Sabine Hossenfelder - 2024-01-06
Check out my quantum mechanics course on Brilliant! First 200 to use our link https://brilliant.org/sabine will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. Imagine you make a prediction for a discovery that wins the Nobel Prize. Your prediction turns out to be correct, and no one cares. This is what happened to these two physicists who correctly predicted the mass of Higgs-Boson with a theory that is no less than one of the most promising candidates for quantum gravity. The quiz for this video is here: https://quizwithit.com/start_thequiz/1704365499313x118636531309206380 The paper which this video is about is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/0912.0208 🤓 Check out our new quiz app ➜ http://quizwithit.com/ 💌 Support us on Donatebox ➜ https://donorbox.org/swtg 📝 Transcripts and written news on Substack ➜ https://sciencewtg.substack.com/ 👉 Transcript with links to references on Patreon ➜ https://www.patreon.com/Sabine 📩 Free weekly science newsletter ➜ https://sabinehossenfelder.com/newsletter/ 👂 Audio only podcast ➜ https://open.spotify.com/show/0MkNfXlKnMPEUMEeKQYmYC 🔗 Join this channel to get access to perks ➜ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1yNl2E66ZzKApQdRuTQ4tw/join 🖼️ On instagram ➜ https://www.instagram.com/sciencewtg/ #physics
Well, it was probably ignored because it wasn't the only one. This 2007 paper (arxiv 0708.3344) which came out years before the Higgs discovery and updated till 2011, compiles the list of 96 papers that tried to predict the Higgs mass. The 2009 paper you picked up is one of the 96 papers but isn't the only special paper. The higgs mass is within the bounds of a lot of papers among them but with larger uncertainty, and all of them are coming up with different theories.
But there's one 1993 paper by Kahana that predicts the Higgs mass of about 125 GeV as central values using dynamical symmetry breaking with the Higgs being a deeply bound state of two top quarks. At the same time, this model predicted two years prior to the discovery of the top quark mass to be 175 GeV.
This and others that came very close in predictions should also be mentioned in a video like this otherwise it gives a wrong impression to commons that asymptotic gravity was something special.
I think this answers my question. Need to read that arxiv paper. Thanks!
Thanks for posting this, it puts some very needed perspective on the video. Although I would find it hilarious if we actually did have a perfectly good theory of quantum gravity but nobody was willing to use it because it was too boring.
Thanks for the info! But what does it mean for quantum gravity? Can one of the theories used in these papers make predictions other than the Higgs mass?
@@employee8449 Yes, most of these theories will have other implications as well, when someone does calculations related to them. But not all of them will be relevant for quantum gravity. Asymptotic gravity was already an approach to quantum gravity, and made one more prediction so that's something nice.
But the composite higgs theory also predicted the mass of top quarks as well as higgs mass before it was measured. And that too in 1993. And the authors are mostly ignored. They barely have any citations, and in total the authors have written 5 papers that come up in arxiv search. So one needs to recognise the work, and build up on it to see what else these theories can do.
But one interesting thing is that Peter Higgs was aware of this paper. When the Higgs was discovered, and someone from the institution of Kahana was with Higgs, Higgs asked him to congratulate Kahana tell him that he was right!
@@faroncobb6040 It is fairly possible that we may already have a theory of quantum gravity by some unknown or not so famous scientist. We just don't know it. And it may be available in arxiv, or vixra or maybe in their personal website because he wasn't a professional scientist or his paper was rejected or he wasn't eligible to apply for publication.
The thing is there is no obvious way to find out. If you look around among these papers, there are a lot of interesting ideas floating around. Tens of thousands of papers are published every year just in physics. Scientists are very selective on what to read, and what to ignore. And just reading also doesn't make things obvious because you have to sit down and do their calculations and carefully analyse their complex new theory. It may take weeks or a month to understand and carefully analyse one good paper that has well developed theory. So most people don't do that, and rather develop their own idea.
We are in information overload. If Einstein had published his papers of 1905 or 1916 in today's world, with a reputation of patent clerk, almost certainly his papers wouldn't even make it to arxiv. Maybe he would upload it in vixra and forget it. And then after several decades some well established physicists would have developed the theory on his own and then it would have been known.
