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Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

Me either and often the technology you get on the back of it doesn't show up for decades and decades anyway.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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