LHC experiments at CERN observe quantum entanglement at the highest energy yet
home.cern
home.cern
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
Huh, could say the same about particle physicists and multibillion-dollar collider proposals.
Don't get me wrong. I think we underspend by an order of magnitude on basic research. But the $17bn the Future Circular Collider is proposed to cost [1] (which comes to $30bn if we assume similar overages to the LHC [2]) could be spent better. That's like, six Europa missions [3]? Three James Webb telescopes [4]? Like fifty gravity wave detectors [5]? Thirty years of Moderna's R&D budget [6]?
[1] https://home.cern/science/accelerators/future-circular-colli...
[2] https://en.as.com/latest_news/how-much-money-did-cerns-large...
[3] https://www.space.com/europa-clipper-mission-explained
[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/james-webb-space-teles...
[5] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/long-search-elusive-ripples-sp...
[6] https://www.biospace.com/business/moderna-slashes-r-d-budget...
The truth is that there's no shortage of money, there's just a shortage of motivation to put it towards forward-looking endeavors. The idea that there's a fixed-sized pie for science and every project takes away from something else is, frankly, defeatist. As a society we don't value investment in science and medicine like we should, and so lawmakers don't fear that putting too little money towards science will lose them an election.
These are not fungible. Basic research, within the basic research budget, is. It's much easier to argue for $17bn being deliberated for the FCC (that's not going to happen, let's be real about European politics) to be re-allocated to the sciences than it is to shift Panzer production.
(As a rule of thumb, arguing for an expense relative to a military budget--the o.g. of state expenses--is a weak argument. And especially in Europe, where the American military is no longer a theoretical backstop, it's politically tonedeaf.)
> there's no shortage of money
There is always a shortage of money. Because human desires are infinite and our resources are not.
> lawmakers don't fear that putting too little money towards science will lose them an election
Do you really think the solution to flagging public support for the sciences is more synchrotrons? Where best case we discover a new particle, but probably not?
Science isn't a faith. There is value in exploring things we don't know. But that doesn't give every exploration mission infinite inherent value.
There is never a shortage of money at the level of overall society and governments because money is a purely social construct and we can always make more of it.
There may be a shortage of real resource, workers, skills, etc.
It's important to understand that money is merely a proxy for those real things, and if that proxy goes out of whack, seriously bad things happen and cause real suffering for people.
Most folks' thoughts and worries are quick to jump to (high / hyper) inflation, which is the bad thing that happens when there is too much money.
Having too little money to go around in society is more insidious because the suffering it causes is just as real, but it's less flashy and often misunderstood -- quite often in fact it leads to people blaming the victims! Just think what happened to ordinary folks in the aftermath of the great financial crisis.
The point is that construct or not, you'll never get agreement to dramatically change the proportions of spending. The "construct" of the United States is right now quite thoroughly tied to continued military presence. It's also quite tied to reluctance to spend on universal, un-means-tested, uncontributed social programs.
Politics in a democracy, of the American sort, is an exercise in manipulation of national myth, of dealing with the "construct".
First of all, that money is a social construct is a fact, not a pretense. Money only exists because of laws that make it so, and those laws can be changed. Not easily, of course, but over time a coalition could be built that changes laws for the better. (Obviously there are forces at play whose consequences need to be kept into account, just like you can't go against physics; there's no magical or wishful thinking here. But the behaviors of the central bank and treasury, for example, are decidedly not physics. They're a political choice.)
Recognizing that those laws can be changed opens up space in public debate that isn't there otherwise. It opens up new possibilities for policies that can lead to the improvement of lives. I'd go even further and say that it's one of the most important shifts in public consciousness that could and should be made.
But that's admittedly fairly long-term thinking. If you're only concerned with policy that has short-term effects (and can be achieved in the short term), then perhaps it makes sense that you don't personally consider my previous comment very useful. You may want to focus your attention on one of them, but both short-term and long-term thinking are important.
Nobody is ever going to say "I'm sure glad we spent two trillion dollars on the F-35." But we'll be writing about the Higgs until the end of humanity.
Nobody cares about your server backups either. Unless something goes wrong and you need them.
I’m not defending this program, I’m saying that money spend on insurance that goes unused is easy to call “wasted”, but that is bad logic.
We had solid reason to believe the Higgs boson existed in the 1970s [1][2] as part of electroweak symmetry and the Standard Model, the most precise scientific theory ever proposed and confirmed. We built the LHC to find the Higgs, and it did. That was a good investment.
The FCC has no similar theoretical backing. It's simply a deeper borehole. Maybe there are WIMPs in that mass range. But there is no theoretical reason to believe they're in that range. It's simply experimental deduction against infinity. If they aren't in the FCC's range, there is about equal likelihood they're in the next energy band. It's not totally worthless. But it's terrible bang for buck at $17bn estimated.
The electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces merge into the electroweak force at 246 GeV [3]. The LHC fires at nearly 60x that [4]. (SPS and Fermilab fired above 246 GeV before that [5].) The electroweak force merges with the strong nuclear force into the electronuclear force around 10 ^ 16 GeV [6]. That is where we'll see truly groundbreaking physics. Using the LHC's construction, we'd need a 0.44 light year (27,800 AU) diameter synchrotron to generate those energies. Pluto orbits around 40 AU. Going back to the analogy, we either need a massive change in the scale of human engineering or a different approach to find the answers we're seeking.
[1] https://cds.cern.ch/record/874049/files/CM-P00061607.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Historical_back...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction
[4] https://home.cern/science/engineering/restarting-lhc-why-13-...
>> The idea that there's a fixed-sized pie for science and every project takes away from something else is, frankly, defeatist.
What fraction of the workforce should be diverted to "forward-looking" (ie, no idea if or when it will result in anything useful) research?
Or how about what fraction of the much smaller part of the workforce who are capable of getting an advanced STEM degree? If we pay those people to switch to speculative research, what happens to whatever they're doing now that has enough proven value that private industry knows it's worth paying them to do?
Why fund any research on any topic? What if nothing pays off? Why bother trying anything that might fail?
My whole point is that if you believe this, you've accepted defeat: you're saying the politics is unwinnable and there's no convincing the people with the purse strings to give out any extra money for science, while the defense contractors suckle at the government's teat unimpeded doing exactly what you said isn't possible for the scientists to do.
The whole argument is literally that we shouldn't explore areas of science because cheaper science should be prioritized. And in fact, I think that attitude is actively harmful for the reasons Adam Mastroianni writes about when he talks about the NIG giving money to "safe" projects labeled as innovative[1]. If all you ever fund are projects that you think are safe, affordable uses of money, you don't end up with MRNA vaccines or a cure for goiter, you end up with a pile of papers that didn't do a whole lot to further anything at all.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/experimentalhistory/p/whos-got...
I’d put it slightly differently: if the best thing a group of scientists can come up with for $17bn is something like the FCC, there are probably better things to be done with those resources.
It might be science. It might be humanitarian. It might be military. (It might be fundamental collider research. As in how do we do orders of magnitude higher energy physics without building solar-system sized synchrotrons. Or, alternatively, a series of proving experiments that aim to better understand what a collider with a substantial chance of uncovering new physics might look like, e.g. in characterising the neutrino fog.)
The FCC is a copy-paste make it bigger LHC. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the LHC was built to detect the Higgs. We had a goal going in and reason beyond “it isn’t elsewhere” for the particle being in the energy domains the LHC could probe. We have nothing analogous for FCC energies.
I want to end on a positive note: I’m excited about the muon collider [1]. In part because it’s a new type of collider, which increases the chances of learning something new, whether that be science or engineering. In part because it gets one step closer to possible electronuclear physics [2].
17bn is casually the yearly R&D budget of the top 10 MedTech companies combined. MedTech is a field with immediate commercial and industry value in improving people's lives. https://www.statista.com/statistics/329064/global-medtech-re...
This is a single scientific project with the possibility of finding nothing new within a field of science that currently lacks commercial or industrial value outside of curiosity. And we're building it on the promise that "we may find something new" while lacking any established theory that would benefit from the higher energy level.
This is NOT chump change, and Using the American defence budget as a comparison is tone-deaf.
Annually. The cost of building something for $17bn is amortized over many years. Nobody is writing a $17bn check.
I believe it would be much easier to generate public support and curiosity if the data could be made more accessible.
Suppose the research articles explicitly told what URL was used to request the relevant slice of the data, which selectors to use etc. so that Average Joe could download the slice of events investigated (and thus learn how to issue other slices of events) and bulk download them for analysis.
Allow the public to interact with the data and the juices -err- funds will start flowing.
Make it more didactic and less ex cathedra.
Is there any precedent for such openness generating public support?
Not saying it wouldn't be scientifically productive. Or even engaging for enthusiasts. But I'm having trouble seeing a politically-relevant number of Average Joes diving into collision datal. (That is already publicly accessible [1].)
If average people can follow the steps in detail, they will probably not contribute observations of significance, but the ivory tower effect would diminish. Otherwise people will just think of all the particle accelerators as very expensive nonsense they don't support.
And yes, I think there is a lot of precedent: look how the LLM community is blooming and all the money being poured in. Average Joe can interact with a chatbot online, Average Joe runs into tutorials and step by step instructions to run a local LLM, etc.
Average Joe is consuming chat bots. He is not raising money or taking tutorials.
Average Joe delegates part of his opinion to the friends or family or idols that are the closest proxies to a certain field. If those think poorly of a certain initiative because it feels exclusive or not down-to-earth enough it will fan-out to all the Average Joes they know.
