Hacker News Reader

Understanding of how things work, so we can bend them to our will.

Better understanding of the standard model will buy us many things, most of which we don't yet realise will be interesting, useful, fun, exciting, and important. Better understanding of the standard model will possibly give us:

* Quantum computers

* Room temperature superconductors

* Substances strong enough to build a space elevator

40 years ago we had no idea how to build 'planes that were bigger, stronger, faster, and more efficient than the ones we had, and yet people did the basic research anyway, just because they thought it might be useful. They found composite structures, and we got the 'planes and other things. The metals used in car engines have improved enormously, in part because of what was seen at the time as being basic research that might not really go anywhere.

But in the end it's basic science, and we don't always know how - or whether - it will repay itself. For every advance that has gained us something there are other efforts that have led nowhere, but we never know in advance which will be which.

    That's the nature of research -- you don't know
        what in hell you're doing. -- 'Doc' Edgerton

    If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be
        called research, would it? -- Albert Einstein

So who knows what will come out of this. The research could give us teleportation, or Star Trek-style replicators, or dirt-cheap solar energy harvesting paints that cars can run on, or electricity storage devices, or plastics that can be made without oil, or entirely new substances, just as plastics once were.

I have no idea how old you are, but I'm fifty, and stuff exists now that didn't when I was in my teens, partly because of people doing basic research.

I understand (somewhat) and agree fully with the value of this research. (Great specifics by the way.) I am hearing from you that we have no idea what we will discover, but it could be anything and likely something really cool.

The question I have is really how it was explained to politicians and decision makers who are not scientific. Was it really, "with this research we could discover anything from teleportation to a better way to make toasters", or was it something more specific?

I currently see our governments doing everything they can to limit discovery and creativity because they don't understand basic science or the Internet. It is interesting and heartening to me that a project like this currently exists and is mostly not questioned.

> I currently see our governments doing everything they can to limit discovery and creativity because they don't understand basic science or the Internet.

The truth is that it's easier for politicians to buy votes with handouts than it is for them to fund research in the hopes that an enlightened public will appreciate them for their foresight. Looks like they're correct... unfortunately.

Government does not fund anything. It redistributes the wealth of the taxpayers. At least attribute the source of the funding to the correct people.

I don't think the top politicians in each country had to sign off on this. More likely the money was already allocated to scientific research and there were people in charge of deciding how to spend it.

<cynical rant>To the extent that politicians did have to be persuaded, they were probably persuaded by other means than that of elucidating the potential scientific payoffs. They were probably persuaded using political arguments, i.e. how it would play with their voters. Politicians are not, in practice, guardians of a sacred trust. They operate by their own rules and for their own reasons.</cynical rant>

no no no you're coming at this from the wrong angle.

To the politicians, it suffices to say that "It's bigger than what the Americans got".

The importance of CERN for European science and culture as a whole is an interesting subject, but I'd assume it's had very much positive effect.

The timing of the announcement, 4th July, surely suggests this could be what actually transpired.

How come you missed something more obvious?

* Controlled Fusion

My guess is that the politicians were sold on the unlimited energy that successful controlled fusion would provide.

As somebody once said: Any problem on Earth can be solved with the careful application of high explosives. The trick is not to be around when they go off.

The benefit of this is we get something that is invaluable, discovery. We discover things that may have no practical application at all, but we discovered it, then someone might come along in 1, 100, 10000 years that has a use for it, but only because it's been discovered.

X-rays, electricity, penicillin we're all discoved with no practical application in mind.

Not even remotely true about penicillin, I'm pretty sure that when Flemming discovered penicillin, since he was a biologist and a pharmacologist he had a pretty good idea of its practical application.

x-rays, maybe, but even electricity im doubtful of. While it may not have been possible then to predict all the uses of electricity, i'm pretty sure someone had the idea of using it's power to, well, power things...

For thousands of years the only application electricity had was that you could rub fur and amber together and then they would attract small objects. The word electricity actually comes from the Greek word for amber.

