As a low-energy quantum physicist, I completely agree: Experimental high-energy physics has become primarily an industrial subsidy scheme[1], and if we want the highest chance of reaching a grand unified theory, it seems the money would be much better spent elsewhere (cosmology, space-based observatories, research positions for young physicists without publish-or-perish incentives to run for the latest fad).
The short history of physics in TFA is spot on: Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise. This has been confirmed by numerous insiders, including by Hossenfelder as mentioned in the article, and Lee Smolin ("The trouble with physics") who is also a theoretical physicist.
Things have changed a lot since accelerators became a must-have for high-energy physics: Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned. I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations.
[1]: The industrial subsidy angle is not touched upon in TFA, but it is clear that there is a large number of people and companies making a good living from mega-physics, and talking to colleagues in the field, I get the distinct impression that it is not always they physicist walking in the front when asking for more machines.
The place is fantastic, you get to meet great people and life is cool.
But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity. Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere. If someone could answer to this "and so what?" in a meaningful way I would be glad to change my mind. For the time being, the energy scale we are making these discoveries is not useful.
"yes, but this is fundamental science..." → yes it is, but where does this fundamental science helps in everyday problems? Have we had a case where the Higgs boson changed anything in our life?
The quantum mechanics of the 1920's changed our everyday world. We could build a whole technology on it, and understand things that changes our everyday life. Is there a comparable impact on knowing that the Higgs boson is +/- 10^-9 (or whatever) aligned with the theoretical model?
We have so many problems where physics is needed (energy production to start with, and then exploring biology), the money should go there instead. Even if it means having less particle physicists the same way we have less philosophes.
The LHC's development produced a number of new technologies (e.g. radiation resistant microcontrollers, and gas electron multipliers). Could the next generation produce more, valuable tech?
I also don't have the expertise to tell whether the article is being overly reductive with the project's goals: are there other questions (besides new particles) that can only be answered with a larger collider? The summary of the FCC (Future Circular Collider) project's goals indicates that yes, there are unresolved questions that the FCC will address[0].
Cannot disagree more. "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's just have 1000 people walk one mile and explore." Simply ridiculous comparison. But sure, let's find a way to build/experiment LHC++ less expensively.
What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.
More realistically : we can only build one car in the entire world, where a tiny minority of people can even understand the potential benefit, and anything they see will be completely useless for everyone else in day to day life because we need a civilisation level effort to even detect the implications of their theory. If their theory had some real world implications - you wouldn't need this car.
And this is expected to be funded by everyone. It's the modern equivalent of building pyramids.
Is the ratio of cost of car to cost of persons walking correct.
It seems like the car is a Bugatti Veyron and like there is a huge (exponentially growing) fronteir to explore.
Exploring another 1000 miles in a very well studied direction seems less curious than pushing outward another mile over the entire frontier. Especially at the places that have gotten less attention.
'Doing more of the same but bigger' feels more like small thinking than 'lets try lots of things we haven't tried before'. To me the latter also feels a lot more curious.
I read it as: "Instead of building one really expensive car to continue to explore in one direction let's build lots of cars and explore in all directions". To me that shows an attitude full of curiosity.
My immediate skepticism is whether there is a dollar limit to your perspective
$100,000,000,000 with afterthought of “sure lets see if we can do it less expensively *since its sooo annoying to some people”? Where is the line for you currently?
Curiousity can have many shapes. Being curious about 100,000 smaller questions is no better or worse than being curious about one big one. A lack of curiousity here would have been to sinply say all this money shouldnt be spent on research at all.
My read of the article was more a call for considering the practical uses of tge research. If we don't know what $100B worth of LHC will discover, why wouldnt we instead fund tens of thousands of smaller projects that often have very practical real world goals?
If there is plenty of unexplored space, and all the car helps you do is figure out what is 1000 miles out but you can only explore one direction with it and can't directly bring anything back... yeah, sending 1000 people out one mile is probably more beneficial.
> "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's just have 1000 people walk one mile and explore."
"Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's instead build an airplane."
The problem with next-gen LHC is that there are no guarantees of any new or interesting physics for that $100 billion. And particle accelerators are not the only way to spend large sums of money, so there is an opportunity cost. Why not spend that $100 billion to build more space telescopes or more sensitive LIGOs to detect gravitational waves, etc.
"Rather than building yet another city-sized internal combustion engine, but even bigger to carry more further, how about we fund a lot of blue-sky research to determine if there's a way to carry scientists forward without city-sized internal combustion engines?"
As a former experimental particle physicist, I don't think string theory or supersymmetry is going to be a description of nature. I say that despite spending a couple of years searching for SUSY. But I still think the cost of building a LHC++ (that is, the FCC or the SPPC) is justified. The current theoretical "dead end" or maybe swamp fundamental physics is in is precisely due to a lack of data.
Of course, there are a lot of smaller experiments that one could do, also in particle physics, that have great value. One example was the Muon g-2 measurement, another is anything neutrino physics. We can get a lot of interesting input and test our theories without going to the "energy frontier". Physicists understand this very well. But there are a bunch of questions that you can only really answer if you go to those higer energies.
As for the costs, 100 billion is a lot, but not when you compare it to other large infrastructure projects, or especially military spending (and note the Chinese proposal SPPC would be a lot cheaper!). I think if we could shave off 100 billion of military expenses and put it into basic research, it would be a great win for society. That's not realistic you say, with all the threats out there? Great, I agree, but now we have a nice project! Lets put as a common goal that we want to be able to do this kind of research, and then improve our societies nationally and globally so that we can reduce our military spending and do this kind of research.
100 billion ($/€) is the amount that Germany is spending as a special budget in response to Russia's aggression, in order to become the nation with the 3rd highest military spending on the planet. If it weren't for the war in Ukraine, we could put it all into such a project.
If we had averted COVID in it's early stages - like we did with SARS-1 and MERS - imagine all the resources we could have put into research instead.
But if you have say 100 billion, why put it into "yet another collider" rather than say condensed matter physics and quantum information research? To me, a non-physicist, it seems those areas have a lot more potential to deliver science that will benefits us.
Alternatively, if one really wants to pursue beyond the standard model physics, it seems to me multi-messenger astronomy has a much better chance of delivering decisive data, so shouldn't we put that money into better observatories?
I think people needs to put a bit of perspective on this :
the FCC is a project for the next 70 years. It is supposed to be operational after 2040 at the earliest if I recall correctly (20 years from now more or less), and to run for around 40 years.
So if you do a very simplistic calculation on the first 20 years : 100 B euros over 20 years over 20 countries (there is 23 member states into the CERN) it is 250 M euros / year / country. This is not even calculated on the over-all project time, on on the different steps that will be happening: first FCC as electron-positron collider and then much later FCC hadron-hadron collider.
And if you are really interested into the previewed outcomes (scientifically and new techs associated):
You can take look at the European research communities symposium that just happened recently on the future of the research topics in Europe. There are a lot of information for FCC and so on.
I feel like this article does not discuss the real reasons why LHC++ would or would not be a success. It absolutely depends on whether you expect it to provide tangible evidence of new physics; that is, physics beyond the standard model. It's easy to say "high-energy physics has become highly academic and mathematical", but if it provided results there wouldn't be a problem with that. Mathematical beauty has proven unreasonably effective at driving innovation in physics [1], and cutting-edge research being academic is nothing new.
The fundamental problem for high-energy physics seems to be the "tyranny of the standard model", as one of my professors called it. We know that our current model of fundamental particles must be incomplete towards extremely high energies (trillions of TeV), because it conflicts with general relativity. However, almost all experimental results are consistent with the standard model.
There are some barely-significant [2] results from muon spin and W-boson experiments, but the effect sizes are minuscule and and two data-points are in no way enough to guide new theory development.
