Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
The short history of physics in TFA is spot on: Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise. This has been confirmed by numerous insiders, including by Hossenfelder as mentioned in the article, and Lee Smolin ("The trouble with physics") who is also a theoretical physicist.
Things have changed a lot since accelerators became a must-have for high-energy physics: Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned. I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations.
[1]: The industrial subsidy angle is not touched upon in TFA, but it is clear that there is a large number of people and companies making a good living from mega-physics, and talking to colleagues in the field, I get the distinct impression that it is not always they physicist walking in the front when asking for more machines.
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Thats just how I read your comment to begin with.
In Steven Wrights voice.
"People ask me what I'm into... Low energy quantum physics... its basically everything"
Isn't the main alternative LQG which is apparently a dead end?
No, science is not the act of publishing in a peer-reviewed journals, science is using past observations to make models that predict future observations, and then evaluating those models after making the future observations. Peer review is just the industry standard quality control mechanism.
The problem with String Theory is it unfalsifiability and that it has not even grown to explain 3D phenomena AT ALL. 40 years later.
Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (both special and general) gave results in a single decade.
String theory is as far as I have ever read the only thing even close to a working theory in this area. That doesn't mean it's correct but in my admittedly limited understanding of the literature many alternatives are either dead or are similar to string theory only without the underlying principles.
People do work on alternatives. there are a lot of smart people unhappy with string theory they just can't actually provide any alternatives.
One thing I'd like to say as well is that if someone does provide an alternative there will be a large movement of minds. This always happens in science, people like to think of physicists as a kind of unionized cabal but this isn't true historically or today as far as I'm concerned. Certainly not with the physicists of tomorrow.
As far as I understand it, string theory has yet to provide a working model of quantum gravity despite focused work on it for ~30 years. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Plank explained the black-body radiation.
Einstein explained too many things to say but predicted the precession of mercury which was unexplained.
Witten has explained either everything (which is to say nothing useful) or nothing at all (it depends on your position). In any of both cases, after 40 years and several LHC unfulfilled “expectations” it is time to accept the facts.
For example my understanding of string theory is that Lorentz covariance must be exact, if you find this is either inconsistent or not true in reality then you have cut ze string.
These people are not some obscenely rich opportunists in power. They are working scientists, who draw public interest because they say interesting things and they are part of a larger discourse.
Now Hossenfelder isn’t known for her fingerspitzengefühl when it comes to criticizing others, but I have yet to find an instance where she doesn’t treat the subject matter with the utomst respect it deserves.
Her claim is that there isn't enough secondary validation to truly conclude they detected gravity waves. the community disagrees and is building more detectors. The creators of the project were awarded Nobel prizes. At best, she raises some interesting questions but the narrative that the data isn't sufficient really doesn't work.
Couldn't the LHC be upgraded then to take advantage of this? Sounds like a much cheaper option. But I'm not a physicist at all so I'm sure I'm oversimplifying.
The fundamental limitations isn't the detectors or computers, it's the energies you can reach with a collider of that size. Yes you can completely retool the LHC, which will probably allow you to do slightly better precision measurements, but won't strongly affect the energies you can probe.
To get to really high energies you need to build bigger. As a (former) particle physicist, I am also a bit sceptical if going bigger is better; the LHC was a calculated risk, with the goal of finding SUSY, which was a very plausible theory at the time.
The FCC seems to be a shot in the dark.
There is the argument that if we don't build a bigger one now we'll lose a lot of expertise, but that feels like a knee-jerk reaction from the community.
Superconducting magnets enable much higher energies in smaller (granted, theoretical) fusion reactor designs than previously possible. Does the same not apply to colliders?
It's a valid concern that must always be considered. It's the kind of thing that's been biting Intel in the ass for the past 7 years. Even if your decision is "we'll lose a lot of expertise and that's okay", it needs to be a conscious, well-grounded decision, otherwise that is a knee-jerk reaction based on your own biases and assumptions that could have significant, even irrevocable, consequences for the future.
This is effectively a measure to maximize the output we can get from the machine, so to maximize the return in investment.
There’s a lot of debate in the field what should happen next. FCC is one possibility, but I’m personally sceptical (even though I work at CERN myself).
It seems to me there’s a clear need for a Higgs-factory as a follow up to LHC, but that doesn’t have to be a ring collider, a electron positron linear collider could fulfill this purpose as well.
I'm not sure there is a fundamental distinction here. The only difference is success: Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist. When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment.
It feels like nature itself is against physicists here.
In 2011: "This is a profound turning point in the quest for a fundamental unified theory of the physical world. The properties and mass of the LHC's Higgs boson suggest that physicists will soon find superpartners for particles, and that we have begun to connect string theory to the real world." from https://www.nature.com/articles/480415a. We didn't find superpartners.
In 2019: "One important lesson from studying such models is that we should not have expected to find superpartners at the LHC with masses below about 1500 GeV." from https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.2019031.... I mean, yes, you should not have expected that, but you totally did, so why should I believe when you say the next LHC will find superpartners?
Nope. It's the other way around. The most important theories from Einstein an Schrödinger were created to explain effects there were experimentally known. The ones where they predicted the effects first and found them later were much less impactful.
A scientific theory is only as valuable as much as it can guide the action of some person.
Popperism is an incredibly successful simplification that made it viable to judge a theory. But at the end of the day, it's just a proxy that nobody really cares about.
Anyway, this is not a large problem. Theories taking decades to give you any practical result is perfectly fine. If all of science gave quick returns, it wouldn't need government spending. The problem is that we do not expect practical results on the future at all, and also do not expect the next large collider to bring anything different enough to change the physics into a new, unpredictable course.
Or, in other words, the next big collider (as we can plan now) is probably way too small to matter. It will also be the largest scientific project ever (space and fusion projects included), and larger than most infrastructure projects on the world. It is a pretty bad picture.
Popper is more against social “science” like Marx or philosopher like Plato. Whilst it clean up the field a bit not sure it is that helpful.
One of the reasons LHC was built in the first place was to try to detect the theoretically predicted Higgs boson.
Genuine question from an ignorant layperson: was confirming the existence of the Higgs boson not significant?
Significant would have been if they'd failed to find it.
And btw there is so much money around...we should not fight against different project but the spending that goes into science itself. LHC and NASA is really just a small drop compared to military spending (in the US).
https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/p...
Modern monetary theory is its own can of worms, but justifying massive spending in one area because of even more massive spending elsewhere isn't solving anything.
https://interestingengineering.com/these-7-cern-spinoffs-sho...
And i think the ISS was still much more expensive (especially over the years) then LHC/Atlas etc.
Like the Moon-landing right? None were due to advances in landing on the moon.
Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing. It's kind of weird because it was marketted as a success story to the public (and don't get me wrong, it was) but theorists were very confident that it was there by 2012. Thus far, it behaves exactly as expected according to the standard model and that is very dull.
HEP would have been left in a very funny position if we didn't find it. No Higgs Boson would have been fascinating from a theory perspective, but good luck trying to get funding for a new collider when you found nothing with the old one.
I was under the impression that this was a smoking gun for something being off with the theory, a bit like the ultraviolet catastrophe that led to QM or the orbital aberration that was resolved by GR.
Sort of.
The higgs boson mass is a parameter to the Standard Model. As far as the Standard Model is concerned, that is the end of the story. There are just a series of constants need to be fitted to data in the Standard Model and that's one of them.
However, the "problem" is why ~125GeV. If there are extremely high energy particles (which are expected in a Grand Unified Theory), then corrections to the Higgs mass would be enormous. This is a fine tuning problem where we arbitrarily tweak those corrections such that we magically end up at 125GeV. Supersymmetry and other Beyond Standard Models look to 'fix' this, and that's where my knowledge ends.
Honestly, when I was doing my PhD I took the pragmatic view on this. Trying to infer things at energy scales we can't probe struck me as more as a mathematical exercise than Physics. Many, many people would disagree with that though (and staked their careers on it).
When I was undergraduate at CERN summer school program I got that this was one of main themes to justify existence of SUSY. However I am still puzzled even after having obtained a PhD (condensed matter) how does this arbitrary tweaking of corrections does look like.
Is it simply unwillingness to accept for world as we live know some parameters of the world like particles masses are not that independent from each other?
But ultimately, yes. The entirety of modern physics is largely borne out of the unwillingness to accept the the world is simply as it appears and that there's no deeper unifying principles.
Based on what I understood from Sabine Hossenfelder's writing, yes, that is a big chunk of modern physics. One example is "the naturalness problem", that some base parameters of the SM are orders of magnitude larger or smaller than other ones - which is of course entirely possible as a fact of nature.
I was thinking the same thing! Haha
It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagine how intolerable the world would be if we'd chosen not to verify it.
We want our best predictions to be proven wrong, since we would learn a lot.
Just coming up with stuff and disproving it isn't always "learning a lot", it's just showing how bad we are at logically thinking about the next step.
