Fusion does remind me of the space program. Surprising new solutions in a wide range of sciences. Easy to produce superconducting ribbons being one of the big successes so far. Said ribbons have lead to significant improvements in electro magnets, improving both field strength and decreasing the magnet sizes. Said magnets are useful for a wide variety of applications (outside of fusion), like improved MRI machines. The ribbons have the potential to help transmit power across the grid with less losses. Significant improvements in predicting and shaping turbulence in plasma has a wide range of applications in producing more efficient engines. Using AI/ML to attack the complexity of the plasma flows that were otherwise computationally intractable.
I'm all for the LHC, but it does seem like the world needs a bit better of an idea of the mysteries that the LHC++ might solve before spending $10-$100B on it. Does seem like science could be pushed further in other areas.
Why bother doing science at all if it's not practical applicable right? Such a nonsense argument I wonder how you think any scientific progress is made.
Research is never a sure thing, but ideally we'd push all areas of science equally. How many other areas of science have a $100B tool that may or may not reveal something interesting?
Why should high energy physics get priority over any other area?
It's the nature of high energy physics that the higher the energy the rarer the event. The standard model already explains our universe unbelievably accurately. Sure there are corner cases, and maybe, just maybe a LHC++ might give some evidence towards one model or another. But what happens if global warming, wars over fuel, lack of fertilizer, and lack of food makes it harder for humanity to survive let alone complete major science projects.
Renewable and/or carbon neutral energy in all it's forms seems pretty important these days compared to slightly reinforcing one physical model over another.
Maybe a fusion engine would let us explore the solar system enough to find planet 9, which might well be a black hole. That would open up particle energies well in excess of anything we could manage with LHC++.
Didn't CERN and LHC had big contribution already related to magnets(though maybe LHC designers don't directly apply to fusion needs) ? There are projects related to fusion too but I am expecting that people agreeing to this article will also want to remove the funding for fusion and invest it in electric cars and solar panels or his pet project.
From what I can tell it's really is ground breaking, significant changes, well ahead of the normal projections for improved magnets. Literally with a single technology that allows magnet to be 40 times smaller. The easy to produce superconducting tape of arbitrary length is likely to find interesting applications as well.
Sure, like all research, practical fusion is not guaranteed, but it does look promising, and real progress has been made, and not just the "few % better this year" that might lead to real progress in a decade or a few centuries.
However Fusion is just an example, imagine 100 $1B projects, doesn't it seem likely for humanity to learn more from those then some particle that is hard to produce, last for a billionth of a second, and makes some models more likely and other models less likely? Maybe help with cancer, medicine, energy production, AI, space travel, faster computers, improving food production, mitigating global warning, energy storage or similar?
Right, the article doesn't argue for fusion funding.
But elsewhere the author has advocated it with "fusion power is a goal worth spending billions on". And in his "Why Particle Colliders Will Go Extinct" article, he supports the billions spent on fusion.
The author's other writings include:
- Gun Ownership Neither Increases Nor Decreases the Crime Rate
Because Supersymmetry is stupid theory that can be fit to any set of facts, there is no point in building LHC++. Besides it is so expensive you could give a 100.000 physicist a million bucks and that would be more productive.
No! It would not. You could fund attic hobby projects all year long, but it's never going to give new data.
It is one of the great perks of civilization that you can combine resources to make something truly awesome, whether it is pyramids, moon landings or large colliders.
The claim that we need to "invest into science" is outright bullshit. We don't need more investment into climate change science - we already know what to do to mitigate climate change and we have known it for decades (hell there is an article from over a hundred years ago that warns of the dangers of CO2 emissions [2]): ban ICE vehicles and coal power plants, promote public transit, massively restrict other uses of fossil material, get rid of mass animal farming, prevent profiteers from burning down the Amazon rainforest.
The problem is, politicians won't do anything because they are either bought out by the fossil fuel industry that is at the top of the CO2 emitter list [1] or because they are afraid of telling their voters that the only way to stay on track regarding climate change will be a drastic cut in their quality of life.
Use electric cars, green energy, and sustainable farming practices?
The gross old shit only still exists because the entrenched industries have the ability to lobby for government subsidies. Imagine if people in the US had to actually pay full price for gas, or for their meat.
I never owned a car (only use trains + bicycles), I’m on a renewable electricity plan, and I’m vegetarian (and being selective with the farms I buy my eggs and milk from).
It’s not “living in caves”, in fact, it’s not any different from the life of anyone else. It’s only a handful of tiny changes and suddenly your climate impact is massively reduced.
or we go forward out of the cave we are living in now, believing we are so advanced that we are at the peak of civilization, while we still pray a non existent being for health and create energy by making giant holes in the ground that give us goo that then we set on fire.
Isn't this a reason to understand more about the climate though? How big cuts are needed, and how fast? What is the consequence of leaving those cuts an extra 10 years? What if we put our energy into cutting methane now and leave CO2 for later? Does black carbon matter in the long term? What amount of warming is acceptable?
These are the kind of questions we need answers to. Just saying 'we need to stop all emissions today' is not good enough. There is always a trade-off and we need to work out where this lies.
Elon Musk was willing to put up upwards of $40bn to buy out Twitter. If a private individual can leverage that kind of money, $100bn seems like peanuts for an international scientific endeavour.
Heck, Germany just greenlit a €100bn special budget for expanding its military capabilities.
It's not that world governments don't have that kind of money to spend on the Climate crisis, it's that they aren't interested and motivated to do it. Germany's special budget was justified with Russia being an existential threat but the Climate crisis has been recognized as an existential threat for decades, yet almost all countries have been dragging their feet.
NATO recommends member nations put 2% of their annual budget into defense. Imagine its members (let alone most countries) would have done the same for combatting Climate change.
That 100B hasn’t been poured into climate change mitigation has absolutely nothing to do with a plan to build a 100B hadron collider. Plus this is 100B over decades.
I wouldn't mind them building it if they just used their own money. Spinoff cern companies have earned a $trillion or more revenue and probably a hundred billions profit from things like medical imaging gear. They could well afford to fund themselves and a new collider without begging the public for money.
Cern really should be investigated and audited publicly, but it would take Delloites and PWC to follow that paper trail and audit hundreds of companies going back 25-30 years. I've always said it, cern is a scam, they take public money to fund product research, and then spin off separate companies to cream off the profits. Then they act broke and beg us for more money.
Edit: There is very little public information on this. The company accounts may be public, but like I said, there are hundreds of them going back 30 years, and no-one is motivated to do that kind of research. There is a recent study here[0] which looks at the economic benefit to companies that help build the research equipment. Obviously a lot of tech has to be invented just to build systems like this. But I haven't seen a similar study of the cern spin-off companies, or KT (Knowledge Transfer) partners in cern nomenclature, and that is where the real meat is.
I don't see why it would be so controversial for cern to retain some share in those KT companies and use that money to be self sufficient. That seems like a win for science.
UK firm buys cancer-zapping spin-off from CERN collider
"The spin-off, known as Adam, was established in 2007 by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to build low-cost innovative accelerators for proton beam therapy (PBT) and conventional radiotherapy. Advanced Oncotherapy will pay for Adam in shares, giving CERN scientist Alberto Colussi, who founded the CERN business, a continuing stake in the technology."
That sounds kind of like what every government dreams of - an institution you fund that does important scientific work and also generates a thriving ecosystem of private sector companies?
If that's a scam then please take the shirt off my back.
Yeah, it might be a non competitive investment for private investors because of the high risk compared to the low return or because the benefits are only seen years down the line, so results in a low annualized rate (you need to do it via nth root, not via dividing the returns by n). So governments do that investment instead. As a government you see things differently. Unless it goes abroad, the money is never gone, but is just going circles in your economy. If there is an added benefit of improvements decades down the line, even better.
I don't think that's true. CERN itself didn't create many (any?) successful companies. People who worked at CERN went on to create companies, but that doesn't create any money for CERN.
Yeah, no. Only LHC can generate particle events in a highly controllable environment with enough energy. In physics there are energy thresholds. Below a certain level of energy a certain event just never happens.
The low hanging fruit of discovering new physics looks like this. Build a bigger machine to collide particles with even more energy. Observe what comes out. It's a clear direction. Just throw money at the problem and get a result.
Does this sort of thing give us tangible benefits? Is it worth the investment? I get things like materials science, supercomputers, AI research, etc. But these colliders are so expensive, all for the sake of discovering a tiny subatomic particle that we have no way of using, AFAIK. But I know nothing, am I wrong here?
the collider itself lends itself to few directly tangible benefits, however the construction of the collider and analysis of the data is one of the largest innovation engines in the science world.
a prolific amount of software, engineering, and material science has come from CERN, as well spinning off numerous high-tech startups.
The LHC has been in operation for about 12-14 years, and has been a "thing" from planning onwards for almost 40. It's cost $9B, split between a huge list of countries.
Estimates of waste in the US medical system range from around $500B-$2T annualy. The lower end of that scale would support starting a new, fully funded, project of a similar scale for every state in the US every single year.
At a multi-national, multi-decade scale I just don't think it's actually that much money.
> all for the sake of discovering a tiny subatomic particle that we have no way of using
There are few ways I'd look at this.
One is that fundamental science can bleed into regular use over time, look at lasers. IIRC they had no clear use when invented, but are now absolutely key to so much. While the LHC had a headline goal (at least publicly) it's not just discovering one thing, it's a large tool to test fundamental physics.
Another is that this money and work doesn't go nowhere. People are paid to work on big complex problems, building and designing magnets, detectors, computing systems, software for analysis, etc. A lot of that is not going to be entirely custom, and at the very least supports companies & the supply chain for newer advanced technology. NASA I think occasionally puts out some lists of things that derived from their work.
Beyond that, I think there's value in getting a lot of people in a lot of countries to work together on a broadly non-political goal.
But isn't that also exactly why the whole effort is a bit futile? If it takes this much effort to detect that an event is even happening, you end up describing something that only really happens in a lab situation and has not much relevance for the real world.
That said, LHC cost $4.75 billion that's pretty much nothing compared to the amount of money that gets thrown around in the tech world. So might still be worth it just for the fun of it, even if the discoveries don't have any direct application.
We need to figure out what we are missing, namely what is dark-matter, how does it interact with the currently visible matter, are there extra dimensions and so on. Once that it is figured out it might well be that we could engineer systems beyond our wildest dreams, we just don’t know yet.
From a purely isolated Experimental (Physics) point of view this might be true. But of course both theory and experiments are highly intertwined. For instance if you would like to observe Neutrinoless Double beta decay in nature, even if it exists, you might never get a chance to actually measure it because it would occur so seldomly. With setups like the LHC there is actually a realistic chance (if such phenomena exist) to measure them and thus applying that knowledge to various theories existing or in the making.
That said, of course particle physics results have direct applications. For instance in speculative commercial applications of Nuclear fusion and also Quantum Computing is connected to particle physics. I mean even GPS systems are based on 4D space time. Not entirely sure if any of that can be directly attributed to research happening in colliders but this is just one part of the field, mainly the experimental part - which can verify/falsify theories or result in new ones.
Driven by this post, out of curiosity I started looking at the price tag of some mega-projects around the world.
Interestingly, the most expensive ones are almost always highway systems.
Can someone briefly explain why? I'm my naive view it's mostly asphalt and terrain work.
Anything that involves digging holes in the ground is enormously expensive. If you take house building as an example, 25-30% of the cost is the foundations - digging it out then filling them with concrete.
Sometimes when they dig into the ground they find something unpredictable e.g. contaminated soil which can result in a major cost blowout, a legal fight between government and contractor and then unplanned delays which further increases costs.
Several people have answered this from the angle of why the cost is large, but missed the other (necessary) angle - the benefits are also massive and well understood. Plenty of potential projects have huge costs but they don't exist because the benefits aren't big enough, highways exhibit a sort of survivor bias in the mega project world.
Highway systems create massive economic benefits that are relatively simple to calculate, just in the raw # hours saved which massively increases productivity. This can be well captured by the state through taxes or (less frequently) by private industry through tolls - i.e. the people that direct their construction.
Other mega projects have much less certain benefits, or the benefits are harder to capture by those with the ability to allocate resources because incentives aren't sufficiently aligned.
It's reasons like this that I don't necessarily see LHC or whatever rev of it as a problem per se. If the technologies developed to get there pay back the cost of the collider then it could end up being a very expensive toy and I wouldn't care. To me it's about the journey and getting there, because for big science in many case the real science is not the tool produced at the end but the science and engineering that has to go into making that tool.
Thus the question I have to the scientists pushing for a new LHC is: "What would we get from the journey?" If they truly believe in the project they'll have a dozen technologies that need to be developed to make their project happen, all of which have practical applications beyond their experiment. If they don't they'll just be pushing for "same but larger" which is IMO a waste of resources. Because why shouldn't we be investing in the technology to do "Same but smaller" in that case so we can do more with less?
> If they truly believe in the project they'll have a dozen technologies that need to be developed to make their project happen, all of which have practical applications beyond their experiment.
I don't think one should even have to demonstrate "practical applications beyond the experiment" beforehand. Just that it is a complete problem that can be solved independently from the entire project.
If there are a lot of those, it's much better to fund those and get the results that will push the cost of the full thing down. Even if the total costs turn up to be higher than focusing on the collider from the start.
Cannot disagree more. "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's just have 1000 people walk one mile and explore." Simply ridiculous comparison. But sure, let's find a way to build/experiment LHC++ less expensively.
What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.
My immediate skepticism is whether there is a dollar limit to your perspective
$100,000,000,000 with afterthought of “sure lets see if we can do it less expensively *since its sooo annoying to some people”? Where is the line for you currently?
More realistically : we can only build one car in the entire world, where a tiny minority of people can even understand the potential benefit, and anything they see will be completely useless for everyone else in day to day life because we need a civilisation level effort to even detect the implications of their theory. If their theory had some real world implications - you wouldn't need this car.
And this is expected to be funded by everyone. It's the modern equivalent of building pyramids.
ISS wasn't useless, but its successor should be much cheaper. We absolutely need to find ways how to do space research more efficiently, otherwise it will stay a luxury of the richest nations.
Fortunately, at the very least, launch costs to orbit are dropping and we may hope for further drops in the future - if Starship works as intended.
It is, really. At one time, it was the only place the shuttle could get to; and the shuttle was the only thing that could get people to it.
Literally the only thing they can do at ISS, not better done with robots, is study how human bodies are affected by exposure to high radiation and long-term weightlessness. Which we care about only because people would be so exposed in ISS-like cans.
Now they are pushing the "lunar gateway", that likewise has exactly one reason to exist: SLS could get there. And, it will be a place for SLS to get to. And, even more useless. A thing in high orbit around the moon is absolutely useless for any other purpose, whether you are heading for the moon or beyond it.
I don't really want to dispute that, just want to paint a more realistic of what these scientific projects actually are. They are not investments for sure.
Europe is so rich it can easily afford all of the great project ideas outlined in the article in addition to a new LHC (and then some).
Let's think big indeed, the author unfortunately has a very reductive vision for the future.
Instead how about:
A renaissance of funding - BIG SCIENCE - education, jobs.
That was basically the promise of the EU - peace through wealth - let's create some more.
