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> They are paid almost nothing (a checkout clerk at a Swiss supermarket makes more than a PhD student at CERN). Then you string along a subset of those for years, exploiting them for further cheap labor, somehow making them believe they are “lucky” to get that opportunity (a postdoc at CERN pays a fraction of what you can make at Google Zurich).

That’s not unique to LHC, or CERN, or physics. It’s a general problem of academia, where PhDs and postdocs are paid a pittance compared to what they could otherwise earn in the industry. This problem is especially bad in high energy physics of course, since jobs are especially limited, and it’s the brightest people competing against each other, who could easily land jobs on Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

> Then there is literally decades of over promising on ground breaking discoveries right around the corner (super symmetry, extra dimensions, dark matter).

Standard Model works exceedingly well at LHC. No one was actually sure about BSM (beyond Standard Model) so there was no “promise” really. Or the promise is: we may see something interesting, or we may disprove some otherwise interesting theories.

> Defunding the super collider in the 90s in the US was probably one of the best science policy decisions they made.

Cancelling SSC was such a stupid waste of labor and money, it’s painful to see someone touting it as a triumph. Two words: defense budget. Enough said.

Disclosure: I worked for CMS for a while. (Not physically at CERN; was doing data analysis for CMS in the U.S.)

Want to throw out that PhD students at CERN & ETH/EPFL are still paid a living salary. Go outside of the ETH system and you can make a fair amount more (nothing considerable, but equivalent to what high school teacher in the states, which for a PhD student is nothing to sneeze at).

I'm pretty positive that people made firm predictions and bets that the LHC will see super partners (because otherwise the "naturalness" argument would go away). Whether it would be the MSSM or something else was up for debate, but people thought it would be more likely than not that they would see them if the Higgs was found in the predicted energy range. In any case physics departments at top universities all over the world are stacked with phenomenologists that made their careers on working out these predictions.

Anderson made an argument against the SSC https://www.the-scientist.com/opinion-old/the-case-against-t..., which I pretty much agree with. Science funding is finite and physics talent in a country as well. Many really good students are funnelled into dead end careers in high-energy physics (whether theoretical or experimental). It's just a huge waste of human potential, especially given the fact of how ruthlessly they are exploited. I know people in the field, a hiring decision between three people was recently described to me as a choice between a 'social case' and two competent workers, one of which happens to be a friend of mine.

Funnily enough lot's of institutions doing fundamental research in high energy physics either also do military research or receive military funding. Most of Witten's work for example has been funded by the Department of Energy. The whole reason CERN was build in a neutral country was because people worried that a post nuclear arms race would break out otherwise. In France one of the major institutes contributing to particle physics (Saclay Nuclear Research Centre) also developed their nuclear arsenal and is located next to a major arms manufacturers research center (Thalys).

> more likely than not

Yeah, “more likely than not” isn’t a promise. Sure, a lot of people firmly believe in their theories, so me saying “no one was actually sure” seems wrong, but I was talking about a different kind of “sure”. The community overwhelmingly agreed on SM, whereas there were huge divides on where the BSM bets were, or even on roughly the same bet, where SUSY scale lies, etc.

> Mant really good students are funneled into dead end careers in high-energy physics, ...

I was one of the funneled. We signed up because we were drawn to the fundamental questions, not because of glowing job prospects, which were largely laid out for anyone paying a little bit of attention. Cancelling things and decreasing funding certainly didn’t help, only lead to worse “exploitation” in your words.

> Funnily enough lot's of institutions doing fundamental research in high energy physics either also do military research or receive military funding.

Institutions do lots of things. Most also receive funding for medical research, so?

In general, modern day HEP in and of itself hardly contributes anything to the military sector. On the more practical side, powerful magnets, computational methods etc. should be useful in military applications, but a lot of different areas have such second-order effects. Nevertheless, I’m neither knowledgeable nor enthusiastic about killing machines, so I could be missing some obvious connections.

> Most of Witten's work for example has been funded by the Department of Energy.

Why would you put all DOE funding under defense budget? It’s not DOD. Or would you characterize all renewable energy spending as military spending too?

> In France one of the major institutes contributing to particle physics (Saclay Nuclear Research Centre) also developed their nuclear arsenal...

Particle physics has largely moved on from nuclear physics. (I know, many particle physicists are still interested in cold fusion etc.)

> Cancelling SSC was such a stupid waste of labor and money

No, it wasn't. The construction site was chosen for political reasons and the entire bidding process was beset with problems that would have made it cost even more money, run into a ton of problems (for example fire ants causing multitudes of delays and groundwater seepage making the installation of sensitive electronics probably impossible), and probably not have been finished. The administrators kind of knew it was going to cost more than they pitched even under best of circumstances and were counting on funding momentum to keep it going (well we put this much money into it so we can't just stop now).

What the US did with the SSC money was to put it into LIGO instead.

source: growing up my neighbor was this guy: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/19/723326933/billion-dollar-gamb... and he told me about these things.

> Then there is literally decades of over promising on ground breaking discoveries right around the corner (super symmetry, extra dimensions, dark matter).

Every statement in your diatribe would seem to be predicated by the assumption that discoveries in theoretical physics (what you're complaining about) will result in revolutionary changes to your day-to-day experience (kinda i.e. applied physics) in a short enough span of time that you can actually enjoy them with an able body.

