"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!"
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.
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.