I do not know if building colliders should be considered increasingly futile.
However, there are other points the author made.
First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance.
Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination. What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard? I supposed that could be useful, but even more pressing was how to motivate the people of Earth to make the necessary changes.
Also, the money offered doesn't seem that huge on scale of countries. 1 billion dollars per year for operating cost? I suppose we could make better use of money that would otherwise go to making a new collider, but so we can do so elsewhere as well.
> First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance.
Me either and often the technology you get on the back of it doesn't show up for decades and decades anyway.
So is that an argument now to stop basic research? That we can't even look across the horizon of our own lifetimes anymore? Even the Romans thought bigger than that.
Is there an actual theoretical question that will be answered by an even bigger collider, or is it just, “let’s see what happens?” It’s not a question of whether basic research is fundamentally valuable but rather whether building larger and larger particle colliders will deliver diminishing returns in exchange for increasing costs.
It's just "Let's see what happens" - and that's why it's a bad idea.
LHC was justified as a search for the Higgs. The Higgs was found. Everyone was happy. Fine.
LHC 2.0++ is just banging rocks together for the sake of it. Something interest might fall out, or it might not.
But considering that we still don't understand quantum origins, have no clue how to make a theory of quantum gravity, and have no idea what Dark Energy is, or even if it exists at all, it might be better to spend the money on pursuing creative theoretical leads in those other directions and coming back to country-sized experimental hardware when there are some new theories to test.
Today the axion is the new hypothetical fundamental particle that coincides with the status that had the Higgs boson two decades ago. It may very well be the next milestone.
Banging rocks together has been a very fruitful method which is always limited by the technology.
Many physicists believe that the rock banging should be an ongoing exercise which itself guides the theoretical directions.
They also believe that there is an almost guaranteed chance of finding something, if their advances to higher energy are achieved.
All we need is one anomaly in the vast data processing. There are many things which are expected to be seen at higher energies. If they are not seen, it still says a great deal and will guide theoretical discussion.
> the technology you get on the back of it doesn't show up for decades
That would be an argument to start even sooner rather than later or never. If you want to combat the usefulness of the research the only arguments you can make are that the results are not useful at all, or that they can be obtained cheaper, faster, or more reliably with other means.
The "it takes decades to bear fruit" works even against education. And I'm sure nobody would agree to be barred access to any tech that was the result of decades of research or simply took decades to reach market.
I'm also not a fan of this project simply because I don't think an incremental advance in colliders will bring anything new at all, certainly not because it will take too long to reach market. As the saying goes, you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. To achieve the next breakthrough we need something on a scale we're simply not capable of building now, or soon.
As a counter point, the gravitational wave discovery came about because of incremental upgrades to the detector. We don't know whats beyond that noise floor.
Maybe there are better ways to measure the tiny signals that hint at new physics, but the question is what we can do now. I would personally say its optimistic to assume we'll get a big breakthrough if we don't invest in the incremental upgrades.
I didn't want to imply that incremental updates in general aren't useful. Just that many physicists' educated assessment (guess) is that new physics and new particles require energy levels that are out of reach right now, substantial higher than this new accelerator's. So now the expected outcome is to give a more detailed look for a slightly better understanding of what we already know, with a hefty price tag. This cost/benefit is where the current controversy comes from.
That's a big lie, it's extremely rare for big projects outside of wartime to create downstream tech that is generally usable. The big ones that are often claimed (Velcro for NASA and MRIs for the supercollider) are definitely lies.
Usually big projects tend to need to be conservative and use off the shelf available materials (just in clever ways).
Sabine's big point is not that we shouldn't do basic science, it's that we shouldn't do bad basic science; that is science that isn't driven by hypotheses. Historically in science you would create a new model that agrees with current facts, but makes an prediction that some unobserved event X would be observable. You build your apparatus or design an experiment to observe X, and then confirm of reject the model.
> That's a big lie, it's extremely rare for big projects outside of wartime to create downstream tech that is generally usable. The big ones that are often claimed (Velcro for NASA and MRIs for the supercollider) are definitely lies.
This quite mistaken based on what I've read. Historically NASA hovers at around a 10:1 ROI. SpaceX would not exist today without the huge benefit of all the material NASA has published historically.
MRI may not have come from colliders, but modern medical imaging absolutely has benefited from these projects. There's a researcher that commented in a sibling thread with specific benefits to their project.
I suggest you look at what was spent on the Space Shuttle, which turned out to be non-reusable (it was re-manufactured after each flight for up to a year.) No ROI there.
Fun facts: NASA knew from the very first flight that they were losing several tiles during launch, and no tiles were optional. Also, NASA managers were given photos of Columbia's damaged wing, which had a gaping hole in the leading edge, before re-entry, and sat on them. I wouldn't fly a Cessna 152 like that.)
I am aware of the design failures of the shuttle and their consequences. This does not invalidate what I said about the net historical ROI of NASA. Please go research a bit more.
Over $110 billion has been spent on the ISS through 2020, excluding international partners. (It makes me want to vomit when I read that. That's 5 new CERN super-colliders, where you know, real science is done.)
Unless we made a trillion dollars on that bungled program alone, still not seeing ROI:
1) I found the reference from 1976 you're referring to, which is so misleading as to be false (note the cumulative arithmetic in Table 5. Trees don't grow to the sky.)
In addition, that was pre-bungled Space Shuttle and ISS programs. Even the GAO is reticent to talk about how much money was wasted in those programs in case future space programs would be immediately cancelled due to gross mismanagement.
2) If you're a scifi fanboi, just admit that you support whatever wasteful spending NASA does. But don't hide behind obfuscated numbers that you haven't read and don't understand.
Let me make sure I have this straight. Trees don’t grow to the sky but we should have built five more colliders instead of a unique zero gravity research laboratory?
“Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination.”
Yeah that argument was extremely dishonest. We don’t build a 1 billion dollar climate change center because that 1 billion is going to beget trillions of dollars in disruption. Throwing 20, 40 billion with staffing (which comes back into the economy) over a decade or more all-in is a total different ballgame.
"First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality"
This is an extremely narrowminded view. Lasers, MRI, X-Ray machines, etc ... are all made by engineers after physicists tried to understand the fundamental nature of reality. One would argue that modern electronics are possible because research was done about Quantum Physics, a fundamental nature of reality.
The very next part of his statement covers that... It could be decades before "society" sees fruits of the research.
> To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance.
His next sentence also says "research is good for research sake" - there doesn't need to be "real world results" for the research to be worth it.
You talk about narrow mindedness... then ignore second part of the first sentence and completely ignore the second sentence... Seems narrow minded to do that?
I tend to agree on both those points... It could be a long time to see results and research for research can be good.
While I sympathize with this viewpoint, as a physicist I think there is a fairly persistent misunderstanding in the public about just how disconnected current particle physics experiments are from application to everyday life.
Essentially none of the particle physics done since the 1960s has had any application outside of fundamental knowledge, with no prospects for it having those applications in the future. At best, and even this is stretching a bit, there are indirect benefits of developing the machines that are needed to explore this frontier (i.e. like some of the argued benefits of space exploration).
Whether that changes the calculus of whether these things are worth the price is still a question (in my opinion: they are), but I don't think making analogies to applications of discoveries of fundamental physics operating at very different energy scales is a good argument. The development of quantum physics (lasers, MRI, etc), while a frontier at the time, is essential to understanding commonplace things like the cohesion of solids or the properties of metals or semi-conductors (say) at room temperature. To my knowledge, there is nothing outside of astrophysical objects and the early universe that depends on knowing what is at the current frontiers in particle physics (or even what was the frontier in 50 years ago).
It's speculation that it will ever be practical for computing, let alone in the near future. And even then I'm not sure how much that'll be related to recent experiments in high energy particle physics.
The experimental platforms that I am aware of that are been used to try and build quantum computers are based on condensed matter physics (superconducting junctions), atomic physics (trapped ions) or photons (quantum optics). None of this involves particle physics. The theoretical side of quantum computing, while a rich and deep field on its own, is an application of quantum mechanics and does not share any deep connection with particle physics.
Quantum computing will never be the future of computing. If we manage to make it work, it will at best be something like a TPU: a specialized processor for accelerating specific tasks. It will always be faster and easier to build more powerful classical computers than an equivalently fast quantum machine.
Quantum computing only solves a few specific problems. Like showing every possible outcome. For instance print(x), and your goal is to get a through z.
But if the problem is linear, like 2+2, it doesn't help to have quantum computing.
Do you think it's likely that any of the post-60s particle physics will lead to new useful inventions? Any idea what they might be or where I could read about them?
I think nuclear physics provides an instructive example that sits in between some of these extremes. Here the energy scales are way way lower than current frontier standards, but also fairly divorced from things in everyday life. Yet nuclear physics has applications (in medicine, in power and [unfortunately] in war). These applications do tend however to be quite specialized (we don't have atomic cars, vacuum cleaners or whatever) so it didn't revolutionize the world the way our understanding of electromagnetism or quantum mechanics did. [I don't want to downplay the effect of nuclear science, but it isn't ubiquitous in our lives].
Barring a fundamental change in our understanding, I would expect that trade off between energy scale and specialization to continue to hold and any developments based on particle physics (of the 60s-present) to be very specialized.
Let me be clear though -- you don't know what you don't know. It could be that what I think are reasonable expectations are wrong, and there are surprises waiting for us (this is one of the reasons I think particle physics is worth supporting).
In a sense though - that's what we should have been expecting all along. Particle physics may have had surprises for the experts along the way, but what it did not have are hidden ways to use those newly discovered particles without those huge energies; and similarly for the weakly-interacting stuff.
That may not hold forever; but it's not a crazy assumption. Something who's existence you cannot deduce without energies that need specialized billion dollar equipment to reach is almost by definition not ever going to create or influence ubiquitous tech. That's quite different from stuff like quantum mechanics; those effects are quite visible in fairly everyday situations (e.g. the double-slit experiment doesn't need anything too exotic, and obviously lots of modern tech relies on tricks classical physics might observe but not predict).
That means that if particle physics is to be relevant, it's most likely going to be in places that are not ubiquitous. Maybe it'll help astronomers understand the universe, and maybe that has some application down the line. Or maybe it'll be in absurdly expensive high-energy devices that matter even with only a few copies in the world (and let's hope those aren't yet more weapons).