That's why I said "our best predictions"; as in, what we actually think is the case (and would put money on).
I once read a paper complaining that the most of psychology experiments are trivial in the sense that their results are predictable in advance. It is like all people know that angry people tend to make other people angry and so if angry person try to communicate then oftentimes communications ends with a conflict. What the point of making an experiment from this?
I'm not sure how much of a psychology fall victim of this, but sometimes I read a paper and think that I've found one more example of this. I personally get nothing from reading such a paper. I can get some ideas while reading about methods researchers used, but it means that the paper is not about how human mind works, but about how to measure psychological phenomena, or how to conduct an experiment. I bet that the most interesting part of the hypothetical paper with angry communicating people would be the trick researchers used to make people angry without violating ethics.
There is some value in experiments that try to prove something that everyone knows already, but not much of a value. So the question is: is it ok to spend $10G to conduct such an experiment?
Well you would have needed the LHC to confirm that, too, right? As a totally uneducated person just remembering media and online discussion about it at the time, I think the most interesting possibility was the detection of entirely new particles, which didn't happen.
And in the run-up to the LHC, I think there was a lot of hope in the possibility of finding stuff, but maybe there's not as much hope now.
Which is the most exciting outcome between SUSY and absolutely nothing is very much debatable. However, I really can't stress how big an outcome it would have been if we didn't detect the Higgs. Generating a mass term for the W and Z bosons which is gauge invariant is hard. Without the Higgs mechanism, all the gauge bosons should be massless and yet the W and Z are very heavy. It wouldn't just be the case of the model doesn't work in some cases (massive neutrinos, dark matter candidate etc), you might as well throw the whole thing in the bin.
Edit: Typo
(Most times, people don't know how to judge that, but high-energy physics really didn't impact anything.)
In my opinion, we are hitting diminishing returns.. It's harder to learn new things now than ever before. You need big machines to do anything interesting?
Same reason why nobody was able to effectively compete with YC: it's a lot less work for VCs to fund a few "big bets" than find 100 good early-stage startups. The VC strategy is a lot less effective, but they still earn their fees no matter what
Perhaps it is reasonable to allow the money to remain unspent on topics related to physics! Spending has opportunity costs, after all; if these other experiments are not really the measure of the cost, then something else of value to society surely is.
The direct scientific value may be limited; the spinoff of that much attention / funding isn't.
Not saying we should definitely fund a new collider. But the amount of effort needed is so huge, that even just the discussion will have positive impact for science.
This might not count as it's not a single 'official scientific experiment or tool', but I think that biosci is clearly getting heavily funded.
Big Science and Big Politics in the United States: Reflections on the Death of the SSC and the Life of the Human Genome Project (1997) is a classic in history of science analyzing this competition.
Research into virology seems a bigger thing to research. There is way more "parallelism" there meaning funding could be allocated more efficiently nin some given time frame.
Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results.
Or are you seriously imagining that there is a cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret?
Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?
This is coming from a forum where it's normal to see "something that already exists, but written in $newLanguage/Framework" as a thing to celebrate. So why not just redo science but with newShiny so we haven't actually achieved anything? /s
And there it is right in this post.
Also, the controversy over the amyloid hypothesis is real. Here [0] is a paper showing arguments for and against with 268 citations. Here [1] is a more journalistic article in Nature. While this is still up in the air, it's nby no means a "conspiracy theory" to suggest that it's possibly a 25-year wild goose chase, or close to it. I would love to be wrong about this, but I suppose time will tell.
[0] https://actaneurocomms.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s4...
If you believe things have changed, just say so, and move the conversation on. If you don't think it's a fruitful conversation, don't participate.
I specifically replied to someone claiming that new minds re-thinking the foundations of a field couldn't possibly be a good idea, and I did so with a relevant quote from one of the new minds that completely re-wrote the foundations of their field. I believe this was a constructive observation moving the conversation.
The idea of getting young physicists to do lots of research is not at all about ignoring the old knowledge. These young people will have gotten a PhD in physics. They will have absorbed a lot of the relevant old knowledge. The idea is that, because they came to this knowledge quite quickly, they have a fresh view on it. You simply get a different view on knowledge you build over decades as opposed to knowledge you learnt in a few years. This different view could very well lead to new and valuable insights.
There is not a "cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret". But there is a "group of people who have been doing high energy physics that want to keep doing high energy physics". It makes sense that they want to keep doing it, even if other approaches would be more fruitful. They have invested lots of time into it, and they might not even know about the other approaches. And doing 'more of the old thing' is a safe bet.
It's just that by now 'more of the old thing' is getting really stupidly expensive. And it looks to be a lot more efficient to try a lot more new things. Give the people with a fresh look on it a change to come up with ideas.
> Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?
These people surely do exist. But there are plenty of others out there that have ideas for 10 million dollar machines rather than 100 billion dollar machines. Try some of the 10 million dollar machines rather than only the 100 billion dollar machines.
I think many of the 10 million dollar machines are currently not being funded because that level of funding requires clout, reputation, and political acumen to get. This currently lies with the people who like doing accelerators. They don't like building non-accelerators that cost 10 million dollars, so they don't help the 10 million dollar machines as much.
That is not malice, these people aren't evil. They just like a tool that is getting inefficient.
Apparently it needs to be said because people act like they don't know it: those are the only people interested in answering questions about the fundamental particles! Diverging interests is the fundamental reason people separate into different fields.
> they might not even know about the other approaches
You can easily find the lists of seminars given at CERN and other places: they do know about other fields. In fact people from HEP move to other fields, and folks from other fields move into HEP.
> Try some of the 10 million dollar machines rather than only the 100 billion dollar machines.
They are being built though! In fact there are 2 billion experiments being built.
The argument here is something else: that High energy physics should just stop building big machines at all, and instead magically solve the problem that small machines were built and fully exploited many many decades ago.
The proposed FCC cost is 30 billion.
Einstein wasn't a 'quantum pioneer'. Einstein was a proponent of classical physics and against quantum physics.
He of course fully knew that the world is quantum, not classical. His beef with the mainstream QM past the mid to late '20s was with the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein believed that a complete theory would have realism and so Copenhagen could not be the complete theory.
What is interesting, is that a lot of the fundamental physics theories were discovered by amateurs. Einstein was a patent clerk, for example.
Maybe we should work on democratizing data collection, and making more raw data available for people to work with. With the advent of cloud computing and on demand computing, maybe your hobby group could code up a an analysis and run it on AWS for a few hundred dollars and discover some new theory.
The place is fantastic, you get to meet great people and life is cool.
But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity. Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere. If someone could answer to this "and so what?" in a meaningful way I would be glad to change my mind. For the time being, the energy scale we are making these discoveries is not useful.
"yes, but this is fundamental science..." → yes it is, but where does this fundamental science helps in everyday problems? Have we had a case where the Higgs boson changed anything in our life?
The quantum mechanics of the 1920's changed our everyday world. We could build a whole technology on it, and understand things that changes our everyday life. Is there a comparable impact on knowing that the Higgs boson is +/- 10^-9 (or whatever) aligned with the theoretical model?
We have so many problems where physics is needed (energy production to start with, and then exploring biology), the money should go there instead. Even if it means having less particle physicists the same way we have less philosophes.
I'm sure that 20,000 years ago some crazy shaman was frowned upon for trying to "melt rocks and see what happened", or "ate some weird/unknown/sacred plants" or "what if I push this seed into this little corner of land and look after it (water, sun, defend if against herbivores)"? etc, etc, etc?
And developing the technology capable of making such precise observations has immense utility outside of the particular experiment that drives their invention. Even if superparters are useless, more powerful magnets are useful. Better sensors are useful. Better data processing technology is useful. And that stuff gets invented by the people probing to find superpartners.
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...
But it doesn't matter. Lots of people all over the world were collaborating to build new Internet protocols.
> There are many known problems in physics right now. $100 billion could fund (quite literally) 100,000 smaller physics experiments.
$1M is a reasonable amount to build a prototype world wide web. There were 5,000 things like WWW we didn't do because we built LHC.
Still is.
No, it was completely unrelated work of someone who happened to also be at CERN.
PhD or not, this is an oddly utilitarian view of science.
I suspect there would be countless discoveries that never would have been made had we only ever weighed an experiment based purely on its ability to "help in everyday problems".
I mean, why, say, develop the theory of evolution? At the time that was irrelevant to "everyday problems". Today our understanding of evolution is valuable in countless settings, but at the time? At best it was an interesting exercise in trying to understand the natural world.
And yet by this reckoning we never would've bothered.
So would you have cancelled the moon landing program? In 2020 dollars that program cost over $257B (over $400B if you count related programs and costs)[1], and that goal--landing humans on the moon--has demonstrated very little utility.
You don't need to put men on the surface of the moon to gain any of these benefits. The US government could've spent far less to achieve those same outcomes.