The uncertainty in their prediction of the Higgs mass was +/-1.7% which is pretty small. The measured value was 0.8% different from the prediction. I think they did an excellent job.
that precision was excellent for a prediction, but very mid evidence for quantum gravity.
@@adamrak7560 Enough to make you wonder if they wasted 50 years looking in all the wrong places, though.
It was spot on really
It was more a testament to the SM and its accuracy than anything else. "If all else fits, then..." was their calculation. Wonderful paper though and generally approachable math.
@@joshcryer not quite. The “if all else fits” prediction based purely on the SM was 115-180.
The paper prediction was “if all else fits and it’s compatible with quantum gravity.”
It’s not evidence for quantum gravity itself, but honestly, it’s more compelling as a reason to consider it than “the other forces are quantum.”
This is the best high level summary of both the history of the Higgs and QG I’ve seen. Great job Sabine! ❤
I'm not actually qualified in this field but the explanation here was so clear I felt that I could actually understand it even though this would it seems to me be a very Advanced topic in physics
Bravo Sabine!
I do wish WIMPs or Axions were mentioned, along with how that interacts with the Crisis in Cosmology and crackpots like me discussing physics without a PhD.
So, I have enjoyed her videos, although I watch them sporadically. I have read on reddit from physicists that she inserts her personal opinion as a scientific fact, or that she doesn't clarify when her explanation starts to veer off into speculation. Can anyone who watches her more regularly chime in on this?
@@ElectronFieldPulse it’s part of her schtick and honest allure.
That's such a small window of prediction. It is stunning that the measured mass is within it. I am surprised not to have ever heard of it discussed
Not really, she said the lower bound was 115 and the upper bound was 1000 but she also said if we assume the Higgs Boson exists and most Physicists were at the time it has an upper limit of 180 so we are working with a range from 115 to 180 that makes it a 1/65 chance of being a random guess but since he gave it an error of +-2.2 the actual odds of guessing it are 1/30 given the number of papers published on it I would say it was almost certain someone would have guessed it, that doesn't make it less correct but I would say with the limited range Its not necessarily a prediction
@@marcosolo6491you're right and I agree that they're being dismissive, but I think their point is to imagine it's a monkeys writing equations on blackboards situation. Even if the monkeys get every step correct you can probably generate any prediction given enough time.
Just shows the power of wishful thinking, even among physicists.
Raphael Sorkin correctly estimated the order of the Cosmological constant 10^-127, beforehand and noone noticed.
@@marcosolo6491 Yes, and so did everybody else who made all those other predictions. The point is, if enough people make enough predictions, then sooner or later one of them will get the right answer by chance. So the fact that one particular prediction was right on the money doesn't by itself tell us anything significant.
In combination with their reasoning for doing the particular calculation the way they did, the close match between their results and the measured value of the Higgs mass tells is that "its still within the bounds of possibility that we just need to do a better job of doing that horribly complex extrapolation and then we'll have cracked quantum gravity". However, it doesn't confirm it. The confirmation will require us to actually DO the horribly complex extrapolation more precisely (using, as Sabine mentions, the latest and most precise (i.e. least uncertain) measurements of all the other variables), and keep getting answers that match closer and closer to the measured Higgs mass as we do so. Eventually, we might find that they all match to give us a 5-sigma level of certainty, and then we can maybe start daring to believe we've actually found the real answer. Until then, it's just an interesting *possibility*.
A marvelous find! Without going into details, as an engineer working on some advanced stuff at the time, I made a name for myself by diving into the past and often old literature and finding gems of ideas or approaches that might have been impractical then and ignored, but were suddenly quite practical and useful using todays technology. This shows why remembering the past and delving into the past is actually a productive method for charting out our future! Don’t want to dwell on he past, but a lot of smart folks have come before us, and their work is often unknown or under appreciated. As in this case it would seem!
I make prototype tooling for foundry use and the parts engineered 60-80 years ago seem more well thought out, not just less complicated but simpler, more elegant and easier for maintenance and manufacturing. I do a LOT of conversion from 2D drawings to 3D models for direct to printed sand molds no tooling required.
One of those underappreciated smart folk was the Marquis de Condorcet. He invented a voting method in 1785 that was nearly 200 years ahead of its time because it requires counting all the head-to-head majorities that can be inferred given each voter's order of preference. That's a lot of counting, because there are N² - N head-to-head majorities & minorities when there are N candidates. But it became practical after computers & machine-readable ballots were invented a few decades ago.