This leaves theorists with almost no experimental input, so they pursue purely mathematical ideas that are in some way elegant, able to describe the standard model as a low-energy limit, and in some cases include a description of gravity as well. But the more advanced and theoretical the ideas get, the more difficult it gets to make experimental predictions. The ones which predict non-standard-model measurements with current equipment are already ruled out anyway, because we did the measurements and the standard model just keeps getting validated.
So what should we do? We can hope that a larger collider will find new evidence of beyond-standard-model physics, but (as I understand it) there is no concrete reason why there has to be anything interesting in the newly-accessible energy region.
[1] As just one example from particle physics: Gell-Mann's "Eightfold Way", which uses advanced representation theory to describe hadrons and was successful at predicting new particles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_way_(physics)
[2] Note that high-energy physics has an extremely high standard of significance at 5 sigma, so it's not comparable to "barely significant" in the social sciences.
I mean... dark matter exists (or MOND if you are into that). So there's no real question that there's physics beyond the standard model. Why not try our luck in the accessible regions to see whether that's where it lives?
My understanding is that most (or at least many) very significant scientific discoveries were serendipitous. They were discovered while looking for something else. So statements like "When you don’t have much to go on, and limited resources, it’s better to aim at problems that you know are out there. Those things will lead you to new discoveries." don't make sense to me.
I'd find this article and its opinion more credible if it could point out how this didn't apply to the LHC. Was every discovery and technology that came out of the LHC predicted in advance? If not, then this argument fails.
Fusion does remind me of the space program. Surprising new solutions in a wide range of sciences. Easy to produce superconducting ribbons being one of the big successes so far. Said ribbons have lead to significant improvements in electro magnets, improving both field strength and decreasing the magnet sizes. Said magnets are useful for a wide variety of applications (outside of fusion), like improved MRI machines. The ribbons have the potential to help transmit power across the grid with less losses. Significant improvements in predicting and shaping turbulence in plasma has a wide range of applications in producing more efficient engines. Using AI/ML to attack the complexity of the plasma flows that were otherwise computationally intractable.
I'm all for the LHC, but it does seem like the world needs a bit better of an idea of the mysteries that the LHC++ might solve before spending $10-$100B on it. Does seem like science could be pushed further in other areas.
Driven by this post, out of curiosity I started looking at the price tag of some mega-projects around the world.
Interestingly, the most expensive ones are almost always highway systems.
Can someone briefly explain why? I'm my naive view it's mostly asphalt and terrain work.
Several people have answered this from the angle of why the cost is large, but missed the other (necessary) angle - the benefits are also massive and well understood. Plenty of potential projects have huge costs but they don't exist because the benefits aren't big enough, highways exhibit a sort of survivor bias in the mega project world.
Highway systems create massive economic benefits that are relatively simple to calculate, just in the raw # hours saved which massively increases productivity. This can be well captured by the state through taxes or (less frequently) by private industry through tolls - i.e. the people that direct their construction.
Other mega projects have much less certain benefits, or the benefits are harder to capture by those with the ability to allocate resources because incentives aren't sufficiently aligned.
Anything that involves digging holes in the ground is enormously expensive. If you take house building as an example, 25-30% of the cost is the foundations - digging it out then filling them with concrete.
I think the question whether to build a new collider deserves more than a simple "yes" and "no". Indeed, it looks as if particle physics right now is a bit in a dead end, there are no obvious and imminent discoveries to be expected from such an instrument. And with the enormous amount of money it would require, a lot of other experiments could be financed, which short term are much more likely to advance science. On the other side, I unless there is evidence that we cannot discover any more by building a new collider, we shouldn't just stop research into that direction. We don't know what lies there and might be missing the true discoveries to be made. Also, these colliders do finance a lot of science around them. Just designing and building them fills plenty of thesises and papers. A lot of adjacent science is involved. Detector design, data processing just to name a few. The web we are using has been invented at CERN :)
Consequently, the cost trade-off isn't as clear-cut as the article might make it sound. Which for me leads to the obvious answer: yes, we should build another, larger collider. But probably not right now. There should be plenty of funding for the current one and also quite a bit of theoretical preparation before it is getting planned/built. In this time, other projects should get priority funding. But eventually, we should build another collider. We should never stop researching.
