Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
The short history of physics in TFA is spot on: Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise. This has been confirmed by numerous insiders, including by Hossenfelder as mentioned in the article, and Lee Smolin ("The trouble with physics") who is also a theoretical physicist.
Things have changed a lot since accelerators became a must-have for high-energy physics: Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned. I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations.
[1]: The industrial subsidy angle is not touched upon in TFA, but it is clear that there is a large number of people and companies making a good living from mega-physics, and talking to colleagues in the field, I get the distinct impression that it is not always they physicist walking in the front when asking for more machines.
Same reason why nobody was able to effectively compete with YC: it's a lot less work for VCs to fund a few "big bets" than find 100 good early-stage startups. The VC strategy is a lot less effective, but they still earn their fees no matter what
Perhaps it is reasonable to allow the money to remain unspent on topics related to physics! Spending has opportunity costs, after all; if these other experiments are not really the measure of the cost, then something else of value to society surely is.
I'm not sure there is a fundamental distinction here. The only difference is success: Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist. When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment.
It feels like nature itself is against physicists here.
Nope. It's the other way around. The most important theories from Einstein an Schrödinger were created to explain effects there were experimentally known. The ones where they predicted the effects first and found them later were much less impactful.
One of the reasons LHC was built in the first place was to try to detect the theoretically predicted Higgs boson.
Genuine question from an ignorant layperson: was confirming the existence of the Higgs boson not significant?
Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing. It's kind of weird because it was marketted as a success story to the public (and don't get me wrong, it was) but theorists were very confident that it was there by 2012. Thus far, it behaves exactly as expected according to the standard model and that is very dull.
HEP would have been left in a very funny position if we didn't find it. No Higgs Boson would have been fascinating from a theory perspective, but good luck trying to get funding for a new collider when you found nothing with the old one.
It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagine how intolerable the world would be if we'd chosen not to verify it.
I was under the impression that this was a smoking gun for something being off with the theory, a bit like the ultraviolet catastrophe that led to QM or the orbital aberration that was resolved by GR.
Well you would have needed the LHC to confirm that, too, right? As a totally uneducated person just remembering media and online discussion about it at the time, I think the most interesting possibility was the detection of entirely new particles, which didn't happen.
And in the run-up to the LHC, I think there was a lot of hope in the possibility of finding stuff, but maybe there's not as much hope now.
Significant would have been if they'd failed to find it.
And btw there is so much money around...we should not fight against different project but the spending that goes into science itself. LHC and NASA is really just a small drop compared to military spending (in the US).
https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/p...
(Most times, people don't know how to judge that, but high-energy physics really didn't impact anything.)
What is interesting, is that a lot of the fundamental physics theories were discovered by amateurs. Einstein was a patent clerk, for example.
Maybe we should work on democratizing data collection, and making more raw data available for people to work with. With the advent of cloud computing and on demand computing, maybe your hobby group could code up a an analysis and run it on AWS for a few hundred dollars and discover some new theory.
Couldn't the LHC be upgraded then to take advantage of this? Sounds like a much cheaper option. But I'm not a physicist at all so I'm sure I'm oversimplifying.
The fundamental limitations isn't the detectors or computers, it's the energies you can reach with a collider of that size. Yes you can completely retool the LHC, which will probably allow you to do slightly better precision measurements, but won't strongly affect the energies you can probe.
To get to really high energies you need to build bigger. As a (former) particle physicist, I am also a bit sceptical if going bigger is better; the LHC was a calculated risk, with the goal of finding SUSY, which was a very plausible theory at the time.
The FCC seems to be a shot in the dark.
There is the argument that if we don't build a bigger one now we'll lose a lot of expertise, but that feels like a knee-jerk reaction from the community.
It's a valid concern that must always be considered. It's the kind of thing that's been biting Intel in the ass for the past 7 years. Even if your decision is "we'll lose a lot of expertise and that's okay", it needs to be a conscious, well-grounded decision, otherwise that is a knee-jerk reaction based on your own biases and assumptions that could have significant, even irrevocable, consequences for the future.
Superconducting magnets enable much higher energies in smaller (granted, theoretical) fusion reactor designs than previously possible. Does the same not apply to colliders?
This is effectively a measure to maximize the output we can get from the machine, so to maximize the return in investment.
There’s a lot of debate in the field what should happen next. FCC is one possibility, but I’m personally sceptical (even though I work at CERN myself).
It seems to me there’s a clear need for a Higgs-factory as a follow up to LHC, but that doesn’t have to be a ring collider, a electron positron linear collider could fulfill this purpose as well.
These people are not some obscenely rich opportunists in power. They are working scientists, who draw public interest because they say interesting things and they are part of a larger discourse.
Now Hossenfelder isn’t known for her fingerspitzengefühl when it comes to criticizing others, but I have yet to find an instance where she doesn’t treat the subject matter with the utomst respect it deserves.
Isn't the main alternative LQG which is apparently a dead end?
In my opinion, we are hitting diminishing returns.. It's harder to learn new things now than ever before. You need big machines to do anything interesting?
Einstein wasn't a 'quantum pioneer'. Einstein was a proponent of classical physics and against quantum physics.
He of course fully knew that the world is quantum, not classical. His beef with the mainstream QM past the mid to late '20s was with the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein believed that a complete theory would have realism and so Copenhagen could not be the complete theory.
Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results.
Or are you seriously imagining that there is a cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret?
Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?
The idea of getting young physicists to do lots of research is not at all about ignoring the old knowledge. These young people will have gotten a PhD in physics. They will have absorbed a lot of the relevant old knowledge. The idea is that, because they came to this knowledge quite quickly, they have a fresh view on it. You simply get a different view on knowledge you build over decades as opposed to knowledge you learnt in a few years. This different view could very well lead to new and valuable insights.
There is not a "cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret". But there is a "group of people who have been doing high energy physics that want to keep doing high energy physics". It makes sense that they want to keep doing it, even if other approaches would be more fruitful. They have invested lots of time into it, and they might not even know about the other approaches. And doing 'more of the old thing' is a safe bet.