Let's bring back the excitement and scientific wonder of the 1960s. This could be a unilateral vision across the democratic spectrum (everyone wants wealth).
And yes, global warming actually should dictate no less. Let's do it now.
Oh and let's just fix poverty while we are at it.
Again, Europe has the means and could do all of that by itself.
The Human Genome Project was a huge success. Being able to read the DNA cheaply got us a revolution in biotech (cancer therapies, gene therapies, mRNA delivery, and my favourite: partial / full cell reprogramming)
What's it currently doing with that money? I guess we could get rid of funding healthcare and trying to help people out of poverty so that a small number of people get to use a very expensive toy...
You know what would be an awesome big science project that would immeasurably improve future people's lives? Sequencing all genes and using that data provide free embryo selection services to everyone who wants to be a parent.
Would probably cost the same as that giant particle smasher and but unlike the giant ring it would pay for itself in a generation.
Terrifying but intriguing idea. China's one-child policy led to widespread female infanticide and a generation of missing girls. What would prevent some similar unintended consequence in Europe?
We're talking about embryos here. I think you're well aware about the ongoing discussions on when those are to be considered humans and when not. That's not an easy topic, obviously, but I'm fairly confident that we won't throw babys in the garbage can if we don't like them but try to make those decisions as early as possible.
> I'm fairly confident that we won't throw babys in the garbage can if we don't like them
Why not? What exactly is the limiting criterion? Sentience is the main criterion that people who want to argue for animal rights and yet support abortion use, and it's a pretty squishy criterion. Already Peter Singer supports veganism and effective altruism (i.e., rebranded utilitarianism), and yet is perfectly okay with both abortion and infanticide, at least until the child gets "sentience".
I think the EU as a group of states seems to work quite well. Furthermore it seems like anti-democratic behaviour is getting punished now, too, if you look over to Poland. I'm quite optimistic that this will further improve.
Dude, what is your definition of "democracy" ? Because your opinion about Poland state seems to be really, really brain-washed. At best.
Democracy as in free election ? Perfect democracy here - one party won twice, other parties lost. You call it a problem ?
Democracy as in free speech ? Dude ! Wake up ! In Poland is so much free speech that it's boarding with anarchy ! Eg. almost decade of opposition internally and internationally literally urges to harm their own country just to retake power - without any gov punishment or something. Mrs. Merkel ex-pet, Tusk, literally calls for purges, without any law procedures ! Freedom bordered with anarchy !
Maybe you are aware judges here act as caste and they do whatever they want. Law is twisted at will here. Do not saying all the time, just when they want it. And that judges are official* opposition of elected party ! Judges ! Acting politically ! You call that despotism ? Or too much freedom ?
Do we have military state like in France ? No. Do we have censorship like in Germany ? No. Do we have problems with making government like Italy ? No. Do our PM resigned because of corruption and next PM promised silence and no more leeks like in GB ? No.
You see ? It's oasis of peace and happiness here compared to rest of the EU ;)
But tell me pls, what you have in mind about that "anti-democracy" in Poland ?
Only if Poland were the one doing the punishing. In this context, if I am correctly interpreting what the OP is referring to, the EU is punishing its member state Poland; Poland is the recipient of the punishment
Yes, European Imperium dark forces keep supporting anti-democracy here: they are on politically involved post-commie juries side, trying to prevent juries from being just third power of democracy; they tried to create illegal immigrants camps here; they constantly abuse union treaties like prohibiting polish drives equality; cretive treaties laws interpretations ? LOL; pushing minorities over-alle privilages and not based on actual reality pseudo-science like gender ? They do constantly. But where to moved "equality parades" from Berlin ? Obviously socialistic systemic method "resolved" minorities public shows in Berlin by terrorist attack threats... "No LGBT spheres" ? Faked and published by actual pro-LGBT zealot - but that's not a problem for fake-democratic EU owners to be another "reason" to punish Poland :>
You will have to be more specific, "democratic" is a grossly overlaoded term these days. When you write "democratic", do you mean "in accordance with the will of the majority of the population", or do you mean "in accordance with the will of unelected EU bureaucrats, the US Department of State, and media elites"?
I'm not sure what the form of government has to do with long-term, unintended consequences deriving from parents regularly choosing the characteristics of their unborn children. Would we have more or fewer: engineers, artists, short people, quirky people, homosexuals, religious people, etc?
Embryo selection[1] is criminally underrated. It is a method to permanently enhance the genetic potential of a child of any given couple. It is already live and there are living children, the only remaining issue is scaling[2].
Well... The US Defense budget for 2021 alone is 7 times the money needed to build a new LHC (705 billion [1] for the US defense in 2021). Germany will spend a similar 100 billion dollars on weapons in the coming years. So while 100 billion looks like an amazing amount of money, the military spends this in the blink of an eye and without the slightest promise of a RoI...
I like having something to scale 100B to, but this is a silly argument.
"Instead of cutting this program, just have every military cut funding at once" is not a very realistic path forwards, and we're not going to get the program funded on stuff like that.
In the hypothetical universe we're in here, where we have to convince people now.
"Embryo selection"—is that a euphemism for "murdering any unborn child that doesn't have all the "right" genes? Because if so I think your definition of "people's lives" must be very different from mine.
I agree with your position, but it is no less polemical and ideological than the comment you are responding to.
> an embryo is not a child and you cannot murder an embryo
It is not obviously and axiomatically true that embryos are not human (I'm assuming the previous comment meant human and not child). Many people think that they are, which is the source of the disagreement. It probably is fruitless to have this conversation on HN, but you shouldn't just assert the opposing position as if it were settled when it is anything but.
> but it is no less polemical and ideological than the comment you are responding to.
I beg to differ. I don't think that using dictionary definitions to make ones arguments can be counted as polemic (as in; to use contentious rhetoric). I might be wrong though.
> I'm assuming the previous comment meant human and not child
No, I actually meant 'child'. An human embryo is - obviously - human. No discussion about that. A human embryo is not a child - the definition of that is also pretty much settled, I'd say. (At least from a scientific point of view.)
But maybe I didn't clearly state my case, thus the misunderstanding.
The point I'm making is as follows. Embryos are not children and thus they are not persons. Just as I cannot murder my toe (it might be human, but it's not a person) I cannot murder an embryo.
Quotation needed. Outside of religious circles there's very little debate about this. Scientific consensus is that fetal viability is considered to begin at 23 or 24 weeks gestational age. That's long after the embryo stage.
Just to make communication easier; are you aware that there's a difference between embryo and fetus?
> You also don't have any definition with a clear line when this switch from non human to human happens.
I never proposed that a embryo is not human. But we can talk about the line dividing persons from non-persons, if you like.
Many (including myself) consider abortion to be murder even before fetal viability.
> Outside of religious circles there's very little debate about this
Do you live in the US or Canada? Almost every other country, including almost all of highly secular Western Europe, bans abortion before at no later than 17 weeks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law).
It's hardly a polemic when it is a question of existential importance- what does it mean to be human, when does a human begin to exist, and at what point does a human have rights?
Embryos are without a question human. So is my little toe. The question is whether they are persons.
The importance of the topic doesn't make it impossible to be polemic. I can talk about a very serious topic and be polemic and I can also talk about a trivial matter and not be polemic. The question of polemic is decided by contentious rhetoric.
Equating embryos with children and abortion with murder is polemic.
The question is not are embryos human, the question is whether they are independent human life with their own rights.
I don't think it is polemic to disagree on this point, but it rationally follows that if embryos are unique life forms, which are also human, then aborting them is murder.
Personally, I don't agree with that line of reasoning either, but the argument isn't in itself polemic.
Edit: I suppose I should add that I am not treating "human" as a collective noun, the way we might talk about bread or water. "A human" is not merely a little toe, for example.
>> Embryos are without a question human. [...] The question is whether they are persons.
> The question is not are embryos human, the question is whether they are independent human life with their own rights.
I think we are pretty much in agreement what the contention is about.
> [..] the argument isn't in itself polemic.
The argument itself is not polemic. No argument in itself is polemic. Polemic is defined in the language used. I'm objecting the language in which the argument is phrased;
To quote the post I originally answered to:
> "Embryo selection"—is that a euphemism for "murdering any unborn child [...]
The phrasing is polemic for reasons I pointed out before.
Definition? Do you mean no limits at all up to and immediately prior to birth? I'm not sure you'd get unanimity on that. That implies a few seconds separating legal permission to kill from infanticide.
Yuval Noah Harari in "Homo Deus" [1], paraphrased: once all your neighbors are selecting their embryos, and you see their children healthier, higher IQ, excelling in school, how long do you think you will hold out?
Europe has an aging population, which is obese, smokes and has heart problems. It is a dying continent whose boomer generation has decided to transfer large amounts of IP to China for a short term profit, while refusing to have children, protesting against the establishment and being generally useless in their youth.
The millennials and gen-z is royally screwed, the writing has been on the walls for years.
So? Infant survival and life expectancy rates are also way up since their parents generation. You can't just throw around generational statistics without any context at all and call it valid.
Money is just one small aspect of it - getting into that kind of research probably requires >2σ IQ, then there's the affinity and motivation - you are left with a small pool of people who can do this work.
By funding toy projects and pipe dreams you are crowding out useful research - and there's plenty of fundamental work in material sciences, superconductivity, etc. that could actually improve the lives of everyone
It sounds like you're worried that creating high-paying fundamental science jobs would pull smart people away from engineering. But it would be more likely to pull smart people from zero-sum (or at least low-sum) fields like advertising and finance.
No - there's a lot of science to be done in these fields - it's just applied (ie. practical). When you fund "fundamental" research - you're not only diverting limited funds - you're diverting limited talent - so it's double crowding out.
Much of Europe is now cranking up defense spending in order to deter future Russian aggression, and comply with NATO treaties. That will take precedence over big science projects for the next few years.
The problem is western society doesn't really believe in science at this point to save us, it believes in technology.
All our problems are just the engineering problem of AGI. Why waste money on something like this when AI will be "smarter" than us by the time it is built?
We should just do nothing and wait for AI to build the instruments it wants.
Maybe there is the slightest hope in this "overpriced" and long delayed space telescope that is getting ready right now but even with that the narrative will end up being how "AI finds alien planet" or "AI sees first star in the universe".
To really build a new LHC it just needs to be marketed to the populace as a tool for AI research. Done. Everyone knows AI is the future and we are not so stupid to skimp on AI research funding.
Spend all that money on researching particle physics though? What a fucking waste of money.
I’m not an expert on AI but I was under the impression that AI is just a fancy way to fit data with massive computative power. So if you wanted AI to do science for us it would basically just return the result we expected in a fancy and unexpected way, and even then we might be overfitting. If an AI would return new science we didn’t expect—I don’t see how but lets imagine—we would reject it as a miss.
Take the Event Horizon Telescope as an example here. It requires a massive amount of computational modeling to create those images from a huge dataset. Humans did their science to figure out how the supermassive black holes would look like and created their models (AI if you will) based on this knowledge. Even so they are not free from criticism that they might be overfitting onto a conformation bias and many scientists are waiting for an independent confirmatory observation before they believe the image. Now if you replace the humans in that equation with more models (AGI if you will) how do you even know what you are looking at is even sensical?
I’m not a fan of the LHC++ project either, but I think you might have too much faith in AI and AGI.
> That was basically the promise of the EU - peace through wealth - let's create some more.
Doing useless science is the destruction of wealth. The destruction of wealth is pleasurable, don't get me wrong, but that's all it is. They could build gargantuan statues to do the same thing, or accumulate huge stockpiles of weapons.
Is the ratio of cost of car to cost of persons walking correct.
It seems like the car is a Bugatti Veyron and like there is a huge (exponentially growing) fronteir to explore.
Exploring another 1000 miles in a very well studied direction seems less curious than pushing outward another mile over the entire frontier. Especially at the places that have gotten less attention.
'Doing more of the same but bigger' feels more like small thinking than 'lets try lots of things we haven't tried before'. To me the latter also feels a lot more curious.
I read it as: "Instead of building one really expensive car to continue to explore in one direction let's build lots of cars and explore in all directions". To me that shows an attitude full of curiosity.
As all car analogies, this is bad. It's more like "instead of building a space probe to explore the solar system, let's build a thousand cars to explore the grass patch in a thousand directions".
Big science projects such as the LHC go very far and very deep in the very fabric of reality. Instead of building a thousand cars, it'd be a good idea to still build the next space probe while, at the same time, use what we learned building the previous one to build a couple cars to explore in different directions.
I think that's crazy reductive though. It's not an either/or, and it's a gross oversimplification that big projects only show benefit within their major focus. LHC has produced benefit in particle physics, yes, but I am 100% sure it also introduced new methods of construction, semiconductors, material science, and other fields in the construction of the facility. I see this argument with space exploration as well, "why not feed the world instead of exploring space?"
Why is it zero sum to begin with? And more importantly, how less effective would be able to feed the world had we had no space race to begin with? If we were still at a 1950s technical level, our farming capacity would be exponentially lower, and most of the big leaps came as a direct result technologies originally developed for space.
It's naive to assume we can see all the benefits of daring to attempt hard things, but attempting hard things is what moves society forward. If all we did was lots of little cars in all directions when we have already figured out the challenges with little cars, mean the ONLY benefit is the direct one. If we've never built a car to explore REALLY far, well, there's a bunch of other problems we need to solve to get there. And honestly, it's those results that will likely move the needle.
> "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's just have 1000 people walk one mile and explore."
"Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's instead build an airplane."
The problem with next-gen LHC is that there are no guarantees of any new or interesting physics for that $100 billion. And particle accelerators are not the only way to spend large sums of money, so there is an opportunity cost. Why not spend that $100 billion to build more space telescopes or more sensitive LIGOs to detect gravitational waves, etc.
Curiousity can have many shapes. Being curious about 100,000 smaller questions is no better or worse than being curious about one big one. A lack of curiousity here would have been to sinply say all this money shouldnt be spent on research at all.
My read of the article was more a call for considering the practical uses of tge research. If we don't know what $100B worth of LHC will discover, why wouldnt we instead fund tens of thousands of smaller projects that often have very practical real world goals?
>I agree, it reads like a variation of 'there's nothing left to discover so lets all go home and not bother'
I don't think that's quite right. The big problem isn't that there is 'nothing left to discover' because we know there are interesting physics at higher energy scales. What we don't actually know if there is anything interesting at the energy scales that this particle accelerator could achieve. You could literally spend two decades building this, and in the end, all you would do is rule out a tiny energy-scale slice.
If there is plenty of unexplored space, and all the car helps you do is figure out what is 1000 miles out but you can only explore one direction with it and can't directly bring anything back... yeah, sending 1000 people out one mile is probably more beneficial.
"Rather than building yet another city-sized internal combustion engine, but even bigger to carry more further, how about we fund a lot of blue-sky research to determine if there's a way to carry scientists forward without city-sized internal combustion engines?"
I fully agree. I’d even go one step further: don’t spend that 100 billion on physics at all. That’s taxpayer money that actually can be spent on feeding the hungry. That’s the humane thing to do, and I bet a much better investment in science too, since those hungry will have a chance to become scientists.
PS. I have a masters in engineering physics and several friends who are physicists. I’m also a science nerd. But I still think this is the right thing to do.
