RE: A hitch-hiker guide for dark matter searches at particle colliders

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Congrats on your discoveries and publications!

I want to ask something related to a previous article, where you talked about how in the last few months you are finding data that show that the Standard Model isn't the whole picture.

After that convo I remembered some previous discussion of ours, probably took place some years ago, where you were saying that, if I recall, the Standard Model is the most verified theory in existence, supported by trillions of observations, something like that (I may be misremembering and misexpressing, but I think the point is the same!)

I remember I was thinking at the time, "there's no way the theory of evolution is less supported than any physics theory! we don't know if the physics theories will hold up for another 10 years, but I'm sure every biologist feels pretty certain Darwin's theory will hold, well, forever!"

And now I was thinking, maybe itemizing all those observations is the wrong way to go about it. Maybe they should be grouped! Like, if I have 50 swans, and I'm trying to figure out whether they are all white, I could count their individual feathers and consider every feather as a piece of evidence; OR I would consider the whole swan as just one piece of evidence. Doing the same kind of experiment over and over again at CERN and counting it kinda seems inappropriate. OR maybe every time a new microbe is 'born' we should count it as further evidence for Darwin!

Another thought: Karl Popper insisted on science being about falsification. Confirmation, to him, doesn't count for much. Science's job is to look for instances that falsify the theory. And that seems to be a large part of what's being done at CERN if I understand correctly.



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Thanks for this interesting comment. There are various points which I should answer in there.

After that convo I remembered some previous discussion of ours, probably took place some years ago, where you were saying that, if I recall, the Standard Model is the most verified theory in existence, supported by trillions of observations, something like that (I may be misremembering and misexpressing, but I think the point is the same!)

I would not say trillions but a few :-) The point is however the same, as you said.

For the rest, the picture of the iceberg answers it pretty well, in my opinion. Whatever is the true theory of nature, at the energy scale of the Standard Model, it is equal to the Standard Model. This is why we are talking about extensions of the Standard Model.

Therefore, depending on what you want to do, making use of the Standard Model may be good enough. To rephrase this, let's assume you want to calculate the speed of a car. There is no need to use special relativity here. This will just make calculations way harder for a numerical result barely different.

Does it clarify?

Cheers!

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