It's just that by now 'more of the old thing' is getting really stupidly expensive. And it looks to be a lot more efficient to try a lot more new things. Give the people with a fresh look on it a change to come up with ideas.
> Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?
These people surely do exist. But there are plenty of others out there that have ideas for 10 million dollar machines rather than 100 billion dollar machines. Try some of the 10 million dollar machines rather than only the 100 billion dollar machines.
I think many of the 10 million dollar machines are currently not being funded because that level of funding requires clout, reputation, and political acumen to get. This currently lies with the people who like doing accelerators. They don't like building non-accelerators that cost 10 million dollars, so they don't help the 10 million dollar machines as much.
That is not malice, these people aren't evil. They just like a tool that is getting inefficient.
This is coming from a forum where it's normal to see "something that already exists, but written in $newLanguage/Framework" as a thing to celebrate. So why not just redo science but with newShiny so we haven't actually achieved anything? /s
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Thats just how I read your comment to begin with.
In Steven Wrights voice.
"People ask me what I'm into... Low energy quantum physics... its basically everything"
The place is fantastic, you get to meet great people and life is cool.
But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity. Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere. If someone could answer to this "and so what?" in a meaningful way I would be glad to change my mind. For the time being, the energy scale we are making these discoveries is not useful.
"yes, but this is fundamental science..." → yes it is, but where does this fundamental science helps in everyday problems? Have we had a case where the Higgs boson changed anything in our life?
The quantum mechanics of the 1920's changed our everyday world. We could build a whole technology on it, and understand things that changes our everyday life. Is there a comparable impact on knowing that the Higgs boson is +/- 10^-9 (or whatever) aligned with the theoretical model?
We have so many problems where physics is needed (energy production to start with, and then exploring biology), the money should go there instead. Even if it means having less particle physicists the same way we have less philosophes.
PhD or not, this is an oddly utilitarian view of science.
I suspect there would be countless discoveries that never would have been made had we only ever weighed an experiment based purely on its ability to "help in everyday problems".
I mean, why, say, develop the theory of evolution? At the time that was irrelevant to "everyday problems". Today our understanding of evolution is valuable in countless settings, but at the time? At best it was an interesting exercise in trying to understand the natural world.
And yet by this reckoning we never would've bothered.
So would you have cancelled the moon landing program? In 2020 dollars that program cost over $257B (over $400B if you count related programs and costs)[1], and that goal--landing humans on the moon--has demonstrated very little utility.
The world wide web which we are currently using was invented at CERN. You can literally go look at the proposal manuscript.
We already had gopher. Web was an incremental step.
FTFY
Honestly, these are country budgets. That's not an insane amount of money. It is Germany spending $2bn/yr at the 5x inflated budget but $500m/yr at the estimated cost (23bn).
Also keep in mind that some scientific endeavors can make other ones much more productive, so prioritizing things correctly can increase the overall output by a large amount (and neglecting to prioritize things correctly can significantly slow output).
"Charles Darwin discussed how selective breeding had been successful in producing change over time in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species. Its first chapter discusses selective breeding and domestication of such animals as pigeons, cats, cattle, and dogs." (Wikipedia)
Darwin's theory of evolution was literally developed to explain the most significant food growing technique since irrigation. Seems very practical to the everyday problem of not starving.
Correct. The theory of evolution explained selective breeding.
But it wasn't needed to practice selective breeding, given it had been going on for literally millenia prior.
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...
But it doesn't matter. Lots of people all over the world were collaborating to build new Internet protocols.
> There are many known problems in physics right now. $100 billion could fund (quite literally) 100,000 smaller physics experiments.
$1M is a reasonable amount to build a prototype world wide web. There were 5,000 things like WWW we didn't do because we built LHC.
No, it was completely unrelated work of someone who happened to also be at CERN.
Still is.
However, I need the tools science gives me. I need scientists and mathematicians to think about how the universe and logic works, so that I can know how to make it work for people.
Quantum foam will almost certainly feature in some product down the line.
Edit: there have been some instances of engineers working out solutions before the science existed by trial and error (steam locomotives before thermodynamics, airfoils before those were understood), but knowing proper theory upfront makes it much easier.
Although I’ve spent a lot of my career working for a strong economy, I lean strongly toward the latter. The highest achievement of humanity is not cheap cell phone plans, it’s more like General Relativity, or the Moon landing.
What “use” is humanity? What is life for? Big questions for sure, and I won’t claim to have the answers. But I feel pretty confident that most folks believe there is more to life than squinting at everyday problems.
Daily quality of life is important but I think there is a deeper feeling about life that most people share.
"Is there a comparable impact on knowing that the Higgs boson is +/- 10^-9 (or whatever) aligned with the theoretical model?" perhaps there is! Might not understanding the fine points of the theoretical model help with something like a reactionless thruster? Could this unlock the door on direct manipulation of spacetime? Assist in devising exotic materials, like say some sort of stable muonic matter and opening up a whole new world of chemistry/solid state physics? The potential is staggering, and by nature is almost completely unguessable until it happens.
If the world followed the lead of yourself or the Sabine Hossenfelders of the world we might never know. The argument that this hypothetical collider can only be used to explore unconfirmable symmetry theories is simply false. The cost of such a facility is insignificant compared to the potential.
My back-of-the-envelope game theory perspective is that humanity should double down on all fronts, at all cost, to push these boundaries. The only impediment is the folks like you, mired in the present and seemingly unable to realize that the unimaginable results are very much unimaginable. Just as those lasers and transistors were 100+ years ago.
I hope I don't come off as confrontational, it is not the least my intention. It just sounds like you have seen both sides of this issue and maybe you have a deeper understanding you could share.
I have probably 100 or 1000 articles with my name as one of the 1000 collaborators of the project. I have no idea what they are about.
I loved my time in CERN because of the people and the insane possibilities you had there. I discovered Unix and this ultimately made me change my life, going to industry.
My friends who were working on solid state physics had much more impactful research, research that could potentially bring something to everyday life.
I was much happier working on biophysics research afterwards.
Physics today is dead in the practical sense, nothing is happening that sparks for in people's imagination. Compare this to biology where you hear about new discoveries everyday.
