This is an extremely narrowminded view. Lasers, MRI, X-Ray machines, etc ... are all made by engineers after physicists tried to understand the fundamental nature of reality. One would argue that modern electronics are possible because research was done about Quantum Physics, a fundamental nature of reality.
Essentially none of the particle physics done since the 1960s has had any application outside of fundamental knowledge, with no prospects for it having those applications in the future. At best, and even this is stretching a bit, there are indirect benefits of developing the machines that are needed to explore this frontier (i.e. like some of the argued benefits of space exploration).
Whether that changes the calculus of whether these things are worth the price is still a question (in my opinion: they are), but I don't think making analogies to applications of discoveries of fundamental physics operating at very different energy scales is a good argument. The development of quantum physics (lasers, MRI, etc), while a frontier at the time, is essential to understanding commonplace things like the cohesion of solids or the properties of metals or semi-conductors (say) at room temperature. To my knowledge, there is nothing outside of astrophysical objects and the early universe that depends on knowing what is at the current frontiers in particle physics (or even what was the frontier in 50 years ago).
Whilst they are not commonly used today, it is not entirely improbable that they play a significant role in the future.
There’s also some developments related to grid computing, sensors, and electronics, which could be reasonably useful in other contexts.
So yeah, chasing the next fancy particle itself is not very relevant to most people (though still very important in our quest of trying to understand the world around us), but it still contributes to technological progress.
Another aspect is international collaboration. It’s not perfect, but CERN and ITER are organisations within which Chinese, Russians, Americans and Europeans (and many, many others) work together towards a common goal.
In my opinion, another important reason to support of keeping these large accelerators alive is there is a very real chance that the expertise to build these kind of devices could atrophy or be lost entirely given the long timescales involved. Even if one is opposed to building this specific collider, I think the prospect of losing this kind of institutional knowledge is concerning (though if one finds these things useless, you might care less if we lost that capability).
I entirely agree with your second point. I’ll add that it is also important to keep these people (from highly specialised technicians and physicists to diplomats and support staff) employed in positions where they can keep their skills sharp. Some of them then go back to their countries of origin to apply this experience and knowledge to help improve research and policy at home, whilst retaining personal links with their counterparts abroad.
In the grand scheme of things, the expenditure is a rounding error anyway.
As an analogy, I currently work on developing a medical imaging system where we track the trajectories of protons and heavy ions after they traverse a patient - in order to infer their energy loss and also the patient's "stopping power" map. With better knowledge of the stopping power we will be able to improve cancer radiation treatment with protons and heavy ions.
We would be nowhere without recent work in particle physics on large scale pixel sensors, Monte Carlo simulation software, readout systems, experimental cross sectional data (although not directly from the high energy experiments), particle tracking algorithms, electronics design for very thin sensors and radiation hard equipment ++.
But I think my main point, that applications of particle physics itself (and not the human and technological advances made to support it) are essentially non-existent stands.
The technological advances made to support particle physics may not have been possible without the effort to do the particle physics.
I.e. they are actually a result of the effort to understand the universe, even though they aren’t written down in the standard model.
It’s not at all obvious that we would have devised them any other way.
> One would argue that modern electronics are possible because research was done about Quantum Physics, a fundamental nature of reality.
which was making the connection that understanding frontier physics from 100 years ago directly enabled new technology, and that was a reason to support particle physics today (presumably b/c it might directly lead to similar advancements).
What does it mean to distinguish these two?
But I think there is a real difference in expectations between technology that operates on known physical principles and that which involves wholly new ones. Historically the latter has been associated with dramatic shifts in what is possible, for example our understanding of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics enables much of the modern world.
So I think presenting the study of particle physics in that light could mislead the public on just what is being done and what kind of outcomes it might precipitate.
We didn’t know what our understanding of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics would enable in advance.
Suggesting that any science would lead to specific outcomes would be misleading, otherwise it wouldn’t be science - it would just be engineering. R&D.
Science is always just exploration, and the outcome in terms of tools is always incidental.
No, but we did know what we had large gaps in our knowledge, even of things at close to human scales -- before those theories were discovered and worked out. It was then reasonable to expect that filling in those gaps might lead to new technology and applications also at human scales. And I'm not talking about direct applications, I'm talking about applications decades or more out -- but the fact that the energy scales were somewhat close to home meant such thing were possible.
From what we know about the current frontier in particle physics, nothing informs physics at human scales. This is a strong statement -- its many many orders of magnitude off in energy scale.
It could be that we're wrong about some that (and that's one of the reasons I think this research should continue) -- but it's not something that should be reasonably expected.
> Science is always just exploration, and the outcome in terms of tools is always incidental.
My comments were about how the science should be presented to the public in an honest way. And I think trying to sell people on science by quoting past developments that are quite different in character and expectations to what is being done today is dishonest and is a disservice to everyone involved.
The point that should be made is exactly the one you make above: science is about exploration -- full stop -- and we shouldn't make exaggerated claims about applications to sell people on it.
We shouldn’t make pessimistic statements about the potential benefits of the process of doing the research itself.
Science is valuable because of what we find, but it’s also always valuable because of what we learn to do in the process.
