But it is not just about making money: The entire field of radiation therapy for cancer exists and continues to improve because people figured out ways to control particle beams with extreme precision and in a much more economical way to study particle physics. Heck, commercial MRIs exist and continue to improve because physicists want cheaper, stronger magnets so they can build more powerful colliders. What if in the future you could do advanced screening quickly and without hassle at your GP's office instead of having to wait for an appointment (and possibly pay lots of money) at an imaging specialist center? And if they find something they could immediately nuke it without cutting you open? We're talking about the ultimate possibility of Star Trek level medbays here.
Let the physicists build the damn thing however they want and future society will be better off for sure. God knows what else they will figure out along the way, but it will definitely be better for the world than sinking another trillion dollars on wars in the middle east.
There is a lot of handwaving going on here to justify the incredibly cheap, mostly privately funded investments that launched the computer generation with the massively expensive, extremely gradual gains we are making now with particle accelerators. Part of it is that people just can't imagine how little was invested in R&D to get these stunning results, given how much we have to invest today to get much less impressive results, so they just assume that semiconductors could not have been invented without tens of billion dollars of research.
There is diminishing returns, just as a 90nm process is really all you need to get 90% of the benefits of computerization -- you can drive industrial automation just fine, all the military applications are fine, etc. But to go from a 90nm process to a 3nm process is an exponential increase in costs. In a lot of fields we are at that tail end where costs are incredibly high and gains are very low, and new fields will need to be discovered where there is low hanging fruit, and those fields will not require "tens of billions" of dollars to get that low hanging fruit.
Even with particle accelerators, SLAC cost $100 million to build and generated a massive bounty of discoveries, dwarfing the discoveries made at CERN.
To pretend that there is no such thing as a curve of diminishing returns, and to say that things have always been this way is to not paint an accurate picture of how science works. New fields are discovered, discoveries come quickly and cheaply, the field matures and discoveries become incremental and exponentially more expensive. That's how it works. For someone who is in a field on the tail end of that process, it's not good history to say "things have always been this way and have always cost this much".
No. These two cases are absurdly different, and you're even completely misunderstanding (or misrepresenting) the meaning of the "tens of billions of dollars" figure.
Microchips were an incremental improvement where the individual increments yielded utility far greater than the investment.
For particle physics, the problem is that the costs have exploded with the size of facilities to reach higher energies (the "tens of billions of dollars" is for one of them) but the results in scientific knowledge (let alone technological advances) have NOT. The early accelerators cost millions or tens of millions and revolutionized our undestanding of the universe. The latest ones cost billions and have confirmed a few things we already thought to be true.
> Let the physicists build the damn thing and future society will be better off for sure.
Absolutely not.
You should look up how modern EUV lithography was commercialised. This was essentially a big plasma physics puzzle. If ASML hadn't taken on a ridiculous gamble (financially on the same order of magnitude as a new collider, esp. for a single colpany) with the research, Moore's law would have died long ago and the entire tech industry would be affected. And there was zero proof that this was going to work beforehand.
So would have been delayed.
Not sure what role of EUV optics was in LHC. But Zeiss would develop you anything on the frontier of optics if you have deep enough pockets.
The rest I don't know enough to comment on, but as far as technology goes both LHC and EUV lithography are bespoke systems. Seriously doubt there is any path dependency. Huge part of LHC cost were earthworks and precision construction of complex machinery at enormous scale.
Engineers not being able to fathom that by building this huge-ass and complicated machines to answer questions about the fundamentals of nature, other problems are solved or new things are invented that improve and change our life will never not be funny to me
Because the trade off of no new accelerators is the definite end of accelerator science for several generations.
The only exception is if some research reveals nothing. Though this isn't a useful claim: "it doesn't work" still revealed something.
Particle physics has told us a lot about the base nature of our model and the affirmation of the standard model. The fruits of these labors still take decades to make their mark on our world.
And, we still are working on those other things at the same time too. It turns out with 8 billion people on the planet and modern technology we can get an absolute fuckload done at once.
