The World Doesn’t Need a New Gigantic Particle Collider
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611738 (CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider)
"particle physicists should focus on developing new technologies that could bring colliders back in a reasonable price range and hold off digging more tunnels."
Creating just a bigger version of the current collider with incremental advancements in technology is very likely a poor use of science euros. The money should be used to investigate other methods for particle acceleration and investigation. Some linear accelerator concepts could be much less expensive than very large circular colliders, but I imagine research into those areas are not funded due to the particle physics budget being mostly consumed by CERN.
This type of problem has happened in fusion research. The fundamental physics of how to build an economic fusion reactor still needs to be worked out, but almost all funding has been cut in fusion research to pour concrete and build magnets for the ITER project. It is clear that the $14 billion and rising reactor cannot lead to economically viable fusion reactors on any kind of reasonable timescale. ITER is currently planned to be fully operational in 2035 and, if the past is anything like the future, there will continue to be more delays.
That's not true; CERN has no particular commitment to circular colliders. Scientists from CERN have proposed linear colliders, along with more exotic options like muon colliders.
However, there are other points the author made.
First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance.
Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination. What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard? I supposed that could be useful, but even more pressing was how to motivate the people of Earth to make the necessary changes.
Also, the money offered doesn't seem that huge on scale of countries. 1 billion dollars per year for operating cost? I suppose we could make better use of money that would otherwise go to making a new collider, but so we can do so elsewhere as well.
This is an extremely narrowminded view. Lasers, MRI, X-Ray machines, etc ... are all made by engineers after physicists tried to understand the fundamental nature of reality. One would argue that modern electronics are possible because research was done about Quantum Physics, a fundamental nature of reality.
Essentially none of the particle physics done since the 1960s has had any application outside of fundamental knowledge, with no prospects for it having those applications in the future. At best, and even this is stretching a bit, there are indirect benefits of developing the machines that are needed to explore this frontier (i.e. like some of the argued benefits of space exploration).
Whether that changes the calculus of whether these things are worth the price is still a question (in my opinion: they are), but I don't think making analogies to applications of discoveries of fundamental physics operating at very different energy scales is a good argument. The development of quantum physics (lasers, MRI, etc), while a frontier at the time, is essential to understanding commonplace things like the cohesion of solids or the properties of metals or semi-conductors (say) at room temperature. To my knowledge, there is nothing outside of astrophysical objects and the early universe that depends on knowing what is at the current frontiers in particle physics (or even what was the frontier in 50 years ago).
Whilst they are not commonly used today, it is not entirely improbable that they play a significant role in the future.
There’s also some developments related to grid computing, sensors, and electronics, which could be reasonably useful in other contexts.
So yeah, chasing the next fancy particle itself is not very relevant to most people (though still very important in our quest of trying to understand the world around us), but it still contributes to technological progress.
Another aspect is international collaboration. It’s not perfect, but CERN and ITER are organisations within which Chinese, Russians, Americans and Europeans (and many, many others) work together towards a common goal.
In my opinion, another important reason to support of keeping these large accelerators alive is there is a very real chance that the expertise to build these kind of devices could atrophy or be lost entirely given the long timescales involved. Even if one is opposed to building this specific collider, I think the prospect of losing this kind of institutional knowledge is concerning (though if one finds these things useless, you might care less if we lost that capability).
I entirely agree with your second point. I’ll add that it is also important to keep these people (from highly specialised technicians and physicists to diplomats and support staff) employed in positions where they can keep their skills sharp. Some of them then go back to their countries of origin to apply this experience and knowledge to help improve research and policy at home, whilst retaining personal links with their counterparts abroad.
In the grand scheme of things, the expenditure is a rounding error anyway.
As an analogy, I currently work on developing a medical imaging system where we track the trajectories of protons and heavy ions after they traverse a patient - in order to infer their energy loss and also the patient's "stopping power" map. With better knowledge of the stopping power we will be able to improve cancer radiation treatment with protons and heavy ions.
We would be nowhere without recent work in particle physics on large scale pixel sensors, Monte Carlo simulation software, readout systems, experimental cross sectional data (although not directly from the high energy experiments), particle tracking algorithms, electronics design for very thin sensors and radiation hard equipment ++.
But I think my main point, that applications of particle physics itself (and not the human and technological advances made to support it) are essentially non-existent stands.
The technological advances made to support particle physics may not have been possible without the effort to do the particle physics.
