A panel of wise experts has been formed under the auspices of the National Academies. It is dubbed EPP2010 and is charged with evaluating the state of elementary particle physics worldwide in 2010 and constructing a roadmap for US participation in this effort. While my opening statement may sound sarcastic, it is meant quite seriously. This is a group of particle physicists, non-particle physicists, scientists from other disciplines, and technically oriented people. The non-particle types are reputed to have influence in the halls of Congress in ways we can only dream of. The report from this panel will influence funding in particle physics (maybe even carrying over to other areas of basic science) for years to come. The panel has conducted a series of meetings during the course of the year, and we in the particle physics community have done our damned best to impress them.
The panel has circulated 2 lists of questions to the community at large. The first list resulted in an official report on the physics case for the International Linear Collider. I was involved in writing that report and will blog about it soon - promise! The second is a less formal set of questions, of which I am also involved in writing a set of answers. One question is just plain fun:
What single discovery would be the most surprising possibility in the next decade?
This question not only involves what we physicists think would be exciting, but what would captivate the imagination of the public? What headline in the newspapers would make people read the article and think about the possibilities?
So I am asking for your help, CV readers: what would you consider the most exciting physics discovery in the next decade?
October 4th, 2005 at 1:33 am
It’s not going to happen, but that’s easy: quantum gravity effects at the TeV scale.
But I can go crazier: warp drives.
October 4th, 2005 at 2:11 am
Dark matter in a bottle, $50 an ounce for spray-on samples at the Macy’s counter.
October 4th, 2005 at 6:41 am
To capture the popular imagination, it should:
1. Deal with cosmology
2. Have some sci-fi resonances
3. Somehow relate to the origin or fate of mankind
4. Be easily understood
5. Be easily misunderstood
The answer is:
Evidence of multiple universes.
October 4th, 2005 at 6:49 am
I assume you mean “surprising but not outrageously so”.
I’ll go for “evidence at the LHC of massive violations of conservation laws due to particles spraying into higher dimensions.”
October 4th, 2005 at 7:29 am
Tachyons.
October 4th, 2005 at 7:49 am
That maybe there is a “tunneling effect” to those “extra dimensions” of the LHC?
However, the supercurrent may tunnel through the barrier, depending on the quantum phase of the superconductors. The amount of supercurrent that may tunnel through the barrier is restricted by the size and substance of the barrier. The maximum value the supercurrent may attain is called the critical current of the Josephson junction, and is an important phenomenological parameter of a junction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_junction
I am a layman by design, so forgive me, as to my wild and uneducated speculations. As I too am stumped by this “missing energy?”
The nature of the quantum Hall Effect? And deeper still, from QED to QCD.
Any corrections for sure as to this “penetrating eye” of the windows on the Universe and the gluonic representation.
There seems to be a inevitable consequence coming from historical understanding that when looked at from a developing perspective, is still going strong. Will this change in the future? There are always consequences out of developing “insight” to philosophical questions and new technologies?
Quantum Computerization for example.
October 4th, 2005 at 7:56 am
A small blackhole relatively nearby, say, beyond the Oort cloud.
October 4th, 2005 at 8:02 am
Although it’s not terribly likely in the next decade, I’ll vote for evidence of thermal radiation from a black hole, better known as Hawking radiation.
If you’re going to excite both physicists and the general public, it helps to involve a physicist that the general public has actually heard of, especially one as iconic as Stephen Hawking has become.
How to do it, of course, is tough: you have to either make small black holes in the lab, or discover them evaporating out there in the universe.
October 4th, 2005 at 8:03 am
P.S. I missed the “surprising” part — Hawking radiation wouln’t be that surprising, though the ability to actually see it would be…
October 4th, 2005 at 8:21 am
I think they already do this Alex with entanglement issues. The stringy approach? D branes.
Oort Cloud? Interesting.
October 4th, 2005 at 8:25 am
How about some surprises that would have radical implications like modifications of special relativity, which are already hinted at in some data sets?
-AUGER could confirms the absence of the GZK cutoff seen in AGASA data and the best explanation could turn out, after elimination of alternatives, to be breaking of Lorentz invariance.
-GLAST seeing a Planck scale energy dependence in the speed of light.
-Dark matter is not detected, but some non-trivial prediction of MOND is confirmed.
