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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

I do not know if building colliders should be considered increasingly futile.

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.

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"First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality"

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.

> at least not for a long time

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.

While I sympathize with this viewpoint, as a physicist I think there is a fairly persistent misunderstanding in the public about just how disconnected current particle physics experiments are from application to everyday life.

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).

Does quantum computing count as particle physics? It seems like this may be the future of computing.

It's speculation that it will ever be practical for computing, let alone in the near future. And even then I'm not sure how much that'll be related to recent experiments in high energy particle physics.

The experimental platforms that I am aware of that are been used to try and build quantum computers are based on condensed matter physics (superconducting junctions), atomic physics (trapped ions) or photons (quantum optics). None of this involves particle physics. The theoretical side of quantum computing, while a rich and deep field on its own, is an application of quantum mechanics and does not share any deep connection with particle physics.

Quantum computing will never be the future of computing. If we manage to make it work, it will at best be something like a TPU: a specialized processor for accelerating specific tasks. It will always be faster and easier to build more powerful classical computers than an equivalently fast quantum machine.

Eli5

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.

Do you think it's likely that any of the post-60s particle physics will lead to new useful inventions? Any idea what they might be or where I could read about them?

I don't know of any promising prospects.

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).

In a sense though - that's what we should have been expecting all along. Particle physics may have had surprises for the experts along the way, but what it did not have are hidden ways to use those newly discovered particles without those huge energies; and similarly for the weakly-interacting stuff.

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.

The hope is that a fundamental discovery will open the door to many other discoveries which could lead us to an understanding of ways to transfer energy between fields in new ways.p Making a Star Trek warp drive may be the only way for humanity to leave our galaxy.

True, but if we continue on our current trajectory (climate change, social inequality), we won’t make it to that future. While I understand, we have enough curious people to invest many long-term possibilities and theories, I do think we should focus more on current pressing concerns when we decide on such a costly project. I can’t help but think of the possibilities of building renewable energy, sanitization for the parts of the world that has been historically and systematically left behind.

Expanding on your second paragraph, off the top of my head I can cite superconducting magnets and high temperature superconductors, both of which have benefitted from funding/interest related to large particle accelerators. Now you have companies building tokamaks with this technology.

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.

Thank you for expanding on this -- I agree with all of these points. There is a real and tangible, albeit in this case indirect, value to have highly skilled people try to push that boundaries of what is possible technologically. It is easy to forget that the world-wide-web itself had its inception in at CERN -- an institution whose focus is particle physics.

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).

Oh yes, good point about the Web. I know there’s a lot of cutting edge research on storage and computing distributed across the world to handle the sheer amount of data coming out of the LHC. It’s not implausible that this could help improve the Internet’s architecture.

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.

It was lost in the US after the supercollider project was cancelled in the 90s.

That's the same argument as weapon developers use, and weapon development contributed much more to fundamental physics than particle accelerators. The majority of funds after the WWII flowed to physics thanks to the nuclear arms race.

So what's your point? The weapon developers are correct of course. But the difference between weapons and super colliders is that super colliders are designer to help humanity instead of destroy it.

I can assure you weapon developers also think they benefit society. They usually say: WWIII did not happen only because of nuclear weapons. The question here is, what would benefit society more, spending said $21B on virology research or on a collider? Or maybe if you spend $21B on AI research, the computer will solve all the remaining theoretical problems of string theory in 0.21 s.

Of course weapons benefit society. I didn't say they didn't...

I agree with you that the current physics output from the high energy experiments are far removed from practical usages today, and that this has immense value in itself. However I feel that you downplay the value of the developed hardware and (especially) software required to perform these experiments.

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 ++.

You're probably right that my statement about "indirect" applications was a bit strong. I agree that there are numerous applications some fairly direct (like medical physics) and some very indirect (like the WWW) that have come out of work in particle physics.

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.

You may be right, but it may be a distinction of low relevance.

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.

If that's the reason one wants to continue funding particle accelerators -- and it's a good argument -- then one needs to make precisely that argument (and not the argument made a few levels up by the original poster).