Still, seems reasonable to be pessimistic about the usefulness of particle physics investments of this type.
The hope is that a fundamental discovery will open the door to many other discoveries which could lead us to an understanding of ways to transfer energy between fields in new ways.p Making a Star Trek warp drive may be the only way for humanity to leave our galaxy.
True, but if we continue on our current trajectory (climate change, social inequality), we won’t make it to that future. While I understand, we have enough curious people to invest many long-term possibilities and theories, I do think we should focus more on current pressing concerns when we decide on such a costly project. I can’t help but think of the possibilities of building renewable energy, sanitization for the parts of the world that has been historically and systematically left behind.
Expanding on your second paragraph, off the top of my head I can cite superconducting magnets and high temperature superconductors, both of which have benefitted from funding/interest related to large particle accelerators. Now you have companies building tokamaks with this technology.
Whilst they are not commonly used today, it is not entirely improbable that they play a significant role in the future.
There’s also some developments related to grid computing, sensors, and electronics, which could be reasonably useful in other contexts.
So yeah, chasing the next fancy particle itself is not very relevant to most people (though still very important in our quest of trying to understand the world around us), but it still contributes to technological progress.
Another aspect is international collaboration. It’s not perfect, but CERN and ITER are organisations within which Chinese, Russians, Americans and Europeans (and many, many others) work together towards a common goal.
Thank you for expanding on this -- I agree with all of these points. There is a real and tangible, albeit in this case indirect, value to have highly skilled people try to push that boundaries of what is possible technologically. It is easy to forget that the world-wide-web itself had its inception in at CERN -- an institution whose focus is particle physics.
In my opinion, another important reason to support of keeping these large accelerators alive is there is a very real chance that the expertise to build these kind of devices could atrophy or be lost entirely given the long timescales involved. Even if one is opposed to building this specific collider, I think the prospect of losing this kind of institutional knowledge is concerning (though if one finds these things useless, you might care less if we lost that capability).
Oh yes, good point about the Web. I know there’s a lot of cutting edge research on storage and computing distributed across the world to handle the sheer amount of data coming out of the LHC. It’s not implausible that this could help improve the Internet’s architecture.
I entirely agree with your second point. I’ll add that it is also important to keep these people (from highly specialised technicians and physicists to diplomats and support staff) employed in positions where they can keep their skills sharp. Some of them then go back to their countries of origin to apply this experience and knowledge to help improve research and policy at home, whilst retaining personal links with their counterparts abroad.
In the grand scheme of things, the expenditure is a rounding error anyway.
That's the same argument as weapon developers use, and weapon development contributed much more to fundamental physics than particle accelerators. The majority of funds after the WWII flowed to physics thanks to the nuclear arms race.
So what's your point? The weapon developers are correct of course. But the difference between weapons and super colliders is that super colliders are designer to help humanity instead of destroy it.
I can assure you weapon developers also think they benefit society. They usually say: WWIII did not happen only because of nuclear weapons. The question here is, what would benefit society more, spending said $21B on virology research or on a collider? Or maybe if you spend $21B on AI research, the computer will solve all the remaining theoretical problems of string theory in 0.21 s.
I agree with you that the current physics output from the high energy experiments are far removed from practical usages today, and that this has immense value in itself. However I feel that you downplay the value of the developed hardware and (especially) software required to perform these experiments.
As an analogy, I currently work on developing a medical imaging system where we track the trajectories of protons and heavy ions after they traverse a patient - in order to infer their energy loss and also the patient's "stopping power" map. With better knowledge of the stopping power we will be able to improve cancer radiation treatment with protons and heavy ions.
We would be nowhere without recent work in particle physics on large scale pixel sensors, Monte Carlo simulation software, readout systems, experimental cross sectional data (although not directly from the high energy experiments), particle tracking algorithms, electronics design for very thin sensors and radiation hard equipment ++.
You're probably right that my statement about "indirect" applications was a bit strong. I agree that there are numerous applications some fairly direct (like medical physics) and some very indirect (like the WWW) that have come out of work in particle physics.
But I think my main point, that applications of particle physics itself (and not the human and technological advances made to support it) are essentially non-existent stands.
If that's the reason one wants to continue funding particle accelerators -- and it's a good argument -- then one needs to make precisely that argument (and not the argument made a few levels up by the original poster).
Sorry, I didn't realize how nested this had gotten; this statement:
> One would argue that modern electronics are possible because research was done about Quantum Physics, a fundamental nature of reality.
which was making the connection that understanding frontier physics from 100 years ago directly enabled new technology, and that was a reason to support particle physics today (presumably b/c it might directly lead to similar advancements).
It’s not clear to me why we should make the distinction between what we write down in the model of physics, and what we write down in the engineering science books as a result of these endeavors.
I agree the distinction can get a little fuzzy at the edges, i.e. for technologies that, while not dependent on frontier physics, would only have been developed in the pursuit of (say) building a larger collider.
But I think there is a real difference in expectations between technology that operates on known physical principles and that which involves wholly new ones. Historically the latter has been associated with dramatic shifts in what is possible, for example our understanding of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics enables much of the modern world.
So I think presenting the study of particle physics in that light could mislead the public on just what is being done and what kind of outcomes it might precipitate.
> Ok, but isn’t the premise of this line of reasoning flawed? We didn’t know what our understanding of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics would enable in advance.
No, but we did know what we had large gaps in our knowledge, even of things at close to human scales -- before those theories were discovered and worked out. It was then reasonable to expect that filling in those gaps might lead to new technology and applications also at human scales. And I'm not talking about direct applications, I'm talking about applications decades or more out -- but the fact that the energy scales were somewhat close to home meant such thing were possible.
From what we know about the current frontier in particle physics, nothing informs physics at human scales. This is a strong statement -- its many many orders of magnitude off in energy scale.
It could be that we're wrong about some that (and that's one of the reasons I think this research should continue) -- but it's not something that should be reasonably expected.
> Science is always just exploration, and the outcome in terms of tools is always incidental.
My comments were about how the science should be presented to the public in an honest way. And I think trying to sell people on science by quoting past developments that are quite different in character and expectations to what is being done today is dishonest and is a disservice to everyone involved.
The point that should be made is exactly the one you make above: science is about exploration -- full stop -- and we shouldn't make exaggerated claims about applications to sell people on it.
We shouldn’t make pessimistic statements about the potential benefits of the process of doing the research itself.
Science is valuable because of what we find, but it’s also always valuable because of what we learn to do in the process.
I agree we shouldn’t make exaggerated claims about benefits, but neither should we act as though one part is somehow incidental and not fundamental to why we do the exploration.
I was surprised to see in recent years quite a lot of applications of neutrinos in imagery. E.g. in geology, to visualize the inside of monuments (e.g. pyramids) without opening them, etc.
Muon detectors are also application of particle physics. I will not be surprised if we’ll see more exotic particles being used, maybe in some areas of manufacturing, as a convenient carrier of certain energy. Particle colliders are the way to develop accessible technology for that purpose.
Arguably the particle accelerator technology is useful for free-electron lasers, to the point where Globalfoundries wanted to base their next node shrink on an FEL-based lithography process.
I believe there is. Observed universe shines on us in a broad spectrum of electromagnetic and gravitational waves and particles, so knowing it well and expecting what may come from it is important, because we utilize more and more of this spectrum. If you build a neutrino detector, you are looking at the whole universe and trying to separate your own signal from the background. In space some strange recurring radio signal may interfere with satellite communications, you may need to distinguish it from something else. It’s all practical right now, even if we are not yet building machines to exploit some new physical law.
That comment doesn’t reject getting applicable results from physics research nor does it claim it didn’t have such outcomes; it says the amount of expected applicable results should not be the (sole) number to use for deciding whether to fund research.
That's not true for MRIs. MRIs came about after the technology was hashed out for NMRs, which were in the beginning largely useful for petrochemical and food science research. (Superconductors for supercolliders came after those) A good chunk of the fundamentals of those came about because of the bomb project research, and the basis of quantum mechanics is not based on idle speculation about fundamental nature of reality, but because of a real discrepancy in our models that clashed with predicted outputs and generated observable predictions (ultraviolet catastrophe through to the double slit experiment). Sabines point is that there are currently no major measurable unexpected predictions or useful experiments that are probable with colliders in the proposed size range.
I resent that comment; the way it typically goes engineers make something work and then an endless parade of scientist comes up with increasingly irrelevant explanations while engineers move on to the next challenge.
As the saying goes, thermodynamics owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to thermodynamics.
The cult of the scientist has gone too far in the US
STRONGLY AGREE. We need to change education where kids get into building, doing, solving and making.Why cant we have a system that brings high school kids into hospitals, factories, research labs, as well as water treatment plants, electricity generating plants, construction sites, etc. As a result of COVID, a lot of work is done online. Why cant PR departments dumb down the content and include schools? Lots of interesting stuff is done on YouTube . Imagine if it were organized along these lines.
Better and more practical education for children sounds great. What exactly has that got to do with disliking spending money on science? There's no reason not to have both.
> What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard?
No? Models are useful for making predictions.
If somebody like the POTUS tells you that nuking thunderstorms would be great against climate change, you don't have to just take their word for it. You can input that into your climate change model, and it will tell you how much of an impact this will have, and whether the impact is good or bad.
The difference between a better model and a worse model is that the better model will agree better with reality.
A shitty model, like the one POTUS is using, might tell you that nuking all thunderstorms would be great. Then we go ahead and do it, and we all die.
A better model, like the mental model that every 14 year old child that starts studying physics and radiation has, might tell you that nuking thunderstorms is a pretty bad idea that would kill us all due to dozens of reasons.
Given that we cannot make accurate predictions today of what the weather tomorrow will look like. If you want to predict the 50 year impact of more subtle changes like, e.g., covering the Sahara with black mats, you need a pretty good model to get an output that isn't multiple orders of magnitude off.
So..... what do we expect from better climate change models? Avoiding the apocalypse to begin with. Worth every penny.
>If somebody like the POTUS tells you that nuking thunderstorms would be great against climate change, you don't have to just take their word for it. You can input that into your climate change model, and it will tell you how much of an impact this will have, and whether the impact is good or bad.
You have an odd concept of both how to determine if nuking a thunderstorm, which was not what was allegedly suggested, but also what large scale climate models actually capture.
