Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
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It's not.
When this is pointed out to the people espousing this odd viewpoint, they usually respond with some passive aggressive comment. I've seen/experienced much of this during my time in research.
New physics not requiring an accelerator would include quantum computing; the real stuff of entangled qubits, and the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits. More generally quantum mechanics interpretation and meaning. There are some unsettling things within QM, such as non-locality, and how to understand them.
There are many other examples, just listing 1 for brevity.
Basically, any text that begins with "the set of all physics is HEP physics" such as this article implies, is, pretty much by definition, incorrect.
I recall while the SSC was being built in Texas, that when the NSF asked for more money for researchers not involved in SSC, they were told that physics folks were getting enough. I remember my thesis advisor's grant that I was funded on, getting cut to help fund other things.
Equating the new physics with new HEP physics is, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, not even wrong. We don't need accelerators for most new physics.
The HEP people in my own department also seem to believe that anything other than beyond the standard model physics isn't fundamental or isn't pure enough to care about.
As they pushed to higher and higher energies and events with lower and lower cross sections, they're solving problems that matter less and less, and are increasingly less likely to be useful in any way.
Of course, it's still incredibly interesting to know about the fundamental building blocks of the universe, but without a promise of practical applications, or at least a convincing argument that they'll find something interesting with this new collider, I find it really hard to justify the price tag.
Would knowing what physics does at 100TeV be any more valuable to us than a great work of literature? I'm not sure.
Can you expand on why you think this? I'm not a physicist, but I feel like one shouldn't discount the possibility of useful discoveries. I'd love to hear if there are reasons that's not true.
Is it possible that we might discover something revolutionary at 100TeV that will have gigantic consequences to our daily lives? Sure. But that's like saying that it's possible that there's a treasure chest full of gold buried in your backyard. Yes, if you dug up your back yard it is possible you'll find something amazing and life changing. But for right now, we don't really have any convincing reason to think that's the case, and you'd probably just be spending a lot of effort to dig a big hole in the ground.
Arguing that it'd have good effects like increasing your fitness and "who knows, you might strike gold!" isn't really a convincing argument for me to dig up my yard.
That analogy has broken down. It’s not to say that we couldn’t learn something at 100TeV that could be useful or even revolutionary like QM was, but we also don’t really have any reason to believe that right now other than cheery optimism.
I’m all for finding high energy physics, I just don’t think it can justify it’s current budget in the quest for newer bigger colliders at higher and higher energies.
Quantum mechanics didn't require $10B (or whatever the equivalent would be in 1930-ish currency) to create. The "inventors" of QM were trying to explain measurements that were already made, quite inexpensively, that did not fit the model of nature that we had at that time.
Basically, the experiments were done, measurements made. Now the theorists were trying to understand what they needed in order to be able to provide a model that fit these results. This required a number of specific mental leaps of faith. Some of these are controversial even today. But they fit the experiments, so the issue for us is one of a mental model.
But ... and this is critical, not all of physics is quantum mechanical. Orbital calculations don't (normally) require QM. Steam engines, heat engines, etc. don't normally require QM.
The objections some of us have with classifying "all of physics being HEP" is that it is not, and the reality is that most physics do not require accelerators. Most new physics won't require accelerators.
A great example from earlier this year is the first sighting of a Majorana fermion[1]. Though this article also makes the mistake of "In particle physics, fermions are a class of elementary particles". Its not in particle (HEP) physics. Its in physics.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/first-majorana-fermion-metal-quant...
Also, look at the military budget and think what is potentially more useful...
> Arguing that it'd have good effects like increasing your fitness and "who knows, you might strike gold!" isn't really a convincing argument for me to dig up my yard.
What I mean by this is that I don't think that the spin off technologies or discoveries from high energy particle physics research (i.e. the fitness you might gain by digging up your yard) are a valid justification for doing it.
Spin off technologies and discoveries will be found in almost any research endeavour, including other particle physics experiments that aren't just "build another collider, but bigger", they're not a justification for the research, they're a bonus.
I mean, you can say that about people going to the moon, right? What data are they going to get? Something about rocks and the consistency of the moon dust, right? The technologies developed in going to the moon got us so many things we didn't see from the goal.
This is the same for a lot of things around the frontiers of science! More experimental data is beneficial to all levels of science. Look at how many papers have been written in obscure and 'irrelevant' fields of higher mathematics only to -- 40 or 200 years later -- be found extremely relevant and useful?
The point is we don't know. It's not like we can't afford it. If the United States, for example, distributed the defense budget into social care and the sciences, we wouldn't be having a conversation about monetary distribution. It's not inherently mutually exclusive, and it doesn't have to be at the moment, either.
> Would knowing what physics does at 100TeV be any more valuable to us than a great work of literature? I'm not sure.
Those things aren't mutually exclusive.