What makes that quote especially remarkable, and ironic, is that was the same Michelson of the famous Michelson - Morley experiment which [1] was an extremely important clue on the path to discovery that would lead rapidly to relativity, and then general explosion of discovery in physics to follow. Not only could he not even imagine the relevance of his very own 'discovery', but largely doubted his own results as the experiment was not intended to 'fail'!
The point I make is that so much of major advances in science have come about not through directed efforts but through some sort of serendipity. And it seems to me that observing what happens with ever higher energy collisions is one area where what may be important is not what is expected, but what is unexpected. It's also an area where there is no direct profit motive as contrasted with things like energy or what I assume you are implying with biology. Those fields will naturally advance because there's money to be made. Atom banging is generally not quite as lucrative an industry and, as such, various sorts of public funding tends to be much more important.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...
Also, nuclear power...
1930s — video image tubes
1940s — nuclear power, atomic clocks, transistors
1960s — lasers, fiber-optic communications, PET-CT scans
1970s — MRIsPeople had singular focus - not on the betterment of humanity in the abstract sense, but for primal SURVIVAL - because both sides believed that if given the chance the other would wipe them out.
This created a unifying focus (amongst two divided sides).
A lot of people have hoped for some event to unify humanity (like the space squid in the watchmen) towards a common goal again. Alas, COVID has shown that is just simply not possible any longer.
How can physics help to explore biology? At a first half of 20th century biology experienced a flow of physicist converting to biology and that had led to a transformation of a biology into what it is now and to a bunch of breakthrough discoveries, most notably the double helix (Francis Crick was a physicist). But I wonder what breakthroughs might happen now if physicists tried to boost biology one more time.
A bit myopic, eh?
We don't know which scientific advancements will result in practical applications or how long it will take.
But history is incredibly clear on this point. In general, scientific pursuits and the technological advancements required to carry them out bring about countless incredible practical applications over time.
In the long run, curiosity and interestingness are very good heuristics for worthwhile endeavors to pursue.
And developing the technology capable of making such precise observations has immense utility outside of the particular experiment that drives their invention. Even if superparters are useless, more powerful magnets are useful. Better sensors are useful. Better data processing technology is useful. And that stuff gets invented by the people probing to find superpartners.
I'm sure that 20,000 years ago some crazy shaman was frowned upon for trying to "melt rocks and see what happened", or "ate some weird/unknown/sacred plants" or "what if I push this seed into this little corner of land and look after it (water, sun, defend if against herbivores)"? etc, etc, etc?
How many things were discovered by ancient Greeks that only became useful in the last 100-200 years? The Sieve of Eratosthenes comes to mind - I can't imagine that was really helping anyone out until we had modern cryptography.
I find that hard to believe considering how much technical innovation came out of the space race that has had an impact on our everyday lives [0].
[0] https://www.aii.org/how-the-space-race-built-todays-technolo....
Devil's Advocate: Could that not also be said for many astrophysics discoveries including: - Edwin Hubble's discovery of the expanding universe and galaxies - Kepler's discovery of 1K plus exoplanets - Hubble telescope's ultra deep field
None of these are practical pursuits that provide us with new, widely used technology (or at least investing in them is not the most efficient path to said practical technology). Instead, they provide us context on where we sit in the universe. Starting from Copernicus, the constant realignment of our perspective that we are not privileged observers in the universe (disproving geocentrism, heliocentrism, and galactocentrism), have been essential to the development of modern secular humanism and providing us context on our purpose (or at least an effective tool to knock down foolish purported purposes espoused by dogmatic leaders).
So I guess I am taking issue with your narrowly defined purpose of science. What is an "everyday problem" worth solving through fundamental research?
If however, you include these philosophical benefits of fundamental science, then I agree with you.
"Have we had a case where the Higgs boson changed anything in our life?" I think nails that the reason why we shouldn't pursue a LHC++. It has neither benefits from providing us practical tools or new technologies to advance society NOR does it aid us in philosophically contextualizing where we sit in the universe.
If you restrict your view only to the particular targeted research in question you are missing much of the pie. Going to the Moon did not help the average person in their day to day lives on its own but numerous side technologies emerged as a result of the engineering and research efforts required to solve problems.
LHC and CERN as a whole have led to a number of technological improvements[1], even if the research goals themselves do not seem oriented towards anything an individual should care about today.
It is certainly possible that similarly funded fusion research or carbon sequestration research would yield similar technologies, it's not a given.
> But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity.
You simply can't know that. We don't know what we don't know and we are but babies when it comes to understanding and harnessing the universe. One cannot possibly predict how _fundamental science_ might impact our future.
> We have so many problems where physics is needed (energy production to start with, and then exploring biology), the money should go there instead. Even if it means having less particle physicists the same way we have less philosophes.
This is a false dichotomy; we have the resources for both and more. Perhaps a lack of willpower/grit/political incentives in some arenas, but none of that is insurmountable.
At least, in 50-100 years, we'll probably still have records of comments and articles like these, which will make it easier to say just how wrong people were about the importance of pure research. (If anyone is reading this in 2100, and it turns out the ROI on these research projects wasn't worth it, feel free to whisper "I told you so" to my ghost.)
All the know-how and human capital generated by these megaprojects along with a better understanding of fundamental physics is transferred into practical applications a few years later. I can understand how a physics phd might not be exposed so much to this aspect of the project, but the societal benefits are very real despite being hard to quantify and track.
God, people like you are the worst. You never know when something could be useful in the future and I think the assumption that fundamentally understanding the universe will never be useful is just absurdly ridiculous. But that's the besides the point, because understanding these things has value in and of itself simply for the fact that people are curious! Is it worth $X billion? That's a different question. But to say it's worthless is just absolute nonsense.
This is similar to astrophysics where you discover that a sun has planets. And do what. Are you going to go there anytime? Or use it to modify your own planet? You won't, and any dreaming won't change that.
White Rabbit alone adds a lot of value to humanity. Proper coherency of data flying around an Ethernet network is super handy when making a big complicated controller for a big complicated machine.
I also don't have the expertise to tell whether the article is being overly reductive with the project's goals: are there other questions (besides new particles) that can only be answered with a larger collider? The summary of the FCC (Future Circular Collider) project's goals indicates that yes, there are unresolved questions that the FCC will address[0].