I.e. they are actually a result of the effort to understand the universe, even though they aren’t written down in the standard model.
It’s not at all obvious that we would have devised them any other way.
> One would argue that modern electronics are possible because research was done about Quantum Physics, a fundamental nature of reality.
which was making the connection that understanding frontier physics from 100 years ago directly enabled new technology, and that was a reason to support particle physics today (presumably b/c it might directly lead to similar advancements).
What does it mean to distinguish these two?
But I think there is a real difference in expectations between technology that operates on known physical principles and that which involves wholly new ones. Historically the latter has been associated with dramatic shifts in what is possible, for example our understanding of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics enables much of the modern world.
So I think presenting the study of particle physics in that light could mislead the public on just what is being done and what kind of outcomes it might precipitate.
We didn’t know what our understanding of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics would enable in advance.
Suggesting that any science would lead to specific outcomes would be misleading, otherwise it wouldn’t be science - it would just be engineering. R&D.
Science is always just exploration, and the outcome in terms of tools is always incidental.
No, but we did know what we had large gaps in our knowledge, even of things at close to human scales -- before those theories were discovered and worked out. It was then reasonable to expect that filling in those gaps might lead to new technology and applications also at human scales. And I'm not talking about direct applications, I'm talking about applications decades or more out -- but the fact that the energy scales were somewhat close to home meant such thing were possible.
From what we know about the current frontier in particle physics, nothing informs physics at human scales. This is a strong statement -- its many many orders of magnitude off in energy scale.
It could be that we're wrong about some that (and that's one of the reasons I think this research should continue) -- but it's not something that should be reasonably expected.
> Science is always just exploration, and the outcome in terms of tools is always incidental.
My comments were about how the science should be presented to the public in an honest way. And I think trying to sell people on science by quoting past developments that are quite different in character and expectations to what is being done today is dishonest and is a disservice to everyone involved.
The point that should be made is exactly the one you make above: science is about exploration -- full stop -- and we shouldn't make exaggerated claims about applications to sell people on it.
We shouldn’t make pessimistic statements about the potential benefits of the process of doing the research itself.
Science is valuable because of what we find, but it’s also always valuable because of what we learn to do in the process.
I agree we shouldn’t make exaggerated claims about benefits, but neither should we act as though one part is somehow incidental and not fundamental to why we do the exploration.
I think nuclear physics provides an instructive example that sits in between some of these extremes. Here the energy scales are way way lower than current frontier standards, but also fairly divorced from things in everyday life. Yet nuclear physics has applications (in medicine, in power and [unfortunately] in war). These applications do tend however to be quite specialized (we don't have atomic cars, vacuum cleaners or whatever) so it didn't revolutionize the world the way our understanding of electromagnetism or quantum mechanics did. [I don't want to downplay the effect of nuclear science, but it isn't ubiquitous in our lives].
Barring a fundamental change in our understanding, I would expect that trade off between energy scale and specialization to continue to hold and any developments based on particle physics (of the 60s-present) to be very specialized.
Let me be clear though -- you don't know what you don't know. It could be that what I think are reasonable expectations are wrong, and there are surprises waiting for us (this is one of the reasons I think particle physics is worth supporting).
That may not hold forever; but it's not a crazy assumption. Something who's existence you cannot deduce without energies that need specialized billion dollar equipment to reach is almost by definition not ever going to create or influence ubiquitous tech. That's quite different from stuff like quantum mechanics; those effects are quite visible in fairly everyday situations (e.g. the double-slit experiment doesn't need anything too exotic, and obviously lots of modern tech relies on tricks classical physics might observe but not predict).
That means that if particle physics is to be relevant, it's most likely going to be in places that are not ubiquitous. Maybe it'll help astronomers understand the universe, and maybe that has some application down the line. Or maybe it'll be in absurdly expensive high-energy devices that matter even with only a few copies in the world (and let's hope those aren't yet more weapons).
Still, seems reasonable to be pessimistic about the usefulness of particle physics investments of this type.
Quantum computing only solves a few specific problems. Like showing every possible outcome. For instance print(x), and your goal is to get a through z.
But if the problem is linear, like 2+2, it doesn't help to have quantum computing.
The very next part of his statement covers that... It could be decades before "society" sees fruits of the research.
> To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance.
His next sentence also says "research is good for research sake" - there doesn't need to be "real world results" for the research to be worth it.
You talk about narrow mindedness... then ignore second part of the first sentence and completely ignore the second sentence... Seems narrow minded to do that?