-A new experiment confirms the Pioneer anomaly.
-The claim of a time varying fine structure constant in quasar absorption lines is
confirmed.
-CPT breaking is observed in the neutrino mass matrix.
-Topology is seen at the Hubble scale, and explains the low l anomaly’s in the CMB data.
Probably most of these data will go away, but will all of them?
October 4th, 2005 at 8:34 am
I like Lee Smolin’s suggestions of modifications to special relativity, and I was going to suggest CPT violation as an exciting surprise.
There aren’t very many *exact* laws of nature around that we’d be really surprised to see violated. Another surprise, which would be even more dramatic than CPT violation or other consequences of SR modification, would be some evidence for non-linearity in quantum mechanics — a violation of the superposition principle.
The consequences of this could be dramatic.
October 4th, 2005 at 9:22 am
I’d say the discovery of the teeny tiny duracell batteries that power quarks will come as a big shock to the physics community. And when they see the little tiny people inside them, on their miniature bicycles, all hell will break loose.
October 4th, 2005 at 9:26 am
There’s a difference between most exciting and most surprising. I think the most exciting would certainly be signs of quantum gravity at the TeV scale, since that’s the case where we have the best chance to really understand what’s going on in the gravity sector.
It seems like the most surprising would be something more subtle, such as strong WW scattering and nothing else up to the kinematic limit of the LHC.
October 4th, 2005 at 9:47 am
In fields I know about, I’d say the combination of “most exciting” and “reasonably plausible” would be the discovery of extra dimensions. Or some deviation from Newton’s law, as we had been discussing earlier.
Other good ones: detection of gravitational radiation, discovery of supersymmetry, discovery of new particle physics that nobody has anticipated, discovery that the dark energy is evolving, direct detection of dark matter, detection of gravitational-wave signatures in the cosmic microwave background, as well as the ones mentioned above (special relativity violations, Hawking radiation, etc.).
I was once on a radio program where we discussed “What is the scientific discovery that you absolutely could not deal with within current frameworks?” I.e., “most surprising,” but with no restrictions on plausibility. The best one I could come up with was a predictable and repeatable violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics — spontaneous decrease of entropy in a closed system — in a macroscopic regime where it really should be working.
October 4th, 2005 at 10:30 am
With respect to dark energy evolving, I think there will be a surprising discovery confirming this fact. And that this evolution has some form the holographic principle as its theoretical underpinnings.
October 4th, 2005 at 10:45 am
I have to go with the transporter. I want to see a full kilogram of matter transported across a room, or better yet, across a continent.
Everything says it can’t be done — if it did, that would be surprising!
October 4th, 2005 at 10:50 am
Lee — Auger has presented at least preliminary results saying they do not agree with Agasa. Their conclusion seemed to be that Agasa’s energy calculations were high by about one standard deviation. If that’s the case, then the flux measurements of Agasa, Fly’s Eye, and Auger all agree rather well.
Personally, I’m fond of black holes at the LHC. That has the possibility of energizing the public like space travel did in the 60’s. With creating black holes in the lab comes a sense of fear and wonderment which can be matched very few things we know about.
October 4th, 2005 at 11:06 am
What about a completely unanticipated force? This would make a major impact within the scientific community as well as the public (ups the “excitement factor”).
For extra cachet, the discoverer (or at least one of them) needs to have a memorable presence. Maybe visible piercings and tattoos?
October 4th, 2005 at 11:09 am
I am a social worker…but what I am waiting for is hearing from class I, ClassII, or CLASS III ET.
another good one would be a warmer and readilly useful super conductor. ( I am tired of paying so much at the pump!)
October 4th, 2005 at 11:33 am
citrine, I love that idea. Of course, as soon as the prize is announced the winners are dragged in front of the cameras; there’s no time for a proper makeover. So we need to be preemptive. We need to figure out who are the most likely prospective Laureates, and get them some tattoos and piercings. They may be reluctant at first; I’m thinking we’re going to have to use tranquilizers. But they’ll come around. It’s for the good of science!
October 4th, 2005 at 11:35 am
Collin- Thanks, but a sober assessment of the preliminary AUGER data, at least that at http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/ssi/2005/lec_notes/Beatty/default.htm, seems to be that it is too soon to tell. Even with the renormalization downward of the AGASA data suggested in Beatty’s slide 42, it would be hard to argue that the case is settled for or against a cutoff. I’ve been told that if there is a cutoff the data should clearly show it in a few years, let’s wait for that.