You tease us with such sweet words, something like Star Trek but more real.
Science, at least from the funding perspective, has always leaned toward what's fashionable -- "nuclear" dominated following WW2, "particle" has had it's moment, and we're moving full force toward "quantum" (& "AI"!)
Scientists seeking funding bend themselves in knots to ensure they include all the key words in their grant applications
We are generally willing to accept the interpretation, as long as we don't look to closely at it. Once we do, we have to start asking questions of nature as to which (set of) interpretation(s) are more likely correct. As in provides an understandable model, and provides correct calculation capability for predicting features given experiments.
If there was no other interesting physics requiring further research, how could those other fields be generating enough papers to fill 4 journals?
And this isn't even counting more recent journals like Phys. Rev. Fluids.
even after decades of massive use ?
Note for the wider audience: 77 K is liquid nitrogen, vastly easier to produce and handle than liquid helium.
(HB is an experimental chef who uses quite a lot of liquid N. Liquid He is probably not indicated for food prep)
These things allow to create warm-dense matter in a laboratory:
Even if you don't, though, there's still cosmology and black hole physics.
Condensed matter physics is, in my opinion, a far more interesting and varied field of study than high energy physics. Not only does it contribute to society in a way high energy physics no longer does, but in many senses it takes on a fundamental character like HEP. Every material in the long wavelength limit acts like its own little universe with its own set of fundamental particles and quantum fields.
The universes Condensed matter physics studies have supersymmetry, Majorana fermions, magnetic monopoles, dualities and any other genuinely interesting physical phenomenon you could want.
What's more is that by understanding the physics of these phenomena, we can create new technologies that really matter.
[1] https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_differen...
Everybody seems to agree with that, yet it seems most Physicists immediately refuse to spend any further thought on it and go back to modeling what happens if you double the number of particles and then crash them at 100 TeV
One can observe anti-de Sitter spaces in superfluid systems. Is that not more "fundamental" than zoology of particles and their interactions? That has, literally to do with the metric tensor of space. Seems to be a bit more fundamental to me than things interacting in that space.
Put another way, the "fundamental" argument is very weak, and everyone outside of HEP knows this.
Where is the innovation/research in this area happening? This is one of those topics that I find very interesting but any attempt to serious inquiry into it tends to result in ridicule from people I know with some expertise in physics and thermodynamics, as though it was just obviously nonsense.
These are all quotidian problems in I guess "condensed matter" physics which are 0) largely unsexy and ignored 1) still largely unsolved, 2) liable to watershed huge, life- and money- saving innovations, while exotic HEP and Low Temp Condensed, are still what most physics students study their way into.
(1) "New physics" is jargon understood by experts to mean new fundamental physics, i.e., new laws/forces/particles at the base of our theoretical edifice. This does not mean that non-fundamental physics is necessarily less important -- see for instance the late Phillip Anderson's "More is different" [ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393 ] -- but the distinction is real and meaningful. The use of this phrase does not equate physics with HEP physics. The reason you might make that mistake is because...
(2) To my knowledge, every single discovery of new physics in the past half century years has been made with a particle accelerator. I am confident that a new particle accelerator is a lot more likely to discover new physics than building a quantum computer or any other experimental work in quantum information. This, I'm sure, is the consensus view, even among people who put a low credence on the chance that new physics will be found at the next accelerator, or that such an investment is worthwhile.
(3) In my opinion, the strongest argument for pursuing quantum information experiments over HEP is that a departure from quantum mechanics would be more revolutionary than merely finding another set of particles and forces with largely unexplained parameters. In that sense, you need to make the reverse argument to the one you are trying to make, i.e., that quantum information is more fundamental than HEP. But for the very same reason, discrepancies with quantum mechanics are just very, very unlikely to be found.
No accelerators needed.
Bose-Einstein condensates have been observed and used in a variety of situations.
No accelerators needed.
And I could go on.
The point is though, fundamental foundational physics is available and accessible in all the various sub-fields.
You might as well argue that new classes of molecules synthesized by chemists are new physics.
Many people think gravitational wave observations matter.
It would not be surprising if completely new, unanticipated plasma fluid phenomena turn up, when someone looks.
People are still trying to understand superconductivity, and have not needed accelerators thus far.
On the other hand, superconductivity is not a good example. It's a still-confusing phenomenon, but the vast majority of physicists believe to follows directly from the known laws of non-relativistic quantum mechanics.
Also, are there other forms of experimental physics that don't have much coverage and could shine the light in other directions?
This slow rate is to be compared to vastly faster rate at which new experimental input was rolling in in the '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s.
But you know, whatever. The fact is that we as physicists are fighting over crumbs. We should instead be political outside our circle rather than fighting internally. The fact that our budget is orders of magnitude smaller than the defense budget is insane.
Also-also, there's plenty of tabletop fundamental experiments. Superconducting cavity based axion searches for instance.