I'm not retarded but I am still not finding the 2017-2018 data through the URL you cited, guess how I will describe it to any acquaintances? Guess in what sense I will precondition the (dis)continuing validity of my comments upon the presence or absence of clear instructions so average joe can reproduce a finding?
If it feels like Average Joes are requesting to hold their hand like a toddler, one is being exclusionary.
areas of improvement:
* where do you download the 2017-2018 data for ATLAS?
* make the methods and data section part of the PDF or provide additional PDF's (some people will opt to "download PDF" for later perusal, and then be disappointed they have to use the browser to render the methods section to PDF as well)
* provide explicit URL's in the data section
* data and code availability upon request: why would you want to organise the bothering of physicists and engineers with N (interested parties) times code and data requests if you can provide them as downloads 1 time?
The first big application of URLs was precisely this use case: distributed access to particle event data in databases and tape silos across different international institutions. The mainframes (mostly IBM 3090) would then crunch the data to analyze and filter the interesting collisions.
I was under the impression that a particular entangled system is defined in terms of a particular waveform, which means that the choice of another waveform including, say, an additional particle off to the side, would imply that the entanglement -- which is supposed to be the behaviour being described, not the theory used to describe it -- actually changes. So, substitution of separate waveforms for each component of the entanglement would imply that entanglement is not present. How would this be false in a way different from the inaccuracies present in any other choice of waveform?
I still have zero concept of why it's impossible. Help?
Anyway, my layperson explanation is as follows. Let Alice and Bob share an entangled system, but are unable to communicate normally (e.g. are lightyears apart). A ice can measure her part of the system to instantaneously affect what Bob has. However, Bob doesn't know what result Alice obtained. So, in trying to figure out what Alice did to affect his system, he has to average out Alice's possible effects on his system i.e. the possible measurements that Alice could have obtained. This averaging procedure makes it so that Bob doesn't gain any information on what system he now has. In fact, he has exactly the same information about what possible measurements he would make after Alice measured her system than information he had before Alice measured her system.
Of course, if Alice was able to tell Bob the result of her measurement, then Bob wouldn't have to do any averaging and would gain information about his system. But that happening means that Alice is communicating her result to Bob classically, at slower-than-light speeds.
> An important assumption going into the theorem is that neither Alice nor Bob is allowed, in any way, to affect the preparation of the initial state. If Alice were allowed to take part in the preparation of the initial state, it would be trivially easy for her to encode a message into it.
Couldn't the galactic emperor distribute a collection of entangled particles to a remote outpost, one for each day, that can be manipulated like a dead man's switch?
Every day, a light turns green, the emperor is alive?
The “has always” is in quotes because it’s a useful lie. You kind of need to really understand the double slit experiment to get quantum fields, superpositions, and how that related to entanglement. Took me years and years of occasional YouTube physics videos before it finally clicked. But if entanglement still doesn’t make sense, I’d start by trying to understand the double slit experiment. It sounds way less awesome than entanglement, but it isn’t really. Double slit is in fact awesome and just as weird. Entanglement is way less cool than it sounds, and no, not actually a way of cheating the speed of light limit for information transmission.
Sigh 202024 and humans still wrestling with the basics.
For example consider a lasing medium but without mirrors, that was excited. There is a range of wavelengths (or outcomes) it could emit. However in a laser a specific wavelength (or wavelentghs) are selected for by the mirrors. A photon of a specific wavelength in the optical gain wavelength range cans stimulate the excited atom to emit the same wavelength.
So there exist conditions where the outcome of a quantum transition can be selected for (stimulated emission in this case).
There is an article that proclaims to do precisely that with a pair of phosphorescent samples, simultaneously irradiated by entangled light. They then arbitrarily call one sample the "master" and the other the "slave" sample.
They claim to observe simultaneous emission from the "slave" sample while stimulating emission at the "master" sample, even when separated at large distances in different places.
The authors themselves highlight this apparent violation of the "no-communication theorem" (which is never proven, only postulated), and how it apparently contradicts conventional wisdom about the impossibility of FTL communication. They do not however measure exact photon timings.
Curiously, no other group has disclosed attempting to reproduce or published results confirming or contradicting the proclaimed measurements (which is relatively cheap to execute).
The other particle never knows the first one was measured.
Consider the analogy that in a box there are two apples. A Red delicious and a green apple. You and a friend close your eyes and take one and go home. You know look at your apple -- its red. Now you know your friend as a Green one without asking them. Was information magically transmitted? No. Was that faster than light communication? No. Could you keep taking apples out of boxes to transmit data? no
If you leave out the properties that are special about entangled systems from the analogy, it can't shed any light on entangled systems.