All non-random decisions are made against models of the world. Some of those models are more detailed than others. All detailed models are made by people who care a lot and have interests at stake. It's not possible to make decisions outside the context of a narrative.
"First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality"
About 10K construction jobs, from high tech to low tech over the life of the build phase of the project, which is overlapping a world wide downturn of unknown length of time.
I mean they could build staircase to the top of the tall hill and still not have it be a waste if it keeps people in work and out of harms way. In this case we may get some physics as an upside to a neat way to stimulate industry.
> First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance.
Berners-Lee invented the web while working at CERN on organizing scientific information for collides and stuff.
> The stage was being set for the invention of the World Wide Web, and future history books will recount how, almost alone, Sendall supported the pioneering work of Tim Berners-Lee, then working in his group. After reading Berners-Lee's prophetic 1989 proposal for what would become the Web, Sendall wrote on the cover "Vague but exciting", and added at the end - "And now?" The rest is already history.
> Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination. What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard? I supposed that could be useful, but even more pressing was how to motivate the people of Earth to make the necessary changes.
It's not either or. Knowing the impact is valuable for mitigating damage. You can allocate capital for mitigation more effectively if you have a more accurate model of the threats. Presumably at some levels funding more accurate models are net cost-saving, by increasing the efficiency of spend. I have no idea if we have or have not passed that level.
Similarly, a better model might provide a better understanding of different strategies for curtailing climate change. e.g. planting trees takes carbon out of the air directly (easy to estimate), but also changes the albedo of the underlying terrain. The impact of the albedo change is less clear, particularly as to how it changes regional weather patterns. It might benefit from better models to guide the most impactful locations to reforest. Again, I'm not an expert/maybe this is a solved problem, but I can see how these cases might exist.
If better models of climate change allow us to predict more precisely what will happen, we may be able to get people to care more. If we can say with a high degree of certainty that City X is going to see 4.5x as many terrible hurricanes every year, then the people of City X may have a more vested interest than if we say "there will probably be more hurricanes".
We can say with high certainty that the great barrier reef will die unless some miracle happens and the world limits warming to 1.5°. And even then most of the reef will be gone. Yet Australia is a country that basically has no real climate policy at all, they still plan for decades of new(!) coal extraction.
The problem is that nobody cares about your model. If it's too grim then people will refuse to believe it. If it's too optimistic people won't do anything.
Let's not make this a choice between colliders and "something good for society". We have so many other things we could take resources from: social media apps, fashion, luxury industry.
Only when all of the parasitic industries are gone can we think whether we need a new particle accelerator, or, say, a new DNA sequencing technology.
Resource allocation is a moot point when it comes to CERN projects because CERN manages their own funding and they have one mission, to do particle research. The fact that they manage their budget is exactly why they can do things like big accelerators, unlike the United States who destroyed their half-way dug accelerator before it even came online. And besides that, CERN is literally the only place on Earth with the foundations for this kind of research.
>> I suppose we could make better use of money that would otherwise go to making a new collider, but so we can do so elsewhere as well.
Tell that to the hundreds, thousands, of valid scientific projects that cannot find funding. This collider, if built, represents not only a lot of money but those hundreds of smaller projects that didn't happen.
I once heard a physicist say that our society spends more on ring tones than it does fusion research. I suspect that this collider would yield an inverse. We will spend more on a narrow aspect of particle science than we do on vaccine research. More than on new antibiotics? More than on SETI? More than on detecting possible life in our own solar system? Particle science is great, but there are more efficient ways to spend billions.
The premise of this article is quite flawed. We don't need to spend the money "researching threats such as climate change", we need to get off our collective duff and actually do something to stop dumping Carbon into the air-ocean and to start removing some of that which we've already put there.
Whether we build another giant particle accelerator or two (reminder: Not only CERN is interested, but China is already well down that path) is almost irrelevant if we don't fix our pollution and destruction of the ecosystems that allow Homo sap. to live comfortably (or, possibly, at all).
> We don't need to spend the money "researching threats such as climate change", we need to get off our collective duff and actually do something to stop dumping Carbon into the air-ocean and to start removing some of that which we've already put there.
Figuring out how to do that economically and at scale includes a number of research problems. How do we generate power, produce concrete, do metallurgy, transport goods, fly airplanes, etc. without greenhouse gas emissions? How do we capture and sequester greenhouse gas emissions? How do we develop closed-loop sources for chemical fuels? How do we store energy in the power grid?
We have the technology to get at least to 80% carbon neutrality and we're on a very tight time schedule. Asking for "more research" before investing massively into the things we already know how to do is stupid. Improving the economics must come after we delayed the existential threat.
We had the technology to get to 80% carbon neutrality for centuries. Preindustrial society was 80% of the way to carbon neutrality compared to today. The only problem is that people aren't willing to accept a preindustrial standard of living. In other words, they are unwilling to live materially poorer lives than they do today. So from that perspective, it's purely a question of "improving the economics".
Perhaps what you meant was that we have the technology to do it without completely abandoning industrial civilization--though maybe people will have to sacrifice some things, like eating meat, driving private cars, or living in climate-controlled private spaces. And maybe that's an easier sell. But it's also a false dichotomy. Developing the technology to reach higher levels of carbon neutrality more quickly and more economically can and must happen at the same time that we do what we can today. Building more renewable power generation can happen at the very same time that we prototype carbon capture systems for natural gas power plants, battery-electric vehicles, or Sabatier-process closed-loop carbon-neutral natural gas production (which, incidentally, is also something we'll need on Mars). We can build Generation III nuclear plants now while researching Generation IV nuclear plants to build later. We can work now on making all of our technology more energy-efficient while developing fusion power to deliver unlimited, carbon-neutral energy for generations to come.
The answer is pretty simple. The damage caused by externalities is not born by the producer so there is no incentive to stop causing damage. Once you create the incentive everything will work itself out without government intervention. That's the beauty of the free market.
However, the reality is that people like the current situation and prefer government intervention in favor of carbon emitters. This unfortunately leads to situations where subsidies to e.g. coal based electricity generation have to be matched by subsidies to zero carbon electricity generation just to have any impact at all.
Alternative technologies already exist but there is no reason to use them because conventional technologies are blessed by the government. Of course you can forcibly pump money into them and eventually get the result you desire but only at a higher cost.
In Germany people absolutely disliked the idea of a revenue neutral carbon tax where every tax payer would receive a share of the collected tax back at the end of the year. Instead the government introduced a minimum price on CO2 certificates which is basically the same thing except it is not revenue neutral but hey at least it's not a "tax" so the uneducated mob won't come after you. People think they understand taxes but when you show them something "complicated" like a cap and trade system they suddenly don't understand a single thing.
I don't think there is a shortage of scientists with ideas about how money could be spent. The article suggests figuring out how to make particle accelerators more efficient, and also global warming and virus research.
I think you'd still want the research center to help you respond to changing conditions, to highlight changes that are caused by warming, and to predict which dominoes are about to fall.
But yea, if we do our jobs, its work will be less significant. Let's try to make that happen.
No? The premise of the article isn't about any of its specific proposals, I think the author would probably be quite annoyed to see people picking on the randomly tossed suggestions for alternative ways to spend this research money.
It's specifically about 'don't spend more money on X' (X being larger particle colliders) than about the specific examples A, B, C, of alternatives it mentions (climate research center, epidemic studies).
TD;DL: we discovered Higgs, but we don't know much about it because LHC doesn't give us enough resolution, and its exact properties are crucial for the future of the whole of theoretical physics. Therefore, even if we do not hope to discover new particles, there's motivation enough to build bigger colliders.
The article says something that is perfectly sensible. Reading it carefully, it seems that the author is doubtful whether building a 100km collider is the correct way forward, given its enormous cost. That is a very valid subject and totally worthy of serious discussion.
In any case, we should never forget that without advancements in fundamental physics we are going nowhere as a species. We might be able to come up with better refinements, better techniques, slightly better computers, etc. But sooner or later we are going to hit a physical limit, and we are going to need to seriously enlarge our fundamental knowledge corpus of how the universe operates if we are going to keep moving forward.
I would favor an argument not rooted in cost but in physics. Whether it is costly or not is not a factor in whether it is the correct way forward, if it gets results it is the way forward, even if it is costly unless a cheaper alternative can be found. If it can't get results then it is wasted money no matter what the cost.
> I would favor an argument not rooted in cost but in physics.
Did we read the same article?
> New measurements brought up new puzzles, and they built bigger colliders until, in 2012, the picture was complete. The Standard Model still has some loose ends, but experimentally testing those would require energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test. The scientific case for a next larger collider is therefore presently slim.
> Yes, one can hope. But there is no reason why the particles that make up dark matter or dark energy should show up in the new device’s energy range. And that is assuming they are particles to begin with, for which there no evidence. Even if they are particles, moreover, highly energetic collisions may not be the best way to look for them. Weakly interacting particles with tiny masses, for example, are not something one looks for with large colliders.
> And there are entirely different types of experiments that could lead to breakthroughs at far smaller costs, such as high precision measurements at low energies or increasing the masses of objects in quantum states. Going to higher energies is not the only way to make progress in the foundations of physics; it’s just the most expensive one.
(1) slim != non-existent, (2) so far every higher energy level has resulted in more insight, I'm all for increasing the size another order of magnitude, if that does not result in new knowledge or insights into the fundamental nature of matter and energy then we can debate whether or not it is still useful to continue.
There is no evidence at this point in time that we know all there is to be known at the next level energetic collisions. The whole idea that we are at the end of the line for particle accelerators smacks of huge hubris: we know all there is to be known. A similar sentiment pervaded the physics discipline about a hundred years ago and look where we've gone since then.
> so far every higher energy level has resulted in more insight
There were theoretical reasons to expect new results with previous colliders. I don't know that any similar reasons have been named here.
> There is no evidence at this point in time that we know all there is to be known at the next level energetic collisions. The whole idea that we are at the end of the line for particle accelerators smacks of huge hubris: we know all there is to be known.
This is a massive strawman argument to use, especially against someone like Dr. Hossenfelder who is a working physicist.
But Sabine Hossenfelder pretty explicitly does not think that (and even states the contrary viewpoint in the original article) so you’re still making an unfair strawman argument.