The importance of counting multiple head-to-head majorities is understood by the world's most frequently used voting method: the Robert's Rules procedure for voting on motions. It eliminates N-1 of the N alternatives by counting N-1 head-to-head majorities (analogous to a single-elimination sports tournament). Counting multiple head-to-head majorities is what makes Robert's Rules reasonably effective at defeating minority-preferred alternatives. Primitive voting methods, however, count at most one majority (or plurality), which can often be a coalition of minorities on different issues. That undermines majority rule, prevents policies from being stable, undermines politicians' incentive to support majority-preferred policies, and empowers extremists by making their votes needed by the rest of their coalition.
Obviously that's important knowledge. But most people are incorrectly taught that there's at most one majority -- and sometimes no majority, only a plurality -- when an election has more than two alternatives.
A 13th century monk named Ramon Llull also invented a voting method that required counting all the head-to-head majorities, but it wasn't as good as Condorcet's method.
Condorcet constructs the order of finish by processing the head-to-head majorities one at a time, from largest majority to smallest majority, placing each majority's more-preferred alternative ahead of their less-preferred alternative in the order of finish.
Llull elects the alternative that has the most head-to-head majority "wins." (Analogous to a round-robin tournament.)
I studied in Heidelberg, did my PhD work at that very institute and knew Christof Wetterich personally. :O (But I left in 2005, long before that paper was published.)
I've met him. Long enough ago, I hope, for this video to not be awkward 😅
I didn't know Christoff but I never went to that institute so I think I deserve some credit for that too.
@@undercoveragent9889Ditto! I think we need some recognition for it too.
@@undercoveragent9889true national hero o7
I neither knew him nor went to that institution, but I watched this video so I'm at least as connected to him as I am to Kevin Bacon. 🤭
Thank you Sabine for giving Englert the recognition he deserves, together with Higgs.
They found a signal without about 50% noise, and declared they found it. It might also be a straight line with no spike signal at all because the spike is within the range of error. Now if you had governments spend $20 billion to build your machine, you bet you would find it too.
So.... uhmm. Sabine... Are you going to redo this calculation to see if it's still valid?
If it turns out we solved quantum gravity correctly more than 50 years ago, but accidentally dismissed it as un-elegant extrapolation, then I'm to be very frustrated. Also, I'm going to give the head of the physics department a bottle of vodka and a slap; I'll imagine he'll welcome both.
Well, it wasn't really "solved" 50 years ago, Weinberg only pointed out how it could be solved back then. Only about 30 years ago, Wetterich did do lots of the actual relevant calculations, as Sabine pointed out.
@@bjornfeuerbacher5514
Yeah, you're correct, but whether its 50 or 30 years doesn't change my sentiment. I feel like that slap and bottle of vodka are still needed (I'm of course only saying this [mostly] in jest).
@@bjornfeuerbacher5514does that mean asymptomatic gravity of Weinberg is really quantum gravity?
@@pwinsider007 It is a version of quantum gravity, yes. Sabine says that in the video, approximately between 5:04 and 5:12.
@@pwinsider007Asymptomatic of asymptotes? 😉
We were using steam power when I was born. My high school Periodic Table lacked all the elements. Slide rules were the thing in college. Our weak-kneed computer took up two full laboratories and was fed punch cards. We were amazed by it's ability to schedule our classes overnight! I am so glad to have seen mankind walk on the moon's surface and to view Sabine's videos. Though I struggle to understand the science, I enjoy her humor. What progress we have made. Never has there been a better time to be alive. Stay positive. We are moving in the right direction.
Amen. 🙂 Let us pray ..
Computer? I grew up with steam engines pulling trains. We had books of log tables, not even calculators. In thec1st year of secondary school at the start of each maths lesson the teacher gave us 2 or 3 sets of 10 mental arithmetic tests. Stuff like 13 x 7, 257 - 145, 390 ÷ 3, 17x 7 or whatever popped into her head. We got very good at arithmetic.
This took us through the next 5 years so we were comfortable with the basics.