Sorry, you’ll have to disambiguate. Which argument should not be made?

Sorry, I didn't realize how nested this had gotten; this statement:

> 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).

It’s not clear to me why we should make the distinction between what we write down in the model of physics, and what we write down in the engineering science books as a result of these endeavors.

What does it mean to distinguish these two?

I agree the distinction can get a little fuzzy at the edges, i.e. for technologies that, while not dependent on frontier physics, would only have been developed in the pursuit of (say) building a larger collider.

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.

Ok, but isn’t the premise of this line of reasoning flawed?

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.

> Ok, but isn’t the premise of this line of reasoning flawed? We didn’t know what our understanding of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics would enable in advance.

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.

I think that’s fair, but it cuts both ways.

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 was surprised to see in recent years quite a lot of applications of neutrinos in imagery. E.g. in geology, to visualize the inside of monuments (e.g. pyramids) without opening them, etc.

Muon detectors are also application of particle physics. I will not be surprised if we’ll see more exotic particles being used, maybe in some areas of manufacturing, as a convenient carrier of certain energy. Particle colliders are the way to develop accessible technology for that purpose.

Arguably the particle accelerator technology is useful for free-electron lasers, to the point where Globalfoundries wanted to base their next node shrink on an FEL-based lithography process.

I believe there is. Observed universe shines on us in a broad spectrum of electromagnetic and gravitational waves and particles, so knowing it well and expecting what may come from it is important, because we utilize more and more of this spectrum. If you build a neutrino detector, you are looking at the whole universe and trying to separate your own signal from the background. In space some strange recurring radio signal may interfere with satellite communications, you may need to distinguish it from something else. It’s all practical right now, even if we are not yet building machines to exploit some new physical law.

That comment doesn’t reject getting applicable results from physics research nor does it claim it didn’t have such outcomes; it says the amount of expected applicable results should not be the (sole) number to use for deciding whether to fund research.

I wonder how faster we would get those innovations if we were actively trying to invent them.

What innovations are you talking about? To actively progress towards something you have to know what that something is.

I agree with this. Half the battle is knowing that something is possible. Once that step is complete you can replicate it and continually improve it.

That's not true for MRIs. MRIs came about after the technology was hashed out for NMRs, which were in the beginning largely useful for petrochemical and food science research. (Superconductors for supercolliders came after those) A good chunk of the fundamentals of those came about because of the bomb project research, and the basis of quantum mechanics is not based on idle speculation about fundamental nature of reality, but because of a real discrepancy in our models that clashed with predicted outputs and generated observable predictions (ultraviolet catastrophe through to the double slit experiment). Sabines point is that there are currently no major measurable unexpected predictions or useful experiments that are probable with colliders in the proposed size range.

I resent that comment; the way it typically goes engineers make something work and then an endless parade of scientist comes up with increasingly irrelevant explanations while engineers move on to the next challenge.

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

STRONGLY AGREE. We need to change education where kids get into building, doing, solving and making.Why cant we have a system that brings high school kids into hospitals, factories, research labs, as well as water treatment plants, electricity generating plants, construction sites, etc. As a result of COVID, a lot of work is done online. Why cant PR departments dumb down the content and include schools? Lots of interesting stuff is done on YouTube . Imagine if it were organized along these lines.

Better and more practical education for children sounds great. What exactly has that got to do with disliking spending money on science? There's no reason not to have both.

“Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination.”

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.

> What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard?

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.

>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.

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.

And this is the problem with climate change models, they are just models. And get changed to suit the narrative thats currently being portrayed.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dozens-failed-climate-pr...

All this based on models, and look how wrong they where.

All non-random decisions are made against models of the world. Some of those models are more detailed than others. All detailed models are made by people who care a lot and have interests at stake. It's not possible to make decisions outside the context of a narrative.

exactly, so why believe climate models? They are biased one way or the other?

Why believe any model?

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.

> 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.

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.

Let's not make this a choice between colliders and "something good for society". We have so many other things we could take resources from: social media apps, fashion, luxury industry. Only when all of the parasitic industries are gone can we think whether we need a new particle accelerator, or, say, a new DNA sequencing technology.