The best way to feed the hungry is to implement systemic change which improves education, distributes productivity more evenly, invests in primary research across a broad range of domains, eliminates debt slavery, and - most of all for this three - keeps qualified physicists in research and out of fintech.
You need to throw politics at poverty and homelessness, not just cash.
Not incidentally, lowering the barriers to physics education and changing the incentives towards risky imagination and away from calculated academic careerism would also make breakthroughs in physics more likely.
Why not take the 100 billion from somewhere other than frontier physics research. I always consider these articles small minded since the people writing them don't consider projects outside of their domain that eat up more funding than something like LHC++. It's such a zero sum situation where there is a 100 billion grant for grabs and the author wants it spent on one project in place of this one.
The more research we do the better and 100 billion spent over approx 20 years by over a dozen countries is a far cry from putting all our eggs in one basket.
The LHC's development produced a number of new technologies (e.g. radiation resistant microcontrollers, and gas electron multipliers). Could the next generation produce more, valuable tech?
I also don't have the expertise to tell whether the article is being overly reductive with the project's goals: are there other questions (besides new particles) that can only be answered with a larger collider? The summary of the FCC (Future Circular Collider) project's goals indicates that yes, there are unresolved questions that the FCC will address[0].
I see the same argument (secondary innovations) being made for war-time/military research. But I don't buy it there, and I don't buy it here.
Investing the same money in something that has a known and positive primary effect will produce the same amount of secondary benefits. So if you can think of something more fruitful to do with these 100B, do that; the secondary benefits will keep coming anyhow.
I've read the history section in that page and I see nothing about that. WiFi had several competing implementation - at best, you could say the Radiophysics Division of CSIRO sped things up a bit. But since the next paragraph begins with "About the same time in The Netherlands in 1991" (aka a year earlier)...
Had the rich noble simply invested his money in doctors instead of the person with a hobby of playing with glass, they might have instead discovered more uses for leeches
We can't keep every avenue open. Resources are finite. What makes you think that spending $100B on an LHC++ will be more useful to humanity than ten smaller, $10B projects that people might come up with (or probably already have come up with, but currently lack funding)?
Allocating resources worth billions on one avenue is not keeping every avenue open, it is forgoing thousands of avenues that don't force you to decide like this.
Is it just one avenue? While I'm not a particle physicist, my layman understanding of LHC is that it can be used to test many theories that would otherwise go unsolved. Should we only research things that are cheap to test and eventually mass producible?
> Should we only research things that are cheap to test and eventually mass producible?
Of course not we should choose avenues according to what they are likely to achieve being better than alternative allocations. For another LHC that is a huge burden to overcome.
What is so great about LHC2 that you want to keep space exploration going at a crawl with commercial companies showing how to do it on a shoestring budget? Maybe the LHC2 will cause a discovery the LHC won't but is that probability of learning something worth sacrificing a huge portion of our resources on? Or is this that we made people gain an expertise and they want to continue with its path even though it's a pretty bad one to continually invest more and more in?
Personally, I have mixed feelings about learning fission and I would rather explore space and have functionally independent colonies before we blow ourselves up with a new subatomic discovery.
There are no theories left that LHC, or any collider we could build, can test.
Strings are right out. Nobody has offered any clue as to how to make a prediction that could be tested with possible equipment.
That does not mean none ever will, but it does not seem to be their focus. Physics departments like string theorists because they come with no equipment budget.
Well I agree that big projects make sense in many cases, and I don't want to be misunderstood as arguing against basic research.
Frankly, given the amounts we spend on things I fundamentally disagree with, I'd even say "sure let them have at it and let's find another 100B somewhere in the military budgets of the world, divert them to more research."
But even if you want to focus on "big, milestone" projects like the LHC[++] you can go for other challenges where you know that there's a tangible benefit to be had at the end.
Fusion research for example comes to mind. Hugely expensive, interesting, rewarding if successful, track record of secondary inventions.
I'm sure there are others. Off the top of my head, carbon capture and storage, better (more sustainable) battery/storage tech, elimination of rare earths in electronics, ...
That's definitely a sensible position. However, I believe these goal-oriented research projects have a tendency to fall stuck in local optima. Sometimes breakthroughs may come from just more people working on it and other times they come from discoveries made in unrelated fields. By cutting ourselves off from any expensive moonshot projects without a clear goal like the LHC, some of our hard problems may never be solved and we may never know why.
Right at the moment and for the next two decades, any big money should build out solar and wind generating capacity. Physics will still be there. Physicists can work on catalysts and excitons for a while.
Each avenue you keep open costs money and takes up people's time. You can't keep every avenue open. You have to decide -- with imperfect information -- which avenues are worth keeping open. And the entire thesis here is that the LHC++ is probably not worth it. You can disagree with that, but if you're going to do so because of possible secondary benefits, you have to take a crack at showing that those secondary benefits -- whatever they may be -- are numerous enough and worth enough to justify the money and time.
Military research has produced a lot of secondary inventions, sure. But look at its funding as well. There's a reason why so many companies work in that sector: the amount of money in there is just huge. So of course that sector will produce more byproducts in absolute terms.
Okay? He's not saying secondary effects don't exist. He's saying you don't get more secondary effects from projects whose primary purpose is highly speculative.
I agree that the opportunity cost of dropping 100B on this is very high, but what if the new data enables tech that can't otherwise be achieved?
We could definitely postpone this work and invest in more impactful work in the present. It might be worth reconsidering this once we've worked through climate change, energy consumption, and the drinking water crises we're facing.
Military research has enormous positive primary effect as it's one of the main ways to prevent wars. Nuclear weapons already prevented Cold war from going hot, saving tens of millions.
>Investing the same money in something that has a known and positive primary effect will produce the same amount of secondary benefits.
Except in reality you don't just get to take something like military money and just invest wherever you want. Military is something that can be funded politically for large sums. So the more likely choice is you get to fund military, with all the associated research and benefits, or you don't get those tax dollars to do anything with, or maybe just spend them on not science.
If it were possible to simply pour money into science/invention politically, then the budgets of NIH, NASA, etc., would not be as small as they are.
There's a really wide gulf between building something in a lab and scaling production to some industrially useful level. The money spent on the LHC wasn't just lot on fire in a giant pit. It went to contractors that took lab scale prototypes or just paper designs and built them at scale.
Building a one inch super conductor in a lab might be straightforward but cost a million dollars. That lab process doesn't scale to building seventeen miles of superconductor. The LHC needed 4722 miles of superconducting cable. Simply manufacturing that much cable led to advances in superconductor manufacturing and design. Even then the LHC's particular superconductors only work if you've got the operating budget to use liquid helium to cool them.
The money spent went into research to develop the components necessary for the design and then into the production of those components. The LHC wasn't some item picked out of a catalog. Many of its components only existed on paper when it was designed.
No one is just going to pump development dollars into some paper design and hope someone somewhere finds a use for it. The LHC's superconductors advanced the state of superconductors in general but no one was going to do that work without an end goal and a budget.
Military development ends up with a similar model. Requirements for a desired capability are given to a contractor and they need to figure out how to build it. Sometimes that development is easy and other times it's difficult and expensive. Contractors definitely make a profit and pad co tracts but that money does pay people to do things. The requirements and funding create a market for the development for technologies that meet those requirements.
It seems to me as if the journalist had to write about something [outrageous] to fulfill their article quota? There are some good ideas buried in there but isn't it a reductive vision indeed? There probably is no reason to fund this and all the good ideas he also mentions.
We also need BIG SCIENCE to solve global warming and many more issues.
Let's not narrow our focus on some fiscal numbers that are basically inconsequential for such a rich place as is the case with Europe.
Let's do the opposite instead. Let's bet on an actual vision for once again - I miss the 1960s!
all true, yet it's a fact that if we want stable prices (1-2% inflation) and doesn't want to pay more taxes then we run into the allocation problem.
at some point instead of more people crawling around in a tunnel around Geneva we need more people installing wind turbines on the sea.
of course real life is not some Sims game, the cost of switching from that to this is far from negligible (and of course ideally we would cut back on people digging up dead plankton, people wasting time in traffic while burning it, also military spending - but as the current real life example in Ukraine shows, sometimes shit does indeed hits the fan)
Secondary innovations can also come from solving a primary industrial or commercial problem as is often the case.
By their nature, secondary innovations are not promised. Hence, researchers can get away with not "delivering" any, no matter how much they pitch the "possibility" when asking for funding.
The quality of researchers who will be working is another factor. Presumably it would be very competitive with LHC stuff. But I've seen research projects just become money black-holes as they just end up with unremarkable un-creative research staff who are just there for the paycheck and not competitive enough to otherwise get out of the academic comfort zone.
I wouldn't say that, it's OK to be skeptical, even necessary sometimes, and I guess she is doing some useful work in some cases. But... well I can only hope her point of view won't become more popular.
My understanding is that most (or at least many) very significant scientific discoveries were serendipitous. They were discovered while looking for something else. So statements like "When you don’t have much to go on, and limited resources, it’s better to aim at problems that you know are out there. Those things will lead you to new discoveries." don't make sense to me.
I'd find this article and its opinion more credible if it could point out how this didn't apply to the LHC. Was every discovery and technology that came out of the LHC predicted in advance? If not, then this argument fails.
For serendipity to work its magic you need to be able to explore the solution space. In high energy physics that usually means putting more energy into a system, as (naively said) that will increase the amount of stuff that will happen. So I'm all for building bigger and bigger accelerators, even if they cost trillions of dollars to make, as we have only explored a tiny piece of the energy scale so far, and we're pretty sure very interesting stuff happens at higher scales (ultimately, grand unification of all forces).
Also, there's a mutual relationship between theory and experiment in physics. The LHC was well motivated by theoretical predictions (most notably the Higgs boson) that needed experimental verification. In physics you have to put your theories to the test, otherwise they're not worth much. Each experimental result is like a nail that fixes a part of your theory space (by excluding possible alternative theories), and that then allows you to explore the space further with greater confidence. Hence the more nails, the better.
You're missing the second part of his argument. Serendipitous discoveries can come from anywhere, so it does make sense to pay attention to cost. Which would you think would be a better bet for a random win, 100k separate experiments, or just one large experiment that's a scaled up version of something we already have?
If you say the second, you have severe scope neglect: 100k is a huge number.
Of course, one expensive experiment may be the right call in some situations, but only if you have good reason to think it'll pay off. Either because you're certain it will, or because the expected utility of unknown results is larger than the cost (expected utility being probability times value). This very much isn't the case here.
The statement "When you don’t have much to go on, and limited resources, it’s better to aim at problems that you know are out there. Those things will lead you to new discoveries." which you say doesn't make sense to you, is exactly meant to promote "serendipitous" discoveries while looking for something else.
A bigger collider does not, in fact, have anything to look for, and so the only possible benefit it could yield is such "serendipitous" discoveries. But how many of those could there really be when you're essentially doing only one thing?
The point of the article is that the ridiculous amount of money, which a bigger collider would cost, is much better spent on a large amount of much more varied research activities, which do have concrete things to look for, but also have the potential for serendipitous discoveries. And since those activities are much more varied, the total potential for such discoveries would much larger as well.
The LHC is a massive machine with advanced technologies, took a decade to design and build, involving 10k scientists and the international community, and cost $9B.
- Squadron of F-35 aircraft: ~0.2 LHCs
- JWT: 1.1 LHCs
- ITER: >2 LHCs
- Elon Musk's wealth: 24 LHCs
- Microsoft's market cap: 30 LHCs
- US annual military budget: 90 LHCs
- US national debt: 3389 LHCs
Given the bizarrely huge numbers casually throw around nowadays, I think it's useful to keep some perspective.
Anything compared to the US annual military budget seems cheap and a good idea.
PS: Dear commenter, please don't "how about X?" in comments. I know you're smart. So smart you can find a counter example. Congratulations, you're clever.
Tongue slightly in cheek, these data point to the answer - get Musk to pay for this thing. It'd consume a big chunk of his wealth but it's probably at least pitchable given his interest set.
I'm just a layman who loves physics, but this article does make a point. The LHC was built to definitively prove or disapprove existing theoretical models, like the Higgs boson. If the exponential increasing of cost of the LHC++ can't even promise new proofs or discoveries, then isn't that money better spent on other scientific experiments that will advance science? I'd have no problem with Europe spending that money on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), or many other projects.
This article brings to mind the plot point [SPOILER ALERT] in "The Three-Body Problem" where the antagonistic and technologically superior aliens halt the progress of our entire civilization merely with nanotechnology that impedes science at our particle accelerators, thus preventing breakthroughs in physics.
Well, there are some urgent issues where the money could be better spent, like solving the climate disaster, starvation, wars, automating most work. But after that, LHC++ is pretty much a top priority.
As a low-energy quantum physicist, I completely agree: Experimental high-energy physics has become primarily an industrial subsidy scheme[1], and if we want the highest chance of reaching a grand unified theory, it seems the money would be much better spent elsewhere (cosmology, space-based observatories, research positions for young physicists without publish-or-perish incentives to run for the latest fad).
The short history of physics in TFA is spot on: Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise. This has been confirmed by numerous insiders, including by Hossenfelder as mentioned in the article, and Lee Smolin ("The trouble with physics") who is also a theoretical physicist.
Things have changed a lot since accelerators became a must-have for high-energy physics: Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned. I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations.
[1]: The industrial subsidy angle is not touched upon in TFA, but it is clear that there is a large number of people and companies making a good living from mega-physics, and talking to colleagues in the field, I get the distinct impression that it is not always they physicist walking in the front when asking for more machines.
Given that they are physicists and no one has actually been able to properly find an alternative to string theory isn't that what they're supposed to be doing?
Isn't the main alternative LQG which is apparently a dead end?
In any case this is not how science works, you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not. Both Smolin and Hossenfelder have been somewhat successful in doing so themselves, but Hossenfelder specifically didn’t manage to secure a professorship for various reasons and I am sure she has some axe to grind (again probably partially justified, partially not).
> you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer-reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not
No, science is not the act of publishing in a peer-reviewed journals, science is using past observations to make models that predict future observations, and then evaluating those models after making the future observations. Peer review is just the industry standard quality control mechanism.
I could have made the point differently. What I wanted to emphasize is that there is an external view of a given field and an internal view. The actual inner workings and process are poorely understood and the few public debates give a very skewed view of the field.
There can be lots of new alternatives. Why not fund those instead, by creating “moonshine physics departments”? (That is just a comment, not a suggestion).
The problem with String Theory is it unfalsifiability and that it has not even grown to explain 3D phenomena AT ALL. 40 years later.
Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (both special and general) gave results in a single decade.
String theory is as far as I have ever read the only thing even close to a working theory in this area. That doesn't mean it's correct but in my admittedly limited understanding of the literature many alternatives are either dead or are similar to string theory only without the underlying principles.
People do work on alternatives. there are a lot of smart people unhappy with string theory they just can't actually provide any alternatives.
One thing I'd like to say as well is that if someone does provide an alternative there will be a large movement of minds. This always happens in science, people like to think of physicists as a kind of unionized cabal but this isn't true historically or today as far as I'm concerned. Certainly not with the physicists of tomorrow.