I have yet to see a single physics analogy that covers every single aspect of the physics without being misleading. If the maths is easy enough to follow without needing an analogy, you just get the maths.
The problem with doing this is that getting an extra graduate degree is a lot of work.
Of these, the only one I did in my double maths A-level was matricies and partial differential equations of single dimensional real functions, and the absolute basics of what complex numbers are.
Seems like it needs a degree to me, having tried to teach myself using brilliant.org
So you on one end can measure whether the particle is 0 or 1 and the other person can also do the same, but you cannot alter the state.
Therefore you cannot encode a data stream without an accompanying slower method to transmit by.
If both sides measure the particle, both sides now know a fact that the other side knows. Let's say that both sides have previously agreed, at sub-light speeds, that "0" will mean "we both sell Microsoft stock" and "1" means "we both buy Microsoft stock". (Assume an entire list of actions so we have more than one bit of common knowledge.) Is this considered a form of FTL communication? Or just a hack?
(also not a physicist, so sorry to any reading this and cringing)
If right before measuring the particle one side gets a new information that e.g. selling the Microsoft stock right now is a really bad idea, they have no way to communicate this information to the other. Both of them will take a synchronized action, but synchronized according to the rules they have agreed on previously. They cannot use entanglement to transmit new information from one side to the other. They can only use it to receive the same random data at the same time, which they can use to take a coordinated action.
So if you flip a coin and get e.g. "head, head, tails, head, tails" (a random sequence), you can be sure that the other wizard got the same outcome.
But communication doesn't mean getting the same outcome. It means sending an information from one place to another. You would like to send some kind of message, such as "how are you?" and receive a meaningful response. Instead, you just have two random number generators that magically happen to be synchronized.
(Magically synchronized random number generators can still be useful. For example, you want to make a synchronized surprise attack on an enemy that lives between you and has a perfect network of spies. Any message between the two wizards would be intercepted, and the enemy would not be surprised by the attack. However, the two wizards can agree that each day they will flip the magical coin ten times, and on the day they get a "10x heads" outcome, they will attack. Even if the enemy has intercepted this agreement, he has no idea when the attack will happen, because the wizards do not need to communicate the coinflips -- they just magically happen to be the same for both of them, so both of them will get "10x heads" on the same unpredictable day.)
The canonical answer to your question is Bell's inequality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem. But TL;DR: the distinction only shows up in the statistics of repeated experiments. There is _no way_ to distinguish them in single-fire experiments. Entanglement is defined in terms of "odd" statistics.
In repeated measurements of related properties (e.g. spin along varying angle), entangled systems show more correlation than it should be possible classically.
For example, quantum teleportation is only possible if you have a source that produces entangled particles. If I want to test that you have such a source, I can give you a random state (which only I know), and ask you to teleport it to a far away location [1]. If you indeed have an entangled particle source, then you can successfully teleport the state 100% of the time. However, because measurements in quantum mechanics are probabilistic, I can't actually single-shot verify that you teleported the correct state. So we will have to repeat this task many times [2], and with each success I will be more and more sure that you have an entangled state source.
Now coming to your musing above: "rather indicates which types of statistics govern a class of systems produced en mass"
You can see why this is not consistent with the repeated teleportation experiment. If every single teleportation test succeeded individually, then every iteration must have involved an entangled state. The repeat is only because of my inability to verify in single-shot. Surely then, entanglement is a property of specific systems, rather one of a class of systems.
If you want to read this more substantially (and you have graduate level of mathematics knowledge), quantum resource theories is the area you are looking into.
[1] There are some assumptions on your honesty required here.
[2] Each time using a different random state.
It means something about a specific system, but it can only be verified statistically by producing copies of that system (not "class of systems") en mass.
You can only deduce a distribution from repeated measurements. But most physicists would have no problem talking about a single experiment having many possible outcomes, governed by a probability distribution. It's almost a philosophical question about whether probability means anything in single systems.
It's the same way in quantum mechanics. The effects of entanglement can only be discerned if you take repeated samples. But we still feel okay talking about single systems governed by such entanglement.
Is there any indication that all reality is not just "quantum bookkeeping" (at a quantum and not gravitational scale, which is also consistent and coherent)? It seems like splitting hairs to differentiate outside of referring to literal discourse, ie referring to the signifier rather than the signified. Otherwise we would not be able to consistently and precisely measure the quantifiable (un)certainty that forms our models.
Of course all our models could be wildly inaccurate and I look like a fool. But that's just looping back to the concept that it's simpler to assume that the world is consistent than to assume the world is conspiring to deceive you.
Any closed system in the universe has certain symmetries/conservation-laws it must follow. Things like "the total amount of energy in there must remain the same", or "the total amount of angular momentum has to remain the same".
Let's look at spin (which is a cousin to classical angular momentum) because that's one of the properties folks like to work with in entanglement experiments.