> Also-also, there's plenty of tabletop fundamental experiments. Superconducting cavity based axion searches for instance.
Yes, sure, such experiments could find new fundamental physics. (And it should be funded!) But the Bayesian credence the overall field places on this happening is quite low, and certainly much lower than a next generation accelerator. No table-top experiments have found new fundamental physics in many decades.
(Of course, the accelerator is arguably a much worse deal given its extraordinary price.)
I'm having a hard time finding it, but there's a quote from a famous physicist along the lines of "we already have a theory of everything we encounter in daily life, it's just that we can't apply it to practically anything". For instance, we still have no idea how unconventional superconductors work. Of course, they're completely described by plain old quantum mechanics without even using field theory. However, that still doesn't mean we understand them because the theory is too complex.
I'm personally interested in the rising complexity frontier of physics where increased computing power and new methods of approaching problems will help uncover emergent phenomena. Plus, there's other accelerators besides colliders that are essential to this field (x-ray light sources for instance).
We should come back to the energy problem experimentally when we can affordably make a revolutionary accelerator (like x100, not a factor of 2 or 3). That will come when we have mastered advanced acceleration techniques like plasma and wakefield.
However, it turns out that some of the same physics of extremely high energy scales is also accessible through extremely high precision/low background experiments like the many neutrinoless double beta decay searches, or the rapidly growing field of neutrino experiments.
In my oppinion, there is still compelling need for an accelerator specialized in colliding electrons with ions at lower energy than at the LHC. The nuclear physics community has been after this for some time now, and it looks like it will be built at Brookhaven. Now that FRIB is almost finished, this will probably be the big budget nuclear physics project for the next 5 years or so.
My own interest isn't in colliders at all, but in building atomic probes like x-ray light sources and fast electron diffraction apparatus, but at a scale accessible to universities instead of large facilities.
There's so much unexplored physics in chemistry and biology happening at atomic time and length scales. Electron diffraction and FELs are right now the only good ways to study that, but right now they're locked away behind long waiting lists because they're too expensive to have a lot of them.
Lot of people from physics read HN.
News to me - I thought that study of non-conventional superconductors relied heavily on effective field theories.
Also, I think this is a bit of a strawman - there's a ton of money and effort going into condensed matter physics right now.
What they meant is that understanding the microscopic degrees of freedom, the electrons and ions in a superconductor, does not require field theory. The plain old particle based Schrodinger equations for N electrons interacting with N ions should be absolutely fine.
The problem is that we can't actually do anything with that description, so things like effective field theories help us distill the important parts away.
> Also, I think this is a bit of a strawman - there's a ton of money and effort going into condensed matter physics right now.
While I agree, and I would love to see more progress in particle physics, I also think that comparing the funding landscape of particle physics to condensed matter physics is a little misleading.
New discoveries and incremental improvements in condensed matter physics benefit the world in direct and tangible ways. The frontiers of particle physics left the regime where it can benefit the world long, long ago. The energies are just too high, there's no reason to believe that anything they discover will actually matter to anyone other than satisfying their intellectual curiosity (or spinoff technologies).
I don't want to sound dismissive of particle physics, because I really do believe in doing physics for its own sake, but honestly a better understanding of particle physics is unlikely to benefit us any more than a great new piece of literature, and the price tag on the next generation collider is just mind-bogglingly high.
That said, there's a lot of know-how in building the complex parts that make up the accelerators and detectors, reducing the HEP investments could erode that know-how.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condensed_matter_physics
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_insulator#Properti...
My specific interests for instance are how we can build university scale light and matter sources for atomic physics. It requires the same types of advances that will power future colliders, but enables different types of research.
I just saw it mentioned a few places as a concern and didn't want to come off as throwing HEP under the bus at any cost.
There was at one point truly a fight about the relative importance of the various fields, but the condensed matter people won that. Just look at lightsources.org again, that's 30 facilities worldwide, with 24000 users in Europe alone over the last five years. CERN has basically 1 facility for HEP, with maybe 9000 users worldwide.
At this point these call for shutting down particle physics for a few generations while the technology magically develops feel more like jealousy that protein structure isn't as sexy for the public as the search for beyond the standard model physics.
You mean, looking for a cure for cancer isn’t as sexy for the public as some arcane things with strange particles nobody understands?
Also, lab coats are pretty famously not very flattering for your figure.
Also, according to CERN[0]
>As of 2017, more than 17 500 people from around the world work together to push the limits of knowledge. CERN’s staff members, numbering around 2500...comprising over 12 200 scientists of 110 nationalities, from institutes in more than 70 countries.
And that's based on what? The number of lightsources in the world? There's dozens of research groups studying quantum computing. I guess they should just pack up and move on to less developed fields.
