Obviously we cannot indefinitely build larger accelerators, and if it turns out that there is no support to go at least one size bigger, then perhaps our best hope is to find more effective ways to use the existing ones we have.
It's like engineers think about research. I worked in both engineering and research, so I could perhaps elucidate the difference.
Basically if one idea out of a hundred major ones really takes off, that's considered a success for a researcher. We're talking one, maybe two real hits throughout the entire scientific career. Researchers are well aware that much of what they do and publish is of little consequence. And they have to make "empty promises" from time to time to continue getting funding from the easily distracted politicians and upper management. They also almost have to have lofty, aspirational goals to keep the motivation.
Basically 99% percent of work of a good, hard working researcher consists of going down the alleys to see if they are blind, which they nearly always are. But the remaining 1% often makes the whole thing worthwhile to all parties involved. The question is, can you pull off that 1% hail Mary or not.
The potential discoveries we're talking about in this case could upend industries, reshape the world economy, and bring about the post-scarcity future, at least when it comes to energy. If we're willing to strain credulity a little, they might even enable interstellar travel. Is that worth a few days of the Pentagon budget? To me, it is, as long as we maximize the chance of the aforementioned Hail Mary.
In contrast, an engineer that doesn't succeed with her ideas at least 50% of the time would quickly find herself out of a job, so by definition the amount of risk engineers take on is as little as possible.
I agree, but the issue here is different I think. The linked article is also arguing for open ended research, the claim is that other open ended research is likely to be more fruitful, and that we have reached the limit of what we can learn from the particle accelerator route.
This is a fair debate to have, even if my personal preferred answer is “do both”.
A typical experiment is to accelerate a lot protons and a lot of antiprotons (or other particle), make them collide, and see the "debris".
The "debris" can be a lot of things. So you must filter some of them. For example pick only the one that produce exactly two photons and two "jets" of mixed particles that are difficult to identify. Now you calculate the energy of the photons and make a nice graph, of number of collisions versus energy of the photons. Using the standard theory you expect a smooth curve, but if there is a new particle you will see a peak somewhere.
If you see something, you only see the peak. So good luck imagining what the particle can be and how it interact with the other particles.
Another team peek another filter, like the experiment that produce two photons and electron and a positron. They make a nice graphic and hope to see an unexpected peak.
Another team ...
If the current theory predicts a peak somewhere you should find it, but if you find an unexpected peak yuo may have founded a new particle.
The theoretical frameworks are useful to guess which filters may be interesting and give a chance to find a new particle. The problem is that there are just too many possible filters and you can't try all of them.
I completely agree, but at some point you do have to make an economic risk/benefit calculation. Almost any person or organization can truly say that they might do something really amazing and important if given lots of money and resources.
You can't really make that calculation with truly open ended, fundamental research. Both the potential benefits, and the complexity/cost of obtaining these benefits (or finding out they can't be obtained) can be enormous. At best, you can improve the odds of getting something rather than nothing, by e.g. hiring the smartest people and letting them do their thing with ample funding, a-la the Space Race or Manhattan Project.
It just pisses me off that we spend trillions on bombing random people in the desert, yet a few billion for e.g. fusion research is an insurmountable obstacle.
If you assume that accelerator technology remains the same then you do of course have to keep making your accelerators bigger. There are a fairly large number of people working on plasma accelerators which are more compact because they support a greater accelerating potential. The AWAKE experiment [1] is an example of such a project.
As an aside, I think this is a great example of a role which fundamental science plays in society: It can facilitate step changes in technological progress.
First here is the original letter to Nature about new colliders: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6
I am certainly a supporter of new colliders, although there are other avenues of constraining particle physics models such as astrophysics, cosmic rays, direct detection experiments that need to be funded. But the authors of that letter to Nature and physicists in general need to be careful about promises, otherwise nobody is going to believe us in the future. And there is a tendency of promising a lot in order to get funding. And for the authors of the article to claim that "A good example of a guaranteed result is dark matter." is just blatant lie. I wish there was an experiment that would for sure tell us what dark matter is. (I'm an astrophysicist myself)
Sure, if you really think that the next bit where they specify what sort of Dark matter they will provide results on is irrelevant context.
I find it a bit rich that Hossenfelder can criticise particle physics for only ruling out some dark matter with words such as "a type nobody has seen". There are no direct detection of dark matter at all, so why does she insist that the models particle physics speak of are any worse than the others?
At the core of the controversy around Hossenfelder is that from the fact there's not been any really _unexpected_ experimental results for four decades concludes that there's no point in doing particle physics. There is not really much more to the argument than that, the rest is just quoting the optimistic physicists over the pessimistic ones and pretend they don't agree on the need for more experiments.
Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder is an opiniated physicist who gets a lot of flak for constantly commenting on this issue. Yet, I believe she does society a service in doing so.
I have yet to see anyone contradict her basic premise with factual information. I wish she were wrong, as I would love to see a breakthrough towards an experimentally verified Grand Unified Theory, including an explanation for what we currently identify as dark matter (similarly for dark energy). From what I read, physicists that criticize her take their own wishes for reality, and prefer to attack the messenger rather than confront the reality of the message.
Her opinion is totally legitimate and I’m glad people like her are speaking up. Everyone should agree that we need to spend money pushing the limits of science. That’s not the issue here. The point of Sabine’s criticism is that these empty promises need more scrutiny based on the failures of the recent past.
I don't really understand that argument. What does a failed prediction about super-symmetry in 1996 have to do with the opportunities of the next collider? How does "we didn't find evidence for or against supersymmetry at LHC" connect to dark matter experiments in its successor?
I'm also not really convinced of what she categorizes as failure. She enumerates quite a few incorrect predictions, but is that sufficient to show that the experiments were a failure? There are literally thousands of papers published because of the LHC and CERN claims hundreds of results. Maybe you can show that they are mostly worthless (which is not the same as boring or not spectecular), but she doesn't really seem to even try to do that.
> She enumerates quite a few incorrect predictions
You make a good point - without the expensive accelerator data, we’d have no idea that these omg ridiculous stupid waaaa predictions are true or false!!!
> You make a good point - without the expensive accelerator data, we’d have no idea that these omg ridiculous stupid waaaa predictions are true or false!!!
No, even with the accelerator data we probably still won't be able to conclusively rule out many approaches. We'll only be able to rule out overly specific variants of those predictions. Which, given the infinitude of available theories, doesn't do much to narrow things down.
Think of it this way: At one point, geocentric theories of planetary motion based on nested crystal spheres were requiring ever more elaborate arrangements with more spheres. More observations with greater precision only required adding more spheres.
We're somewhat in the same situation WRT high-energy physics today, in that larger and more powerful accelerators will only rule out particular theory variants, just as more powerful telescopes would only have ruled out particular arrangements of crystal spheres. Just as geocentrism as a category of theories isn't falsifiable by greater precision, many of the current approaches toward HEP aren't falsifiable by ever more powerful accelerators. You can always add another dimension or mathematical elaboration to explain the observations.
Which simply means that right now, another large particle accelerator probably isn't the most useful experimental approach to figuring out how to reconcile the two well-supported theories we do have.
That's the Hossenfelder take on the scientific method for you: whereby you make the experiments to confirm the theory. Which is fantastic because if science had ever worked that way you would be done with all experiments as the sensible ones would give known results, so what's the point.
The point is that you can spend a lump of money to check things out in that way, and fine - especially when you have the Higgs to confirm as well. But if you want to double down you need to have better evidence and a better argument. This is the logic that applies in any lab; sure take a punt look at x or y, if you're right then you'll get a grant and your career will thrive. If you're wrong you're out.
That's happened to many people (Hossenfelder included?) but it's now happening to the community and no one likes it. But given that is how science as an institution operates they shouldn't be surprised.
Here's a thought experiment. Would there be a bid for a new 100Tev machine if super symmetry had been confirmed at LHC? My bet is :for sure. And the key argument would be "we told you that we were good last time, so you have to back us this time"
The thing is we didn't know whether the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking involved the Higgs or something else. But we knew that there would be particles associated to electroweak symmetry breaking at TeV scale because of a unitarity bound, among other reasons (as happens with this particular kind of dark matter at 100 TeV that Sabine dishonestly calls "weasel words").
Something had to happen at that scale, the Higgs wasn't guaranteed. Sabine gets experimental physics backwards because no one planned the LHC to confirm the Higgs, but to know whether the Higgs existed and if it didn't what did instead. My money was mostly on it not showing up; many physicists were convinced it wouldn't, then it was there but we couldn't know beforehand.
There's a scientific case for making precision measurements of it, as was done with the electroweak bosons for very good reasons that she dismisses without showing any kind of understanding about the research she wants to shut off.
Were there other theories that explained why the elementary particles have mass except for the Higgs?
Regardless, the point stands: we knew that something is missing from the Standard model, and we knew that it must exist in a very precise range of energy. If it didn't exist there, it could have called into question the whole SM.
In contrast, we don't know that there must be some kind of dark matter at the 100TeV scale. We know that one particular type that we have thought about could exist, but we have other candidates as well, and there are ways that the 100TeV prediction could also be moved to higher energy levels.
Meanwhile, we don't even know if dark matter is a kind of matter or a modification of the force of gravity or a problem with approximations of Einstein's equations used in practice etc.
Sure, for instance EWSB by strong dynamics such as Technicolor. Here's a well known review from back in the day: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0203079
I'm not sure we're done with composite models. There are more exotic alternatives and then the fact remains that neutrino masses aren't in the SM.
I consider pretty hopeless to keep thinking that you can modify GR like plasticine in all the instances in which putting amounts of matter that doesn't radiate works (maybe it works because it's there and its effects on other stuff is how you "see" it). It has the appeal of making some people feel like they can call a whole profession or several a bunch of crooks, and that's pretty much what it has going for it outside of the scientists working in earnest on it.
The scientific method has usually worked by either coming up with theories and testing them; or by measuring things we thought we knew and finding new explanations when those turn out to be false.
What has not really worked too often has been coming up with mathematical models out of thin air, fitting them to all of the current data, extrapolating them to things we haven't been able to observe yet, and then building those things to check if they also worked.
That is why research into astronomical objects to ever greater precision is a promising candidate: we know what we expect to find if our current theories are correct, we know of real problems with our theories, and we can come up with new theories that predict such and such structures that should be visible in precisely such and such conditions.
This is the exact same model of how physics advanced from Tycho Brahe to Newton - people had models of the motions of the stars, they collected data to confirm those models, and found problems that they couldn't explain. Then Newton came along and found a mathematical model that, for the first time, explained those observations, and even reconciled them with other observations on the ground. We then spent a lot of time testing Newton's theories and didn't find any holes for a few hundred years.
Along came electromagnetism, the study of its dynamics, and the discovery of the speed of light problem, which couldn't be explained - requiring a new model that could actually explain everything we knew + the new data, and so on.
> What has not really worked too often has been coming up with mathematical models out of thin air, fitting them to all of the current data, extrapolating them to things we haven't been able to observe yet, and then building those things to check if they also worked.
But this is the story of early to mid 20th century physics! General relativity, the initial quantum mechanical theories, Dirac’s equation and anti-particles, neutrinos were all the product of this process of adding mathematical conveniences and extrapolating to things that turned out to be real. You can argue that more recent efforts in this direction have been much less successful than those were, but I think you have to turn a completely blind eye to the history of modern physics to claim that method “has not really worked too often”.
