Comment by pif | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pif | Hacker News Reader

I am a particle physicist and when I worked at CERN I helped building the data acquisition software of the ATLAS experiment.

The empty promises she is talking about are the equivalent of the promises by politicians during a campaign: they are for the larger public, for the people who (rightfully!) don't want to get more informed than that.

In the background, both in science and in politics, technical folks know what they mean and, especially, where the money is actually going.

In the case of politics, it happens unfortunately that big chunks of the money involved go into private pockets.

Based on my experience, in the case of particle physics, that money invariably goes to wide technological improvement.

Very few sane people really cared whether the Higgs boson existed, but the world is a better place because we got our efforts together in order to find an answer.

If the argument is that widespread technological improvements always come from heavy investment in something so technologically challenging, then why Yet Another Particle Collider instead of the myriad other technologically challenging physics experiments we could be investing in? What's specific to a particle collider that produces these serendipitous side-effect advances compared to, say, a space telescope or other ambitious experiments?

Which technological improvements?

https://kt.cern/startups

For a start you can look at the list of technologies you can license from them: https://kt.cern/technologies

Get a beer with a particle physicist some time, you will find most of them didn't actually work on "finding dark matter" but worked on a myriad of specific technical challenges.

- Superconducting magnets and power distribution

- Radiation hard ASICs and detectors

- CAD software like KICAD

- ROOT

- Grid computing infrastructure

- Analog circuit design (1024 channel low power ADCs, pixel sensors)

- FPGA design for data aggregation and communication

I asked this elsewhere, but does anyone use ROOT outside of physics? It reads to me as "this development is useful to society at large!" while society at large has its own data stacks that are pretty much completely independent. Likewise for most of your other items.

Did you work with Bernardo Kastrup?

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