If you create a new pair of particles, the total spin before they get created is zero, so the total spin after they get created also has to be zero. Thus whatever spin one particle has (when measured along a certain axis) the other has to be opposite.. by dint of our knowledge about the closed system that the particles inhabit.
Saying that they are "entangled" does more to represent the knowledge we have about how the particles were created than it does to represent something special about the particles themselves.
And this entanglement only holds as long as the wave function does not collapse, because that represents the cling-wrap around the fact that they exist within a perfectly closed system. Allowing the particles to interact with their environment in some uncontrolled fashion for example would ruin our closed-system guarantee, thus losing any measurable entanglement. They would not longer be guaranteed to have opposite spin because some other phenomena dumped some un-accounted-for amount of spin into the two-particle system.
So the answer to "How can an entangled system be differentiated from a nonentangled system?" is exactly "Do you have some closed-system guarantee of a precise total amount of spin (or other conserved/symmetric quantity) that all parts of the system must add up to?"
This also means that if some experimenter knows the exact total spin of a given closed system, and another experimenter does not know that total, then the entanglement is only relevant to the experimenter who knows the total.
Does that perspective help? (and/or can any folk better at physics than I confirm or deny my explanation as being sound?)
In this view, there's no "collapse", just a product of wavefunctions. Though the "bigger" wavefunction isn't tractable to treat as a wavefunction, computationally.
Also, entanglement is «faster than light», which does indeed have physical implications. Quite mind-bending ones, at that.
But the entanglement between A and B _doesn't_ change by adding C.
"Entangled" is the negation of "separable". If A and B can be described by a wavefunction that looks like (wavefunction A)x(wavefunction B), then we say the system AB is separable. This means, essentially, that A and B can be considered independent. If we can't write the wavefunction of AB as a product, then we say AB are entangled.
Now, I hope that it is more clear that adding C to the side results in a wavefunction for ABC that is (wavefunction AB)x(wavefunction C). The entanglement of AB is unchanged, since the AB part of the ABC wavefunction is unchanged. All we have done is add a C part to the wavefunction, but this C part is not entanglement with AB.
From the top of my head, quantum entanglement is something:
1/ that happens at quantum level, so typically with measurable effects on a scale smaller than one atom (way smaller than one neuron);
2/ that requires specific operations on a specific group of particles (the probability that such entangled particles end up in two different brains of related people is infinitesimal);
3/ that requires many measures to confirm – and you can only do so once per group of particles (so it would not be sufficient to have two entangled particles one in each brain, you'd probably need tens of thousands).
This simple observation is something physicists have hard time wrapping their head around for some reason. The reason I suspect being that it clashes with their religious beliefs about free will and whatnot.
It's weird.
> something physicists have hard time wrapping their head around for some reason
The problem is that it's fundamentally different from anything you can do in classical mechanics. And because of that, attempts to explain it in simple terms with casual language are doomed. And attempts to take shortcuts in reasoning by analogizing it to something from everyday life are doomed.
Nobel Prize in physics 2022 “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”
Say you have two billiard balls on a very very large table with almost no friction. One ball is stationery, the other is moving towards it and spinning along some axis. When they collide, they'll be sent along some random directions and each with some spin, and their spins are going to add up to the original spin of the moving ball (angular momentum is conserved in frictionless interactions in classical mechanics too). Now, when the ball arrive at a long distance away from each other, two experimenters which can't see the balls measure their spin. They each choose some direction and measure how much their ball spins along that direction. They repeat the experiment lots of times, keeping good track of each individual result.
When they later compare notes, they'll measure how much their respective results for each individual experiment were correlated. Since they were measuring along different axis, they didn't both see the exact same result: maybe for the ball that reached one was spinning at one revolution along the 45° axis every two seconds, and the other was spinning at half a revolution along the 1° axis every second. Ultimately, they'll find that the correlation between their experiments was about 75% (each time they measure along unrelated axis, they get no correlation, when they happen to measure along the exact same axis, they get perfect correlation, and when it's in between, it's some subset of that).
However, if we repeat the same thing with quantum particles, we actually find a higher correlation, about 85%. This can only happen if (a) measuring one particle changes the other - and we've quickly ruled out that this can happen at slower than light speeds, or (b) the particle pair don't share a definite state to begin with, but assume an appropriate state only when they are measured [or (c) the axis chosen by the experimenters in each measurement somehow depends on the spin of the particle pair].
Of course I'll now be slammed for "woo woo" unscientific thinking as is always the case on HN, when someone who "knows all" encounters someone who doesn't.
I think this also holds up with how ad tracking aims to hoover up all sorts of data to find correlations. There are probably a lot of non-obvious correlations in there, which causes ads to sometimes eerily seem to read minds. These same correlations may cause people to exhibit very similar thoughts without needing to invoke quantum entanglement.
