All intensive purposes. Get down to brass tax. There's a lot of these that I've uttered or heard and they last a long time because they sound kind of sensible.
It will surely do. Those achievements are not possible without staggering advances in technology that can be later applied in different fields.
The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today.
The question is, how much better would "MRI and other diagnosis tools" if that money had been spent actively trying to improve them instead of mostly going to detecting gravity waves? That's the question you need to answer to justify spending billions chasing physicists latest "fetish".
"Big physics" proponents always justify wasting (in my opinion) billions in colliders and observers by the unintended benefits that accidentally derive from them but they never mention how much more progress those other ares could make by directly using that money.Instead of spending $40B in the next big collider, what if we were spent developing CRISPR and related technologies? Or on a "moon-shot" for AGI? On developing new tools and techniques to study and understand large scale social systems?
P.S.: I have a BS/MS/PhD in Theoretical Physics
If you want the MRI 2.0, you start with something monstrously different, otherwordly, like gravitational wave detection. There you reach metrological precision, DSP, optics, waveguides, EM shielding, thermal noise compensation, and other incremental advancements that taken together gives you MRI 1.5, and then you can bring in those who make it work into a nice and shiny improved MRI.
The problem with moon-shots (eg. AGI) is that you don't know where to go. With physics at least you sort of do. Higher energy. More sensitivity. Better experiments.
Arguments for "spinoff benefits" from research always seem really weak to me. If you want lighter, imperishable food, invest in food preservation, not a space program that might happen to produce freeze-dried food.
I think, when you take humans into account, you're better off setting interesting and challenging goals, with many useful byproducts.
I still think it's pretty weak though; the inspiration benefit seems unlikely to overcome the lost efficiency, in general. And different people find different problems inspiring; some people can be inspired by practical problems (e.g. "how can we lighten the backpacks of trampers").
The problem with attempting to justify space exploration with spin-off examples like food preservation is that it risks provoking a 'so what?' response. Piling on unimpressive claims does not strengthen one's argument, it dilutes it, and gives the opposition an easy target to dispute.
When Clarke came up with the idea of communications satellites, he, and others, thought he had come up with a before-the-fact justification for space travel, as he expected these relays would need regular maintenance, but another claimed-spinoff-but-not-really, semiconductor electronics, obviated the need.
There is plenty of wasted money in the pharma sector that can be spent and profited from in crispr technologies. I'm not sure why you're taking physics money for that.
The physics funding programs have already moved on from big budget tags in some spaces. ITER will probably be the last big white whale project in fusion. There are a bunch of smaller fusion projects being funded at smaller scales to prove their efforts before going big. The iterative tech model is bleeding over into science funding.
I've always been very skeptical of claims that heavy investment in the space sciences advacnced other technologies, more than if we had just invested that money directly in the other technology. I also see a lot of money wasted in space sciences running experiments on the ISS that aren't really that useful (like crystallography- sure, you can grow nice crystals in space and then bring them back down to earth, but for the money you spent on that, you could have funded 10 PIs, and also crystal structures aren't that useful for advancing science).
Interestingly, if you look at modern science funding, it does basically treat it as a multi-armed bandit and there is a portfolio of project funding that includes both large particle physics experiments and individual investigators.
(Also a BSc in TPhys (& maths), fwiw.)
And you basically followed with it. Basic science is the foundation engineering builds on. I believe 1st semiconductors were a science experiment. Em waves were. Gigantomagnetoresistance was. The internet was an academic curiosity.
It think it's important to blow some of human work on the free thinkers. It moves the popluation forward. Any other comparable scientific and engineering progress I can think was fueled by war.
Imho allocating resources only for acute goals lead to local technological optima. Seemingly puporseless research helps to break out.
I'm pretty sure the transistor [1] was invented specifically to solve a real engineering problem.
[1] I'm taking your use of "semiconductor" to mean transistor because my understanding is semiconductors are a kind of material that was discovered, not invented.
Today number theory is the basis for several important fields of application, including computation theory, modern cryptography, and numerical calculation.
Also in modern times, especially, there is a big problem of discoverability. If the mathematical result you need for some application is buried in a thirty-year-old journal using unfamiliar terminology, what are the chances you'll find it and understand it when you need it? I venture to suggest that much of the time it's easier to re-derive the result than to find it.
Not a chance.
The average cost of an application of permethrin 1% cream is about $20; an application of spinosad costs $270 without insurance.
Ouch!
As a knit pick, these metrics are all derivatives of science output, and not science itself. For example, detecting gravity waves does move the needle on any of these metrics, but it is still a great achievement for experimental physics.