Government finances don't work the same way as other finances. A normally functioning democracy can basically invent as much money as it needs to (see Covid relief packages). If there's political will to do an LHC++, three ITERs and two ISS's, the money will appear. If there's opposition to the LHC++ and it gets scrapped, that doesn't mean that the funds will be re-allocated. They will just disappear.
True, however printed money's not free free, it devalues all money so it's sort of a backdoor tax. Assuming that there is an upper bound on a nation's science budget (and in practice, there is), then the article makes a valid point - particle colliders have diminishing returns as it stands right now, and that money might be better spent on thousands of smaller studies.
Forward thinking nations would take this approach, a single discovery in just one of these studies might unlock a huge amount of scientific, commercial or industrial value, and casting the net wide gives the greatest chance of making that discovery.
I think there's a certain disconnect from the underlying reality here. If you didn't have those things then the people who design, build and operate the thing would be doing something else. Are you sure the other things they'd be doing are less valuable?
Also, I'll note that inflation in the UK is at 9%. Printing money is essentially a tax on those with cash holdings, who are mostly poorer. Not to mention the wastage on repricing...
> can basically invent as much money as it needs to
This is only true of the world's reserve currency (which is currently the USD). In all other cases they basically guarantee the issues stated elsewhere like inflation.
I'm just a layman who loves physics, but this article does make a point. The LHC was built to definitively prove or disapprove existing theoretical models, like the Higgs boson. If the exponential increasing of cost of the LHC++ can't even promise new proofs or discoveries, then isn't that money better spent on other scientific experiments that will advance science? I'd have no problem with Europe spending that money on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), or many other projects.
Yeah, no. Only LHC can generate particle events in a highly controllable environment with enough energy. In physics there are energy thresholds. Below a certain level of energy a certain event just never happens.
The low hanging fruit of discovering new physics looks like this. Build a bigger machine to collide particles with even more energy. Observe what comes out. It's a clear direction. Just throw money at the problem and get a result.
But isn't that also exactly why the whole effort is a bit futile? If it takes this much effort to detect that an event is even happening, you end up describing something that only really happens in a lab situation and has not much relevance for the real world.
That said, LHC cost $4.75 billion that's pretty much nothing compared to the amount of money that gets thrown around in the tech world. So might still be worth it just for the fun of it, even if the discoveries don't have any direct application.
Does this sort of thing give us tangible benefits? Is it worth the investment? I get things like materials science, supercomputers, AI research, etc. But these colliders are so expensive, all for the sake of discovering a tiny subatomic particle that we have no way of using, AFAIK. But I know nothing, am I wrong here?
I completely disagree, 100 billion might sound like a lot of money, but it's not. It's going to take like 20 years to build/assemble right? That's like 5 billion a year the EU GDP is 17.9 trillion per year. It's worth it just to keep all these physicists and engineers employed.
I read the article and wondered where the author got the next hadron collider to be LHC++ and how he got this estimation for the cost. Anyway I remember that a couple of years ago I was talking with my of my professors and he mentioned LHC++ which was a OOP software environment proposed (1).
Anyway as someone inside experimental HEP field, I would encourage anyone who wants to understand more about finding and ideas to try to follow up the snowmass process as an example on how the dynamics of funding and new ideas for the future forms, discussed and gets priorities (at least in US)
Snowmass process is basically a series of meeting for the US HEP community where they discuss the US strategy and funding requests for the coming decade. the last one was in 2014 and now this process which takes about 3 years (probably more this time thanks to covid). It is really insightful but technical in nature but try to read more about it and the final report that gets to DOE committee to act as advisory guideline from the community.
It's a good case made here. I don't disagree. But what it raises is interesting & challenging:
> There are many known problems in physics right now. $100 billion could fund (quite literally) 100,000 smaller physics experiments. There may not be enough physics labs on Earth to carry out that many experiments!
