u/SKRules

I wish I could've been a physicist 25 years earlier and just had fun with TeV scale model building

In my view as a working particle theorist, one of the central questions of particle physics is

What do you look like at the smallest, most fundamental distance scales we can probe?

We know at ~10^-4 -10^-6 meters you are composed of cells, we know at ~10^-9 meters you are composed of molecules, and at ~10^-10 meters you are composed of atoms, which are composed of electrons and nuclei. At ~10^-13 meters we know those nuclei are composed of protons and neutrons, and at ~10^-15 meters we know those protons and neutrons are made out of quarks.

With the absolutely remarkable success of the LHC experimental program and the Standard Model, we now understand our structure down to ~10^-19 meters: we're made out of fundamental chiral fermion fields which are massless and only become massive at longer distances due to electroweak symmetry breaking by an elementary-looking Higgs boson.

If we want to understand what we look like at distances ~10^-20 meters, we must build a higher energy collider. Both the FCC and the muon collider offer complementary views on this question, each having their separate benefits in what probes of the SM they best offer. Both should be built.

Hahaha I considered it, and it would have been a fun reference, but in the end I thought the one I'd been given at my bar mitzvah emphasized more that this was a topic that was personal to me.

Thanks! Yeah, I respect all of the moderators, who are great physicists, but I found it startling I'm not allowed to do humor about my own cultural background and lived experiences.

The rest here: https://sethko.ren/files/proofofcosmicstrings.pdf

Rhys Mathewson's Rhys Math You Show

This is fantastic

Merrimans' Playhouse has jazz concerts 2-3 times each week. They get really fantastic groups coming from all over; much better jazz than one might expect in a small midwestern town.

Brilliant, definitely useful.

Pushing forward the energy frontier with a larger collider is the only surefire way we have to understand the structure of matter at smaller distances. From the fantastic experimental work of the LHC we now understand the visible sector down to <~10^-19 meters. The FCC would allow us to push reductionism to even smaller distances, below 10^-20 m. The only other option is to give up on the program of understanding the short-distance structure of the universe.

Did the prize task seem a bit off? It cut Karen's bit immediately, and then Jeremy's feedback didn't really make sense. I wonder if he was referencing some argument they ended up cutting.

I saw a bunch of live GM's GM-SBs listed on Guy's website and they looked like a lot of fun. Any idea if Guy was recording these? Would be lovely to watch without having to fly to Australia.

They're measuring the W mass empirically by looking at the kinematics of its decay products, so that inference doesn't require assuming a value for the vev or the coupling or whatever.

Sure, that's true---the number of degrees of freedom in the early universe controls the expansion rate, for a start.

We've only definitively answered the question of how many there are in the past ~10 years, by measuring the rate of Higgs boson production at the LHC. There are exactly three generations.

Hahaha thank you for pinging me! I guess if people are somehow still being led to this thread I should provide some update. TL;DR: I'm still in physics! But it's been difficult and YMMV.

Senior year I applied to graduate schools whilst taking too many classes, which was exacting. But it worked and the next year I went off to a top physics department. Grad school was difficult and stressful and overall left my mental health in a rather worse condition than it had been, but I managed to be productive and do some interesting things. Postdoc applications were again stressful, but I got an offer from a great group where I now am. And now I've struggled as a postdoc in the middle of a pandemic and I'm worried I haven't gotten much done. But I think I've had some interesting ideas that will come to fruition before too long, hopefully.

Anyway, I'm quite glad to say all these years I've been paid to think about physics. And that it's still possible that I can continue to make a living doing so going forward. I don't at all regret not having pursued more profitable options that would not have allowed me to think about physics. But it's also true that other jobs might have consumed less of my life, or other paths might have been less stressful.

Take this with a grain of salt, though, as I'm only now a postdoc. Perhaps I'll have to revise this comment in 7-8 years. ;-)

I continue to enjoy this, but my gosh can that laugh track be off-putting sometimes.

Rabbits aren't mindless automata. They're mammals just like you and me, and in fact you and that rabbit have a shared ancestor who lived less than 100 million years ago. I can't immediately find anything about 'how far they can think ahead', but they have social structure and build nests and find food, etc. Clearly they 'know what's going on', so to speak.

Tickets for the next live show (a week from today) can be found here!

Absolutely brilliant stuff. Glad I got to watch it before they decided they had let enough people see the video and took it down. Truly brings No More Jockeys to new heights.

Makes one wonder if Graham Linehan isn't secretly involved with the show.

My prior exposure to fractons had mainly been the (abstracts of) Seiberg papers crosslisted to hep-th, and I didn't see what was interesting in them besides being something you could do. Prof. Chen tells the story from the other direction, starting with error propagation in topological qubit devices. I did a double-take when Prof. Chen first brought said 'fracton' halfway through her talk---my gosh, of course, what natural theories to study!

Keep in mind this putative axion production mechanism is independent of the relic density of axions -- that is, independent of whether axions are dark matter.

Obviously, as with all BSM model-building, still very exciting if it's corroborated by further observations. But doesn't necessarily have anything to do with dark matter.

I'm not in that field. But for my money, you should be applying to more schools, if that's feasible. You should also (hopefully already have) talk(ed) to your mentors/advisers in your lab and department and asked for their advice on where to apply. They're the ones who will know the places where research on the topics you like is done. Reach out especially to any nice grad students you know. Good luck.

Edit: Also wanted to say congrats on your paper! Very impressive to get on the arXiv as an undergrad. :) I'm sure you'll do great in grad school.

Hahaha I would hope I read it - I cited it in my disseratation!

My apologies; I had thought about reaching out to ask how you preferred I cited it, but my social anxiety got the better of me and I chickened out. Unfortunately it looks like the UCThesis style did a woeful job at communicating that to Google Scholar; I'll have to hack together a different bibtex entry type for the updated version that will display the URL.

Yeah, unfortunately senior high energy theorists being too busy to build relationships with their students is an all-too-common experience. I've been trying to compliment young/early career physicists more in general as some part of efforts to combat that, in part. It would be easier if not for the anxiety, but I'm getting there and working on it :P. By the by, I think we have a situation which would be unusual in real-world genealogy but academically you're my uncle.