I don't think general relativity at least fits into this model: general relativity explained phenomena that special relativity just couldn't, and that were already well known to exist (gravity, objects of equal mass falling at equal speeds, time dilation in relation to acceleration).
I'm less well versed about the other subjects you mention, but there were several unsolved problems in physics at that time that absolutely required new theories (the photoelectric effect VS the wave behavior of light, black body radiation, the need to reconcile quantum mechanics with special relativity). In all of these cases, we had unexplained data or inconsistencies between theories.
By contrast, most of the theories that could be tested with a new collider are not solving anything - they are just theories about things that might exist, but could very well not exist at all. There is no hope of gaining insights into the measurement problem or quantum gravity at the next collider.
Even the theories of dark matter that could be tested are still too early to be worth a 20b bet. There are too many equally plausible theories of dark matter to say any one of them is promising enough to be worth that amount of money. And even ruling one of them out will not have a major effect on the field. It's not like it would rule out string theory, for example.
> What does a failed prediction about super-symmetry in 1996 have to do with the opportunities of the next collider?
There are two criticisms she articulates very clearly:
1. SUSY is not a testable theory, as it can always "retreat" to higher energy levels, without any real limit.
2. There is no scientific reason to believe SUSY should be true - it doesn't solve any real problem with any of the known theories of the universe. There are infinitely many ways that the universe could be different wherever we haven't looked yet - we can't possibly test all of those theories.
The combination of both arguments leads to the following "law": until we have a theory that solves unsolved problems in physics AND that makes concrete predictions with bounded parameters (so that a failure will explicitly rule out this theory, instead of pushing it endlessly to "maybe at higher energy levels"), we shouldn't be paying huge amounts of money to test things blindly.
This is the fundamental difference between, say, the Higgs prediction and SUSY - we were looking for a concrete thing that it was necessary to exist for the rest of the Standard Model to make sense; and we knew a clear range of energies where the Higgs must exist; if we found it like we did, we know the theory was correct. If LHC didn't find the Higgs, then it would have definitively ruled it out, leading to an explicit need for a new SM.
By contrast, SUSY has not been confirmed, but it is also impossible to rule out entirely, and none of our models NEED SUSY to be right - so in the end, experiments for SUSY don't achieve anything. We might as well be launching space missions to look for Russel's teapot.
In my opinion the problem with her messaging is that while she says that we should not fund the next collider, I think the argument should be, what's the best allocation of money in physics? And there are legitimate reasons to have the next collider even if we have no guarantee that it will deliver GUT or whatever. We have to venture into the unknown. We just should not lie that it will prove supersymmetry or is guaranteed to find dark matter because it sounds better.
Let's not pretend that we can't find some other way to allocate billions of collider dollars. I don't see it as a problem with her argument that she doesn't promote an alternative, because I'm sure then the critics would say that the alternative isn't promising enough. Yes we need to go into the unknown, but the point is that at some point, it's not cost effective to do that, and we live in a world with constrained resources where we can do more good by investing elsewhere.
How can you seriously make an argument about efficient allocation without discussing the alternatives you choose between? Is it even logically possible to define efficiency without comparing alternatives?
Yeah, it does get tiring that all the novelty in her writing shows up in the sections describing the well known history of the standard model resisting all attempts at being made into a theory.
But apparently the only point worth making is progress in particle physics has been slow. Well, to be fair the point Hossenfelder tries to make is that there's been no progress, and since that's not actually true convincing people of it regardless takes more work.
She has specific proposals - climate science (the most pressing concern of our times, if organized human society is to survive the next century or so), and astronomical research.
I would also mention that things like the Voyager missions are still providing novel data ~50 years after their launch. Will the same be true of the LHC, or any other particle collider?
I have bad news for you: Most high energy physicists I know go on to finance or "data science" before they would work on climate science. It is just not that interesting and doesn't pay well. HEP carriers prestige and is actually something aspiring physicists want to do.
That's not really bad news, is it? It doesn't seem unreasonable to redirect all the money being spent on HEP projects into climate science. That high energy physicists have great employment options is a good thing. It makes it much easier to close down those projects.
The HEP problems aren't going anywhere. Lets deal with more pressing concerns now and come back to HEP problems later.
It is really hard to organise 6000+ people to do anything. HEP won’t come back if you do. There isn’t much to figure out on climate change on a fundamental level anyways. It is a political and technological problem, not something you need a ton of scientists working on.
Organizations and cultures are kind of like living beings in this regard. The relationships and unspoken understandings between those 6000+ people are not things that could be replaced easily.
This is e.g. why the current rocket companies had to do a lot of reinvention and research instead of just switching the Saturn V production line back on.
No, you cannot reestablish HEP. HEP was extremely attractive to the theoretical inclined physicist because it contained a lot of unexplained data. There is no unexplained data now, HEP currenty lives on on the momentum it has. If you reduce this momentum to zero it will be gone (it will also be gone in 20 years if nothing is found)
It's kinda like the nuclear power industry. There was a huge investment by the government with an interest to build weapons. Some of it spilled over to energy plants. Once the government got what it wanted and had enough bombs funding was pulled. Nuclear power plants did ok for a while. Then decades passed and just a skeleton crew remains. Restarting the momentum is only possible through massive cost overruns.
Sure, but if the money were redirected to climate science, then the climate science people would be the well-payed ones, wouldn't they?
Also, there are other avenues for particle physics that don't require 20 billion dollars to start with. The 20 billion isn't going to retaining particle physicists, it's mostly going to hardware, engineering construction etc. efforts.
To be fair it’s not like HEP pays well. And redirecting the resources that currently flow to HEP to climate science wouldn’t make much difference, as it’s not a particularly large amount of resources in the grand scheme of things. HEP has a lot of people who work there for a lot less than they could make elsewhere because they like being physicists. If the field is gutted in favor of some other discipline they will move to finance or industry, not other scientific fields. We can approximate where they would end up be looking at where PhD graduates who don’t go into physics research end up.
Yes, climate is a pressing concern, but you are aware that climate science is descriptive an not a solution at all (more climate science will not change carbon emission). More funding on ITER might though (but I wouldnt call that climate science).
and I don't think she's even saying we shouldn't ever fund the next collider. I think she's suggesting that maybe we should wait until at least:
- many interesting falsifiable theories emerge that are resolvable at the accessible energy scale.
- technology catches up to make the engineering of such a thing cheaper.
It's not a terrible idea to wait. An important part of why the LHC was more effective than the hole in texas is that chemists using NMRs and doctors using MRIs drove technical and production improvements that brought down the cost of superconducting magnets.
There is this narrative that theoretical physics drives investments in technical innovation that improves other scientists, but I'm not sure that narrative is entirely true. It's often the other way.
It's hard to be loved when one wants to take money away from other people and their projects. A more promising line of action would be building another community of particle physicists with different goals than building a bigger collider, possibly aligned with Hossenfelder's suggestions. In this way they'll have something to gain and will fight for the budget that otherwise would go into the collider.
I'm not sure we're improving anything when we discover some public good is flawed, mediocre, or maybe even a little corrupt and respond by tearing it down and replacing it with nothing.
I think we've done enough of that. At this point I'm really only interested in positive proposals, what new stuff can we do? If we have a wave of new successes any old failures will fade out on their own.
Sure the base is covered, but I'm calling for "20 arguments for quantum gravity experiments" and #18 is "we've tried bigger and bigger particle colliders and the results are disappointing"
Everything's disappointing, I am (ironically given my tone here) only interested in hearing from those leading with solutions.
In summary, the reason for quantum gravity experiments is that investigating contradictions in our theory has always been the best source of progress in science, and experiment has to lead theory. We know that QM and GR contradict each other, and therefore we should research that.
She gives a variety of experiments that can research that. The equipment for which is of use in a variety of other sciences. (Particularly astronomy.)
I am not conviced. I mean, you wouldnt want/know what to do with 5 Billion (just looked up the LHC value, I am not sure what the amount of the new proposed accelerators would be) for these kinds of experiments, probably 100 Million would be plenty. If you think that Iter is 15 Billion then 5 Billion doesnt sound so much. (Also in the grand Scheme of things like 50 Billion is not much)
You mean like RHIC and JLAB? They had to compete mightily over comparative trump change for an upgrade to an electron-ion collider? (RHIC won but JLAB will contribute)
There are plenty of other areas of real research that are still nominally 'particle' physics that are actually able to put to paper real goals for what they expect to achieve.
There are also facilities like NSLS II that are heavily subscribed and doing research that is both very real world and pie in the sky.
Keep this in mind too - the Tevatron at FNAL would have had the Higgs discovery if they could have run another 3-5 years - they already had data order 3 sigma IIRC. Likewise, they would have had a lot more data on the top, something LHC has been gathering since the confirmation of the Higgs. This would have come at a fraction of the cost of the Higgs. Beyond that, has Higgs done anything more than add to the already known to be narrow avenues left for SUSY?
She is absolutely correct that the particle physics community needs their feet held to the fire to justify such an enormous single outlay and being a jobs program for a few thousand physicists is not one of them.
Collider projects were much more interesting to a public who had remembered the sea change of reactors and the bomb. While I love the LHC, from a productivity standpoint there are other projects which have been bearing more fruit for ~50 billion.
This Wikipedia entry is 1) generically about the type of unproven theoretical model without experimental support that is used in an attempt to justify investment in the next big collider; 2) more specifically, about a theoretical model that has been shown to be wrong in terms of describing what we observe.
Lisi's work is generally considered extremely unlikely by physicists. The eye-catching title and colorfulness of its author attracts a lot of attention with the public, but it doesn't match experiment. It has basically been abandoned.
I agree that we could probably spend billions of dollars better than on another enormous collider, even within high-energy physics, but it probably wouldn't be best spent on E8 Theory. Figuring out how it would be best spent, however, would be contentious to say the least.
What a fucking waste of money, imagine if these resources for a new collider could instead be used to bolster the ECB/SNB/BOE programs for purchasing corporate debt and equity. My understanding is they've only had ~few hundred billion to a couple of trillion for that so far.
THE MONEY SHOULD GO TO BAIL OUT BANKS AND THE CREDITORS OF LARGE CORPORATIONS, WHAT'S THE POINT OF TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSE ANYWAY.
Surely not so much a troll as a tub-thumping snort of sarcasm.
The truism of sales is that if a customer comes looking to buy a suit and a pullover then you make sure to sell them the suit first, after which the price tag on the most exorbitant cashmere pulli will seem utterly reasonable. With that as a guide maybe science budgets are best discussed on the tails of bailouts?
My point is that money is fungible. It's weird to me to see this complete disconnect between science funding and the trillions being created and pumped into the financial system. She/we are treating science funding as zero sum, yet completely ignoring the trillions being wasted (relative to spending on fundamental research) by central banks.
Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and the data processing pipeline they feed into are at the pinacle of human engineering. The software infrastructure supports analysis of petabytes of data distributed across 100s of clusters around the world. This is because physicists working on colliders and particle physics are extremely passionate and intelligent people. Isn’t it nice that a fraction of the smartest people on the world are not working on getting you to click Ads and are using machine learning to advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature?
Tremendous value has been created by their work and an institution like CERN is hard to replicate because it is hard to get brilliant people to a agree what to do for the next 30 years of their lives. I’ve been taught by professors that did precisely that. Whatever theorists predict is not the only reason for them to do it, higher energies are a technical challenge, a data processing challenge, something to focus your attention and creativity on. There is no question we should try to build better telescopes, a 100 TeV collider is a better microscope for High Energy Physics.