In reality, there are huge open problems with synchrotron light sources that people are spending their careers on (and I don't think they're jealous of HEP). What I'm more interested in, however, are university scale sources of xrays and matter for atomic scale physics. Even though there are a few dozen facilities around the world, all of them are oversubscribed. Many times if you apply for time on a synchrotron you'll be denied because there just isn't space for you. Even companies that pay for time (and yes these machines don't just impact local job counts) don't always get a slot. It would be transformative to take some of these techniques (and more advanced ones) to a wider audience.
I'm just pointing out they it seems to be doing pretty well for itself, three dozen international facilities with commercial customers doesn't sound like particularly lean times.
If mere over-subscription is to be given such weight, then I call for x-ray sources to be fully commercialized and the public money going to build medium energy gamma ray satellites! We ain't got even one of those flying at the moment so we basically don't know what happens in the sky at those energies. Hows that for reasonable?
In reality the HEP people mostly actively chose that field in competition with atomic and molecular physics et al, and if you kill HEP for generation most of the new students will keep choosing something else.
When is it worth it? They tested many theories, and many of them were proven wrong, and some were proven right. What price can you attach to having this knowledge? Is there a maximum price tag for potentially knowing more about the universe?
Yes. On the extreme end, there’s a finite amount of useful work that can be done before the heat death of the universe. An energy budget the size of the combined output of all power stations on the planet is much smaller than that, but also too much. At a more realistic scale, human knowledge is only valuable in so far as it improves the human condition in some way, now or in the future. Other research areas could be more important to progress right now and we only have so many scientists available to do the work. Allocating those scientists to research areas is an incredibly hard task, but it’s a necessary one.
Even if we accept that pure physics knowledge is a worthy goal in itself, diving straight into another megaproject isn’t necessarily the best way forward. Maybe it’s more valuable right now to find uses for the great theoretical leaps we’ve already made, for instance. Or maybe we should be focussing on training theorists so that we can have a better idea of what the next piece of giant scientific equipment needs to be. Or maybe we need to raise the global literacy rate so that we have more scientists available.
That's not really how it works. People work on things they're interested in, not what they get assigned to.
That's not how reality works out to be.
As a researcher, there are many problems I could find interesting and get passionate about working on, either with the right colleagues, funding, world implications, etc...
The scientist oblivious to the world and only interested in their little niche is not the majority. Give a problem funding at the early stage of careers (grad school, new tenure grants) and it gets worked on and some people get super passionate.
kd5bjo seemed to be talking about allocating people to entirely different fields which they likely have no existing experience in.
As for switching fields, one of the key parts of scientific training is how to learn things, so scientists have a better chance of successfully changing felds than many other people. It also isn’t necessarily as big a leap as physics to biochem, like you suggested in another comment. Moving from theoretical particle physics to tokamak design seems like it should be doable, for instance.
You have no idea how management and funding of large-scale research projects works.
If I consider what kinds of crappy jobs some excellent physicists who could not find a position in research had to take, I am not so sure.
The truth in my opinion thus rather is: Because, as you wrote, "they wouldn't be trained in it anyway", they won't be allocated for "organic chemistry" in your example.
On the other hand, if they were, I really believe that they would prefer this job over the one that they had to take.
[1] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/m...
We have no idea how it will improve the human condition though. You could have said this to many scientists throughout history. Look at what the (much cheaper) fooling around at Bell Labs got us.
I don’t have much of an opinion one way or the other about building another particle accelerator: the costs are significant, but manageable, and I haven’t followed the science enough to get a good idea of the likely benefit.
The question posed, however, was whether the cost could ever be too high. The only answer to that question is “yes,” regardless of the topic.
It seems very unlikely that we've really run up against the limits of what physics can do for us. That is an enormous change and it isn't even a lifetime ago. One more development like that would trivially justify investment values in the trillions of dollars range. Let alone all the other stuff that is likely to happen along the way.
Theoretical limits are all very well, but I strongly suspect the rational amount to spend on it is "everything we can". If I really wanted to start a fight I'll argue that diverting all welfare spending to scientific research would probably result in a greater net good over two generations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_power_history.svg.
Science is using duct tape to explore the properties of graphene. Engineering is building a plant that can produce 500km2 of graphene a day.
Why welfare spending? Why not corporate subsidies? Or just forcefully seize the entire assets of some number of non-scientists, chosen at random? Cutting out welfare as a whole seems to be the single spending cut most likely to kill the largest number of people.
Yes. I think the GP's point was that even on the worst case it would still pay off.
Personally, I doubt it. Increasing social risks would move things the other way around and decrease the speed of science advances, even with high investment.
By saying “everything,” you’re dodging the question of what sacrifices we should make to speed up basic science research. How do you draw the line between what we can and can’t afford?