I agree we shouldn’t make exaggerated claims about benefits, but neither should we act as though one part is somehow incidental and not fundamental to why we do the exploration.
I think nuclear physics provides an instructive example that sits in between some of these extremes. Here the energy scales are way way lower than current frontier standards, but also fairly divorced from things in everyday life. Yet nuclear physics has applications (in medicine, in power and [unfortunately] in war). These applications do tend however to be quite specialized (we don't have atomic cars, vacuum cleaners or whatever) so it didn't revolutionize the world the way our understanding of electromagnetism or quantum mechanics did. [I don't want to downplay the effect of nuclear science, but it isn't ubiquitous in our lives].
Barring a fundamental change in our understanding, I would expect that trade off between energy scale and specialization to continue to hold and any developments based on particle physics (of the 60s-present) to be very specialized.
Let me be clear though -- you don't know what you don't know. It could be that what I think are reasonable expectations are wrong, and there are surprises waiting for us (this is one of the reasons I think particle physics is worth supporting).
That may not hold forever; but it's not a crazy assumption. Something who's existence you cannot deduce without energies that need specialized billion dollar equipment to reach is almost by definition not ever going to create or influence ubiquitous tech. That's quite different from stuff like quantum mechanics; those effects are quite visible in fairly everyday situations (e.g. the double-slit experiment doesn't need anything too exotic, and obviously lots of modern tech relies on tricks classical physics might observe but not predict).
That means that if particle physics is to be relevant, it's most likely going to be in places that are not ubiquitous. Maybe it'll help astronomers understand the universe, and maybe that has some application down the line. Or maybe it'll be in absurdly expensive high-energy devices that matter even with only a few copies in the world (and let's hope those aren't yet more weapons).
Still, seems reasonable to be pessimistic about the usefulness of particle physics investments of this type.
Quantum computing only solves a few specific problems. Like showing every possible outcome. For instance print(x), and your goal is to get a through z.
But if the problem is linear, like 2+2, it doesn't help to have quantum computing.
The very next part of his statement covers that... It could be decades before "society" sees fruits of the research.
> To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance.
His next sentence also says "research is good for research sake" - there doesn't need to be "real world results" for the research to be worth it.
You talk about narrow mindedness... then ignore second part of the first sentence and completely ignore the second sentence... Seems narrow minded to do that?
I tend to agree on both those points... It could be a long time to see results and research for research can be good.
As the saying goes, thermodynamics owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to thermodynamics.
The cult of the scientist has gone too far in the US
Yeah that argument was extremely dishonest. We don’t build a 1 billion dollar climate change center because that 1 billion is going to beget trillions of dollars in disruption. Throwing 20, 40 billion with staffing (which comes back into the economy) over a decade or more all-in is a total different ballgame.
No? Models are useful for making predictions.
If somebody like the POTUS tells you that nuking thunderstorms would be great against climate change, you don't have to just take their word for it. You can input that into your climate change model, and it will tell you how much of an impact this will have, and whether the impact is good or bad.
The difference between a better model and a worse model is that the better model will agree better with reality.
A shitty model, like the one POTUS is using, might tell you that nuking all thunderstorms would be great. Then we go ahead and do it, and we all die.
A better model, like the mental model that every 14 year old child that starts studying physics and radiation has, might tell you that nuking thunderstorms is a pretty bad idea that would kill us all due to dozens of reasons.
Given that we cannot make accurate predictions today of what the weather tomorrow will look like. If you want to predict the 50 year impact of more subtle changes like, e.g., covering the Sahara with black mats, you need a pretty good model to get an output that isn't multiple orders of magnitude off.
So..... what do we expect from better climate change models? Avoiding the apocalypse to begin with. Worth every penny.
You have an odd concept of both how to determine if nuking a thunderstorm, which was not what was allegedly suggested, but also what large scale climate models actually capture.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dozens-failed-climate-pr...
All this based on models, and look how wrong they where.
Just act completely random.
Don't wake up, and go to your job, under the assumption that you will get paid.
Don't avoid jumping down a 15 stories building under the assumption that you will die.
Don't breathe. Your model is biased towards breathing.
It's not either or. Knowing the impact is valuable for mitigating damage. You can allocate capital for mitigation more effectively if you have a more accurate model of the threats. Presumably at some levels funding more accurate models are net cost-saving, by increasing the efficiency of spend. I have no idea if we have or have not passed that level.
Similarly, a better model might provide a better understanding of different strategies for curtailing climate change. e.g. planting trees takes carbon out of the air directly (easy to estimate), but also changes the albedo of the underlying terrain. The impact of the albedo change is less clear, particularly as to how it changes regional weather patterns. It might benefit from better models to guide the most impactful locations to reforest. Again, I'm not an expert/maybe this is a solved problem, but I can see how these cases might exist.
About 10K construction jobs, from high tech to low tech over the life of the build phase of the project, which is overlapping a world wide downturn of unknown length of time.
I mean they could build staircase to the top of the tall hill and still not have it be a waste if it keeps people in work and out of harms way. In this case we may get some physics as an upside to a neat way to stimulate industry.
