Hacker News: g6pdh

New comment by g6pdh in "CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3"

g6pdh — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:17:11 +0000

Yes, I know her and I agree with what she says. I also think many physicists working in the field secretly agree with her but it's a taboo to admit it openly. As an insider I can assure you that currently most analyses in experimental particle physics are a mechanical repetition of previous analyses with a few slight modifications to adapt them to the bigger statistics. It's true that it could simply be an effect due to the experiments lifetime, that have been running for 20 years now and where younger generations are struggling to come up with ideas not yet explored. I can speak less from the perspective of theoretical physics, but it seems obvious to all those in the field that there's a proliferation of papers proposing new particles, new interactions, etc. with no real impact.

New comment by g6pdh in "CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3"

g6pdh — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:46:21 +0000

I'm a former LHCb physicist and I worked for years in the cavern, fixing the cables you saw :) Thanks for your enthusiasm. Obviously, things seen from the inside aren't as ideal as a non-physicist person might think. There are the usual power dynamics you find in academia: PhD students and postdocs exploited to do service and technical work instead of independent research, careerism, researchers who have to worry more about symbolic roles and political aspects than actual research, as if the PhD->Postdoc->Tenure->Professor career model serves to create real expertise and not vice versa. In general (personally) I've felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact, other than increasing the h-index, hoping to get a permanent position somewhere. Forgive the outburst, I'm in the IT industry now and I'm feeling definitely better, but eventually it was great and educational to do research at CERN.

New comment by g6pdh in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

g6pdh — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:25:54 +0000

A physicist who worked on radiation-tolerant electronics here. Apart from the short iteration loops, agile also means that the SW/HW requirements are not fully defined during the first iterations, because they may also evolve over time. But this cannot be applied to projects where radiation/fault tolerance is the top priority. Most of the time, the requirements are 100% defined ahead of time, leading to a waterfall-like or a mixed one, where the development is still agile but the requirements are never discussed again, except in negligible terms.