Thanks for a great equation: the walk on the moon and Sabine´s rise on YT. Totally right.🙂
"My high school Periodic Table lacked ALL the elements." Wow!!!! A Periodic Table with no elements -- it boggles the mind!!! ;-)
@@fewwiggle It was still just a periodic tree.
I have never quite experienced a feeling of being thrilled and disappointed at the exact same time like this video has.
Thank you Sabine. I love your "realistic" style. I hate others fancy "science" videos where they try so hard to sound mystical with those "quantum eraser experiments" and "multidimentional multiverse magic"
Same here , too many others sound are probably made by TV celebrities or high school football/science teachers
Gotta agree because those "multiversal magic" people are so caught up in string theory where you literally have to believe that string theory works in order to prove that it works. Circular logic for sure but then they'll just say if you can't figure out the math just keep adding dimensions til the math works.
This leads to M-theory and 22 mathematical dimensions that will not and can never be actually tested or observed because all those dimensions somehow collapse into reality thus making it impossible to observe higher dimensions so therefore it's true. That's the best answer I could get from someone who "understood" string theory.
I don't understand why there are people who are yet to be astonished enough of what science can already offer (which is fascinating), that they prefer fantasy over factuality
Plus, in her own geeky way, Sabine is kind of hot.
@@ericsonhazeltine5064 This comment is inappropriate. It's 2024 we don't comment on women's looks in professional settings, unless is modeling or something similar. I am assuming you are neurodiverse and simply have not noticed.
Thx Sabine, really interesting and new to me. In before asymptotic safe QC sounded to me like a math trick to get the result you want (you know do not fall for beauty of math ), but i had no clue that they could use it to calculate the higgs mass so spot on.
it is a shame how some of the good works from the past seem to have been forgotten, last year i was working on a problem i thought was new, then i found a paper from 1911 where they guy had actually already solved it, how could i not know about this? especially in this day in age, it should have been there in the internet searches
Google search has been somehow 'bent' to try to sell you something or be 'politically correct'. It's no longer a general search. Bing still seems to work for finding the kind of partial or exact matches you may have been used to in the past. Asking google vs bing this: "what do you call a person with two x chromosomes" will show the 'politically correct' bias...
Simple solutions are often buried these days because they are not magical enough. Physicists want observer-dependence, things spontaneously popping into existence when you look at them, consciousness being some special substance, multiverses, so on and so forth. If you try to explain things simply, it is buried. Take Einstein's ensemble interpretation of quantum mechanics for example. It's incredibly simple, yet almost no one has heard of it and you have to really dig around to find information on it.
Finally Sabine is back again. Nice to hear your voice with an amazing science story.
Thank you for the video.
Sabine, excellent clarification on the Higgs particle 👍, and excellent visual contrast today 👀👏🥂
I love your channel, intelligence, & humour. Keep up the good work.
Can you do a full video about asymptotic safety of gravity? I’m intrigued. What is extrapolated? What infinities are avoided?
Hi, I asked my niece if she knew what's inside black holes and she is sure it's marshmallows, just in case somebody is interested...
An excellent episode, I had no idea of that prediction, I hope this video puts it on the radar of the Physicists community.
This one of the best uncoverings. One of your best videos.
They didn't understand the gravity of the discovery.
All I know is that there are some really smart people out there and I am humbled and appreciative of them.
What a compelling story about one of the most fascinating topics in physics. Thank you for sharing it with the community.
Now I need a video explaining Asymptotically Safe Gravity.
10 seconds in and I hear Clash Royale sound effects. I love you, Sabine (in a professional way)
So if the calculated mass of the Higgs boson depends intrinsically on the masses of other elementary particles with their uncertainties, going the other way, does the measured mass of the Higgs infer any refinements to those other particle's masses, or is it too tangled a relationship to tell what values might be assigned to which particle?
@00:48 FERMILAB !!! (Zebra shakes hoof at Fermilab)
Ok, I love the fact that when I started watching the video, it had about 3,000 views. When I was finished, it had about 12,000. It's amazing to think that there are 9,000 people interested in advanced science topics like this, taking 10 minutes on a Saturday morning to watch this. Instead of click bait, Taylor Swift, or Kardashians, no less. It restores my faith just a bit.
Taylor Swift? Where’s the link?
I am sure I would have a blast watching quantum gravity explained by the Kardashians 😂
As a percentage of 8 billion though, I'm not getting my hopes up.