>The whole idea that we are at the end of the line for particle accelerators smacks of huge hubris
The worst part is that the LHC has been a success. You don't stop after a success. You stop because you've hit a dead end. The only way to know if we need a bigger particle accelerator is by building it and then either seeing or not seeing any results. After doing this we can definitively agree on never building another accelerator. Giving up after finding the higgs boson is like winning a bronze medal and quitting instead of going after the silver medal.
It's like saying, we landed on the moon by flying less than 400,000km into space, so why don't we fly 800,000km into space and see if we can land on something else? When in reality, everything we know about astronomy tells us the next nearest thing we could expect to land on is Mars, and that's 77,000,000km away.
I know we don't understand particle physics as well as we understand astronomy, but, taking Dr. Hossenfelder at her word that the Higgs boson "completes" the "picture" and that the theoretical "loose ends" would actually require "energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test", it sounds like we're a lot closer to Mars than to the next breakthrough in terms of particle colliders.
This sounds reasonable, but we don't have the knowledge to be able to make a targeted experiment now, nor do we know whether we'll gain that knowledge within the next 100+ years. If we just stop, then we might not have the infrastructure or the people/ skills to make those experiments when the theory arrives.
Even if we didn't get a physics result from a high energy collider, we'd have a few more generations of skillful and motivated scientists/ engineers. Perhaps there are more efficient ways to achieve that, but I think "a waste" is perhaps an overstatement; we lose something either way.
Sabine's point is rooted in physics. It's that there are no hypotheses that are tested by the proposed energy levels of these colliders. It's just a fishing expedition. Quite frankly, having seen tons of fishing expeditions in biology (which individually cost way less, on the order of 100k to 1M), not doing it is the correct decision. Come up with a testable hypothesis that the collider will address, then build it.
So far the fishing expeditions in physics have been extraordinarily fruitful, both in the discovery of behavior that had not been predicted as well as in confirmation of theoretical results. But we are still far away from a UFT and there is a lot of knowledge that is still to be discovered in this field. On the total budget that humanity spends annually on far less productive things (such as weaponry) this is a small drop in the bucket. Let's see where it leads and if it turns out to be a dead end then we can all it a day. But as long as every new level of energy seems to give more and novel insight I'd much rather continue one step too far than to call it a day and maybe miss out on something crucial that we just had not thought of yet.
What fishing expeditions are you talking about? Every major physics construction project to date has been justified by at least one, maybe more specific expected result that is theoretically predicted. There are a handful of we don't know things going on, like keeping a staff on hand for Voyager probes, but the main project was a smashing success.
Why are we going nowhere as a species without advancements in fundamental physics? That's quite a loaded statement, and not something we can just agree is a given. I mean sure, physics advancements are good and important, but I would say what's holding us back as a species is climate change and human suffering and inequality.
Carl Sagan, MLK, and many other such thought leaders often talked about the existential threat posed by the fact that our scientific progress has so greatly outpaced out moral progress.
That’s one of those things I’ve pondered but don’t think I’ve seen it discussed by the two you mention, both of whom I respect deeply- got any good links?
> I mean sure, physics advancements are good and important, but I would say what's holding us back as a species is climate change and human suffering and inequality.
It's unfortunate that most of the general public does not understand how important it is that fundamental physics continues to advance. Advancing fundamental physics is the most important thing humans can do. It is not difficult to argue that the basis for our civilisation, that is, technology, would be impossible without the advances in fundamental physics. Some products of physics:
- Electricity (our ability to generate, store, and transmit it)
- Lasers
- Electron microscope (arguably, the great leap forward in medical research)
- Nuclear energy (arguably the cleanest energy available)
- WiFi
- GPS
- The internet (developed by Berners-Lee while at CERN)
- The semiconductor (the camera on your phone would not exist without fundamental physics)
- X-ray and Magnetic Resonance imaging.
- Radiotherapy to treat cancers
There are many others that we take for granted every day.[0] Even our understanding of DNA, the most significant discovery in biology, would have been impossible without fundamental physics in the form of X-ray crystallography. (and Francis Crick was a physicist!)
(It can also be argued that climate change, human suffering, and inequality can be directly solved if significant advances in fundamental physics are made: new powerful sources of energy like fusion or something else yet unimagined could transform our economic landscape entirely by driving the cost and harms of energy production and use down by large percentages. The Standard Model has revealed the structure of the atom, yet the benefits of this knowledge have yet to be broadly realised and applied to control matter at the sub-atomic level. There might be no practical limit to our ability to control matter! It might be possible to make wars (economic and physical) over resources irrelevant.)
The question of spending money is the question of politics, and there is a finite budget. I would argue the reason for all of these inventions is the increasing number of educated people (not only physicists) in the world. So maybe investing this money into education is better. Also, of course the physics will birth all of these inventions, it would be useless otherwise.
> I would argue the reason for all of these inventions is the increasing number of educated people (not only physicists) in the world. So maybe investing this money into education is better.
This is an alarming statement. I'm not sure on what basis you make it. Education seems to very much be a "you-get-what-you-pay-for" type deal. I'll assume that you know the comparative histories of educational policies in China, Russia, U.S.A, East Africa, so instead of rehashing those, let me give you a comparable sentence to yours:
"I would argue that the reason for all these life-saving surgeries is the increasing number of educated people (not only surgeons) in the world. So maybe investing this money into education is better."
fwiw. Having read Dr. Hossenfleder's book and others, I believe she is correct that we don't need another accelerator because the benefit for the cost just isn't there. Fundamental physics has stagnated. Other avenues of fundamental physics should be funded instead of being crowded out, urgently.
I made an argument to challenge the parent comment's argument. It is obvious that nor physics nor population size led to advancements alone. There are many confounders.
What I wanted to point out is: there is a trade-off in allocating budgets which are finite to different parts of society. If science gets a certain budget, I argue (like the original author) that new collider takes away a part of the cake from others. However you frame the sources of the money, the budget is obviously limited and can be directed in other experiments and ideas as well.
What prompted my response is defending physics through listing inventions. Ironically, the proposed experiment might never give any practical application, and it shouldn't in my opinion. The search for knowledge, especially as fundamental as this is enough. But this part of physics already appeals to wide audience and has great PR. There might be other parts that could use billions but are not as sexy to general public.
it's a very myopic perspective to act as if progress in physics is the be all end all of human progress.
Any kind of social progress or social technologies that could alleviate human suffering, greed, or solve problems of tragedy of the commons would be much more interesting.
Technology simply allows us to be more effective at what we already are doing, doesn't make us better people.
Sure, and the foundational breakthroughs in physics has allowed us to spend more time thinking about social progress and technology. The two are tightly coupled.
I can't even begin to calculate how many hours of humanity has been saved by the breakthroughs and technology that physics has bequeathed us.
I did not say anything about LHC2 opportunity cost being better than no LHC2 for physics. I was giving a counterargument for specific flawed reasoning/question.
It's a good argument, however I think it's pretty clear to a lot of people that today's issues (e.g., climate change) are indeed real and indeed important.
But to your question of why to spend on them, it's because it's going to cost us a lot more (and not just money) down the line if we don't address it.
I would really love to see other ideas for physics than going higher energy colliders. Granted, my knowledge is limited, but to me it feels like in experimental physics right now there is a bunch of expensive and complex experiments that look like they reached diminishing returns.
Generally, in tech it feels like we keep eeking out small improvements in efficiency, but there is nothing that jumps us up a level.
But also:
* govs and central banks all over
the world are printing money like crazy so the economy doesn't tank
* important research projects still battle for funding
* climate change battling measures, like building clean power plants and storage, are not built at large enough scale because money is not there
Where is all the trillions going? Stock market and real estate? Cool. Do we get any value out of it? Is pensions funds all that matters anymore?
Objectively, spending the money on covid research would be more beneficial than a particle collider. I don't see how anyone can even debate this. I know CERN doesn't specialise in that, but my question is why is our society so inefficient when it comes to spending money?
If you had 20 billion euros, you're telling me you can't buy anything else more productive for physicists to work on with it? It's 20 billion euros. You could buy a small country with that.
Suppose you find a way to use some grand-unification energy source thanks to some new high-energy physics discovery. Then that would mean way more energy available to manufacture tests, medical supplies, synthetic coton and masks, electricity to perform new drugs research on computational models, etc.
Of course, that's the best-case scenario, but the way progress goes has always been quite impredictable.
A bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. Having physicists continue work using the current collider and literally spending the 20b on education, would be a better use of their money than this.
I understand your way of thinking, but if it had been meticulously followed throughout history, don't you think that almost no scientific research would have been made? Why should anyone spend time thinking when we have so much to do with our hands and readily available knowledge?
The difference is that most scientific breakthroughs didn't cost 20 billion euros. Not trying to be a smartass, i know the value of research without a certain end goal or outcome, i just think this is one exception where money is irresponsibly spent.
Suppose we spend $20B to discover that the standard model remains intact. Then, physicists request $100B for the next supercollider, only to discover that the standard model remains intact. At what point does a society say “no” to future requests without being deemed “anti-science”? Without worthwhile results, economically, adderall enhanced physicists are no different than trailer park meth heads when they’re both eating government cheese.
But the standard model is already broken by known experiment results... Now is a race to affine results (or find more new phenomena) and navigate through the possible new theories.
We're already pouring huge sums into covid, that's likely near diminishing returns now. On the other hand, what would be really helpful is spending a lot of money on viruses that arent currently causing pandemics. There was a lot of research into SARS in the mid 2000s that lost funding when interest died up, and if we'd continued that work, we would have been so much better prepared to stop COVID, perhaps even with a vaccine already approved and ready to deploy. Pandemics spread faster than researchers work, and we should be investing in virology research and preparedness before theres an outbreak, not after it happens and it's too late.
Spending on cern doesn’t mean not spending on covid research. So far cost per physicists hour at cern really has not been that crazy. Compare to space missions where often the physics teams are 2 orders of magnitude smaller...
What if with this research we found how to manipule matter and energy at microscopic magnitudes and we can finally develop nanomachines? that could solve a large number of current health, construction and energy problems.
Covid will be eventually solved, not like cancer of course.
> why is our society so inefficient when it comes to spending money?
There's no recipe for that - it's a gamble. The amounts of money that are spent in science have been increasing rapidly for decades to great proportions, but there's no law that says that the returns won't be diminishing.
