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Comment by greggman2 | Hacker News Reader

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greggman2·

would love to read comments on Sabine Hossenfelder book "Lost in Math" related to this

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36341728-lost-in-math

She basically makes the claim we have no good scientific reason to build this at the moment

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Me too, though I think her concern is more the huge amount of money being spent on a project with nebulous aims, and what she perceives as an unhealthy tribalism or peer pressure that discourages hard questions.

I don't think many would object to research that probes rather than has a specific end goal like discovering a predicted particle; it's the billions diverted from other potential smaller projects to one that might not reveal anything new - beyond a torchlight sweeping through and revealing just an extension to our current darkness - that is more questionable.

A Problem with accelerator physics particularly is that there is a large scientific industry around the actual experiments that depend on these experiments continuing. The engineers just get told what to build and they get going, without having a deep understanding why this particular experiment is really necessary. I worked in accelerator physics for 5 years and on all the conferences, meetings etc. I had yet to meet anyone who understands, why we are doing this (with an understanding that goes deeper than Wikipedia).

Well, accelerator physicists work with particle physicists who do understand these things. More often than not particle physicists don't understand how the accelerator works. Particle physics is complicated, and so is the LHC. I am not sure it's right to expect people to be experts on both, it's surely better for people to specialise.

Regarding Hossenfelder: I think she is an iconoclast and arch contrarian.

"arch contrarian"

Could make a good title for one of her German synthpop music videos, which I kindof dig.

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