Should we require everyone to pursue a Master’s degree? A PhD? Do we shut down university humanities departments? Do we halt all production that doesn’t directly support the basic sciences? Do we reduce food production to only that which is needed to support the scientific staff?
Some or all of these suggestions are probably beyond your idea of what’s acceptable. If so, you agree that there is some price that is too great to pay. The interesting question isn’t whether there’s a limit, it’s what it is.
Or maybe we start paying scientists living wages so anyone who can wipe their ass doesn't end up as a quant. Speaking as a quant with a physics phd working with another 400 phds in an hft firm.
I don't see anyone arguing that science is not a good investment.
I do see people asking the salient question of, is this the right science to fund right now, given all of societies needs.
The answer to that question should be obvious, we have other priorities at the moment.
Why should society at this day and time then plow millions of man hours and raw materials into proving it literally?
Perhaps when nanotechnology or AI is able to be put to the task, those peoples can then build a very specific machine to prove very specific questions
But this is throwing spaghetti at the wall for what to us will be a moment of excitement then having no clue how to make use of it and a big mess to clean up
Nobody is sure about anything. Nobody denies that high-energy physics might one day bring great things. The problem is cost. Other areas of science are much more likely to bring great things with far less money. If tens of billions are to be spent on a bigger microscope, let it be one that will give us better solar panels, or a direct treatment for viruses. Polishing the details of the standard model can wait.
Things are not quite that bad, but the case is weaker now than it has ever been before.
What is more likely to revolutionise physics - spending $20bn on an incremental increase in collider energies, on spending $20bn funding a new generation of PhDs and postdocs exploring quantum gravity fundamentals?
At this point practical HEP shows every signs of being a boondoggle. There are plenty of hard theoretical questions that haven't been answered, but with a few exceptions they're outside of the mainstream. Research into them has been actively discouraged, except at a few locations.
Physics doesn't need more hardware, it needs more ideas - more intellectual diversity, and more creativity.
Electrons were useful, because they have long lifetimes, are easy to make, and interact well. Higgs bosons are unlikely to be useful as technology ever since they are so ephermeral. And they're certainly not giving immediate benefits.
Often not, because you don't know what areas to choose. Having a big, hard goal to solve usually requires building pieces to solve the problem, and these pieces end up being useful in themselves. Plus the big goal is often achieved.
Mankind could have done a lot of the stuff discovered along the way to big goals, but didn't, until the big goals were attempted.
Plus, it's often easier to get funding as a nation-state for big goals. Little side projects are often not individually worth chasing. The internet is a good example - it could have been done by industry before the govt decided to chase it as a piece of a big goal.
There is a similar debate around Newtonian physics. How far might the industrial revolution have gone without a perfect understanding of how things move? You don't need newton to build complex machines. Look at any early windmill or waterwheel. You need newton to understand machines well enough to build and run them efficiently. You don't always need theory before practical, but theory always makes practical better.
Newtonian physics lets you work out loads with free body diagrams, derive Euler beam theory, and that's how they built the Eiffel tower.
[1]https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/112615/why-is-it...
Yeah, somebody would probably invent them at some point. Somebody would probably even invent FETs, even if it took many decades more. MOSFETs are a completely different matter, I don't think anybody would invent them without understanding how they work.
What everybody seems to forget is modern chemistry, material engineering and medicine. The world would be a completely different place without quantum mechanics. Electronics is just a tiny part of the change.
Bipolar transistors are more complex, but they still work by controlling the bulk geometry of moving charge.
None of this requires QM, except in the very simple sense that you need to know what a bandgap is and how doping changes it. Beyond that, the "mechanical" details of the charge dynamics are just calculus - even more crudely, very very small plumbing.
QM effects are only relevant when the simple space charge models start to break down at very small geometries. Your "mechanical" space charge model becomes soft, noisy, and more complicated. Essentially the plumbing develops waves and ripples that depend on the geometry, and the edges of the pools and pipes can start to leak. And that's where QM finally starts to make a real difference.
There is a huge double standard where some things undergo a stringent cost/benefit analysis and other things are not scrutinised at all. Also the upside or benefit of scientific investment can be astronomically and unpredictably high. How can you compare building more public housing to inventing the semiconductor industry?
She seems more interested in attacking the "physics establishment" than in giving people a picture of the reality of our situation. Take a look at her articles on LIGO [1] for instance where she makes conspiracy theory level claims saying that the group is lying about their data and that "big physics" is in on it.
My opinion happens to be similar to hers on building the next big collider, but I'm not a high energy physics expert. Given how dishonest she was on the subjects I am familiar with, there's no way that I trust her to give an accurate portrayal of the ones I'm not.
[1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/whats-up-with-ligo...
The problem is that Sabine Hossenfelder doesn't just make arguments about the data, but makes the researchers out to be villains. Not only that, but all of the problems she brings up have good community accepted resolutions that she selectively ignores.