Must be 9000 bored german physicist that are trying to apply for the one free job in academia
Honestly, Sabine uses clickbait a lot more than most. It just isn't in the way you might be thinking about it.
Could you make a video about what it means for a theory to be "quantum"? What exactly about gravity would become quantized, the carriers of its force or the least amount of gravity possible? How does this play with the fact that's GR is purely geometrical?
Isn't your last sentence the entire crux of the issue?
A theory is quantum if a particle’s position/momentum is indeterminate in that it can be superimposed across a range of space-time. Ie. You can’t say a particle went through a left or right slit in a double slit experiment, its wave function went through both, and only decoheres upon interaction. Bear in mind I’m not a physicist, so I could be completely wrong.
@@philtrubey7480A better description of what makes something quantum is that it is fundamentally describing the universe as non-continuous system ie that it is discrete at the most foundational level (plank length etc).
When gravity is being quantised, you would assume it is referring to the force carrying particles (a theorised graviton) in much the same way the photon was quantised in the original theories of quantum mechanics.
The issue for quantising gravity is that spacetime is a continuous topology in the three dimensions of space + time described by General Relatively. The same mathematical treatment used on other forces is not possible for gravity due to the infinite infinities it produces at asymptotic points such as black holes.
@@blue-pi2ktThe Planck length is the smallest distance we *can measure*. It doesn’t claim to be the smallest distance *possible*.
@@AdrianBoyko No, that's precisely the opposite. It is a fundamental limitation of nature, not of our capacity to measure. It litteraly makes no sense speaking of "smaller distances than the Plank lenght" because the notion of distance itself becomes meaningless at such a scale.
According to our current theories, of course.
As a scientist, I don't give a shit about understanding Nature. All I care about is coming up with fancy "theories" (they are indeed hypotheses), proving that I'm smarter than everyone else. I also name them with fancy buzzwords so that I can fool people to get more funds. That's why my next work is titled: Physics informed artificial intelligence model for superconductive qubit driven quantum computer on topologically insulating twisted graphene at the event horizon of a super massive black hole.
My mind is blown. This is the best of your videos, Sabine.
Thanks for continuing to provide such great content.
Wonderful walk trough Sabine - thank You.
"prizes" do stimulate the good people that deserve them - and others who want to get one.
In that regard they create focus, awareness etc. Maybe some retrospective recognition, in the form of some prize/title would be a good thing.
what an interesting idea....what is going to come of this? surely some physicists out there are following up
Awsome informative perspective on the Higgs and quantum gravity! Thanks ^__^
Great episode. I suspect the appeal of the story will suffer from the same limited interest, but it's exactly the kind of story I hope and expect to get here and no place else.
Sabine,
I truly admire your work. You have splendidly addressed many lingering physics questions I have had.
As to the Higgs boson, quantum field theory, and dark energy, my conundrum is that, as far as I know, Feynman regarded virtual particals as just a mathematical tool to solve the complex series of interactions in quantum electrodynamics. This idea and picture seem to have been lost in the following decades, with more and more physicists describing a universe in which virtual particles are real, and even contribute to (or amass to) the negative pressure of observed dark energy - while being wrong by 120 orders of magnitude, or so.
What are your thoughts on this?
Excellent physicist work, brilliant description. 😃
Black holes have no "inside." BH merger-observed gravitational waves: External post-ring down but no "internal singularities''" ringdown. No inside exists. The externally merged object does not thereafter wobble. BHs are 2-D membranes. There is no "internal" singularity to be exposed naked. Finally...what "Information loss?"
Solenoid pseudovectors? Coherently rotate each mirror image about a parallel view axis so field reversal is now consistent with winding direction reversal. If perspective is relevant, "chirality" downgrades to "ellipticity." The Earth's rotation direction reverses (absent the external universe as reference) depending upon which pole you look down.
This is how I envision black holes.
On the inside there's literally nothing, not even space-time.
So the event horizon of a black hole can be considered an 'endpoint' or 'edge' of the universe.
Congratulations on doing a competent literature search! I don’t follow everything you are saying but evidently you know the field. You could try nominating Shaposhnikov and Wetterich for a prize in their own country.
This is absolutely Maddening.
Yea! It’s Sabine!