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-69...
Investing the same money in something that has a known and positive primary effect will produce the same amount of secondary benefits. So if you can think of something more fruitful to do with these 100B, do that; the secondary benefits will keep coming anyhow.
A short story about the discovery of microscopes from https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/
Had the rich noble simply invested his money in doctors instead of the person with a hobby of playing with glass, they might have instead discovered more uses for leeches
Frankly, given the amounts we spend on things I fundamentally disagree with, I'd even say "sure let them have at it and let's find another 100B somewhere in the military budgets of the world, divert them to more research."
But even if you want to focus on "big, milestone" projects like the LHC[++] you can go for other challenges where you know that there's a tangible benefit to be had at the end.
Fusion research for example comes to mind. Hugely expensive, interesting, rewarding if successful, track record of secondary inventions.
I'm sure there are others. Off the top of my head, carbon capture and storage, better (more sustainable) battery/storage tech, elimination of rare earths in electronics, ...
There's no shortage of big, hard problems
Each avenue you keep open costs money and takes up people's time. You can't keep every avenue open. You have to decide -- with imperfect information -- which avenues are worth keeping open. And the entire thesis here is that the LHC++ is probably not worth it. You can disagree with that, but if you're going to do so because of possible secondary benefits, you have to take a crack at showing that those secondary benefits -- whatever they may be -- are numerous enough and worth enough to justify the money and time.
To quote the writer of the line uttered by the equanimous Jeff GoldBloom.
https://i.imgur.com/XpKoQIf.gif
Seriously, this is where 'black budgets' are a thing.
There is serious money pumped into the MIC and the secondary effects are far more than tertiary at this point. Dark breakaway.
How much is a dollar worth in space. Asking for a Musk of mine.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/ree/archives/archive08/usa/pr...
shrug. It's always hard to guess?
Except in reality you don't just get to take something like military money and just invest wherever you want. Military is something that can be funded politically for large sums. So the more likely choice is you get to fund military, with all the associated research and benefits, or you don't get those tax dollars to do anything with, or maybe just spend them on not science.
If it were possible to simply pour money into science/invention politically, then the budgets of NIH, NASA, etc., would not be as small as they are.
Building a one inch super conductor in a lab might be straightforward but cost a million dollars. That lab process doesn't scale to building seventeen miles of superconductor. The LHC needed 4722 miles of superconducting cable. Simply manufacturing that much cable led to advances in superconductor manufacturing and design. Even then the LHC's particular superconductors only work if you've got the operating budget to use liquid helium to cool them.
The money spent went into research to develop the components necessary for the design and then into the production of those components. The LHC wasn't some item picked out of a catalog. Many of its components only existed on paper when it was designed.
No one is just going to pump development dollars into some paper design and hope someone somewhere finds a use for it. The LHC's superconductors advanced the state of superconductors in general but no one was going to do that work without an end goal and a budget.
Military development ends up with a similar model. Requirements for a desired capability are given to a contractor and they need to figure out how to build it. Sometimes that development is easy and other times it's difficult and expensive. Contractors definitely make a profit and pad co tracts but that money does pay people to do things. The requirements and funding create a market for the development for technologies that meet those requirements.
We could definitely postpone this work and invest in more impactful work in the present. It might be worth reconsidering this once we've worked through climate change, energy consumption, and the drinking water crises we're facing.
By their nature, secondary innovations are not promised. Hence, researchers can get away with not "delivering" any, no matter how much they pitch the "possibility" when asking for funding.
The quality of researchers who will be working is another factor. Presumably it would be very competitive with LHC stuff. But I've seen research projects just become money black-holes as they just end up with unremarkable un-creative research staff who are just there for the paycheck and not competitive enough to otherwise get out of the academic comfort zone.
We also need BIG SCIENCE to solve global warming and many more issues.
Let's not narrow our focus on some fiscal numbers that are basically inconsequential for such a rich place as is the case with Europe.
Let's do the opposite instead. Let's bet on an actual vision for once again - I miss the 1960s!
at some point instead of more people crawling around in a tunnel around Geneva we need more people installing wind turbines on the sea.
of course real life is not some Sims game, the cost of switching from that to this is far from negligible (and of course ideally we would cut back on people digging up dead plankton, people wasting time in traffic while burning it, also military spending - but as the current real life example in Ukraine shows, sometimes shit does indeed hits the fan)
What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.
More realistically : we can only build one car in the entire world, where a tiny minority of people can even understand the potential benefit, and anything they see will be completely useless for everyone else in day to day life because we need a civilisation level effort to even detect the implications of their theory. If their theory had some real world implications - you wouldn't need this car.
And this is expected to be funded by everyone. It's the modern equivalent of building pyramids.
Let's think big indeed, the author unfortunately has a very reductive vision for the future.
Instead how about:
A renaissance of funding - BIG SCIENCE - education, jobs.
That was basically the promise of the EU - peace through wealth - let's create some more.
Let's bring back the excitement and scientific wonder of the 1960s. This could be a unilateral vision across the democratic spectrum (everyone wants wealth).
And yes, global warming actually should dictate no less. Let's do it now.
Oh and let's just fix poverty while we are at it.
Again, Europe has the means and could do all of that by itself.
I wish it was true, it would be much easier to convince people to have ten of them.
It seems like the car is a Bugatti Veyron and like there is a huge (exponentially growing) fronteir to explore. Exploring another 1000 miles in a very well studied direction seems less curious than pushing outward another mile over the entire frontier. Especially at the places that have gotten less attention.
'Doing more of the same but bigger' feels more like small thinking than 'lets try lots of things we haven't tried before'. To me the latter also feels a lot more curious.
Why is it zero sum to begin with? And more importantly, how less effective would be able to feed the world had we had no space race to begin with? If we were still at a 1950s technical level, our farming capacity would be exponentially lower, and most of the big leaps came as a direct result technologies originally developed for space.
It's naive to assume we can see all the benefits of daring to attempt hard things, but attempting hard things is what moves society forward. If all we did was lots of little cars in all directions when we have already figured out the challenges with little cars, mean the ONLY benefit is the direct one. If we've never built a car to explore REALLY far, well, there's a bunch of other problems we need to solve to get there. And honestly, it's those results that will likely move the needle.