Also, covid has been politicized and nationalized so you 're not likely to see a concerted effort , even if it costs way more that way. Human crowds it seems are not wise enough to be efficient.
Isn't concern trolling when you pretend to support something but actually make arguments against it? This article seems to be pretty firmly against the idea of building a collider from the title on. I would think textbook concern trolling would be indicated by an argument like "I want a bigger particle collider, but I'm just concerned about the cost" while this article just says a particle collider is not going to be useful, lets fund something else instead of investing on inertia
Actually climate change is the main reason we need bigger colliders - it's happening, we won't coordinate until it is too late, so unless we find new sources of energy of whole different magnitude we are doomed. I suggest we move to acceptance stage already. Right now most people are in anger or denial and it is getting boring.
I disagree. Doing science is one of the best ways for us to spend money as a society. The money spent there is not "wasted", a lot comes back in jobs, training, better technologies. Moreover, it is money that goes into society, not into the pockets of a few scoundrels linked to billionaires. This is an extremely retrograde view of science, in my opinion.
I don't think they disagree that we should spend money on science. The question is which science. A bigger collider is a lot of money, following a lot of money on the existing collider. It could instead be spent in many other areas, with at least as good an opportunity to repay itself in jobs and technologies. Fundamental physics is sexy and has had tremendous success, but less sexy areas can also provide benefits.
I think the problem is that this well funded science establishment is good at getting money where other science people are not that good at it. Maybe better to spend it on some science than on something else if other scientists would not manage to get that funding anyway.
Who cares where the money goes? Money is just worthless green paper.
The fact is, highly trained people are fed by the government, which is turn steal that food from someone else, to research something of questionable value. All the effort that went into training those people, and the effort to feed them, and the good these people could otherwise do, may be wasted.
"We as society" (What does that even mean?) shouldn't spend effort on science. You as an individual should.
I do understand the concept of taxes. We as society fund police and defense. That could even be argued to be a definition of society. While taxes are still theft, this theft appears to be necessary.
It's an entirely different thing to steal from almost everyone in order to fund what most consider bullshit. You have no business even thinking about what other people should do with their time (remember, money is a proxy for time), just because taxes are a concept.
I'm bothered by the attempt to suggest we either have a particle accelerator or a global warming research centre (or whatever it was called). I can't see why they are related, and imagine there is room for both.
I don't think human knowledge and striving for it should be reduced to a question of what the practical benefits of it are - that sort of thinking didn't put man on the moon.
So overall, not a very well argued position from my perspective.
As quoted in this previous discussion, I think this is a key point:
"particle physicists should focus on developing new technologies that could bring colliders back in a reasonable price range and hold off digging more tunnels."
Creating just a bigger version of the current collider with incremental advancements in technology is very likely a poor use of science euros. The money should be used to investigate other methods for particle acceleration and investigation. Some linear accelerator concepts could be much less expensive than very large circular colliders, but I imagine research into those areas are not funded due to the particle physics budget being mostly consumed by CERN.
This type of problem has happened in fusion research. The fundamental physics of how to build an economic fusion reactor still needs to be worked out, but almost all funding has been cut in fusion research to pour concrete and build magnets for the ITER project. It is clear that the $14 billion and rising reactor cannot lead to economically viable fusion reactors on any kind of reasonable timescale. ITER is currently planned to be fully operational in 2035 and, if the past is anything like the future, there will continue to be more delays.
> Some linear accelerator concepts could be much less expensive than very large circular colliders, but I imagine research into those areas are not funded due to the particle physics budget being mostly consumed by CERN.
That's not true; CERN has no particular commitment to circular colliders. Scientists from CERN have proposed linear colliders, along with more exotic options like muon colliders.
It's surprising to see so many comments here entirely miss the point, or arguing against points Sabine never made.
She's not arguing for stopping scientific research, but finding more optimal ways to do said research. She has continuously been pointing out that the particle physics community behaves like a cabal. There is little if any progress or evidence of future progress yet they keep increasing costs and forging ahead with their -surely by now flawed- interpretation of scientific research.
Sabine Hossenfelder outlined a lot of unexplored scientific areas that are ripe for research and proposed a lot of alternatives.
The main issue is clearly the sunk cost fallacy. At some point, scientists need to cut their losses short and re-align themselves with more promising avenues. The reproducibility crisis and string theory debacle proves that scientists are not immune to biases, short-termism and self-serving behavior.
I'm curious why you call the string theory a debacle.
From what I followed, the debacle was rather with supersymmetry. And even though, the research in this domain stimulated the development of new mathematical tools.
Finally, as with all failed research, it would have been pretty hard to rule it out without trying to search it before, so this negative result is as much positive result in favor of rival theories.
Probably because for the amount of time and money its absorbed it seems to produce very little of value in terms of applications, it's hard to perform real experiments with, and string theory and high energy particle collision physics both absorb the vast majority of grant money - and by extension - make it harder to do work in physics that doesn't pay homage to those two large bodies or continue that work.
The problem is she's misrepresenting the position of the particle physics community. Here's a short talk on what they expect to find with a larger collider: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q
I do not understand why it is a “either or” problem. We could fund CERN and climate research and other things. It just comes down to political will. Trying to phrase them as one for other is disingenuous and wrong. There is also a hidden assumption that all science work should have immediate social relevance and impact and one kind of science is replaceable by another. By that logic, we should not think about space exploration since the marine ecosystem is being over-fished.
>Trying to phrase them as one for other is disingenuous and wrong.
By this logic we can spend infinite money on infinite wants, but this is simply not true. Money spent on one project forces there to be less for other projects. As such it's reasonable to consider opportunity costs for a project.
Let's say we stop international conflicts, make successful demographic transitions in all countries, and concentrate our time and efforts in making progress in biology, physics, and all?
Yes I know that what I propose is impossible right know, but it makes me cringe that we are such an irrational species...
I do not believe this to be a zero sum game. You can argue for the merits of each one independently. Along with infinite wants, we also have infinite problems.
It’s not zero sum in the long run. But the converse of zero sum is not unlimited sum, especially in the foreseeable future. Thus spending on one project limits Spending for other projects.
It’s a mystery to me how people with an outlook as parochial as Sabine Hossenfelder’s even get a job in the sciences. This is really mind bending and quite frankly unsettling.
I'm not sure if you're being satirical or so unaware that you're actually just proving her point without even noticing it. Physics has been captured by so much rent-seeking activity that many people who feel like Hossenfelder don't even speak up any more because they're afraid of killing their career.
So concentrating on science to "fix" climate change is less important than a new particle collider? What good will a particle collider do if the human race has radically changed the climate in the next 50 years? That's her point and it's very relevant.
Looking at the replies to my comment, it seems clear that the brain rot is well advanced with some people. Therefore some random points in no special order:
23 billion is nothing for a project that has 23, mostly western European, member states paying for it. The GDP of Switzerland alone (which has a population of only 8.5 million) was around 700 billion in 2019.
Climate change is not going to be solved by an “International Center for Climate Modeling”. That is so completely nonsensical that I didn’t even thought it worth pointing out. We already have climate models – that’s how we know we have a problem.
Also, we have solar, wind, hydroelectricity and nuclear fission already. The first two could be refined a lot. The last one I am not a fan of but it’s either that or coal in many places. THAT is what’s going to solve our energy and thus climate problems. It will also solve some longstanding geopolitical problems as a bonus (no more western money for the Saudis).
That being said, nuclear fusion could be developed much faster (than ITER is) with the right minds and organizational structure behind it. Just look at the Space Launch System (SLS) which still doesn’t exist, has cost 20 billion already and whose ultimate goal is throwaway rockets vs. what SpaceX has done with a fraction of the money, faster.
Then there’s individual transportation which is being solved right now with electric cars and batteries. Both of which are just at the beginning of their development. More interesting to me however, is the loss of energy through badly built homes that have almost no insulation at all (U.S. and Japan come to mind).
Hossenfelder rhetorically asking “why, you may have wondered recently, do we not have a center for epidemic modeling” is the worst kind of pandering to the fears of the people at this moment. It’s also wrong because epidemic modeling has been done for a long time at many universities and the pharmaceutical industry.
Hossenfelder says a lot of extremely idiotic things in her piece but “the potential rewards are unclear” is on my number one spot: The potential rewards in experimental science are always unclear – that’s one of the key characteristics of experimental science.
The only point she could potentially have would be the one about inertia in funding. That’s something I don’t see into as I don’t work in that field.
Given, however, how ill-informed and, I have to assume, ill-intentioned her other twaddle in that article is, I would rather hear that information about funding problems from a more trustworthy source than her.
Maybe she has a point, but for the wrong reasons. There's something to be said about "throwing more money" believing that it will end up in better science. It's politically easy to pass a bigger, huger accelerator: tons of jobs, recognizability of the effort by taxpayers , but scientifically it's a rather predictable bet. It's similar to rich people throwing megatons of money on startups believing that they are creating something useful. LHC size projects are not that exciting projects. They are mostly a welfare package for the hordes of decomissioned physicists who are left behind after the wild century of Physics. It's probably more fruitul to seek innovative accelerator designs or other kinds of stuff. Or, that money would probably better be spent if they just paid the scientists to work and compete on whatever they like. Perhaps physics needs more patent clerks who spent a lot of time thinking rather than submitting grants, catching flights to perpetual meetings and publishing 500-author papers.
Indeed, big colliders are like the Space Shuttle of science.
The STS was an unmitigated disaster for everything associated with getting space-related things done. It sucked up all the money and gave net nothing back.
A big collider will be good at soaking up budget with not much detail oversight needed, but will not deliver new insight. For that you need one a hundred times bigger, say straddling the moon. Which we would be better-equipped to build today, if not for the Space Shuttle.
Couldn't agree more. Obsession with fundamental physics as "the only way forward as a species" is absurd. Do any of our discoveries in CRISPR or check point inhibitors rely on the knowledge of the Higgs Boson or the fundamental theory? No.
Stop the obsession with quixotic physics quests. Spend the same (or more!) resources on apied science focused on climate change, pandemics, longevity, clean energy, etc. Far more rewards in that direction.
Here's a video that she made on the subject in mid-2019 [1]. I really love her other videos and her philosophical pragmatism [2][3], but honestly I don't know why she's been spending so much energy on this particular subject.