However those are all private enterprises? Are you saying that we need to eliminate privately owned assets/capitalism?

"First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality"

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.

Surely those 10K construction jobs could be used to build things with much more relevance, maybe things to reduce / mitigate climate change.

Resource allocation is a moot point when it comes to CERN projects because CERN manages their own funding and they have one mission, to do particle research. The fact that they manage their budget is exactly why they can do things like big accelerators, unlike the United States who destroyed their half-way dug accelerator before it even came online. And besides that, CERN is literally the only place on Earth with the foundations for this kind of research.

If better models of climate change allow us to predict more precisely what will happen, we may be able to get people to care more. If we can say with a high degree of certainty that City X is going to see 4.5x as many terrible hurricanes every year, then the people of City X may have a more vested interest than if we say "there will probably be more hurricanes".

The counterexample is Australia.

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.

That is an excellent counterexample. It defies comprehension.

The problem is that nobody cares about your model. If it's too grim then people will refuse to believe it. If it's too optimistic people won't do anything.

> 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.

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.

> First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality

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.

So is that an argument now to stop basic research? That we can't even look across the horizon of our own lifetimes anymore? Even the Romans thought bigger than that.

Is there an actual theoretical question that will be answered by an even bigger collider, or is it just, “let’s see what happens?” It’s not a question of whether basic research is fundamentally valuable but rather whether building larger and larger particle colliders will deliver diminishing returns in exchange for increasing costs.

It's just "Let's see what happens" - and that's why it's a bad idea.

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.

Today the axion is the new hypothetical fundamental particle that coincides with the status that had the Higgs boson two decades ago. It may very well be the next milestone.

What's the particle energy range needed to make an observation about axions?

Pretty tiny: 10−5 to 10−3 eV/c2

Though the utility of a big collider would be in diversifying the types of decays observed?

Banging rocks together has been a very fruitful method which is always limited by the technology. Many physicists believe that the rock banging should be an ongoing exercise which itself guides the theoretical directions. They also believe that there is an almost guaranteed chance of finding something, if their advances to higher energy are achieved.

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.

Not what I meant, I was agreeing with the sentiment that we shouldn't stop doing science because it has no immediate application.

> the technology you get on the back of it doesn't show up for decades

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.

As a counter point, the gravitational wave discovery came about because of incremental upgrades to the detector. We don't know whats beyond that noise floor.

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.

I didn't want to imply that incremental updates in general aren't useful. Just that many physicists' educated assessment (guess) is that new physics and new particles require energy levels that are out of reach right now, substantial higher than this new accelerator's. So now the expected outcome is to give a more detailed look for a slightly better understanding of what we already know, with a hefty price tag. This cost/benefit is where the current controversy comes from.

That's a big lie, it's extremely rare for big projects outside of wartime to create downstream tech that is generally usable. The big ones that are often claimed (Velcro for NASA and MRIs for the supercollider) are definitely lies.

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?

> That's a big lie, it's extremely rare for big projects outside of wartime to create downstream tech that is generally usable. The big ones that are often claimed (Velcro for NASA and MRIs for the supercollider) are definitely lies.

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

> Historically NASA hovers at around a 10:1 ROI.

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."

I am aware of the design failures of the shuttle and their consequences. This does not invalidate what I said about the net historical ROI of NASA. Please go research a bit more.

Over $110 billion has been spent on the ISS through 2020, excluding international partners. (It makes me want to vomit when I read that. That's 5 new CERN super-colliders, where you know, real science is done.)

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...

Again, you're cherry picking things. Just google nasa roi please.

1) I found the reference from 1976 you're referring to, which is so misleading as to be false (note the cumulative arithmetic in Table 5. Trees don't grow to the sky.)

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.

Let me make sure I have this straight. Trees don’t grow to the sky but we should have built five more colliders instead of a unique zero gravity research laboratory?

I was not referring to this source. It's a well known general observation with support from multiple researchers.

Your second point goes beyond the bounds of civility here.

I disagree with every premise in this comment.

>> 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.

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.

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