We can say with high certainty that the great barrier reef will die unless some miracle happens and the world limits warming to 1.5°. And even then most of the reef will be gone. Yet Australia is a country that basically has no real climate policy at all, they still plan for decades of new(!) coal extraction.
Berners-Lee invented the web while working at CERN on organizing scientific information for collides and stuff.
> The stage was being set for the invention of the World Wide Web, and future history books will recount how, almost alone, Sendall supported the pioneering work of Tim Berners-Lee, then working in his group. After reading Berners-Lee's prophetic 1989 proposal for what would become the Web, Sendall wrote on the cover "Vague but exciting", and added at the end - "And now?" The rest is already history.
The Superconducting Supercollider would have had to figure out how to deal with fire ants (apparently the magnetic fields attracted them).
That's the kind of really useful technology that spins out of projects like this.
Me either and often the technology you get on the back of it doesn't show up for decades and decades anyway.
Usually big projects tend to need to be conservative and use off the shelf available materials (just in clever ways).
Sabine's big point is not that we shouldn't do basic science, it's that we shouldn't do bad basic science; that is science that isn't driven by hypotheses. Historically in science you would create a new model that agrees with current facts, but makes an prediction that some unobserved event X would be observable. You build your apparatus or design an experiment to observe X, and then confirm of reject the model.
In the case of a bigger collider, what is X?
This quite mistaken based on what I've read. Historically NASA hovers at around a 10:1 ROI. SpaceX would not exist today without the huge benefit of all the material NASA has published historically.
MRI may not have come from colliders, but modern medical imaging absolutely has benefited from these projects. There's a researcher that commented in a sibling thread with specific benefits to their project.
> In the case of a bigger collider, what is X?
Here's a quick summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q
I suggest you look at what was spent on the Space Shuttle, which turned out to be non-reusable (it was re-manufactured after each flight for up to a year.) No ROI there.
Fun facts: NASA knew from the very first flight that they were losing several tiles during launch, and no tiles were optional. Also, NASA managers were given photos of Columbia's damaged wing, which had a gaping hole in the leading edge, before re-entry, and sat on them. I wouldn't fly a Cessna 152 like that.)
https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html
That and the ISS sucked most of the funding out of US space research and is still going on.
My constructive suggestion? Take a chain saw to the ISS on the next "mission."
Unless we made a trillion dollars on that bungled program alone, still not seeing ROI:
https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-ig-iss-cost-u-s-75-b...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/197600...
In addition, that was pre-bungled Space Shuttle and ISS programs. Even the GAO is reticent to talk about how much money was wasted in those programs in case future space programs would be immediately cancelled due to gross mismanagement.
2) If you're a scifi fanboi, just admit that you support whatever wasteful spending NASA does. But don't hide behind obfuscated numbers that you haven't read and don't understand.
Your second point goes beyond the bounds of civility here.
That would be an argument to start even sooner rather than later or never. If you want to combat the usefulness of the research the only arguments you can make are that the results are not useful at all, or that they can be obtained cheaper, faster, or more reliably with other means.
The "it takes decades to bear fruit" works even against education. And I'm sure nobody would agree to be barred access to any tech that was the result of decades of research or simply took decades to reach market.
I'm also not a fan of this project simply because I don't think an incremental advance in colliders will bring anything new at all, certainly not because it will take too long to reach market. As the saying goes, you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. To achieve the next breakthrough we need something on a scale we're simply not capable of building now, or soon.
Maybe there are better ways to measure the tiny signals that hint at new physics, but the question is what we can do now. I would personally say its optimistic to assume we'll get a big breakthrough if we don't invest in the incremental upgrades.
LHC was justified as a search for the Higgs. The Higgs was found. Everyone was happy. Fine.
LHC 2.0++ is just banging rocks together for the sake of it. Something interest might fall out, or it might not.
But considering that we still don't understand quantum origins, have no clue how to make a theory of quantum gravity, and have no idea what Dark Energy is, or even if it exists at all, it might be better to spend the money on pursuing creative theoretical leads in those other directions and coming back to country-sized experimental hardware when there are some new theories to test.
Though the utility of a big collider would be in diversifying the types of decays observed?
All we need is one anomaly in the vast data processing. There are many things which are expected to be seen at higher energies. If they are not seen, it still says a great deal and will guide theoretical discussion.
Tell that to the hundreds, thousands, of valid scientific projects that cannot find funding. This collider, if built, represents not only a lot of money but those hundreds of smaller projects that didn't happen.
I once heard a physicist say that our society spends more on ring tones than it does fusion research. I suspect that this collider would yield an inverse. We will spend more on a narrow aspect of particle science than we do on vaccine research. More than on new antibiotics? More than on SETI? More than on detecting possible life in our own solar system? Particle science is great, but there are more efficient ways to spend billions.
However, there are other points the author made.
First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance.
Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination. What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard? I supposed that could be useful, but even more pressing was how to motivate the people of Earth to make the necessary changes.
Also, the money offered doesn't seem that huge on scale of countries. 1 billion dollars per year for operating cost? I suppose we could make better use of money that would otherwise go to making a new collider, but so we can do so elsewhere as well.