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Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

As someone who did their PhD at CERN - I agree.

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.

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> yes it is, but where does this fundamental science helps in everyday problems?

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.

I think it is important to remember the context of the discussion. I think I it is completely reasonable, and not odd at all, to have a utilitarian view of science, when you are talking about spending $100 Billion.

Alright. I agree, that's certainly a very valid point.

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.

[1]: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo

It had utility to the US government in demonstrating to the Russians our ability to accurately move payloads on the planetary scale. Actually landing on the moon was just a conveniently goal-aligned PR win. Beyond that though, being able to put things at that scale in orbit has shown major dividends at in every sector.

> It had utility to the US government in demonstrating to the Russians our ability to accurately move payloads on the planetary scale. Actually landing on the moon was just a conveniently goal-aligned PR win. Beyond that though, being able to put things at that scale in orbit has shown major dividends at in every sector.

You don't need to put men on the surface of the moon to gain any of these benefits. The US government could've spent far less to achieve those same outcomes.

And that's ignoring the fact that, particularly regarding those "major dividends", much of those justifications can only be made in hindsight. At the time I think it would've been difficult to justify the moonshot on that kind of utilitarian basis.

But why are you talking out of your ass? The point of going to the moon was never to dimly increase utility to the public. JFK took us to the moon because "No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space".

https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches...

> But why are you talking out of your ass?

Keep it civil, please.

> The point of going to the moon was never to dimly increase utility to the public.

I think maybe you've lost the thread of the conversation?

The original claim was that scientific research/projects should be funded based on evident utility.

My point is that if you fund such projects purely based on immediately evident utility, then projects like Apollo (among many others) don't happen.

My unspoken corollary is that that would represent a loss to humanity, and that pure utilitarianism is too narrow a frame to use when assessing the value of a given project.

Honestly, I think we're in agreement, here, and I'm not sure I understand your aggressive response.

A lot of people wanted to cancel the moon landing program while it was happening, and they eventually did.

And yet many ascribe a whole range of knock-on benefits as a consequence of the Apollo missions. Had those people had their way, one wonders what technologies we wouldn't have today because, in the moment, no one could find a clear utilitarian justification for the program.

Knock-on effects can just as well be ascribed to alternative targets for those Apollo funds. Those don't take much imagination to come up with, e.g. reducing the student-teacher ratios in schools.

Often politics is not a question of "funding this good thing or funding this great thing", but rather "funding this good thing that we can agree on, or funding nothing".

Politicians sometimes do the wrong thing is a truism, no?

Maybe if we spent a few more years improving computers and materials before so many launches, we could have done more with less money. Likewise for the disastrous Shuttle program.

That $100 billion doesn't vanish into thin air. It principally goes into plant and equipment to build the machine, as well as research into high tech manufacturing for the same.

The world wide web which we are currently using was invented at CERN. You can literally go look at the proposal manuscript.

Where does this argument stop? 1 trillion, 10 trillion?

Ideally never

Isn't that the economic theory of broken windows? Given the choice between alternatives, added value should be considered, not added cost.

The problem with the the broken window narrative is that while invalid, it's counter-argument is also too simplistic when dealing with issues on the level of nation states.

Suppose you have a city where windows never get broken. So there's no demand for glazing for a few years. So the glaziers all go out of business and move onto other things - they break down their machines and factories and repurpose them.

Then there's a minor earthquake and it breaks a lot of windows. But the cost to replace them is enormous - there's no glass making business anymore! What should have cost a few hundred dollars costs hundreds of thousands because the machines and people need to be built and retrained, and the quality for a few months is kind of bad as well.

What should the city have done? Well, one answer would be to break some windows regularly to keep at least one glazier operating. Or we could pay the glazier to make windows we don't use right now, or ask them to build better windows under government grant to keep them available and maybe come up with an improved window design...etc. etc. etc.

A machine on the scale of the LHC doesn't get made in a factory which makes LHCs. It gets made in literally tens of thousands of businesses, each of which services a big order for some type of precision part that's either within their capabilities or that they might believe can be accomplished if demanded. Once they can do that, that becomes the new thing that everyone else can now buy potentially.