Big science projects such as the LHC go very far and very deep in the very fabric of reality. Instead of building a thousand cars, it'd be a good idea to still build the next space probe while, at the same time, use what we learned building the previous one to build a couple cars to explore in different directions.
You wouldn't go to the north pole with a VW Beetle.
Same thing applies here, smaller cars that explore in all direction can probably find a local maxima and get stuck there.
$100,000,000,000 with afterthought of “sure lets see if we can do it less expensively *since its sooo annoying to some people”? Where is the line for you currently?
My read of the article was more a call for considering the practical uses of tge research. If we don't know what $100B worth of LHC will discover, why wouldnt we instead fund tens of thousands of smaller projects that often have very practical real world goals?
"Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's instead build an airplane."
The problem with next-gen LHC is that there are no guarantees of any new or interesting physics for that $100 billion. And particle accelerators are not the only way to spend large sums of money, so there is an opportunity cost. Why not spend that $100 billion to build more space telescopes or more sensitive LIGOs to detect gravitational waves, etc.
It appears we suspect there is a better way.
I don't think that's quite right. The big problem isn't that there is 'nothing left to discover' because we know there are interesting physics at higher energy scales. What we don't actually know if there is anything interesting at the energy scales that this particle accelerator could achieve. You could literally spend two decades building this, and in the end, all you would do is rule out a tiny energy-scale slice.
From the people who brought you compost fueled cars?
Of course, there are a lot of smaller experiments that one could do, also in particle physics, that have great value. One example was the Muon g-2 measurement, another is anything neutrino physics. We can get a lot of interesting input and test our theories without going to the "energy frontier". Physicists understand this very well. But there are a bunch of questions that you can only really answer if you go to those higer energies.
As for the costs, 100 billion is a lot, but not when you compare it to other large infrastructure projects, or especially military spending (and note the Chinese proposal SPPC would be a lot cheaper!). I think if we could shave off 100 billion of military expenses and put it into basic research, it would be a great win for society. That's not realistic you say, with all the threats out there? Great, I agree, but now we have a nice project! Lets put as a common goal that we want to be able to do this kind of research, and then improve our societies nationally and globally so that we can reduce our military spending and do this kind of research.
100 billion ($/€) is the amount that Germany is spending as a special budget in response to Russia's aggression, in order to become the nation with the 3rd highest military spending on the planet. If it weren't for the war in Ukraine, we could put it all into such a project.
If we had averted COVID in it's early stages - like we did with SARS-1 and MERS - imagine all the resources we could have put into research instead.
Alternatively, if one really wants to pursue beyond the standard model physics, it seems to me multi-messenger astronomy has a much better chance of delivering decisive data, so shouldn't we put that money into better observatories?
Because the only reason you have $100 billion to spend is that it's a large scale infrastructure project. And that money is trickling down to member states through contracts to a mix of businesses who hire white and blue collar workers.
It is equal part economic stimulus, political marketing and scientific research.
You can't just ask for the last part and ignore the first two.
Secondly condensed matter and quantum information already get plenty of money: superconductivity alone is a market worth around 5 billion dollars, google is spending billions of its own money into quantum computers.
But sure, lets give these starving fields that produce commercial products a some tax-payer dollars at the slight cost of completely de funding high energy physics, I'm sure that will get the scientist there to care about the proton despite them very consciously choosing to do something else.
the FCC is a project for the next 70 years. It is supposed to be operational after 2040 at the earliest if I recall correctly (20 years from now more or less), and to run for around 40 years.
So if you do a very simplistic calculation on the first 20 years : 100 B euros over 20 years over 20 countries (there is 23 member states into the CERN) it is 250 M euros / year / country. This is not even calculated on the over-all project time, on on the different steps that will be happening: first FCC as electron-positron collider and then much later FCC hadron-hadron collider.
And if you are really interested into the previewed outcomes (scientifically and new techs associated):
https://indico.cern.ch/event/1040535/timetable/#20220503.det...
You can take look at the European research communities symposium that just happened recently on the future of the research topics in Europe. There are a lot of information for FCC and so on.
The fundamental problem for high-energy physics seems to be the "tyranny of the standard model", as one of my professors called it. We know that our current model of fundamental particles must be incomplete towards extremely high energies (trillions of TeV), because it conflicts with general relativity. However, almost all experimental results are consistent with the standard model. There are some barely-significant [2] results from muon spin and W-boson experiments, but the effect sizes are minuscule and and two data-points are in no way enough to guide new theory development.
This leaves theorists with almost no experimental input, so they pursue purely mathematical ideas that are in some way elegant, able to describe the standard model as a low-energy limit, and in some cases include a description of gravity as well. But the more advanced and theoretical the ideas get, the more difficult it gets to make experimental predictions. The ones which predict non-standard-model measurements with current equipment are already ruled out anyway, because we did the measurements and the standard model just keeps getting validated.
So what should we do? We can hope that a larger collider will find new evidence of beyond-standard-model physics, but (as I understand it) there is no concrete reason why there has to be anything interesting in the newly-accessible energy region.
[1] As just one example from particle physics: Gell-Mann's "Eightfold Way", which uses advanced representation theory to describe hadrons and was successful at predicting new particles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_way_(physics) [2] Note that high-energy physics has an extremely high standard of significance at 5 sigma, so it's not comparable to "barely significant" in the social sciences.
We're stuck on earth for the foreseeable future, and building 2 more of the instruments we're already building won't do anything to resolve the problems high energy physics struggle with.
I'd find this article and its opinion more credible if it could point out how this didn't apply to the LHC. Was every discovery and technology that came out of the LHC predicted in advance? If not, then this argument fails.
Also, there's a mutual relationship between theory and experiment in physics. The LHC was well motivated by theoretical predictions (most notably the Higgs boson) that needed experimental verification. In physics you have to put your theories to the test, otherwise they're not worth much. Each experimental result is like a nail that fixes a part of your theory space (by excluding possible alternative theories), and that then allows you to explore the space further with greater confidence. Hence the more nails, the better.