Of all the post-Standard Model theories in existence, string theory has the best publicists and has (to a degree) sucked up all of the air out of competing theories, so that the lack of competing theories is less due to string theory being better and more due to being unable to get funding to work on competing theories.
As far as I understand it, string theory has yet to provide a working model of quantum gravity despite focused work on it for ~30 years. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Einstein explained too many things to say but predicted the precession of mercury which was unexplained.
Witten has explained either everything (which is to say nothing useful) or nothing at all (it depends on your position). In any of both cases, after 40 years and several LHC unfulfilled “expectations” it is time to accept the facts.
The issue is not that nobody found an alternative to string theory, the problem is that nobody found a use for string theory. Essentially vast amount of funding and talent has been pushed into string theory (via the tenure processes at universities which favored string theory for a long time, because it was considered the cutting edge of theoretical physics), and what did we get from it? Not one falsifiable prediction, which as Popper would tell you is necessary to do science. So everything and nothing would be an alternative to string theory.
String theory does make falsifiable predictions they're just at very high energy, technically.
For example my understanding of string theory is that Lorentz covariance must be exact, if you find this is either inconsistent or not true in reality then you have cut ze string.
That’s a passive aggressive ad hominem without any substance whatsoever.
These people are not some obscenely rich opportunists in power. They are working scientists, who draw public interest because they say interesting things and they are part of a larger discourse.
Now Hossenfelder isn’t known for her fingerspitzengefühl when it comes to criticizing others, but I have yet to find an instance where she doesn’t treat the subject matter with the utomst respect it deserves.
I will always get onboard to boost Hossenfelder. She respects the subject matter and also the students, and it impresses me a lot to see it in practice.
Her claim is that there isn't enough secondary validation to truly conclude they detected gravity waves. the community disagrees and is building more detectors. The creators of the project were awarded Nobel prizes. At best, she raises some interesting questions but the narrative that the data isn't sufficient really doesn't work.
At least for Hossenfelder, I think she's lost the message. She accused LIGO of fraud a while back. However, none of the points she made ended up being real. Even after being corrected, she kept pushing the narrative. I guess because it gets her more views.
> Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned.
Couldn't the LHC be upgraded then to take advantage of this? Sounds like a much cheaper option. But I'm not a physicist at all so I'm sure I'm oversimplifying.
The detectors on the LHC get upgraded regularly, between every run some part gets updated. Computing-wise as well, better computing resources are there.
The fundamental limitations isn't the detectors or computers, it's the energies you can reach with a collider of that size. Yes you can completely retool the LHC, which will probably allow you to do slightly better precision measurements, but won't strongly affect the energies you can probe.
To get to really high energies you need to build bigger. As a (former) particle physicist, I am also a bit sceptical if going bigger is better; the LHC was a calculated risk, with the goal of finding SUSY, which was a very plausible theory at the time.
The FCC seems to be a shot in the dark.
There is the argument that if we don't build a bigger one now we'll lose a lot of expertise, but that feels like a knee-jerk reaction from the community.
> to get to really high energies you need to build bigger
Superconducting magnets enable much higher energies in smaller (granted, theoretical) fusion reactor designs than previously possible. Does the same not apply to colliders?
> we'll lose a lot of expertise, but that feels like a knee-jerk reaction from the community.
It's a valid concern that must always be considered. It's the kind of thing that's been biting Intel in the ass for the past 7 years. Even if your decision is "we'll lose a lot of expertise and that's okay", it needs to be a conscious, well-grounded decision, otherwise that is a knee-jerk reaction based on your own biases and assumptions that could have significant, even irrevocable, consequences for the future.
Like the sibling comment says: we’re currently doing this.
Higher energies are not really feasible without a bigger ring though so we’re increasing the beam intensity (sort of) to produce more physics per time unit. This very likely won’t reveal any new physics processes, but it will allow us to increase the precision in many measurements we do and could allow us to find discrepancies or otherwise increase our understanding of the existing model.
This is effectively a measure to maximize the output we can get from the machine, so to maximize the return in investment.
There’s a lot of debate in the field what should happen next. FCC is one possibility, but I’m personally sceptical (even though I work at CERN myself).
It seems to me there’s a clear need for a Higgs-factory as a follow up to LHC, but that doesn’t have to be a ring collider, a electron positron linear collider could fulfill this purpose as well.
How about thinking about this on a grander scale / in the open - and just have more and even larger “industrial subsidy schemes”? Wouldn’t you like to work on another BIG SCIENCE project that tries to find answers to something that seems more worthwhile (to you)?
I'd much rather live on a planet with too many giant science projects than have top engineers and scientists with obscene budgets for blowing up whole countries into the middle ages for political gain.
Agree. The total US non-defense research budget has hovered below 2% of federal spending for the last four decades. The military budget has been around 15%. We need more research, not less.
> Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise.
I'm not sure there is a fundamental distinction here. The only difference is success: Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist. When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment.
It feels like nature itself is against physicists here.
Sorry but several of the most prominent string theorists have gone from “LHC will find this to be a fact” to “We need a bigger LHC” as time passed. Not very trustworthy.
Many did, but Gordon Kane is a standard example because he is kind of more brazen about it than most.
In 2011: "This is a profound turning point in the quest for a fundamental unified theory of the physical world. The properties and mass of the LHC's Higgs boson suggest that physicists will soon find superpartners for particles, and that we have begun to connect string theory to the real world." from https://www.nature.com/articles/480415a. We didn't find superpartners.
In 2019: "One important lesson from studying such models is that we should not have expected to find superpartners at the LHC with masses below about 1500 GeV." from https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.2019031.... I mean, yes, you should not have expected that, but you totally did, so why should I believe when you say the next LHC will find superpartners?
> Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist.
Nope. It's the other way around. The most important theories from Einstein an Schrödinger were created to explain effects there were experimentally known. The ones where they predicted the effects first and found them later were much less impactful.
A scientific theory is only as valuable as much as it can guide the action of some person.
Popperism is an incredibly successful simplification that made it viable to judge a theory. But at the end of the day, it's just a proxy that nobody really cares about.
Noob here, can we discuss about what are the practical effects of understanding high-energy theories? ie have we invented anything practical based on those colliders?
There are some side-effects of running a place like CERN that benefit scientists (for example, CERN makes and stores antimatter for experiments, and they sometimes develop new tech to solve their problems that can be applied in the real world, but by-and-large, high energy physics doesn't contribute directly to applied science or products. Countries run projects like this for prestige, not applications.
I would add creating WWW as a nice side product of CERN. I am sure they do much more in their highly specialized fields, ie seen tons of stuff open sourced (but I am not an expert on this so can't say how usable it actually is to other physicists).
I think the LHC was the first collider that didn't create any practical application from its main working. There were still spin-offs, but for a few decades the main research topic of high-energy physics has been entirely theoretical.
Anyway, this is not a large problem. Theories taking decades to give you any practical result is perfectly fine. If all of science gave quick returns, it wouldn't need government spending. The problem is that we do not expect practical results on the future at all, and also do not expect the next large collider to bring anything different enough to change the physics into a new, unpredictable course.
Or, in other words, the next big collider (as we can plan now) is probably way too small to matter. It will also be the largest scientific project ever (space and fusion projects included), and larger than most infrastructure projects on the world. It is a pretty bad picture.
It is a criterion but not a way to generate theory. In fact the key turning points mentioned are those theory (qm and r) both tried to explain something theory failed itself (the crazy energy of ultraviolet like today zero field energy) or observation that cannot be explained (increase intensity does not give your more electron in photo-electric effect but frequency does, like dark energy and matter these days).
Popper is more against social “science” like Marx or philosopher like Plato. Whilst it clean up the field a bit not sure it is that helpful.
> When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment.
One of the reasons LHC was built in the first place was to try to detect the theoretically predicted Higgs boson.
I would claim finding it was equally significant. Theory is not reality but just a model until verified. I know there is a trend in physics where computing is supposed to suffice without actually verifying anything but that is just wrong - I presume this notion is driven by the incentives to focus on publishing more than tedious collaboration.
So finding Black-holes is not significant because it was already predicted?
And btw there is so much money around...we should not fight against different project but the spending that goes into science itself. LHC and NASA is really just a small drop compared to military spending (in the US).
Modern monetary theory is its own can of worms, but justifying massive spending in one area because of even more massive spending elsewhere isn't solving anything.
Those "practical" results were all due to the spending on technology. None were due to advances in physics, as far as I can tell (that website seems designed to obfuscate not illuminate)
(Former PhD student in Particle Physics Pheno here, far from an expert)
Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing. It's kind of weird because it was marketted as a success story to the public (and don't get me wrong, it was) but theorists were very confident that it was there by 2012. Thus far, it behaves exactly as expected according to the standard model and that is very dull.
HEP would have been left in a very funny position if we didn't find it. No Higgs Boson would have been fascinating from a theory perspective, but good luck trying to get funding for a new collider when you found nothing with the old one.
I’m pretty sure there remains a discrepancy between the predicted mass of the Higgs boson and the measured mass in experiments. Is this resolved then?
I was under the impression that this was a smoking gun for something being off with the theory, a bit like the ultraviolet catastrophe that led to QM or the orbital aberration that was resolved by GR.
> I’m pretty sure there remains a discrepancy between the predicted mass of the Higgs boson and the measured mass in experiments. Is this resolved then?
Sort of.
The higgs boson mass is a parameter to the Standard Model. As far as the Standard Model is concerned, that is the end of the story. There are just a series of constants need to be fitted to data in the Standard Model and that's one of them.
However, the "problem" is why ~125GeV. If there are extremely high energy particles (which are expected in a Grand Unified Theory), then corrections to the Higgs mass would be enormous. This is a fine tuning problem where we arbitrarily tweak those corrections such that we magically end up at 125GeV. Supersymmetry and other Beyond Standard Models look to 'fix' this, and that's where my knowledge ends.
Honestly, when I was doing my PhD I took the pragmatic view on this. Trying to infer things at energy scales we can't probe struck me as more as a mathematical exercise than Physics. Many, many people would disagree with that though (and staked their careers on it).
> However, the "problem" is why ~125GeV. If there are extremely high energy particles (which are expected in a Grand Unified Theory), then corrections to the Higgs mass would be enormous. This is a fine tuning problem where we arbitrarily tweak those corrections such that we magically end up at 125GeV.
When I was undergraduate at CERN summer school program I got that this was one of main themes to justify existence of SUSY. However I am still puzzled even after having obtained a PhD (condensed matter) how does this arbitrary tweaking of corrections does look like.
Is it simply unwillingness to accept for world as we live know some parameters of the world like particles masses are not that independent from each other?
There are other problems with the theory too, they probably weren't solved perfectly by whatever SUSY model your supervisor was working on so they got less attention.
But ultimately, yes. The entirety of modern physics is largely borne out of the unwillingness to accept the the world is simply as it appears and that there's no deeper unifying principles.
> Is it simply unwillingness to accept for world as we live know some parameters of the world like particles masses are not that independent from each other?
Based on what I understood from Sabine Hossenfelder's writing, yes, that is a big chunk of modern physics. One example is "the naturalness problem", that some base parameters of the SM are orders of magnitude larger or smaller than other ones - which is of course entirely possible as a fact of nature.
Not a particle physicist, but I think the entire history of human scientific discovery is set again that proposition. Namely: (1) that we have a fundamental theory that describes the Universe; (2) that it is within our technical capability to experimentally verify the reality of that theory; and (3) we choose not to do so.
It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagine how intolerable the world would be if we'd chosen not to verify it.
I get where you're coming from, but at the same time, we have to KNOW things before we can continue to theorize about new things. If you keep theorizing on things that turn out to not be true, then it's just a waste of everyone's time. Find things that are true, theorize on the next step, test, prove/disprove, lather, rinse, repeat.
Just coming up with stuff and disproving it isn't always "learning a lot", it's just showing how bad we are at logically thinking about the next step.
If "information is a measure of surprise", then you don't want every prediction to be wrong. You want every prediction to have a 50% chance of being wrong. Half of your experiments should be failures.
I don't understand this logic at all. At those odds, you're just guessing like flipping a coin. An inferred prediction should have a higher success rate. We look at the data we do know, we see what holes are there, and then make predictions based on all of our previous knowledge. The fact that the previous knowledge allows us to make more accurate predictions shows we have a better understanding of the subject than just random coin flips.
> Just coming up with stuff and disproving it isn't always "learning a lot", it's just showing how bad we are at logically thinking about the next step.
That's why I said "our best predictions"; as in, what we actually think is the case (and would put money on).
Yes and, riffing on your clarification, maybe also make a distinction between hypothesis and prediction. Both are based on models, but a hypothesis hasn't been experimentally validated yet.
> It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagine how intolerable the world would be if we'd chosen not to verify it.
I once read a paper complaining that the most of psychology experiments are trivial in the sense that their results are predictable in advance. It is like all people know that angry people tend to make other people angry and so if angry person try to communicate then oftentimes communications ends with a conflict. What the point of making an experiment from this?
I'm not sure how much of a psychology fall victim of this, but sometimes I read a paper and think that I've found one more example of this. I personally get nothing from reading such a paper. I can get some ideas while reading about methods researchers used, but it means that the paper is not about how human mind works, but about how to measure psychological phenomena, or how to conduct an experiment. I bet that the most interesting part of the hypothetical paper with angry communicating people would be the trick researchers used to make people angry without violating ethics.
There is some value in experiments that try to prove something that everyone knows already, but not much of a value. So the question is: is it ok to spend $10G to conduct such an experiment?
>Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing.
Well you would have needed the LHC to confirm that, too, right? As a totally uneducated person just remembering media and online discussion about it at the time, I think the most interesting possibility was the detection of entirely new particles, which didn't happen.
And in the run-up to the LHC, I think there was a lot of hope in the possibility of finding stuff, but maybe there's not as much hope now.
Well that's sort of my point. In the media there was a lot of excitement about detecting supersymmetry with a whole array of new particles. When talking to the general public, it's easy to drum up the excitement by saying we're going to find lots of stuff. On the other hand, wheeling out a Physicist in front of the public and say "Finding nothing would be the most exciting outcome!" is a much harder sell, even though it is arguably true.
Which is the most exciting outcome between SUSY and absolutely nothing is very much debatable. However, I really can't stress how big an outcome it would have been if we didn't detect the Higgs. Generating a mass term for the W and Z bosons which is gauge invariant is hard. Without the Higgs mechanism, all the gauge bosons should be massless and yet the W and Z are very heavy. It wouldn't just be the case of the model doesn't work in some cases (massive neutrinos, dark matter candidate etc), you might as well throw the whole thing in the bin.
> I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations.
In my opinion, we are hitting diminishing returns.. It's harder to learn new things now than ever before. You need big machines to do anything interesting?
True, but sadly, if you defund Big Physics, it doesn't mean the money will go to 1000 experiments. It's more likely that nothing will be funded.
Same reason why nobody was able to effectively compete with YC: it's a lot less work for VCs to fund a few "big bets" than find 100 good early-stage startups. The VC strategy is a lot less effective, but they still earn their fees no matter what
> it doesn't mean the money will go to 1000 experiments. It's more likely that nothing will be funded
Perhaps it is reasonable to allow the money to remain unspent on topics related to physics! Spending has opportunity costs, after all; if these other experiments are not really the measure of the cost, then something else of value to society surely is.