So yes, sure - let's talk about added value, but when "choosing between alternatives" you need to have some actual, reasonable alternatives. The postulate here - build ITER instead for fusion power - is exactly the same sort of project. And the reality is we can and should do both.

Eh, Berners-Lee could have written that proposal for a different collaborative project, or someone else would have eventually.

We already had gopher. Web was an incremental step.

It was invented at CERN and had nothing to do with the accelerator. It would have been invented the same way in the home lab of T. Berners-Lee

true, yet big budget research institutions do have more occasional super-high-yield inventions than home labs. maybe because it was just easy for him to "beta test" it with like-minded folks.

so the solution is obvious. spend all the physics money on healthcare (or fusion power) research institutions and hope for the best.

Well, 30 billion EUR, so not 100 billion dollars unless the US has some really bad inflation.

> when you are talking about spending UPWARDS of $100 billion, split over 10 years and over a dozen countries.

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).

That's a different question though and they were not arguing that point at all. Their claim was that it had no value unless it was useful and that it's not useful, both parts of which are clearly false. Is its value worth $100 is another topic (the actual topic of this post I supposed.)

At a certain point we have to make choices about what gets funded. Even if you think much more money should be going into science, you still have to decide what takes priority, and you're going to eventually run into some limits. One can take the view (as many seem to) that if it's science it should be funded, but that's not useful for any discussion of resource allocation. If someone doesn't have a preference, then it makes sense for the people who do have preferences to decide.

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).

Hertz on the discovery of radio waves: “I do not think that the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical application”.

Hertz was humble or unambitious, but everyone else saw the obvious value. Radio was commercialized within 3 years.

> I mean, why, say, develop the theory of evolution? At the time that was irrelevant to "everyday problems".

"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.

> Darwin's theory of evolution was literally developed to explain the most significant food growing technique since irrigation.

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.

What's your point? That we shouldn't research medicine because humans have been using plants with healing properties since forever? That we shouldn't study the world because we're already living in it? That it's useless to explain one's self since one already exists?

I thought my point was obvious.

As a reminder, the original commenter stated they felt that research shouldn't be funded if there isn't a clear benefit/application. I.e. a utilitarian argument regarding research funding.

I used the theory of evolution as an example of research that, at the time, had no utilitarian value, but ultimately ended up enormously important.

You then countered that Darwin was, in part, trying to explain how selective breeding worked, and therefore the research had utility at the time.

I countered that no, that's not practical utility because understanding the mechanisms underlying selective breeding isn't necessary to do it; that simply explaining the natural world does not represent practical utility (if it did, we wouldn't be debating whether high energy research, which simply seeks to explain the natural world, is worth funding).

Therefore your comment does not invalidate my example of evolution as research that had no practical value or utility at the time.

My point in all of this is we should engage in research even if it doesn't have immediate, practical value because we can't know what research will or won't be useful in the fullness of time.

And that's ignoring the fact that I, in fact, absolutely agree with you that we should engage in research simply because learning about the natural world is a worthwhile pursuit.

Meanwhile, I honestly don't know what point you're trying to make given the context of the discussion.

Thank you for walking me through it. Been having a bad flu and doped for the pain, maybe I added less to the conversation than I thought I did!

Looks like we agree on the core issue :)

No worries, I hope you feel better soon!

It's ironic that you write this comment on the World Wide Web. An invention made in the "useless for humanity" CERN... :-/

https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

I have no doubt we’d have gotten basically the same thing within five years from elsewhere if CERN didn’t exist.

Gopher came slightly after WWW, so I'm not sure how much influence WWW had on it, but it makes me think you're right. Other people were working in the problem space.

It came because it was somewhere inspired. WWW was the initial spark. And it could have only come in some big time, blue sky lab.

Gopher came first. Berners-Lee used gopher while we was developing WWW.

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.

It's not, though.

> 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.

folks were already putting postscript papers on FTP servers. Discoverability (linking) was the big hard problem.

> Discoverability (linking) was the big hard problem.