I think that once we had multi-messenger confirmation of merger events, any doubt about gravitational wave detection vanished outside of some fringe groups. All of that happened and played out long before Hossenfelder's article, but she doesn't really give a fair representation of it.
Often the people in a position to give the most important feedback are _not_ in a position to give feedback gently and tactfully.
So if you want to really know the world, you need to have a check in your mind that lets you take tactless feedback.
One example is when you hurt someone... a person you hurt is almost never going to be in a position to gently, calmly say what happened in a fair, generous way. That kind of feedback almost always comes with barbs, or inflations that accompany a person trying to talk to someone who hurt them.
If you ignore tactless feedback, you will mostly never be able to understand the people you hurt.
Another category like this is feedback about norms. People who are well versed in norms and good at operating within them generally won’t be the people who can see outside of those same norms. The people who can see alternatives to norms, who can give feedback on where they work and don’t work, often will not be able to give that feedback in a way that conforms to other norms.
So if you ignore tactless feedback, you will mostly never be able to understand broken norms.
If you can separate the content of the message from how it’s delivered you can dramatically increase your access to understanding.
Then she came out with the linked post, which pretends LIGO had no reply to the substantive issues even though she already had blogged positively about their reply earlier, and disingenuously throws in a few complete non-issues just to make a gish-gallop. That's not science popularization, that's spreading FUD for the sake of self-promotion. Any field can be "taken down" with enough dishonesty.
https://motls.blogspot.com/2019/03/some-reasons-why-west-won...
https://motls.blogspot.com/2018/11/new-veins-of-science-cant...
In fact, if there's any identifiable trend at all, it's that this fraction has been falling. The LHC, for instance, was slapped together after the last would-be supercollider was defunded, and reuses the LEP tunnel (built in the 1980s). If you're wondering why we took so long to find the Higgs boson, it's because the field has already been shrinking under the pressure of declining funding for 40 years.
People seem to be ignorant that everything has a populist aspect, and very expensive things always do.
The politicians who foot the bill are thinking "We just spent bazillions and what did we get? Now we have to convince the proles to spend billions more?"
If LHS gave us some really fundamental new insights, the Round B would be easy. But right now it's like a startup with no 'product market fit' it's going to be hard.
Does China have experience making particle colliders? I’ve seen their magnetic confinement fusion research devices. Even in the design stage, there are lessons yet to be learned that are well documented in other machines. That doesn’t mean the people working on them are dumb, or that all fields of large-magnetic-confinement-machine-building physicists are in the same position, but I think we should be pretty sure whoever builds the next big particle collider is actually up to the task.
Given the current state of the world and the trajectory of the West's relationship with the Chinese government, it may have to be built by China if it's going to be built in China.
If you mean smaller accelerators, it's unclear what the value in that would be.
With respect, I have no idea what your link has to do with anything. Making a giant dish is absolutely trivial compared to a particle accelerator.
My point is that Chinese medium-scale magnetic confinement fusion research devices have not learned from 60 years of painful lessons that the fusion research community have learned and published. Magnetic confinement fusion research machines share a lot of similarities to particle accelerators. Is there any indication that China would succeed in making a particle accelerator other than “they are good at STEM” and have made a giant parabola? It’s not very convincing.
I don't know much about particle accelerators, but I do know a bit about advanced manufacturing and I think you might be surprised at the degree to which Chinese industry is still functionally dependent on foreign machinery and expertise.
This is a country that, until about two years ago, couldn't successfully produce an entire ballpoint pen using fully domestic processes.
Which countries can?
I was trying to illustrate the broad chasm between theoretical and practical expertise. Just because someone "knows a lot of STEM" doesn't mean they can actually produce a useful thing. China already had perhaps the most highly concentrated amount of manufacturing engineering expertise anywhere in the world, yet still they needed help with what most people would consider a basic item.
This is fine! Most countries, as you noted, are in the same position. It's a desirable outcome of globalization.
It becomes problematic, though, when your goal is to build an incredibly complex machine that requires expertise beyond your own (like a particle accelerator, perhaps) and the people and countries whose help you require are unwilling to work with you.
But I don’t really know anything about China.
Not only the job didn’t seem to match the prospect, the “large organization politics” drove me away pretty quickly.
Imho the next big accelerator will be either some LHC upgrade, clic (very very unlikely) or the ILC.
There will and it will come from photonics research.
Current plasma wakefield accelerators are in GeV range, we need TeV.
It is a simple matter of voltage gradient. The higher the frequency, the steeper the gradient.
Losses also scale with frequency.
And while other acceleration principles have higher voltage gradient, they still can't reach TeV of collision energy, since you either can't concatenate them, or you can't control the beam sufficiently well.
As I wrote in another comment, stuff like plasma wakefield accelerators need to get better by a factor of 1000 before they reach the realms of SRF accelerators. This wont magically happen over night.