It's amazing & a bit problematic how big-biased we are. For reference, LHC cost a bit under $5B by compare. I have a hard time imagining what it would take to get $5B in funding for physics. How much effort would each physics project have to spend to go get funding, versus how much time did it take the LHC to get funding?
I really like the idea of diversity, of a range of medium & small projects. But it feels like structurally we are disposed towards bigger higher ticket tasks. That once the ball is rolling, once there's critical mass, we can get the checkbooks opening. But by compare the channels for getting small & medium funding is more case by case, that large pools of money aren't as available or accessible.
The "who should decide" question i find the most interesting.
It's one of the rare setups where i lack thé arrogance to think my opinion would be relevant. (That said, if the goal was to burn the funds with minimal progress I couldn't imagine a better tool than the LHC BWANDO corporation.)
If the tax payer is to fund the effort perhaps their opinion should have some non-zero influence on the choice?
Im not entirely against theoretical efforts (which is like my opinion) but to alienate clearly productive effort under some "let industries do it" banner seems several bridges to far.
Maybe the other way around: let industries decide. would be less sensless.
useful things like wind solar wave tidal energy, clean water, agriculture etc all directly compete for the funds.
Wait, i know. Lets spend an insane amount of money to research what we should be funding. Im sure we can figure out howmany apples an orange is worth.
But build medium-sized synchrotrons for IC fabs.[1]
That paper describes a design for a 160 meter ring synchrotron to produce "extreme ultraviolet" for IC fabs in the 7nm and below range. Some large research accelerators have been used for that experimentally, including SLAC at Stanford. So the concept is known to work. It just needs to come down in price and size.
ASML's tin-vaporization light source, which is a mechanical and optical nightmare made to work by throwing a few billion dollars at it, is the current technology.
This may be how China leapfrogs the West in IC technology.
[+] [-] japanuspus|3 years ago|reply
The short history of physics in TFA is spot on: Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise. This has been confirmed by numerous insiders, including by Hossenfelder as mentioned in the article, and Lee Smolin ("The trouble with physics") who is also a theoretical physicist.
Things have changed a lot since accelerators became a must-have for high-energy physics: Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned. I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations.
[1]: The industrial subsidy angle is not touched upon in TFA, but it is clear that there is a large number of people and companies making a good living from mega-physics, and talking to colleagues in the field, I get the distinct impression that it is not always they physicist walking in the front when asking for more machines.
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|3 years ago|reply
The place is fantastic, you get to meet great people and life is cool.
But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity. Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere. If someone could answer to this "and so what?" in a meaningful way I would be glad to change my mind. For the time being, the energy scale we are making these discoveries is not useful.
"yes, but this is fundamental science..." → yes it is, but where does this fundamental science helps in everyday problems? Have we had a case where the Higgs boson changed anything in our life?
The quantum mechanics of the 1920's changed our everyday world. We could build a whole technology on it, and understand things that changes our everyday life. Is there a comparable impact on knowing that the Higgs boson is +/- 10^-9 (or whatever) aligned with the theoretical model?
We have so many problems where physics is needed (energy production to start with, and then exploring biology), the money should go there instead. Even if it means having less particle physicists the same way we have less philosophes.
[+] [-] popinman322|3 years ago|reply
I also don't have the expertise to tell whether the article is being overly reductive with the project's goals: are there other questions (besides new particles) that can only be answered with a larger collider? The summary of the FCC (Future Circular Collider) project's goals indicates that yes, there are unresolved questions that the FCC will address[0].
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-69...
[+] [-] mehrdada|3 years ago|reply
What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.
[+] [-] moonchrome|3 years ago|reply
More realistically : we can only build one car in the entire world, where a tiny minority of people can even understand the potential benefit, and anything they see will be completely useless for everyone else in day to day life because we need a civilisation level effort to even detect the implications of their theory. If their theory had some real world implications - you wouldn't need this car.
And this is expected to be funded by everyone. It's the modern equivalent of building pyramids.