Still is.

the WWW had nothing to do with physics research in particular but with the need to document and exchange information across systems which was a secular trend. Hypertext as a user interface paradigm existed before the WWW. (Douglas Engelbart's NLS for example)

Was that part of an accelerator? Or one of the detectors?

No, it was completely unrelated work of someone who happened to also be at CERN.

As an engineer, my sole concern is making things useful in everyday life for real humans.

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.

How many orders of magnitude of energy inprovement are needed to make quantum foam accessible?

Do we pursue knowledge to build a strong economy? Or do we build a strong economy so we can pursue knowledge?

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.

Most people care about knowledge for its ability to raise quality of living, a.k.a it's ability to strengthen the economy.

I don’t think the moon landing is celebrated because it gave us Velcro and Tang. I don’t think Einstein is so famous because he helped create the foundation for cell phones.

Daily quality of life is important but I think there is a deeper feeling about life that most people share.

Consider a hypothetical analogous argument against supporting fundamental science made in 1900: What they are working on is completely useless for humanity and doesn't help solve everyday problems... the "and so what?" about the photoelectric effect or quantum theory. Because those people in 1900 could not conceive of inventions like lasers and transistors. They didn't just lack imagination, they lacked total conceptual inability in that context. Just as you are seeming to do here. But of course, either of those two inventions have transformed human society on a level with fire, language, writing and metallurgy.

"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.

Honest question: Did you feel this way when you were working on your PhD at CERN? Were you working toward solving everyday problems, or fundamental science problems? If the latter, what changed your views since then?

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.

My work at CERN was a tiny little screw in a huge machine. It meant nothing.

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.

"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. .. Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." - Albert Michelson, 1894

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...

How long was the time gap from quantum machanics work in the 1920s until serious practical applications for that work?

Most semiconductor applications involve an understanding of QM. The transistor was invented in 1948. So not too long after.

Also, nuclear power...

off the cuff, non-exhaustive list:

  1930s — video image tubes
  1940s — nuclear power, atomic clocks, transistors
  1960s — lasers, fiber-optic communications, PET-CT scans
  1970s — MRIs

It's worth acknowledging that the fears of the cold war funded tremendous scientific and technological innovation on both sides of the iron curtain.

People 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.

Curiously, and sadly, it seems that the only threat we are always primed and ready to deal with is other humans. Which I suppose makes sense given our 'tribe' ancestry.

> We have so many problems where physics is needed (energy production to start with, and then exploring biology)

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.

> Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere.

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.

There's a point at which theory needs to catch up to observations before it makes sense to gather more observations.

what about trying to see such advanced fields of studies as (extremely?) long-term investments (for the species?).

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?

My understanding is that theory has blasted way past observations and what we need now are more precise observations.

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.

> 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.

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.

Are you claiming that no knowledge or technology has come out of CERN that benefits humanity in any way?

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....

> 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.

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.

Did the physicists working on early QM know that it would be so useful? Or were they, like the scientists at CERN, just trying to piece together a model of reality?

I understand your point of view here but I think I disagree.

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.

[1]: https://kt.cern/technology-portfolio

The pursuit of knowledge is insanely underrated.

> 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.

Does anyone know anything like a percentage of scientific advancements that ended up being hugely beneficial to society, but were originally derided as being pointless wastes of resources? Might be hard to find out, for example, how many Victorians scoffed at Maxwell wasting his time wondering about imaginary waves flying through the air.

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.)

The biggest contribution of CERN to humanity is not theoretical physics, it's the engineering progress made possible by the truly exceptional requirements of the machinery of the accelerator and all the supporting infrastructure. Ultra high vacuum, specialty detectors, electromagnetic components, control systems, cryonics, new alloys etc.

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.

> "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?

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.

When the energy you need to access these areas are orders of magnitude larger that what we have on earth (except for pinpointed single places such as the LHC) then it does not make sense. You simply cannot make use of them. Let's get back to them when we have the energy.

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.

Digitizer and controller platforms suitable for many other industries (such as uTCA.4) were developed for LHC.

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.

it takes time, discoveries made 100s of years ago only became useful later on, and in ways nobody knew, the more we understand fundamentals the better it's unquestionably.

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