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Comment by chroem- | Hacker News Reader

Has the LHC produced technological advances that are used outside of particle physics? I am struggling to think of any.

Stating that such a project is worth doing only if it produces other technological advances is not something I would like to be accused of, but fortunately your question does not have to be interpreted in that way.

Here is an exchange between physicist Robert Wilson and senator John Pastore in 1969, about establishing Fermilab.

Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?

Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.

P: Nothing at all?

W: Nothing at all.

P: It has no value in that respect?

W: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of man, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

Spending four billion dollars to prove (to whom?) that we are really good at building super colliders is not something I personally would like to see my government do. If I want to prove my country is worth defending I want it to be a place where no children go hungry and the citizens have the resources and feel empowered to continue our elimination of human suffering in this world. I personally can't see what a new accelerator would provide to humanity over using that money providing food to the hungry.

What do you think happens with the money? It's not burned. Ideally, the project also employs people that use their money to exchange it for goods and services, which in turn might make some children not go hungry.

Consumption is not bad (up to ecological damage). Wealth hoarding and concentration is bad.

If the goal is economic stimulus, why not spend it on something with a better scientific ROI?

Which, for instance?

If we're talking about megaprojects, a mini-Manhattan Project of sorts for developing better theories of superconductivity would be extremely beneficial. Practical room temperature superconductors would totally revolutionize our society. We're close, but we're not quite there yet.

The usual question is what to do with the those who don't know anything about that, don't really want to. Should particle physics simply ended? Should they go and beg for money from billionaires?

We don't coddle other professions with declining ROI like that. Why should particle physics be an exception? Anyone else would be told to "learn to code".

Except when folks accidentally elect someone who keeps telling coal miners that let's bring back coal.

You could also try to repair all the bridges from the east coast to the west coast, but I'm not sure you'd cross the Appalachian trail with that little of a budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

What if we did both?

There are miserably poor people in this world, that's right, but it's not because of the LHC or particle physicists. And assuming you're American (most likely) then your country has far, far, far, far bigger problems than the support it may opt to provide to a fundamental physics search.

That's false perspective. People keep repeating things like "why India sends a probe to Mars, heck, there are so many poor people in India". In the long run investments in new technologies always leads to common people life improvement. Even building pyramids in Egypt was beneficial for peasants living there, as it required development of skilled workforce, required building efficient administration, "project management" skills that were used in other fields (agriculture, warfare).

Scientists are people too! What's wrong with feeding them? You can also see any research facilities and space programs as a cheap jobs program that keeps employed the people building them (scientist are really underpaid compared to software engineers, lawyers etc....), doing research in there and all the people that build anything that these people use.

It's also subsidizing the high precision research and development that private companies do to be able to provide the tools used by these research facility (thought to a much lower extend than military programs), which in turns should lower the cost of producing high precision doodads you put on your wrist or your pocket.

Understanding the deep structure of matter is necessary for two things - materials science and energy science - both of which could have massive economic payoffs for society.

In the modern world, much of our economic growth is driven by innovation - new scientific understandings result in new technologies that result in new products and services that introduce new capabilities into the world that never existed before, and which are in demand because they improve people's lives.

Scaling production and volume lowers prices making them more accessible to everyone. That's the wealth creation pipeline at work, a modern miracle that brought humanity out of the permanent dark ages and repeating Malthusian cycles.

For example, much of modern technology - silicon chips, mobile phone networks, etc, would not have been possible without a deeper understanding of quantum physics.

However, continuing this growth and wealth generation process depends on continuing to deepen our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy. Stop or slow the latter and we stop or slow the former. To date, particle accelerators are key component of doing that. And even if someone discovers a better way, we'll still have to invest in that. Either way we still have to invest in the process of unveiling the deep structure of matter.

It created White Rabbit[0], a system for sub nanosecond time keeping precision over ethernet. It is now used in many financial exchanges to ensure fairness for market participants. [1]

(0): https://white-rabbit.web.cern.ch/

(1): https://www.eurex.com/ex-en/support/initiatives/archive/high...

That sounds like it has very marginal value to me. What's the problem it's solving in financial exchanges that you can't do with pedestrian cables and techniques inside a datacenter? Let alone a wild and crazy solution like only processing orders once per second.

I'm especially looking at where it says "typical distances of 10 km between network elements"

Yes, it's just that they aren't directly linked with LHC - most of the time you're dealing with second/third or higher degree connection, where part of LHC required support technology that in turn required technology that often can be used in for something else. The most famous example is of course WWW, although it's fairly remote - a bit of the encouragement for building it was help CERN work better, and at the time work on LHC's design already started.

Other things are work on grid/cloud technology as well as supercomputing, computer visualisation, research on industrial automation (something I personally used for work, directly related to challenges of building and running LHC), etc. etc.

I have no direct insight, but from what I gather, the amount of data generated there is staggering (1 petabyte/second raw, 1 petabyte/day after filtering). Storing and processing this much data certainly required immense technological advances (which have been shared with the community at large). Again, my impression from far outside.

But fundamental research like this does not have short-term prosperity or technological breakthroughs as main priority anyway, so I'm not sure why you're so concerned about that.

Goodhart's Law ensures that if you require technological advances, you will get some. For instance, the SSC was going to bring us flat panel displays.

What?

Yes, I recall at the time that when news articles talked about the SSC, flat panel displays were mentioned in multiple articles. Now this was certainly a case of one article influencing the others, with the original information source buried in obscurity.

We're really bad at projecting the technological outcomes of any specific science research project, and asking scientists or their funding agencies to do so is just an invitation for them to make up some bullshit. I'd prefer that they are just honest with their expectations.

Is it not the case that a lot of machine learning research was done to make the data processing at LHC possible?

There is literally civilizations worth of knowledge generated by projects like this, not all of it exactly commercially useful but if you bump into it and they've solved your problem or written your tutorial better than you it's very nice to have.

Are you implying advancing particle physics itself is useless? I believe that today's biggest challenge in engineering is finding applications for the most cutting edge physics, and I think focus on Skunk Works for the same is the need of the hour.

If we have not found any applications, its probably because we have not tried enough / invested enough.

There was a time when "Lasers are a solution looking for a problem." Now they are everywhere. Be patient.

Obviously lots of radiation measuring and management technology, but I doubt you would think that is worthwhile until you get proton therapy.

LHC does basic research which is opposite of what you are asking (applied research). They seek to increase our understanding on particle physics, not make our lifes directly better.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_research

The pipeline from fundamental research to practical applications is very long. Relativity or QM seemed pointless 100 years ago.

It has created a ton of jobs for instrumentation engineers and PhDs. It has also brought many economic benefits to Switzerland.

creating jobs is not a positive argument in and of itself.

Better than selling ads I guess

that makes jobs too right?

Yes, building an accelerator would have economic benefits for whatever location is chosen as the site. This could be built in Japan (as the paper mentions, it may build the ILC) or even the US.

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