I tend to agree on both those points... It could be a long time to see results and research for research can be good.
As the saying goes, thermodynamics owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to thermodynamics.
The cult of the scientist has gone too far in the US
Yeah that argument was extremely dishonest. We don’t build a 1 billion dollar climate change center because that 1 billion is going to beget trillions of dollars in disruption. Throwing 20, 40 billion with staffing (which comes back into the economy) over a decade or more all-in is a total different ballgame.
No? Models are useful for making predictions.
If somebody like the POTUS tells you that nuking thunderstorms would be great against climate change, you don't have to just take their word for it. You can input that into your climate change model, and it will tell you how much of an impact this will have, and whether the impact is good or bad.
The difference between a better model and a worse model is that the better model will agree better with reality.
A shitty model, like the one POTUS is using, might tell you that nuking all thunderstorms would be great. Then we go ahead and do it, and we all die.
A better model, like the mental model that every 14 year old child that starts studying physics and radiation has, might tell you that nuking thunderstorms is a pretty bad idea that would kill us all due to dozens of reasons.
Given that we cannot make accurate predictions today of what the weather tomorrow will look like. If you want to predict the 50 year impact of more subtle changes like, e.g., covering the Sahara with black mats, you need a pretty good model to get an output that isn't multiple orders of magnitude off.
So..... what do we expect from better climate change models? Avoiding the apocalypse to begin with. Worth every penny.
You have an odd concept of both how to determine if nuking a thunderstorm, which was not what was allegedly suggested, but also what large scale climate models actually capture.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dozens-failed-climate-pr...
All this based on models, and look how wrong they where.
Just act completely random.
Don't wake up, and go to your job, under the assumption that you will get paid.
Don't avoid jumping down a 15 stories building under the assumption that you will die.
Don't breathe. Your model is biased towards breathing.
It's not either or. Knowing the impact is valuable for mitigating damage. You can allocate capital for mitigation more effectively if you have a more accurate model of the threats. Presumably at some levels funding more accurate models are net cost-saving, by increasing the efficiency of spend. I have no idea if we have or have not passed that level.
Similarly, a better model might provide a better understanding of different strategies for curtailing climate change. e.g. planting trees takes carbon out of the air directly (easy to estimate), but also changes the albedo of the underlying terrain. The impact of the albedo change is less clear, particularly as to how it changes regional weather patterns. It might benefit from better models to guide the most impactful locations to reforest. Again, I'm not an expert/maybe this is a solved problem, but I can see how these cases might exist.
About 10K construction jobs, from high tech to low tech over the life of the build phase of the project, which is overlapping a world wide downturn of unknown length of time.
I mean they could build staircase to the top of the tall hill and still not have it be a waste if it keeps people in work and out of harms way. In this case we may get some physics as an upside to a neat way to stimulate industry.
We can say with high certainty that the great barrier reef will die unless some miracle happens and the world limits warming to 1.5°. And even then most of the reef will be gone. Yet Australia is a country that basically has no real climate policy at all, they still plan for decades of new(!) coal extraction.
Berners-Lee invented the web while working at CERN on organizing scientific information for collides and stuff.
> The stage was being set for the invention of the World Wide Web, and future history books will recount how, almost alone, Sendall supported the pioneering work of Tim Berners-Lee, then working in his group. After reading Berners-Lee's prophetic 1989 proposal for what would become the Web, Sendall wrote on the cover "Vague but exciting", and added at the end - "And now?" The rest is already history.
The Superconducting Supercollider would have had to figure out how to deal with fire ants (apparently the magnetic fields attracted them).
That's the kind of really useful technology that spins out of projects like this.
Me either and often the technology you get on the back of it doesn't show up for decades and decades anyway.
Usually big projects tend to need to be conservative and use off the shelf available materials (just in clever ways).
Sabine's big point is not that we shouldn't do basic science, it's that we shouldn't do bad basic science; that is science that isn't driven by hypotheses. Historically in science you would create a new model that agrees with current facts, but makes an prediction that some unobserved event X would be observable. You build your apparatus or design an experiment to observe X, and then confirm of reject the model.
In the case of a bigger collider, what is X?
This quite mistaken based on what I've read. Historically NASA hovers at around a 10:1 ROI. SpaceX would not exist today without the huge benefit of all the material NASA has published historically.
MRI may not have come from colliders, but modern medical imaging absolutely has benefited from these projects. There's a researcher that commented in a sibling thread with specific benefits to their project.
