If you compare how much money is spend on fundamental research (or research in general), the pool of funds for a given direction is not limited because of other research. It's limited by all the other things we spend money on. If society wants to fund more DM, astro, whatever research, it would be much easier to find that money for example in the military spending. A minimal haircut there and you could double the research funding.
As opposed to? This sentiment was bandied around a lot before the LHC went online, but no one ever had a proposition of what the alternative was is the goal was to advance fundamental particle physics. You've got exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic interactions: (1) particle accelerator measurement and (2) incidental measurements of high-energy spaceborne collisions.
We're doing both. Theoreticians being unable to conclusively find a new measurement is a problem independent of the fact the LHC exists to do those sorts of measurements that they'd need.
The Standard Model is a bit of a franken-theory of a thing, a kit of parts bolted together in awkward ways. It looks a lot like the pre-quantum ad-hoc theories that attempted to describe quantum effects before QM was invented.
It's hard to believe that physics can't do better. But easy to believe that physics won't do better while most of the money and all of the mental space is owned by concepts that are more than a hundred years old now.
Add to that that experimental physics is simply far more expensive then theoretical physics, and it should come as no surprise that we spend more money on experiments then pure theory.
The complaint about LHC is more about questioning weather spending $5 billion to smash protons together is the most effective way of getting more empirical evidence to the physicists.
About the same as a the price of a large modern sports club in a top league[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/apr/29/chelsea-sir...
Providing better bounds on the (non-)existence of phenomena predicted by existing non-Standard Model particle physics theories sounds like a worthwhile endeavor rather than praying that particle accelerators will maybe uncover a particle if you give it just a little bit more juice.
Sabine has recommended funding more telescopes to learn more about dark matter.
You'd be equally opposed to Sabine's alternative since what use is knowing anything about dark matter? For that matter who cares where the universe came from. What have telescopes helped us with lately?
This is not true! There's much more to particle physics than simply hunting for new particles. Our knowledge of even the particles we know to exist is massively incomplete. Several next-gen collider proposals are for "Higgs factories" to study the Higgs boson better, for example.
She's not trying to undermine anyone, just giving her opinion about where funding should go in order to actually advance our knowledge of the world.
Either she is socially clueless on how this can be seen negatively by the rest of the scientific community or she is malicious in her attempts to defund parts of science she believes shouldn't get funding.
If she's lying, then that's different. But I haven't seen any convincing evidence that she's lying. It's clear a lot of people don't like what she's saying, feel threatened by what she's saying, and think she's wrong. But that doesn't make her malicious.
It's also a step beyond casting shade.
You're too focused on whether there is "malicious intent" to see that your description fits just fine with the initial words you were objecting to.
I don't think it's too strong to call it "disinformation" out of the journals. They claimed that the next big toy will prove or disprove supersymmetry. They never acknowledged that their claim had been incorrect, or that it was misleading.
Calling out that repeated pattern is, I think, on the respectful side of the public gadfly playbook.
I think she wants to "improve the field" by incenting theoretical advances that actually lead to testable predictions. Unfortunately, that transition will put a lot of e.g. string theorists out of work.
This isn't entirely true. In this blog post (http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/04/does-world-need-lar...) she recommends:
> "One of the key motivations for building a larger particle collider that particle physicists like to bring up is that we still do not know what dark matter is made of. But we are not even sure that dark matter is made of particles. And if it’s a particle, we do not know what mass it has or how it interacts. If it’s a light particle, you would not look for it with a bigger collider. So really it makes more sense to collect more information about the astrophysical situation first. That means concretely better telescopes, better sky coverage, better redshift resolution, better frequency coverage, and so on."
Though she goes on to say
> "But really my intention here is not to advocate a particular alternative. I merely think that physicists should have an honest debate about the evident lack of progress in the foundations of physics and what to do about it."
And all of this is being built currently or already exists (ELT, ASSN, Vera Rubin, SKA, CTA), so it's not clear what she's advocating.
So "more of that" isn't a very useful position, science output isn't a linear, or even monotonous function of dollars spent.
It is disappointing, and more unfortunately pretty much her personal brand now. There are, as she seems to have discovered, a lot of eyeballs to be had when you bash things that are poorly understood and already looked down upon for it.
She's a fine physicist and her points have merit, but she's smart enough to be perfectly aware that rather than improving the field through discussions with peers what she's doing here is just capitalizing on that distaste people have for their work and doing what she can to undermine them.