Right, but you can push unknowns into tmp vars only so much before you have to introduce constraints, otherwise it's all downright undetermined. You have to inject a structure into the placeholder soup or you're just pushing ambiguity around with no real net gain.. which is also fun to play around, question is will you get a paper out of it or even paid if you play like that to no end.
Maybe, (I don't know), but it's easy to accidentally come up with a theory of "mysterious stuff" that appears to explain something, but neither constrains your expectation nor provides predictions.
Sometimes it is a discovery, new particle, and sometimes it is nothing.
But that is how science works.
At some point in time, everything was an unknown, and people had to work with unknowns.
This whole movement from the 'right' that all science has to know the answers ahead of time in order to justify spending money, is hindering progress. How can you know the results are worthwhile, in order to justify funding, before doing the research to know the results?
The Phlogiston theory made one crucial prediction - that the speed of light would vary depending on the observer’s movement through the ether. That prediction turned out to be famously wrong.
Virtual particles and related effects are actually widely accepted and experimentally proven (at least partially). Current physics wouldn't really work without them, or at least something that looks the same.
The gist of it is, that quantum mechanics prevents vacuum from really being empty. Any finite-size system or any system with some kind of influence/force/anything will have a lowest energy state that is not actually zero energy but slightly above. Which means that this non-zero can fluctuate and on occasion pair-produce and pair-annihilate particles (probability inversely depending on pair energy).
The Wikipedia article that you quote is quite explicit that, while virtual particles are a widely accepted mathematical tool, they're actual existence of elements of reality is very much not widely accepted, and definitely nowhere close to "experimentally verified". It's in fact considered impossible to verify experimentally, even in principle.
Note that there are many very widely used physical theories that include mathematical elements that are not necessarily assigned any physical meaning. The Poynting vector in classical electrodynamics, for example, carries no widely accepted physical meaning, even though it appears in many well verified and used calculations. This doesn't make the theory suspect or anything, I'm not trying to imply that - simply that virtual particles being "real" or not is a mostly philosophical question that has no widely accepted consensus.
Those particles are virtual in that they don't really exist, so you are right that proving them isn't actually possible, because they are simply not there, just virtually, in our mathematical imagination. In quantum mechanics[1], this isn't really a "doesn't exist" kind of thing, rather it means that the wave function is there, leading to the (slim) possibility of existence through some kind of wave function collapse.
What is proven is that e.g. vacuum energy / zero point energy exists (not actually in the StarGate sense of extractable energy, just that the lowest energy state of any physical system isn't zero), and that the Casimir effect exists. Vacuum energy directly leads to virtual particles through pair production (which is a proven mechanism, at high energies, for low energies we do suspect that there isn't a cutoff there), and also influences e.g. high-energy cosmic rays leading to an observed high-energy cutoff (although there are other possible explanations for that cutoff and lack of very-high-energy cosmic rays). The Casimir effect is most easily explained by virtual particles and vaccum energy.
In Hawking radiation, the idea is actually that virtual particles through interaction with the gravity of the black hole become real particles. The event horizon actually makes those wave functions collapse such that real particles start to exist. Hawking radiation hasn't been observed yet, however.
[1] non-Kopenhagen QM has the same consequences, it's just even harder to explain actually.
You're probably thinking of the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory, where there are actual particles with determinate trajectories at all times, which are probabilistically guided by a wave. I think they main problem with this idea is that it can't be made relativistically invariant, and so it can only be used for systems with low realtive velocities of its components.
OTOH de Broglie for one of the central ideas in the development of quantum mechanics: he inverted Einstein's idea about photons, which were previously thought to be waves but Einstein showed how they came in particle-like quanta. de Broglie realised you could apply the same thinking to matter, which had previously been thought of as particles, and describe them using waves. Subsequent observation of wavelike dynamics (diffraction) of electrons in the Davisson-Germer experiment got de Broglie the Nobel prize.
Isn't that how equations get solved?
Pretty much anything known entered through such placeholder, it's just that equations could be connected more easily.
It's not like Higgs field is something you can directly observe
Right, but you can push unknowns into tmp vars only so much before you have to introduce constraints, otherwise it's all downright undetermined. You have to inject a structure into the placeholder soup or you're just pushing ambiguity around with no real net gain.. which is also fun to play around, question is will you get a paper out of it or even paid if you play like that to no end.
