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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

She has specific proposals - climate science (the most pressing concern of our times, if organized human society is to survive the next century or so), and astronomical research.

I would also mention that things like the Voyager missions are still providing novel data ~50 years after their launch. Will the same be true of the LHC, or any other particle collider?

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I have bad news for you: Most high energy physicists I know go on to finance or "data science" before they would work on climate science. It is just not that interesting and doesn't pay well. HEP carriers prestige and is actually something aspiring physicists want to do.

That's not really bad news, is it? It doesn't seem unreasonable to redirect all the money being spent on HEP projects into climate science. That high energy physicists have great employment options is a good thing. It makes it much easier to close down those projects.

The HEP problems aren't going anywhere. Lets deal with more pressing concerns now and come back to HEP problems later.

It is really hard to organise 6000+ people to do anything. HEP won’t come back if you do. There isn’t much to figure out on climate change on a fundamental level anyways. It is a political and technological problem, not something you need a ton of scientists working on.

Organizations and cultures are kind of like living beings in this regard. The relationships and unspoken understandings between those 6000+ people are not things that could be replaced easily.

This is e.g. why the current rocket companies had to do a lot of reinvention and research instead of just switching the Saturn V production line back on.

> It is really hard to organise 6000+ people to do anything.

For sure, but we know we can do it because we've already done it.

No, you cannot reestablish HEP. HEP was extremely attractive to the theoretical inclined physicist because it contained a lot of unexplained data. There is no unexplained data now, HEP currenty lives on on the momentum it has. If you reduce this momentum to zero it will be gone (it will also be gone in 20 years if nothing is found)

It's kinda like the nuclear power industry. There was a huge investment by the government with an interest to build weapons. Some of it spilled over to energy plants. Once the government got what it wanted and had enough bombs funding was pulled. Nuclear power plants did ok for a while. Then decades passed and just a skeleton crew remains. Restarting the momentum is only possible through massive cost overruns.

Sure, but if the money were redirected to climate science, then the climate science people would be the well-payed ones, wouldn't they?

Also, there are other avenues for particle physics that don't require 20 billion dollars to start with. The 20 billion isn't going to retaining particle physicists, it's mostly going to hardware, engineering construction etc. efforts.

To be fair it’s not like HEP pays well. And redirecting the resources that currently flow to HEP to climate science wouldn’t make much difference, as it’s not a particularly large amount of resources in the grand scheme of things. HEP has a lot of people who work there for a lot less than they could make elsewhere because they like being physicists. If the field is gutted in favor of some other discipline they will move to finance or industry, not other scientific fields. We can approximate where they would end up be looking at where PhD graduates who don’t go into physics research end up.

Yes, climate is a pressing concern, but you are aware that climate science is descriptive an not a solution at all (more climate science will not change carbon emission). More funding on ITER might though (but I wouldnt call that climate science).

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