancy between my experiment and LEP's hasn't been resolved.
It might be nothing. It might be the first whisper of dark matter or a new force. And the only way to find out is to build the next machine. That's not 'dead', that's science being hard.
My measurement is a thread that's been dangling for decades, waiting to be pulled.
Replies
Is it hard as in:
1) we know what to do, but it is expensive
2) we don't know what to do exactly, but many more people involved can increase search speed, so just need more people
3) it is purely sequential problem, and therefore it takes a lot of time
>"It might be the first whisper of dark matter"
Come now.
I guess we will find out in 20+ years once the next electron positron collider at CERN has been build
So, if the answer were obvious or quick, it wouldn't be worth building machines that take decades to design
Its a clickbait article name (from otherwise good place), of course its not dead... we are now getting understanding of all things we don't know yet, discrepancies like yours, unified theory and so on.
Everybody knows we are not there yet and how the final knowledge set will look like, if its even possible to cover it (ie are quarks the base layer or we can go deeper, much deeper all the way to planck scales? dynamics of singularities etc)
What would the cost of the “next machine” be? Is it going to be tens of billions or can we make progress with lesser money. If it is going to be tens of billions, then maybe we need to invest in engineering to reduce this cost, because it’s not sustainable to suspend thirty years, tens of billions for every incremental improvement.