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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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