Maybe, (I don't know), but it's easy to accidentally come up with a theory of "mysterious stuff" that appears to explain something, but neither constrains your expectation nor provides predictions.
Phlogiston is the classic example. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RgkqLqkg8vLhsYpfh/fake-causa...
Its a process.
You find some un-identified variables.
Form some hypothesis, try to narrow it down.
Sometimes it is a discovery, new particle, and sometimes it is nothing.
But that is how science works.
At some point in time, everything was an unknown, and people had to work with unknowns.
This whole movement from the 'right' that all science has to know the answers ahead of time in order to justify spending money, is hindering progress. How can you know the results are worthwhile, in order to justify funding, before doing the research to know the results?
The Phlogiston theory made one crucial prediction - that the speed of light would vary depending on the observer’s movement through the ether. That prediction turned out to be famously wrong.
I'm pretty sure physicists are aware that "dark matter" hypothesis is nowhere as solid as theory of electromagnetism.
It's still useful to denote the area of study.
Primordial black holes.
Don't forget phlogiston.
Virtual Particles!
Was that de Broglie's thing? I always thought it didn't get a fair shake
Virtual particles and related effects are actually widely accepted and experimentally proven (at least partially). Current physics wouldn't really work without them, or at least something that looks the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
The gist of it is, that quantum mechanics prevents vacuum from really being empty. Any finite-size system or any system with some kind of influence/force/anything will have a lowest energy state that is not actually zero energy but slightly above. Which means that this non-zero can fluctuate and on occasion pair-produce and pair-annihilate particles (probability inversely depending on pair energy).
And yes, this sounds like some kind of ether...
The Wikipedia article that you quote is quite explicit that, while virtual particles are a widely accepted mathematical tool, they're actual existence of elements of reality is very much not widely accepted, and definitely nowhere close to "experimentally verified". It's in fact considered impossible to verify experimentally, even in principle.
Note that there are many very widely used physical theories that include mathematical elements that are not necessarily assigned any physical meaning. The Poynting vector in classical electrodynamics, for example, carries no widely accepted physical meaning, even though it appears in many well verified and used calculations. This doesn't make the theory suspect or anything, I'm not trying to imply that - simply that virtual particles being "real" or not is a mostly philosophical question that has no widely accepted consensus.
Those particles are virtual in that they don't really exist, so you are right that proving them isn't actually possible, because they are simply not there, just virtually, in our mathematical imagination. In quantum mechanics[1], this isn't really a "doesn't exist" kind of thing, rather it means that the wave function is there, leading to the (slim) possibility of existence through some kind of wave function collapse.
What is proven is that e.g. vacuum energy / zero point energy exists (not actually in the StarGate sense of extractable energy, just that the lowest energy state of any physical system isn't zero), and that the Casimir effect exists. Vacuum energy directly leads to virtual particles through pair production (which is a proven mechanism, at high energies, for low energies we do suspect that there isn't a cutoff there), and also influences e.g. high-energy cosmic rays leading to an observed high-energy cutoff (although there are other possible explanations for that cutoff and lack of very-high-energy cosmic rays). The Casimir effect is most easily explained by virtual particles and vaccum energy.
In Hawking radiation, the idea is actually that virtual particles through interaction with the gravity of the black hole become real particles. The event horizon actually makes those wave functions collapse such that real particles start to exist. Hawking radiation hasn't been observed yet, however.
[1] non-Kopenhagen QM has the same consequences, it's just even harder to explain actually.
You're probably thinking of the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory, where there are actual particles with determinate trajectories at all times, which are probabilistically guided by a wave. I think they main problem with this idea is that it can't be made relativistically invariant, and so it can only be used for systems with low realtive velocities of its components.
OTOH de Broglie for one of the central ideas in the development of quantum mechanics: he inverted Einstein's idea about photons, which were previously thought to be waves but Einstein showed how they came in particle-like quanta. de Broglie realised you could apply the same thinking to matter, which had previously been thought of as particles, and describe them using waves. Subsequent observation of wavelike dynamics (diffraction) of electrons in the Davisson-Germer experiment got de Broglie the Nobel prize.