If you say the second, you have severe scope neglect: 100k is a huge number.
Of course, one expensive experiment may be the right call in some situations, but only if you have good reason to think it'll pay off. Either because you're certain it will, or because the expected utility of unknown results is larger than the cost (expected utility being probability times value). This very much isn't the case here.
A bigger collider does not, in fact, have anything to look for, and so the only possible benefit it could yield is such "serendipitous" discoveries. But how many of those could there really be when you're essentially doing only one thing?
The point of the article is that the ridiculous amount of money, which a bigger collider would cost, is much better spent on a large amount of much more varied research activities, which do have concrete things to look for, but also have the potential for serendipitous discoveries. And since those activities are much more varied, the total potential for such discoveries would much larger as well.
Thats the point of discovery and arguably a point in favour of doing this
Heck, Germany just greenlit a €100bn special budget for expanding its military capabilities.
It's not that world governments don't have that kind of money to spend on the Climate crisis, it's that they aren't interested and motivated to do it. Germany's special budget was justified with Russia being an existential threat but the Climate crisis has been recognized as an existential threat for decades, yet almost all countries have been dragging their feet.
NATO recommends member nations put 2% of their annual budget into defense. Imagine its members (let alone most countries) would have done the same for combatting Climate change.
The problem is, politicians won't do anything because they are either bought out by the fossil fuel industry that is at the top of the CO2 emitter list [1] or because they are afraid of telling their voters that the only way to stay on track regarding climate change will be a drastic cut in their quality of life.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_contributors_to_greenhouse...
[2]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/13/fact...
These are the kind of questions we need answers to. Just saying 'we need to stop all emissions today' is not good enough. There is always a trade-off and we need to work out where this lies.
I'm all for the LHC, but it does seem like the world needs a bit better of an idea of the mysteries that the LHC++ might solve before spending $10-$100B on it. Does seem like science could be pushed further in other areas.
https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusio...
From what I can tell it's really is ground breaking, significant changes, well ahead of the normal projections for improved magnets. Literally with a single technology that allows magnet to be 40 times smaller. The easy to produce superconducting tape of arbitrary length is likely to find interesting applications as well.
Sure, like all research, practical fusion is not guaranteed, but it does look promising, and real progress has been made, and not just the "few % better this year" that might lead to real progress in a decade or a few centuries.
However Fusion is just an example, imagine 100 $1B projects, doesn't it seem likely for humanity to learn more from those then some particle that is hard to produce, last for a billionth of a second, and makes some models more likely and other models less likely? Maybe help with cancer, medicine, energy production, AI, space travel, faster computers, improving food production, mitigating global warning, energy storage or similar?
A particle collider does not, in fact, "solve physics" in any meaningful way, especially not in terms of practical applicability.
> if we solve fusion we have solved fusion.
The comment you are replying to has explained in some detail why this is not true.
It says to stop putting everything (or rather, a ridiculous amount of money) into high energy particle physics and start funding other experiments.
But elsewhere the author has advocated it with "fusion power is a goal worth spending billions on". And in his "Why Particle Colliders Will Go Extinct" article, he supports the billions spent on fusion.
The author's other writings include:
- Gun Ownership Neither Increases Nor Decreases the Crime Rate
- Fleeing Paris Accords Makes Scientific Sense
- NSF Should Stop Funding Social 'Science'
Interestingly, the most expensive ones are almost always highway systems. Can someone briefly explain why? I'm my naive view it's mostly asphalt and terrain work.
Highway systems create massive economic benefits that are relatively simple to calculate, just in the raw # hours saved which massively increases productivity. This can be well captured by the state through taxes or (less frequently) by private industry through tolls - i.e. the people that direct their construction.
Other mega projects have much less certain benefits, or the benefits are harder to capture by those with the ability to allocate resources because incentives aren't sufficiently aligned.
Thus the question I have to the scientists pushing for a new LHC is: "What would we get from the journey?" If they truly believe in the project they'll have a dozen technologies that need to be developed to make their project happen, all of which have practical applications beyond their experiment. If they don't they'll just be pushing for "same but larger" which is IMO a waste of resources. Because why shouldn't we be investing in the technology to do "Same but smaller" in that case so we can do more with less?
- It’s a lot of asphalt
- construction happens over a wide possibly remote area so all construction materials need transportation
- materials are probably made to order so you are buying effectively a lot of custom components
- engineering/architecture/construction talent isn’t cheap and there’s a lot of competing demand
- hiring is even more difficult as the job isn’t in one place may require a lot of travel, bed and board for all types of workers
- property itself is possible a significant cost to build it through. Even more if you get caught up in legal battles acquiring certain properties
- grift, with large projects in any country at any time there’s always grift. Grift is a constant
It’s labour, fuel, and material, intensive work.
Sometimes when they dig into the ground they find something unpredictable e.g. contaminated soil which can result in a major cost blowout, a legal fight between government and contractor and then unplanned delays which further increases costs.
Having to carry trucks for decades means a lot more steel and concrete. Especially when constructing bridges and overpasses.
Consequently, the cost trade-off isn't as clear-cut as the article might make it sound. Which for me leads to the obvious answer: yes, we should build another, larger collider. But probably not right now. There should be plenty of funding for the current one and also quite a bit of theoretical preparation before it is getting planned/built. In this time, other projects should get priority funding. But eventually, we should build another collider. We should never stop researching.
Forward thinking nations would take this approach, a single discovery in just one of these studies might unlock a huge amount of scientific, commercial or industrial value, and casting the net wide gives the greatest chance of making that discovery.
And after this the US has hit levels of inflation that it hasn't seen for 50 years. Before that inflation was that high in WW2.
Printing money is not free, neither is tax money.
Also, I'll note that inflation in the UK is at 9%. Printing money is essentially a tax on those with cash holdings, who are mostly poorer. Not to mention the wastage on repricing...
Sure. For some time period and amount of money, indeed. What happens once this limit is reached and people stop trusting that money?
Currency collapses are nasty. Look at Weimar Germany after WWI.
