Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

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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.)

> 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.

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.)

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).

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