A statement that certain needs some backing.
You might say that the statement you were replying to also needs some backing, but they did give some, although you believe it was incorrect.
It just seems that "absolutely not" goes against the conventional wisdom that knowledge for knowledge sake will lead to some greater return than was expended on getting that knowledge somewhere down the road which really is one of the main underlying ideas of Western Civilization since before Newton.
Absolutely not means future society will not be better off! That seems to be a big weird absurdly pompous and conceited statement to make unless you have a time machine, or at least a big mess of statistics that can show that scientific advances in physics for a significant amount of time has failed to provide a return value on existence, although I would think that does not rise to the promise of "absolutely not".
Yes, but we had hopes that it would lead to more. And had lead to more, something only known to be false in hindsight, who knows where that would have ended us up? What if it upended the standard model instead of reinforcing it?
> Absolutely not.
What are we supposed to do then? As humans, I mean. No one knows why we're here, what the universe really is like. We have some pretty good models that we know are wrong and we don't know what wonders the theoretical implications of any successor models might bring. That said, do we really need to motivate fundamental research into the nature of reality with a promise of technology?
I'm not arguing for mindlessly building bigger accelerators, and I don't think anyone is - there has to exist a solid line of reasoning to warrant the effort. And we might find that there are smarter ways of getting there for less effort - great! But if there isn't, discrediting the venue of particle accelerators due to their high upfront cost as well as historical results would be a mistake. We can afford it, and we don't know the future.
You sure about that?
The GP whose position you’re defending wrote this:
> Let the physicists build the damn thing however they want and future society will be better off for sure.
But you are and they are. Just by the comments here its clear that even suggesting not to use untold billions on maybe pushing theoretical physics a little forward is meet with scorn. The value proposition either, in knowledge or technology, is just not well argued anymore besides hand waving.
Sure, but it didn't. Which is knowledge that really should factor into the decision to build the next, bigger one.
> What are we supposed to do then? As humans, I mean.
Invest the money and effort elsewhere, for now. There are many other fields of scientific exploration that are very likely to yield greater return (in knowledge and utility) for less. You could fund a hundred smaller but still substantial intiatives instead of one big accelerator. And be virtually guaranteed to have an exciting breakthrough in a few of them.
And who knows, maybe a breakthrough in material science or high-voltage electrophysics will substantially reduce the costs for a bigger particle accelerator?
>Sure, but it didn't. Which is knowledge that really should factor into the decision to build the next, bigger one.
Not this week, no. And if, next week (or next year or next decade) we resolve some of the most significant problems in modern physics, any expenditures in those fields were a waste?
You've repeatedly bashed particle physics based on your perception of a lack of progress vis-a-vis the costs, and claimed that other fields should be prioritized. Which fields? What would you hope to gain from those fields?
Is there no room for basic research that attempts to validate the bases (Standard Model, Quantum Field Theory, the marriage of the former with General Relativity, etc.) of modern physics? If not why not? Our models are definitely wrong, but they're measurably less wrong than previous models.
Should we not continue to hone/probe those models to find the cracks in the theories underpinning those models? If we don't, how will we solve these extant issues?
It was always factored in, and of course it would be in any next iteration.
> Invest the money and effort elsewhere, for now. There are many other fields of scientific exploration that are very likely to yield greater return (in knowledge and utility) for less. You could fund a hundred smaller but still substantial intiatives instead of one big accelerator. And be virtually guaranteed to have an exciting breakthrough in a few of them.
I agree with this to a large extent. I'm just not against particle accelerators as a venue for scientific advancement and in the best of worlds we could do both.
I'd not be so sure about that. Doing this research will probably allow us to answer "it works but we don't know exactly why" cases in things we use everyday (i.e. li-ion batteries). Plus, while the machines are getting bigger, the understood tech is getting smaller as the laws of physics allows.
If we are going to insist on "Absolutely not" path, we should start with proof-of-work crypto farms and AI datacenters which consume county or state equivalents of electricity and water resources for low quality slop.