> In the case of a bigger collider, what is X?
Here's a quick summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q
I suggest you look at what was spent on the Space Shuttle, which turned out to be non-reusable (it was re-manufactured after each flight for up to a year.) No ROI there.
Fun facts: NASA knew from the very first flight that they were losing several tiles during launch, and no tiles were optional. Also, NASA managers were given photos of Columbia's damaged wing, which had a gaping hole in the leading edge, before re-entry, and sat on them. I wouldn't fly a Cessna 152 like that.)
https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html
That and the ISS sucked most of the funding out of US space research and is still going on.
My constructive suggestion? Take a chain saw to the ISS on the next "mission."
Unless we made a trillion dollars on that bungled program alone, still not seeing ROI:
https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-ig-iss-cost-u-s-75-b...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/197600...
In addition, that was pre-bungled Space Shuttle and ISS programs. Even the GAO is reticent to talk about how much money was wasted in those programs in case future space programs would be immediately cancelled due to gross mismanagement.
2) If you're a scifi fanboi, just admit that you support whatever wasteful spending NASA does. But don't hide behind obfuscated numbers that you haven't read and don't understand.
Your second point goes beyond the bounds of civility here.
That would be an argument to start even sooner rather than later or never. If you want to combat the usefulness of the research the only arguments you can make are that the results are not useful at all, or that they can be obtained cheaper, faster, or more reliably with other means.
The "it takes decades to bear fruit" works even against education. And I'm sure nobody would agree to be barred access to any tech that was the result of decades of research or simply took decades to reach market.
I'm also not a fan of this project simply because I don't think an incremental advance in colliders will bring anything new at all, certainly not because it will take too long to reach market. As the saying goes, you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. To achieve the next breakthrough we need something on a scale we're simply not capable of building now, or soon.
Maybe there are better ways to measure the tiny signals that hint at new physics, but the question is what we can do now. I would personally say its optimistic to assume we'll get a big breakthrough if we don't invest in the incremental upgrades.
LHC was justified as a search for the Higgs. The Higgs was found. Everyone was happy. Fine.
LHC 2.0++ is just banging rocks together for the sake of it. Something interest might fall out, or it might not.
But considering that we still don't understand quantum origins, have no clue how to make a theory of quantum gravity, and have no idea what Dark Energy is, or even if it exists at all, it might be better to spend the money on pursuing creative theoretical leads in those other directions and coming back to country-sized experimental hardware when there are some new theories to test.
Though the utility of a big collider would be in diversifying the types of decays observed?
All we need is one anomaly in the vast data processing. There are many things which are expected to be seen at higher energies. If they are not seen, it still says a great deal and will guide theoretical discussion.
Tell that to the hundreds, thousands, of valid scientific projects that cannot find funding. This collider, if built, represents not only a lot of money but those hundreds of smaller projects that didn't happen.
I once heard a physicist say that our society spends more on ring tones than it does fusion research. I suspect that this collider would yield an inverse. We will spend more on a narrow aspect of particle science than we do on vaccine research. More than on new antibiotics? More than on SETI? More than on detecting possible life in our own solar system? Particle science is great, but there are more efficient ways to spend billions.
But I can't imagine that throwing ever more billions into this particular very well funded science establishment is the best way to do it.
The fact is, highly trained people are fed by the government, which is turn steal that food from someone else, to research something of questionable value. All the effort that went into training those people, and the effort to feed them, and the good these people could otherwise do, may be wasted.
"We as society" (What does that even mean?) shouldn't spend effort on science. You as an individual should.
Surely you understand the concept of taxes? It's difficult to take this comment as a whole in good faith :/
It's an entirely different thing to steal from almost everyone in order to fund what most consider bullshit. You have no business even thinking about what other people should do with their time (remember, money is a proxy for time), just because taxes are a concept.
In any case, we should never forget that without advancements in fundamental physics we are going nowhere as a species. We might be able to come up with better refinements, better techniques, slightly better computers, etc. But sooner or later we are going to hit a physical limit, and we are going to need to seriously enlarge our fundamental knowledge corpus of how the universe operates if we are going to keep moving forward.
Here's the result of just one of the fishing expeditions I saw (Dr Murray is a saint: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pro.2339)
And even no result is a valid result!
Did we read the same article?
> New measurements brought up new puzzles, and they built bigger colliders until, in 2012, the picture was complete. 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. The scientific case for a next larger collider is therefore presently slim.