Several LHCs, ITERs and ISSes won't bring any of the nations close to Weimar Germany. Aircraft carriers, F-35s, failing infrastructure projects and corruption have a larger chance of doing that.
This is only true of the world's reserve currency (which is currently the USD). In all other cases they basically guarantee the issues stated elsewhere like inflation.
The low hanging fruit of discovering new physics looks like this. Build a bigger machine to collide particles with even more energy. Observe what comes out. It's a clear direction. Just throw money at the problem and get a result.
That said, LHC cost $4.75 billion that's pretty much nothing compared to the amount of money that gets thrown around in the tech world. So might still be worth it just for the fun of it, even if the discoveries don't have any direct application.
That said, of course particle physics results have direct applications. For instance in speculative commercial applications of Nuclear fusion and also Quantum Computing is connected to particle physics. I mean even GPS systems are based on 4D space time. Not entirely sure if any of that can be directly attributed to research happening in colliders but this is just one part of the field, mainly the experimental part - which can verify/falsify theories or result in new ones.
The LHC has been in operation for about 12-14 years, and has been a "thing" from planning onwards for almost 40. It's cost $9B, split between a huge list of countries.
Estimates of waste in the US medical system range from around $500B-$2T annualy. The lower end of that scale would support starting a new, fully funded, project of a similar scale for every state in the US every single year.
At a multi-national, multi-decade scale I just don't think it's actually that much money.
> all for the sake of discovering a tiny subatomic particle that we have no way of using
There are few ways I'd look at this.
One is that fundamental science can bleed into regular use over time, look at lasers. IIRC they had no clear use when invented, but are now absolutely key to so much. While the LHC had a headline goal (at least publicly) it's not just discovering one thing, it's a large tool to test fundamental physics.
Another is that this money and work doesn't go nowhere. People are paid to work on big complex problems, building and designing magnets, detectors, computing systems, software for analysis, etc. A lot of that is not going to be entirely custom, and at the very least supports companies & the supply chain for newer advanced technology. NASA I think occasionally puts out some lists of things that derived from their work.
Beyond that, I think there's value in getting a lot of people in a lot of countries to work together on a broadly non-political goal.
By confirming a theory you can use the entire framework to come up with useful ideas. This is what happened to General relativity.
If people only asked "ok, that star is a little bit off, but will that lead us to faster horses?" would look funny in hindsight.
a prolific amount of software, engineering, and material science has come from CERN, as well spinning off numerous high-tech startups.
If we do find new particles we probably can't use them right away, yes, but that doesn't mean we can't later on. A lot of science has been like that.
Anyway as someone inside experimental HEP field, I would encourage anyone who wants to understand more about finding and ideas to try to follow up the snowmass process as an example on how the dynamics of funding and new ideas for the future forms, discussed and gets priorities (at least in US)
Snowmass process is basically a series of meeting for the US HEP community where they discuss the US strategy and funding requests for the coming decade. the last one was in 2014 and now this process which takes about 3 years (probably more this time thanks to covid). It is really insightful but technical in nature but try to read more about it and the final report that gets to DOE committee to act as advisory guideline from the community.
> There are many known problems in physics right now. $100 billion could fund (quite literally) 100,000 smaller physics experiments. There may not be enough physics labs on Earth to carry out that many experiments!
It's amazing & a bit problematic how big-biased we are. For reference, LHC cost a bit under $5B by compare. I have a hard time imagining what it would take to get $5B in funding for physics. How much effort would each physics project have to spend to go get funding, versus how much time did it take the LHC to get funding?
I really like the idea of diversity, of a range of medium & small projects. But it feels like structurally we are disposed towards bigger higher ticket tasks. That once the ball is rolling, once there's critical mass, we can get the checkbooks opening. But by compare the channels for getting small & medium funding is more case by case, that large pools of money aren't as available or accessible.
It's one of the rare setups where i lack thé arrogance to think my opinion would be relevant. (That said, if the goal was to burn the funds with minimal progress I couldn't imagine a better tool than the LHC BWANDO corporation.)
If the tax payer is to fund the effort perhaps their opinion should have some non-zero influence on the choice?
Im not entirely against theoretical efforts (which is like my opinion) but to alienate clearly productive effort under some "let industries do it" banner seems several bridges to far. Maybe the other way around: let industries decide. would be less sensless.
useful things like wind solar wave tidal energy, clean water, agriculture etc all directly compete for the funds.
Wait, i know. Lets spend an insane amount of money to research what we should be funding. Im sure we can figure out howmany apples an orange is worth.
That paper describes a design for a 160 meter ring synchrotron to produce "extreme ultraviolet" for IC fabs in the 7nm and below range. Some large research accelerators have been used for that experimentally, including SLAC at Stanford. So the concept is known to work. It just needs to come down in price and size.
ASML's tin-vaporization light source, which is a mechanical and optical nightmare made to work by throwing a few billion dollars at it, is the current technology.
This may be how China leapfrogs the West in IC technology.
The link between CERN and the web is a great example of something that had nothing to do with the core science but was certainly worth more than the investment.
It's not like we have many other great ideas for science experiments. Apparently.
PS. I have a masters in engineering physics and several friends who are physicists. I’m also a science nerd. But I still think this is the right thing to do.
The more research we do the better and 100 billion spent over approx 20 years by over a dozen countries is a far cry from putting all our eggs in one basket.
You need to throw politics at poverty and homelessness, not just cash.
Not incidentally, lowering the barriers to physics education and changing the incentives towards risky imagination and away from calculated academic careerism would also make breakthroughs in physics more likely.
Cannot eat money, unfortunately it's far more durable and fungible than food.
Now, perhaps there are investments that can be made to improve the world's agriculture.
XX century science has delivered plenty of practical applications. But is there any practical application to expect from another large Hadron collider? Wouldn’t that money be better used in bio science or something else?
The really important scientific work doesn't follow this rule and demanding it does is short-sighted. Perhaps worse, it's refusing to learn from plenty of historical examples where you can see the work yielded nothing of immediate use but was still very important (that is to say, society would look vastly different without it). In a sense, it's this kind of goal-oriented thinking that led society to the mess that it has become in the last 15 years.
Most previous science discoveries weren't throwing around oodles of money.