Yes but if the person who is saying that those 1000 experiments won't be funded but the next large hadron collider will and the next LHC is a waste of money then the alternative is between funding a waste of money and funding possibly not a waste of money like maybe some social programs or something.
The premise of this subthread is that failing to fund another collider does not mean that those 1000 experiments will be funded. The person you're replying to is saying that even if money not thrown at a collider doesn't end up going to 1000 physics experiments, it will go to something. If that something is net-useful, it will be better than a new collider whose usefulness is questionable.
Physics is (or should be) regarded enviably by other disciplines. They keep managing to get these crazily expensive multinational projects funded: LHC, ITER, various space telescopes... multi-billion projects. I honestly cannot recall an official scientific experiment or tool in another discipline funded for even only 100 million. Just imagine that level of funding for your favourite discipline.
The direct scientific value may be limited; the spinoff of that much attention / funding isn't.
Not saying we should definitely fund a new collider. But the amount of effort needed is so huge, that even just the discussion will have positive impact for science.
Human Genome Project was $3B. It is especially salient because in a sense it was in competition with Superconducting Super Collider, which it won.
Big Science and Big Politics in the United States: Reflections on the Death of the SSC and the Life of the Human Genome Project (1997) is a classic in history of science analyzing this competition.
Maybe not that much. They could 100x the sample size of all their experiments giving one decimal point more. They could research some more obscure cancers.
Research into virology seems a bigger thing to research. There is way more "parallelism" there meaning funding could be allocated more efficiently nin some given time frame.
The money could be spent on telescopes looking at non-human sources of particles (hard to do for particles of short lifetimes, but then again you have whole galaxies to work with). This is how much of QM and cosmology in general have been investigated.
> I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit
Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results.
Or are you seriously imagining that there is a cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret?
Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?
>Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results.
This is coming from a forum where it's normal to see "something that already exists, but written in $newLanguage/Framework" as a thing to celebrate. So why not just redo science but with newShiny so we haven't actually achieved anything? /s
It's also often said that science advances one funeral at a time. It's entirely possible for an entire field to be stuck in a local maximum and refuse to admit that they are not advancing, especially when huge money depends on it. A recent example is the amyloid hypothesis for Alzheimers, which has failed every single time it was tested in clinical trials, but is still being pushed again and again, mostly by a cabal of academics that refuse to accept that were wrong, and industry bureaucrats that are afraid to challenge the orthodoxy (no one was ever fired for approving research proposed by the foremost expert in their field!).
Yes it's said a lot by non-scientist commentators on internet forums, frequently about 5 seconds before they push whatever bizzare conspiracy theory they've made their pet cause.
It was said by Max Planck (well, not this exact quote, but the spirit is entirely there), not exactly a non-scientist commenting on an internet forum.
Also, the controversy over the amyloid hypothesis is real. Here [0] is a paper showing arguments for and against with 268 citations. Here [1] is a more journalistic article in Nature. While this is still up in the air, it's nby no means a "conspiracy theory" to suggest that it's possibly a 25-year wild goose chase, or close to it. I would love to be wrong about this, but I suppose time will tell.
It's not like it's some subtle mathematical conjecture that laymen can't possibly comprehend. It's a social comment by a well known researcher that has a good chance of being a fact of the scientific community today just as much as then.
If you believe things have changed, just say so, and move the conversation on. If you don't think it's a fruitful conversation, don't participate.
I specifically replied to someone claiming that new minds re-thinking the foundations of a field couldn't possibly be a good idea, and I did so with a relevant quote from one of the new minds that completely re-wrote the foundations of their field. I believe this was a constructive observation moving the conversation.
> "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh"
The idea of getting young physicists to do lots of research is not at all about ignoring the old knowledge. These young people will have gotten a PhD in physics. They will have absorbed a lot of the relevant old knowledge. The idea is that, because they came to this knowledge quite quickly, they have a fresh view on it.
You simply get a different view on knowledge you build over decades as opposed to knowledge you learnt in a few years. This different view could very well lead to new and valuable insights.
There is not a "cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret". But there is a "group of people who have been doing high energy physics that want to keep doing high energy physics". It makes sense that they want to keep doing it, even if other approaches would be more fruitful. They have invested lots of time into it, and they might not even know about the other approaches. And doing 'more of the old thing' is a safe bet.
It's just that by now 'more of the old thing' is getting really stupidly expensive. And it looks to be a lot more efficient to try a lot more new things. Give the people with a fresh look on it a change to come up with ideas.
> Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?
These people surely do exist. But there are plenty of others out there that have ideas for 10 million dollar machines rather than 100 billion dollar machines. Try some of the 10 million dollar machines rather than only the 100 billion dollar machines.
I think many of the 10 million dollar machines are currently not being funded because that level of funding requires clout, reputation, and political acumen to get. This currently lies with the people who like doing accelerators. They don't like building non-accelerators that cost 10 million dollars, so they don't help the 10 million dollar machines as much.
That is not malice, these people aren't evil. They just like a tool that is getting inefficient.
> But there is a "group of people who have been doing high energy physics that want to keep doing high energy physics".
Apparently it needs to be said because people act like they don't know it: those are the only people interested in answering questions about the fundamental particles! Diverging interests is the fundamental reason people separate into different fields.
> they might not even know about the other approaches
You can easily find the lists of seminars given at CERN and other places: they do know about other fields. In fact people from HEP move to other fields, and folks from other fields move into HEP.
> Try some of the 10 million dollar machines rather than only the 100 billion dollar machines.
They are being built though! In fact there are 2 billion experiments being built.
The argument here is something else: that High energy physics should just stop building big machines at all, and instead magically solve the problem that small machines were built and fully exploited many many decades ago.
No. He was working on the photoelectric effect because "the field" already existed. And he was working on it from a classical physics standpoint. What makes quantum physics revolutionary is it's non-classical nature. That's what einstein was against - quantum physics as we know it today. Einstein was a life long classic physicist. His relativity was grounded on classical physics. It's why many are working towards a quantum theory of gravity.
His Nobel Prize was for his early quantum work (explaining the photoelectric effect). He was a major participant at the first Solvay conference. Bose-Einstein statistics didn't get that name just because someone though it looked cool.
He of course fully knew that the world is quantum, not classical. His beef with the mainstream QM past the mid to late '20s was with the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein believed that a complete theory would have realism and so Copenhagen could not be the complete theory.
That isn't true. Einstein's "breakout" paper was on the Photoelectric effect. He wasn't a fan of probabilistic interpretations of quantum mechanics but it's not accurate to say that he didn't have a hand in it
If you had even the shallowest understanding of what Einstein's contributions to physics are, you wouldn't make such comments... He literally got his Nobel prize for photoelectric effect in 2021.
> I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations.
What is interesting, is that a lot of the fundamental physics theories were discovered by amateurs. Einstein was a patent clerk, for example.
Maybe we should work on democratizing data collection, and making more raw data available for people to work with. With the advent of cloud computing and on demand computing, maybe your hobby group could code up a an analysis and run it on AWS for a few hundred dollars and discover some new theory.
As a former experimental particle physicist, I don't think string theory or supersymmetry is going to be a description of nature. I say that despite spending a couple of years searching for SUSY. But I still think the cost of building a LHC++ (that is, the FCC or the SPPC) is justified. The current theoretical "dead end" or maybe swamp fundamental physics is in is precisely due to a lack of data.
Of course, there are a lot of smaller experiments that one could do, also in particle physics, that have great value. One example was the Muon g-2 measurement, another is anything neutrino physics. We can get a lot of interesting input and test our theories without going to the "energy frontier". Physicists understand this very well. But there are a bunch of questions that you can only really answer if you go to those higer energies.
As for the costs, 100 billion is a lot, but not when you compare it to other large infrastructure projects, or especially military spending (and note the Chinese proposal SPPC would be a lot cheaper!). I think if we could shave off 100 billion of military expenses and put it into basic research, it would be a great win for society. That's not realistic you say, with all the threats out there? Great, I agree, but now we have a nice project! Lets put as a common goal that we want to be able to do this kind of research, and then improve our societies nationally and globally so that we can reduce our military spending and do this kind of research.
100 billion ($/€) is the amount that Germany is spending as a special budget in response to Russia's aggression, in order to become the nation with the 3rd highest military spending on the planet. If it weren't for the war in Ukraine, we could put it all into such a project.
If we had averted COVID in it's early stages - like we did with SARS-1 and MERS - imagine all the resources we could have put into research instead.
But if you have say 100 billion, why put it into "yet another collider" rather than say condensed matter physics and quantum information research? To me, a non-physicist, it seems those areas have a lot more potential to deliver science that will benefits us.
Alternatively, if one really wants to pursue beyond the standard model physics, it seems to me multi-messenger astronomy has a much better chance of delivering decisive data, so shouldn't we put that money into better observatories?
> But if you have say 100 billion, why put it into "yet another collider" rather than say condensed matter physics and quantum information research?
Because the only reason you have $100 billion to spend is that it's a large scale infrastructure project. And that money is trickling down to member states through contracts to a mix of businesses who hire white and blue collar workers.
It is equal part economic stimulus, political marketing and scientific research.
You can't just ask for the last part and ignore the first two.
First of all, the proposed design is estimated to cost 21 billion EUR.
Secondly condensed matter and quantum information already get plenty of money: superconductivity alone is a market worth around 5 billion dollars, google is spending billions of its own money into quantum computers.
But sure, lets give these starving fields that produce commercial products a some tax-payer dollars at the slight cost of completely de funding high energy physics, I'm sure that will get the scientist there to care about the proton despite them very consciously choosing to do something else.
Government finances don't work the same way as other finances. A normally functioning democracy can basically invent as much money as it needs to (see Covid relief packages). If there's political will to do an LHC++, three ITERs and two ISS's, the money will appear. If there's opposition to the LHC++ and it gets scrapped, that doesn't mean that the funds will be re-allocated. They will just disappear.
True, however printed money's not free free, it devalues all money so it's sort of a backdoor tax. Assuming that there is an upper bound on a nation's science budget (and in practice, there is), then the article makes a valid point - particle colliders have diminishing returns as it stands right now, and that money might be better spent on thousands of smaller studies.
Forward thinking nations would take this approach, a single discovery in just one of these studies might unlock a huge amount of scientific, commercial or industrial value, and casting the net wide gives the greatest chance of making that discovery.
LHC costs are basically peanuts in comparison to any kind of spending the western countries do (especially if you compare it to spending on killing machines).
Several LHCs, ITERs and ISSes won't bring any of the nations close to Weimar Germany. Aircraft carriers, F-35s, failing infrastructure projects and corruption have a larger chance of doing that.
I think there's a certain disconnect from the underlying reality here. If you didn't have those things then the people who design, build and operate the thing would be doing something else. Are you sure the other things they'd be doing are less valuable?
Also, I'll note that inflation in the UK is at 9%. Printing money is essentially a tax on those with cash holdings, who are mostly poorer. Not to mention the wastage on repricing...
I didn't check if that's the actual (main?) reason for the inflation we are seeing since before February 2022. But let's suppose it is, there are still some entities who have been earning tons of money during this pandemic so far. Maybe Amazon, Pfizer & co just need to be taxed higher.
> can basically invent as much money as it needs to
This is only true of the world's reserve currency (which is currently the USD). In all other cases they basically guarantee the issues stated elsewhere like inflation.
I think people needs to put a bit of perspective on this :
the FCC is a project for the next 70 years. It is supposed to be operational after 2040 at the earliest if I recall correctly (20 years from now more or less), and to run for around 40 years.
So if you do a very simplistic calculation on the first 20 years : 100 B euros over 20 years over 20 countries (there is 23 member states into the CERN) it is 250 M euros / year / country. This is not even calculated on the over-all project time, on on the different steps that will be happening: first FCC as electron-positron collider and then much later FCC hadron-hadron collider.
And if you are really interested into the previewed outcomes (scientifically and new techs associated):
You can take look at the European research communities symposium that just happened recently on the future of the research topics in Europe. There are a lot of information for FCC and so on.
I am all for spending money on scientific research but to justify large investments, it needs to yield something useful in practice. Otherwise it’s a form of philosophy, minus the societal impact.
XX century science has delivered plenty of practical applications. But is there any practical application to expect from another large Hadron collider? Wouldn’t that money be better used in bio science or something else?
> to justify large investment it needs to yield something useful in practice
The really important scientific work doesn't follow this rule and demanding it does is short-sighted. Perhaps worse, it's refusing to learn from plenty of historical examples where you can see the work yielded nothing of immediate use but was still very important (that is to say, society would look vastly different without it). In a sense, it's this kind of goal-oriented thinking that led society to the mess that it has become in the last 15 years.
How many of those historical examples cost so much though? With $100 billion you could give $10000 to 10 million people. Or spend it on retraining or some other education.
Most previous science discoveries weren't throwing around oodles of money.
We need to start building large-scale space-based experiments. Not experiments to study space necessarily but because they'd be too big to fit on the Earth.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadI'm all for the LHC, but it does seem like the world needs a bit better of an idea of the mysteries that the LHC++ might solve before spending $10-$100B on it. Does seem like science could be pushed further in other areas.
A particle collider does not, in fact, "solve physics" in any meaningful way, especially not in terms of practical applicability.
> if we solve fusion we have solved fusion.
The comment you are replying to has explained in some detail why this is not true.
Why should high energy physics get priority over any other area?
It's the nature of high energy physics that the higher the energy the rarer the event. The standard model already explains our universe unbelievably accurately. Sure there are corner cases, and maybe, just maybe a LHC++ might give some evidence towards one model or another. But what happens if global warming, wars over fuel, lack of fertilizer, and lack of food makes it harder for humanity to survive let alone complete major science projects.
Renewable and/or carbon neutral energy in all it's forms seems pretty important these days compared to slightly reinforcing one physical model over another.
Maybe a fusion engine would let us explore the solar system enough to find planet 9, which might well be a black hole. That would open up particle energies well in excess of anything we could manage with LHC++.
And, we control plenty of energy. The project is to concentrate it in one spot.
And I didn't mean to suggest that available energy was the limitation on building LHC++, but rather that available economic surplus was.
https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusio...
From what I can tell it's really is ground breaking, significant changes, well ahead of the normal projections for improved magnets. Literally with a single technology that allows magnet to be 40 times smaller. The easy to produce superconducting tape of arbitrary length is likely to find interesting applications as well.
Sure, like all research, practical fusion is not guaranteed, but it does look promising, and real progress has been made, and not just the "few % better this year" that might lead to real progress in a decade or a few centuries.
However Fusion is just an example, imagine 100 $1B projects, doesn't it seem likely for humanity to learn more from those then some particle that is hard to produce, last for a billionth of a second, and makes some models more likely and other models less likely? Maybe help with cancer, medicine, energy production, AI, space travel, faster computers, improving food production, mitigating global warning, energy storage or similar?
It says to stop putting everything (or rather, a ridiculous amount of money) into high energy particle physics and start funding other experiments.
But elsewhere the author has advocated it with "fusion power is a goal worth spending billions on". And in his "Why Particle Colliders Will Go Extinct" article, he supports the billions spent on fusion.