> Yes, one can hope. But there is no reason why the particles that make up dark matter or dark energy should show up in the new device’s energy range. And that is assuming they are particles to begin with, for which there no evidence. Even if they are particles, moreover, highly energetic collisions may not be the best way to look for them. Weakly interacting particles with tiny masses, for example, are not something one looks for with large colliders.
> And there are entirely different types of experiments that could lead to breakthroughs at far smaller costs, such as high precision measurements at low energies or increasing the masses of objects in quantum states. Going to higher energies is not the only way to make progress in the foundations of physics; it’s just the most expensive one.
There is no evidence at this point in time that we know all there is to be known at the next level energetic collisions. The whole idea that we are at the end of the line for particle accelerators smacks of huge hubris: we know all there is to be known. A similar sentiment pervaded the physics discipline about a hundred years ago and look where we've gone since then.
The worst part is that the LHC has been a success. You don't stop after a success. You stop because you've hit a dead end. The only way to know if we need a bigger particle accelerator is by building it and then either seeing or not seeing any results. After doing this we can definitively agree on never building another accelerator. Giving up after finding the higgs boson is like winning a bronze medal and quitting instead of going after the silver medal.
It's like saying, we landed on the moon by flying less than 400,000km into space, so why don't we fly 800,000km into space and see if we can land on something else? When in reality, everything we know about astronomy tells us the next nearest thing we could expect to land on is Mars, and that's 77,000,000km away.
I know we don't understand particle physics as well as we understand astronomy, but, taking Dr. Hossenfelder at her word that the Higgs boson "completes" the "picture" and that the theoretical "loose ends" would actually require "energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test", it sounds like we're a lot closer to Mars than to the next breakthrough in terms of particle colliders.
There were theoretical reasons to expect new results with previous colliders. I don't know that any similar reasons have been named here.
> There is no evidence at this point in time that we know all there is to be known at the next level energetic collisions. The whole idea that we are at the end of the line for particle accelerators smacks of huge hubris: we know all there is to be known.
This is a massive strawman argument to use, especially against someone like Dr. Hossenfelder who is a working physicist.
Even if we didn't get a physics result from a high energy collider, we'd have a few more generations of skillful and motivated scientists/ engineers. Perhaps there are more efficient ways to achieve that, but I think "a waste" is perhaps an overstatement; we lose something either way.
We don't know what we don't know, but one way or the other it's money spent on basic research and physics.
It's unfortunate that most of the general public does not understand how important it is that fundamental physics continues to advance. Advancing fundamental physics is the most important thing humans can do. It is not difficult to argue that the basis for our civilisation, that is, technology, would be impossible without the advances in fundamental physics. Some products of physics:
- Electricity (our ability to generate, store, and transmit it)
- Lasers
- Electron microscope (arguably, the great leap forward in medical research)
- Nuclear energy (arguably the cleanest energy available)
- WiFi
- GPS
- The internet (developed by Berners-Lee while at CERN)
- The semiconductor (the camera on your phone would not exist without fundamental physics)
- X-ray and Magnetic Resonance imaging.
- Radiotherapy to treat cancers
There are many others that we take for granted every day.[0] Even our understanding of DNA, the most significant discovery in biology, would have been impossible without fundamental physics in the form of X-ray crystallography. (and Francis Crick was a physicist!)
(It can also be argued that climate change, human suffering, and inequality can be directly solved if significant advances in fundamental physics are made: new powerful sources of energy like fusion or something else yet unimagined could transform our economic landscape entirely by driving the cost and harms of energy production and use down by large percentages. The Standard Model has revealed the structure of the atom, yet the benefits of this knowledge have yet to be broadly realised and applied to control matter at the sub-atomic level. There might be no practical limit to our ability to control matter! It might be possible to make wars (economic and physical) over resources irrelevant.)
[0]: Physics for an advanced world: A look at the vital contribution that physics research has made to a number of major technological developments https://www.iop.org/publications/iop/2009/file_38209.pdf
This is an alarming statement. I'm not sure on what basis you make it. Education seems to very much be a "you-get-what-you-pay-for" type deal. I'll assume that you know the comparative histories of educational policies in China, Russia, U.S.A, East Africa, so instead of rehashing those, let me give you a comparable sentence to yours:
"I would argue that the reason for all these life-saving surgeries is the increasing number of educated people (not only surgeons) in the world. So maybe investing this money into education is better."
fwiw. Having read Dr. Hossenfleder's book and others, I believe she is correct that we don't need another accelerator because the benefit for the cost just isn't there. Fundamental physics has stagnated. Other avenues of fundamental physics should be funded instead of being crowded out, urgently.