And that's ignoring the fact that, particularly regarding those "major dividends", much of those justifications can only be made in hindsight. At the time I think it would've been difficult to justify the moonshot on that kind of utilitarian basis.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches...
Keep it civil, please.
> The point of going to the moon was never to dimly increase utility to the public.
I think maybe you've lost the thread of the conversation?
The original claim was that scientific research/projects should be funded based on evident utility.
My point is that if you fund such projects purely based on immediately evident utility, then projects like Apollo (among many others) don't happen.
My unspoken corollary is that that would represent a loss to humanity, and that pure utilitarianism is too narrow a frame to use when assessing the value of a given project.
Honestly, I think we're in agreement, here, and I'm not sure I understand your aggressive response.
The world wide web which we are currently using was invented at CERN. You can literally go look at the proposal manuscript.
Suppose you have a city where windows never get broken. So there's no demand for glazing for a few years. So the glaziers all go out of business and move onto other things - they break down their machines and factories and repurpose them.
Then there's a minor earthquake and it breaks a lot of windows. But the cost to replace them is enormous - there's no glass making business anymore! What should have cost a few hundred dollars costs hundreds of thousands because the machines and people need to be built and retrained, and the quality for a few months is kind of bad as well.
What should the city have done? Well, one answer would be to break some windows regularly to keep at least one glazier operating. Or we could pay the glazier to make windows we don't use right now, or ask them to build better windows under government grant to keep them available and maybe come up with an improved window design...etc. etc. etc.
A machine on the scale of the LHC doesn't get made in a factory which makes LHCs. It gets made in literally tens of thousands of businesses, each of which services a big order for some type of precision part that's either within their capabilities or that they might believe can be accomplished if demanded. Once they can do that, that becomes the new thing that everyone else can now buy potentially.
So yes, sure - let's talk about added value, but when "choosing between alternatives" you need to have some actual, reasonable alternatives. The postulate here - build ITER instead for fusion power - is exactly the same sort of project. And the reality is we can and should do both.
We already had gopher. Web was an incremental step.
so the solution is obvious. spend all the physics money on healthcare (or fusion power) research institutions and hope for the best.
FTFY
Honestly, these are country budgets. That's not an insane amount of money. It is Germany spending $2bn/yr at the 5x inflated budget but $500m/yr at the estimated cost (23bn).
Also keep in mind that some scientific endeavors can make other ones much more productive, so prioritizing things correctly can increase the overall output by a large amount (and neglecting to prioritize things correctly can significantly slow output).
"Charles Darwin discussed how selective breeding had been successful in producing change over time in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species. Its first chapter discusses selective breeding and domestication of such animals as pigeons, cats, cattle, and dogs." (Wikipedia)
Darwin's theory of evolution was literally developed to explain the most significant food growing technique since irrigation. Seems very practical to the everyday problem of not starving.
Correct. The theory of evolution explained selective breeding.
But it wasn't needed to practice selective breeding, given it had been going on for literally millenia prior.
As a reminder, the original commenter stated they felt that research shouldn't be funded if there isn't a clear benefit/application. I.e. a utilitarian argument regarding research funding.
I used the theory of evolution as an example of research that, at the time, had no utilitarian value, but ultimately ended up enormously important.
You then countered that Darwin was, in part, trying to explain how selective breeding worked, and therefore the research had utility at the time.
I countered that no, that's not practical utility because understanding the mechanisms underlying selective breeding isn't necessary to do it; that simply explaining the natural world does not represent practical utility (if it did, we wouldn't be debating whether high energy research, which simply seeks to explain the natural world, is worth funding).
Therefore your comment does not invalidate my example of evolution as research that had no practical value or utility at the time.
My point in all of this is we should engage in research even if it doesn't have immediate, practical value because we can't know what research will or won't be useful in the fullness of time.
And that's ignoring the fact that I, in fact, absolutely agree with you that we should engage in research simply because learning about the natural world is a worthwhile pursuit.
Meanwhile, I honestly don't know what point you're trying to make given the context of the discussion.
Looks like we agree on the core issue :)
How can physics help to explore biology? At a first half of 20th century biology experienced a flow of physicist converting to biology and that had led to a transformation of a biology into what it is now and to a bunch of breakthrough discoveries, most notably the double helix (Francis Crick was a physicist). But I wonder what breakthroughs might happen now if physicists tried to boost biology one more time.
I hope I don't come off as confrontational, it is not the least my intention. It just sounds like you have seen both sides of this issue and maybe you have a deeper understanding you could share.
I have probably 100 or 1000 articles with my name as one of the 1000 collaborators of the project. I have no idea what they are about.
I loved my time in CERN because of the people and the insane possibilities you had there. I discovered Unix and this ultimately made me change my life, going to industry.
My friends who were working on solid state physics had much more impactful research, research that could potentially bring something to everyday life.
I was much happier working on biophysics research afterwards.
Physics today is dead in the practical sense, nothing is happening that sparks for in people's imagination. Compare this to biology where you hear about new discoveries everyday.
Also, nuclear power...
1930s — video image tubes
1940s — nuclear power, atomic clocks, transistors
1960s — lasers, fiber-optic communications, PET-CT scans
1970s — MRIsPeople had singular focus - not on the betterment of humanity in the abstract sense, but for primal SURVIVAL - because both sides believed that if given the chance the other would wipe them out.
This created a unifying focus (amongst two divided sides).
A lot of people have hoped for some event to unify humanity (like the space squid in the watchmen) towards a common goal again. Alas, COVID has shown that is just simply not possible any longer.
Devil's Advocate: Could that not also be said for many astrophysics discoveries including: - Edwin Hubble's discovery of the expanding universe and galaxies - Kepler's discovery of 1K plus exoplanets - Hubble telescope's ultra deep field
None of these are practical pursuits that provide us with new, widely used technology (or at least investing in them is not the most efficient path to said practical technology). Instead, they provide us context on where we sit in the universe. Starting from Copernicus, the constant realignment of our perspective that we are not privileged observers in the universe (disproving geocentrism, heliocentrism, and galactocentrism), have been essential to the development of modern secular humanism and providing us context on our purpose (or at least an effective tool to knock down foolish purported purposes espoused by dogmatic leaders).
So I guess I am taking issue with your narrowly defined purpose of science. What is an "everyday problem" worth solving through fundamental research?
If however, you include these philosophical benefits of fundamental science, then I agree with you.
"Have we had a case where the Higgs boson changed anything in our life?" I think nails that the reason why we shouldn't pursue a LHC++. It has neither benefits from providing us practical tools or new technologies to advance society NOR does it aid us in philosophically contextualizing where we sit in the universe.
However, I need the tools science gives me. I need scientists and mathematicians to think about how the universe and logic works, so that I can know how to make it work for people.
Quantum foam will almost certainly feature in some product down the line.
Edit: there have been some instances of engineers working out solutions before the science existed by trial and error (steam locomotives before thermodynamics, airfoils before those were understood), but knowing proper theory upfront makes it much easier.
If you restrict your view only to the particular targeted research in question you are missing much of the pie. Going to the Moon did not help the average person in their day to day lives on its own but numerous side technologies emerged as a result of the engineering and research efforts required to solve problems.
LHC and CERN as a whole have led to a number of technological improvements[1], even if the research goals themselves do not seem oriented towards anything an individual should care about today.
It is certainly possible that similarly funded fusion research or carbon sequestration research would yield similar technologies, it's not a given.
"Is there a comparable impact on knowing that the Higgs boson is +/- 10^-9 (or whatever) aligned with the theoretical model?" perhaps there is! Might not understanding the fine points of the theoretical model help with something like a reactionless thruster? Could this unlock the door on direct manipulation of spacetime? Assist in devising exotic materials, like say some sort of stable muonic matter and opening up a whole new world of chemistry/solid state physics? The potential is staggering, and by nature is almost completely unguessable until it happens.
If the world followed the lead of yourself or the Sabine Hossenfelders of the world we might never know. The argument that this hypothetical collider can only be used to explore unconfirmable symmetry theories is simply false. The cost of such a facility is insignificant compared to the potential.
My back-of-the-envelope game theory perspective is that humanity should double down on all fronts, at all cost, to push these boundaries. The only impediment is the folks like you, mired in the present and seemingly unable to realize that the unimaginable results are very much unimaginable. Just as those lasers and transistors were 100+ years ago.
At least, in 50-100 years, we'll probably still have records of comments and articles like these, which will make it easier to say just how wrong people were about the importance of pure research. (If anyone is reading this in 2100, and it turns out the ROI on these research projects wasn't worth it, feel free to whisper "I told you so" to my ghost.)
What makes that quote especially remarkable, and ironic, is that was the same Michelson of the famous Michelson - Morley experiment which [1] was an extremely important clue on the path to discovery that would lead rapidly to relativity, and then general explosion of discovery in physics to follow. Not only could he not even imagine the relevance of his very own 'discovery', but largely doubted his own results as the experiment was not intended to 'fail'!