Regarding climate change, do we need more research? I don't know but it seems like if we're going to divert funds then maybe it should be toward action at this point.
[1]. https://youtu.be/WIMGAFL8DVk
[2]. "the simplest assumption is no assumption"
[3]. "an entity exists if it is useful to explain observed phenomena"
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadHowever, there are other points the author made.
First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance.
Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination. What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard? I supposed that could be useful, but even more pressing was how to motivate the people of Earth to make the necessary changes.
Also, the money offered doesn't seem that huge on scale of countries. 1 billion dollars per year for operating cost? I suppose we could make better use of money that would otherwise go to making a new collider, but so we can do so elsewhere as well.
Me either and often the technology you get on the back of it doesn't show up for decades and decades anyway.
LHC was justified as a search for the Higgs. The Higgs was found. Everyone was happy. Fine.
LHC 2.0++ is just banging rocks together for the sake of it. Something interest might fall out, or it might not.
But considering that we still don't understand quantum origins, have no clue how to make a theory of quantum gravity, and have no idea what Dark Energy is, or even if it exists at all, it might be better to spend the money on pursuing creative theoretical leads in those other directions and coming back to country-sized experimental hardware when there are some new theories to test.
Though the utility of a big collider would be in diversifying the types of decays observed?
All we need is one anomaly in the vast data processing. There are many things which are expected to be seen at higher energies. If they are not seen, it still says a great deal and will guide theoretical discussion.
That would be an argument to start even sooner rather than later or never. If you want to combat the usefulness of the research the only arguments you can make are that the results are not useful at all, or that they can be obtained cheaper, faster, or more reliably with other means.
The "it takes decades to bear fruit" works even against education. And I'm sure nobody would agree to be barred access to any tech that was the result of decades of research or simply took decades to reach market.
I'm also not a fan of this project simply because I don't think an incremental advance in colliders will bring anything new at all, certainly not because it will take too long to reach market. As the saying goes, you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. To achieve the next breakthrough we need something on a scale we're simply not capable of building now, or soon.
Maybe there are better ways to measure the tiny signals that hint at new physics, but the question is what we can do now. I would personally say its optimistic to assume we'll get a big breakthrough if we don't invest in the incremental upgrades.
Usually big projects tend to need to be conservative and use off the shelf available materials (just in clever ways).
Sabine's big point is not that we shouldn't do basic science, it's that we shouldn't do bad basic science; that is science that isn't driven by hypotheses. Historically in science you would create a new model that agrees with current facts, but makes an prediction that some unobserved event X would be observable. You build your apparatus or design an experiment to observe X, and then confirm of reject the model.
In the case of a bigger collider, what is X?
This quite mistaken based on what I've read. Historically NASA hovers at around a 10:1 ROI. SpaceX would not exist today without the huge benefit of all the material NASA has published historically.
MRI may not have come from colliders, but modern medical imaging absolutely has benefited from these projects. There's a researcher that commented in a sibling thread with specific benefits to their project.
> In the case of a bigger collider, what is X?
Here's a quick summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q
I suggest you look at what was spent on the Space Shuttle, which turned out to be non-reusable (it was re-manufactured after each flight for up to a year.) No ROI there.
Fun facts: NASA knew from the very first flight that they were losing several tiles during launch, and no tiles were optional. Also, NASA managers were given photos of Columbia's damaged wing, which had a gaping hole in the leading edge, before re-entry, and sat on them. I wouldn't fly a Cessna 152 like that.)
https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html
That and the ISS sucked most of the funding out of US space research and is still going on.
My constructive suggestion? Take a chain saw to the ISS on the next "mission."
Unless we made a trillion dollars on that bungled program alone, still not seeing ROI:
https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-ig-iss-cost-u-s-75-b...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/197600...
In addition, that was pre-bungled Space Shuttle and ISS programs. Even the GAO is reticent to talk about how much money was wasted in those programs in case future space programs would be immediately cancelled due to gross mismanagement.
2) If you're a scifi fanboi, just admit that you support whatever wasteful spending NASA does. But don't hide behind obfuscated numbers that you haven't read and don't understand.
Your second point goes beyond the bounds of civility here.
Yeah that argument was extremely dishonest. We don’t build a 1 billion dollar climate change center because that 1 billion is going to beget trillions of dollars in disruption. Throwing 20, 40 billion with staffing (which comes back into the economy) over a decade or more all-in is a total different ballgame.
This is an extremely narrowminded view. Lasers, MRI, X-Ray machines, etc ... are all made by engineers after physicists tried to understand the fundamental nature of reality. One would argue that modern electronics are possible because research was done about Quantum Physics, a fundamental nature of reality.
The very next part of his statement covers that... It could be decades before "society" sees fruits of the research.
> To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance.
His next sentence also says "research is good for research sake" - there doesn't need to be "real world results" for the research to be worth it.
You talk about narrow mindedness... then ignore second part of the first sentence and completely ignore the second sentence... Seems narrow minded to do that?
I tend to agree on both those points... It could be a long time to see results and research for research can be good.
Essentially none of the particle physics done since the 1960s has had any application outside of fundamental knowledge, with no prospects for it having those applications in the future. At best, and even this is stretching a bit, there are indirect benefits of developing the machines that are needed to explore this frontier (i.e. like some of the argued benefits of space exploration).
Whether that changes the calculus of whether these things are worth the price is still a question (in my opinion: they are), but I don't think making analogies to applications of discoveries of fundamental physics operating at very different energy scales is a good argument. The development of quantum physics (lasers, MRI, etc), while a frontier at the time, is essential to understanding commonplace things like the cohesion of solids or the properties of metals or semi-conductors (say) at room temperature. To my knowledge, there is nothing outside of astrophysical objects and the early universe that depends on knowing what is at the current frontiers in particle physics (or even what was the frontier in 50 years ago).
Quantum computing only solves a few specific problems. Like showing every possible outcome. For instance print(x), and your goal is to get a through z.
But if the problem is linear, like 2+2, it doesn't help to have quantum computing.
I think nuclear physics provides an instructive example that sits in between some of these extremes. Here the energy scales are way way lower than current frontier standards, but also fairly divorced from things in everyday life. Yet nuclear physics has applications (in medicine, in power and [unfortunately] in war). These applications do tend however to be quite specialized (we don't have atomic cars, vacuum cleaners or whatever) so it didn't revolutionize the world the way our understanding of electromagnetism or quantum mechanics did. [I don't want to downplay the effect of nuclear science, but it isn't ubiquitous in our lives].
Barring a fundamental change in our understanding, I would expect that trade off between energy scale and specialization to continue to hold and any developments based on particle physics (of the 60s-present) to be very specialized.
Let me be clear though -- you don't know what you don't know. It could be that what I think are reasonable expectations are wrong, and there are surprises waiting for us (this is one of the reasons I think particle physics is worth supporting).
That may not hold forever; but it's not a crazy assumption. Something who's existence you cannot deduce without energies that need specialized billion dollar equipment to reach is almost by definition not ever going to create or influence ubiquitous tech. That's quite different from stuff like quantum mechanics; those effects are quite visible in fairly everyday situations (e.g. the double-slit experiment doesn't need anything too exotic, and obviously lots of modern tech relies on tricks classical physics might observe but not predict).
That means that if particle physics is to be relevant, it's most likely going to be in places that are not ubiquitous. Maybe it'll help astronomers understand the universe, and maybe that has some application down the line. Or maybe it'll be in absurdly expensive high-energy devices that matter even with only a few copies in the world (and let's hope those aren't yet more weapons).
Still, seems reasonable to be pessimistic about the usefulness of particle physics investments of this type.
Whilst they are not commonly used today, it is not entirely improbable that they play a significant role in the future.
There’s also some developments related to grid computing, sensors, and electronics, which could be reasonably useful in other contexts.
So yeah, chasing the next fancy particle itself is not very relevant to most people (though still very important in our quest of trying to understand the world around us), but it still contributes to technological progress.
Another aspect is international collaboration. It’s not perfect, but CERN and ITER are organisations within which Chinese, Russians, Americans and Europeans (and many, many others) work together towards a common goal.
In my opinion, another important reason to support of keeping these large accelerators alive is there is a very real chance that the expertise to build these kind of devices could atrophy or be lost entirely given the long timescales involved. Even if one is opposed to building this specific collider, I think the prospect of losing this kind of institutional knowledge is concerning (though if one finds these things useless, you might care less if we lost that capability).
I entirely agree with your second point. I’ll add that it is also important to keep these people (from highly specialised technicians and physicists to diplomats and support staff) employed in positions where they can keep their skills sharp. Some of them then go back to their countries of origin to apply this experience and knowledge to help improve research and policy at home, whilst retaining personal links with their counterparts abroad.
In the grand scheme of things, the expenditure is a rounding error anyway.
As an analogy, I currently work on developing a medical imaging system where we track the trajectories of protons and heavy ions after they traverse a patient - in order to infer their energy loss and also the patient's "stopping power" map. With better knowledge of the stopping power we will be able to improve cancer radiation treatment with protons and heavy ions.
We would be nowhere without recent work in particle physics on large scale pixel sensors, Monte Carlo simulation software, readout systems, experimental cross sectional data (although not directly from the high energy experiments), particle tracking algorithms, electronics design for very thin sensors and radiation hard equipment ++.
But I think my main point, that applications of particle physics itself (and not the human and technological advances made to support it) are essentially non-existent stands.
The technological advances made to support particle physics may not have been possible without the effort to do the particle physics.
I.e. they are actually a result of the effort to understand the universe, even though they aren’t written down in the standard model.
It’s not at all obvious that we would have devised them any other way.
> One would argue that modern electronics are possible because research was done about Quantum Physics, a fundamental nature of reality.
which was making the connection that understanding frontier physics from 100 years ago directly enabled new technology, and that was a reason to support particle physics today (presumably b/c it might directly lead to similar advancements).
What does it mean to distinguish these two?
But I think there is a real difference in expectations between technology that operates on known physical principles and that which involves wholly new ones. Historically the latter has been associated with dramatic shifts in what is possible, for example our understanding of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics enables much of the modern world.
So I think presenting the study of particle physics in that light could mislead the public on just what is being done and what kind of outcomes it might precipitate.
We didn’t know what our understanding of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics would enable in advance.
