> The problem isn't that "finding nothing" isn't progress. The problem is that "finding nothing" is terrible progress-per-dollar.
> if you go on to argue about how vital it is to spend another 5x times as much money to build another particle collider that we have no reason to believe will find anything new, you will continue to be marginalized and find your influence waning to apparently no effect.
The first part is fine if by it you mean you think the physics-practitioner-theory of the collider advocates (a theory about what next research steps might be fruitful, not a theory of physics) is now implausible to you. On the other hand if you just think something like "We expect the future (of physics) to be 'like' the past (not making progress)", then that isn't an explanatory statement and is unrelated to whether we should fund a future collider. If you know what you're going to find in an experiment, you're not setting out to discover something new, so there is no such "future will be like the past" principle here.
The second really is an argument not to fund a future collider because it comes with an explanation: what good theory (of physics, this time) do we have that predicts we'll find new tests, or new problems? If there's no very good theory, new tests or new problems might come from other experiments instead, especially if they're a lot cheaper so we can do more of them. Personally I guess that it's a good argument you make here in this second part, but what do I know?
Problem is that humanity is not unified for our own betterment, so that ends up being a bad metric to judge actions upon. I think you are right in the outcome, it would mean losing influence, and even if we get funding it'll likely be diverted from the areas we least want it diverted from. You're probably right and I find that unsatisfactory.
I want to be clear that this is your claim before I spend any more time on it.
I even point out that the reality is likely if we fund particle accelerators, it will likely be diverted from places we don't want it to be diverted from, like other research spending.
>even if we get funding it'll likely be diverted from the areas we least want it diverted from
Note I even end by saying the poster is probably right, for as much as I don't like that they are (not meant as a negative to the poster, but to how humanity currently allocates our resources).
This is pushing forward research into theory, even with highly positive results it's completely unknown whether any of those results actually result in any progress for the human race other than knowledge, and at a base cost of €21 billion that knowledge comes with a huge opportunity cost.
We face so many tangible risks right now that €21 billion invested elsewhere into things that will likely produce meaningful advances to our problems that the question of 'is spending this much money disproving philosophical arguments justifiable right now?' should rightly be being asked.
>'is spending this much money disproving philosophical arguments justifiable right now?' should rightly be being asked.
In light of all the expenditures we are already making elsewhere, I don't see how many of those can be justified but this one not.
The problem here is we don't know what will be discovered and if it will be useful. Cheap Science Fiction FTL without all the time dilation - very valuable. Add half a decimal point to our models - probably can't be used for anything and so less valuable than a game. I have no idea, I just picked unlikely two extremes.
(https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/app/html/index.en.h...)
Just because you can name some other bad use of money that we do doesn't make some other one good.
Multiple gravity wave detectors
-Telescopes gives us lot of confirmations, but also they, especially largest, constantly feed us data about new, unknown things.
If you're still having trouble with that concept, peer into the alternate universe where the LHC actually provided enough data to nail down the Theory of Everything. Now that would be some progress-per-dollar to celebrate.
There's a contingent of people who just don't want to think about "how much" progress something is making and want to live in a fantasy world where building a multi-billion dollar particle collider that finds nothing is exactly the same as a $50,000 experiment that finds nothing. I don't know that I'm terribly interested in trying to argue y'all out of that belief. But I can say with great confidence that no matter how good it may make you feel, if you go on to argue about how vital it is to spend another 5x times as much money to build another particle collider that we have no reason to believe will find anything new, you will continue to be marginalized and find your influence waning to apparently no effect.
But in the faint hope of maybe convincing you, consider that there is no infinite money fountain, and even if you just can't process that fact, there certainly aren't an infinite amount of physicists. What is so vital about another particle accelerator that we must dedicate thousands of professional careers to it despite the lack of solid reason to hope anything will come of it? Why not let them do something else? I submit it's all Availability Heuristic. You see and apprehend the particle accelerator, so it must be a good idea. You don't see the thousands upon thousands of other things you're trading away for it, so they don't factor in.
But given the current big fat zero rational reason to build another, it is very easy to build a model in which those other experiments will actually be the ones that make the difference somehow. Probably by some long, convoluted chain we can't imagine now; I doubt there's a bench experiment that we just haven't done that will nail down quantum gravity. But there's a lot of other interesting paths. Quantum computers, for instance, just by their nature, tend to probe the limits of quantum theory in a way nothing else can. Something very interesting could come out of that. Dark matter detectors could produce something. Someone might actually work a theory down into something that can be tested.