October 4th, 2005 at 11:41 am
god
October 4th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Scientitst discover that it’s all just a dream.
October 4th, 2005 at 11:55 am
Evidence of the branes.
October 4th, 2005 at 12:11 pm
I go with Ben: quantum gravity at the TeV scale shows up at the LHC whose understanding leads to a solution of the Dark Energy problem…Then we need the ILC to study it further.
October 4th, 2005 at 12:40 pm
Or evidence for brains. That would be shocking.
October 4th, 2005 at 1:07 pm
A tiny registered trademark sign on absolutely everything saying “Intelligent Designs, Inc”.
-cvj
October 4th, 2005 at 1:24 pm
For us to qualify as a Class I civilization.
October 4th, 2005 at 2:16 pm
Any real, clear violation of causality. That would surpise my socks off.
Does conclusive proof exist for or against the orthodox interpretation of the uncertainty principle? If quantum mechanics was suddenly proven to be a statistical approximation of something deeper…
Or if MOND, or any modified gravity theory for that matter, could be demonstrated to be experimentally superior to dark matter/dark energy. That wouldn’t necessarily surprise me, but it would probably cause me to smirk a great deal.
If string theory suddenly went out of vogue, and was replaced by something else entirely, rather than a shinier newer updated epicyclic version of itself, that would surprise me.
October 4th, 2005 at 3:05 pm
If we all step back and think about it for a moment… the most “surprising” discovery would be one that none of us here could predict. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a surprise.
That being said a violation of causality would a be major league surprise.
October 4th, 2005 at 3:06 pm
Cliff re: trademarks
If you asked some people they would tell you those trademarks are already there
October 4th, 2005 at 3:41 pm
A theory of quantum gravity that actually works.
October 4th, 2005 at 3:44 pm
I think none of the reasonable possibilities would be as exciting to the general public as creation of black holes in the lab. Plus it would prove existence of large extra dimensions. Two hugely exciting and suitable for misinterpretation discoveries with one stone.
For experts, modifications to SR would probably be more “exciting” in the sense of theoretically challenging, though.
October 4th, 2005 at 3:45 pm
*smirks*
October 4th, 2005 at 4:25 pm
As a physics-groupie layman, I’d say proving the existence of multiple universes would be pretty exciting. A whole new approach to quantum gravity would be cool, too, but I don’t think a lot of people know about quantum gravity NOW, let alone whole new ways to approach it.
October 4th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
way out on the proverbial limb w/ this one: methodologically appropriate experimental research that evidences focussed human consciousness altering quantum fields(and yes, not by actually showing that such is the case based on human consciousness developing technological means to do so): just a subject’s mind, asked to focus on this or that construct and altering the field.
October 4th, 2005 at 6:48 pm
I like where you are going with this Spyder…Have you read Arnold Mindel “Quantum Mind”?
October 4th, 2005 at 7:11 pm
The discovery that . . .this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire . . . is in fact the sixth grade science project of a super intelligent pan-dimensional being, and, the science fair being over, we, and our firmament, are about to be tossed in the old toy box with the pan-dimensional soccer trophies, and dirty underwear.
October 4th, 2005 at 7:13 pm
Oh wait. Did Amy already say that?
October 4th, 2005 at 7:28 pm
CIP: “this most excellent canopy, the air” - where does this quote come from? Forgive my ignorance.
October 4th, 2005 at 7:51 pm
erc - Hamlet, Act Two, Scene 2.
It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.
Only one guy could make that kind of word music - Big Bill S.
October 4th, 2005 at 7:54 pm
Tough I think it’s also in Hair, that quintessential sixties musical;)
October 4th, 2005 at 11:13 pm
I think SETI actually finding ETI would be a pretty big and captivating surprise. A veritable bolt from the black, so to speak.
October 4th, 2005 at 11:51 pm
Hey,
Thanks all for your responses so far - keep bringing them in! So far, modifications to quantum gravity/blackholes/extra dimensions are leading in the vote, but I really like the ideas of new forces and violations of causality. Now, the latter would really rock my boat…
Plato: I have a post planned to explain the relevance of missing energy. Give me time…
Philip D: I would love a transporter that would allow me to eat dinner (with cheese trollies, which are in my mind equivalent to heaven) in France every night.
