CERN makes push to build €21B super-collider
nature.com
nature.com
> "When physicists started building colliders in the 1940s, they did not have a complete inventory of elementary particles, and they knew it... [] The Standard Model still has some loose ends, but experimentally testing those would require energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test."
> "... particle physicists should focus on developing new technologies that could bring colliders back in a reasonable price range and hold off digging more tunnels."
> "It’s because too much science funding is handed out on the basis of inertia. In the past century, particle physics has grown into a large, very influential and well-connected community. They will keep on building bigger particle colliders as long as they can, simply because that’s what particle physicists do, whether that makes sense or not."
When I see things like that I often remember a quote I came across years ago when tracking down the origin of the Lord Kelvin "end of science" quote (that never actually happened)
> While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals. - Albert Michelson - 1894
It seems like every generation someone claims we've reached the end somehow and while they are giving that speech some young experimental scientist is in the background going "hmmm, that's funny" to prove them wrong.
Ironically she repeats the Kelvin myth here in point 16 - http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...
“We do know that the only way to find answers is by experiment and the only place to find them is where we haven’t been able to look yet.”
Further, it's an utterly superficial analogy. Physics 2020 is completely different than Physics 1894. We don't just have a complete understanding of the fundamental principles [1] underlying all terrestrial observations/experiments ever performed, but also a complete inventory of the involved matter. And we have had for decades.
[1] It's important to understand this in a strict reductionist way. Of course knowing the axioms is completely different from understanding their implications. And when studying their implication you are bound to encounter many novel principles not anticipated in the axioms. Thus even in the absence of what is by particle physicists "new physics" there is much to discover.
NOT true. The Standard Model does not explain neutrino behavior. See https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/february-2013/neutr... for a some examples of that.
Unfortunately a large particle accelerator is not designed to tell us much about neutrinos...
But we still don't have a complete understanding of the properties of neutrinos, nor a definitive understanding of how to properly tweak the Standard Model to include them. They are the only area of particle physics where experimental evidence did not fit the Standard Model, and therefore evidence of that discrepancy should be no more ignored than the failure of attempts to measure ether dragging should have been in Rutherford's day.
But this is at the end just semantics. We don't know by which mechanism neutrinos gain mass yet. We don't know any number of things about non-terrestrial observations. There clearly is plenty of physics to discover. But it's easy to underestimate the discrepancy to Kelvins days. When he made that statement the existence of electrons had not yet been discovered. Atomism was something coming out of chemistry, not out of physics, and at the close of the 19th century time it was still possible to doubt the reality of atoms.
You focus on ether dragging, but in fact it was not understood what the mirrors Michelson used were made of, or how they got their reflective properties.
PS: By unknown I mean experimentally.
At this point, spending more money on banging very small rocks together is unlikely to be useful. It might work, but a pause for creative and original thought seems like a more productive idea.
Re: "unlikely to be useful," consider that every other major collider exploring new energy levels so far has found a new fundamental particle.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...
I tend to mainly agree with her stance overall (and I happen to be a theoretical physicist.)
Personally I know nothing of the field, and thus have no say in the matter either way.
Personally, I find turbulence much more interesting. The fact that it's orders of magnitude more important than HEP and also very intellectually challenging should give pause to those who have dedicated their lives to HEP. But my impression is that cultural forces have unfortunately convinced many of our best and brightest to go into HEP or other similarly impractical areas of physics. I guess that's better than working for Facebook to make people click on ads, but that's setting the bar low. If you're interested in physics, you can make a much better choice than HEP. (If you're open to areas outside of physics you may be able to make an even better choice.)
I can see why someone might view the "building blocks" of the universe as fundamental or how there are interesting philosophical questions that HEP can address. But turbulence is fairly ubiquitous; certainly that makes it "fundamental" in some sense. And there are philosophical implications of chaos and statistical mechanics; turbulence is part of both.
Some people just like what they like though. I studied computer science and really enjoyed the more abstract mathematical stuff like type theory and semantics. Probably less applicable than something like machine learning or robotics or NLP, but I like what I like.
Also, someone may have already mentioned this in response to your other post, but perhaps people are interested in things like astronomy and HEP precisely because they're so far removed from common experience. That was part of my personal interest in quantum computing (and as a corollary, QM).
The mathematicians question whether the Navier-Stokes continuum fluid model can be trusted to remain mathematically well-posed in all scenarios; but Navier-Stokes is just a second-order approximation to Boltzmann transport, and higher-order approximations are well known. If N-S were to blow up, it would merely indicate that the second-order approximation breaks down in some regime, necessarily involving shocks. But... I don’t think any experts in transport theory would be surprised by that. It would be more be like solving the mystery of rogue waves, and less like finding bigfoot.
