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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

>This is personal to me, some of my friends work at CERN

That is very clear. You didn't engage her argument at all.

Is is really too much to ask for scientific mega project to generate all that value, while at the same time same pursuing a central object that is scientifically viable?

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Building a high energy collider is like building a larger telescope. The only things you can be sure of is that you will be able to understand whatever you have seen better than before. There is scientific consensus that we should be able to understand dark matter better by building one aswell. This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public. Attacking this communication to the general scientific community is different from attacking the substance of these technical arguments. One can be done by a blog post, the other would need to be accepted by a scientific journal. Physical review letters would be more than happy to publish substantive attacks on prevailing beliefs about dark matter.

>>There is scientific consensus

Really - I thought that we were debating an article by a scientist, who along with many other scientists disagrees with that position.

>>This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public.

And yet the general public is being asked to pay for it. Perhaps sorting out that gap and explaining how understanding dark matter will be as important as (for example) curing cancer or alzheimers disease, or more prosaically cystic fibrosis or malaria would be a good thing? Or even understanding ecologies and the global climate? Will the new accelerator be carbon neutral? Will understanding dark matter prevent the collapse of our planet and the deaths of our children?

If I were a politician funding this project I would want some pretty cold, hard information on these things.

Well, it's a scientist in a different field. More importantly, it's by a scientists that doesn't engage with the technical arguments made by those actually in the field, so it's unclear what exactly the label "scientist" brings.

If a physicist criticises recommendations by epidemiologist without reference to the theory of how diseases spread, should you count that as disagreement from the consensus of how to fight infectious diseases?

> Will understanding dark matter prevent the collapse of our planet and the deaths of our children?

It's difficult to know. General relativity is useful for GPS. Superconductivity is useful for NMR that actually sometimes saves children from cancer. Neither of the applications were clear at the discovery time.

(My favorite was Magnetoresistance. You start to explain it as a weird quantum boring effect of the spin of electrons in magnetic conductors, and when the other person is convinced that it totally unuseful you explain that it is used in hard disks. SSD are killing the fun.)

GR-> GPS ~50 years?

Superconductivity -> NMR ~60 years?

Do we have that long?

She is not a scientist active in this area. At this point she is for the most part paid to be a science communicator. A lot of money is spend on curing all these other things. Particle accelerators have been instrumental in developing the technology for hadron radiation therapy (there are now special purpose one just for cancer treatment) and superconducting magnets (useful for MRT medical devices). If you examine it closely a lot of advances in biology and medicine were thanks to technical advances made by physics. They have been a really solid bet so far and have created trillions of dollars in value. Why not let them have some fun and let them chase their McGuffin, which btw. might be totally real and interesting fundamental physics. The high energy particle physics community is doing ground breaking research on radiation hard imaging sensors, large scale super conducting power distribution (which might be useful for connecting solar power in a lossless manner to consumers).

These projects are a way to train high skilled STEM people (competition to stay at CERN is brutal, but most go on to industry) in a structured way that then work on a lot of other societally relevant problems.

That second paragraph is a really terrible justification.

> The only things you can be sure of is that you will be able to understand whatever you have seen better than before

I think it's more correct that you will be generating observations in largely the same way as in the past, but with higher resolution and fidelity.

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