But sure, go build a $100B machine out of habit.
In any case it will be built by a conglomerate of countries and the budget is not huge when splitting the bill.
Heck I would even like to see a couple of these built per year instead of more planes and warships.
Edit: Typo.
That shouldn't ever be the argument because you can argue about the exact peice of fecundity that the dollar value can have until you are blue in the face on X, Y, Z projects.
When it comes to government spending, my reactions seems to be the opposite of most. I actually think that these big audacious projects is the only use for government. Fund big things that individually and within the private market would never be a thing. Do Hubble, Do LHC++, do scientific exploration missions because that is what makes you proud to be part of what is going on around you. That sense of inspiration in the air of progress is all that is required for a functioning society.
The important part is "building" which pumps billions into research programs for improving materials/electronics etc.
Sure we can defund all expensive science and maintain the status quo, last time we did this dark ages happened.
Interesting point, there was a time where it wasn't even clear whether string theory should be considered part of Physics or rather Mathematics or even Metaphysics. That said, the LHC has continuously given additional insights into existing theories and also it's not the only collider in the world although probably there's no other where so many countries collaborate. Also an interesting read about the early history of CERN: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.1955503
Is this that?
I don't think you need to worry about it
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/nov/06/cern-big-ban...
(Old physics meme :-) )
The LHC is a massive machine with advanced technologies, took a decade to design and build, involving 10k scientists and the international community, and cost $9B.
- Squadron of F-35 aircraft: ~0.2 LHCs
- JWT: 1.1 LHCs
- ITER: >2 LHCs
- Elon Musk's wealth: 24 LHCs
- Microsoft's market cap: 30 LHCs
- US annual military budget: 90 LHCs
- US national debt: 3389 LHCs
Nit: MSFT market cap is ~210 LHC.
PS: Dear commenter, please don't "how about X?" in comments. I know you're smart. So smart you can find a counter example. Congratulations, you're clever.
I think breakthroughs are often perpendicular to the energy, so the best investment in understanding the universe is probably to explore it.
Unfortunately that also requires alot of energy.
Rate of change is going to slow down with the price of energy going up.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...
This has been said, in one form or another, about almost any invention and experiment, shortly before actual discoveries were made. Scientific conservatism at its worst.
Cern really should be investigated and audited publicly, but it would take Delloites and PWC to follow that paper trail and audit hundreds of companies going back 25-30 years. I've always said it, cern is a scam, they take public money to fund product research, and then spin off separate companies to cream off the profits. Then they act broke and beg us for more money.
Edit: There is very little public information on this. The company accounts may be public, but like I said, there are hundreds of them going back 30 years, and no-one is motivated to do that kind of research. There is a recent study here[0] which looks at the economic benefit to companies that help build the research equipment. Obviously a lot of tech has to be invented just to build systems like this. But I haven't seen a similar study of the cern spin-off companies, or KT (Knowledge Transfer) partners in cern nomenclature, and that is where the real meat is.
I don't see why it would be so controversial for cern to retain some share in those KT companies and use that money to be self sufficient. That seems like a win for science.
[0] https://cds.cern.ch/record/2632083/files/CERN-ACC-2018-0022....
Further reading:
https://kt.cern/success-stories/fostering-culture-entreprene...
https://kt.cern/success-stories/managing-cern-intellectual-p...
One example company (out of hundreds):
UK firm buys cancer-zapping spin-off from CERN collider
"The spin-off, known as Adam, was established in 2007 by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to build low-cost innovative accelerators for proton beam therapy (PBT) and conventional radiotherapy. Advanced Oncotherapy will pay for Adam in shares, giving CERN scientist Alberto Colussi, who founded the CERN business, a continuing stake in the technology." https://www.avoplc.com/en-gb/Investors/Share-Price-Informati...
If that's a scam then please take the shirt off my back.
Happy to be corrected.
We're going to need that $100 billion for burn cream.
Well, if this isn’t predictable!
Because Supersymmetry is stupid theory that can be fit to any set of facts, there is no point in building LHC++. Besides it is so expensive you could give a 100.000 physicist a million bucks and that would be more productive.
Would it? A bunch of the arguments in the article apply to pretty much all science funding.
It is one of the great perks of civilization that you can combine resources to make something truly awesome, whether it is pyramids, moon landings or large colliders.
The other thing I hate about this is that the numbers reported in the article are clearly inflationary. The use the precise phrasing " It’s entirely possible that the price could swell to $100 billion." while highlighting the big number. Well let's check another source. CNET says $23bn. So that would require a 5x over budget, which would be quite high. I know HN loves Hossenfelder, but she is overly pessimistic. At least in my group of physicists, we don't know other physicists who like her much (not that I hate her, just more ambivalent). Pessimists are good, but they shouldn't dominate conversations the same way optimists shouldn't.
Either way, it is clear that this type of money is very small when we are discussing country budgets. It should not be inflated and should not be sold as if there is a single country buying it (which it is well cheap enough to be done. Hell, Bezos and Musk could each have one, or several. Hell, there's at least 20 billionaires that wouldn't have issues building their own and funding them for significant periods of time).
So the real question is if we should build it, not the cost. As a former physicist, I do think the argument for building one is weak. It is correct that we don't have any great things to test. But there are reasons to do so. We need to consider it will take at least another decade to build, which theorists will hopefully come up with something in that time. If they don't, we can still test precision levels which is highly helpful. But there are other intangible things that are hard to evaluate. Anytime we humans tackle difficult problems and push the boundaries of what we can do, we learn a lot. That's where spinoffs come from and we've seen them in every major scientific endeavor (NASA, CERN, LIGO, and many more). Also, what happens when you put a bunch of smart people from many countries in a room together? There's political advantages (and why I think it is a shame Bush killed the American accelerator). There's also the fact that if we stop doing this, we'll lose talent and skill. So yeah, the upsides aren't crazy good like finding a new fundamental particle, but it also isn't that expensive. That's the real conversation that needs to be had.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d...
[1] https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.cern...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/science/cern-wants-to-build-a-new-23-bi...
Side note: this is comic number 401. Comic number 404 is particularly good.
Please read this book, which is in my opinion the most important book written this century.