Sean: I think it’s time for you to get pierced.
The GZK debate: The Auger speaker at the SLAC Summer Institute claimed that Auger recorded (sort-of) a GZP event. But, the center of the event landed outside of their working detector stations and they could not record all of it. Give Auger some time - they are just getting started.
October 5th, 2005 at 1:22 am
Plato: I have a post planned to explain the relevance of missing energy. Give me time…
Cool…..look forward to it.:)
October 5th, 2005 at 10:18 am
The most exciting experiment around is the search for permanent electric dipole moments. As Chad Orzel points out,
“Experiments currently in production should lower that limit by another 2-4 orders of magnitude, which would either find a non-zero EDM, or rule out pretty much every theory now on the books. ”
Either way, the outcome is bound to be exciting.
October 5th, 2005 at 10:31 am
Carl Sagan had a good one…eventually finding a message hidden in Pi.
October 7th, 2005 at 4:00 pm
Most important discovery: quantum gravity, and it is all SO much simpler than we could have ever imagined.
October 7th, 2005 at 10:37 pm
Discussed above is the possibility that dark energy evolves over time. What about the discovery that its value varies in different regions of the universe?
October 8th, 2005 at 5:03 am
A most surprising discovery would be if dark matter turned out not to exist after all.
Uh, wait, maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps people just thought so because they used Newtonian gravity rather than general relativity, see this article.
October 8th, 2005 at 12:43 pm
Thomas Larsson, it may be worth also looking at this take on the Cooperstock et al article:
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0508377
October 8th, 2005 at 8:43 pm
I think the discovery of magnetic monopoles would turn physics upside down!
October 9th, 2005 at 2:45 am
Arun,
I am no expert in GR so I can only judge this matter second hand, but Cern Courier is usually a reliable source. It seems like Korzynski’s criticism is that Cooperstock and Tieu has made an ansatz which involves the non-analytical function exp(-k |z|). Perhaps the analysis can be repeated using exp(-k z^2) instead. That should remove the disk at z=0; whether it also removes the conclusion remains to be seen.
More important is the observation that the evidence for dark matter is based on Newtonian gravity. Instinctively is seems very dangerous to rely on the Newtonian approximation when dealing with galactic objects. If it hadn’t been for Cooperstock and Tieu, I wouldn’t have known about this, but would assume that people had made relativistic calculations.
October 9th, 2005 at 9:21 am
Thomas,
I’m no expert in GR either. The Geometrodynamists, however, have a very systematic expansion around flat space-time for GR and most other metric theories of gravity (e.g, see Chapter 39 of Misner, Thorne, Wheeler, on the Parametrized Post-Newtonian formalism), and that formalism would indicate that GR is irrelevant on the galactic scale, barring singular sources and so on.
So I’m extremely dubious, though I do keep checking for citations of the Cooperstock paper to see if anything further can be made of it.
BTW, the Cooperstock & Tieu paper has been discussed before, briefly, on another cosmicvariance.com thread. See comment 63 onwards of
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2005/08/02/how-are-we-to-make-progress-with-w/
October 9th, 2005 at 10:35 am
I’m no expert in GR either
That the point arun and you have to be careful if you don’t want to end up on ‘t Hoofts bad list page.
How do you match up bubble technologies with current day ideas about roads leading through GR to have it understood in cosmological situations? It raised all kinds of question for me about origination and leading geometric indications, from “gravitational collapse” to set the fuse for new bubbles out of this supersymmetrical sea.
You had to define how you got there in the beginning, and in this cyclical process nature seems to have assign no singularities, but smooth topological processes of unfoldment?
October 9th, 2005 at 12:26 pm
What maybe extremely exciting Arun is the change in perspective, as I relay here to another site for consideration, as well as developing, perspective in this geometrodynamical sense.
October 9th, 2005 at 5:39 pm
Plato, I’m sorry, but I have difficulty in understanding.
October 10th, 2005 at 5:13 am
If we’re going to make it another thousand years, it would be pretty cool and mutually beneficial for everyone if we could humanize on an international level– if we could recognize the need for human beings to take pride as hive organism rather than divided as we so are.
I want a predator from space.