The author's other writings include:
- Gun Ownership Neither Increases Nor Decreases the Crime Rate
- Fleeing Paris Accords Makes Scientific Sense
- NSF Should Stop Funding Social 'Science'
Because Supersymmetry is stupid theory that can be fit to any set of facts, there is no point in building LHC++. Besides it is so expensive you could give a 100.000 physicist a million bucks and that would be more productive.
Would it? A bunch of the arguments in the article apply to pretty much all science funding.
It is one of the great perks of civilization that you can combine resources to make something truly awesome, whether it is pyramids, moon landings or large colliders.
Thats the point of discovery and arguably a point in favour of doing this
The problem is, politicians won't do anything because they are either bought out by the fossil fuel industry that is at the top of the CO2 emitter list [1] or because they are afraid of telling their voters that the only way to stay on track regarding climate change will be a drastic cut in their quality of life.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_contributors_to_greenhouse...
[2]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/13/fact...
The gross old shit only still exists because the entrenched industries have the ability to lobby for government subsidies. Imagine if people in the US had to actually pay full price for gas, or for their meat.
It’s not “living in caves”, in fact, it’s not any different from the life of anyone else. It’s only a handful of tiny changes and suddenly your climate impact is massively reduced.
Doesn't sound so advanced to me...
These are the kind of questions we need answers to. Just saying 'we need to stop all emissions today' is not good enough. There is always a trade-off and we need to work out where this lies.
Heck, Germany just greenlit a €100bn special budget for expanding its military capabilities.
It's not that world governments don't have that kind of money to spend on the Climate crisis, it's that they aren't interested and motivated to do it. Germany's special budget was justified with Russia being an existential threat but the Climate crisis has been recognized as an existential threat for decades, yet almost all countries have been dragging their feet.
NATO recommends member nations put 2% of their annual budget into defense. Imagine its members (let alone most countries) would have done the same for combatting Climate change.
Cern really should be investigated and audited publicly, but it would take Delloites and PWC to follow that paper trail and audit hundreds of companies going back 25-30 years. I've always said it, cern is a scam, they take public money to fund product research, and then spin off separate companies to cream off the profits. Then they act broke and beg us for more money.
Edit: There is very little public information on this. The company accounts may be public, but like I said, there are hundreds of them going back 30 years, and no-one is motivated to do that kind of research. There is a recent study here[0] which looks at the economic benefit to companies that help build the research equipment. Obviously a lot of tech has to be invented just to build systems like this. But I haven't seen a similar study of the cern spin-off companies, or KT (Knowledge Transfer) partners in cern nomenclature, and that is where the real meat is.
I don't see why it would be so controversial for cern to retain some share in those KT companies and use that money to be self sufficient. That seems like a win for science.
[0] https://cds.cern.ch/record/2632083/files/CERN-ACC-2018-0022....
Further reading:
https://kt.cern/success-stories/fostering-culture-entreprene...
https://kt.cern/success-stories/managing-cern-intellectual-p...
One example company (out of hundreds):
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-cancer-cern-advancedoncot...https://www.avoplc.com/en-gb/Investors/Share-Price-Informati...
If that's a scam then please take the shirt off my back.
Happy to be corrected.
The low hanging fruit of discovering new physics looks like this. Build a bigger machine to collide particles with even more energy. Observe what comes out. It's a clear direction. Just throw money at the problem and get a result.
a prolific amount of software, engineering, and material science has come from CERN, as well spinning off numerous high-tech startups.
If we do find new particles we probably can't use them right away, yes, but that doesn't mean we can't later on. A lot of science has been like that.
By confirming a theory you can use the entire framework to come up with useful ideas. This is what happened to General relativity.
If people only asked "ok, that star is a little bit off, but will that lead us to faster horses?" would look funny in hindsight.
The LHC has been in operation for about 12-14 years, and has been a "thing" from planning onwards for almost 40. It's cost $9B, split between a huge list of countries.
Estimates of waste in the US medical system range from around $500B-$2T annualy. The lower end of that scale would support starting a new, fully funded, project of a similar scale for every state in the US every single year.
At a multi-national, multi-decade scale I just don't think it's actually that much money.
> all for the sake of discovering a tiny subatomic particle that we have no way of using
There are few ways I'd look at this.
One is that fundamental science can bleed into regular use over time, look at lasers. IIRC they had no clear use when invented, but are now absolutely key to so much. While the LHC had a headline goal (at least publicly) it's not just discovering one thing, it's a large tool to test fundamental physics.
Another is that this money and work doesn't go nowhere. People are paid to work on big complex problems, building and designing magnets, detectors, computing systems, software for analysis, etc. A lot of that is not going to be entirely custom, and at the very least supports companies & the supply chain for newer advanced technology. NASA I think occasionally puts out some lists of things that derived from their work.
Beyond that, I think there's value in getting a lot of people in a lot of countries to work together on a broadly non-political goal.
That said, LHC cost $4.75 billion that's pretty much nothing compared to the amount of money that gets thrown around in the tech world. So might still be worth it just for the fun of it, even if the discoveries don't have any direct application.
That said, of course particle physics results have direct applications. For instance in speculative commercial applications of Nuclear fusion and also Quantum Computing is connected to particle physics. I mean even GPS systems are based on 4D space time. Not entirely sure if any of that can be directly attributed to research happening in colliders but this is just one part of the field, mainly the experimental part - which can verify/falsify theories or result in new ones.
Interestingly, the most expensive ones are almost always highway systems. Can someone briefly explain why? I'm my naive view it's mostly asphalt and terrain work.
It’s labour, fuel, and material, intensive work.
Sometimes when they dig into the ground they find something unpredictable e.g. contaminated soil which can result in a major cost blowout, a legal fight between government and contractor and then unplanned delays which further increases costs.
- It’s a lot of asphalt
- construction happens over a wide possibly remote area so all construction materials need transportation
- materials are probably made to order so you are buying effectively a lot of custom components
- engineering/architecture/construction talent isn’t cheap and there’s a lot of competing demand
- hiring is even more difficult as the job isn’t in one place may require a lot of travel, bed and board for all types of workers
- property itself is possible a significant cost to build it through. Even more if you get caught up in legal battles acquiring certain properties
- grift, with large projects in any country at any time there’s always grift. Grift is a constant
Highway systems create massive economic benefits that are relatively simple to calculate, just in the raw # hours saved which massively increases productivity. This can be well captured by the state through taxes or (less frequently) by private industry through tolls - i.e. the people that direct their construction.
Other mega projects have much less certain benefits, or the benefits are harder to capture by those with the ability to allocate resources because incentives aren't sufficiently aligned.
Thus the question I have to the scientists pushing for a new LHC is: "What would we get from the journey?" If they truly believe in the project they'll have a dozen technologies that need to be developed to make their project happen, all of which have practical applications beyond their experiment. If they don't they'll just be pushing for "same but larger" which is IMO a waste of resources. Because why shouldn't we be investing in the technology to do "Same but smaller" in that case so we can do more with less?
I don't think one should even have to demonstrate "practical applications beyond the experiment" beforehand. Just that it is a complete problem that can be solved independently from the entire project.
If there are a lot of those, it's much better to fund those and get the results that will push the cost of the full thing down. Even if the total costs turn up to be higher than focusing on the collider from the start.
Having to carry trucks for decades means a lot more steel and concrete. Especially when constructing bridges and overpasses.
What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.
$100,000,000,000 with afterthought of “sure lets see if we can do it less expensively *since its sooo annoying to some people”? Where is the line for you currently?
More realistically : we can only build one car in the entire world, where a tiny minority of people can even understand the potential benefit, and anything they see will be completely useless for everyone else in day to day life because we need a civilisation level effort to even detect the implications of their theory. If their theory had some real world implications - you wouldn't need this car.
And this is expected to be funded by everyone. It's the modern equivalent of building pyramids.
ISS wasn't useless, but its successor should be much cheaper. We absolutely need to find ways how to do space research more efficiently, otherwise it will stay a luxury of the richest nations.
Fortunately, at the very least, launch costs to orbit are dropping and we may hope for further drops in the future - if Starship works as intended.
Literally the only thing they can do at ISS, not better done with robots, is study how human bodies are affected by exposure to high radiation and long-term weightlessness. Which we care about only because people would be so exposed in ISS-like cans.
Now they are pushing the "lunar gateway", that likewise has exactly one reason to exist: SLS could get there. And, it will be a place for SLS to get to. And, even more useless. A thing in high orbit around the moon is absolutely useless for any other purpose, whether you are heading for the moon or beyond it.
We're talking about using everybody's money for these science projects. And this is not money that's voluntarily given, it's taken.
Let's think big indeed, the author unfortunately has a very reductive vision for the future.
Instead how about:
A renaissance of funding - BIG SCIENCE - education, jobs.
That was basically the promise of the EU - peace through wealth - let's create some more.
Let's bring back the excitement and scientific wonder of the 1960s. This could be a unilateral vision across the democratic spectrum (everyone wants wealth).
And yes, global warming actually should dictate no less. Let's do it now.
Oh and let's just fix poverty while we are at it.
Again, Europe has the means and could do all of that by itself.
Let's do that again. It was at least a lot more multi-disciplinary than an atom-smasher.
You know what would be an awesome big science project that would immeasurably improve future people's lives? Sequencing all genes and using that data provide free embryo selection services to everyone who wants to be a parent.
Would probably cost the same as that giant particle smasher and but unlike the giant ring it would pay for itself in a generation.
We're not some fucked up dictatorship state?!?
Why not? What exactly is the limiting criterion? Sentience is the main criterion that people who want to argue for animal rights and yet support abortion use, and it's a pretty squishy criterion. Already Peter Singer supports veganism and effective altruism (i.e., rebranded utilitarianism), and yet is perfectly okay with both abortion and infanticide, at least until the child gets "sentience".
- Every prosperous and civilized nation's last words
Democracy as in free election ? Perfect democracy here - one party won twice, other parties lost. You call it a problem ?
Democracy as in free speech ? Dude ! Wake up ! In Poland is so much free speech that it's boarding with anarchy ! Eg. almost decade of opposition internally and internationally literally urges to harm their own country just to retake power - without any gov punishment or something. Mrs. Merkel ex-pet, Tusk, literally calls for purges, without any law procedures ! Freedom bordered with anarchy !
Maybe you are aware judges here act as caste and they do whatever they want. Law is twisted at will here. Do not saying all the time, just when they want it. And that judges are official* opposition of elected party ! Judges ! Acting politically ! You call that despotism ? Or too much freedom ?
Do we have military state like in France ? No. Do we have censorship like in Germany ? No. Do we have problems with making government like Italy ? No. Do our PM resigned because of corruption and next PM promised silence and no more leeks like in GB ? No.
You see ? It's oasis of peace and happiness here compared to rest of the EU ;)
But tell me pls, what you have in mind about that "anti-democracy" in Poland ?
They're saying anti-democratic behavior is being punished, which implies that Poland is pro-democracy.
Etc, etc.
You will have to be more specific, "democratic" is a grossly overlaoded term these days. When you write "democratic", do you mean "in accordance with the will of the majority of the population", or do you mean "in accordance with the will of unelected EU bureaucrats, the US Department of State, and media elites"?
1. https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
2. https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/biopolitical-times/first-...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
"Instead of cutting this program, just have every military cut funding at once" is not a very realistic path forwards, and we're not going to get the program funded on stuff like that.
In the hypothetical universe we're in here, where we have to convince people now.
From Wikipedia: "A child (plural children) is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty [...]"
You are also conflating the abortion of an embryo with murder; only human persons can be murdered, embryos are not persons, therefore no murder.
I sincerely ask you to cut down the polemics here on HN. It does not lead to fruitful (no pun intended) discussions.
> an embryo is not a child and you cannot murder an embryo
It is not obviously and axiomatically true that embryos are not human (I'm assuming the previous comment meant human and not child). Many people think that they are, which is the source of the disagreement. It probably is fruitless to have this conversation on HN, but you shouldn't just assert the opposing position as if it were settled when it is anything but.
I beg to differ. I don't think that using dictionary definitions to make ones arguments can be counted as polemic (as in; to use contentious rhetoric). I might be wrong though.
> I'm assuming the previous comment meant human and not child
No, I actually meant 'child'. An human embryo is - obviously - human. No discussion about that. A human embryo is not a child - the definition of that is also pretty much settled, I'd say. (At least from a scientific point of view.)
But maybe I didn't clearly state my case, thus the misunderstanding.
The point I'm making is as follows. Embryos are not children and thus they are not persons. Just as I cannot murder my toe (it might be human, but it's not a person) I cannot murder an embryo.
You also don't have any definition with a clear line when this switch from non human to human happens.
It almost always boils down to "when it's convenient for me"
Quotation needed. Outside of religious circles there's very little debate about this. Scientific consensus is that fetal viability is considered to begin at 23 or 24 weeks gestational age. That's long after the embryo stage.
Just to make communication easier; are you aware that there's a difference between embryo and fetus?
> You also don't have any definition with a clear line when this switch from non human to human happens.
I never proposed that a embryo is not human. But we can talk about the line dividing persons from non-persons, if you like.
> Outside of religious circles there's very little debate about this
Do you live in the US or Canada? Almost every other country, including almost all of highly secular Western Europe, bans abortion before at no later than 17 weeks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law).
To suggest there is only one definition of "child" is even more incorrect than suggesting that it can't refer to an unborn person:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/childThe importance of the topic doesn't make it impossible to be polemic. I can talk about a very serious topic and be polemic and I can also talk about a trivial matter and not be polemic. The question of polemic is decided by contentious rhetoric.
Equating embryos with children and abortion with murder is polemic.
I don't think it is polemic to disagree on this point, but it rationally follows that if embryos are unique life forms, which are also human, then aborting them is murder.
Personally, I don't agree with that line of reasoning either, but the argument isn't in itself polemic.
Edit: I suppose I should add that I am not treating "human" as a collective noun, the way we might talk about bread or water. "A human" is not merely a little toe, for example.
> The question is not are embryos human, the question is whether they are independent human life with their own rights.
I think we are pretty much in agreement what the contention is about.
> [..] the argument isn't in itself polemic.
The argument itself is not polemic. No argument in itself is polemic. Polemic is defined in the language used. I'm objecting the language in which the argument is phrased;
To quote the post I originally answered to:
> "Embryo selection"—is that a euphemism for "murdering any unborn child [...]
The phrasing is polemic for reasons I pointed out before.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062464345
The millennials and gen-z is royally screwed, the writing has been on the walls for years.
And about "obese population", Europe is not so bad in fact. Obese people die younger and most elders in Europe are slim.
By funding toy projects and pipe dreams you are crowding out useful research - and there's plenty of fundamental work in material sciences, superconductivity, etc. that could actually improve the lives of everyone
All our problems are just the engineering problem of AGI. Why waste money on something like this when AI will be "smarter" than us by the time it is built?
We should just do nothing and wait for AI to build the instruments it wants.
Maybe there is the slightest hope in this "overpriced" and long delayed space telescope that is getting ready right now but even with that the narrative will end up being how "AI finds alien planet" or "AI sees first star in the universe".
To really build a new LHC it just needs to be marketed to the populace as a tool for AI research. Done. Everyone knows AI is the future and we are not so stupid to skimp on AI research funding.