And most of these people have tenure, they hardly care for trends.
I have been to all major accelerator physics conferences over nearly the last decade. Despite clic there is no one seriously claiming to go beyond LHC energy without SRF. No one. Not the plasma wakefield guys, not some strange theoretical accelerator principle. No matter what you read on Wikipedia.
Your namedropping comments with very little actual content, disregarding the work of thousands of scientists show a certain arrogance that is super annoying.
Do you really expect a detector/machine of the size of a building to have 100% availability ?
This is the sciences world, boy, not aerospace engineering. These detectors are ''home-made' and much closer to an experimental prototype than to anything "engineered". We do not name them "CERN experiments" for nothing.
(1) The Russians, EU, China, Japan might pursue HEP so the US does not want to appear to fall behind. So in part, the funding is "a matter of national pride".
(2) The funding has a constituency and keeps it and the university physics departments going. The US does want healthy university physics departments if only to teach physics for all the roles all of physics can play in national security, NASA, the economy, other sciences, e.g., medicine, engineering, e.g., computing, etc.
For the power of constituencies, notice that a lot of physics laboratories were started during WWII and are still operating. One way and another, somehow they keep getting funding.
(3) In the Manhattan Project the world, the power elite, all of civilization were surprised, shocked, felt blind-sided, afraid. The lesson they took was: It's a big, complicated universe out there; a good guess is that not nearly all of it is well understood (true or not); so we must pursue physics, at least keep up as insurance against another shocking discovery.
(4) The US likes to claim to have the best country, economy, culture, human rights, standard of living, roads, bridges, public health, Internet, ..., cars, hamburgers, milk, pizza, etc., basketball, Olympic athletes, pop music, etc., nearly the best of everything, in particular the best universities. So, can't have a great university without at least a good physics department, and very much want a great physics department.
Short version: The US wants to be the best, e.g., be the first to put a human with a flag on Mars, the Stars and Stripes.
Also, i think if we invested the money for a new collider into an effort to develop what we've learned so far into a useful technology that inspires the general public, the funding for the next collider would take care of itself.
Strange as it might sound, I think technology being developed for the next generation of mobile networks could be what opens up a new regime (with likely candidate theories) of high energy physics. - Terahertz beamforming for wakefield accelerators, to throw some lingo at you.
Annihilation is too uncontrolled to help, often in terms of direction.
Accelerators are all about trying to add just a tiny bit more velocity to something already moving at 99.99% of the speed of light, in the exact direction that particle is already going in. So it is both precision and vanishing results.
It's a tricky situation.
This however does not increase the collision energy significantly: a single electron-positron pair has the (rest) energy of ~1MeV -- this is what is released during the annihilation, but the energies we want to go to at the next collider go up to 10TeV, so 10^7 times larger.
So that's still 4 orders of magnitude below the collision energy of the LHC.
[1]: http://pdglive.lbl.gov/DataBlock.action?node=S016M&home=BXXX...
It's not going to happen overnight, but it's good that people are opening their eyes. Let's reevaluate in 2040 and see if we've moved the needle in fundamental physics even just a little compared to what was achieved in the first half of the 20th century.
There are promising works with high-powered lasers, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcGgaa2mFc4
But it seems the "spin particles really fast in a very long circular tube" is reaching the end of its life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
"1 after the new particle collider": Guess what? we need an even bigger particle collider.
What we really need is to build one on the moon.
I'm also seeing a lot resentment for the price tag of colliders in this thread. My personal opinion is that we shouldn't build a new one, but I'll point out that colliders are incredibly cost efficient.
The whole LHC (which has been running and providing jobs to people for 12 years) costs a similar amount as just two B-2 bombers. The US owns like 20 of those and that money went somewhere into huge defense contractors profits as opposed to knowledge and tech which is now accessible to the whole world.
You might not know this, but a lot of the technology developed during the construction of the LHC is now used to improve medical imaging and power transmission to name a few applications. These all have a direct impact on the quality of our every day life. That fancy PET scan you received to diagnose your cancer was literally funded in part by the LHC.
It solves two issues with one stone*, and it'll provide leaps of advancement more than the minutiae incremental development cycle we're stuck in.
Particle colliders seem to have reached a moore's law threshold on earth, thus the connotation of tunnel vision.
To me, bringing up that the WWW, fancy PET scans, etc. came in part from HEP and therefore we should be grateful is missing one major point. In the WWW case, in an alternative history it seems likely to me that some other project would have developed something similar around the same time if the funding were allocated differently. As for the other benefits, I think if the money were allocated towards research in those areas it would have been more effectively spent.
