Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises by krspykrm on Friday October 23, 2020 @06:29AM (#24867947)

I somewhat agree with the premise, but the real kicker is the opportunity cost: there is so much Europe could be doing with this money that would have actual, real-world impact. There is a critical need for independent European software infrastructure - for this kind of money, they could fund their own web browser or OS or social media platform, which would exist independently of US-controlled tech.

Would I trade a European-controlled alternative to Android and iOS for yet another particle collider in Geneva? Yes, absolutely.

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Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises by matthewdgreen on Friday October 23, 2020 @08:47AM (#24868869)

Would you trade a European collider for a failed commercial alternative like FirefoxOS or PalmOS? Because keep in mind that commercial failure is the overwhelmingly likely outcome of the project you’re proposing. I’d rather fail at finding dark matter and learn things along the way than having a state-backed organization make lousy software that nobody uses.

Of course, the more fundamental point is that industry seems perfectly happy to try (and fail) at making Google competitors, while nobody in industry is going to do fundamental physics research.

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Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises by raziel2701 on Friday October 23, 2020 @01:34PM (#24871853)

I'd rather distribute that money into all kinds of other research ideas that if successful would help people directly. The poor and the hungry don't benefit from knowing that dark matter exists. We need energy, food, medications and treatments. Those are better places to invest than another accelerator.

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Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises by SiempreViernes on Friday October 23, 2020 @08:12AM (#24868596)

Well, it does have actual real world impact: it trains a lot of people in data analysis and drives a lot of R&D in very technical fields among other things. In fact, the economic benefit[1] of CERN due to all these other things has been estimated as a net positive while excluding the value of science, which is either good or bad news depending on how you view it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf82KOPvTOk

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Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises by feoren on Friday October 23, 2020 @11:08PM (#24876633)

And what's unique about that to Yet Another Particle Collider compared with the myriad other challenging, data-heavy experiments we could be investing in?

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Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises by nmlnn on Friday October 23, 2020 @09:00AM (#24868989)

It would cost at least 3 times as much to get the same amount of talent working on something like that. Projects like the LHC are able to massively leverage the money spent just because smart people are happy to work on exciting/deep problems for much less.

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Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises by pabs3 on Friday October 23, 2020 @09:09AM (#24869078)

I think it would be better for the EU to fund existing open source solutions than to create EU-controlled proprietary ones. Fund Firefox so Mozilla doesn't have to take funding from Google any more. Fund Linux kernel porting to mobile devices. Fund LineageOS, Replicant, postmarketOS and the myriad GNU/Linux mobile OSes. Fund yaCy and searx. Fund RISC-V implementations.

PS: it sounds like there is some sort of EU plan for this:

https://fsfe.org/news/2020/news-20201023-01.en.html

They probably also need to fund an alternative to TSMC.

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Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises by stooart on Friday October 23, 2020 @05:16PM (#24874275)

CERN isn't an EU organisation - it is funded by its 23 member states, and collaborates very closely with its other observers.

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Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises by pabs3 on Friday October 23, 2020 @09:52PM (#24876275)

I need to mentally s/EU/Europe/ more often, sorry about that.

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Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises by pmontra on Friday October 23, 2020 @06:58AM (#24868135)

I'd start from independence in basic electronics. Software is easier IMHO. But, as always, which Europe? It's Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. each one with different and competing goals (the UK will be on its own soon).

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Re:Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises by pabs3 on Friday October 23, 2020 @09:14AM (#24869124)

The interesting thing about electronics is that the Dutch ASML company is basically have monopoly on producing the machines that silicon fabs use to produce chips. So everyone indirectly depends on the EU for hardware production.

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