Spend all that money on researching particle physics though? What a fucking waste of money.
We dont know if we will ever reach AGI and if we want to theoretically demonstrate if we can reach it or not then we need to rely on science.
Engineering alone cannot answer theoretical questions.
Take the Event Horizon Telescope as an example here. It requires a massive amount of computational modeling to create those images from a huge dataset. Humans did their science to figure out how the supermassive black holes would look like and created their models (AI if you will) based on this knowledge. Even so they are not free from criticism that they might be overfitting onto a conformation bias and many scientists are waiting for an independent confirmatory observation before they believe the image. Now if you replace the humans in that equation with more models (AGI if you will) how do you even know what you are looking at is even sensical?
I’m not a fan of the LHC++ project either, but I think you might have too much faith in AI and AGI.
I'm afraid - not even in technology at this point.
Doing useless science is the destruction of wealth. The destruction of wealth is pleasurable, don't get me wrong, but that's all it is. They could build gargantuan statues to do the same thing, or accumulate huge stockpiles of weapons.
I wish it was true, it would be much easier to convince people to have ten of them.
It seems like the car is a Bugatti Veyron and like there is a huge (exponentially growing) fronteir to explore. Exploring another 1000 miles in a very well studied direction seems less curious than pushing outward another mile over the entire frontier. Especially at the places that have gotten less attention.
'Doing more of the same but bigger' feels more like small thinking than 'lets try lots of things we haven't tried before'. To me the latter also feels a lot more curious.
You wouldn't go to the north pole with a VW Beetle.
Same thing applies here, smaller cars that explore in all direction can probably find a local maxima and get stuck there.
Big science projects such as the LHC go very far and very deep in the very fabric of reality. Instead of building a thousand cars, it'd be a good idea to still build the next space probe while, at the same time, use what we learned building the previous one to build a couple cars to explore in different directions.
Why is it zero sum to begin with? And more importantly, how less effective would be able to feed the world had we had no space race to begin with? If we were still at a 1950s technical level, our farming capacity would be exponentially lower, and most of the big leaps came as a direct result technologies originally developed for space.
It's naive to assume we can see all the benefits of daring to attempt hard things, but attempting hard things is what moves society forward. If all we did was lots of little cars in all directions when we have already figured out the challenges with little cars, mean the ONLY benefit is the direct one. If we've never built a car to explore REALLY far, well, there's a bunch of other problems we need to solve to get there. And honestly, it's those results that will likely move the needle.
From the people who brought you compost fueled cars?
"Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's instead build an airplane."
The problem with next-gen LHC is that there are no guarantees of any new or interesting physics for that $100 billion. And particle accelerators are not the only way to spend large sums of money, so there is an opportunity cost. Why not spend that $100 billion to build more space telescopes or more sensitive LIGOs to detect gravitational waves, etc.
My read of the article was more a call for considering the practical uses of tge research. If we don't know what $100B worth of LHC will discover, why wouldnt we instead fund tens of thousands of smaller projects that often have very practical real world goals?
I don't think that's quite right. The big problem isn't that there is 'nothing left to discover' because we know there are interesting physics at higher energy scales. What we don't actually know if there is anything interesting at the energy scales that this particle accelerator could achieve. You could literally spend two decades building this, and in the end, all you would do is rule out a tiny energy-scale slice.
It appears we suspect there is a better way.
It's not like we have many other great ideas for science experiments. Apparently.
PS. I have a masters in engineering physics and several friends who are physicists. I’m also a science nerd. But I still think this is the right thing to do.
You need to throw politics at poverty and homelessness, not just cash.
Not incidentally, lowering the barriers to physics education and changing the incentives towards risky imagination and away from calculated academic careerism would also make breakthroughs in physics more likely.
The more research we do the better and 100 billion spent over approx 20 years by over a dozen countries is a far cry from putting all our eggs in one basket.
Cannot eat money, unfortunately it's far more durable and fungible than food.
Now, perhaps there are investments that can be made to improve the world's agriculture.
I also don't have the expertise to tell whether the article is being overly reductive with the project's goals: are there other questions (besides new particles) that can only be answered with a larger collider? The summary of the FCC (Future Circular Collider) project's goals indicates that yes, there are unresolved questions that the FCC will address[0].
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-69...
Investing the same money in something that has a known and positive primary effect will produce the same amount of secondary benefits. So if you can think of something more fruitful to do with these 100B, do that; the secondary benefits will keep coming anyhow.
A more verbose history : https://blog.patentology.com.au/2012/04/story-behind-csiros-...
A short story about the discovery of microscopes from https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/
Had the rich noble simply invested his money in doctors instead of the person with a hobby of playing with glass, they might have instead discovered more uses for leeches
Of course not we should choose avenues according to what they are likely to achieve being better than alternative allocations. For another LHC that is a huge burden to overcome.
What is so great about LHC2 that you want to keep space exploration going at a crawl with commercial companies showing how to do it on a shoestring budget? Maybe the LHC2 will cause a discovery the LHC won't but is that probability of learning something worth sacrificing a huge portion of our resources on? Or is this that we made people gain an expertise and they want to continue with its path even though it's a pretty bad one to continually invest more and more in?
Personally, I have mixed feelings about learning fission and I would rather explore space and have functionally independent colonies before we blow ourselves up with a new subatomic discovery.
Strings are right out. Nobody has offered any clue as to how to make a prediction that could be tested with possible equipment.
That does not mean none ever will, but it does not seem to be their focus. Physics departments like string theorists because they come with no equipment budget.
Frankly, given the amounts we spend on things I fundamentally disagree with, I'd even say "sure let them have at it and let's find another 100B somewhere in the military budgets of the world, divert them to more research."
But even if you want to focus on "big, milestone" projects like the LHC[++] you can go for other challenges where you know that there's a tangible benefit to be had at the end.
Fusion research for example comes to mind. Hugely expensive, interesting, rewarding if successful, track record of secondary inventions.
I'm sure there are others. Off the top of my head, carbon capture and storage, better (more sustainable) battery/storage tech, elimination of rare earths in electronics, ...
There's no shortage of big, hard problems
To quote the writer of the line uttered by the equanimous Jeff GoldBloom.
https://i.imgur.com/XpKoQIf.gif
Seriously, this is where 'black budgets' are a thing.
There is serious money pumped into the MIC and the secondary effects are far more than tertiary at this point. Dark breakaway.
How much is a dollar worth in space. Asking for a Musk of mine.
Each avenue you keep open costs money and takes up people's time. You can't keep every avenue open. You have to decide -- with imperfect information -- which avenues are worth keeping open. And the entire thesis here is that the LHC++ is probably not worth it. You can disagree with that, but if you're going to do so because of possible secondary benefits, you have to take a crack at showing that those secondary benefits -- whatever they may be -- are numerous enough and worth enough to justify the money and time.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/ree/archives/archive08/usa/pr...
shrug. It's always hard to guess?
We could definitely postpone this work and invest in more impactful work in the present. It might be worth reconsidering this once we've worked through climate change, energy consumption, and the drinking water crises we're facing.
Except in reality you don't just get to take something like military money and just invest wherever you want. Military is something that can be funded politically for large sums. So the more likely choice is you get to fund military, with all the associated research and benefits, or you don't get those tax dollars to do anything with, or maybe just spend them on not science.
If it were possible to simply pour money into science/invention politically, then the budgets of NIH, NASA, etc., would not be as small as they are.
Building a one inch super conductor in a lab might be straightforward but cost a million dollars. That lab process doesn't scale to building seventeen miles of superconductor. The LHC needed 4722 miles of superconducting cable. Simply manufacturing that much cable led to advances in superconductor manufacturing and design. Even then the LHC's particular superconductors only work if you've got the operating budget to use liquid helium to cool them.
The money spent went into research to develop the components necessary for the design and then into the production of those components. The LHC wasn't some item picked out of a catalog. Many of its components only existed on paper when it was designed.
No one is just going to pump development dollars into some paper design and hope someone somewhere finds a use for it. The LHC's superconductors advanced the state of superconductors in general but no one was going to do that work without an end goal and a budget.
Military development ends up with a similar model. Requirements for a desired capability are given to a contractor and they need to figure out how to build it. Sometimes that development is easy and other times it's difficult and expensive. Contractors definitely make a profit and pad co tracts but that money does pay people to do things. The requirements and funding create a market for the development for technologies that meet those requirements.
https://youtu.be/9qqEU1Q-gYE
We also need BIG SCIENCE to solve global warming and many more issues.
Let's not narrow our focus on some fiscal numbers that are basically inconsequential for such a rich place as is the case with Europe.
Let's do the opposite instead. Let's bet on an actual vision for once again - I miss the 1960s!
at some point instead of more people crawling around in a tunnel around Geneva we need more people installing wind turbines on the sea.
of course real life is not some Sims game, the cost of switching from that to this is far from negligible (and of course ideally we would cut back on people digging up dead plankton, people wasting time in traffic while burning it, also military spending - but as the current real life example in Ukraine shows, sometimes shit does indeed hits the fan)
By their nature, secondary innovations are not promised. Hence, researchers can get away with not "delivering" any, no matter how much they pitch the "possibility" when asking for funding.
The quality of researchers who will be working is another factor. Presumably it would be very competitive with LHC stuff. But I've seen research projects just become money black-holes as they just end up with unremarkable un-creative research staff who are just there for the paycheck and not competitive enough to otherwise get out of the academic comfort zone.
Well, if this isn’t predictable!
I'd find this article and its opinion more credible if it could point out how this didn't apply to the LHC. Was every discovery and technology that came out of the LHC predicted in advance? If not, then this argument fails.
Also, there's a mutual relationship between theory and experiment in physics. The LHC was well motivated by theoretical predictions (most notably the Higgs boson) that needed experimental verification. In physics you have to put your theories to the test, otherwise they're not worth much. Each experimental result is like a nail that fixes a part of your theory space (by excluding possible alternative theories), and that then allows you to explore the space further with greater confidence. Hence the more nails, the better.
If you say the second, you have severe scope neglect: 100k is a huge number.
Of course, one expensive experiment may be the right call in some situations, but only if you have good reason to think it'll pay off. Either because you're certain it will, or because the expected utility of unknown results is larger than the cost (expected utility being probability times value). This very much isn't the case here.
A bigger collider does not, in fact, have anything to look for, and so the only possible benefit it could yield is such "serendipitous" discoveries. But how many of those could there really be when you're essentially doing only one thing?
The point of the article is that the ridiculous amount of money, which a bigger collider would cost, is much better spent on a large amount of much more varied research activities, which do have concrete things to look for, but also have the potential for serendipitous discoveries. And since those activities are much more varied, the total potential for such discoveries would much larger as well.
The LHC is a massive machine with advanced technologies, took a decade to design and build, involving 10k scientists and the international community, and cost $9B.
Given the bizarrely huge numbers casually throw around nowadays, I think it's useful to keep some perspective.Nit: MSFT market cap is ~210 LHC.
PS: Dear commenter, please don't "how about X?" in comments. I know you're smart. So smart you can find a counter example. Congratulations, you're clever.
In any case it will be built by a conglomerate of countries and the budget is not huge when splitting the bill.
Heck I would even like to see a couple of these built per year instead of more planes and warships.
Edit: Typo.
The short history of physics in TFA is spot on: Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise. This has been confirmed by numerous insiders, including by Hossenfelder as mentioned in the article, and Lee Smolin ("The trouble with physics") who is also a theoretical physicist.
Things have changed a lot since accelerators became a must-have for high-energy physics: Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned. I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations.
[1]: The industrial subsidy angle is not touched upon in TFA, but it is clear that there is a large number of people and companies making a good living from mega-physics, and talking to colleagues in the field, I get the distinct impression that it is not always they physicist walking in the front when asking for more machines.
===
Thats just how I read your comment to begin with.
In Steven Wrights voice.
"People ask me what I'm into... Low energy quantum physics... its basically everything"
Isn't the main alternative LQG which is apparently a dead end?
No, science is not the act of publishing in a peer-reviewed journals, science is using past observations to make models that predict future observations, and then evaluating those models after making the future observations. Peer review is just the industry standard quality control mechanism.
The problem with String Theory is it unfalsifiability and that it has not even grown to explain 3D phenomena AT ALL. 40 years later.
Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (both special and general) gave results in a single decade.
String theory is as far as I have ever read the only thing even close to a working theory in this area. That doesn't mean it's correct but in my admittedly limited understanding of the literature many alternatives are either dead or are similar to string theory only without the underlying principles.
People do work on alternatives. there are a lot of smart people unhappy with string theory they just can't actually provide any alternatives.
One thing I'd like to say as well is that if someone does provide an alternative there will be a large movement of minds. This always happens in science, people like to think of physicists as a kind of unionized cabal but this isn't true historically or today as far as I'm concerned. Certainly not with the physicists of tomorrow.
As far as I understand it, string theory has yet to provide a working model of quantum gravity despite focused work on it for ~30 years. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Plank explained the black-body radiation.
Einstein explained too many things to say but predicted the precession of mercury which was unexplained.
Witten has explained either everything (which is to say nothing useful) or nothing at all (it depends on your position). In any of both cases, after 40 years and several LHC unfulfilled “expectations” it is time to accept the facts.
For example my understanding of string theory is that Lorentz covariance must be exact, if you find this is either inconsistent or not true in reality then you have cut ze string.
These people are not some obscenely rich opportunists in power. They are working scientists, who draw public interest because they say interesting things and they are part of a larger discourse.
Now Hossenfelder isn’t known for her fingerspitzengefühl when it comes to criticizing others, but I have yet to find an instance where she doesn’t treat the subject matter with the utomst respect it deserves.
Her claim is that there isn't enough secondary validation to truly conclude they detected gravity waves. the community disagrees and is building more detectors. The creators of the project were awarded Nobel prizes. At best, she raises some interesting questions but the narrative that the data isn't sufficient really doesn't work.
Couldn't the LHC be upgraded then to take advantage of this? Sounds like a much cheaper option. But I'm not a physicist at all so I'm sure I'm oversimplifying.
The fundamental limitations isn't the detectors or computers, it's the energies you can reach with a collider of that size. Yes you can completely retool the LHC, which will probably allow you to do slightly better precision measurements, but won't strongly affect the energies you can probe.
To get to really high energies you need to build bigger. As a (former) particle physicist, I am also a bit sceptical if going bigger is better; the LHC was a calculated risk, with the goal of finding SUSY, which was a very plausible theory at the time.
The FCC seems to be a shot in the dark.
There is the argument that if we don't build a bigger one now we'll lose a lot of expertise, but that feels like a knee-jerk reaction from the community.
Superconducting magnets enable much higher energies in smaller (granted, theoretical) fusion reactor designs than previously possible. Does the same not apply to colliders?
It's a valid concern that must always be considered. It's the kind of thing that's been biting Intel in the ass for the past 7 years. Even if your decision is "we'll lose a lot of expertise and that's okay", it needs to be a conscious, well-grounded decision, otherwise that is a knee-jerk reaction based on your own biases and assumptions that could have significant, even irrevocable, consequences for the future.
This is effectively a measure to maximize the output we can get from the machine, so to maximize the return in investment.
There’s a lot of debate in the field what should happen next. FCC is one possibility, but I’m personally sceptical (even though I work at CERN myself).