This is personal to me, some of my friends work at CERN. I can’t help but feel it is personal to her. I actually met her once, she seemed nice enough, I just don’t understand why she focuses her time on work that is adversarial as opposed to constructive.
> > She didn’t cut it and now is in a non-tenured position at a second rate institution.
Lee Smolin, who did "cut it" and who worked in several first rate institutions, wrote about the same thing in his 2006 book The Trouble With Physics. So Sabine Hossenfelder is not alone with these opinions.
How dare you? None of us have ever said something in a comment that was over the line! Um... at least not so far this morning... I think... um... (furtively checks comment history) nope, not me. I don't do that kind of thing (mumbling) so far today...
We've all been there. Props for recognizing it, admitting it, and dealing with it.
It is pretty representative of the state of the academia. You should have left it in, if only as to serve as a reminder that science nowadays is all about status.
Ignoring the fact that this is another ad hominem attack, judging a researcher by her/his home institution won't get you anywhere. I know dozens of outstanding mathematicians and physicists who are very well known in their respective fields and reside at less-than-well-known institutions. (Often, because their family is from there and they took the chance to go back.)
Generally speaking, in Central and Western Europe it doesn't matter which institution a researcher is from. They're all good and those at top-tier institutions are only marginally better at best.
I agree with you. I would still love to work in academia, but when the work required to get proper funding is tied to the extension of your contract it can lead to some sleepless nights.
In the book God Particle, the author describes how the funding for colliders in USA stopped after the cold war and it was extremely demoralizing even as a reader.
More structural funding for open source software would also be welcome. Software that deals with communication (browsers, protocols, email, filesystems, codecs, etc.) should be fully open and developed by universities and government institutions, imho.
I think the argument being made there is that when you gather smart people together, with resources to work on a hard problem, they will tend to invent things on the side which we didn't know we needed.
An academic committee to decide what software was worth funding, in the 80s, would probably have come up with a very different list to yours. And would have hired people from safer, more academic, backgrounds than Sir Tim.
>This is personal to me, some of my friends work at CERN
That is very clear. You didn't engage her argument at all.
Is is really too much to ask for scientific mega project to generate all that value, while at the same time same pursuing a central object that is scientifically viable?
Building a high energy collider is like building a larger telescope. The only things you can be sure of is that you will be able to understand whatever you have seen better than before. There is scientific consensus that we should be able to understand dark matter better by building one aswell. This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public. Attacking this communication to the general scientific community is different from attacking the substance of these technical arguments. One can be done by a blog post, the other would need to be accepted by a scientific journal. Physical review letters would be more than happy to publish substantive attacks on prevailing beliefs about dark matter.
Really - I thought that we were debating an article by a scientist, who along with many other scientists disagrees with that position.
>>This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public.
And yet the general public is being asked to pay for it. Perhaps sorting out that gap and explaining how understanding dark matter will be as important as (for example) curing cancer or alzheimers disease, or more prosaically cystic fibrosis or malaria would be a good thing? Or even understanding ecologies and the global climate? Will the new accelerator be carbon neutral? Will understanding dark matter prevent the collapse of our planet and the deaths of our children?
If I were a politician funding this project I would want some pretty cold, hard information on these things.
Well, it's a scientist in a different field. More importantly, it's by a scientists that doesn't engage with the technical arguments made by those actually in the field, so it's unclear what exactly the label "scientist" brings.
If a physicist criticises recommendations by epidemiologist without reference to the theory of how diseases spread, should you count that as disagreement from the consensus of how to fight infectious diseases?
> Will understanding dark matter prevent the collapse of our planet and the deaths of our children?
It's difficult to know. General relativity is useful for GPS. Superconductivity is useful for NMR that actually sometimes saves children from cancer. Neither of the applications were clear at the discovery time.
(My favorite was Magnetoresistance. You start to explain it as a weird quantum boring effect of the spin of electrons in magnetic conductors, and when the other person is convinced that it totally unuseful you explain that it is used in hard disks. SSD are killing the fun.)
She is not a scientist active in this area. At this point she is for the most part paid to be a science communicator. A lot of money is spend on curing all these other things. Particle accelerators have been instrumental in developing the technology for hadron radiation therapy (there are now special purpose one just for cancer treatment) and superconducting magnets (useful for MRT medical devices). If you examine it closely a lot of advances in biology and medicine were thanks to technical advances made by physics. They have been a really solid bet so far and have created trillions of dollars in value. Why not let them have some fun and let them chase their McGuffin, which btw. might be totally real and interesting fundamental physics. The high energy particle physics community is doing ground breaking research on radiation hard imaging sensors, large scale super conducting power distribution (which might be useful for connecting solar power in a lossless manner to consumers).
These projects are a way to train high skilled STEM people (competition to stay at CERN is brutal, but most go on to industry) in a structured way that then work on a lot of other societally relevant problems.
Well, going on to see what should be done instead, we find she advocates for different experiments with the same type of argument she's so gleefully savaging here
> You already know we haven’t found anything yet—otherwise you’d have heard of it. But even null results are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us that some ideas—for example, that spacetime might be a regular lattice—are simply incompatible with observations.[1]
So this is really mostly about a "you had your chance with the toy, now it's time to let others play" argument, though she's very adamant that it's not. This is really the large problem with her criticisms: the case that exists is for particle physics getting less priority, but her argument is that it should stop completely, the collaborations disbanded, and everyone goes to find a new job because they can't be trusted to think clearly.
> This is really the large problem with her criticisms: the case that exists is for particle physics getting less priority, but her argument is that it should stop completely, the collaborations disbanded, and everyone goes to find a new job because they can't be trusted to think clearly.
Huh? Where is she saying this? Everything I've read from her suggests that she's against building bigger accelerators, not stop investigating particle physics.
> Science is exploratory and to make progress we should study what has not been studied before, true. But any new experiment in the foundations of physics does that. You can probe new regimes not only be reaching higher energies, but also by reaching higher resolution, better precision, bigger systems, lower temperatures, less noise, more data, and so on.
> No one is saying we should stop explorative research in the foundations of physics. But since resources are limited, we should invest in experiments that bring the biggest benefit for the projected cost. This means the higher the expenses for an experiment, the better the reasons for building it should be. And since a bigger particle collider is presently the most expensive proposal on the table, particle physicists should have the best reasons.
Show we were she actually advocates for building any accelerator and you'd have a case. She violently opposes the FCC despite one of it's explicit goals being precisions measurements of the Higgs.
In fact in the very post you link to she dismisses the idea of high precision measurements: "Yeah, except that I am the one saying we could do better things with $20 billion than measuring the next digits of some constants"
Accelerators aren't the be-all, end-all of particle physics. She explicitly advocates for investigating particle physics in new ways, such as astronomical interaction observations.
Those aren't new ways, it's already being done by astroparticle physicists. You can look at Ice Cube, HESS and Pierre Auger Observatory for examples. Dropping accelerators simply leaves a hole, and those experiments all rely on cross sections from CERN for their predictions by the way.
> (a) Astrophysical and cosmological observations attributed to dark matter. These are discrepancies between theory and data which should be studied closer, until we have pinned down the theory. Some people have mistakenly claimed I am advocating more direct detection experiments for certain types of dark matter particles. This is not so. I am saying we need better observations of the already known discrepancies. Better sky coverage, better resolution, better stats. If we have a good idea what dark matter is, we can think of building a collider to test it, if that turns out to be useful
I usually have to bite my tongue when it comes to Sabine's ramblings. BTW, I would love if anyone could point me any phenomenology paper of hers, I can't find them. Maybe when she single-handedly finishes with the slaying of the particle physics dragon she might tackle idk, condensed matter physics, she has the same kind of background there so who knows.
Anyway, I'd like to link Dorigo's post where this anti-science stirrup might have shown up first:
I think it is wrong to cherry pick the HTML example. It would have been invented outside (wasn't SGML already a thing?).
Compared to open source in general the CERN stacks are horrible, typical sloppy academic software of no use to the general public. Tons of stuff like the cling C++ interpreter that look interesting but are never polished to be generally useful.
Truth is, I did get your point. Perfect refinement is not necessary in every context. Your comment, like CERN's interpreter, though sloppy was fit for purpose.
There have been a lot of bad ideas in markup languages. Check out some of the ideas tossed around in the creation of HTML. Plenty of disasters averted by pragmatic thinkers and good luck.
The web browser enabled my whole very comfortable career so I'm willing to overlook a sloppy C++ interpreter here and there.
I've never heard of anyone outside of physics using ROOT. Have you? The tech open source data stacks are their own quickly maturing but completely separate stacks.
Which is a curious argument since it compares the free time activities of a patent officer with the activities of a scientist trying to improve his workplace communication. I.e., apples with oranges.
> Isn’t it nice (...) advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature?
The criticism is that the ROI = (the potential advance) / (invested money) is too small. As you pointed out it can be argued that the real goal is elsewhere: in the engineering / technology or science of complex systems. Creating a big machine that verifiably works brings many unexpected advances in many fields. And what is more important it is a symbol of human advancement which unites people and inspires them to pursue science. Since humans need a clear goal to invest much resources in a constructive endeavor. It may not be that important though that the ROI in fundamental physics is small, as long as people work hard together. But it can be argued that the whole process begins to resemble religion more than a scientific method; which can be problematic as religions have a bad reputation among scientific community.
An organisation like CERN is extremely hard to replicate and easily destroyed and dragged down by a thousand cuts. The EU is funding similar moonshots in Neuroscience , Graphene, Quantum Computing and most recently machine learning. They all provide case studies what can go wrong in such a big science project (in fighting, diverging goals, huge administrative overhead, bureaucracy, political grand-standing).
The people working at CERN directly and their collaborators truly belief in the goal of understanding the fundamental forces of nature. And they had tremendous success doing so. They are the gold standard for a well managed long running big science project. Just recently they found the Higgs boson. Hossfelder worked for years on extremely speculative ideas in quantum gravity, they weren’t super well received, most people liked string theory better. Bottom up and top down reasoning in particle physics phenomenology suggests there are more discoveries to be made at the energy frontier. I like to see a future where eventually we build a solar system sized particle accelerator not stop at a radius of ~100 km
> ROI = (the potential advance) / (invested money) is too small
That's unknown in advance. To take example from maths, the conic sections, braid theory, number theory—they all used to be very abstract and un-applicable parts maths, until one day.
If it's unknown in advance surely it's more rational to spread the research out instead of putting most of the available eggs in a single basket.
CERN found Higgs - which was proposed decades before CERN was built. There is nothing like the Higgs proposal around today.
That's the real problem. Spend $20bn on some new models, and then you can spend $20bn chasing the most interesting prospects.
That's far more likely to get you somewhere exciting than the experimental equivalent of throwing more spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of it does something unexpected.
> Spend $20bn on some new models, and then you can spend $20bn chasing the most interesting prospects.
This is a very incorrect description of the problem. The situation in basic particle physics is that models are super plentiful; Six months in 2016 saw 500 different papers written to explain a novel signal that ended up not being real, so it's not models that are missing.
Professor Hossenfelder and others have written long books about why the probability of finding new physics based on not liking the aesthetics of the current maths (naturalness, supersimetry, grand unification) is extremely likely to fail, and has been constantly failing for ~50 years.
If our way of generating new theories has given bad predictions for 50 years, at what time should we stop and try out other ways of extending the confirmed theories?
It is unknown in advance if putting your hand through a fire will hurt you this time as well, but after 50 years of doing so, perhaps it's time to stop.