What I wanted to point out is: there is a trade-off in allocating budgets which are finite to different parts of society. If science gets a certain budget, I argue (like the original author) that new collider takes away a part of the cake from others. However you frame the sources of the money, the budget is obviously limited and can be directed in other experiments and ideas as well.
What prompted my response is defending physics through listing inventions. Ironically, the proposed experiment might never give any practical application, and it shouldn't in my opinion. The search for knowledge, especially as fundamental as this is enough. But this part of physics already appeals to wide audience and has great PR. There might be other parts that could use billions but are not as sexy to general public.
Any kind of social progress or social technologies that could alleviate human suffering, greed, or solve problems of tragedy of the commons would be much more interesting.
Technology simply allows us to be more effective at what we already are doing, doesn't make us better people.
I can't even begin to calculate how many hours of humanity has been saved by the breakthroughs and technology that physics has bequeathed us.
Whether we build another giant particle accelerator or two (reminder: Not only CERN is interested, but China is already well down that path) is almost irrelevant if we don't fix our pollution and destruction of the ecosystems that allow Homo sap. to live comfortably (or, possibly, at all).
Figuring out how to do that economically and at scale includes a number of research problems. How do we generate power, produce concrete, do metallurgy, transport goods, fly airplanes, etc. without greenhouse gas emissions? How do we capture and sequester greenhouse gas emissions? How do we develop closed-loop sources for chemical fuels? How do we store energy in the power grid?
Perhaps what you meant was that we have the technology to do it without completely abandoning industrial civilization--though maybe people will have to sacrifice some things, like eating meat, driving private cars, or living in climate-controlled private spaces. And maybe that's an easier sell. But it's also a false dichotomy. Developing the technology to reach higher levels of carbon neutrality more quickly and more economically can and must happen at the same time that we do what we can today. Building more renewable power generation can happen at the very same time that we prototype carbon capture systems for natural gas power plants, battery-electric vehicles, or Sabatier-process closed-loop carbon-neutral natural gas production (which, incidentally, is also something we'll need on Mars). We can build Generation III nuclear plants now while researching Generation IV nuclear plants to build later. We can work now on making all of our technology more energy-efficient while developing fusion power to deliver unlimited, carbon-neutral energy for generations to come.
However, the reality is that people like the current situation and prefer government intervention in favor of carbon emitters. This unfortunately leads to situations where subsidies to e.g. coal based electricity generation have to be matched by subsidies to zero carbon electricity generation just to have any impact at all.
Alternative technologies already exist but there is no reason to use them because conventional technologies are blessed by the government. Of course you can forcibly pump money into them and eventually get the result you desire but only at a higher cost.
In Germany people absolutely disliked the idea of a revenue neutral carbon tax where every tax payer would receive a share of the collected tax back at the end of the year. Instead the government introduced a minimum price on CO2 certificates which is basically the same thing except it is not revenue neutral but hey at least it's not a "tax" so the uneducated mob won't come after you. People think they understand taxes but when you show them something "complicated" like a cap and trade system they suddenly don't understand a single thing.
It's specifically about 'don't spend more money on X' (X being larger particle colliders) than about the specific examples A, B, C, of alternatives it mentions (climate research center, epidemic studies).
But yea, if we do our jobs, its work will be less significant. Let's try to make that happen.
She's not arguing for stopping scientific research, but finding more optimal ways to do said research. She has continuously been pointing out that the particle physics community behaves like a cabal. There is little if any progress or evidence of future progress yet they keep increasing costs and forging ahead with their -surely by now flawed- interpretation of scientific research.
Sabine Hossenfelder outlined a lot of unexplored scientific areas that are ripe for research and proposed a lot of alternatives.
The main issue is clearly the sunk cost fallacy. At some point, scientists need to cut their losses short and re-align themselves with more promising avenues. The reproducibility crisis and string theory debacle proves that scientists are not immune to biases, short-termism and self-serving behavior.
From what I followed, the debacle was rather with supersymmetry. And even though, the research in this domain stimulated the development of new mathematical tools.
Finally, as with all failed research, it would have been pretty hard to rule it out without trying to search it before, so this negative result is as much positive result in favor of rival theories.