[+] [-] rocqua|3 years ago|reply
It seems like the car is a Bugatti Veyron and like there is a huge (exponentially growing) fronteir to explore. Exploring another 1000 miles in a very well studied direction seems less curious than pushing outward another mile over the entire frontier. Especially at the places that have gotten less attention.
'Doing more of the same but bigger' feels more like small thinking than 'lets try lots of things we haven't tried before'. To me the latter also feels a lot more curious.
[+] [-] discreteevent|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yieldcrv|3 years ago|reply
$100,000,000,000 with afterthought of “sure lets see if we can do it less expensively *since its sooo annoying to some people”? Where is the line for you currently?
[+] [-] _heimdall|3 years ago|reply
My read of the article was more a call for considering the practical uses of tge research. If we don't know what $100B worth of LHC will discover, why wouldnt we instead fund tens of thousands of smaller projects that often have very practical real world goals?
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|3 years ago|reply
"Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's instead build an airplane."
The problem with next-gen LHC is that there are no guarantees of any new or interesting physics for that $100 billion. And particle accelerators are not the only way to spend large sums of money, so there is an opportunity cost. Why not spend that $100 billion to build more space telescopes or more sensitive LIGOs to detect gravitational waves, etc.
[+] [-] jvanderbot|3 years ago|reply
It appears we suspect there is a better way.
[+] [-] Neil44|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onpensionsterm|3 years ago|reply
From the people who brought you compost fueled cars?
[+] [-] captainmuon|3 years ago|reply
Of course, there are a lot of smaller experiments that one could do, also in particle physics, that have great value. One example was the Muon g-2 measurement, another is anything neutrino physics. We can get a lot of interesting input and test our theories without going to the "energy frontier". Physicists understand this very well. But there are a bunch of questions that you can only really answer if you go to those higer energies.
As for the costs, 100 billion is a lot, but not when you compare it to other large infrastructure projects, or especially military spending (and note the Chinese proposal SPPC would be a lot cheaper!). I think if we could shave off 100 billion of military expenses and put it into basic research, it would be a great win for society. That's not realistic you say, with all the threats out there? Great, I agree, but now we have a nice project! Lets put as a common goal that we want to be able to do this kind of research, and then improve our societies nationally and globally so that we can reduce our military spending and do this kind of research.
100 billion ($/€) is the amount that Germany is spending as a special budget in response to Russia's aggression, in order to become the nation with the 3rd highest military spending on the planet. If it weren't for the war in Ukraine, we could put it all into such a project.
If we had averted COVID in it's early stages - like we did with SARS-1 and MERS - imagine all the resources we could have put into research instead.
[+] [-] magicalhippo|3 years ago|reply
Alternatively, if one really wants to pursue beyond the standard model physics, it seems to me multi-messenger astronomy has a much better chance of delivering decisive data, so shouldn't we put that money into better observatories?
[+] [-] oyoman|3 years ago|reply
the FCC is a project for the next 70 years. It is supposed to be operational after 2040 at the earliest if I recall correctly (20 years from now more or less), and to run for around 40 years.
So if you do a very simplistic calculation on the first 20 years : 100 B euros over 20 years over 20 countries (there is 23 member states into the CERN) it is 250 M euros / year / country. This is not even calculated on the over-all project time, on on the different steps that will be happening: first FCC as electron-positron collider and then much later FCC hadron-hadron collider.
And if you are really interested into the previewed outcomes (scientifically and new techs associated):
https://indico.cern.ch/event/1040535/timetable/#20220503.det...
You can take look at the European research communities symposium that just happened recently on the future of the research topics in Europe. There are a lot of information for FCC and so on.
[+] [-] yccs27|3 years ago|reply
The fundamental problem for high-energy physics seems to be the "tyranny of the standard model", as one of my professors called it. We know that our current model of fundamental particles must be incomplete towards extremely high energies (trillions of TeV), because it conflicts with general relativity. However, almost all experimental results are consistent with the standard model. There are some barely-significant [2] results from muon spin and W-boson experiments, but the effect sizes are minuscule and and two data-points are in no way enough to guide new theory development.