Short of that.. yeah.. warp drives,
Or a freak high energy accident, or a graviton.
October 10th, 2005 at 8:01 am
Arun (58),
There had to be a fundamental shift in perspective from flat euclidean thinking, to gravitational understandings.
If you did not include “bubble technologies” as I relate in my site linked in 57, then how would any geometrical valution have ever made sense in geometrodynamical views. You need models for this (Reimann), and a shift in “tonal perspectives” in relation? Webber comes to mind here and gravitational perspective, and roads leading to better ways from historical standpoint in which to percieve Kip Thorne’s LIGO monitors, and future roads leading to comprehension.
This “bubble creation” would account for the “missing energy” from a theoretical standpoint, as temperature increase(CFT relation?)? One would thus look for such signs in the early cosmos? I was looking for geometrical consistancies, and any evidnece of this was from my poor layman views, that were trying to mature.
Still waiting for JoAnne to write her blog entry on this.
October 10th, 2005 at 11:25 am
We are lagging in our integrating the insights of modern science, in our everyday world-view. A great discovery would include a way to help people make the quantum leap in understanding.
forget about extra dimensions…most people don’t have a notion of space/time!
October 10th, 2005 at 3:40 pm
The Cooperstock et al. paper on dark matter got slash-dotted (my awareness is from Peter Woit’s blog).
http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/10/10/1052224.shtml?tid=160&tid=14
October 11th, 2005 at 11:37 pm
Arun,
After having spent some time penetrating the papers, I now believe that Korzynski’s criticism is correct. A critical point is that C&T construct a non-zero solution to the Laplace equation which vanishes at infinity. Since the solution to the Laplace equation is unique, and zero is the solution with zero boundary conditions, C&T must in fact be making an error. As Korzynski points out, they deal in fact with the Poisson equation with a delta-function source delta(z).
I guess I have learnt (again) not to trust the popular press, not even Cern Courier.
October 12th, 2005 at 1:58 am
[…] Morning at work: Chat with co-workers. Deal with referee reports: write a reply to answer a referee report on my latest paper, print out the large review article that I have been asked to referee (printer jammed several times, so the printing process took awhile), started to read a paper that I have been asked to referee - determined that they included all the correct Feynman diagrams contributing to their calculation. Started the required computer training course for supervisors on detecting sexual harassment (last week we determined that supervising graduate students counts as being an official lab/university supervisor). Talked at length on the phone with my former graduate student, and laid out the groundwork for a new project we are starting (I’m quite excited about it!). Filled out the paperwork to have my desktop monitor, which died last week, fixed or replaced. Cleaned out my backpack (this was not trivial). Read through the latest draft of responses to a set of questions posed by the EPP2010 panel about the future of high energy physics. Continuous monitoring of email. […]
October 18th, 2005 at 1:30 am
[…] I recently wrote about a request from a wise panel of experts to name the single discovery (in high energy physics) that would be the most surprising possibility in the next decade. You, our readers, gave a variety of enlightening and entertaining responses. […]
October 20th, 2005 at 1:23 am
Some more :
1) Discovery/evidence for fractionally charged stable particles
2) Discovery of strange stars
3) Evidence for sterile neutrinos
for some crazy stuff which no one mentioned how about
evidence for advanced potentials in electromagnetism
(see P.C.W. Davies, 1975 Journal of Physics A 8 ,272 1975 which discusses some experiments which looked for such effects.)
May 4th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
[…] Caveats: First, I must make some confessions. (1) I gave input to the panel. I was asked to present the physics case for the International Linear Collider (ILC) to the panel. In fact, I was the only speaker they heard which outlined the actual measurements that the ILC could perform. (I wasn’t nervous while giving the talk or anything…) I also served on a panel which wrote a report for the panel outlining the role of the ILC in the era of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). That report was alot of work, but we are pleased with how it turned out. A snazzier version will make its public debut next week, and CV fans will be the first to read all about it. I also served on an ad-hoc committee to address a set of questions posed by the panel. CV readers even helped on that one! (2) I am tickled pink with this report! I very strongly support the International Linear Collider. I believe that it will be necessary to decipher what is found at the LHC - it also has the potential to directly study dark matter particles in a controlled laboratory environment. In addition, I would like to see the US host the ILC because I care deeply about the vitality of the US high energy physics program in particular, and the US science program as a whole. […]