(maybe super-asymmetry ;)
People keeping saying this, but we haven't been permitted to dig a single new tunnel since 1983. Multiple proposed colliders have been shot down, with the US's attempt defunded in the middle of construction. The LHC doesn't even have its own tunnel; it was put in the 1983 tunnel to save money. To save more money, the LHC is going to run for another 20 years, so any future collider's tunnel won't be dug until 2040 at the earliest.
That is a nearly 60 year gap between new tunnels, which I find incredibly depressing. What I find almost incomprehensible, though, is that the people who successfully argued to defund earlier proposed colliders now argue to defund the next one on the basis that our field is progressing slowly! I wonder why that is?
The most important reason is that there are already lots of people living a nice small-town life on the surface, and erecting a giant, dangerous ring would wreak havoc. It would require land rights, cut towns in half, split highways, trigger lawsuits, and probably end up costing more money and time than just digging.
Moreover if you didn't find anything around ~10 TeV you could make convincing theoretical arguments based on the Hierarchy problem you wouldn't find anything at 100 TeV or even 1000 TeV, the next energy regime where you might think you could find things would be something like 10^9 TeV where microscopic gravitational effects would become visible.
Of course you are already near the limits of human engineering building a ~10-100 TeV collider. The only way you can probe higher energy would be in astrophysical processes or maybe cosmic rays.
The other option is instead of going for higher center of mass energy you go for rates and try to channel high luminosity beams and do ultra precise measurements of physical parameters and try to deduce significant deviations from theory. That's the idea behind the ILC, electron beams are clean and with a linear collider you don't have synchrotron radiation background to worry about. Another way is the any number of fixed target neutrino experiments. Basically you setup an extremely sensitive detector somewhere with low background, like the bottom of a nickel mine and you wait to detect a once in a blue moon neutrino that interacts with the nucleus of an atom. But they too haven't found significant deviations from expectation to the best of my knowledge in recent years.
All in all, I think high energy physics is in kind of a funk. Don't get me wrong, the technology of the modern world, including much of the big data techniques, what is used in the Big N tech companies was pioneered in particle physics but as a scientific field we are in kind of a funk.
The LHC was supposed to guide the direction of theoretical research by excluding some and supporting other ideas but in the absence of any new discoveries the field is kind of without a clear direction. You have to have a strong theoretical argument for why you want to build a bigger collider.
Generally, in tech it feels like we keep eeking out small improvements in efficiency, but there is nothing that jumps us up a level.
But also:
* govs and central banks all over the world are printing money like crazy so the economy doesn't tank
* important research projects still battle for funding
* climate change battling measures, like building clean power plants and storage, are not built at large enough scale because money is not there
Where is all the trillions going? Stock market and real estate? Cool. Do we get any value out of it? Is pensions funds all that matters anymore?
Right now, we don't even know if humanity as we know it will be around in 100 years to reap the potential benefits of particle physics knowledge.
Regarding climate change, do we need more research? I don't know but it seems like if we're going to divert funds then maybe it should be toward action at this point.
[1]. https://youtu.be/WIMGAFL8DVk [2]. "the simplest assumption is no assumption" [3]. "an entity exists if it is useful to explain observed phenomena"
This reminds me of all the people that think we should stop all nuclear energy research because we have Wind, Solar, and Hydro.
What if I want energy somewhere where those things are in short supply / don't exist at all (say, space?).
Building it serves two purposes: if either demonstrates that there's no new physics (within easy reach), or there is new physics. Both will trigger research for decades, regardless.
I don't think human knowledge and striving for it should be reduced to a question of what the practical benefits of it are - that sort of thinking didn't put man on the moon.
So overall, not a very well argued position from my perspective.
But to your question of why to spend on them, it's because it's going to cost us a lot more (and not just money) down the line if we don't address it.
Cf. "opportunity cost"
That reminds me very much of G. H. Hardy. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy#Pure_mathematics
I am generally against gov. spending, but it doesn't seem much compared to the waste on other industries.
Similarly for space exploration (even if we weren't in need of a contingency plan) to know what's out there and satisfy natural curiosity.
If there were projects to answer "what is our purpose for existence?"/"why do we exist?" or "do we exist?" I'd fund them too.
...and still there is no viable way to get rid of plastics out of the ocean, on how to treat Nuclear waste that remains active for centuries or how to get rid of the CO2 in the air. Not to speak of Nuclear fusion which would solve at least the CO2 emission side. Physics that was once new actually enables solar power, optical trash sorting with lasers and what not. New Physics could advance quantum computing which in turn could enable better weather simulations. The whole arguments seems pretty short-sighted and anti-scientific to me...
