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Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

The amount of money that goes into these unuseable results is just sad. This and astrophysics of remote galaxies.

Either we have a breakthrough that shakes physics and that leads to brand new discoveries that further shake engineering, or it is a waste of time. Between ~1870 and ~1950 we had a fireworks of discoveries that wee shaking our view of the world. And explained transistors.

Today? Nothing special except for a bunch of people and PhD students.

We are just starting to scratch the surface of biology - this is where we need to invest. Solid state physics could be another one. But not particle physics with their crazy energies that are completely unreachable outside of an accelerator.

For context, I have a PhD done in CERN. If I were to choose again, I would bo for bioinformatics or biophysics.

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I have a PhD done in CERN, too, and I can state that your remark is idiotic.

Money was not spent in order to confirm that the Higgs boson existed: rather, it was invested in order to improve technology to such a degree that we could have an answer. That is what people paid for, and that is what humanity will enjoy.

Whether the Standard Model is validated or challenged, it matters as much as a grain of sand on top of the Himalayas.

> I can state that your remark is idiotic.

Thank you for the kind comment.

> it was invested in order to improve technology to such a degree that we could have an answer. That is what people paid for, and that is what humanity will enjoy.

What part exactly is humanity going to enjoy? The 8 T magnet? Where do you envision using the technology to drive particles?

Or, to be fair, which technology from the LHC was ever used for humanity? Anything you do in biology today can have a direct effect OTOH.

For what it’s worth, a very close friend of mine got his Physics PhD at CERN in the late 80s (high energy particle physics) where he witnessed the birth of HTTP.

This experience, coupled with the US government’s decision to not build an equivalent super collider in the 90s, led him to switch to computer science, where he had a bit of a “head start” due to his experience at CERN.

He always said the data analysis, measurement, and collection stuff was more advanced than anything else in the world at the time. The original “big data”. But in 2022, this is less of a distinguishing feature in his opinion. Also, Bell Labs probably faced similar issues.

I asked, and he agrees that he’d do molecular biology if he were starting over today. So you’re not at all crazy!

This is very similar to my trajectory (PhD in the mid to late 90's).

I made friends with some people working in the computer center (the famous 513 at the time, may have changed by now). I discovered UNIX, then Linux and I was sold. During my PhD I started to work for the industry in IT and never stopped since then.

CERN had an outstanding computer system, they invented the "grid". As for HTTP, it just happened to be invented at CERN when Tim Berners-Lee was working there (there was nothing special related to CERN). The hardware-software interface was bleeding edge technology (built into the detectors) and the data bandwidth capacities were ahead of their times.

All of this, however, is not particle physics and if CERN did not exist there would be not much "holes" in today's computers (as opposed, say, to DARPA or Linus).

Very high field magnets are critical for MRIs, tokamak fusion reactors, mass spectrometers, and probably many other uses if we consider pure science as “useful”.

Actually particle accelerators somewhat funded the early investment in high field superconducting magnets which might now appear to yield improvements in fusion energy Q factors due to the strong dependence on field intensity [1]

[1] https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc

> if we consider pure science as “useful”.

Of course it has to be useful. Based on that we build our world (through engineering) and if we work for something that cannot be used then it does not make sense. I do not see any use for quantic foam or quasars any time soon.

As for magnets: this certainly helps, but has CERN done any breakthroughs that were used afterwards? They had at some point the world record for the density of a magnetic field. There is no practical use for that neither in MRIs (that require a lower field and were used for many years already), nor tokamaks (where the homogeneity of the filed is paramount on larger scales compared to the ones in CERN.

I am not saying that the engineering work that is done in CERN is useless - it is just that the money poured there goes primarily in some "whose is bigger" contest that has exactly zero chances to be used.

> Of course it has to be useful.

No, it hasn't. "Science" means "knowledge", and the only things you can know are the things how they actually are.

A PhD from CERN should not confuse science with engineering.

> the only things you can know are the things how they actually are

Yes, but investing MM€ to know something that has no use does not make sense, if there is much more important knowledge competing for the fund. I guess that knowing how to cure MS is more important that discovering a four quarks particle, right? In an ideal world we could do everything but we have to choose wisely because the amount of funds is limited.

> A PhD from CERN should not confuse science with engineering.

Can you please tell me where I confused them?

At cern, science is engineering is science

> further shake engineering, or it is a waste of time. Between ~1870 and ~1950 we had a fireworks of discoveries....

... which started with a simple observation. 200 years ago in 1820, Ørsted was giving a lecture when he noticed that a current-carrying wire deflects a compass needle. Of course, he had no idea what that would lead to, nor did anyone else. It was a completely 'pure', 'unuseable' observation. But, as a student of Kant (what a waste of time!) he shared it in a four-page pamphlet.

Thanks for sharing this great story.

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