[sashank_1509]

What would the cost of the “next machine” be? Is it going to be tens of billions or can we make progress with lesser money. If it is going to be tens of billions, then maybe we need to invest in engineering to reduce this cost, because it’s not sustainable to suspend thirty years, tens of billions for every incremental improvement.

[sigmoid10]

This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips that ultimately enabled you to type this comment on your phone/computer. The return on that investment is obvious.

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.

[carefree-bob]

Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild did not require tens of billions of dollars. Sherman Fairchild invested 1.3 million and the treacherous eight each put in $500. Fairchild did have the right to purchase the firm for $3 million, which of course he exercised. Similarly, Shockley's lab was funded by a $1 million grant in the 50s.

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".

[brazzy]

> This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips that ultimately enabled you to type this comment on your phone/computer.

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.

[gosub100]

Why can't some of these trillion dollar companies invest back in the quantum tech that got them there, if it's so certain there will be benefits? Why not Apple and Nvidia fund the next particle collider, and give something back to society instead of letting tax payers fund it so billionaires can privatize the profits?

[accidentallfact]

I'm so sick of this "good guy approach". It didn't give us progress, it gave us those like Watt and Intel, highly celebrated bullshiters who stopped being relevant as soon as their IP deadlock expired.

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.

[toast0]

Spending tens of billions every thirty years is pretty sustainable actually.

"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.

[ajam1507]

You could say the same thing about the world wars or porn. Any human pursuit taken to an extreme can produce knock-on effects, that isn't an argument in a vacuum to continue to fund any one area.

[snowwrestler]

In the scope of international cooperation, tens of billions of dollars is not very much money. For context, the U.S. economy generates $10 billion every ~3 hours. One private company, Google, spends $10 billion in about 2 weeks.

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.

[WarmWash]

Takes like this are an optical illusion meant to create the idea that there is an insane amount of money freely floating around that is just being hoarded.

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.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money

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.

[Uehreka]

There are people in this thread saying tens of billions isn't that much in the long term (I'd agree) but there's a bigger point that comes into play whatever the price: The universe doesn't care if exploring it is expensive. You can't make a "that's not sustainable" argument to the universe and have it meet you half way. And that's who you're arguing against: not the scientists, the universe. The scientists don't decide how expensive future discoveries will be.

[raverbashing]

The next machine is not necessarily a longer LHC

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)

[ForgotIdAgain]

I think that engineering progress made while building those machines are maybe more relevant for practical technical development than the discovery they make.

[api]

Better superconductors here. Would you like a $20 MRI down at your local drug store to detect cancer at early stage 1?