So your point about Penicillin might be correct, but you are completely wrong about X-rays and electricity.

Actually Flemming did not.

He did the research, he published, and the publication sat for 12 years until a couple of other people came along, and tried to build on it by making a practical product out of it.

Also after penicillin was discovered, researchers going back found evidence that other scientists had encountered it, and had failed to see that it had potential.

About electricity, Maxwell (who unified electricity and magnetism in one set of equations) when asked to justify the value of his work famously replied, "To tell you the truth we don't do it because it is useful but because it's amusing." In retelling the story he added, "Would it be any good to ask a mother what practical use her baby is?"

This is a clear demonstration that the scientists studying electricity in the early days did not know what practical utility their work would have. (Though the connection between electricity and magnetism today drives generators and electric motors all over the world, and the prediction of electromagnetic waves lead to the understanding of what light really is, and to the development of the telegraph, radio, television, etc, etc.)

At a 9 Billion USD price tag, what are our governments buying for us? There must be something beyond scientific intellectual curiosity. Those of us with this curiosity may be happy to pay for it, but how were politicians convinced? What value will this provide to the governments of the world who made the decision to purchase this answer.

False dilemma. When we spend trillions of dollars a year to kill people in the name of stopping violence, 10^-3 of that for curiosity is not something that is rational to attack. Particularly when exploration for curiosity's sake has led to plenty of demonstrably beneficial results.

"Your wasting a lot of money here, so you shouldn't mind wasting a lesser amount here"

Government funding needs to justify itself, not against other uses for the money. The bills have come due and we need to cut out what isn't vital. 9 billion could have paid a lot of health insurance policies.

I'm glad they valued this, but it needs to be valuable based on its own merit.

Im not saying that. Im saying if you care about waste, quit attacking minor inefficiencies when instead, there is a giant one right there. I have no problem talking about whether some money spent on science has value, right after we deal with the huge money sink in other places. It's basic triage. Don't waste our time worrying about pocket change when you're burning hundred dollar bills because the smoke is pretty.

The problem with most government budgets is that most of the problems are the pocket change. All the little things need to be cleaned up to get at the bigger issues.

I'm not a mathematician, but I am pretty sure you can go by a rough order of magnitude scale... If you have gross headings that are many orders of magnitude larger than others, your best bet is to look in those large ones for waste first. Scientific research would have to be eliminated tens or hundreds of times over to get to a level of savings that could probably be removed easier from waste in headings like defense and law enforcement and corporate subsidy.

Mathematically, sure. Math isn't the problem in politics, territory is. All the little things add to people's territory and patronage. It also keeps people from making the big cuts. We need a culture change to spend the money responsibly and it will only happen when "it's only a couple of million" is removed from our vocabulary.

As an aside in 2011, Defense and international security assistance is 20% of the budget. Social Security spending was higher than that (731 vs 718 billion). Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP was a bit bigger at $769 billion. The rest of the safety net style programs was $466 billion. $230 billion was spent paying interest on the national debt.

The actual value of a government program is a meaningless thing because the calculations you do depend entirely upon what you or your cohort personally value.

The American military's V-22 tilt-rotor "Osprey" helicopter program will cost approximately $36B. A cursory web search will show that it is considered a deathtrap that does not meet most of its design objectives.

So is the value of a program to build suicide machines worth four times more than knowing more about how foundational reality is constructed? Blark, argh, divide by zero. If you get paid to build suicide machines, it's a valuable program. If you get paid to fly a suicide machine, it both is and it isn't. If you are watching someone who is flying a suicide machine die, it probably isn't. If you like science more than you like watching people die, no. If you like watching people die more than you like science, yes. On and on and over and over in limitless permutations multiplied by every taxpayer.

All you can say with certainty is that someone or some party in the course of a government process valued that process at some point enough to make it happen.

I would bet "knowing more about how foundational reality is constructed" is probably worth less to a lot of people than say research into the top 10 cause of death by disease.