Sabine is one of the only two vloggers not using clickbait to get views, the other is "Closer to Truth". I love the two channels
Closer To Truth titles are often clickbait, in my opinion.
When the truth is too boring it's human nature to ignore it. This is the origin for most conspiracy theories.
But aliens are real right?
We care Sabine. Thanks for sharing ❤
Thanks for another great video Sabine!
A basic question but why was something so big & heavy 122 GeV, roughly the size/weight of antimony (Sb) or tin (Sn), so hard to find? Puzzled chemist.
It's because it's so big and heavy that it was hard to find; you need an accelerator that can put a huge amount of energy into a collision to create a Higgs boson. The Higgs boson also can't be observed directly as it has a half life of around 1.5*10^-22 seconds, so you need to predict how it's going to decay and then look for the decay products in the results of the collisions. Since the particles the Higgs decays into can be produced by other decay paths, you need to look for small changes in the relative amounts of each decay product when the collision energy becomes large enough to create the Higgs compared to the results when the Higgs boson isn't produced.
It's not that it is hard to 'find', it is hard to create a Higg's boson and then to detect it once it has almost immediately decayed. You have to concentrate a lot of energy into a tiny point to create one (beams of protons smashing into each other), and then you have to detect its remains after it decays, basically looking for particles of a certain energy (eg. gamma rays or quarks or lepton pairs via intermediate W and Z bosons) in a vast ocean of data. A Higg's boson has a half life of 10^-22 seconds, about as short as some isotopes.
@@tonywells6990 But surprisingly it's about a thousand times the lifetimes of the W and Z particles and the top quark.
I look forward to your explanations, as an amateur who is fundamentally fascinating by the big questions.
You've restored my faith in Quantum Gravity. And faith is all we have to go on, you know.....
"The desperate have no other recourse but only faith .." 😄
I LOVE your Einstein Hoptimist! And your explanations of Physics, way beyond my ordinary understanduing. “if you’ve ever been the only quantum theory at a party…” 😂😂😂
@SabineHossenfelder - 2024-01-06
The quiz for this video is here: https://quizwithit.com/start_thequiz/1704365499313x118636531309206380
@KrystelSpicerMindArkLateralThi - 2024-01-06
3:39
Quantum gravity. Could that be block time (moments) along string current time (memory) & anything we remembered meaning they hadn't happened, not that they had.
⭐After something bad has happened to you, As you ever asked yourself if you'd received a warning? The block of time (moment) you recall back to where yes you had recalled a warning, any exists out of alignment with what you'd thought you remembered for a moment. Once you've been stubbed so fast you'd not burnt your wick as yet back. Time is a shattering and self-healing thing, hard to chase if you can't go faster than speed of light.
I can't wait to show you all my stuff. & plans. Fragments of truth always create plans. I think I might have written a good 50 times more than Confucius lol. Really hope you all like it. The work is for the not so faint of heart, but it is free. Come with may. *Plays the willow maiden*🎶
@Human_01 - 2024-01-06
Thank you for your insightful vids 👍✨
@devonbrockhaus6554 - 2024-01-06
Loved this. At 3:41 though, I was feeling this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYj-gxTBxaA
@theunknownunknowns256 - 2024-01-06
Nuclear Power. Sabine you miss the real argument against nuclear energy. Transfer of wealth. In history the biggest transfer of wealth to the already wealthy was the advent of centralised energy production and distribution. Nuclear energy is a continuation of the rich getting richer. Solar photovoltaics however allows for the average household to produce their own energy as opposed to giving their hard earned money to authoritarian pterostates that kill childen in unjustified wars or the corrupt oligarchy that permeates democracies. Nuclear energy is not a path to global energy abundance, it is yet another path to continued enslavement of the working class.
@theunknownunknowns256 - 2024-01-07
Nuclear Power. Sabine you miss the real argument against nuclear energy. Transfer of wealth. In history the biggest transfer of wealth to the already wealthy was the advent of centralised energy production and distribution. Nuclear energy is a continuation of the rich getting richer. Solar photovoltaics however allows for the average household to produce their own energy as opposed to giving their hard earned money to authoritarian pterostates that kill childen in unjustified wars or the corrupt oligarchy that permeates democracies. Nuclear energy is not a path to global energy abundance, it is yet another path to continued enslavement of the working class.