The other group I’m aware of are those who study large-scale turbulence. The goal there is to summarize or coarse-grain the turbulence that goes on within a small computational volume, as a cost-saving measure versus using a more finely-resolved mesh in space and time. That’s valuable work with true social impact, such as in atmospheric forecasting and erosion studies. But... it’s kinda phenomenological. Not as much fun for many scientists.
> The other group I’m aware of are those who study large-scale turbulence. The goal there is to summarize or coarse-grain the turbulence that goes on within a small computational volume, as a cost-saving measure versus using a more finely-resolved mesh in space and time. [...] But... it’s kinda phenomenological. Not as much fun for many scientists.
The turbulence "closure" problem you describe here is the main obstacle for the prediction of any turbulent flow. This is not far removed from everyday engineering! Practically speaking, the computational complexity of turbulence is far too high, so approximations become necessary.
You've described the basic idea behind large-eddy simulation, but I think you underestimate how interesting the theory could be there. Look into spectral theories of turbulence. I find this sort of research rather interesting, though it's formidable. My understanding is that some of the techniques Kraichnan applied to turbulence in the late 1950s were later independently redeveloped by quantum field theorists in the 1970s. (Note that I'm no expert in these models, but learning about them is on my TODO list.)
> The mathematicians question whether the Navier-Stokes continuum fluid model can be trusted to remain mathematically well-posed in all scenarios
The media unfortunately gives the wrong impression about the Navier-Stokes existence and uniqueness problem. This problem doesn't have much to do with turbulence in the computational complexity sense. I honestly don't see how proving that the Navier-Stokes equations do or do not have unique solutions is going to help turbulence. They've already proved that for 2D turbulence, but that didn't help solve 2D turbulence.
Anyway, your understanding of the problem is basically correct if not focused on the best examples. It's already known that the solutions aren't unique in inviscid compressible flows, but that doesn't stop people from using the compressible Euler equations as a model. They just add an extra condition to make the solutions unique (arguing that the other solutions won't appear in reality). My impression is that many people working on the NS existence problem believe that in certain circumstances the dissipation can become unbounded, and would be limited by different physical mechanisms that should be used instead. Practically speaking this might solved by simply using a different viscosity model, for instance.
The difference is that you don't need a partnership of a dozen large governments to swirl things in a coffee cup, but you do if you want to expand on the previous generation of collider.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/turbulence-the-oldes...
Where would the US be after twenty years of that instead of spending it on military?
People think this idea is crazy, but if I were in charge, I'd keep a small but efficient force that can be scaled up and down quickly for dealing with Iraq or Iran scale enemies, and rely solely on nuclear weapons for defending against hostile superpowers - which is how any superpower conflict is likely to end anyway.
Yeah, you can't play the imperialism game like that, but it doesn't seem worth the cost anyway.
Can you present an argument for how a new super-collider is actually useful?
While I agree this is a huge expense, I do question the slippery slope of attacking research budgets. I wish more nations chalked this up as the 'cost of doing business'. Cutting research funding works well for election cycles, but doesn't do much for the folks down the road.
That makes sense, but you must also have a framework that tells you when something is just too much. It looks like you are comfortable with €21 BN, would €210 BN be also ok, or €2.1 TN or €21 TN? Which level does not justify the knowledge gain?
Fundamental knowledge is valuable, but in a world with finite resources you must always be able to compare with other valuable alternatives. Should we, the humankind, invest a few tens of billions into chasing hypothetical superpartner particles? Or we should invest in the ARC fusion reactor [1], that might help us cut down our greenhouse gas emissions in 20 years?
One could perhaps get those benefits through more direct means for less, but if not then it would make the collider technically useful.
Just like military R&D. So what's the point of the comparison?
While the collider cost is one-time.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d...
As it is, the supercollider money comes from the limited science budget, and buying the one thing means we can't have the other.
Things need to stand on their own if they are worth. Removing the military is not politically viable, so we can come up with 1000s of fantasy project we could finance.
However, the problem remains the same, what is the alternative use for those 21 billion. No matter if you can use the military budget, in that case you also need to evaluate alternative uses for those 21 billions.
[1] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/USNuclearModernizatio...
It has been money well spent, but I agree with you and President Trump that we should be bringing the troops home not wasting money and lives on endless wars overseas.
Many of the key advancements were made with military funding, but: A) the fact that the military did it first doesn't mean that somebody else wouldn't have done it a year or ten later. B) how much did we waste on our main goal of murdering people, compared to the amount of funding necessary for helpful scientific advancements?
If we threw $700 billion a year at anything, we'd see major scientific advancements happening almost by accident. We could have invested it in agriculture, or infrastructure, health, or ending poverty. All of those would produce major first order benefits in addition to the advancement of science and technologies.