They make qualitative arguments, nobody has any realistic prediction of what the probabilities are.
And the problem has never been making new theories, the problem is always that we have a very good model, and no principled way for choosing between all the possible theories that gives rise to almost precisely that model.
So people tried to invent reasons and so far nobody has had any luck. And Hossenfelder is correct that in hindsight naturalness wasn't a very good rule.
But by the same hindsight, no theory that could be detected in previous experiments would have worked either. In this view, making the experiments at all was a complete waste, we should just have drawn the winning theory from a hat and stopped all further work.
The point is that there are known problems in the foundations of physics (the measurement problem, the reconciliation of general relativity and quantum mechanics to name the 2 best known ones) and that they should be by far the biggest focus for new research - not GUTs and solutions for un-naturalness.
If we have a theory that could solve the measurement problem (or detect quantum gravity etc.), and a plausible experiment for that theory, we should perform this experiment - it may well yield valuable data whatever result we get.
Conversely, if we have a theory that predicts that more particles may exist at higher levels of energy and nothing else, then there is no good reason to perform this experiment. Especially if the precise level of energy is a free parameter of the theory, so the theory won't change if the experiment fails.
> And Hossenfelder is correct that in hindsight naturalness wasn't a very good rule.
I believe that she is correct that naturalness wasn't a very good rule at all, not just in hindsight. It's as good a rule as it would have been to expect all numbers to be multiples of Pi.
To claim that the standard model has nothing to do with the quantization of gravity is very strange, part of the motivation for a GUT is that it would be a huge help towards making a theory of everything. And a TOE is precisely a unified treatment of the standard model forces and gravity.
The measurement problem isn't a physics thing, just like naturalness that's more of a life-style choice. In fact, the only reason to have problems with wave-function collapse is precisely a naturalness reasoning, technically it makes very accurate predictions just fine.
> part of the motivation for a GUT is that it would be a huge help towards making a theory of everything. And a TOE is precisely a unified treatment of the standard model forces and gravity.
A GUT is specifically the part of a TOE that has nothing to do with gravity... A TOE is a GUT + a theory of quantum gravity.
If we had the Standard Model + a theory of quantum gravity, this could be a complete theory of the universe (pending explanations for dark matter, dark energy etc.). These could very well be completely separate phenomena, there is no reason to believe they reduce to a single phenomenon - that there exists a TOE.
> The measurement problem isn't a physics thing, just like naturalness that's more of a life-style choice. In fact, the only reason to have problems with wave-function collapse is precisely a naturalness reasoning, technically it makes very accurate predictions just fine.
This isn't entirely accurate. There is a very clear quantitative question behind the measurement problem: what kind of system constitutes a measurement device, in the sense of invoking the need for the Born rule? There must be some precise size/kind of system that, when a particle interacts with it, you can no longer use Schrodinger's equation to predict its movement after that interaction - you must apply the Born rule. We know that this doesn't happen after a particle collision, but that it does happen after a collision with a "detector".
This is a clear empirical question (you don't need to call it a problem), well within the realm of physics. It may be extremely difficult to answer, but I see no reason to imagine it is a priori impossible to resolve.
One could argue that spending a lot of money on a hyper advanced anything would lead to a bunch of cool technologies, even if the primary objective yielded no results. Why spend many billions of euros on something speculative when one could spend the money on something much more likely to produce both primary and secondary benefits?
Point me to something that has these characteristics and hasn’t received funding. Anderson made the case to fund many small scale experiments when it came to funding the SSC, but that doesn’t have the same secondary benefits.
If you limit your characteristics to "involves high energy particle physics" it's pretty easy to put blinders on and pretend there aren't large challenges facing humanity that could potentially be solved by hard science progress and a lot of funding.
Well what I meant show me plans with 1000s of pages of itemized highly realistic goals that have a chance of succeeding and yield real technological advances over a period of 30 years with 100s of professors putting their professional careers on the line for a common goal. The overlooked value of the HEP community is that they have moved to the industrial age of scientific endeavour, while almost everyone else is stuck in the Middle Ages.
It would be great if people managed to organized around any of the goals you mentioned, so far it hasn’t happened at a comparative scale for various reasons.
Its not zero sum, but the sum isn't infinite, especially for research without direct commercial applications. It would be nice to fund everything, but scientists have to get lot more politically engages before that sort of political support is even on the table
BTW her examples of experiments that received insufficient funding is really curious: FAIR she just happens to work at a university that is pretty directly involved with it, the cost overruns were so bad that the original people lost management of the project . The James Webb Telescope was in part delayed because it shares the platform with the next gen of American spy sattelites. I happen to know someone that worked on the sensors for both. Sensors that btw. share a lot of similarities with the sensors used in particle detectors.
Her main point is that from physics perspective there are better ways to use money. Whatever success and failures in projects, we should keep throwing money into places that are more likely solve important physical questions.
Any argument that sidesteps that is nonsense. If goal of investing in fundamental physics is not R&D it's just a side effect as I assume.
If I read your argument correctly it's "We can't give argument that this is the best way spend money if you want to solve these problems, but it will generate other side benefits that may help indirectly". It's honest argument if put that way.
The particle community has enumerated why new accelerators are the best way to answer particle physics questions, Hossenfelders position is however that those arguments aren't worth engaging with because particle physicists are slaves to "group think".
As for the argument that cosmology or astronomy are more promising ways of yielding new insights, that's not something she ever bothers to discuss in detail. There's no articles about how the extremely noisy and uncertain constrains from astronomy are more worth to gamble on that than the much cleaner direct detections from accelerators.
And there's certainly no arguments about how we should stop giving so much money to the exoplanet researchers and their instruments instead of making satellites to measure the cosmic radio background. (There's not even a little post about how SpaceX will hamper radio astronomy by making sure there's no radio quiet place left on earth).
> Whatever theorists predict is not the only reason for them to do it, higher energies are a technical challenge, a data processing challenge, something to focus your attention and creativity on.
I don't understand this argument. We should prefer a particular experiment not because it is more likely to answer a research question but because it, itself, is more challenging?
There are few other ways of probing high energy physics systematically and a lot of them are funded and done aswell. This is not a zero sum game. We can bury detectors in the antarctic, in mines and have CERN. In fact technology developed at CERN helps those other experiments aswell.
Fine, but that's not the interesting part of Hossenfelder's claim. Suppose we couldn't do it all and could only do one thing first. What is wrong with her claim that a bigger collider shouldn't be that thing? Is she wrong that that is not the most promising investment for discovery or is she wrong that "most promising investment" should be the main criterion for choosing what to do first?
But we can do it all. Moreover a large number of talented people really want to do it. Whatever money they are asking for is a fraction of the cumulative benefits these people have provided to humanity. When arguing about money you never argue about "science discoveries", no-one in their right mind cares about them when it comes to fundamental science, when you talk about this level of funding. If you manage to build a 100 TeV detector you need to figure out a mind boggling number of practical technical challenges along the way. All of those sum up to a value that is far larger than 10 billion. For other projects like the Human Genome project or the Brain projects the ROI seems more immediate. But in fact physics projects have routinely yielded higher ROIs. There is an extremely long tail of physics / technology research that is funded by a new detector.
As another example take the EU quantum initiative, they managed to get ~1 Billion and have promised to get ~5000 people working on it for ~10 years. That works out to ~20000 per person / per year. This only works because a lot of these people are so passionate about this project, that they are willing to self exploit themselves for years.
I honestly don’t think she is qualified to speak on the priorities of a discipline she has never been involved in. They will do and prioritise what they think is reasonable based on fierce internal discussions and consensus building. I personally was never taken by the prospect of working on a huge project like the various experiments at LHC or any of the successors. If you defund HEP these people won’t magically go work on something else together. A large pool of people will simply stop doing physics and dissipate. Let them do what they want, it has worked out pretty well so far. There is plenty of other research that is well funded and competing for talent and attention. Why give up on something where Europe has clear worldwide leadership.
Pretty simple neither Hossfelder, nor politicians, nor you get to tell people what they would like to do. At this point it becomes a power struggle and so far mainstream physics has won that power struggle, because we have good arguments on our side. Investment in particle physics has had large net positive effects on society at large. Why kill the golden goose just because you aren't interested in whatever these people are interested in. Science doesn't enter this argument at all, purely from a technology and human capital level this is close to optimal use of their talents. You have a bunch of high y motivated, talented people working towards a common goal. Even if you don't perfectly understand why they would do that, their results alone are convincing enough to let them continue.
Right good arguments in the political sense. A highly organized, well connected, motivated group of people that write excellent funding proposals, with a track record of Nobel price worthy results and the ability to execute on >10 billion dollar projects on the time scale of decades. There aren’t that many people like that around and they happen to like to smash atoms.
> Generally speaking developing a new [HUGE PROJECT] leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack.
It's true for accelerators and a huge number of other things too. If this isn't unique to accelerators, it's not really a case for accelerators specifically.
> Isn’t it nice that a fraction of the smartest people on the world are not working on getting you to click Ads and are using machine learning to advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature?
This isn't a good faith argument. What if we got our smartest people working in hospitals or schools or orphanages instead of getting you to click ads? Maybe that's where the money should go. Think of the children.
> Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN.
The exact same argument can be made for military spending. The internet was invented at...
It is always such a dishonest argument to talk about spin-off benefits.
People really need to stop quoting tangentially invented technologies as the justification for CERN to exist, if I was to gather the same group of scientists to ask them to build the best Lego set possible with 50bil they would have also produced the same tangential technologies.
I think we need more clever people making more predictions (and especially from people quoted in the article like Gross, Witten, Rattazzi etc), and fewer blog articles like this designed to discourage them.
The last time a huge, costly, dedicated collider was built, it was in service of the Higgs prediction, and that worked out quite nicely.
I think you’re setting up a bit of a straw man there. I agree that people coming up with creative ideas and making bold predictions is good in general. But surely we’re allowed to point out when a) predictions have not in fact worked out, and b) nothing particularly useful was learned from the failure. That’s not the same as trying to discourage new ideas.
For the LHC specifically, it was widely expected that it would find evidence of supersymmetry, and that pinning down the details would help identify which extensions to the Standard Model are worth pursuing. But in fact a) no evidence of supersymmetry has been found, and b) no new lines of inquiry have been suggested. Most theorists have simply adjusted their existing models, moving the goalposts to account for the lack of experimental support.
This is exactly what Hossenfelder is complaining about. Why double and triple down on the same strategy that hasn’t worked yet? Why not at least spread your bets across some different strategies?
This appears to value the negative findings of the LHC at zero. I’m no physicist, but my understanding is that some variants and parameters of the theory have been excluded as a result of LHC experiments.
More to the point, what is the alternative strategy that’s more likely to produce useful data? “Don’t do experiments to validate or invalidate theory” doesn’t obviously seem like it’s going to produce better results.
I’m no physicist, but my understanding is that some variants and parameters of the theory have been excluded as a result of LHC experiments.
I'm no physicist either, so take my hot take with the appropriate pinch of salt. :) My understanding is that some variants and parameters should have been excluded, if you hold theorists to their ~2005 predictions, but in practice most theorists are essentially burying their heads in the sand, or ignoring their past predictions and just making new ones. Both Hossenfelder and Peter Woit (of the "Not Even Wrong" book and blog) have documented many such cases. Many theorists are still assuming supersymmetry as a basis for their work and essentially ignoring the fact that it didn't show up where expected.
More to the point, what is the alternative strategy that’s more likely to produce useful data?
