Scientists participate in international committees to analyze the most important questions and tools to solve them. Every few years, scientists step back to take a closer look at their field and identify the most important questions (Scientists helping shape the vision for the future of physics) and tools they will need to answer those questions.
This year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are starting a study to set a vision for the next few decades of particle physics (Scientists helping shape the vision for the future of physics) in the large context. A committee of 17 scientists from around the world will participate in this study.
“We’ve been given carte blanche to think critically, which is good, because the questions in this area are very important,” said Michael Turner, Rauner Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Physics at University of Chicago, who – in charge of the committee and the physicist Maria Spiropulu, from Caltech.
“The purpose of the field is to understand the basic nature of matter, energy, space and time,” he said. “What is our place in the universe? Do we live in the multiverse? What caused the Big Bang? The possibilities in physics right now are amazing.
The resulting study, which is expected to be released in 2024, is intended to help federal agencies, policy makers and experts make research decisions, money and planning. Turner is one of three University of Chicago associate scientists serving on the committee, along with fellow scientists Young Kee-Kim and Marcela Carena.
“The Funniest Question”
Over the past century, scientists have gradually developed a comprehensive framework for our understanding of the universe – how it behaves and how it began. But a few parts of the puzzle don’t fit.
For example, by observing the movement of galaxies, scientists believe that there is a type of matter that affects their orbits, known as “dark matter”. However, the mystery is invisible to the telescope – no one has ever seen it directly. Other puzzles include the explanation of why there is more matter in the universe than antimatter; measure the mass of neutrinos; and understand how Einstein’s theory of general relativity applies to quantum mechanics.
The purpose of the new National Education Commission is to examine these and other outstanding issues and how to address them.
Known as “Elementary Particle Physics: Progress and Promise” or EPP-2024, the study was conducted at the request of the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy. It will also take into account two other recommendations capital news reached in the next two years: “Snowmass”, a thousand members of the international physics community; and the Physics Project Prioritization Panel or P5, which makes recommendations to US agencies for the next 10 years of funding.
“To answer many deep questions in the field of particle physics, we will need a good balance between the size of the company, from small projects to large ones. Large and complex projects will take decades from start to finish. head,” Kim said. “Long-term thinking is important.”
These tasks are so big that no country can do it alone. More than 20 countries participated in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider.
“As your understanding expands, you get more questions, and they become more and more difficult to answer,” Turner explained.
Even projects smaller than the LHC have long development and construction times and long lifetimes. Consider, for example, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, America’s first physics laboratory. Fermilab’s flagship project, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment or DUNE, is currently under construction and will be the largest physics experiment on American soil. When completed within the next decade, it will send a beam of neutrinos 800 miles across the land from Illinois to South Dakota; we hope that this process will reveal more about neutrinos and help scientists better understand what the ghostly can tell us about the universe.
Challenges and opportunities
The National Academy conducted extensive research on such a degree in 2006, when the Large Hadron Collider was being built. The new research comes as the Large Hadron Collider begins its third run, searching for more information about the elusive Higgs particle in hopes of uncovering a loose string that could lead scientists to ‘The right way in.
“When I think about where we were 20 years ago, I think the science department is not very connected. But today the questions we are asking are so complex that we need information and insights from astronomers who study dark matter, quantum engineers who create quantum bits, computer scientists who work in machine learning”, Marcela Carena, another member of the committee is a scientist. at the University of Chicago and Fermilab. “So it’s important to think in this larger environment.”
Elementary physics, Turner added, is an area that has accounted for an unprecedented amount of scientific progress.
“From my point of view, compared to the last time we did this, we know a lot more about the universe, but less about where we’re going,” Turner said. “It happens sometimes in science, and in my opinion, usually at exciting times when there is a need for a revolutionary change.
“It is a field that has been at the forefront of scientific research in physics and has developed new scientific methods to answer important questions,” says Turner, an astronomer. It helped us understand our place in the universe. There are challenges, but the opportunities can be tremendous.