The technologies we got out of the space program are vast and while there was always a military aspect (there couldn't really not be given that the technology to put a satellite is basically an ICBM) a lot of the technology had civilian applications.
This will move some technologies a bit ahead but so would work on biology and medical areas. I would be much more happy to see people cured or otherwise helped than to know that a partcle is this or that.
This is in strong opposition to what happened in these areas of physics in the previous century. Things which were directives had a conceivable practical application.
What can you make out of events which happen at such energies, the kind we will never reach outside of such research centers.
The solution just has to be a perfect fit with the problem to become practical in industry. We often do not see the practicality of such abstract ideas until they are abundant in use.
Moreover, the cost is small. This is also the rational by which we can agree that philosophy is worth spending money on (because "general culture").
Here we have 20B€ so that some people discover the structure of a particle, knowing that it is exactly impossible to have a real life use because of the required energies.
All manmade elements have been extremely expensive to make the first ti-me, and that hasn't stopped them from being constantly used.
Then there is nothing to use from such experiments. The research is purely academic, it is not like the cure for cancer is hidden behind a gluon.
I can understand dumping even 20B€ in research which brings something tangible. Making sure that the structure of a quark is what we think it is is not one of these.
There is certainly efficiency to consider when making energy. We can't tap into the full potential of any source, there are "hard limits" to many of our current methods, but that doesen't stop a paradigm shift from happening and making it so.
Many things studied before had no "tangible" use then, it doesen't come like that. It's iteration upon iteration, using previous work to achieve a little bit of something new. You cannot foresee the future beforehand.
What do you get in return? The confirmation or not of a theory which can be confirmed only at these energies. It is not as a non-confirmation would turn around physics, it would be just some strange thing happening at these energies.
Compare this with experiments from the late 1800 and early 1900. You had obvious holes in the theory (Michelson-Morley, the ultraviolet catastrophe, ...) - these experiments were showing that something in our everyday theory is wrong. Not some fluctuations at 20B€.
There are branches of physics where the research is really cool (notably solid state physics) and which you can make a real life use of. Particle physics is not one of them.
Things like "enormous" are subjective, and it's indeed not impossible to get such amounts cheaply in the future, even if you can't at the time reduce it's need.
It's easy to look in the past and point out the obvious when you already have all the answers, but trying to divine something that changes the way you think about current physics is not as simple.
> Even minor things can have major impact when combined with further research
We are talking about things happening at energies which are way beyond normal interactions. Let's imagine we pick a simple artificial signal from the sky, from a place that is 5000 light years away.
People will get crazy about aliens and loose their shit on how we are not alone. And so what - from a practical perspective there is exactly zero interest in this. We cannot use that information at all because whatever is there is unreachable.
There are however plenty of place in physics which are worth the effort (I mentioned solid state physics as one of the most promising ones). Not to mention biology where we are only right at the beginning and there are plenty of outcomes.
If we had infinite resources then fine. We do not have them. And putting 20B€ in some fancy research with zero practical interest (such as this one, or middle-ages French literature, or Platon philosophy, ...) is a tremendous waste of opportunities.
I understand that we need to fund research with no practical interest - this is part of what makes us human. Just not 20B€ when people are starving, dying, etc.
Humans may still be around after 100 thousand years. The electron had not even been discovered just 130 years ago.
It is very difficult to make good predictions about the possible practical applications of our current physics knowledge. Of course, it is much more difficult to make such predictions about as yet undiscovered physics...
Besides, HEP experiments aim to expand our knowledge about the fundamental laws of nature. Fundamental laws are by definition applicable to all energy scales.
Understanding the structure of a quark is priority 100 compared to understanding how to cure MS.
In an ideal world where we have all the money we need, sure. In the world we are in one must make choices.
To me, fusion research need more $$ and a higher priority as it has extremely practical applications for all humanity, from energy independence to global warming.
21b Euros is a lot of money, and apart the ongoing ITER effort, fusion research can be tackled from different angles with just half of that money.
http://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-e...
Funds for a collider - why not fusion? Funds for space exploration - why not end world hunger? Funds for astronomy - why not medicine? etc..
It happens every time a relatively big budget is discussed as if it was some kind of lottery where only one gets the jackpot.
Funding for all practical purposes is limited, and there is so much any nation, (or group of nations), can provide.
Sure, you 1. can cut other areas of the budged (health, defense, roads/infra, admin, pick what), or 2) raise taxes.... but even that has a practical bound.
However, 21$ billion allocated more like it was for Commercial Crew/Cargo by NASA would make more sense. Have many competitors who get a little money and get more to those who can actually prove out the system.
Building advanced commercial fission reactors and helping them with getting threw the currently idiotic license scheme would probably be an even better return on investment then fusion. But somehow the world has decide that fission is evil and only fusion can save humanity, even if that makes little sense from a physics perspective.