The point I make is that so much of major advances in science have come about not through directed efforts but through some sort of serendipity. And it seems to me that observing what happens with ever higher energy collisions is one area where what may be important is not what is expected, but what is unexpected. It's also an area where there is no direct profit motive as contrasted with things like energy or what I assume you are implying with biology. Those fields will naturally advance because there's money to be made. Atom banging is generally not quite as lucrative an industry and, as such, various sorts of public funding tends to be much more important.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...
Although I’ve spent a lot of my career working for a strong economy, I lean strongly toward the latter. The highest achievement of humanity is not cheap cell phone plans, it’s more like General Relativity, or the Moon landing.
What “use” is humanity? What is life for? Big questions for sure, and I won’t claim to have the answers. But I feel pretty confident that most folks believe there is more to life than squinting at everyday problems.
Daily quality of life is important but I think there is a deeper feeling about life that most people share.
How many things were discovered by ancient Greeks that only became useful in the last 100-200 years? The Sieve of Eratosthenes comes to mind - I can't imagine that was really helping anyone out until we had modern cryptography.
I find that hard to believe considering how much technical innovation came out of the space race that has had an impact on our everyday lives [0].
[0] https://www.aii.org/how-the-space-race-built-todays-technolo....
A bit myopic, eh?
We don't know which scientific advancements will result in practical applications or how long it will take.
But history is incredibly clear on this point. In general, scientific pursuits and the technological advancements required to carry them out bring about countless incredible practical applications over time.
In the long run, curiosity and interestingness are very good heuristics for worthwhile endeavors to pursue.
White Rabbit alone adds a lot of value to humanity. Proper coherency of data flying around an Ethernet network is super handy when making a big complicated controller for a big complicated machine.
All the know-how and human capital generated by these megaprojects along with a better understanding of fundamental physics is transferred into practical applications a few years later. I can understand how a physics phd might not be exposed so much to this aspect of the project, but the societal benefits are very real despite being hard to quantify and track.
> But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity.
You simply can't know that. We don't know what we don't know and we are but babies when it comes to understanding and harnessing the universe. One cannot possibly predict how _fundamental science_ might impact our future.
> We have so many problems where physics is needed (energy production to start with, and then exploring biology), the money should go there instead. Even if it means having less particle physicists the same way we have less philosophes.
This is a false dichotomy; we have the resources for both and more. Perhaps a lack of willpower/grit/political incentives in some arenas, but none of that is insurmountable.
God, people like you are the worst. You never know when something could be useful in the future and I think the assumption that fundamentally understanding the universe will never be useful is just absurdly ridiculous. But that's the besides the point, because understanding these things has value in and of itself simply for the fact that people are curious! Is it worth $X billion? That's a different question. But to say it's worthless is just absolute nonsense.
This is similar to astrophysics where you discover that a sun has planets. And do what. Are you going to go there anytime? Or use it to modify your own planet? You won't, and any dreaming won't change that.
I also don't have the expertise to tell whether the article is being overly reductive with the project's goals: are there other questions (besides new particles) that can only be answered with a larger collider? The summary of the FCC (Future Circular Collider) project's goals indicates that yes, there are unresolved questions that the FCC will address[0].
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-69...
Investing the same money in something that has a known and positive primary effect will produce the same amount of secondary benefits. So if you can think of something more fruitful to do with these 100B, do that; the secondary benefits will keep coming anyhow.
A more verbose history : https://blog.patentology.com.au/2012/04/story-behind-csiros-...
A short story about the discovery of microscopes from https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/
Had the rich noble simply invested his money in doctors instead of the person with a hobby of playing with glass, they might have instead discovered more uses for leeches
Of course not we should choose avenues according to what they are likely to achieve being better than alternative allocations. For another LHC that is a huge burden to overcome.
What is so great about LHC2 that you want to keep space exploration going at a crawl with commercial companies showing how to do it on a shoestring budget? Maybe the LHC2 will cause a discovery the LHC won't but is that probability of learning something worth sacrificing a huge portion of our resources on? Or is this that we made people gain an expertise and they want to continue with its path even though it's a pretty bad one to continually invest more and more in?
Personally, I have mixed feelings about learning fission and I would rather explore space and have functionally independent colonies before we blow ourselves up with a new subatomic discovery.
Strings are right out. Nobody has offered any clue as to how to make a prediction that could be tested with possible equipment.
That does not mean none ever will, but it does not seem to be their focus. Physics departments like string theorists because they come with no equipment budget.
Frankly, given the amounts we spend on things I fundamentally disagree with, I'd even say "sure let them have at it and let's find another 100B somewhere in the military budgets of the world, divert them to more research."
But even if you want to focus on "big, milestone" projects like the LHC[++] you can go for other challenges where you know that there's a tangible benefit to be had at the end.
Fusion research for example comes to mind. Hugely expensive, interesting, rewarding if successful, track record of secondary inventions.
I'm sure there are others. Off the top of my head, carbon capture and storage, better (more sustainable) battery/storage tech, elimination of rare earths in electronics, ...
There's no shortage of big, hard problems
To quote the writer of the line uttered by the equanimous Jeff GoldBloom.
https://i.imgur.com/XpKoQIf.gif
Seriously, this is where 'black budgets' are a thing.
There is serious money pumped into the MIC and the secondary effects are far more than tertiary at this point. Dark breakaway.
How much is a dollar worth in space. Asking for a Musk of mine.
Each avenue you keep open costs money and takes up people's time. You can't keep every avenue open. You have to decide -- with imperfect information -- which avenues are worth keeping open. And the entire thesis here is that the LHC++ is probably not worth it. You can disagree with that, but if you're going to do so because of possible secondary benefits, you have to take a crack at showing that those secondary benefits -- whatever they may be -- are numerous enough and worth enough to justify the money and time.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/ree/archives/archive08/usa/pr...
shrug. It's always hard to guess?
We could definitely postpone this work and invest in more impactful work in the present. It might be worth reconsidering this once we've worked through climate change, energy consumption, and the drinking water crises we're facing.
Except in reality you don't just get to take something like military money and just invest wherever you want. Military is something that can be funded politically for large sums. So the more likely choice is you get to fund military, with all the associated research and benefits, or you don't get those tax dollars to do anything with, or maybe just spend them on not science.
If it were possible to simply pour money into science/invention politically, then the budgets of NIH, NASA, etc., would not be as small as they are.
Building a one inch super conductor in a lab might be straightforward but cost a million dollars. That lab process doesn't scale to building seventeen miles of superconductor. The LHC needed 4722 miles of superconducting cable. Simply manufacturing that much cable led to advances in superconductor manufacturing and design. Even then the LHC's particular superconductors only work if you've got the operating budget to use liquid helium to cool them.
The money spent went into research to develop the components necessary for the design and then into the production of those components. The LHC wasn't some item picked out of a catalog. Many of its components only existed on paper when it was designed.
No one is just going to pump development dollars into some paper design and hope someone somewhere finds a use for it. The LHC's superconductors advanced the state of superconductors in general but no one was going to do that work without an end goal and a budget.
Military development ends up with a similar model. Requirements for a desired capability are given to a contractor and they need to figure out how to build it. Sometimes that development is easy and other times it's difficult and expensive. Contractors definitely make a profit and pad co tracts but that money does pay people to do things. The requirements and funding create a market for the development for technologies that meet those requirements.
We also need BIG SCIENCE to solve global warming and many more issues.
Let's not narrow our focus on some fiscal numbers that are basically inconsequential for such a rich place as is the case with Europe.
Let's do the opposite instead. Let's bet on an actual vision for once again - I miss the 1960s!
at some point instead of more people crawling around in a tunnel around Geneva we need more people installing wind turbines on the sea.
of course real life is not some Sims game, the cost of switching from that to this is far from negligible (and of course ideally we would cut back on people digging up dead plankton, people wasting time in traffic while burning it, also military spending - but as the current real life example in Ukraine shows, sometimes shit does indeed hits the fan)
By their nature, secondary innovations are not promised. Hence, researchers can get away with not "delivering" any, no matter how much they pitch the "possibility" when asking for funding.
The quality of researchers who will be working is another factor. Presumably it would be very competitive with LHC stuff. But I've seen research projects just become money black-holes as they just end up with unremarkable un-creative research staff who are just there for the paycheck and not competitive enough to otherwise get out of the academic comfort zone.
What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.
$100,000,000,000 with afterthought of “sure lets see if we can do it less expensively *since its sooo annoying to some people”? Where is the line for you currently?
More realistically : we can only build one car in the entire world, where a tiny minority of people can even understand the potential benefit, and anything they see will be completely useless for everyone else in day to day life because we need a civilisation level effort to even detect the implications of their theory. If their theory had some real world implications - you wouldn't need this car.
