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Comment by popinman322 | Hacker News Reader

The LHC's development produced a number of new technologies (e.g. radiation resistant microcontrollers, and gas electron multipliers). Could the next generation produce more, valuable tech?

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...

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I see the same argument (secondary innovations) being made for war-time/military research. But I don't buy it there, and I don't buy it here.

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.

Good point with secondary benefits being equal.

WiFi > a secondary benefit was developed from speculative theoretical research in radio-astronomy : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiFi

I've read the history section in that page and I see nothing about that. WiFi had several competing implementation - at best, you could say the Radiophysics Division of CSIRO sped things up a bit. But since the next paragraph begins with "About the same time in The Netherlands in 1991" (aka a year earlier)...

See a terse history : https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/it/Bringin...

A more verbose history : https://blog.patentology.com.au/2012/04/story-behind-csiros-...

Except that you don't know what the secondary benefits are until you find them so you should keep every avenue open

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

Spending $100B on one big project is very much the opposite of keeping every avenue open.

And skipping on a big project/infrastructure because it costs a lot is also not keeping every avenue open

We can't keep every avenue open. Resources are finite. What makes you think that spending $100B on an LHC++ will be more useful to humanity than ten smaller, $10B projects that people might come up with (or probably already have come up with, but currently lack funding)?

Allocating resources worth billions on one avenue is not keeping every avenue open, it is forgoing thousands of avenues that don't force you to decide like this.

Is it just one avenue? While I'm not a particle physicist, my layman understanding of LHC is that it can be used to test many theories that would otherwise go unsolved. Should we only research things that are cheap to test and eventually mass producible?

> Should we only research things that are cheap to test and eventually mass producible?

Of course not we should choose avenues according to what they are likely to achieve being better than alternative allocations. For another LHC that is a huge burden to overcome.

What is so great about LHC2 that you want to keep space exploration going at a crawl with commercial companies showing how to do it on a shoestring budget? Maybe the LHC2 will cause a discovery the LHC won't but is that probability of learning something worth sacrificing a huge portion of our resources on? Or is this that we made people gain an expertise and they want to continue with its path even though it's a pretty bad one to continually invest more and more in?

Personally, I have mixed feelings about learning fission and I would rather explore space and have functionally independent colonies before we blow ourselves up with a new subatomic discovery.

There are no theories left that LHC, or any collider we could build, can test.

Strings are right out. Nobody has offered any clue as to how to make a prediction that could be tested with possible equipment.

That does not mean none ever will, but it does not seem to be their focus. Physics departments like string theorists because they come with no equipment budget.

Well I agree that big projects make sense in many cases, and I don't want to be misunderstood as arguing against basic research.

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

That's definitely a sensible position. However, I believe these goal-oriented research projects have a tendency to fall stuck in local optima. Sometimes breakthroughs may come from just more people working on it and other times they come from discoveries made in unrelated fields. By cutting ourselves off from any expensive moonshot projects without a clear goal like the LHC, some of our hard problems may never be solved and we may never know why.

Right at the moment and for the next two decades, any big money should build out solar and wind generating capacity. Physics will still be there. Physicists can work on catalysts and excitons for a while.

This is always a factor of amazement (pun intended) for me.

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.

Or Judd Hirsch in Independence Day wisecracking about marked up hammers and toilet seats.

> ... so you should keep every avenue open

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.

silicon valley is a DIRECT result of the secondary effect of radar systems.

https://web.stanford.edu/group/ree/archives/archive08/usa/pr...

shrug. It's always hard to guess?

Military research has produced a lot of secondary inventions, sure. But look at its funding as well. There's a reason why so many companies work in that sector: the amount of money in there is just huge. So of course that sector will produce more byproducts in absolute terms.

Okay? He's not saying secondary effects don't exist. He's saying you don't get more secondary effects from projects whose primary purpose is highly speculative.

I agree that the opportunity cost of dropping 100B on this is very high, but what if the new data enables tech that can't otherwise be achieved?

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.

Military research has enormous positive primary effect as it's one of the main ways to prevent wars. Nuclear weapons already prevented Cold war from going hot, saving tens of millions.

>Investing the same money in something that has a known and positive primary effect will produce the same amount of secondary benefits.

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.

There's a really wide gulf between building something in a lab and scaling production to some industrially useful level. The money spent on the LHC wasn't just lot on fire in a giant pit. It went to contractors that took lab scale prototypes or just paper designs and built them at scale.

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.

Secondary innovations can also come from solving a primary industrial or commercial problem as is often the case.

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.

This video is relevant here

https://youtu.be/9qqEU1Q-gYE

Thanks for awesome channel!

It seems to me as if the journalist had to write about something [outrageous] to fulfill their article quota? There are some good ideas buried in there but isn't it a reductive vision indeed? There probably is no reason to fund this and all the good ideas he also mentions.

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!

all true, yet it's a fact that if we want stable prices (1-2% inflation) and doesn't want to pay more taxes then we run into the allocation problem.

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)

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