I'm glad they chose to fund this, but my original point is that no government funding these days should survive unless it can be justified. We cannot keep running deficits.

Your "cursory web search" might want to include actual statistics on accidents particularly compared to the CH-46 it is replacing.

My example was pure hyperbole. :) But I think my point stands: any government program can be justified by some party, deficit or not. Even deficit spending itself is a virtue for some.

There is no test to separate pork from fiber where there is no fundamental accountability. Spending programs exist because spending programs exist.

I figured :), but I love reading about aircraft and hate Wired's reporting on anything involving risk or the military.

At this point, if it doesn't keep the lights on, the trains running, or protect / save lives; it needs to be looked at for cutting.

Are you suggesting that research into the top 10 causes of death isn't a lot more than the $9 billion spent on the equipment needed to discover the Higgs?

The NIH gets $30B/yr[1]. I don't know where the $9B figure for the LHC came from, but I bet it's total cost, over what, 10-15 years?

[1]http://nih.gov/about/almanac/appropriations/part2.htm

Nope, not saying that at all, I was saying that an additional $9 billion on the top 10 might have been prioritized higher. Once again, I am glad they funded the LHC, but my thesis is that government spending needs to be cut to the bone until the deficit and unpaid liabilities are dealt with. Much like we cut spending after WWII.

I updated my comment to communicate better what I was asking. I do fully support this kind of research. I am interested in the technological directions and discoveries for society that this research is expected to provide. It seems odd that politicians who don't necessarily have specific interest in theoretical physics are convinced to fund a project of this size and scope without tangible benefits.

It's basic research. Some countries' politicians were convinced that you need basic research to do applied research. It's also a great international collaborative project, where subcontractors from many countries get actual money making contracts to build the required detectors, magnets, etc.

Without quantum mechanics exploration you wouldn’t have a transistor, which means no computer or television. Furthermore you can say goodbye to lasers and all the changes they brought to medical operations-for example all eye surgery today is done using lasers. So while the discovery of the Boson particle per se might not have a direct impact in our lives, the more we understand particle physics as a whole the better machines we will be able to build in the future which will definitely change the way we live.

Basically, we just keep discovering things like this until they flesh out our understanding of a whole bunch of interrelated domains enough to build a warp drive.

I'm serious.

There is no known outcome.

"what are our governments buying for us?": - knowledge - possible future applications

It's that simple. That's always how fundamental research works. How politicians were convinced, I don't know - that's an excellent question.

I am no physicist, but i have been following particle physics as a hobby. And as i understand it, there is this standard model which which describes how particles behave and groups them, and hence like periodic table (extreme simplification) helps predict particles that have not been discovered yet but that can be proved following the standard model and it's calculations. But There needs to be confirmation that standard model is itself correct. One way is to find particles that the model predicts. If they are found then we know that the standard model is in fact correct and the other implications can be that much more "correct". So Higgs boson will not only explain why/how matter has mass and hence makes everything possible but it will also re affirm that standard model is on track, for now.

> One way is to find particles that the model predicts. If they are found then we know that the standard model is in fact correct.

Actually, finding those particles doesn't tell us that the standard model is correct. Finding those particles just tells us that it doesn't have some specific errors.

One difference between science and math is that you can't prove anything "correct" in science.

"One difference between science and math is that you can't prove anything "correct" in science."

Excellent analogy

Yes, i think over simplification killed it. The existence of higgs will only tell us that the model was not wrong in it's prediction and will hence increase the credibility and chances of success of other predictions. I stand corrected.

One difference between science and math is that you can't prove anything "correct" in science.

To be fair, you can only prove something "correct" in math to the extent that it agrees with the underlying axioms. In broader scientific fields, an assertion is just as "correct" if it agrees with the underlying models.

In mathematics, you can challenge the validity of axioms, which is usually a pointless thing to do, or you can point out, as Goedel did, that some assertions will remain unprovable within any given framework of axioms. So the math guys know where they stand, at least.

