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Comment by robonerd | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't the same be said for particle physics? The accelerators and detectors seem very high tech.

No, not if take her at face value. She’s saying particle physics has built a framework where the goalpost can keep moving.

It’s become a bottomless trap of sorts.

Given that resources—money and bright minds—aren’t infinite, she then proposes that there are other areas of research that received less attention and are ripe for discovery.

The LHC computing infrastructure is also quite impressive.

And CERN is literally the reason we're here on th Web right now.

That's a huge stretch. CERN might be a reason we have the web that looks like it looks today, but we would have something similar with or without CERN.

We might be stuck with compuserve and AOL.

We had the internet before the web, and we had gopher. So we had an open network, the client server model and links. What the web brought was a more flexible protocol and document format. That was important, but there's no way we'd have been stuck with compuserve or AOL.

Do you remember the time when messenger services were open to third party clients? You could actually talk to all your friends using only one app!

Those days have ended.

Do you remember the AIM/MSN wars, where AOL was literally building buffer overflows into their protocols to prevent MSN messenger from interoperating?

There never was a golden age of interoperability on the internet, at least not after HTTP. Maybe there was a lot of cooperation when it was purely academic in the late 70s and 80s. BBS operators often were cooperative. But commercial internet has always and forever been cutthroat.

I could not talk to all my friends on only one app, as the vast majority of people were not online. If anything, a far larger number of people are still on open services today than were back then; there are just even more people on locked down services.

But why you brought this up in a discussion about the invention of the web, I have no idea.

Do you remember Microsoft's Blackbird:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)

We may well be stuck with the equivalent of those again, only we'll call them Google and Facebook.

We had gopher and SGML before and independently of CERN. The internet was just starting to take off; dial-up modem BBS emigres were getting shell accounts at early ISPs around that time (I know; I had such an account and worked at such an ISP).

Just because TBL happened to work at CERN and have a need for hypermedia, doesn't mean that we wouldn't have the WWW in approximately the same shape in approximately the same time frame without CERN or TBL.

In an alternative timeline we could have had

[1] http://www.art.net/studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/hyperlook/ind...

[2] https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go... (with screen shots)

[3] https://libarynth.org/hyperlook (larger screenshots)

based on

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

running atop of whatever, maybe even

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project

[6] http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/homepage.html

instead of the bloat we have now.

there's a lot of learning potential in building one or two but after that you're pretty much just making them bigger. There's a lot of engineering and construction involved but the new ones are really just very expensive and huge without netting necessarily much in terms of engineering science. In particular if you consider opportunity costs. With the 23 billion(!) it costs to build the new Large Hadron collider you could fund 230.000 100k grants to young scientists. That's enough money to fund entire disciplines.

And that's important to keep in mind because money is a limited resource and what's relevant is where that money didn't go rather than just speaking idealistically about the potential benefits of a megaproject.

The technology used in the accelerator and the detectors keeps changing though. Particle accelerators today are quite different to those in the 60ies.

Also not sure where you got the 23 billions from. Total budget for LHC is less than 8 billion euros. And that's over quite a long time frame. The whole CERN budget is only 1.1 billion a year (and they run quite a few different experiments apart from the LHC). That's within a factor of a few of a major sports club!

I'm talking about the new collider (FCC), the LHC is already finished so there's not much point talking about its costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Circular_Collider

"There's a lot of engineering and construction involved but the new ones are really just very expensive and huge without netting necessarily much in terms of engineering science."

This is extremely false. The new engineering science required to make the incredibly strong magnets for each collider (newer colliders requiring stronger magnets) is one obvious counterexample.

Your comment about skill transfer is about as accurate as if you had meant going from "toy boat" to "Ever Given (the ship)".

The world spends about 2 Trillion dollars on military per year. 23 billion over, say, 10 years as a lower bound, is a per mille of that. NASA has a yearly budget of 20 billion, ~1/3 of which goes into science.

(BTW, with 100k, in experimental physics, you can't even pay for a postdoc at an US institution for a year)

That shouldn't mean NASA should get less money. But 23 billion for a world-wide, multi-decade project isn't that much.

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