This leaves theorists with almost no experimental input, so they pursue purely mathematical ideas that are in some way elegant, able to describe the standard model as a low-energy limit, and in some cases include a description of gravity as well. But the more advanced and theoretical the ideas get, the more difficult it gets to make experimental predictions. The ones which predict non-standard-model measurements with current equipment are already ruled out anyway, because we did the measurements and the standard model just keeps getting validated.
So what should we do? We can hope that a larger collider will find new evidence of beyond-standard-model physics, but (as I understand it) there is no concrete reason why there has to be anything interesting in the newly-accessible energy region.
[1] As just one example from particle physics: Gell-Mann's "Eightfold Way", which uses advanced representation theory to describe hadrons and was successful at predicting new particles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_way_(physics) [2] Note that high-energy physics has an extremely high standard of significance at 5 sigma, so it's not comparable to "barely significant" in the social sciences.
[+] [-] Jweb_Guru|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rlpb|3 years ago|reply
I'd find this article and its opinion more credible if it could point out how this didn't apply to the LHC. Was every discovery and technology that came out of the LHC predicted in advance? If not, then this argument fails.
[+] [-] Havoc|3 years ago|reply
Thats the point of discovery and arguably a point in favour of doing this
[+] [-] gonzo41|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw457|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliken|3 years ago|reply
I'm all for the LHC, but it does seem like the world needs a bit better of an idea of the mysteries that the LHC++ might solve before spending $10-$100B on it. Does seem like science could be pushed further in other areas.
[+] [-] brazzy|3 years ago|reply
It says to stop putting everything (or rather, a ridiculous amount of money) into high energy particle physics and start funding other experiments.
[+] [-] rvieira|3 years ago|reply
Interestingly, the most expensive ones are almost always highway systems. Can someone briefly explain why? I'm my naive view it's mostly asphalt and terrain work.
[+] [-] FairlyInvolved|3 years ago|reply
Highway systems create massive economic benefits that are relatively simple to calculate, just in the raw # hours saved which massively increases productivity. This can be well captured by the state through taxes or (less frequently) by private industry through tolls - i.e. the people that direct their construction.
Other mega projects have much less certain benefits, or the benefits are harder to capture by those with the ability to allocate resources because incentives aren't sufficiently aligned.
[+] [-] slickrick216|3 years ago|reply
- It’s a lot of asphalt
- construction happens over a wide possibly remote area so all construction materials need transportation
- materials are probably made to order so you are buying effectively a lot of custom components
- engineering/architecture/construction talent isn’t cheap and there’s a lot of competing demand
- hiring is even more difficult as the job isn’t in one place may require a lot of travel, bed and board for all types of workers
- property itself is possible a significant cost to build it through. Even more if you get caught up in legal battles acquiring certain properties
- grift, with large projects in any country at any time there’s always grift. Grift is a constant
[+] [-] samwillis|3 years ago|reply
It’s labour, fuel, and material, intensive work.
[+] [-] julienreszka|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inglor_cz|3 years ago|reply
Having to carry trucks for decades means a lot more steel and concrete. Especially when constructing bridges and overpasses.
[+] [-] perryizgr8|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ph_|3 years ago|reply
Consequently, the cost trade-off isn't as clear-cut as the article might make it sound. Which for me leads to the obvious answer: yes, we should build another, larger collider. But probably not right now. There should be plenty of funding for the current one and also quite a bit of theoretical preparation before it is getting planned/built. In this time, other projects should get priority funding. But eventually, we should build another collider. We should never stop researching.
[+] [-] wasmitnetzen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SturgeonsLaw|3 years ago|reply
Forward thinking nations would take this approach, a single discovery in just one of these studies might unlock a huge amount of scientific, commercial or industrial value, and casting the net wide gives the greatest chance of making that discovery.