If there's a non-psychological explanation for the phenomenon you're describing, it's not quantum entanglement, it's an entirely new kind of science that we have yet to contemplate.
"Surely we're just a teensy bit away from that new physics, and if we can just a little bit more money^Wenergy into the system, we'll find that new physics for sure!"
It is completely reasonable to test whether phenomenon that hold at low energies still hold at high energies, and that may be the only way you're going to find more fundamental physical laws. Especially when we know quantum theory is incomplete, since it is currently incompatible with general relativity.
They are grateful that the public seems willing to pay for curiosity. I don't know how long it will last. Though I can say that it's a rounding error in national budgets.
That's kind of their point, though? They're suggesting our "way of life" is backwards in some ways, which I think is a fair assessment.
We find ourselves supporting financially things like what's happening in Israel or Gaza or happened in Iraq or Afghanistan or Sudan or Armenia or Haiti or insert the rest of the list of countries we've coup'ed here. While we fight over whether poor people deserve healthcare, or if school kids deserve not to starve. Over if public education is good or not. Or if women deserve medical autonomy...
None of that is particularly democratic. Globalization happened because rich people wanted cheaper labor in the 'global south' not because of military bases. I don't know that it's obvious military is what's "produced globalization" and "highly democratic" societies. That seems a fairly large keep of faith.
Most of the negatives you’ve listed here are a result of other countries defence force inadequacies.
If there are inequalities of wealth, and a delineation of artificial constructs like race, religion or nationality, there will result an inequality of military force.
This material inequality is reflected in reality by the negatives I've described. A world where we accept "stronger military = good" naively exacerbates that inequality.
>we have the most democratic and stable societies that have ever existed in the history of our species, as well as the highest quality of life.
I'm glad you brought this up. One might argue the material wealth of our nations is a direct result of utilizing inequity by building a domineering military presence globally. Of the exploitation of colonialism and slavery.
Globalization in capitalism is the will of capital owners seeking more exploitable labor, not some desire to spread an ideology. That material/economic relationships are the oldest dated interactions between continents and societies seems obvious enough demonstration of that fact.
We have indeed made a marked change in quality of life, but on societal scales is the lifestyle 'gains' of the comparative 1% worth the toil of the 99? We have to pay heed to this measure when using any analysis on quality of life or the worth of decisions like military strength.
I'm not a sociologist, I just wanted to add that there is, to my knowledge, no evidence of an innate correlation between democracy, quality of life, and military strength. If you have literature that suggests otherwise I'd be happy to read it.
>Funding Israel’s conflicts is not a fundamental part of our way of life.
The specifics may not be, but the purpose of an extensive global military presence is fundamentally about creating or exploiting these inequalities wherever they arise for material aims. This is reflected by the fact that the action we take is directly proportional to the material value intervention would have to our bottom line.
SA killing Kashoggi or contributing to direct attacks? Cool, long as they got $/oil. Israel doing war crimes? Cool, long as they keep buying their arms from us and their ire focused on those we don't care for. Country getting worked over by our 'rival' ie taiwan or ukraine? Give them all the money and arms.
I'm not even trying to argue the merit of any of these decisions, I just don't agree any analysis is as simple as "stronger military = safer better happier fun time pax romana".
None of this would be possible without the security provided by the militaries of the western democracies. Strong militaries don't cause this outcome, but they are 100% required if you are trying to create it. The only way to prevent all of those bad things that you have the described western militaries doing from happening where you live is to have the protection of a strong military yourself. This is such a plainly obvious fact, denying it is about on par with the "defund the police" rationale. Sure they can do bad things, and that can be addressed, but society needs the military possibly even more than it needs the police.
That's the way they sell it, we agree about that.
>the effect that has is to minimize inequality.
So that's why we have worse than gilded age inequality?[0] Seems they haven't done too much of that despite their sales pitch. See trickle down economics.
>the 99%" are the primary benefactors of the improvements in quality of life that it has brought with it.
Not what the math says. I agree, in general starvation and what not are technically down. But shouldn't we have aspirations a little greater than "less people are starving to death in a world we drop?" I just don't see what evidence you have other than a correlation
[0]https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/wealth-inequality-billionai...
I wouldn't say its importance is on par with defending global shipping, but it really is up there. That's not to say we, or they, are doing it well. But it's not just a whim on our part.
The military is certainly necessary. But even a 25% cut would be a lot of money you could spend on other things, and still be by far the most advanced and expensive military in the world.
Colonial imperialism is a highly effective means of resource extraction.
Healthcare expenditure is 5 trillion, per-capita is around double that of other first world countries, for worse social health outcomes in many objective measures.
