An excerpt on an essay about a trip to China for two conferences in summer 2016.
On the previous December 15, seven months earlier, the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider provided an early Christmas present to the salivating hordes of theorists who had, from their perspective, too long been deprived of excitement and intrigue in the data. The experiments saw a bump on a plot that should be smoothly falling and these emaciated theorists went berserk. Every possibility was tried, and most impossibilities as well, as models of new physics to explain this deviation from the null hypothesis, with a deluge of more than 500 papers of tenuous scientific merit written over the following weeks. As more was written, more confusions arose because these bumps seemed at odds with other, boring, data, and the experiments continued to collect events, update the plots, and provide additional context with the picture transitioning from grainy and obscured to much sharper and clearer. Alas, this bump deflated with the enthusiasm of the masses and was officially declared dead by June, simply an unfortunate collection of statistical coincidences that evaporated with more data. Conferences, of course, must be planned months in advance, so that invitations can be made, plane tickets purchased, and rooms reserved to ensure healthy participation, and along with these logistics, a theme is also established to focus the conversations and questions to be answered. Now, in July, a group of 30 or so of us were gathered at the Chinese Academy of Sciences for a workshop under the auspices of discussions and updates and brainstorming about hints of new physics in the data collected by the Large Hadron Collider.
Theorists, especially those whose livelihood depends on their unwavering ability to dream of a signal in the noise, are nothing if not eternal optimists. So this once exciting deviation now swept into the bottomless dustbin of what Nature is not, was not mentioned at all, and instead new but baroque ideas about the older, canonical problems in particle physics were presented. How can one solve the hierarchy problem, the discrepancy between the mass scale of the Higgs boson and the Planck scale at which gravity dominates the fundamental forces? Simple, just add a billion billion new degrees of freedom to your theory. Where are all these new particles that were promised that the LHC would find? Just out of reach, hidden because of innumerable convenient numerical accidents amongst parameters in your theory. Not all talks were so quixotic, though perhaps only a quarter addressed practical improvements to predictions, for example, and dreaming the most extravagant dreams serves the purpose of exploring and mapping the space of possibilities even if Nature is none of them. The collective amnesia was both impressive and depressing with nearly the entire field mere months earlier frothing at the mouth, following a statistical fluctuation to the edge of logic and beyond, and when that well dried up just returned to business as usual. With a deep breath, healthy skepticism, and patience to wait for the data to let statistics do their thing this could have been avoided, but where’s the fun in that?
A Physicist Abroad 