[+] [-] Aerroon|3 years ago|reply
And after this the US has hit levels of inflation that it hasn't seen for 50 years. Before that inflation was that high in WW2.
Printing money is not free, neither is tax money.
[+] [-] concordDance|3 years ago|reply
Also, I'll note that inflation in the UK is at 9%. Printing money is essentially a tax on those with cash holdings, who are mostly poorer. Not to mention the wastage on repricing...
[+] [-] im3w1l|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inglor_cz|3 years ago|reply
Sure. For some time period and amount of money, indeed. What happens once this limit is reached and people stop trusting that money?
Currency collapses are nasty. Look at Weimar Germany after WWI.
[+] [-] maerF0x0|3 years ago|reply
This is only true of the world's reserve currency (which is currently the USD). In all other cases they basically guarantee the issues stated elsewhere like inflation.
[+] [-] r3x_m|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivanb|3 years ago|reply
The low hanging fruit of discovering new physics looks like this. Build a bigger machine to collide particles with even more energy. Observe what comes out. It's a clear direction. Just throw money at the problem and get a result.
[+] [-] grumbel|3 years ago|reply
That said, LHC cost $4.75 billion that's pretty much nothing compared to the amount of money that gets thrown around in the tech world. So might still be worth it just for the fun of it, even if the discoveries don't have any direct application.
[+] [-] uejfiweun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VaxWithSex|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayffffas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elashri|3 years ago|reply
Anyway as someone inside experimental HEP field, I would encourage anyone who wants to understand more about finding and ideas to try to follow up the snowmass process as an example on how the dynamics of funding and new ideas for the future forms, discussed and gets priorities (at least in US)
Snowmass process is basically a series of meeting for the US HEP community where they discuss the US strategy and funding requests for the coming decade. the last one was in 2014 and now this process which takes about 3 years (probably more this time thanks to covid). It is really insightful but technical in nature but try to read more about it and the final report that gets to DOE committee to act as advisory guideline from the community.
[1] https://cds.cern.ch/record/451601/files/p59.pdf
[+] [-] rektide|3 years ago|reply
> There are many known problems in physics right now. $100 billion could fund (quite literally) 100,000 smaller physics experiments. There may not be enough physics labs on Earth to carry out that many experiments!
It's amazing & a bit problematic how big-biased we are. For reference, LHC cost a bit under $5B by compare. I have a hard time imagining what it would take to get $5B in funding for physics. How much effort would each physics project have to spend to go get funding, versus how much time did it take the LHC to get funding?
I really like the idea of diversity, of a range of medium & small projects. But it feels like structurally we are disposed towards bigger higher ticket tasks. That once the ball is rolling, once there's critical mass, we can get the checkbooks opening. But by compare the channels for getting small & medium funding is more case by case, that large pools of money aren't as available or accessible.
[+] [-] throwaway14356|3 years ago|reply
It's one of the rare setups where i lack thé arrogance to think my opinion would be relevant. (That said, if the goal was to burn the funds with minimal progress I couldn't imagine a better tool than the LHC BWANDO corporation.)
If the tax payer is to fund the effort perhaps their opinion should have some non-zero influence on the choice?
Im not entirely against theoretical efforts (which is like my opinion) but to alienate clearly productive effort under some "let industries do it" banner seems several bridges to far. Maybe the other way around: let industries decide. would be less sensless.
useful things like wind solar wave tidal energy, clean water, agriculture etc all directly compete for the funds.
Wait, i know. Lets spend an insane amount of money to research what we should be funding. Im sure we can figure out howmany apples an orange is worth.
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
That paper describes a design for a 160 meter ring synchrotron to produce "extreme ultraviolet" for IC fabs in the 7nm and below range. Some large research accelerators have been used for that experimentally, including SLAC at Stanford. So the concept is known to work. It just needs to come down in price and size.
ASML's tin-vaporization light source, which is a mechanical and optical nightmare made to work by throwing a few billion dollars at it, is the current technology.
This may be how China leapfrogs the West in IC technology.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z