> If we are going to insist on "Absolutely not" path, we should start with proof-of-work crypto farms and AI datacenters which consume county or state equivalents of electricity and water resources for low quality slop.
Who exactly is the "we" that is able to make this decision? The allocation of research budgets is completely unrelated to the funding of AI datacenters or crypto farms. There is no organization on this planet that controls both.
And if you're gonna propose that the whole of human efforts should somehow be organized differently so that these things can be prioritized against each other properly, then I'm afraid that is a much, MUCH harder problem than any fundamental physics.
Which are? Just asking for the purposes of this discussion.
> Absolutely not.
And what do YOU mean, "absolutely not"? You have no more say in what happens than anyone else unless you're high level politician, who would still be beholden to their constituents anyway.
And yet big science, like particle accelerators, STILL gets funding. There's plenty to go around. Sure, every once in a while a political imperative will "pull the plug" on something deemed wasteful or too expensive and maybe sometimes that's right. But we STILL have particle physics, we STILL send out pure science space missions, there are STILL mathematicians and theorists who are paid for their whole careers to study subject matter that has no remotely practical applications.
Not everything must have a straight-line monetary ROI.
That's the problem with cutting edge reaserch....you don't even know if you will ever needed it or if a trilion dollar industry is waiting for just a number to be born
Because the costs aren't just numbers. They represent hundreds or thousands of person-years of effort. You're proposing that a large number of people should spend their entire lives supporting this (either directly as scientists, or indirectly through funding it) - and maybe end up with nothing to show for it.
And there's the opportunity costs. You could fund hundreds of smaller, yet still substantial scientific efforts in many different fields for the cost of just one particle accelerator of the size we think is sufficient to yield some new observations.
If that's the case it seems like it might be shrewd for younger investors to buy into physics research on a 15-20 year timeline?
Where do you think that tax money comes from?
Apple and Nvidia are creating the economies that produce tax revenue at every step of the way.
Government has always been the backbone of basic science research - no one else can reasonably bear the risk and the advances are public domain.
I suppose the only solution is undeground science. Do enough progress in silence, dont disseminare the results, unless the superiority becomes so obvious that an armed resistance becomes unthinkable.
"Fundamental Research" may or may not pan out, but the things that happen along the way are often valuable... I don't think there's any practical applications related to generating Higgs Bosons, but it's interesting (at least for particle physicists) and there's a bunch of practical stuff you have to figure out to confirm them.
That practical work can often generate or motivate industrial progress that's generally useful. For example, LHC generates tons of data and advances the state of the art in data processing, transmission, and storage; that's useful even if you don't care about the particle work.
Porn seems to be sustainably self funding; no need for government stimulus.
Only because you haven't seen the plans for the Large Hardon Collider
So look at it this way. Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money, and they’ll spend 30 years advancing engineering to probe the very fabric of reality. And everything they learn will be shared with the rest of humanity for free.
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
But just like that money is generated, it's also all spent.
So the actual hard part is deciding what not to spend money on so we can build some crazy physics machines with a blurry ROI instead.
Unpopular opinion: Google makes an insane amount of money, so they can afford this salary. The CERN (or whatever your favourite research institute is), on the other hand, is no money-printing machine.
Is it?
You are assuming cold fusion is possible. We don't know that. It might be one more step before we finally prove it is never possible.
You are also assuming that cold fusion is something this path of research will lead us to. However this might be a misstep that isn't helpful at all because it doesn't prove anything useful about the as yet unknown physical process that cold fusion needs.
We just don't know, and cannot know at this point.
Similar statements were already claimed about nuclear fission power plants in the 70s.
> The second we're able to understand and capture this [cold fusion] energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective.
This said beyond the marketing there is a reality that if cold fusion did show up that there is a singularity event that occurs that making predictions past that point will almost always fail as the world would change very rapidly.
There are talks of a Muon collider, also there's a spallation source being built in Sweden(?) and also of an electron 'Higgs factory' (and while the LHC was built for the Higgs boson it is not a great source for it - it is built as a generic tool that could produce and see the Higgs)