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Comment by uaaiIbab | Hacker News Reader

Objectively, spending the money on covid research would be more beneficial than a particle collider. I don't see how anyone can even debate this. I know CERN doesn't specialise in that, but my question is why is our society so inefficient when it comes to spending money?

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.

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Spending on cern doesn’t mean not spending on covid research. So far cost per physicists hour at cern really has not been that crazy. Compare to space missions where often the physics teams are 2 orders of magnitude smaller...

> why is our society so inefficient when it comes to spending money?

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.

What if with this research we found how to manipule matter and energy at microscopic magnitudes and we can finally develop nanomachines? that could solve a large number of current health, construction and energy problems. Covid will be eventually solved, not like cancer of course.

Physicists are not Biologists. COVID may be higher priority, but COVID research opportunity can be easily saturated with money left over for physics.

We're already pouring huge sums into covid, that's likely near diminishing returns now. On the other hand, what would be really helpful is spending a lot of money on viruses that arent currently causing pandemics. There was a lot of research into SARS in the mid 2000s that lost funding when interest died up, and if we'd continued that work, we would have been so much better prepared to stop COVID, perhaps even with a vaccine already approved and ready to deploy. Pandemics spread faster than researchers work, and we should be investing in virology research and preparedness before theres an outbreak, not after it happens and it's too late.

Suppose you find a way to use some grand-unification energy source thanks to some new high-energy physics discovery. Then that would mean way more energy available to manufacture tests, medical supplies, synthetic coton and masks, electricity to perform new drugs research on computational models, etc.

Of course, that's the best-case scenario, but the way progress goes has always been quite impredictable.

A bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. Having physicists continue work using the current collider and literally spending the 20b on education, would be a better use of their money than this.

I understand your way of thinking, but if it had been meticulously followed throughout history, don't you think that almost no scientific research would have been made? Why should anyone spend time thinking when we have so much to do with our hands and readily available knowledge?

The difference is that most scientific breakthroughs didn't cost 20 billion euros. Not trying to be a smartass, i know the value of research without a certain end goal or outcome, i just think this is one exception where money is irresponsibly spent.

Why not abolish church tax exemption and do both?

Suppose we spend $20B to discover that the standard model remains intact. Then, physicists request $100B for the next supercollider, only to discover that the standard model remains intact. At what point does a society say “no” to future requests without being deemed “anti-science”? Without worthwhile results, economically, adderall enhanced physicists are no different than trailer park meth heads when they’re both eating government cheese.

But the standard model is already broken by known experiment results... Now is a race to affine results (or find more new phenomena) and navigate through the possible new theories.

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