Daniel J. Boorstin described a celebrity as a person who is "well known for their well known-ness". Fusion is a technology that is similarly recursive: it's being investigated because it was being investigated, not because it's worth doing when examined freshly. Whatever rationale for pushing DT fusion that once existed has largely evaporated.
If fusion survives at all, it has to be as a lower key modest pure research effort into long shot ideas that might evade the showstoppers. And new blood should be kept out of the field until it's shrunk enough. Anyone going into fusion these days is being poorly advised.
It could indeed be a problem if large parts of the economy were using proof-of-work crypto currencies by the time we figured out fusion energy, though.
Sure, people who will be getting paid from those $21B of public money are saying: "Another one! Even bigger and faster! That project will be definitely worthwhile!"
Because the beneficiaries of the jobs of this project are definitely not the disadvantaged in society (research-wise, or construction-wise). And I have to say, HEP's huge experiments seem to produce one-time headline discoveries (of a few hundred authors, yes), but then quickly become obsolete pieces of equipment.
And the science or industrial benefits themselves, of hitting the next tier beyond 13 TeV for such a collider? What is, and where does that benefit go? Does anyone have even an inkling of what results it will produce? Or is this just HEP on autopilot, "we need the next big one"?
Please don't trot out the usual "science for its own sake", as if that justifies any arbitrary amount of $ being spent without question.
At least astronomy produces pretty pictures for its funding.
The cost to build these things doesn't just go into an abyss, it gives an enormous amount of workers jobs in building it, and then employs tons of scientists for running it.
The west really needs to take a page from the CCP's book; you can raise people out of poverty by educating them and putting them to work on ambitious, far reaching infrastructure projects for the good of everyone. Much more desirable to most welfare solutions.
Because, as has been pointed out in the past, you could pay people to simply dig holes in the ground and have others fill them in, which would equally create work and productivity. But was it more worthwhile and beneficial than other ways the money could be spent?
Now, I don't know if this collider is going to make any difference about that. Quite likely it won't. But given physics' track record, I don't think it's clear at all that there are very many things that the money would be better spent on.
Would it really be bad to simply print the money for CERN, ITER or other scientific projects? New money without anything in return is bad but here? In these cases we would get an actual collider/reactor/rocket/whatever - built by actual companies that employ actual people, run by actual scientists, maintained by actual engineers, ...
A better understanding of the universe we live in?
21 billion could be spent on two hundred thousand(!) 100k grants to scientists. Building a giant machine to perform experiments that will likely merely confirm the existing models of particle physics while revealing very little of interest to society at large is pretty much indefensible.
The $1T F35 program has entered the chat.
When they approved the LHC, they were almost entirely certain they'd find the Higgs and there was solid arguments for why they should find more.
Now it seems much less clear that they stand to find anything groundbreaking by simply doing more of the same.
Personally I'd like to see more money being put towards condensed matter physics, quantum information science and similar areas which seems to have potential for much more practical applications.
Considering the vast amounts of money needed for these huge colliders, for me it's about diminishing returns. I just don't think anything we learn "down there" will have as much impact compared to other areas.
Instead I think now is a good time to slow down a bit, fund other interesting areas more, until we have a better handle on where to look. Then we can come back, if possible.
Got a link for that?
That's on the order of magnitude of the NIH budget in the US. But it's spread across a huge number of researchers rather than just a few huge projects.
The Human Genome Project was only a $1B project which led to huge technology development in sequencers.
Other efforts at developing large canonical datasets have been less effective at spinning out clear tech wins, but they have had huge science wins.
I think biology has been really good at balancing having tons of churn from small independent labs pushing on new ideas, and coming together for big asks when it makes sense.
You're not going to see medical spinoffs from massively larger machines.
I could see the creation of a utopia or an equitable state as another purpose. I suppose some people don't support super-colliders because they want money to go to this goal instead.
This almost sounds like the secular version of the tower of babel. The point of building scientific instruments ought not to be the worship of science as some sort of ritualistic activity.
We (ideally) engage in science to maximize human knowledge and insight, not to just build a utopia or the 2001 monolith.
But I think once we figure out how to assemble gigantic telescopes in space, the options for astronomy and maybe physics are huge.
With the ability to launch cheaply now, and with Starship maybe even cheaper in the future. You can build something truly gigantic in space.
What I think is more practically pressing is a commercial competition for next generation of fission reactors, but that was pressing since the 1970s and politics has ignore it. So that's not gone happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope
Along with support of minorities, disabilities and the environment and all such things.
The next half a decade isn't going to be much fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Synchrotron_Light_Sou...
There are tons of resources written by them and others that explains how it all works. None of it is secret.