Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

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> when sufficient energy is crammed into a sufficiently small space, particles that were not previously present can sometimes be created out of that energy

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...

> To observe entanglement between top quarks, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations selected pairs of top quarks from data from proton–proton collisions that took place at an energy of 13 teraelectronvolts during the second run of the LHC, between 2015 and 2018. In particular, they looked for pairs in which the two quarks are simultaneously produced with low particle momentum relative to each other. This is where the spins of the two quarks are expected to be strongly entangled.

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.

> 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

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].)

[1] https://opendata.cern.ch/record/80020

An out-of-band URL to the data without instructions on how the slice of interest was requested is not what I described.

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.

> 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

Average Joe is consuming chat bots. He is not raising money or taking tutorials.

The mere act of consuming brings money to the field.

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.

We already make the data available publicly...

http://opendata.cern.ch/

please show me the low barrier to entry

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?

Tell Average Joe that CERN invented URLs.

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.

But that would convince them to sponsor the particle physicists of the day, not of today?

$17bn is 2% of the US government annual defense budget, and that money will build a facility that operates for far longer than a year. It's 0.8% of the cost of the F-35 program (or 3.8% of the program's procurement cost). $17bn is a big number for individuals, but it's a fairly small number for governments.

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.

> $17bn is 2% of the US government annual defense budget

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 always a shortage of money. Because human desires are infinite and our resources are not.

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.

Pretending that money is a social construct is not quite meaningless, but certainly non-constructive. It doesn't help understand or decide wisely. It's like saying that consciousness is a retrospective illusion.

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".

We are all engaged in this "exercise in manipulation of myth" in this very discussion, and so you either missed the point or are engaging in dishonest rhetoric intended to further your goals in this manipulation of myth. Out of the principle of charity, I'm going to assume the former and will attempt to clarify.

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.

I'm not saying a new collider is the best use of our money. I'm saying that fighting over scraps, comparatively, for science investment is ignoring that far greater sums of money are spent unthinkingly on other areas, and often wasted without regret.

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 is ever going to say "I'm sure glad we spent two trillion dollars on the F-35."

Nobody cares about your server backups either. Unless something goes wrong and you need them.

Perfect analogy. Some companies overspend on disaster recovery preparedness. Most do not. But it’s very hard to call any spending in that area “wasted”.

$2tn for 630 jets isn't "overspending"???

How much would you pay to deter a way that’s likely to go nuclear? You think maybe $500B tops?

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.

Exactly! Why can we fund defense projects with no cap on budget that might never become operational but we have to pick and choose which areas of science we're going to put money towards? That's the whole point: nobody is glad we spent the money. Surely instead of inventing an almost unimaginably expensive jet, we could have spent that money on less ambitious jets that are many orders of magnitude cheaper? Ukraine doesn't have any F-35s and yet they're holding their own against Russia. Why is there a double standard?

> we'll be writing about the Higgs until the end of humanity

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-...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Proton_Synchrotron

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory

A few billion here, a few billion there, pretty soon we're talking real money.

>> 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?

> 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?

The problem isn't that there isn't money, but that there isn't enough money for scientific research. The view that building bigger and bigger LHCs is coming at the expense of more deserving research is IMO worth consideration and is something folks like Sabine Hossenfelder aggressively share. I don't think it's fair to just shout down and down-vote people just for raising the concern.

> The problem isn't that there isn't money, but that there isn't enough money for scientific research

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...

> that we shouldn't explore areas of science because cheaper science should be prioritized

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].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00105-9

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.04469

17bn is more or less NASA's budget if you suddenly want to discuss the European scientific budget with America as a baseline. It's also more than two times the budget of the ESA (European Space Agency)

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.

> 17bn is more or less NASA's budget if you suddenly want to discuss the European scientific budget with America as a baseline. It's also more than two times the budget of the ESA (European Space Agency)

Annually. The cost of building something for $17bn is amortized over many years. Nobody is writing a $17bn check.

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