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Comment by orbifold | Hacker News Reader

There are few other ways of probing high energy physics systematically and a lot of them are funded and done aswell. This is not a zero sum game. We can bury detectors in the antarctic, in mines and have CERN. In fact technology developed at CERN helps those other experiments aswell.

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Fine, but that's not the interesting part of Hossenfelder's claim. Suppose we couldn't do it all and could only do one thing first. What is wrong with her claim that a bigger collider shouldn't be that thing? Is she wrong that that is not the most promising investment for discovery or is she wrong that "most promising investment" should be the main criterion for choosing what to do first?

But we can do it all. Moreover a large number of talented people really want to do it. Whatever money they are asking for is a fraction of the cumulative benefits these people have provided to humanity. When arguing about money you never argue about "science discoveries", no-one in their right mind cares about them when it comes to fundamental science, when you talk about this level of funding. If you manage to build a 100 TeV detector you need to figure out a mind boggling number of practical technical challenges along the way. All of those sum up to a value that is far larger than 10 billion. For other projects like the Human Genome project or the Brain projects the ROI seems more immediate. But in fact physics projects have routinely yielded higher ROIs. There is an extremely long tail of physics / technology research that is funded by a new detector.

As another example take the EU quantum initiative, they managed to get ~1 Billion and have promised to get ~5000 people working on it for ~10 years. That works out to ~20000 per person / per year. This only works because a lot of these people are so passionate about this project, that they are willing to self exploit themselves for years.

Fine, but if we couldn't, does she have a point about the priorities, and if not, why not?

(And, BTW, the fact that some investment has a good ROI doesn't mean you should pick it over another with a higher ROI)

I honestly don’t think she is qualified to speak on the priorities of a discipline she has never been involved in. They will do and prioritise what they think is reasonable based on fierce internal discussions and consensus building. I personally was never taken by the prospect of working on a huge project like the various experiments at LHC or any of the successors. If you defund HEP these people won’t magically go work on something else together. A large pool of people will simply stop doing physics and dissipate. Let them do what they want, it has worked out pretty well so far. There is plenty of other research that is well funded and competing for talent and attention. Why give up on something where Europe has clear worldwide leadership.

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