Welfare expenditure is 6 trillion, still >10% of the population is in poverty somehow. If you gave that money to everyone living in poverty, they would be getting $200k/year.
I think governments have a problem with wasteful (via incompetence, corruption, and bureaucratic overhead) spending. Sure, saving one % by cutting military expenditure or finding a few % more revenue by increasing taxes on wealthy or corporations might help at the margins. It's not going to be some incredible transformative thing like the online-leftist narrative would have you think.
It did not make us more secure or establish democracies (quite the opposite in Afghanistan).
I agree that we need national defense but we spend way too much with zero accountability.
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/financial-legacy-ir...
The effects of inexperience and general unreadiness amongst some of our biggest adversaries are currently on display for all to see in Ukraine.
Not that I'm saying this is an adequate justification for any of the terrible wars we've waged, but it is an outcome that should be accounted for.
Technically, yes. But imagine our focus is Earth science. The name of the game is drill the deepest borehold. Now, the Kola Superdeep team could rightfully claim they are digging into the deepest layers of our terrestrial reality that humans, heretofore, have ever reached.
But if you only dig boreholes, you're not reaching our planet's iron core. At least not for, at the very least, centuries for materials science to catch up with science fiction. Instead, the secrets will be unveiled through seismology.
Similarly, it's fair to ask whether building bigger and bigger synchrotrons is akin to trying to discover the secrets of Earth's interior by drilling deeper and deeper boreholes. (Disclaimer: I have zero background in particle physics.)
I'd be happy to hear about other promising experiments we're ignoring, but unless there are very promising and expensive alternative experiments we're ignoring, there's no good reason not to keep pushing particle accelerators. Why stop following the best approach we have so far?
So, even if there is no alternative, there's no reason to spend the money. There is no rule of science or economics that if we spend 17bn euro on a new collider we'll get some new science. It's very much possible we'll get ~nothing, and thus the money is better spent on other research. If the astronomy community doesn't have a better use for it as you claim (I highly doubt that), then I'm sure some other important science does - maybe materials science, maybe in bio sciences etc. If particle physics has run its course with current technology levels, then we can put it on pause and invest in other more promising areas of physics.
1) you presume a collider only brings value if it can definitively prove/refute a theory, but the Wikipedia article lists a number of incremental improvements (ruling out "a very broad class of models for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in the GeV – tens of TeV mass scale" as explanations for dark matter, improvements "in precision measurements of Electroweak precision observables" which supports other research, as well as "new avenues in the study of the collective properties of quarks and gluons"). Can you prove these incremental improvements have a lower RoI than other experiments that we're currently ignoring?
2) the 17bn euro don't disappear into a black hole. The development of these experiments requires R&D in areas (e.g. cryogenics & magnetics) that have produced a lot of value, but are often expensive to advance. Pushing these fields means that a portion of the budget will follow your suggestion, but it will be focused on important topics. It's hard for me to gauge the RoI of your suggested approach because you haven't suggested such a focus - can you give some examples?
In conclusion: you're treating the RoI of accelerators as boolean, but it's not. There's a bunch of definitive incremental improvements as well as useful side effects, even when disregarding the potential for discovering unknown physics.
I am also one of the people whose money would be used to pay for this, so I have at least some entitlement to an opinion on the matter. Ultimately, they need to convince ordinary EU citizens like myself that it's worth investing in this.
Now, if I were in a position to write proposals that had even a small chance to attract 17bn euro of investments to a project I'd like to work on, I can assure you I could come up with dozens if not hundreds of small advantages the project could bring, without lying. Most of them would of course be bullshit and far from actually worth the money, but hey, that's the game. The reasons you quote from Wikipedia all strike me as an aspect of this: real things that the FCC could probably really do, but ultimately irrelevant.
For example, it could rule out a broad class of models of WIMPs as candidates for dark matter. Great. But does this actually mean anything for the advancement of science? Not really: there would still remain many other broad classes of models of WIMPs that are far beyond what could be proved with an accelerator. And there are many other at least as good theories of what dark matter could be that are also well outside this range. So, ruling out some models, ones that we anyway don't have any particular reason to believe are the best models, is in fact almost useless.
I know less about the others to understand whether they are as much bullshit or not. And even if they all are, this doesn't mean there is 0 RoI. But I also don't thing the RoI is as high as in other, less well studied areas of physics.
As for the engineering advances, the problem with that line of argument is always the same: if buidling the FCC has minor value, but will have positive side-effects of improving our ability to build X, then investing directly in X would be even better.
Your approval as a citizen sadly doesn't mean much - the EU is not a direct democracy, and I haven't come across data showing that this issue would influence elections in a meaningful way (please share any you should find!). The representative nature of our shared democracy can often be frustrating, but as a fellow citizen you'll have to convince me that it should turn into such an issue when I vote the next time, however the way you're assigning negative intentions without providing examples of better investments doesn't convince me that you're treating the subject in an objective way.