Suggesting that any science would lead to specific outcomes would be misleading, otherwise it wouldn’t be science - it would just be engineering. R&D.
Science is always just exploration, and the outcome in terms of tools is always incidental.
No, but we did know what we had large gaps in our knowledge, even of things at close to human scales -- before those theories were discovered and worked out. It was then reasonable to expect that filling in those gaps might lead to new technology and applications also at human scales. And I'm not talking about direct applications, I'm talking about applications decades or more out -- but the fact that the energy scales were somewhat close to home meant such thing were possible.
From what we know about the current frontier in particle physics, nothing informs physics at human scales. This is a strong statement -- its many many orders of magnitude off in energy scale.
It could be that we're wrong about some that (and that's one of the reasons I think this research should continue) -- but it's not something that should be reasonably expected.
> Science is always just exploration, and the outcome in terms of tools is always incidental.
My comments were about how the science should be presented to the public in an honest way. And I think trying to sell people on science by quoting past developments that are quite different in character and expectations to what is being done today is dishonest and is a disservice to everyone involved.
The point that should be made is exactly the one you make above: science is about exploration -- full stop -- and we shouldn't make exaggerated claims about applications to sell people on it.
We shouldn’t make pessimistic statements about the potential benefits of the process of doing the research itself.
Science is valuable because of what we find, but it’s also always valuable because of what we learn to do in the process.
I agree we shouldn’t make exaggerated claims about benefits, but neither should we act as though one part is somehow incidental and not fundamental to why we do the exploration.
As the saying goes, thermodynamics owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to thermodynamics.
The cult of the scientist has gone too far in the US
No? Models are useful for making predictions.
If somebody like the POTUS tells you that nuking thunderstorms would be great against climate change, you don't have to just take their word for it. You can input that into your climate change model, and it will tell you how much of an impact this will have, and whether the impact is good or bad.
The difference between a better model and a worse model is that the better model will agree better with reality.
A shitty model, like the one POTUS is using, might tell you that nuking all thunderstorms would be great. Then we go ahead and do it, and we all die.
A better model, like the mental model that every 14 year old child that starts studying physics and radiation has, might tell you that nuking thunderstorms is a pretty bad idea that would kill us all due to dozens of reasons.
Given that we cannot make accurate predictions today of what the weather tomorrow will look like. If you want to predict the 50 year impact of more subtle changes like, e.g., covering the Sahara with black mats, you need a pretty good model to get an output that isn't multiple orders of magnitude off.
So..... what do we expect from better climate change models? Avoiding the apocalypse to begin with. Worth every penny.
You have an odd concept of both how to determine if nuking a thunderstorm, which was not what was allegedly suggested, but also what large scale climate models actually capture.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dozens-failed-climate-pr...
All this based on models, and look how wrong they where.
Just act completely random.
Don't wake up, and go to your job, under the assumption that you will get paid.
Don't avoid jumping down a 15 stories building under the assumption that you will die.
Don't breathe. Your model is biased towards breathing.
About 10K construction jobs, from high tech to low tech over the life of the build phase of the project, which is overlapping a world wide downturn of unknown length of time.
I mean they could build staircase to the top of the tall hill and still not have it be a waste if it keeps people in work and out of harms way. In this case we may get some physics as an upside to a neat way to stimulate industry.
Berners-Lee invented the web while working at CERN on organizing scientific information for collides and stuff.
> The stage was being set for the invention of the World Wide Web, and future history books will recount how, almost alone, Sendall supported the pioneering work of Tim Berners-Lee, then working in his group. After reading Berners-Lee's prophetic 1989 proposal for what would become the Web, Sendall wrote on the cover "Vague but exciting", and added at the end - "And now?" The rest is already history.
It's not either or. Knowing the impact is valuable for mitigating damage. You can allocate capital for mitigation more effectively if you have a more accurate model of the threats. Presumably at some levels funding more accurate models are net cost-saving, by increasing the efficiency of spend. I have no idea if we have or have not passed that level.
Similarly, a better model might provide a better understanding of different strategies for curtailing climate change. e.g. planting trees takes carbon out of the air directly (easy to estimate), but also changes the albedo of the underlying terrain. The impact of the albedo change is less clear, particularly as to how it changes regional weather patterns. It might benefit from better models to guide the most impactful locations to reforest. Again, I'm not an expert/maybe this is a solved problem, but I can see how these cases might exist.
We can say with high certainty that the great barrier reef will die unless some miracle happens and the world limits warming to 1.5°. And even then most of the reef will be gone. Yet Australia is a country that basically has no real climate policy at all, they still plan for decades of new(!) coal extraction.
Tell that to the hundreds, thousands, of valid scientific projects that cannot find funding. This collider, if built, represents not only a lot of money but those hundreds of smaller projects that didn't happen.
I once heard a physicist say that our society spends more on ring tones than it does fusion research. I suspect that this collider would yield an inverse. We will spend more on a narrow aspect of particle science than we do on vaccine research. More than on new antibiotics? More than on SETI? More than on detecting possible life in our own solar system? Particle science is great, but there are more efficient ways to spend billions.
The Superconducting Supercollider would have had to figure out how to deal with fire ants (apparently the magnetic fields attracted them).
That's the kind of really useful technology that spins out of projects like this.
Whether we build another giant particle accelerator or two (reminder: Not only CERN is interested, but China is already well down that path) is almost irrelevant if we don't fix our pollution and destruction of the ecosystems that allow Homo sap. to live comfortably (or, possibly, at all).
Figuring out how to do that economically and at scale includes a number of research problems. How do we generate power, produce concrete, do metallurgy, transport goods, fly airplanes, etc. without greenhouse gas emissions? How do we capture and sequester greenhouse gas emissions? How do we develop closed-loop sources for chemical fuels? How do we store energy in the power grid?
Perhaps what you meant was that we have the technology to do it without completely abandoning industrial civilization--though maybe people will have to sacrifice some things, like eating meat, driving private cars, or living in climate-controlled private spaces. And maybe that's an easier sell. But it's also a false dichotomy. Developing the technology to reach higher levels of carbon neutrality more quickly and more economically can and must happen at the same time that we do what we can today. Building more renewable power generation can happen at the very same time that we prototype carbon capture systems for natural gas power plants, battery-electric vehicles, or Sabatier-process closed-loop carbon-neutral natural gas production (which, incidentally, is also something we'll need on Mars). We can build Generation III nuclear plants now while researching Generation IV nuclear plants to build later. We can work now on making all of our technology more energy-efficient while developing fusion power to deliver unlimited, carbon-neutral energy for generations to come.
However, the reality is that people like the current situation and prefer government intervention in favor of carbon emitters. This unfortunately leads to situations where subsidies to e.g. coal based electricity generation have to be matched by subsidies to zero carbon electricity generation just to have any impact at all.
Alternative technologies already exist but there is no reason to use them because conventional technologies are blessed by the government. Of course you can forcibly pump money into them and eventually get the result you desire but only at a higher cost.
In Germany people absolutely disliked the idea of a revenue neutral carbon tax where every tax payer would receive a share of the collected tax back at the end of the year. Instead the government introduced a minimum price on CO2 certificates which is basically the same thing except it is not revenue neutral but hey at least it's not a "tax" so the uneducated mob won't come after you. People think they understand taxes but when you show them something "complicated" like a cap and trade system they suddenly don't understand a single thing.
But yea, if we do our jobs, its work will be less significant. Let's try to make that happen.
It's specifically about 'don't spend more money on X' (X being larger particle colliders) than about the specific examples A, B, C, of alternatives it mentions (climate research center, epidemic studies).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q
In any case, we should never forget that without advancements in fundamental physics we are going nowhere as a species. We might be able to come up with better refinements, better techniques, slightly better computers, etc. But sooner or later we are going to hit a physical limit, and we are going to need to seriously enlarge our fundamental knowledge corpus of how the universe operates if we are going to keep moving forward.
Did we read the same article?
> New measurements brought up new puzzles, and they built bigger colliders until, in 2012, the picture was complete. The Standard Model still has some loose ends, but experimentally testing those would require energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test. The scientific case for a next larger collider is therefore presently slim.
> Yes, one can hope. But there is no reason why the particles that make up dark matter or dark energy should show up in the new device’s energy range. And that is assuming they are particles to begin with, for which there no evidence. Even if they are particles, moreover, highly energetic collisions may not be the best way to look for them. Weakly interacting particles with tiny masses, for example, are not something one looks for with large colliders.
> And there are entirely different types of experiments that could lead to breakthroughs at far smaller costs, such as high precision measurements at low energies or increasing the masses of objects in quantum states. Going to higher energies is not the only way to make progress in the foundations of physics; it’s just the most expensive one.
There is no evidence at this point in time that we know all there is to be known at the next level energetic collisions. The whole idea that we are at the end of the line for particle accelerators smacks of huge hubris: we know all there is to be known. A similar sentiment pervaded the physics discipline about a hundred years ago and look where we've gone since then.
There were theoretical reasons to expect new results with previous colliders. I don't know that any similar reasons have been named here.
> There is no evidence at this point in time that we know all there is to be known at the next level energetic collisions. The whole idea that we are at the end of the line for particle accelerators smacks of huge hubris: we know all there is to be known.
This is a massive strawman argument to use, especially against someone like Dr. Hossenfelder who is a working physicist.
The worst part is that the LHC has been a success. You don't stop after a success. You stop because you've hit a dead end. The only way to know if we need a bigger particle accelerator is by building it and then either seeing or not seeing any results. After doing this we can definitively agree on never building another accelerator. Giving up after finding the higgs boson is like winning a bronze medal and quitting instead of going after the silver medal.
It's like saying, we landed on the moon by flying less than 400,000km into space, so why don't we fly 800,000km into space and see if we can land on something else? When in reality, everything we know about astronomy tells us the next nearest thing we could expect to land on is Mars, and that's 77,000,000km away.
I know we don't understand particle physics as well as we understand astronomy, but, taking Dr. Hossenfelder at her word that the Higgs boson "completes" the "picture" and that the theoretical "loose ends" would actually require "energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test", it sounds like we're a lot closer to Mars than to the next breakthrough in terms of particle colliders.
Even if we didn't get a physics result from a high energy collider, we'd have a few more generations of skillful and motivated scientists/ engineers. Perhaps there are more efficient ways to achieve that, but I think "a waste" is perhaps an overstatement; we lose something either way.