I think it's "remove the focus from high-energy physics and particle colliders, bring more attention to less fashionable areas that might benefit more from huge big-budget experiments." I don't know of any specific proposals to do something completely different with the budget that might otherwise go to e.g. CERN's Future Circular Collider proposal. Hossenfelder has pointed to other big science projects that could produce more scientific bang-for-the-buck than the LHC, such as LIGO and the James Webb space telescope.
I somewhat agree with the premise, but the real kicker is the opportunity cost: there is so much Europe could be doing with this money that would have actual, real-world impact. There is a critical need for independent European software infrastructure - for this kind of money, they could fund their own web browser or OS or social media platform, which would exist independently of US-controlled tech.
Would I trade a European-controlled alternative to Android and iOS for yet another particle collider in Geneva? Yes, absolutely.
I'd start from independence in basic electronics. Software is easier IMHO. But, as always, which Europe? It's Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. each one with different and competing goals (the UK will be on its own soon).
The interesting thing about electronics is that the Dutch ASML company is basically have monopoly on producing the machines that silicon fabs use to produce chips. So everyone indirectly depends on the EU for hardware production.
Well, it does have actual real world impact: it trains a lot of people in data analysis and drives a lot of R&D in very technical fields among other things. In fact, the economic benefit[1] of CERN due to all these other things has been estimated as a net positive while excluding the value of science, which is either good or bad news depending on how you view it.
And what's unique about that to Yet Another Particle Collider compared with the myriad other challenging, data-heavy experiments we could be investing in?
Would you trade a European collider for a failed commercial alternative like FirefoxOS or PalmOS? Because keep in mind that commercial failure is the overwhelmingly likely outcome of the project you’re proposing. I’d rather fail at finding dark matter and learn things along the way than having a state-backed organization make lousy software that nobody uses.
Of course, the more fundamental point is that industry seems perfectly happy to try (and fail) at making Google competitors, while nobody in industry is going to do fundamental physics research.
I'd rather distribute that money into all kinds of other research ideas that if successful would help people directly. The poor and the hungry don't benefit from knowing that dark matter exists. We need energy, food, medications and treatments. Those are better places to invest than another accelerator.
It would cost at least 3 times as much to get the same amount of talent working on something like that. Projects like the LHC are able to massively leverage the money spent just because smart people are happy to work on exciting/deep problems for much less.
I think it would be better for the EU to fund existing open source solutions than to create EU-controlled proprietary ones. Fund Firefox so Mozilla doesn't have to take funding from Google any more. Fund Linux kernel porting to mobile devices. Fund LineageOS, Replicant, postmarketOS and the myriad GNU/Linux mobile OSes. Fund yaCy and searx. Fund RISC-V implementations.
PS: it sounds like there is some sort of EU plan for this:
I think more should be spent on fusion research - I think it is just as likely to produce interesting random spin off technologies, but could also produce huge direct benefits to the earth if it can be made into a safe way to produce energy cheaply.
If you sum up all the negative aspects of something you can make it look bad. If you sum up all the positive aspects of something you can make it look good. So you can make something look either good or bad by not saying anything that is untrue. It is really the onlookers who have to decide how to weigh both stories.
I don't agree with her initial gripe. Discovery or serious exclusion - it is not weasel words, it is the truth. The correct question to ask is if the exclusion would be enough to warrant the cost. And of course this is far from the only result one would expect from such a machine. So these are not empty promises and while she clearly is not stupid, Hossenfelder sure loves telling people their research is useless...
Edit: are you downvoting because you don't think my comment contributes to the discussion, or because you don't agree?
I am a particle physicist and when I worked at CERN I helped building the data acquisition software of the ATLAS experiment.
The empty promises she is talking about are the equivalent of the promises by politicians during a campaign: they are for the larger public, for the people who (rightfully!) don't want to get more informed than that.
In the background, both in science and in politics, technical folks know what they mean and, especially, where the money is actually going.
In the case of politics, it happens unfortunately that big chunks of the money involved go into private pockets.
Based on my experience, in the case of particle physics, that money invariably goes to wide technological improvement.
Very few sane people really cared whether the Higgs boson existed, but the world is a better place because we got our efforts together in order to find an answer.
Get a beer with a particle physicist some time, you will find most of them didn't actually work on "finding dark matter" but worked on a myriad of specific technical challenges.
- Superconducting magnets and power distribution
- Radiation hard ASICs and detectors
- CAD software like KICAD
- ROOT
- Grid computing infrastructure
- Analog circuit design (1024 channel low power ADCs, pixel sensors)
- FPGA design for data aggregation and communication
I asked this elsewhere, but does anyone use ROOT outside of physics? It reads to me as "this development is useful to society at large!" while society at large has its own data stacks that are pretty much completely independent. Likewise for most of your other items.
If the argument is that widespread technological improvements always come from heavy investment in something so technologically challenging, then why Yet Another Particle Collider instead of the myriad other technologically challenging physics experiments we could be investing in? What's specific to a particle collider that produces these serendipitous side-effect advances compared to, say, a space telescope or other ambitious experiments?
Edit: downvotes? let me rephrase: if you care about particle physics then there was no reason to ignore the original proposal. if you care about outrage, on the other hand...
I am afraid that, no matter how well thought out a strategy or plan for the future really is, there is always a ranting blogger who will get more attention.
And in that tradition I guess I should have expected a dismissive reply using 'generic press release' to describe the Comment that introduces an entire section of Nature Physics.
I think it's very interesting to see publicly a back and forth dialogue of two sides discussing the merits and demerits of a scientific proposal.
It's a rare sight, and the contrarian view is necessary, we need red teams so that things don't become too one-sided and people can overcome their biases. I think the inherent structure in academia and in institutions like CERN make it difficult for dissenting voices to be heard, so I'm glad that the view that's going against the grain is getting more attention. In this era of censorship and punishing of whistleblowers I'm surprised she's freely critiquing their core arguments. Although I do see a lot of ad hominem attacks.
The insight that people care about outrage is not particularly novel. You yourself care about outrage - it's the reason you left the comment you left. If I care about outrage, on the other hand... What? I'm like you and most other people?
In a better forum the original proposal by the particle physics community would have reached the front page and then a version of this blog post could have been a valid comment.
Now it is the other way around and I think that is unfortunate. Why does it happen?
Building particle accelerators is the status quo. I first looked up a list of upcoming accelerator projects on Wikipedia more than a decade ago. A proposal to continue the status quo is rarely novel. An argument against the status quo brings up new ideas.
I think observing the Higgs was worth the money. We're sort of rebounding from our overconfidence in string theory, so I think this kind of criticism is expected and appropriate, but in the long run this citizen wants to pay for more big physics.
I think it is worth noting that while this is an opinion not widely shared within physics, Sabine is not some completely far-out crank writing bizarre rants in green ink either.
In other words, we can all disagree. As it happens I do, but she's also not a lunatic whose ideas can just be dismissed as obviously uninformed.
Basically: making charged particles change direction causes them to emit radiation, and the more they turn the more they radiate. This gets worse and worse at higher energies, so increasing the magnets but keeping the same angle means you waste more energy and your magnets get destroyed by the intense radiation.
My understanding is that is true of Electrons, but not Protons, which is why SLAC is a straight line, the only way to get electrons up to high energies.
Physicist here, although it is nice to know what happens when we use very high energies, this is not something relevant for humanity, I'd invest that money on things that we really need, for example clean energies.
This seems somewhat shortsighted. Couldn't we have said the same thing about general relativity and QM? Which now have relevant implications for GPS and chip design.
Couldn't a more thorough understanding of particle physics be relevant to things like nano-materials or better understanding superconductivity or possibly additional ways to contain plasma for fusion?
In 2016, Hossenfelder offered to act as a physics consultant on her blog—US$50 for twenty minutes of discussion—and had to recruit five extra physicists to deal with the demand.[30][31
Here’s a question I have that maybe somebody in this thread can help me with: what is the positive case for a new particle collider at much higher energies than the LHC?
It seems to me that particle physics post-LHC is just the same as it was pre-LHC. We verified the existence of the Higgs, which is great, but that meant no revisions to the Standard Model were needed as it already assumed the Higgs. And no exotic or unexpected new particles have turned up.
You can definitely argue that the technology spin-offs from the LHC have been great; but is that really an argument for another collider specifically, or just Big Science in general?
To put it another way, what’s the argument for a collider that goes beyond “provide employment for hundreds of high-energy physicists, and throw some unprecedented engineering and logistical challenges at then”? Is there a pitch that’s based on the science rather than the technology?
The current standard model can't explain a number of observations. There was a rather detailed post over on PhysicsForums[1] detailing a number of issues.
The LHC hasn't really shown us where to look, the hope is that a larger collider can give a more clear indication.
That said, I have this feeling that we're approaching the limits of "going big". There was a very interesting talk[2] over at Perimeter Institute recently about larger colliders and their feasibility.
As a related tangent: we have verified the existence of the Higgs, but only partially.
What was so far measured was the interaction strength between Higgs and W bosons, Z bosons, and the top quarks: these are the main channels of Higgs production at the LHC, and they fit the theory prediction within 20%. Yes, 20%. Not precise at all. What about interaction between Higgs and the other 5 kinds of quarks? Electrons? Muons? Tau? Itself? The data ranges from +-100% to none at all.
In particular the measurement of Higgs-Higgs interaction is an important one: the assumption Standard Model makes about the strength of this interaction is not unique, and others are possible. We don't know yet: not enough data. Moreover models with multiple Higgs particles are possible. Again, we don't know yet, not enough data.
This is why some cautious researchers claim that we have discovered "a scalar particle", "believed to be Higgs", but further measurement is needed to determine all of its properties.
This is one of the main activities at LHC and among the theoreticians at the moment: measuring Higgs interactions with other particles. There is still way to improve precision with more data from LHC, but ultimately there is only so much it can do without increasing the energy.
>The most likely outcome will be that particle physicists will swap their current theories for new theories according to which the supposed particles are heavier than expected.
i.e. exactly what happened for the top quark, without proof of which we wouldn't have a working standard model. Why wasn't that the example?
Theory fitting also happened with epicycles. We got nothing from that. Everything looked progressively more correct until all of it was suddenly incorrect.
Well our most up-to-date understanding of the solar system's orbits is based on general relativity. That's how we explain Mercury's precession. Is that your failure case?
Then we built new technology that conclusively disproved them. As a result we have sat-nav and space travel. If that's the disaster that came from building bigger telescopes, keep it coming. 'We don't believe it because it's hard to test' is not science.
I can't argue with that, as you are correct. I was contending your example, as the standard model is ridden with theory fitting and is a really good example of science done badly.
This is by far one of the best HN articles and discussions going on I've come across. Some really great conversations happening in the comments here, it would be great to open this conversation beyond the comments section in a more public forum.
Good piece. I support science, but I wonder at times whether the really expensive experiments are really producing results worthy of the investment... it's not as though particle collisions are the only interesting experiments out there.
I think it’s unlikely that we’re ever going to find another particle as useful as, say, the electron. You need a particle collider to get free Higgs bosons; you can obtain free electrons by rubbing a balloon on your head. And electrons are the Swiss Army knife of technology, they are important in every chemical reaction and every electric device. Higgs bosons will likely never have a practical use.
