Hacker News Reader

Comment by orbifold | Hacker News Reader

BTW her examples of experiments that received insufficient funding is really curious: FAIR she just happens to work at a university that is pretty directly involved with it, the cost overruns were so bad that the original people lost management of the project . The James Webb Telescope was in part delayed because it shares the platform with the next gen of American spy sattelites. I happen to know someone that worked on the sensors for both. Sensors that btw. share a lot of similarities with the sensors used in particle detectors.

View on HN

Her main point is that from physics perspective there are better ways to use money. Whatever success and failures in projects, we should keep throwing money into places that are more likely solve important physical questions.

Any argument that sidesteps that is nonsense. If goal of investing in fundamental physics is not R&D it's just a side effect as I assume.

If I read your argument correctly it's "We can't give argument that this is the best way spend money if you want to solve these problems, but it will generate other side benefits that may help indirectly". It's honest argument if put that way.

The particle community has enumerated why new accelerators are the best way to answer particle physics questions, Hossenfelders position is however that those arguments aren't worth engaging with because particle physicists are slaves to "group think".

As for the argument that cosmology or astronomy are more promising ways of yielding new insights, that's not something she ever bothers to discuss in detail. There's no articles about how the extremely noisy and uncertain constrains from astronomy are more worth to gamble on that than the much cleaner direct detections from accelerators.

And there's certainly no arguments about how we should stop giving so much money to the exoplanet researchers and their instruments instead of making satellites to measure the cosmic radio background. (There's not even a little post about how SpaceX will hamper radio astronomy by making sure there's no radio quiet place left on earth).

>The particle community has enumerated why new accelerators are the best way to answer particle physics questions

They have not given a good answer why particle accelerators they are asking for would give any answers at 100 TeV.

It's just biggest they can hope to get.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com