We don't know what we don't know, but one way or the other it's money spent on basic research and physics.
Here's the result of just one of the fishing expeditions I saw (Dr Murray is a saint: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pro.2339)
And even no result is a valid result!
It's unfortunate that most of the general public does not understand how important it is that fundamental physics continues to advance. Advancing fundamental physics is the most important thing humans can do. It is not difficult to argue that the basis for our civilisation, that is, technology, would be impossible without the advances in fundamental physics. Some products of physics:
- Electricity (our ability to generate, store, and transmit it)
- Lasers
- Electron microscope (arguably, the great leap forward in medical research)
- Nuclear energy (arguably the cleanest energy available)
- WiFi
- GPS
- The internet (developed by Berners-Lee while at CERN)
- The semiconductor (the camera on your phone would not exist without fundamental physics)
- X-ray and Magnetic Resonance imaging.
- Radiotherapy to treat cancers
There are many others that we take for granted every day.[0] Even our understanding of DNA, the most significant discovery in biology, would have been impossible without fundamental physics in the form of X-ray crystallography. (and Francis Crick was a physicist!)
(It can also be argued that climate change, human suffering, and inequality can be directly solved if significant advances in fundamental physics are made: new powerful sources of energy like fusion or something else yet unimagined could transform our economic landscape entirely by driving the cost and harms of energy production and use down by large percentages. The Standard Model has revealed the structure of the atom, yet the benefits of this knowledge have yet to be broadly realised and applied to control matter at the sub-atomic level. There might be no practical limit to our ability to control matter! It might be possible to make wars (economic and physical) over resources irrelevant.)
[0]: Physics for an advanced world: A look at the vital contribution that physics research has made to a number of major technological developments https://www.iop.org/publications/iop/2009/file_38209.pdf
This is an alarming statement. I'm not sure on what basis you make it. Education seems to very much be a "you-get-what-you-pay-for" type deal. I'll assume that you know the comparative histories of educational policies in China, Russia, U.S.A, East Africa, so instead of rehashing those, let me give you a comparable sentence to yours:
"I would argue that the reason for all these life-saving surgeries is the increasing number of educated people (not only surgeons) in the world. So maybe investing this money into education is better."
fwiw. Having read Dr. Hossenfleder's book and others, I believe she is correct that we don't need another accelerator because the benefit for the cost just isn't there. Fundamental physics has stagnated. Other avenues of fundamental physics should be funded instead of being crowded out, urgently.
What I wanted to point out is: there is a trade-off in allocating budgets which are finite to different parts of society. If science gets a certain budget, I argue (like the original author) that new collider takes away a part of the cake from others. However you frame the sources of the money, the budget is obviously limited and can be directed in other experiments and ideas as well.
What prompted my response is defending physics through listing inventions. Ironically, the proposed experiment might never give any practical application, and it shouldn't in my opinion. The search for knowledge, especially as fundamental as this is enough. But this part of physics already appeals to wide audience and has great PR. There might be other parts that could use billions but are not as sexy to general public.
Any kind of social progress or social technologies that could alleviate human suffering, greed, or solve problems of tragedy of the commons would be much more interesting.
Technology simply allows us to be more effective at what we already are doing, doesn't make us better people.
I can't even begin to calculate how many hours of humanity has been saved by the breakthroughs and technology that physics has bequeathed us.
Cf. "opportunity cost"
But to your question of why to spend on them, it's because it's going to cost us a lot more (and not just money) down the line if we don't address it.
Generally, in tech it feels like we keep eeking out small improvements in efficiency, but there is nothing that jumps us up a level.
But also:
* govs and central banks all over the world are printing money like crazy so the economy doesn't tank
* important research projects still battle for funding
* climate change battling measures, like building clean power plants and storage, are not built at large enough scale because money is not there
Where is all the trillions going? Stock market and real estate? Cool. Do we get any value out of it? Is pensions funds all that matters anymore?
If you had 20 billion euros, you're telling me you can't buy anything else more productive for physicists to work on with it? It's 20 billion euros. You could buy a small country with that.
Of course, that's the best-case scenario, but the way progress goes has always been quite impredictable.
There's no recipe for that - it's a gamble. The amounts of money that are spent in science have been increasing rapidly for decades to great proportions, but there's no law that says that the returns won't be diminishing.
Also, covid has been politicized and nationalized so you 're not likely to see a concerted effort , even if it costs way more that way. Human crowds it seems are not wise enough to be efficient.
But I can't imagine that throwing ever more billions into this particular very well funded science establishment is the best way to do it.
The fact is, highly trained people are fed by the government, which is turn steal that food from someone else, to research something of questionable value. All the effort that went into training those people, and the effort to feed them, and the good these people could otherwise do, may be wasted.
"We as society" (What does that even mean?) shouldn't spend effort on science. You as an individual should.
Surely you understand the concept of taxes? It's difficult to take this comment as a whole in good faith :/
It's an entirely different thing to steal from almost everyone in order to fund what most consider bullshit. You have no business even thinking about what other people should do with their time (remember, money is a proxy for time), just because taxes are a concept.
I don't think human knowledge and striving for it should be reduced to a question of what the practical benefits of it are - that sort of thinking didn't put man on the moon.
So overall, not a very well argued position from my perspective.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611738 (CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider)
"particle physicists should focus on developing new technologies that could bring colliders back in a reasonable price range and hold off digging more tunnels."
Creating just a bigger version of the current collider with incremental advancements in technology is very likely a poor use of science euros. The money should be used to investigate other methods for particle acceleration and investigation. Some linear accelerator concepts could be much less expensive than very large circular colliders, but I imagine research into those areas are not funded due to the particle physics budget being mostly consumed by CERN.
This type of problem has happened in fusion research. The fundamental physics of how to build an economic fusion reactor still needs to be worked out, but almost all funding has been cut in fusion research to pour concrete and build magnets for the ITER project. It is clear that the $14 billion and rising reactor cannot lead to economically viable fusion reactors on any kind of reasonable timescale. ITER is currently planned to be fully operational in 2035 and, if the past is anything like the future, there will continue to be more delays.
That's not true; CERN has no particular commitment to circular colliders. Scientists from CERN have proposed linear colliders, along with more exotic options like muon colliders.
She's not arguing for stopping scientific research, but finding more optimal ways to do said research. She has continuously been pointing out that the particle physics community behaves like a cabal. There is little if any progress or evidence of future progress yet they keep increasing costs and forging ahead with their -surely by now flawed- interpretation of scientific research.
Sabine Hossenfelder outlined a lot of unexplored scientific areas that are ripe for research and proposed a lot of alternatives.
The main issue is clearly the sunk cost fallacy. At some point, scientists need to cut their losses short and re-align themselves with more promising avenues. The reproducibility crisis and string theory debacle proves that scientists are not immune to biases, short-termism and self-serving behavior.
From what I followed, the debacle was rather with supersymmetry. And even though, the research in this domain stimulated the development of new mathematical tools.
Finally, as with all failed research, it would have been pretty hard to rule it out without trying to search it before, so this negative result is as much positive result in favor of rival theories.
(maybe super-asymmetry ;)
By this logic we can spend infinite money on infinite wants, but this is simply not true. Money spent on one project forces there to be less for other projects. As such it's reasonable to consider opportunity costs for a project.
Yes I know that what I propose is impossible right know, but it makes me cringe that we are such an irrational species...
I am generally against gov. spending, but it doesn't seem much compared to the waste on other industries.
23 billion is nothing for a project that has 23, mostly western European, member states paying for it. The GDP of Switzerland alone (which has a population of only 8.5 million) was around 700 billion in 2019.
Climate change is not going to be solved by an “International Center for Climate Modeling”. That is so completely nonsensical that I didn’t even thought it worth pointing out. We already have climate models – that’s how we know we have a problem.
Also, we have solar, wind, hydroelectricity and nuclear fission already. The first two could be refined a lot. The last one I am not a fan of but it’s either that or coal in many places. THAT is what’s going to solve our energy and thus climate problems. It will also solve some longstanding geopolitical problems as a bonus (no more western money for the Saudis).
That being said, nuclear fusion could be developed much faster (than ITER is) with the right minds and organizational structure behind it. Just look at the Space Launch System (SLS) which still doesn’t exist, has cost 20 billion already and whose ultimate goal is throwaway rockets vs. what SpaceX has done with a fraction of the money, faster.
Then there’s individual transportation which is being solved right now with electric cars and batteries. Both of which are just at the beginning of their development. More interesting to me however, is the loss of energy through badly built homes that have almost no insulation at all (U.S. and Japan come to mind).
Hossenfelder rhetorically asking “why, you may have wondered recently, do we not have a center for epidemic modeling” is the worst kind of pandering to the fears of the people at this moment. It’s also wrong because epidemic modeling has been done for a long time at many universities and the pharmaceutical industry.
Hossenfelder says a lot of extremely idiotic things in her piece but “the potential rewards are unclear” is on my number one spot: The potential rewards in experimental science are always unclear – that’s one of the key characteristics of experimental science.
The only point she could potentially have would be the one about inertia in funding. That’s something I don’t see into as I don’t work in that field. Given, however, how ill-informed and, I have to assume, ill-intentioned her other twaddle in that article is, I would rather hear that information about funding problems from a more trustworthy source than her.
Right now, we don't even know if humanity as we know it will be around in 100 years to reap the potential benefits of particle physics knowledge.
The STS was an unmitigated disaster for everything associated with getting space-related things done. It sucked up all the money and gave net nothing back.
A big collider will be good at soaking up budget with not much detail oversight needed, but will not deliver new insight. For that you need one a hundred times bigger, say straddling the moon. Which we would be better-equipped to build today, if not for the Space Shuttle.
Stop the obsession with quixotic physics quests. Spend the same (or more!) resources on apied science focused on climate change, pandemics, longevity, clean energy, etc. Far more rewards in that direction.
Well, yeah, because they're advances in medicine…
Regarding climate change, do we need more research? I don't know but it seems like if we're going to divert funds then maybe it should be toward action at this point.
[1]. https://youtu.be/WIMGAFL8DVk [2]. "the simplest assumption is no assumption" [3]. "an entity exists if it is useful to explain observed phenomena"