Here's the result of just one of the fishing expeditions I saw (Dr Murray is a saint: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pro.2339)
And even no result is a valid result!
Did we read the same article?
> New measurements brought up new puzzles, and they built bigger colliders until, in 2012, the picture was complete. The Standard Model still has some loose ends, but experimentally testing those would require energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test. The scientific case for a next larger collider is therefore presently slim.
> Yes, one can hope. But there is no reason why the particles that make up dark matter or dark energy should show up in the new device’s energy range. And that is assuming they are particles to begin with, for which there no evidence. Even if they are particles, moreover, highly energetic collisions may not be the best way to look for them. Weakly interacting particles with tiny masses, for example, are not something one looks for with large colliders.
> And there are entirely different types of experiments that could lead to breakthroughs at far smaller costs, such as high precision measurements at low energies or increasing the masses of objects in quantum states. Going to higher energies is not the only way to make progress in the foundations of physics; it’s just the most expensive one.
There is no evidence at this point in time that we know all there is to be known at the next level energetic collisions. The whole idea that we are at the end of the line for particle accelerators smacks of huge hubris: we know all there is to be known. A similar sentiment pervaded the physics discipline about a hundred years ago and look where we've gone since then.
The worst part is that the LHC has been a success. You don't stop after a success. You stop because you've hit a dead end. The only way to know if we need a bigger particle accelerator is by building it and then either seeing or not seeing any results. After doing this we can definitively agree on never building another accelerator. Giving up after finding the higgs boson is like winning a bronze medal and quitting instead of going after the silver medal.
It's like saying, we landed on the moon by flying less than 400,000km into space, so why don't we fly 800,000km into space and see if we can land on something else? When in reality, everything we know about astronomy tells us the next nearest thing we could expect to land on is Mars, and that's 77,000,000km away.
I know we don't understand particle physics as well as we understand astronomy, but, taking Dr. Hossenfelder at her word that the Higgs boson "completes" the "picture" and that the theoretical "loose ends" would actually require "energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test", it sounds like we're a lot closer to Mars than to the next breakthrough in terms of particle colliders.
There were theoretical reasons to expect new results with previous colliders. I don't know that any similar reasons have been named here.
> There is no evidence at this point in time that we know all there is to be known at the next level energetic collisions. The whole idea that we are at the end of the line for particle accelerators smacks of huge hubris: we know all there is to be known.
This is a massive strawman argument to use, especially against someone like Dr. Hossenfelder who is a working physicist.
Even if we didn't get a physics result from a high energy collider, we'd have a few more generations of skillful and motivated scientists/ engineers. Perhaps there are more efficient ways to achieve that, but I think "a waste" is perhaps an overstatement; we lose something either way.
We don't know what we don't know, but one way or the other it's money spent on basic research and physics.
It's unfortunate that most of the general public does not understand how important it is that fundamental physics continues to advance. Advancing fundamental physics is the most important thing humans can do. It is not difficult to argue that the basis for our civilisation, that is, technology, would be impossible without the advances in fundamental physics. Some products of physics:
- Electricity (our ability to generate, store, and transmit it)
- Lasers
- Electron microscope (arguably, the great leap forward in medical research)
- Nuclear energy (arguably the cleanest energy available)
- WiFi
- GPS
- The internet (developed by Berners-Lee while at CERN)
- The semiconductor (the camera on your phone would not exist without fundamental physics)
- X-ray and Magnetic Resonance imaging.
- Radiotherapy to treat cancers
There are many others that we take for granted every day.[0] Even our understanding of DNA, the most significant discovery in biology, would have been impossible without fundamental physics in the form of X-ray crystallography. (and Francis Crick was a physicist!)
(It can also be argued that climate change, human suffering, and inequality can be directly solved if significant advances in fundamental physics are made: new powerful sources of energy like fusion or something else yet unimagined could transform our economic landscape entirely by driving the cost and harms of energy production and use down by large percentages. The Standard Model has revealed the structure of the atom, yet the benefits of this knowledge have yet to be broadly realised and applied to control matter at the sub-atomic level. There might be no practical limit to our ability to control matter! It might be possible to make wars (economic and physical) over resources irrelevant.)
[0]: Physics for an advanced world: A look at the vital contribution that physics research has made to a number of major technological developments https://www.iop.org/publications/iop/2009/file_38209.pdf
This is an alarming statement. I'm not sure on what basis you make it. Education seems to very much be a "you-get-what-you-pay-for" type deal. I'll assume that you know the comparative histories of educational policies in China, Russia, U.S.A, East Africa, so instead of rehashing those, let me give you a comparable sentence to yours:
"I would argue that the reason for all these life-saving surgeries is the increasing number of educated people (not only surgeons) in the world. So maybe investing this money into education is better."
fwiw. Having read Dr. Hossenfleder's book and others, I believe she is correct that we don't need another accelerator because the benefit for the cost just isn't there. Fundamental physics has stagnated. Other avenues of fundamental physics should be funded instead of being crowded out, urgently.
What I wanted to point out is: there is a trade-off in allocating budgets which are finite to different parts of society. If science gets a certain budget, I argue (like the original author) that new collider takes away a part of the cake from others. However you frame the sources of the money, the budget is obviously limited and can be directed in other experiments and ideas as well.
What prompted my response is defending physics through listing inventions. Ironically, the proposed experiment might never give any practical application, and it shouldn't in my opinion. The search for knowledge, especially as fundamental as this is enough. But this part of physics already appeals to wide audience and has great PR. There might be other parts that could use billions but are not as sexy to general public.
Any kind of social progress or social technologies that could alleviate human suffering, greed, or solve problems of tragedy of the commons would be much more interesting.
Technology simply allows us to be more effective at what we already are doing, doesn't make us better people.
I can't even begin to calculate how many hours of humanity has been saved by the breakthroughs and technology that physics has bequeathed us.
In any case, we should never forget that without advancements in fundamental physics we are going nowhere as a species. We might be able to come up with better refinements, better techniques, slightly better computers, etc. But sooner or later we are going to hit a physical limit, and we are going to need to seriously enlarge our fundamental knowledge corpus of how the universe operates if we are going to keep moving forward.