But-
I still think we should keep doing particle physics, for a while longer. We have built up a huge global community of physicists and engineers who do particle physics, and without a way for them to conduct experiments there won’t be any jobs for those people to do, and in 2 generations all that expertise will be gone. The praxis will be gone. After all, that’s what technology really is; it isn’t a set of books on a shelf, it’s networks of people, with skills and connections to each other, who can get things done. Let’s make sure we don’t pull the plug early.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadObviously we cannot indefinitely build larger accelerators, and if it turns out that there is no support to go at least one size bigger, then perhaps our best hope is to find more effective ways to use the existing ones we have.
As a random example to illustrate what I mean: https://www.google.nl/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-07-plasma-siz...
Maybe stopping here will force more thinking along these lines? I hope so, anyway.
Basically if one idea out of a hundred major ones really takes off, that's considered a success for a researcher. We're talking one, maybe two real hits throughout the entire scientific career. Researchers are well aware that much of what they do and publish is of little consequence. And they have to make "empty promises" from time to time to continue getting funding from the easily distracted politicians and upper management. They also almost have to have lofty, aspirational goals to keep the motivation.
Basically 99% percent of work of a good, hard working researcher consists of going down the alleys to see if they are blind, which they nearly always are. But the remaining 1% often makes the whole thing worthwhile to all parties involved. The question is, can you pull off that 1% hail Mary or not.
The potential discoveries we're talking about in this case could upend industries, reshape the world economy, and bring about the post-scarcity future, at least when it comes to energy. If we're willing to strain credulity a little, they might even enable interstellar travel. Is that worth a few days of the Pentagon budget? To me, it is, as long as we maximize the chance of the aforementioned Hail Mary.
In contrast, an engineer that doesn't succeed with her ideas at least 50% of the time would quickly find herself out of a job, so by definition the amount of risk engineers take on is as little as possible.
This is a fair debate to have, even if my personal preferred answer is “do both”.
A typical experiment is to accelerate a lot protons and a lot of antiprotons (or other particle), make them collide, and see the "debris".
The "debris" can be a lot of things. So you must filter some of them. For example pick only the one that produce exactly two photons and two "jets" of mixed particles that are difficult to identify. Now you calculate the energy of the photons and make a nice graph, of number of collisions versus energy of the photons. Using the standard theory you expect a smooth curve, but if there is a new particle you will see a peak somewhere.
If you see something, you only see the peak. So good luck imagining what the particle can be and how it interact with the other particles.
Another team peek another filter, like the experiment that produce two photons and electron and a positron. They make a nice graphic and hope to see an unexpected peak.
Another team ...
If the current theory predicts a peak somewhere you should find it, but if you find an unexpected peak yuo may have founded a new particle.
The theoretical frameworks are useful to guess which filters may be interesting and give a chance to find a new particle. The problem is that there are just too many possible filters and you can't try all of them.
It just pisses me off that we spend trillions on bombing random people in the desert, yet a few billion for e.g. fusion research is an insurmountable obstacle.
As an aside, I think this is a great example of a role which fundamental science plays in society: It can facilitate step changes in technological progress.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWAKE
I find it a bit rich that Hossenfelder can criticise particle physics for only ruling out some dark matter with words such as "a type nobody has seen". There are no direct detection of dark matter at all, so why does she insist that the models particle physics speak of are any worse than the others?
At the core of the controversy around Hossenfelder is that from the fact there's not been any really _unexpected_ experimental results for four decades concludes that there's no point in doing particle physics. There is not really much more to the argument than that, the rest is just quoting the optimistic physicists over the pessimistic ones and pretend they don't agree on the need for more experiments.
I have yet to see anyone contradict her basic premise with factual information. I wish she were wrong, as I would love to see a breakthrough towards an experimentally verified Grand Unified Theory, including an explanation for what we currently identify as dark matter (similarly for dark energy). From what I read, physicists that criticize her take their own wishes for reality, and prefer to attack the messenger rather than confront the reality of the message.
I'm also not really convinced of what she categorizes as failure. She enumerates quite a few incorrect predictions, but is that sufficient to show that the experiments were a failure? There are literally thousands of papers published because of the LHC and CERN claims hundreds of results. Maybe you can show that they are mostly worthless (which is not the same as boring or not spectecular), but she doesn't really seem to even try to do that.
You make a good point - without the expensive accelerator data, we’d have no idea that these omg ridiculous stupid waaaa predictions are true or false!!!
No, even with the accelerator data we probably still won't be able to conclusively rule out many approaches. We'll only be able to rule out overly specific variants of those predictions. Which, given the infinitude of available theories, doesn't do much to narrow things down.
Think of it this way: At one point, geocentric theories of planetary motion based on nested crystal spheres were requiring ever more elaborate arrangements with more spheres. More observations with greater precision only required adding more spheres.
We're somewhat in the same situation WRT high-energy physics today, in that larger and more powerful accelerators will only rule out particular theory variants, just as more powerful telescopes would only have ruled out particular arrangements of crystal spheres. Just as geocentrism as a category of theories isn't falsifiable by greater precision, many of the current approaches toward HEP aren't falsifiable by ever more powerful accelerators. You can always add another dimension or mathematical elaboration to explain the observations.
Which simply means that right now, another large particle accelerator probably isn't the most useful experimental approach to figuring out how to reconcile the two well-supported theories we do have.
That's happened to many people (Hossenfelder included?) but it's now happening to the community and no one likes it. But given that is how science as an institution operates they shouldn't be surprised.
Here's a thought experiment. Would there be a bid for a new 100Tev machine if super symmetry had been confirmed at LHC? My bet is :for sure. And the key argument would be "we told you that we were good last time, so you have to back us this time"
Something had to happen at that scale, the Higgs wasn't guaranteed. Sabine gets experimental physics backwards because no one planned the LHC to confirm the Higgs, but to know whether the Higgs existed and if it didn't what did instead. My money was mostly on it not showing up; many physicists were convinced it wouldn't, then it was there but we couldn't know beforehand.
There's a scientific case for making precision measurements of it, as was done with the electroweak bosons for very good reasons that she dismisses without showing any kind of understanding about the research she wants to shut off.
Regardless, the point stands: we knew that something is missing from the Standard model, and we knew that it must exist in a very precise range of energy. If it didn't exist there, it could have called into question the whole SM.
In contrast, we don't know that there must be some kind of dark matter at the 100TeV scale. We know that one particular type that we have thought about could exist, but we have other candidates as well, and there are ways that the 100TeV prediction could also be moved to higher energy levels.
Meanwhile, we don't even know if dark matter is a kind of matter or a modification of the force of gravity or a problem with approximations of Einstein's equations used in practice etc.
I'm not sure we're done with composite models. There are more exotic alternatives and then the fact remains that neutrino masses aren't in the SM.
I consider pretty hopeless to keep thinking that you can modify GR like plasticine in all the instances in which putting amounts of matter that doesn't radiate works (maybe it works because it's there and its effects on other stuff is how you "see" it). It has the appeal of making some people feel like they can call a whole profession or several a bunch of crooks, and that's pretty much what it has going for it outside of the scientists working in earnest on it.
The scientific method has usually worked by either coming up with theories and testing them; or by measuring things we thought we knew and finding new explanations when those turn out to be false.
What has not really worked too often has been coming up with mathematical models out of thin air, fitting them to all of the current data, extrapolating them to things we haven't been able to observe yet, and then building those things to check if they also worked.
That is why research into astronomical objects to ever greater precision is a promising candidate: we know what we expect to find if our current theories are correct, we know of real problems with our theories, and we can come up with new theories that predict such and such structures that should be visible in precisely such and such conditions.
This is the exact same model of how physics advanced from Tycho Brahe to Newton - people had models of the motions of the stars, they collected data to confirm those models, and found problems that they couldn't explain. Then Newton came along and found a mathematical model that, for the first time, explained those observations, and even reconciled them with other observations on the ground. We then spent a lot of time testing Newton's theories and didn't find any holes for a few hundred years.
Along came electromagnetism, the study of its dynamics, and the discovery of the speed of light problem, which couldn't be explained - requiring a new model that could actually explain everything we knew + the new data, and so on.
But this is the story of early to mid 20th century physics! General relativity, the initial quantum mechanical theories, Dirac’s equation and anti-particles, neutrinos were all the product of this process of adding mathematical conveniences and extrapolating to things that turned out to be real. You can argue that more recent efforts in this direction have been much less successful than those were, but I think you have to turn a completely blind eye to the history of modern physics to claim that method “has not really worked too often”.
I'm less well versed about the other subjects you mention, but there were several unsolved problems in physics at that time that absolutely required new theories (the photoelectric effect VS the wave behavior of light, black body radiation, the need to reconcile quantum mechanics with special relativity). In all of these cases, we had unexplained data or inconsistencies between theories.
By contrast, most of the theories that could be tested with a new collider are not solving anything - they are just theories about things that might exist, but could very well not exist at all. There is no hope of gaining insights into the measurement problem or quantum gravity at the next collider.
Even the theories of dark matter that could be tested are still too early to be worth a 20b bet. There are too many equally plausible theories of dark matter to say any one of them is promising enough to be worth that amount of money. And even ruling one of them out will not have a major effect on the field. It's not like it would rule out string theory, for example.
There are two criticisms she articulates very clearly:
1. SUSY is not a testable theory, as it can always "retreat" to higher energy levels, without any real limit.
2. There is no scientific reason to believe SUSY should be true - it doesn't solve any real problem with any of the known theories of the universe. There are infinitely many ways that the universe could be different wherever we haven't looked yet - we can't possibly test all of those theories.
The combination of both arguments leads to the following "law": until we have a theory that solves unsolved problems in physics AND that makes concrete predictions with bounded parameters (so that a failure will explicitly rule out this theory, instead of pushing it endlessly to "maybe at higher energy levels"), we shouldn't be paying huge amounts of money to test things blindly.
This is the fundamental difference between, say, the Higgs prediction and SUSY - we were looking for a concrete thing that it was necessary to exist for the rest of the Standard Model to make sense; and we knew a clear range of energies where the Higgs must exist; if we found it like we did, we know the theory was correct. If LHC didn't find the Higgs, then it would have definitively ruled it out, leading to an explicit need for a new SM.
By contrast, SUSY has not been confirmed, but it is also impossible to rule out entirely, and none of our models NEED SUSY to be right - so in the end, experiments for SUSY don't achieve anything. We might as well be launching space missions to look for Russel's teapot.
But apparently the only point worth making is progress in particle physics has been slow. Well, to be fair the point Hossenfelder tries to make is that there's been no progress, and since that's not actually true convincing people of it regardless takes more work.
I would also mention that things like the Voyager missions are still providing novel data ~50 years after their launch. Will the same be true of the LHC, or any other particle collider?
The HEP problems aren't going anywhere. Lets deal with more pressing concerns now and come back to HEP problems later.
This is e.g. why the current rocket companies had to do a lot of reinvention and research instead of just switching the Saturn V production line back on.
For sure, but we know we can do it because we've already done it.
Also, there are other avenues for particle physics that don't require 20 billion dollars to start with. The 20 billion isn't going to retaining particle physicists, it's mostly going to hardware, engineering construction etc. efforts.
- many interesting falsifiable theories emerge that are resolvable at the accessible energy scale.
- technology catches up to make the engineering of such a thing cheaper.
It's not a terrible idea to wait. An important part of why the LHC was more effective than the hole in texas is that chemists using NMRs and doctors using MRIs drove technical and production improvements that brought down the cost of superconducting magnets.
There is this narrative that theoretical physics drives investments in technical innovation that improves other scientists, but I'm not sure that narrative is entirely true. It's often the other way.
