Of course, she thinks spending on other work is not well directed, but others think spending it on her work is not well directed. While I think that maybe we just fund all (because really, it's not that much money -- for her group, we probably talk about a couple of shot-down balloon kind of money [Sidewinder is >300k], for several years worth of research), we do not live in that world.
I want to note, though, that this "controversy", is very important for her book sales. I am not convinced that these books actually bring the field forward.
Maybe address one or two of her actual points and try to refute them?
No, because the vested interests have blinders on because they're invested in current paradigms. They could get stuck trying to find a local optimum rather than the global optimum we actually want. External objective assessments are sometimes needed, and Sabine is making a good case that particle physicists need a wake up call to get out of their rut. She won't convince the currently entrenched interests, but hopefully she's convincing graduate students that will start gaining influence over the next decade.
The argument she lays out in this video is exactly such an assessment. She is an external agent because she's not working in particle physics. Plenty of other physicists are in the same position and can impartially evaluate the state of particle physics and where funding for basic science research should go.
What are the objective reasons to justify the expense of yet larger particle accelerators at this point? It's literally just for the hell of it, all the low hanging fruit has long since been plucked. There are no theoretical reasons to expect to find anything. Empirically, we haven't found anything surprising in numerous previous accelerators. The Higgs was expected and justified the LHC. If the Higgs had not been found, then there would have been a decent argument for a larger accelerator, but that's not the world we live in.
The colossal funds that would go towards a larger accelerator could fund literally thousands of scientific experiments that aren't suffering from diminishing returns. We'd be better off funneling that money towards wakefield accelerators, for instance.
Additionally: The relative attribution of funds is decided by funding agencies, by reviewing the individual fields and asking for input from these fields, using panels that span fields. The finer contribution in the field then depends on experts in the field.
It's also not true that money is fungible in that way. Especially for bigger projects like this, without such a project, the money just wouldn't be there.
And if you don't trust the in-field experts to distribute the money, why do you believe that out-field experts, who directly would profit from the diverted funding (if the money would be a zero sum game), are neutral?
I'm aware. She hasn't worked in HEP in quite some time as she's been focusing on cosmology and quantum foundations.
> A condensed matter physicist cannot evaluate the field, the same way as a particle physicist cannot evaluate the field of CM.
They absolutely can evaluate whether a field lacks any prospects or real problems to solve.
> It's also not true that money is fungible in that way. Especially for bigger projects like this, without such a project, the money just wouldn't be there.
The money just drying up is frankly better than wasting it on a fruitless endeavour, which just discredits research as a whole.
> And if you don't trust the in-field experts to distribute the money, why do you believe that out-field experts, who directly would profit from the diverted funding (if the money would be a zero sum game), are neutral?
There are many ways to approach this, use your imagination and consider how science could be funded freed from its current shackles. A certain percentage of funds can be earmarked for particle physics, but that doesn't mean a new collider should get most of it. You can separate the decision of how much funding a sub field gets from how much of that funding goes to specific projects in that sub field, and each decision could be made by different sets of people, as but one example.
This is an outstanding non-reply! Is this how you actually think reasoning works, or are just getting replies from ChatGPT?
I have some concerns about the dark matter point but I think she is more or less right and I think it sucks to be competing for funding with work that's not well-directed.