And this is expected to be funded by everyone. It's the modern equivalent of building pyramids.
ISS wasn't useless, but its successor should be much cheaper. We absolutely need to find ways how to do space research more efficiently, otherwise it will stay a luxury of the richest nations.
Fortunately, at the very least, launch costs to orbit are dropping and we may hope for further drops in the future - if Starship works as intended.
Literally the only thing they can do at ISS, not better done with robots, is study how human bodies are affected by exposure to high radiation and long-term weightlessness. Which we care about only because people would be so exposed in ISS-like cans.
Now they are pushing the "lunar gateway", that likewise has exactly one reason to exist: SLS could get there. And, it will be a place for SLS to get to. And, even more useless. A thing in high orbit around the moon is absolutely useless for any other purpose, whether you are heading for the moon or beyond it.
We're talking about using everybody's money for these science projects. And this is not money that's voluntarily given, it's taken.
Let's think big indeed, the author unfortunately has a very reductive vision for the future.
Instead how about:
A renaissance of funding - BIG SCIENCE - education, jobs.
That was basically the promise of the EU - peace through wealth - let's create some more.
Let's bring back the excitement and scientific wonder of the 1960s. This could be a unilateral vision across the democratic spectrum (everyone wants wealth).
And yes, global warming actually should dictate no less. Let's do it now.
Oh and let's just fix poverty while we are at it.
Again, Europe has the means and could do all of that by itself.
Let's do that again. It was at least a lot more multi-disciplinary than an atom-smasher.
You know what would be an awesome big science project that would immeasurably improve future people's lives? Sequencing all genes and using that data provide free embryo selection services to everyone who wants to be a parent.
Would probably cost the same as that giant particle smasher and but unlike the giant ring it would pay for itself in a generation.
We're not some fucked up dictatorship state?!?
Why not? What exactly is the limiting criterion? Sentience is the main criterion that people who want to argue for animal rights and yet support abortion use, and it's a pretty squishy criterion. Already Peter Singer supports veganism and effective altruism (i.e., rebranded utilitarianism), and yet is perfectly okay with both abortion and infanticide, at least until the child gets "sentience".
- Every prosperous and civilized nation's last words
Democracy as in free election ? Perfect democracy here - one party won twice, other parties lost. You call it a problem ?
Democracy as in free speech ? Dude ! Wake up ! In Poland is so much free speech that it's boarding with anarchy ! Eg. almost decade of opposition internally and internationally literally urges to harm their own country just to retake power - without any gov punishment or something. Mrs. Merkel ex-pet, Tusk, literally calls for purges, without any law procedures ! Freedom bordered with anarchy !
Maybe you are aware judges here act as caste and they do whatever they want. Law is twisted at will here. Do not saying all the time, just when they want it. And that judges are official* opposition of elected party ! Judges ! Acting politically ! You call that despotism ? Or too much freedom ?
Do we have military state like in France ? No. Do we have censorship like in Germany ? No. Do we have problems with making government like Italy ? No. Do our PM resigned because of corruption and next PM promised silence and no more leeks like in GB ? No.
You see ? It's oasis of peace and happiness here compared to rest of the EU ;)
But tell me pls, what you have in mind about that "anti-democracy" in Poland ?
They're saying anti-democratic behavior is being punished, which implies that Poland is pro-democracy.
Etc, etc.
You will have to be more specific, "democratic" is a grossly overlaoded term these days. When you write "democratic", do you mean "in accordance with the will of the majority of the population", or do you mean "in accordance with the will of unelected EU bureaucrats, the US Department of State, and media elites"?
1. https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
2. https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/biopolitical-times/first-...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
"Instead of cutting this program, just have every military cut funding at once" is not a very realistic path forwards, and we're not going to get the program funded on stuff like that.
In the hypothetical universe we're in here, where we have to convince people now.
From Wikipedia: "A child (plural children) is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty [...]"
You are also conflating the abortion of an embryo with murder; only human persons can be murdered, embryos are not persons, therefore no murder.
I sincerely ask you to cut down the polemics here on HN. It does not lead to fruitful (no pun intended) discussions.
> an embryo is not a child and you cannot murder an embryo
It is not obviously and axiomatically true that embryos are not human (I'm assuming the previous comment meant human and not child). Many people think that they are, which is the source of the disagreement. It probably is fruitless to have this conversation on HN, but you shouldn't just assert the opposing position as if it were settled when it is anything but.
I beg to differ. I don't think that using dictionary definitions to make ones arguments can be counted as polemic (as in; to use contentious rhetoric). I might be wrong though.
> I'm assuming the previous comment meant human and not child
No, I actually meant 'child'. An human embryo is - obviously - human. No discussion about that. A human embryo is not a child - the definition of that is also pretty much settled, I'd say. (At least from a scientific point of view.)
But maybe I didn't clearly state my case, thus the misunderstanding.
The point I'm making is as follows. Embryos are not children and thus they are not persons. Just as I cannot murder my toe (it might be human, but it's not a person) I cannot murder an embryo.
You also don't have any definition with a clear line when this switch from non human to human happens.
It almost always boils down to "when it's convenient for me"
Quotation needed. Outside of religious circles there's very little debate about this. Scientific consensus is that fetal viability is considered to begin at 23 or 24 weeks gestational age. That's long after the embryo stage.
Just to make communication easier; are you aware that there's a difference between embryo and fetus?
> You also don't have any definition with a clear line when this switch from non human to human happens.
I never proposed that a embryo is not human. But we can talk about the line dividing persons from non-persons, if you like.
> Outside of religious circles there's very little debate about this
Do you live in the US or Canada? Almost every other country, including almost all of highly secular Western Europe, bans abortion before at no later than 17 weeks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law).
To suggest there is only one definition of "child" is even more incorrect than suggesting that it can't refer to an unborn person:
Definition of child
…
3 a : an unborn or recently born person
"… Meghan Markle, married Prince Harry, now pregnant with child."
The importance of the topic doesn't make it impossible to be polemic. I can talk about a very serious topic and be polemic and I can also talk about a trivial matter and not be polemic. The question of polemic is decided by contentious rhetoric.
Equating embryos with children and abortion with murder is polemic.
I don't think it is polemic to disagree on this point, but it rationally follows that if embryos are unique life forms, which are also human, then aborting them is murder.
Personally, I don't agree with that line of reasoning either, but the argument isn't in itself polemic.
Edit: I suppose I should add that I am not treating "human" as a collective noun, the way we might talk about bread or water. "A human" is not merely a little toe, for example.
> The question is not are embryos human, the question is whether they are independent human life with their own rights.
I think we are pretty much in agreement what the contention is about.
> [..] the argument isn't in itself polemic.
The argument itself is not polemic. No argument in itself is polemic. Polemic is defined in the language used. I'm objecting the language in which the argument is phrased;
To quote the post I originally answered to:
> "Embryo selection"—is that a euphemism for "murdering any unborn child [...]
The phrasing is polemic for reasons I pointed out before.
The millennials and gen-z is royally screwed, the writing has been on the walls for years.
And about "obese population", Europe is not so bad in fact. Obese people die younger and most elders in Europe are slim.
By funding toy projects and pipe dreams you are crowding out useful research - and there's plenty of fundamental work in material sciences, superconductivity, etc. that could actually improve the lives of everyone
All our problems are just the engineering problem of AGI. Why waste money on something like this when AI will be "smarter" than us by the time it is built?
We should just do nothing and wait for AI to build the instruments it wants.
Maybe there is the slightest hope in this "overpriced" and long delayed space telescope that is getting ready right now but even with that the narrative will end up being how "AI finds alien planet" or "AI sees first star in the universe".
To really build a new LHC it just needs to be marketed to the populace as a tool for AI research. Done. Everyone knows AI is the future and we are not so stupid to skimp on AI research funding.
Spend all that money on researching particle physics though? What a fucking waste of money.
We dont know if we will ever reach AGI and if we want to theoretically demonstrate if we can reach it or not then we need to rely on science.
Engineering alone cannot answer theoretical questions.
Take the Event Horizon Telescope as an example here. It requires a massive amount of computational modeling to create those images from a huge dataset. Humans did their science to figure out how the supermassive black holes would look like and created their models (AI if you will) based on this knowledge. Even so they are not free from criticism that they might be overfitting onto a conformation bias and many scientists are waiting for an independent confirmatory observation before they believe the image. Now if you replace the humans in that equation with more models (AGI if you will) how do you even know what you are looking at is even sensical?
I’m not a fan of the LHC++ project either, but I think you might have too much faith in AI and AGI.
I'm afraid - not even in technology at this point.
Doing useless science is the destruction of wealth. The destruction of wealth is pleasurable, don't get me wrong, but that's all it is. They could build gargantuan statues to do the same thing, or accumulate huge stockpiles of weapons.