I think we've done enough of that. At this point I'm really only interested in positive proposals, what new stuff can we do? If we have a wave of new successes any old failures will fade out on their own.
I have no idea of they are something particle scientists do or if they belong to another branch of physics.
Everything's disappointing, I am (ironically given my tone here) only interested in hearing from those leading with solutions.
In summary, the reason for quantum gravity experiments is that investigating contradictions in our theory has always been the best source of progress in science, and experiment has to lead theory. We know that QM and GR contradict each other, and therefore we should research that.
She gives a variety of experiments that can research that. The equipment for which is of use in a variety of other sciences. (Particularly astronomy.)
There are plenty of other areas of real research that are still nominally 'particle' physics that are actually able to put to paper real goals for what they expect to achieve.
There are also facilities like NSLS II that are heavily subscribed and doing research that is both very real world and pie in the sky.
Keep this in mind too - the Tevatron at FNAL would have had the Higgs discovery if they could have run another 3-5 years - they already had data order 3 sigma IIRC. Likewise, they would have had a lot more data on the top, something LHC has been gathering since the confirmation of the Higgs. This would have come at a fraction of the cost of the Higgs. Beyond that, has Higgs done anything more than add to the already known to be narrow avenues left for SUSY?
She is absolutely correct that the particle physics community needs their feet held to the fire to justify such an enormous single outlay and being a jobs program for a few thousand physicists is not one of them.
Collider projects were much more interesting to a public who had remembered the sea change of reactors and the bomb. While I love the LHC, from a productivity standpoint there are other projects which have been bearing more fruit for ~50 billion.
Time to spend some money else well.
This Wikipedia entry is 1) generically about the type of unproven theoretical model without experimental support that is used in an attempt to justify investment in the next big collider; 2) more specifically, about a theoretical model that has been shown to be wrong in terms of describing what we observe.
I agree that we could probably spend billions of dollars better than on another enormous collider, even within high-energy physics, but it probably wouldn't be best spent on E8 Theory. Figuring out how it would be best spent, however, would be contentious to say the least.
[1]: http://pirsa.org/17110133
THE MONEY SHOULD GO TO BAIL OUT BANKS AND THE CREDITORS OF LARGE CORPORATIONS, WHAT'S THE POINT OF TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSE ANYWAY.
The truism of sales is that if a customer comes looking to buy a suit and a pullover then you make sure to sell them the suit first, after which the price tag on the most exorbitant cashmere pulli will seem utterly reasonable. With that as a guide maybe science budgets are best discussed on the tails of bailouts?
Tremendous value has been created by their work and an institution like CERN is hard to replicate because it is hard to get brilliant people to a agree what to do for the next 30 years of their lives. I’ve been taught by professors that did precisely that. Whatever theorists predict is not the only reason for them to do it, higher energies are a technical challenge, a data processing challenge, something to focus your attention and creativity on. There is no question we should try to build better telescopes, a 100 TeV collider is a better microscope for High Energy Physics.
This is personal to me, some of my friends work at CERN. I can’t help but feel it is personal to her. I actually met her once, she seemed nice enough, I just don’t understand why she focuses her time on work that is adversarial as opposed to constructive.
What an awful reply to legitimate criticism. I infer that some of your friends at CERN talk about her (quite successful) book this way?
Lee Smolin, who did "cut it" and who worked in several first rate institutions, wrote about the same thing in his 2006 book The Trouble With Physics. So Sabine Hossenfelder is not alone with these opinions.
We've all been there. Props for recognizing it, admitting it, and dealing with it.
Generally speaking, in Central and Western Europe it doesn't matter which institution a researcher is from. They're all good and those at top-tier institutions are only marginally better at best.
In the book God Particle, the author describes how the funding for colliders in USA stopped after the cold war and it was extremely demoralizing even as a reader.
More structural funding for open source software would also be welcome. Software that deals with communication (browsers, protocols, email, filesystems, codecs, etc.) should be fully open and developed by universities and government institutions, imho.
An academic committee to decide what software was worth funding, in the 80s, would probably have come up with a very different list to yours. And would have hired people from safer, more academic, backgrounds than Sir Tim.
The NSA called to say that they like your thinking there!
That is very clear. You didn't engage her argument at all.
Is is really too much to ask for scientific mega project to generate all that value, while at the same time same pursuing a central object that is scientifically viable?
Really - I thought that we were debating an article by a scientist, who along with many other scientists disagrees with that position.
>>This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public.
And yet the general public is being asked to pay for it. Perhaps sorting out that gap and explaining how understanding dark matter will be as important as (for example) curing cancer or alzheimers disease, or more prosaically cystic fibrosis or malaria would be a good thing? Or even understanding ecologies and the global climate? Will the new accelerator be carbon neutral? Will understanding dark matter prevent the collapse of our planet and the deaths of our children?
If I were a politician funding this project I would want some pretty cold, hard information on these things.
If a physicist criticises recommendations by epidemiologist without reference to the theory of how diseases spread, should you count that as disagreement from the consensus of how to fight infectious diseases?
It's difficult to know. General relativity is useful for GPS. Superconductivity is useful for NMR that actually sometimes saves children from cancer. Neither of the applications were clear at the discovery time.
(My favorite was Magnetoresistance. You start to explain it as a weird quantum boring effect of the spin of electrons in magnetic conductors, and when the other person is convinced that it totally unuseful you explain that it is used in hard disks. SSD are killing the fun.)
Superconductivity -> NMR ~60 years?
Do we have that long?
These projects are a way to train high skilled STEM people (competition to stay at CERN is brutal, but most go on to industry) in a structured way that then work on a lot of other societally relevant problems.
I think it's more correct that you will be generating observations in largely the same way as in the past, but with higher resolution and fidelity.
> You already know we haven’t found anything yet—otherwise you’d have heard of it. But even null results are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us that some ideas—for example, that spacetime might be a regular lattice—are simply incompatible with observations.[1]
So this is really mostly about a "you had your chance with the toy, now it's time to let others play" argument, though she's very adamant that it's not. This is really the large problem with her criticisms: the case that exists is for particle physics getting less priority, but her argument is that it should stop completely, the collaborations disbanded, and everyone goes to find a new job because they can't be trusted to think clearly.
[1]: http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/what-quantum-gravity-needs-i...
Huh? Where is she saying this? Everything I've read from her suggests that she's against building bigger accelerators, not stop investigating particle physics.
E.g. from http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...:
> Science is exploratory and to make progress we should study what has not been studied before, true. But any new experiment in the foundations of physics does that. You can probe new regimes not only be reaching higher energies, but also by reaching higher resolution, better precision, bigger systems, lower temperatures, less noise, more data, and so on.
> No one is saying we should stop explorative research in the foundations of physics. But since resources are limited, we should invest in experiments that bring the biggest benefit for the projected cost. This means the higher the expenses for an experiment, the better the reasons for building it should be. And since a bigger particle collider is presently the most expensive proposal on the table, particle physicists should have the best reasons.
In fact in the very post you link to she dismisses the idea of high precision measurements: "Yeah, except that I am the one saying we could do better things with $20 billion than measuring the next digits of some constants"
In point 18 of this article: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-..., her first suggestion for an alternative avenue of research is
> (a) Astrophysical and cosmological observations attributed to dark matter. These are discrepancies between theory and data which should be studied closer, until we have pinned down the theory. Some people have mistakenly claimed I am advocating more direct detection experiments for certain types of dark matter particles. This is not so. I am saying we need better observations of the already known discrepancies. Better sky coverage, better resolution, better stats. If we have a good idea what dark matter is, we can think of building a collider to test it, if that turns out to be useful
Anyway, I'd like to link Dorigo's post where this anti-science stirrup might have shown up first:
https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/what_it_means_to_be...
I don't find it surprising tbh.
Compared to open source in general the CERN stacks are horrible, typical sloppy academic software of no use to the general public. Tons of stuff like the cling C++ interpreter that look interesting but are never polished to be generally useful.
Truth is, I did get your point. Perfect refinement is not necessary in every context. Your comment, like CERN's interpreter, though sloppy was fit for purpose.
The web browser enabled my whole very comfortable career so I'm willing to overlook a sloppy C++ interpreter here and there.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zpeh9wuzMs&feature=youtu.be...
Theory of Relativity was invented at the Swiss Patent Office.
The criticism is that the ROI = (the potential advance) / (invested money) is too small. As you pointed out it can be argued that the real goal is elsewhere: in the engineering / technology or science of complex systems. Creating a big machine that verifiably works brings many unexpected advances in many fields. And what is more important it is a symbol of human advancement which unites people and inspires them to pursue science. Since humans need a clear goal to invest much resources in a constructive endeavor. It may not be that important though that the ROI in fundamental physics is small, as long as people work hard together. But it can be argued that the whole process begins to resemble religion more than a scientific method; which can be problematic as religions have a bad reputation among scientific community.
The people working at CERN directly and their collaborators truly belief in the goal of understanding the fundamental forces of nature. And they had tremendous success doing so. They are the gold standard for a well managed long running big science project. Just recently they found the Higgs boson. Hossfelder worked for years on extremely speculative ideas in quantum gravity, they weren’t super well received, most people liked string theory better. Bottom up and top down reasoning in particle physics phenomenology suggests there are more discoveries to be made at the energy frontier. I like to see a future where eventually we build a solar system sized particle accelerator not stop at a radius of ~100 km
That's unknown in advance. To take example from maths, the conic sections, braid theory, number theory—they all used to be very abstract and un-applicable parts maths, until one day.
CERN found Higgs - which was proposed decades before CERN was built. There is nothing like the Higgs proposal around today.
That's the real problem. Spend $20bn on some new models, and then you can spend $20bn chasing the most interesting prospects.
That's far more likely to get you somewhere exciting than the experimental equivalent of throwing more spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of it does something unexpected.
This is a very incorrect description of the problem. The situation in basic particle physics is that models are super plentiful; Six months in 2016 saw 500 different papers written to explain a novel signal that ended up not being real, so it's not models that are missing.
If our way of generating new theories has given bad predictions for 50 years, at what time should we stop and try out other ways of extending the confirmed theories?
It is unknown in advance if putting your hand through a fire will hurt you this time as well, but after 50 years of doing so, perhaps it's time to stop.
And the problem has never been making new theories, the problem is always that we have a very good model, and no principled way for choosing between all the possible theories that gives rise to almost precisely that model.
So people tried to invent reasons and so far nobody has had any luck. And Hossenfelder is correct that in hindsight naturalness wasn't a very good rule.
But by the same hindsight, no theory that could be detected in previous experiments would have worked either. In this view, making the experiments at all was a complete waste, we should just have drawn the winning theory from a hat and stopped all further work.
If we have a theory that could solve the measurement problem (or detect quantum gravity etc.), and a plausible experiment for that theory, we should perform this experiment - it may well yield valuable data whatever result we get.
Conversely, if we have a theory that predicts that more particles may exist at higher levels of energy and nothing else, then there is no good reason to perform this experiment. Especially if the precise level of energy is a free parameter of the theory, so the theory won't change if the experiment fails.
> And Hossenfelder is correct that in hindsight naturalness wasn't a very good rule.
I believe that she is correct that naturalness wasn't a very good rule at all, not just in hindsight. It's as good a rule as it would have been to expect all numbers to be multiples of Pi.
The measurement problem isn't a physics thing, just like naturalness that's more of a life-style choice. In fact, the only reason to have problems with wave-function collapse is precisely a naturalness reasoning, technically it makes very accurate predictions just fine.