Ultimately I think the worst "cost" for HEP in general (not just colliders) is that it encourages something like brain drain on other fields. I think that people interested in certain mostly non-practical areas of physics like HEP would do the world a lot more good if they instead got a PhD in some field of engineering or CS, or at the very least a more practical area of "physics". Here I refer to physics in the descriptive sense which doesn't align well with the prescriptive definition of physics. E.g., I don't understand why fluid dynamics is not "physics" in that it's rarely researched in physics departments (unless studied indirectly in chaos theory or plasma physics). Must be too Newtonian for people to care. (For what it's worth I'm at the end of a PhD in mechanical engineering studying fluid dynamics.)
LHC would be one way to use that some of that "waste" in defense spending more wisely.
Regarding "practical" study-- Where you see value in the output of engineering work, those guiding the work of engineers see value in the output of scientific work. If we had more people of the latter type that appreciated the value of scientific work, we might have more productive engineers and developers.
As for your final paragraph, I'm not really sure what you're getting at. If you believe I have misunderstood you, I'm interested in learning how. Most physicists I've met seem to severely underestimate the amount of scientific research conducted by engineers. If you get a PhD in engineering, you're typically doing primarily (if not exclusively) science. The main difference is that this research keeps in mind the applications. That's what makes it useful. I think it's a shame that so many very smart people choose to study HEP rather than engineering where they would do better in the world. And I don't think people working in HEP (for example) make engineers or programmers more productive.
The LHC cost about 4.75 billion during construction, and requires a yearly operating budget of around 1 billion dollars.
The total cost estimate for finding the Higgs was about 13.25 billion.
The B-2 bomber program cost 44 Billion (or an average cost of 2.1 billion per unit), but it resulted in considerably MORE jobs over a much longer time span, also led to several innovations in manufacturing/radar/ECS/Material science, and it costs LESS to maintain per year at ~850 million a year for all 21 units.
This all for a program that had immediate and obvious applicability (we got a physical object out the other side with clear purpose), and it was STILL the object of intense budgetary concerns.
Basically - It was a costs DISASTER and it was only 4 times the cost.
Not saying I'd rather have more bombers than another collider, but this is not the argument I would make...
While verifying the Higgs is nice there are no practical applications for the knowledge.
1) Can't use the any of the theorists or experiementalists who had anything to do with the useless research of the LHC.
2) Can't use any of the hardware research required to make that discovery (all apparently useless):
2a) superconducting magnets
2b) high performance fpga computing
2c) particle detectors
FPGA computing was in use in industry well before it was in use in HEP colliders.
Particle detectors have existed for more than 100 years. When was the first collider built?
Seriously, this is one of the issues I take with HEP advocates claiming that their field yielded all of these advances. Works well with politicians they have to lobby for funding their stuff. Doesn't work so well with other physicists.
HEP has utility, as all science does. Investment in it generally turns out useful items, even if the science is esoteric, and not applicable to problems in the world now.
However, and this is the crux of the problem, we have many items of significant priority. Which means we have to triage our expenditures. Is HEP and collider physics one of these high priorities right now?
In short, no. It shouldn't be.
So as such it has had decent success I think.
Another goal was to look for supersymmetry. While the LHC so far has excluded large sections of the possible parameter space for supersymmetry, I don't think it was unreasonable to think at the time LHC was designed that it had a decent chance of finding evidence for supersymmetry.
However given how things are looking currently, maybe effort should be focused on the areas where we know there's something weird, such as neutrinos[3], as well as astronomical searches such as LIGO[4] which can constrain Beyond Standard Model physics.
[1]: https://home.cern/resources/faqs/facts-and-figures-about-lhc
[2]: https://home.cern/news/press-release/physics/lhcb-sees-new-f...
[3]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutrino-evidence-could-expla...
[4]: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-gravitational-...
Shouldn't it be the height of an average adult from Denmark? At 1.672m (edit: closer to 1.8) it's a big enough difference to matter. The inaccuracies in this article are disgusting! This is a serious matter that has numerous implications, and is definitely not a joke.
Edit: I meant to post this somewhere else. Sorry.
Now we need billions of dollars and all the best minds to even hypothetically make progress.
Maybe something is wrong in the state of scientific research.
IMO like with space ships this is just not a useful engineering endeavor in general
We probably could iterate on engineering AI and nanotechnology so future people could programmatically build specific machines
But let’s go on a whim and prematurely optimize a machine to maybe produce new insights at scale that, unlike with the Higgs, we’re still trying to find consensus mathematics to define
We’re putting the cart before the horse this time and the fact the LHC hasn’t produced much else even with all the mathy theories has shown on paper we’re so off the mark a giant new machine would be built just to titillate a generation that is addicted to being titillated
Maybe we could just get our own imaginations back for a bit before we keep following the imaginings of yesterday
Not sure if you’ve noticed but pandemic life is making building such a thing a non-starter. How do you design, plan, and assemble such a thing when groups of people have to work on a basement?
Academia is also much less religious these days. Perhaps there is a correlation.