I wish it was true, it would be much easier to convince people to have ten of them.
It seems like the car is a Bugatti Veyron and like there is a huge (exponentially growing) fronteir to explore. Exploring another 1000 miles in a very well studied direction seems less curious than pushing outward another mile over the entire frontier. Especially at the places that have gotten less attention.
'Doing more of the same but bigger' feels more like small thinking than 'lets try lots of things we haven't tried before'. To me the latter also feels a lot more curious.
You wouldn't go to the north pole with a VW Beetle.
Same thing applies here, smaller cars that explore in all direction can probably find a local maxima and get stuck there.
Big science projects such as the LHC go very far and very deep in the very fabric of reality. Instead of building a thousand cars, it'd be a good idea to still build the next space probe while, at the same time, use what we learned building the previous one to build a couple cars to explore in different directions.
Why is it zero sum to begin with? And more importantly, how less effective would be able to feed the world had we had no space race to begin with? If we were still at a 1950s technical level, our farming capacity would be exponentially lower, and most of the big leaps came as a direct result technologies originally developed for space.
It's naive to assume we can see all the benefits of daring to attempt hard things, but attempting hard things is what moves society forward. If all we did was lots of little cars in all directions when we have already figured out the challenges with little cars, mean the ONLY benefit is the direct one. If we've never built a car to explore REALLY far, well, there's a bunch of other problems we need to solve to get there. And honestly, it's those results that will likely move the needle.
From the people who brought you compost fueled cars?
"Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's instead build an airplane."
The problem with next-gen LHC is that there are no guarantees of any new or interesting physics for that $100 billion. And particle accelerators are not the only way to spend large sums of money, so there is an opportunity cost. Why not spend that $100 billion to build more space telescopes or more sensitive LIGOs to detect gravitational waves, etc.
My read of the article was more a call for considering the practical uses of tge research. If we don't know what $100B worth of LHC will discover, why wouldnt we instead fund tens of thousands of smaller projects that often have very practical real world goals?
I don't think that's quite right. The big problem isn't that there is 'nothing left to discover' because we know there are interesting physics at higher energy scales. What we don't actually know if there is anything interesting at the energy scales that this particle accelerator could achieve. You could literally spend two decades building this, and in the end, all you would do is rule out a tiny energy-scale slice.
It appears we suspect there is a better way.
Of course, there are a lot of smaller experiments that one could do, also in particle physics, that have great value. One example was the Muon g-2 measurement, another is anything neutrino physics. We can get a lot of interesting input and test our theories without going to the "energy frontier". Physicists understand this very well. But there are a bunch of questions that you can only really answer if you go to those higer energies.
As for the costs, 100 billion is a lot, but not when you compare it to other large infrastructure projects, or especially military spending (and note the Chinese proposal SPPC would be a lot cheaper!). I think if we could shave off 100 billion of military expenses and put it into basic research, it would be a great win for society. That's not realistic you say, with all the threats out there? Great, I agree, but now we have a nice project! Lets put as a common goal that we want to be able to do this kind of research, and then improve our societies nationally and globally so that we can reduce our military spending and do this kind of research.
100 billion ($/€) is the amount that Germany is spending as a special budget in response to Russia's aggression, in order to become the nation with the 3rd highest military spending on the planet. If it weren't for the war in Ukraine, we could put it all into such a project.
If we had averted COVID in it's early stages - like we did with SARS-1 and MERS - imagine all the resources we could have put into research instead.
Alternatively, if one really wants to pursue beyond the standard model physics, it seems to me multi-messenger astronomy has a much better chance of delivering decisive data, so shouldn't we put that money into better observatories?
Because the only reason you have $100 billion to spend is that it's a large scale infrastructure project. And that money is trickling down to member states through contracts to a mix of businesses who hire white and blue collar workers.
It is equal part economic stimulus, political marketing and scientific research.
You can't just ask for the last part and ignore the first two.
Secondly condensed matter and quantum information already get plenty of money: superconductivity alone is a market worth around 5 billion dollars, google is spending billions of its own money into quantum computers.
But sure, lets give these starving fields that produce commercial products a some tax-payer dollars at the slight cost of completely de funding high energy physics, I'm sure that will get the scientist there to care about the proton despite them very consciously choosing to do something else.
the FCC is a project for the next 70 years. It is supposed to be operational after 2040 at the earliest if I recall correctly (20 years from now more or less), and to run for around 40 years.
So if you do a very simplistic calculation on the first 20 years : 100 B euros over 20 years over 20 countries (there is 23 member states into the CERN) it is 250 M euros / year / country. This is not even calculated on the over-all project time, on on the different steps that will be happening: first FCC as electron-positron collider and then much later FCC hadron-hadron collider.
And if you are really interested into the previewed outcomes (scientifically and new techs associated):
https://indico.cern.ch/event/1040535/timetable/#20220503.det...
You can take look at the European research communities symposium that just happened recently on the future of the research topics in Europe. There are a lot of information for FCC and so on.
The fundamental problem for high-energy physics seems to be the "tyranny of the standard model", as one of my professors called it. We know that our current model of fundamental particles must be incomplete towards extremely high energies (trillions of TeV), because it conflicts with general relativity. However, almost all experimental results are consistent with the standard model. There are some barely-significant [2] results from muon spin and W-boson experiments, but the effect sizes are minuscule and and two data-points are in no way enough to guide new theory development.
This leaves theorists with almost no experimental input, so they pursue purely mathematical ideas that are in some way elegant, able to describe the standard model as a low-energy limit, and in some cases include a description of gravity as well. But the more advanced and theoretical the ideas get, the more difficult it gets to make experimental predictions. The ones which predict non-standard-model measurements with current equipment are already ruled out anyway, because we did the measurements and the standard model just keeps getting validated.
So what should we do? We can hope that a larger collider will find new evidence of beyond-standard-model physics, but (as I understand it) there is no concrete reason why there has to be anything interesting in the newly-accessible energy region.
[1] As just one example from particle physics: Gell-Mann's "Eightfold Way", which uses advanced representation theory to describe hadrons and was successful at predicting new particles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_way_(physics) [2] Note that high-energy physics has an extremely high standard of significance at 5 sigma, so it's not comparable to "barely significant" in the social sciences.
We're stuck on earth for the foreseeable future, and building 2 more of the instruments we're already building won't do anything to resolve the problems high energy physics struggle with.
I'd find this article and its opinion more credible if it could point out how this didn't apply to the LHC. Was every discovery and technology that came out of the LHC predicted in advance? If not, then this argument fails.
Also, there's a mutual relationship between theory and experiment in physics. The LHC was well motivated by theoretical predictions (most notably the Higgs boson) that needed experimental verification. In physics you have to put your theories to the test, otherwise they're not worth much. Each experimental result is like a nail that fixes a part of your theory space (by excluding possible alternative theories), and that then allows you to explore the space further with greater confidence. Hence the more nails, the better.
If you say the second, you have severe scope neglect: 100k is a huge number.
Of course, one expensive experiment may be the right call in some situations, but only if you have good reason to think it'll pay off. Either because you're certain it will, or because the expected utility of unknown results is larger than the cost (expected utility being probability times value). This very much isn't the case here.
A bigger collider does not, in fact, have anything to look for, and so the only possible benefit it could yield is such "serendipitous" discoveries. But how many of those could there really be when you're essentially doing only one thing?
The point of the article is that the ridiculous amount of money, which a bigger collider would cost, is much better spent on a large amount of much more varied research activities, which do have concrete things to look for, but also have the potential for serendipitous discoveries. And since those activities are much more varied, the total potential for such discoveries would much larger as well.
Thats the point of discovery and arguably a point in favour of doing this
The problem is, politicians won't do anything because they are either bought out by the fossil fuel industry that is at the top of the CO2 emitter list [1] or because they are afraid of telling their voters that the only way to stay on track regarding climate change will be a drastic cut in their quality of life.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_contributors_to_greenhouse...
[2]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/13/fact...
The gross old shit only still exists because the entrenched industries have the ability to lobby for government subsidies. Imagine if people in the US had to actually pay full price for gas, or for their meat.
It’s not “living in caves”, in fact, it’s not any different from the life of anyone else. It’s only a handful of tiny changes and suddenly your climate impact is massively reduced.
Doesn't sound so advanced to me...
These are the kind of questions we need answers to. Just saying 'we need to stop all emissions today' is not good enough. There is always a trade-off and we need to work out where this lies.
Heck, Germany just greenlit a €100bn special budget for expanding its military capabilities.
It's not that world governments don't have that kind of money to spend on the Climate crisis, it's that they aren't interested and motivated to do it. Germany's special budget was justified with Russia being an existential threat but the Climate crisis has been recognized as an existential threat for decades, yet almost all countries have been dragging their feet.
NATO recommends member nations put 2% of their annual budget into defense. Imagine its members (let alone most countries) would have done the same for combatting Climate change.