A GUT is specifically the part of a TOE that has nothing to do with gravity... A TOE is a GUT + a theory of quantum gravity.
If we had the Standard Model + a theory of quantum gravity, this could be a complete theory of the universe (pending explanations for dark matter, dark energy etc.). These could very well be completely separate phenomena, there is no reason to believe they reduce to a single phenomenon - that there exists a TOE.
> The measurement problem isn't a physics thing, just like naturalness that's more of a life-style choice. In fact, the only reason to have problems with wave-function collapse is precisely a naturalness reasoning, technically it makes very accurate predictions just fine.
This isn't entirely accurate. There is a very clear quantitative question behind the measurement problem: what kind of system constitutes a measurement device, in the sense of invoking the need for the Born rule? There must be some precise size/kind of system that, when a particle interacts with it, you can no longer use Schrodinger's equation to predict its movement after that interaction - you must apply the Born rule. We know that this doesn't happen after a particle collision, but that it does happen after a collision with a "detector".
This is a clear empirical question (you don't need to call it a problem), well within the realm of physics. It may be extremely difficult to answer, but I see no reason to imagine it is a priori impossible to resolve.
- Large-scale climate engineering
- Digitizing human consciousness
- Strong AI
- True life extension
- A replacement for the ISS
If you limit your characteristics to "involves high energy particle physics" it's pretty easy to put blinders on and pretend there aren't large challenges facing humanity that could potentially be solved by hard science progress and a lot of funding.
It would be great if people managed to organized around any of the goals you mentioned, so far it hasn’t happened at a comparative scale for various reasons.
I agree with her. These are nonsense arguments.
> Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game.
(2. The “No Zero Sum” argument)
> new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack
5. It is not a waste of money
11. It may lead to spin-offs.
12. A big particle collider would benefit many tech industries and scientific networks.
Any argument that sidesteps that is nonsense. If goal of investing in fundamental physics is not R&D it's just a side effect as I assume.
If I read your argument correctly it's "We can't give argument that this is the best way spend money if you want to solve these problems, but it will generate other side benefits that may help indirectly". It's honest argument if put that way.
As for the argument that cosmology or astronomy are more promising ways of yielding new insights, that's not something she ever bothers to discuss in detail. There's no articles about how the extremely noisy and uncertain constrains from astronomy are more worth to gamble on that than the much cleaner direct detections from accelerators.
And there's certainly no arguments about how we should stop giving so much money to the exoplanet researchers and their instruments instead of making satellites to measure the cosmic radio background. (There's not even a little post about how SpaceX will hamper radio astronomy by making sure there's no radio quiet place left on earth).
They have not given a good answer why particle accelerators they are asking for would give any answers at 100 TeV.
It's just biggest they can hope to get.
I don't understand this argument. We should prefer a particular experiment not because it is more likely to answer a research question but because it, itself, is more challenging?
As another example take the EU quantum initiative, they managed to get ~1 Billion and have promised to get ~5000 people working on it for ~10 years. That works out to ~20000 per person / per year. This only works because a lot of these people are so passionate about this project, that they are willing to self exploit themselves for years.
(And, BTW, the fact that some investment has a good ROI doesn't mean you should pick it over another with a higher ROI)
Poor people "shouldn’t" die from simple diseases. Is this the game, we are wishing away things we don't like?
Science 100% is zero sum. Especially talking the figures we are here.
How about we start with creating free science text books (that are not garbage) for the world then we'll let you blow multi-billions on your religion?
It's true for accelerators and a huge number of other things too. If this isn't unique to accelerators, it's not really a case for accelerators specifically.
> Isn’t it nice that a fraction of the smartest people on the world are not working on getting you to click Ads and are using machine learning to advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature?
This isn't a good faith argument. What if we got our smartest people working in hospitals or schools or orphanages instead of getting you to click ads? Maybe that's where the money should go. Think of the children.
> Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN.
The exact same argument can be made for military spending. The internet was invented at...
It is always such a dishonest argument to talk about spin-off benefits.
The last time a huge, costly, dedicated collider was built, it was in service of the Higgs prediction, and that worked out quite nicely.
For the LHC specifically, it was widely expected that it would find evidence of supersymmetry, and that pinning down the details would help identify which extensions to the Standard Model are worth pursuing. But in fact a) no evidence of supersymmetry has been found, and b) no new lines of inquiry have been suggested. Most theorists have simply adjusted their existing models, moving the goalposts to account for the lack of experimental support.
This is exactly what Hossenfelder is complaining about. Why double and triple down on the same strategy that hasn’t worked yet? Why not at least spread your bets across some different strategies?
More to the point, what is the alternative strategy that’s more likely to produce useful data? “Don’t do experiments to validate or invalidate theory” doesn’t obviously seem like it’s going to produce better results.
I'm no physicist either, so take my hot take with the appropriate pinch of salt. :) My understanding is that some variants and parameters should have been excluded, if you hold theorists to their ~2005 predictions, but in practice most theorists are essentially burying their heads in the sand, or ignoring their past predictions and just making new ones. Both Hossenfelder and Peter Woit (of the "Not Even Wrong" book and blog) have documented many such cases. Many theorists are still assuming supersymmetry as a basis for their work and essentially ignoring the fact that it didn't show up where expected.
More to the point, what is the alternative strategy that’s more likely to produce useful data?
I think it's "remove the focus from high-energy physics and particle colliders, bring more attention to less fashionable areas that might benefit more from huge big-budget experiments." I don't know of any specific proposals to do something completely different with the budget that might otherwise go to e.g. CERN's Future Circular Collider proposal. Hossenfelder has pointed to other big science projects that could produce more scientific bang-for-the-buck than the LHC, such as LIGO and the James Webb space telescope.
Would I trade a European-controlled alternative to Android and iOS for yet another particle collider in Geneva? Yes, absolutely.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf82KOPvTOk
Of course, the more fundamental point is that industry seems perfectly happy to try (and fail) at making Google competitors, while nobody in industry is going to do fundamental physics research.
PS: it sounds like there is some sort of EU plan for this:
https://fsfe.org/news/2020/news-20201023-01.en.html
They probably also need to fund an alternative to TSMC.
JET has proved it is possible: https://ccfe.ukaea.uk/research/joint-european-torus/
ITER is taking JET's work to the next level https://www.iter.org/
Maybe it can't ever be made cheap or practical but worst case scenario it produces interesting results and spin offs like CERN does now.
I remember times when LHC was powered on. It was exiting and many things were speculated that this door would open.
And well... it all fizzled out quite quickly.
Building bigger collider feels like doubling down on a huge sunken cost fallacy.
Edit: are you downvoting because you don't think my comment contributes to the discussion, or because you don't agree?
This misrepresents what she says about weasel words.
Also she specifically addresses the "Discovery or serious exclusion"
I didn't downvote but I would guess you've only skimmed the written article, try watching the video.
The empty promises she is talking about are the equivalent of the promises by politicians during a campaign: they are for the larger public, for the people who (rightfully!) don't want to get more informed than that.
In the background, both in science and in politics, technical folks know what they mean and, especially, where the money is actually going.
In the case of politics, it happens unfortunately that big chunks of the money involved go into private pockets.
Based on my experience, in the case of particle physics, that money invariably goes to wide technological improvement.
Very few sane people really cared whether the Higgs boson existed, but the world is a better place because we got our efforts together in order to find an answer.
- Superconducting magnets and power distribution
- Radiation hard ASICs and detectors
- CAD software like KICAD
- ROOT
- Grid computing infrastructure
- Analog circuit design (1024 channel low power ADCs, pixel sensors)
- FPGA design for data aggregation and communication
It is both curious and sad to see the outsize attention given to bitter polemicists (and not just in physics).
Please read https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 .
Edit: downvotes? let me rephrase: if you care about particle physics then there was no reason to ignore the original proposal. if you care about outrage, on the other hand...
And in that tradition I guess I should have expected a dismissive reply using 'generic press release' to describe the Comment that introduces an entire section of Nature Physics.
It's a rare sight, and the contrarian view is necessary, we need red teams so that things don't become too one-sided and people can overcome their biases. I think the inherent structure in academia and in institutions like CERN make it difficult for dissenting voices to be heard, so I'm glad that the view that's going against the grain is getting more attention. In this era of censorship and punishing of whistleblowers I'm surprised she's freely critiquing their core arguments. Although I do see a lot of ad hominem attacks.
In a better forum the original proposal by the particle physics community would have reached the front page and then a version of this blog post could have been a valid comment.
Now it is the other way around and I think that is unfortunate. Why does it happen?
In other words, we can all disagree. As it happens I do, but she's also not a lunatic whose ideas can just be dismissed as obviously uninformed.
Someone will figure out how to make 1000 Tesla electromagnets at some point, and it's off to the races again. Without the need for more construction.
[Edit]Wrong! Turns out protons do emit energy as well... up to 6.7 KeV per turn. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation
For this reason I've seen suggestions to do round electron-type accelerators but using the much heavier muons to get around the radiation problem.
Couldn't a more thorough understanding of particle physics be relevant to things like nano-materials or better understanding superconductivity or possibly additional ways to contain plasma for fusion?
It seems to me that particle physics post-LHC is just the same as it was pre-LHC. We verified the existence of the Higgs, which is great, but that meant no revisions to the Standard Model were needed as it already assumed the Higgs. And no exotic or unexpected new particles have turned up.
You can definitely argue that the technology spin-offs from the LHC have been great; but is that really an argument for another collider specifically, or just Big Science in general?
To put it another way, what’s the argument for a collider that goes beyond “provide employment for hundreds of high-energy physicists, and throw some unprecedented engineering and logistical challenges at then”? Is there a pitch that’s based on the science rather than the technology?
The LHC hasn't really shown us where to look, the hope is that a larger collider can give a more clear indication.
That said, I have this feeling that we're approaching the limits of "going big". There was a very interesting talk[2] over at Perimeter Institute recently about larger colliders and their feasibility.
[1]: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-are-the-most-impo...
[2]: http://pirsa.org/20100056/
As a related tangent: we have verified the existence of the Higgs, but only partially.
What was so far measured was the interaction strength between Higgs and W bosons, Z bosons, and the top quarks: these are the main channels of Higgs production at the LHC, and they fit the theory prediction within 20%. Yes, 20%. Not precise at all. What about interaction between Higgs and the other 5 kinds of quarks? Electrons? Muons? Tau? Itself? The data ranges from +-100% to none at all.
In particular the measurement of Higgs-Higgs interaction is an important one: the assumption Standard Model makes about the strength of this interaction is not unique, and others are possible. We don't know yet: not enough data. Moreover models with multiple Higgs particles are possible. Again, we don't know yet, not enough data.
This is why some cautious researchers claim that we have discovered "a scalar particle", "believed to be Higgs", but further measurement is needed to determine all of its properties.
This is one of the main activities at LHC and among the theoreticians at the moment: measuring Higgs interactions with other particles. There is still way to improve precision with more data from LHC, but ultimately there is only so much it can do without increasing the energy.
i.e. exactly what happened for the top quark, without proof of which we wouldn't have a working standard model. Why wasn't that the example?
But-
I still think we should keep doing particle physics, for a while longer. We have built up a huge global community of physicists and engineers who do particle physics, and without a way for them to conduct experiments there won’t be any jobs for those people to do, and in 2 generations all that expertise will be gone. The praxis will be gone. After all, that’s what technology really is; it isn’t a set of books on a shelf, it’s networks of people, with skills and connections to each other, who can get things done. Let’s make sure we don’t pull the plug early.