By this logic we can spend infinite money on infinite wants, but this is simply not true. Money spent on one project forces there to be less for other projects. As such it's reasonable to consider opportunity costs for a project.
Yes I know that what I propose is impossible right know, but it makes me cringe that we are such an irrational species...
23 billion is nothing for a project that has 23, mostly western European, member states paying for it. The GDP of Switzerland alone (which has a population of only 8.5 million) was around 700 billion in 2019.
Climate change is not going to be solved by an “International Center for Climate Modeling”. That is so completely nonsensical that I didn’t even thought it worth pointing out. We already have climate models – that’s how we know we have a problem.
Also, we have solar, wind, hydroelectricity and nuclear fission already. The first two could be refined a lot. The last one I am not a fan of but it’s either that or coal in many places. THAT is what’s going to solve our energy and thus climate problems. It will also solve some longstanding geopolitical problems as a bonus (no more western money for the Saudis).
That being said, nuclear fusion could be developed much faster (than ITER is) with the right minds and organizational structure behind it. Just look at the Space Launch System (SLS) which still doesn’t exist, has cost 20 billion already and whose ultimate goal is throwaway rockets vs. what SpaceX has done with a fraction of the money, faster.
Then there’s individual transportation which is being solved right now with electric cars and batteries. Both of which are just at the beginning of their development. More interesting to me however, is the loss of energy through badly built homes that have almost no insulation at all (U.S. and Japan come to mind).
Hossenfelder rhetorically asking “why, you may have wondered recently, do we not have a center for epidemic modeling” is the worst kind of pandering to the fears of the people at this moment. It’s also wrong because epidemic modeling has been done for a long time at many universities and the pharmaceutical industry.
Hossenfelder says a lot of extremely idiotic things in her piece but “the potential rewards are unclear” is on my number one spot: The potential rewards in experimental science are always unclear – that’s one of the key characteristics of experimental science.
The only point she could potentially have would be the one about inertia in funding. That’s something I don’t see into as I don’t work in that field. Given, however, how ill-informed and, I have to assume, ill-intentioned her other twaddle in that article is, I would rather hear that information about funding problems from a more trustworthy source than her.
Do we make one which girdles the world? Do we disassemble the planets and encircle the Solar System for the one after that? Why not the Milky Way? The Local Group?
Or are these side-effects more elusive, and the only way to generate them is to let smart people play with a problem?
The STS was an unmitigated disaster for everything associated with getting space-related things done. It sucked up all the money and gave net nothing back.
A big collider will be good at soaking up budget with not much detail oversight needed, but will not deliver new insight. For that you need one a hundred times bigger, say straddling the moon. Which we would be better-equipped to build today, if not for the Space Shuttle.
Certainly there are power requirements, but that is solvable. Same for structural rigidity, etc.
Would there be any advantages of such a thing?
Stop the obsession with quixotic physics quests. Spend the same (or more!) resources on apied science focused on climate change, pandemics, longevity, clean energy, etc. Far more rewards in that direction.
Well, yeah, because they're advances in medicine…
“WILLIAMSBURG DOESN'T NEED A SPACE ELEVATOR!”
[1] https://boingboing.net/2005/02/01/brooklyn-residents-j.html
I can't comment on whether it's needed or not.
But now is a great time to build it. War is the natural state, not peace, so a major international project like this should be done while possible.
To balance the risk that little new is found, a rider could be attached to fund 10 small(er) projects. That would also allow continuous research while the new collider is being constructed or undergoing maintenance.
Oh, wait, the "people" funding it are actually governments who fund research using other people's money. That might explain why so much expensive nonsense like colliders or Neanderthal genomes is funded! Maybe we should change that.
If you had 20 billion euros, you're telling me you can't buy anything else more productive for physicists to work on with it? It's 20 billion euros. You could buy a small country with that.
There's no recipe for that - it's a gamble. The amounts of money that are spent in science have been increasing rapidly for decades to great proportions, but there's no law that says that the returns won't be diminishing.
Also, covid has been politicized and nationalized so you 're not likely to see a concerted effort , even if it costs way more that way. Human crowds it seems are not wise enough to be efficient.
Of course, that's the best-case scenario, but the way progress goes has always been quite impredictable.