In many areas of science, the experimental method is becoming less and less useful over time. Particle physicists need to know how well the Standard Model agrees with reality, because so much of their future work will depend on assumptions that can only be tested against the model. (We won't see a bigger-than-LHC facility constructed anytime soon, put it that way, and that was the case even before the recent global financial problems came to light.)

Similarly, the work of climatologists can be, and has been, attacked because it depends on models, and the map is not the territory. As with the Standard Model of particle physics, an assertion can be shown to be unequivocally true or false within the bounds of a given climate model, but not in reality, because we only have one Earth to experiment with. In both climatology and particle physics, the lab door is now locked. The models are all we have to go by, so it's really important that we get them right.

Well, mathematics is somewhat unique in that ultimately, it's purely detached from reality - it's purely conceptual.

When we can use it to model the things we percieve, that's great, but at it's most fundamental level, mathematics is not a natural science (if that's the right term) - it's a human construct - purely abstract.

But to be fair, when we say "prove" in common speech with regards to science, do we really need to say "science can't prove anything?" - every time? Most people get that on forums that discuss such things - "proven" in these things simply mean their theories checked out. We'll never know what the universe really "IS" - we only know what we percieve, directly or indirectly,and what we can predict. It's still turtles, all the way down.

- not literally that it's an absolute truth - that's impossible, as you said, other than in mathematics.

I've had many dreams in which the rules of gravity no longer held, but I've never had a dream in which three things and four other things didn't make a total of seven things.

There's something more absolute and universal about math.

I've had a reality in which 0 (zero) things makes two things ... [particle-antiparticle pairs appearing in quantum fluctuations in vacuo in case that's too terse].

Similarly thousands of things can make up a single thing. [Like bosons in a Bose-Einstein Condensate].

Or in the case in point where you just stick various particles in a pot and pull out some other particles with corresponding energy. For example in beta decay a neutron changes to a proton emitting a W- particle which itself decays to an electron and electron-anti-neutrino (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beta_Negative_Decay.svg).

Ultimately maths is axiomatic, so not universal, and Godel shows that it's not absolute.

I am not a physics researcher, but based on the videos that I have seen and whatever articles I have read, the most fascinating takeaway for me are:

1. That mass is not an intrinsic property of matter; rather it is acquired by the particle's interaction with Higgs field.

2. A massless particle travels at the speed of light.

When controlled, this has the potential to result in super crazy outcomes (super fast transfer of matter and energy etc).

PS: Please correct my interpretation if it looks wrong.

You've just discovered the fundamental question about basic research.

We've reached the point in scientific discoveries where you can't expect an apple falling on a scientist's head to eventually lead to an explanation (I know this story isn't true). The proposed theory is more complex and therefore requires lots of money. You have no idea what this potential discovery could lead to 10, 20, 50, 200 years down the road. And neither does anybody, it could be a steal. How much is the truth worth (or a glimpse at why things happen)?

By the way, what was the common man's response when Newton first explained gravity? Probably, "Things fall, what more do you need to know"

How much is the truth worth (or a glimpse at why things happen)?

If I'm starving? It's not worth more than a meal.

This is actually a pretty shortsighted perspective. The understanding of the mechanism responsible for giving all particles the property of mass will have far reaching consequences for further research and technology in the future.

I'm pretty sure that the invention of much of the communication technologies we have today were not readily predicted in the mid-1800's when Maxwell was developing EM theory.

Coming up with applications of the Higgs Boson can make it easier to discover. If the thing works, that indicates that the theory is correct.

Part of the answer is a conscious decision on the EU level to 'become the best at science'. That sounds awfully vague and usually is an empty promise in politics, but in this case there was broad support for such an effort (plenty of money was available, the USA seemed to be slacking off, CERN had proven its worth etc etc).

Discover magazine hosted a conversation about this very question.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/03/20/...

Here is the CERN's “we found the Higgs, what comes next?” press release:

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/background/B11-Higgs_understa...