Probably not. Flight/space and semiconductors were notable exceptions, and they were largely driven by the century of hot and cold war that we know to be the 1900s.

Bad science is science that fundamentally doesn't yield a new understanding of the world, either by falsifying theories or confirming them. What you described is:

1. failure to meet exaggerated lay expectations, and

2. poor working conditions in the nonprofit space.

#2 (and possibly #1 depending on where the theoretical discoveries take us) can largely be resolved by pouring more money into science, not less. I'll point back to our century of war if you need past precedent.

Edit: removed a line that was unnecessarily insulting. Sorry about that.

Indeed, flight and space have applications, which is why they (completely justifiably) get more funding. People seem to forget this, but the space shuttle alone was funded over 15x more than the LHC was, and by a single country rather than many.

> Every statement in your diatribe would seem to be predicate...

I would be happy if they found any experimental evidence for their predictions. If you have followed the field basically the majority opinion was that supersymmetry at the LHC would be inevitably found, as long as the Higgs mass was in a certain range (naturalness argument). Turns out it (narrowly) was in that range but supersymmetry was not found anyways. Arguably a lot of particle phenomenology in the last 20+ years was bad science in that way, because no new phenomena had actually been observed/measured and needed model building. Of course there is nothing inherently bad with conjecture or theory, but given the fact that there are lots of unsolved problems in physics on which progress was made in that time, a lot of what they were doing seems like a huge waste of time.

Philip Anderson made his case for refocussing physics a long time ago: See his case against against the SSC: https://www.the-scientist.com/opinion-old/the-case-against-t... and "More is Different" https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393.

> Arguably a lot of particle phenomenology in the last 20+ years was bad science.

Perhaps that wouldn't have gone on so long if the SSC wasn't fucking cancelled in '93.

> Arguably a lot of particle phenomenology in the last 20+ years was bad science in that way, because no new phenomena had actually been observed/measured

That is an interesting observation. Would you be willing to guess specifically why there was such a long gap between the LHC and the previous collider? The answer is already in your comment.

I kinda wish this comment focused more on bad science rather than bad pay. If bad pay implied bad science then most of science is bad!

I suppose I'd be much more interested in learning about the latter half of your comment (specific scientific failures).

Nobody forces academics to work for low pay. I mean, that's what I'm doing right now and I certainly don't feel exploited.

> Then there is literally decades of over promising on ground breaking discoveries right around the corner (super symmetry, extra dimensions, dark matter).

Suppose all TeV-scale colliders had been defunded in the 90s, including the LHC. Then we would have forever been stuck with the strong suspicion that a Higgs is there, but no proof, along with untested but plausible-sounding well-motivated speculation over what else could be. Is that not worse than actually knowing?

While it is true that nobody forces you to work for low pay - there is definitely misleading advertising at play.

Most young people that pick science do not understand the "real" rules of science, and what it takes to "succeed". Being a good, reliable, hard-working scientists will not ensure your success.

Whereas in many if not most jobs, being good at the job itself usually suffices.

I know what the rules are. In fact the community seems to be extremely transparent about it -- there are sites that keep track of all job offers out there for you, along with historical statistics.

The struggle for jobs is the result of the government funding structure, plus supply and demand. It's not perfect, but it's infinitely preferably to the older system, where you could reliably do science only if you had great personal wealth, or were favored by somebody who did.

First and foremost, we are talking in general, about young scientists. Do you think they all know what they sign up for? I for one, having seen many hundreds of them, I don't think so.

Then I will say, job offers are not relevant here. Who gets the job offer? What do they have to actually do in that job? Where are they going to be in 10 years? What kind of life, job security, job conditions, career advancement prospects do you have over the long term? For most scientists, these are the most nebulous concepts ever.

You may think you know what the job is - maybe, I wouldn't know.

What I do know that most people do not understand that a PI (principal investigator) at a University does nothing even remotely similar to what a postdoc (who wants to be a PI does)/ The churn and exploitation is very common.

> I certainly don't feel exploited.

Sure this is your subjective perception, maybe fuelled by the positive reinforcement that rituals of accomplishment provide and the fact that working on physics is really fun. As long as you realise that you are playing a game that is unlikely to yield any economic or societal value (in the case of high-energy physics) at any time-scale with a group of people that have been playing the same game for >20 years with no discernible progress except for the discovery of one particle predicted >40 years ago.

> Suppose all TeV-scale colliders [..]

Well this is hypothetical, but what would most likely have happened is that the ~10000+ scientists involved with the LHC and high-energy physics had gone into different subfields of physics. Hopefully the same would have happened with funding (we don't want it to go to biologists, do we?). Since high-energy physics still attracts some of the best students, this would have actually disproportionately improved human capital in other areas of physics. Whether the Higgs was there or not was never a super pressing concern anyways. Condensed matter physics, bio-physics, environmental physics, all kinds of (mostly experimental) quantum physics still have discoveries to be made with ~1-10s of million in budget. Not only that a lot of those discoveries will have society level consequences in a time frame of decades. We are in contrast very unlikely to derive any benefit from studying the energy scales high-energy physics has reached. For those reasons I think funding high-energy physics is a huge net negative to overall societal progress.

> ALICE’s desaster of a analysis Pipeline

Any references to this? First I've heard of it.

You can take a look here: https://github.com/alisw/AliRoot

it is true that moving protobufs is more profitable than moving protons, but I think CERN represents a fundamentally interesting and important scientific endeavor.