I'm all for the LHC, but it does seem like the world needs a bit better of an idea of the mysteries that the LHC++ might solve before spending $10-$100B on it. Does seem like science could be pushed further in other areas.
A particle collider does not, in fact, "solve physics" in any meaningful way, especially not in terms of practical applicability.
> if we solve fusion we have solved fusion.
The comment you are replying to has explained in some detail why this is not true.
Why should high energy physics get priority over any other area?
It's the nature of high energy physics that the higher the energy the rarer the event. The standard model already explains our universe unbelievably accurately. Sure there are corner cases, and maybe, just maybe a LHC++ might give some evidence towards one model or another. But what happens if global warming, wars over fuel, lack of fertilizer, and lack of food makes it harder for humanity to survive let alone complete major science projects.
Renewable and/or carbon neutral energy in all it's forms seems pretty important these days compared to slightly reinforcing one physical model over another.
Maybe a fusion engine would let us explore the solar system enough to find planet 9, which might well be a black hole. That would open up particle energies well in excess of anything we could manage with LHC++.
And, we control plenty of energy. The project is to concentrate it in one spot.
And I didn't mean to suggest that available energy was the limitation on building LHC++, but rather that available economic surplus was.
https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusio...
From what I can tell it's really is ground breaking, significant changes, well ahead of the normal projections for improved magnets. Literally with a single technology that allows magnet to be 40 times smaller. The easy to produce superconducting tape of arbitrary length is likely to find interesting applications as well.
Sure, like all research, practical fusion is not guaranteed, but it does look promising, and real progress has been made, and not just the "few % better this year" that might lead to real progress in a decade or a few centuries.
However Fusion is just an example, imagine 100 $1B projects, doesn't it seem likely for humanity to learn more from those then some particle that is hard to produce, last for a billionth of a second, and makes some models more likely and other models less likely? Maybe help with cancer, medicine, energy production, AI, space travel, faster computers, improving food production, mitigating global warning, energy storage or similar?
It says to stop putting everything (or rather, a ridiculous amount of money) into high energy particle physics and start funding other experiments.
But elsewhere the author has advocated it with "fusion power is a goal worth spending billions on". And in his "Why Particle Colliders Will Go Extinct" article, he supports the billions spent on fusion.
The author's other writings include:
- Gun Ownership Neither Increases Nor Decreases the Crime Rate
- Fleeing Paris Accords Makes Scientific Sense
- NSF Should Stop Funding Social 'Science'
Interestingly, the most expensive ones are almost always highway systems. Can someone briefly explain why? I'm my naive view it's mostly asphalt and terrain work.
It’s labour, fuel, and material, intensive work.
Sometimes when they dig into the ground they find something unpredictable e.g. contaminated soil which can result in a major cost blowout, a legal fight between government and contractor and then unplanned delays which further increases costs.
- It’s a lot of asphalt
- construction happens over a wide possibly remote area so all construction materials need transportation
- materials are probably made to order so you are buying effectively a lot of custom components
- engineering/architecture/construction talent isn’t cheap and there’s a lot of competing demand
- hiring is even more difficult as the job isn’t in one place may require a lot of travel, bed and board for all types of workers
- property itself is possible a significant cost to build it through. Even more if you get caught up in legal battles acquiring certain properties
- grift, with large projects in any country at any time there’s always grift. Grift is a constant
Highway systems create massive economic benefits that are relatively simple to calculate, just in the raw # hours saved which massively increases productivity. This can be well captured by the state through taxes or (less frequently) by private industry through tolls - i.e. the people that direct their construction.
Other mega projects have much less certain benefits, or the benefits are harder to capture by those with the ability to allocate resources because incentives aren't sufficiently aligned.
Thus the question I have to the scientists pushing for a new LHC is: "What would we get from the journey?" If they truly believe in the project they'll have a dozen technologies that need to be developed to make their project happen, all of which have practical applications beyond their experiment. If they don't they'll just be pushing for "same but larger" which is IMO a waste of resources. Because why shouldn't we be investing in the technology to do "Same but smaller" in that case so we can do more with less?
I don't think one should even have to demonstrate "practical applications beyond the experiment" beforehand. Just that it is a complete problem that can be solved independently from the entire project.
If there are a lot of those, it's much better to fund those and get the results that will push the cost of the full thing down. Even if the total costs turn up to be higher than focusing on the collider from the start.
Having to carry trucks for decades means a lot more steel and concrete. Especially when constructing bridges and overpasses.
Consequently, the cost trade-off isn't as clear-cut as the article might make it sound. Which for me leads to the obvious answer: yes, we should build another, larger collider. But probably not right now. There should be plenty of funding for the current one and also quite a bit of theoretical preparation before it is getting planned/built. In this time, other projects should get priority funding. But eventually, we should build another collider. We should never stop researching.
Forward thinking nations would take this approach, a single discovery in just one of these studies might unlock a huge amount of scientific, commercial or industrial value, and casting the net wide gives the greatest chance of making that discovery.
Sure. For some time period and amount of money, indeed. What happens once this limit is reached and people stop trusting that money?
Currency collapses are nasty. Look at Weimar Germany after WWI.
Several LHCs, ITERs and ISSes won't bring any of the nations close to Weimar Germany. Aircraft carriers, F-35s, failing infrastructure projects and corruption have a larger chance of doing that.
Also, I'll note that inflation in the UK is at 9%. Printing money is essentially a tax on those with cash holdings, who are mostly poorer. Not to mention the wastage on repricing...
And after this the US has hit levels of inflation that it hasn't seen for 50 years. Before that inflation was that high in WW2.
Printing money is not free, neither is tax money.
This is only true of the world's reserve currency (which is currently the USD). In all other cases they basically guarantee the issues stated elsewhere like inflation.
The low hanging fruit of discovering new physics looks like this. Build a bigger machine to collide particles with even more energy. Observe what comes out. It's a clear direction. Just throw money at the problem and get a result.
a prolific amount of software, engineering, and material science has come from CERN, as well spinning off numerous high-tech startups.
If we do find new particles we probably can't use them right away, yes, but that doesn't mean we can't later on. A lot of science has been like that.
By confirming a theory you can use the entire framework to come up with useful ideas. This is what happened to General relativity.
If people only asked "ok, that star is a little bit off, but will that lead us to faster horses?" would look funny in hindsight.
The LHC has been in operation for about 12-14 years, and has been a "thing" from planning onwards for almost 40. It's cost $9B, split between a huge list of countries.
Estimates of waste in the US medical system range from around $500B-$2T annualy. The lower end of that scale would support starting a new, fully funded, project of a similar scale for every state in the US every single year.
At a multi-national, multi-decade scale I just don't think it's actually that much money.
> all for the sake of discovering a tiny subatomic particle that we have no way of using
There are few ways I'd look at this.
One is that fundamental science can bleed into regular use over time, look at lasers. IIRC they had no clear use when invented, but are now absolutely key to so much. While the LHC had a headline goal (at least publicly) it's not just discovering one thing, it's a large tool to test fundamental physics.
Another is that this money and work doesn't go nowhere. People are paid to work on big complex problems, building and designing magnets, detectors, computing systems, software for analysis, etc. A lot of that is not going to be entirely custom, and at the very least supports companies & the supply chain for newer advanced technology. NASA I think occasionally puts out some lists of things that derived from their work.
Beyond that, I think there's value in getting a lot of people in a lot of countries to work together on a broadly non-political goal.
That said, LHC cost $4.75 billion that's pretty much nothing compared to the amount of money that gets thrown around in the tech world. So might still be worth it just for the fun of it, even if the discoveries don't have any direct application.
That said, of course particle physics results have direct applications. For instance in speculative commercial applications of Nuclear fusion and also Quantum Computing is connected to particle physics. I mean even GPS systems are based on 4D space time. Not entirely sure if any of that can be directly attributed to research happening in colliders but this is just one part of the field, mainly the experimental part - which can verify/falsify theories or result in new ones.
Anyway as someone inside experimental HEP field, I would encourage anyone who wants to understand more about finding and ideas to try to follow up the snowmass process as an example on how the dynamics of funding and new ideas for the future forms, discussed and gets priorities (at least in US)
Snowmass process is basically a series of meeting for the US HEP community where they discuss the US strategy and funding requests for the coming decade. the last one was in 2014 and now this process which takes about 3 years (probably more this time thanks to covid). It is really insightful but technical in nature but try to read more about it and the final report that gets to DOE committee to act as advisory guideline from the community.
> There are many known problems in physics right now. $100 billion could fund (quite literally) 100,000 smaller physics experiments. There may not be enough physics labs on Earth to carry out that many experiments!
It's amazing & a bit problematic how big-biased we are. For reference, LHC cost a bit under $5B by compare. I have a hard time imagining what it would take to get $5B in funding for physics. How much effort would each physics project have to spend to go get funding, versus how much time did it take the LHC to get funding?