> And there are many other at least as good theories of what dark matter could be that are also well outside this range. So, ruling out some models, ones that we anyway don't have any particular reason to believe are the best models, is in fact almost useless.
Have you read studies that analyze existing theories regarding "discoverability" (for lack of a better term)? Or how did you arrive at "almost useless"? It's hard for me to know if the likelihood is closer to 0.0000000001% or 1%, and at least some analysis on this should be doable, even if just by counting the raw amount of possibly achievable/non-achievable theories.
> I know less about the others to understand whether they are as much bullshit or not. And even if they all are, this doesn't mean there is 0 RoI. But I also don't thing the RoI is as high as in other, less well studied areas of physics.
Okay, and what are those areas? What would the required investments be for what kind of RoI?
> As for the engineering advances, the problem with that line of argument is always the same: if buidling the FCC has minor value, but will have positive side-effects of improving our ability to build X, then investing directly in X would be even better.
Only if the expected RoI of the FCC is lower than the additional RoI of investing in X. I'm open to this being the case, but since both of us aren't physicists (and probably not knowledgeable in these kinds of budgetary questions), I need more than your word.
Particle accelerators are the very definition of diminishing returns currently.
I'm not saying that no such examples exist, but I need concrete examples. Possible new research for the FCC is pretty well defined, meeting similar requirements should be easy if there really are so many better places to invest the money.
I also don’t think that the public really has much of a say in what gets tax payer funding. Governments are just bureaucratic behemoths and once they start paying for something, they can almost never find an acceptable way to stop. Additionally I’ve never met a tax funding recipient that was grateful to be getting it, if anything the perspective that they should be entitled to even more is a lot more common.
I recognize this support as a “luxury” made possible by a wealthy and progressive American society that wants great science and progress with the potential to improve the quality and duration of healthy lives.
CERN is not claiming that FCC is merely an engineering PoC stepping stone towards some larger collider, though. They are explicitly claiming that the FCC will either find or rule out some existing theories. This is basically false: all of our theories either make the same predictions for LHC energy levels as for the FCC ones (e.g. the standard model), or they have unbounded parameters and thus can't be ruled out in this way (e.g. super symmetry appears at higher energy levels, but there is no bound on how much higher energy level is required; if the FCC doesn't find supersymmetric particles, then we only find out that they require more energy, we don't get to say "sypersymmetry is now ruled out".
So what exactly are we supposed to build this thing for? The LHC had a very clear mandate: find or rule out the Higgs boson. What is the FCC going to either find or rule out?
LHC reaches collision energy environments in the scale of 10^4 GeV = 10 TeV, the FCC proposal is shooting for 10^5 GeV = 100 TeV. Just one order of magnitude higher, and note this won't appear any time soon. The LHC itself took 10 years to construct, another 4 for the Higgs detecting experiment. The FCC would probably take at least that long, I've seen estimates of 20-30+ years. Is this really the thing to commit on? It's not just money and time, but also attention. The thousands of scientists involved in particle physics are smart people, is a bigger collider project the best way to use their talents, for deep probes into reality or otherwise?
I don't know what's required for even higher energy levels -- like what would an equator sized one even be capable of? A quick google suggests with 30 T magnets, around the order of 10,000 TeV = 10^7 GeV would be achievable. Still a far cry short from the >= 10^(11±1) GeV level estimated to be the point where electroweak vacuum stability breaks down, and similar very high levels suggested by grand unified theory topics. Maybe decade+ projects should focus more on figuring out how to build (probably linear) accelerators in space to reach much higher energy levels than just 100 TeV? (Of course the max proton-proton collision energy isn't the only design parameter.)
The lack of "mandate" is of course striking, too. Papers from the 90s related to the LHC proposal all mention the importance of the Higgs and how various calculations let them be confident the LHC could find it (or not find it and invalidate so much). But, to try and credit the FCC proponents, it's not like you can't easily find some justifications. Whether they're convincing to different audiences is another matter. Several years ago there were a series of 5 papers on uses of the FCC, to be turned into the current 4 volume CDR. Here's the one (a couple hundred pages) specifically on new physics: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00947 There's some classes of dark matter theories it could rule out (but not all, so ultimately a similar situation with supersymmetry), and the paper helpfully compares reach vs. the LHC.
In the end I'm not even actively opposed to the FCC proposal, I just don't think it's adequately justified itself on its own merits or in comparison to potential other uses of funds and attention. (The latter being somewhat important because, while it'd be nice if there were more budget and more people, budget proportions probably aren't changing anytime soon, and birthrates are declining.) That's fine, what I think doesn't matter, and many things get funded that don't really justify themselves either. It's just nice when the benefits are much more direct and more easily explainable to non-experts.