It seems to me there’s a clear need for a Higgs-factory as a follow up to LHC, but that doesn’t have to be a ring collider, a electron positron linear collider could fulfill this purpose as well.
I'm not sure there is a fundamental distinction here. The only difference is success: Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist. When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment.
It feels like nature itself is against physicists here.
In 2011: "This is a profound turning point in the quest for a fundamental unified theory of the physical world. The properties and mass of the LHC's Higgs boson suggest that physicists will soon find superpartners for particles, and that we have begun to connect string theory to the real world." from https://www.nature.com/articles/480415a. We didn't find superpartners.
In 2019: "One important lesson from studying such models is that we should not have expected to find superpartners at the LHC with masses below about 1500 GeV." from https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.2019031.... I mean, yes, you should not have expected that, but you totally did, so why should I believe when you say the next LHC will find superpartners?
Nope. It's the other way around. The most important theories from Einstein an Schrödinger were created to explain effects there were experimentally known. The ones where they predicted the effects first and found them later were much less impactful.
A scientific theory is only as valuable as much as it can guide the action of some person.
Popperism is an incredibly successful simplification that made it viable to judge a theory. But at the end of the day, it's just a proxy that nobody really cares about.
Anyway, this is not a large problem. Theories taking decades to give you any practical result is perfectly fine. If all of science gave quick returns, it wouldn't need government spending. The problem is that we do not expect practical results on the future at all, and also do not expect the next large collider to bring anything different enough to change the physics into a new, unpredictable course.
Or, in other words, the next big collider (as we can plan now) is probably way too small to matter. It will also be the largest scientific project ever (space and fusion projects included), and larger than most infrastructure projects on the world. It is a pretty bad picture.
Popper is more against social “science” like Marx or philosopher like Plato. Whilst it clean up the field a bit not sure it is that helpful.
One of the reasons LHC was built in the first place was to try to detect the theoretically predicted Higgs boson.
Genuine question from an ignorant layperson: was confirming the existence of the Higgs boson not significant?
Significant would have been if they'd failed to find it.
And btw there is so much money around...we should not fight against different project but the spending that goes into science itself. LHC and NASA is really just a small drop compared to military spending (in the US).
https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/p...
Modern monetary theory is its own can of worms, but justifying massive spending in one area because of even more massive spending elsewhere isn't solving anything.
https://interestingengineering.com/these-7-cern-spinoffs-sho...
And i think the ISS was still much more expensive (especially over the years) then LHC/Atlas etc.
Like the Moon-landing right? None were due to advances in landing on the moon.
Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing. It's kind of weird because it was marketted as a success story to the public (and don't get me wrong, it was) but theorists were very confident that it was there by 2012. Thus far, it behaves exactly as expected according to the standard model and that is very dull.
HEP would have been left in a very funny position if we didn't find it. No Higgs Boson would have been fascinating from a theory perspective, but good luck trying to get funding for a new collider when you found nothing with the old one.
I was under the impression that this was a smoking gun for something being off with the theory, a bit like the ultraviolet catastrophe that led to QM or the orbital aberration that was resolved by GR.
Sort of.
The higgs boson mass is a parameter to the Standard Model. As far as the Standard Model is concerned, that is the end of the story. There are just a series of constants need to be fitted to data in the Standard Model and that's one of them.
However, the "problem" is why ~125GeV. If there are extremely high energy particles (which are expected in a Grand Unified Theory), then corrections to the Higgs mass would be enormous. This is a fine tuning problem where we arbitrarily tweak those corrections such that we magically end up at 125GeV. Supersymmetry and other Beyond Standard Models look to 'fix' this, and that's where my knowledge ends.
Honestly, when I was doing my PhD I took the pragmatic view on this. Trying to infer things at energy scales we can't probe struck me as more as a mathematical exercise than Physics. Many, many people would disagree with that though (and staked their careers on it).
When I was undergraduate at CERN summer school program I got that this was one of main themes to justify existence of SUSY. However I am still puzzled even after having obtained a PhD (condensed matter) how does this arbitrary tweaking of corrections does look like.
Is it simply unwillingness to accept for world as we live know some parameters of the world like particles masses are not that independent from each other?
But ultimately, yes. The entirety of modern physics is largely borne out of the unwillingness to accept the the world is simply as it appears and that there's no deeper unifying principles.
Based on what I understood from Sabine Hossenfelder's writing, yes, that is a big chunk of modern physics. One example is "the naturalness problem", that some base parameters of the SM are orders of magnitude larger or smaller than other ones - which is of course entirely possible as a fact of nature.
I was thinking the same thing! Haha
It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagine how intolerable the world would be if we'd chosen not to verify it.
We want our best predictions to be proven wrong, since we would learn a lot.
Just coming up with stuff and disproving it isn't always "learning a lot", it's just showing how bad we are at logically thinking about the next step.
That's why I said "our best predictions"; as in, what we actually think is the case (and would put money on).
I once read a paper complaining that the most of psychology experiments are trivial in the sense that their results are predictable in advance. It is like all people know that angry people tend to make other people angry and so if angry person try to communicate then oftentimes communications ends with a conflict. What the point of making an experiment from this?
I'm not sure how much of a psychology fall victim of this, but sometimes I read a paper and think that I've found one more example of this. I personally get nothing from reading such a paper. I can get some ideas while reading about methods researchers used, but it means that the paper is not about how human mind works, but about how to measure psychological phenomena, or how to conduct an experiment. I bet that the most interesting part of the hypothetical paper with angry communicating people would be the trick researchers used to make people angry without violating ethics.
There is some value in experiments that try to prove something that everyone knows already, but not much of a value. So the question is: is it ok to spend $10G to conduct such an experiment?
Well you would have needed the LHC to confirm that, too, right? As a totally uneducated person just remembering media and online discussion about it at the time, I think the most interesting possibility was the detection of entirely new particles, which didn't happen.
And in the run-up to the LHC, I think there was a lot of hope in the possibility of finding stuff, but maybe there's not as much hope now.
Which is the most exciting outcome between SUSY and absolutely nothing is very much debatable. However, I really can't stress how big an outcome it would have been if we didn't detect the Higgs. Generating a mass term for the W and Z bosons which is gauge invariant is hard. Without the Higgs mechanism, all the gauge bosons should be massless and yet the W and Z are very heavy. It wouldn't just be the case of the model doesn't work in some cases (massive neutrinos, dark matter candidate etc), you might as well throw the whole thing in the bin.
Edit: Typo
(Most times, people don't know how to judge that, but high-energy physics really didn't impact anything.)
In my opinion, we are hitting diminishing returns.. It's harder to learn new things now than ever before. You need big machines to do anything interesting?
Same reason why nobody was able to effectively compete with YC: it's a lot less work for VCs to fund a few "big bets" than find 100 good early-stage startups. The VC strategy is a lot less effective, but they still earn their fees no matter what
Perhaps it is reasonable to allow the money to remain unspent on topics related to physics! Spending has opportunity costs, after all; if these other experiments are not really the measure of the cost, then something else of value to society surely is.
The direct scientific value may be limited; the spinoff of that much attention / funding isn't.
Not saying we should definitely fund a new collider. But the amount of effort needed is so huge, that even just the discussion will have positive impact for science.
This might not count as it's not a single 'official scientific experiment or tool', but I think that biosci is clearly getting heavily funded.
Big Science and Big Politics in the United States: Reflections on the Death of the SSC and the Life of the Human Genome Project (1997) is a classic in history of science analyzing this competition.
Research into virology seems a bigger thing to research. There is way more "parallelism" there meaning funding could be allocated more efficiently nin some given time frame.
Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results.
Or are you seriously imagining that there is a cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret?
Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?
This is coming from a forum where it's normal to see "something that already exists, but written in $newLanguage/Framework" as a thing to celebrate. So why not just redo science but with newShiny so we haven't actually achieved anything? /s
And there it is right in this post.
Also, the controversy over the amyloid hypothesis is real. Here [0] is a paper showing arguments for and against with 268 citations. Here [1] is a more journalistic article in Nature. While this is still up in the air, it's nby no means a "conspiracy theory" to suggest that it's possibly a 25-year wild goose chase, or close to it. I would love to be wrong about this, but I suppose time will tell.
[0] https://actaneurocomms.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s4...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4
If you believe things have changed, just say so, and move the conversation on. If you don't think it's a fruitful conversation, don't participate.
I specifically replied to someone claiming that new minds re-thinking the foundations of a field couldn't possibly be a good idea, and I did so with a relevant quote from one of the new minds that completely re-wrote the foundations of their field. I believe this was a constructive observation moving the conversation.
The idea of getting young physicists to do lots of research is not at all about ignoring the old knowledge. These young people will have gotten a PhD in physics. They will have absorbed a lot of the relevant old knowledge. The idea is that, because they came to this knowledge quite quickly, they have a fresh view on it. You simply get a different view on knowledge you build over decades as opposed to knowledge you learnt in a few years. This different view could very well lead to new and valuable insights.
There is not a "cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret". But there is a "group of people who have been doing high energy physics that want to keep doing high energy physics". It makes sense that they want to keep doing it, even if other approaches would be more fruitful. They have invested lots of time into it, and they might not even know about the other approaches. And doing 'more of the old thing' is a safe bet.
It's just that by now 'more of the old thing' is getting really stupidly expensive. And it looks to be a lot more efficient to try a lot more new things. Give the people with a fresh look on it a change to come up with ideas.
> Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?
These people surely do exist. But there are plenty of others out there that have ideas for 10 million dollar machines rather than 100 billion dollar machines. Try some of the 10 million dollar machines rather than only the 100 billion dollar machines.
I think many of the 10 million dollar machines are currently not being funded because that level of funding requires clout, reputation, and political acumen to get. This currently lies with the people who like doing accelerators. They don't like building non-accelerators that cost 10 million dollars, so they don't help the 10 million dollar machines as much.
That is not malice, these people aren't evil. They just like a tool that is getting inefficient.
Apparently it needs to be said because people act like they don't know it: those are the only people interested in answering questions about the fundamental particles! Diverging interests is the fundamental reason people separate into different fields.
> they might not even know about the other approaches
You can easily find the lists of seminars given at CERN and other places: they do know about other fields. In fact people from HEP move to other fields, and folks from other fields move into HEP.
> Try some of the 10 million dollar machines rather than only the 100 billion dollar machines.
They are being built though! In fact there are 2 billion experiments being built.
The argument here is something else: that High energy physics should just stop building big machines at all, and instead magically solve the problem that small machines were built and fully exploited many many decades ago.
The proposed FCC cost is 30 billion.
Einstein wasn't a 'quantum pioneer'. Einstein was a proponent of classical physics and against quantum physics.
He of course fully knew that the world is quantum, not classical. His beef with the mainstream QM past the mid to late '20s was with the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein believed that a complete theory would have realism and so Copenhagen could not be the complete theory.
What is interesting, is that a lot of the fundamental physics theories were discovered by amateurs. Einstein was a patent clerk, for example.
Maybe we should work on democratizing data collection, and making more raw data available for people to work with. With the advent of cloud computing and on demand computing, maybe your hobby group could code up a an analysis and run it on AWS for a few hundred dollars and discover some new theory.
Of course, there are a lot of smaller experiments that one could do, also in particle physics, that have great value. One example was the Muon g-2 measurement, another is anything neutrino physics. We can get a lot of interesting input and test our theories without going to the "energy frontier". Physicists understand this very well. But there are a bunch of questions that you can only really answer if you go to those higer energies.
As for the costs, 100 billion is a lot, but not when you compare it to other large infrastructure projects, or especially military spending (and note the Chinese proposal SPPC would be a lot cheaper!). I think if we could shave off 100 billion of military expenses and put it into basic research, it would be a great win for society. That's not realistic you say, with all the threats out there? Great, I agree, but now we have a nice project! Lets put as a common goal that we want to be able to do this kind of research, and then improve our societies nationally and globally so that we can reduce our military spending and do this kind of research.
100 billion ($/€) is the amount that Germany is spending as a special budget in response to Russia's aggression, in order to become the nation with the 3rd highest military spending on the planet. If it weren't for the war in Ukraine, we could put it all into such a project.
If we had averted COVID in it's early stages - like we did with SARS-1 and MERS - imagine all the resources we could have put into research instead.
Alternatively, if one really wants to pursue beyond the standard model physics, it seems to me multi-messenger astronomy has a much better chance of delivering decisive data, so shouldn't we put that money into better observatories?
Because the only reason you have $100 billion to spend is that it's a large scale infrastructure project. And that money is trickling down to member states through contracts to a mix of businesses who hire white and blue collar workers.
It is equal part economic stimulus, political marketing and scientific research.
You can't just ask for the last part and ignore the first two.
Secondly condensed matter and quantum information already get plenty of money: superconductivity alone is a market worth around 5 billion dollars, google is spending billions of its own money into quantum computers.
But sure, lets give these starving fields that produce commercial products a some tax-payer dollars at the slight cost of completely de funding high energy physics, I'm sure that will get the scientist there to care about the proton despite them very consciously choosing to do something else.
Forward thinking nations would take this approach, a single discovery in just one of these studies might unlock a huge amount of scientific, commercial or industrial value, and casting the net wide gives the greatest chance of making that discovery.
Sure. For some time period and amount of money, indeed. What happens once this limit is reached and people stop trusting that money?
Currency collapses are nasty. Look at Weimar Germany after WWI.
Several LHCs, ITERs and ISSes won't bring any of the nations close to Weimar Germany. Aircraft carriers, F-35s, failing infrastructure projects and corruption have a larger chance of doing that.
Also, I'll note that inflation in the UK is at 9%. Printing money is essentially a tax on those with cash holdings, who are mostly poorer. Not to mention the wastage on repricing...
And after this the US has hit levels of inflation that it hasn't seen for 50 years. Before that inflation was that high in WW2.
Printing money is not free, neither is tax money.
This is only true of the world's reserve currency (which is currently the USD). In all other cases they basically guarantee the issues stated elsewhere like inflation.
the FCC is a project for the next 70 years. It is supposed to be operational after 2040 at the earliest if I recall correctly (20 years from now more or less), and to run for around 40 years.
So if you do a very simplistic calculation on the first 20 years : 100 B euros over 20 years over 20 countries (there is 23 member states into the CERN) it is 250 M euros / year / country. This is not even calculated on the over-all project time, on on the different steps that will be happening: first FCC as electron-positron collider and then much later FCC hadron-hadron collider.
And if you are really interested into the previewed outcomes (scientifically and new techs associated):
https://indico.cern.ch/event/1040535/timetable/#20220503.det...
You can take look at the European research communities symposium that just happened recently on the future of the research topics in Europe. There are a lot of information for FCC and so on.
XX century science has delivered plenty of practical applications. But is there any practical application to expect from another large Hadron collider? Wouldn’t that money be better used in bio science or something else?
The really important scientific work doesn't follow this rule and demanding it does is short-sighted. Perhaps worse, it's refusing to learn from plenty of historical examples where you can see the work yielded nothing of immediate use but was still very important (that is to say, society would look vastly different without it). In a sense, it's this kind of goal-oriented thinking that led society to the mess that it has become in the last 15 years.
Most previous science discoveries weren't throwing around oodles of money.