I really like the idea of diversity, of a range of medium & small projects. But it feels like structurally we are disposed towards bigger higher ticket tasks. That once the ball is rolling, once there's critical mass, we can get the checkbooks opening. But by compare the channels for getting small & medium funding is more case by case, that large pools of money aren't as available or accessible.
It's one of the rare setups where i lack thé arrogance to think my opinion would be relevant. (That said, if the goal was to burn the funds with minimal progress I couldn't imagine a better tool than the LHC BWANDO corporation.)
If the tax payer is to fund the effort perhaps their opinion should have some non-zero influence on the choice?
Im not entirely against theoretical efforts (which is like my opinion) but to alienate clearly productive effort under some "let industries do it" banner seems several bridges to far. Maybe the other way around: let industries decide. would be less sensless.
useful things like wind solar wave tidal energy, clean water, agriculture etc all directly compete for the funds.
Wait, i know. Lets spend an insane amount of money to research what we should be funding. Im sure we can figure out howmany apples an orange is worth.
That paper describes a design for a 160 meter ring synchrotron to produce "extreme ultraviolet" for IC fabs in the 7nm and below range. Some large research accelerators have been used for that experimentally, including SLAC at Stanford. So the concept is known to work. It just needs to come down in price and size.
ASML's tin-vaporization light source, which is a mechanical and optical nightmare made to work by throwing a few billion dollars at it, is the current technology.
This may be how China leapfrogs the West in IC technology.
The link between CERN and the web is a great example of something that had nothing to do with the core science but was certainly worth more than the investment.
It's not like we have many other great ideas for science experiments. Apparently.
PS. I have a masters in engineering physics and several friends who are physicists. I’m also a science nerd. But I still think this is the right thing to do.
You need to throw politics at poverty and homelessness, not just cash.
Not incidentally, lowering the barriers to physics education and changing the incentives towards risky imagination and away from calculated academic careerism would also make breakthroughs in physics more likely.
The more research we do the better and 100 billion spent over approx 20 years by over a dozen countries is a far cry from putting all our eggs in one basket.
Cannot eat money, unfortunately it's far more durable and fungible than food.
Now, perhaps there are investments that can be made to improve the world's agriculture.
XX century science has delivered plenty of practical applications. But is there any practical application to expect from another large Hadron collider? Wouldn’t that money be better used in bio science or something else?
The really important scientific work doesn't follow this rule and demanding it does is short-sighted. Perhaps worse, it's refusing to learn from plenty of historical examples where you can see the work yielded nothing of immediate use but was still very important (that is to say, society would look vastly different without it). In a sense, it's this kind of goal-oriented thinking that led society to the mess that it has become in the last 15 years.
Most previous science discoveries weren't throwing around oodles of money.
But sure, go build a $100B machine out of habit.
In any case it will be built by a conglomerate of countries and the budget is not huge when splitting the bill.
Heck I would even like to see a couple of these built per year instead of more planes and warships.
Edit: Typo.
That shouldn't ever be the argument because you can argue about the exact peice of fecundity that the dollar value can have until you are blue in the face on X, Y, Z projects.
When it comes to government spending, my reactions seems to be the opposite of most. I actually think that these big audacious projects is the only use for government. Fund big things that individually and within the private market would never be a thing. Do Hubble, Do LHC++, do scientific exploration missions because that is what makes you proud to be part of what is going on around you. That sense of inspiration in the air of progress is all that is required for a functioning society.
The important part is "building" which pumps billions into research programs for improving materials/electronics etc.
Sure we can defund all expensive science and maintain the status quo, last time we did this dark ages happened.
Interesting point, there was a time where it wasn't even clear whether string theory should be considered part of Physics or rather Mathematics or even Metaphysics. That said, the LHC has continuously given additional insights into existing theories and also it's not the only collider in the world although probably there's no other where so many countries collaborate. Also an interesting read about the early history of CERN: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.1955503
Is this that?
I don't think you need to worry about it
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/nov/06/cern-big-ban...
(Old physics meme :-) )
The LHC is a massive machine with advanced technologies, took a decade to design and build, involving 10k scientists and the international community, and cost $9B.
- Squadron of F-35 aircraft: ~0.2 LHCs
- JWT: 1.1 LHCs
- ITER: >2 LHCs
- Elon Musk's wealth: 24 LHCs
- Microsoft's market cap: 30 LHCs
- US annual military budget: 90 LHCs
- US national debt: 3389 LHCs
Nit: MSFT market cap is ~210 LHC.
PS: Dear commenter, please don't "how about X?" in comments. I know you're smart. So smart you can find a counter example. Congratulations, you're clever.
I think breakthroughs are often perpendicular to the energy, so the best investment in understanding the universe is probably to explore it.
Unfortunately that also requires alot of energy.
Rate of change is going to slow down with the price of energy going up.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...
This has been said, in one form or another, about almost any invention and experiment, shortly before actual discoveries were made. Scientific conservatism at its worst.
Cern really should be investigated and audited publicly, but it would take Delloites and PWC to follow that paper trail and audit hundreds of companies going back 25-30 years. I've always said it, cern is a scam, they take public money to fund product research, and then spin off separate companies to cream off the profits. Then they act broke and beg us for more money.
Edit: There is very little public information on this. The company accounts may be public, but like I said, there are hundreds of them going back 30 years, and no-one is motivated to do that kind of research. There is a recent study here[0] which looks at the economic benefit to companies that help build the research equipment. Obviously a lot of tech has to be invented just to build systems like this. But I haven't seen a similar study of the cern spin-off companies, or KT (Knowledge Transfer) partners in cern nomenclature, and that is where the real meat is.
I don't see why it would be so controversial for cern to retain some share in those KT companies and use that money to be self sufficient. That seems like a win for science.
[0] https://cds.cern.ch/record/2632083/files/CERN-ACC-2018-0022....
Further reading:
https://kt.cern/success-stories/fostering-culture-entreprene...
https://kt.cern/success-stories/managing-cern-intellectual-p...
One example company (out of hundreds):
UK firm buys cancer-zapping spin-off from CERN collider
"The spin-off, known as Adam, was established in 2007 by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to build low-cost innovative accelerators for proton beam therapy (PBT) and conventional radiotherapy. Advanced Oncotherapy will pay for Adam in shares, giving CERN scientist Alberto Colussi, who founded the CERN business, a continuing stake in the technology." https://www.avoplc.com/en-gb/Investors/Share-Price-Informati...
If that's a scam then please take the shirt off my back.
Happy to be corrected.
We're going to need that $100 billion for burn cream.
Well, if this isn’t predictable!
Because Supersymmetry is stupid theory that can be fit to any set of facts, there is no point in building LHC++. Besides it is so expensive you could give a 100.000 physicist a million bucks and that would be more productive.
Would it? A bunch of the arguments in the article apply to pretty much all science funding.
It is one of the great perks of civilization that you can combine resources to make something truly awesome, whether it is pyramids, moon landings or large colliders.
The other thing I hate about this is that the numbers reported in the article are clearly inflationary. The use the precise phrasing " It’s entirely possible that the price could swell to $100 billion." while highlighting the big number. Well let's check another source. CNET says $23bn. So that would require a 5x over budget, which would be quite high. I know HN loves Hossenfelder, but she is overly pessimistic. At least in my group of physicists, we don't know other physicists who like her much (not that I hate her, just more ambivalent). Pessimists are good, but they shouldn't dominate conversations the same way optimists shouldn't.
Either way, it is clear that this type of money is very small when we are discussing country budgets. It should not be inflated and should not be sold as if there is a single country buying it (which it is well cheap enough to be done. Hell, Bezos and Musk could each have one, or several. Hell, there's at least 20 billionaires that wouldn't have issues building their own and funding them for significant periods of time).
So the real question is if we should build it, not the cost. As a former physicist, I do think the argument for building one is weak. It is correct that we don't have any great things to test. But there are reasons to do so. We need to consider it will take at least another decade to build, which theorists will hopefully come up with something in that time. If they don't, we can still test precision levels which is highly helpful. But there are other intangible things that are hard to evaluate. Anytime we humans tackle difficult problems and push the boundaries of what we can do, we learn a lot. That's where spinoffs come from and we've seen them in every major scientific endeavor (NASA, CERN, LIGO, and many more). Also, what happens when you put a bunch of smart people from many countries in a room together? There's political advantages (and why I think it is a shame Bush killed the American accelerator). There's also the fact that if we stop doing this, we'll lose talent and skill. So yeah, the upsides aren't crazy good like finding a new fundamental particle, but it also isn't that expensive. That's the real conversation that needs to be had.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d...
[1] https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.cern...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/science/cern-wants-to-build-a-new-23-bi...
Side note: this is comic number 401. Comic number 404 is particularly good.
Please read this book, which is in my opinion the most important book written this century.