HN: Governments don’t fund enough scientific research projects.
Also HN: Governments shouldn’t be funding this scientific research project.
Can’t win with this crowd.
CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
71–80 of 223 posts
Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
The LHC has not been a failure. First you complain about the lack of experimentation, then you complain when they perform experiments. It is normal in science to formulate a theory, design an experiment, and then having to discard the theory in view of the experimental results. That's the scientific method, and that's what has happened with SUSY (kind of). You also claim the goal of new collider is to validate SUSY,…
The goal of every top-tier collider is new physics, that greater understanding that progresses mankind. What did the previous collider discover? It certainly validated current theories, but did it create anything new? If it did, why do we yet need a new one? If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two. If there is no new physics from the last experimen…
> If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two. If there is no new physics from the last experiment, why do we think that building a bigger microscope will be any different?
The LHC likely would keep running for a generation, even if this new collider is constructed. The article notes that construction wouldn't begin until 2038. It doesn't say how long construction would take, but my guess is at least a decade (the LHC took a decade to build). So that's 30 years between now and the likely earliest time a new collider would be constructed, or 40 years since the LHC first went operational. Since the new collider would require construction of a new ring, it's possible the LHC would continue to operate while the new one is under construction, collecting more data.
The reason one needs a "bigger microscope" is due how signal to noise typically increases. In a simplified scenario, you're talking about poisson noise (shot noise, counting noise) dominating the error budget. The Signal-to-noise goes as the square root of the number of counts. So in order to double the S/N, you need to quadruple the number of events. In the case of a particle accelerator, that means doubling the amount of time.
The proposed collider would be 100 TeV, so ~6x more powerful than the LHC. All else being equal, the LHC could do some of the same experiments, but it would take it 36x longer to do them to the same statistical significance. Put another way, 1 year of operation of this proposed collider could achieve results it would take 36 years of the LHC to build up. 4 years of the new collider (doubling the signal to noise over the 1 year) would require 144 years (4 * 36) of the LHC.
But particle physics isn't a slow ramp-up in energy. There are collisions that can only be accessed once you reach particular energy thresholds. Unfortunately my understanding is that there aren't predicted "interesting" features above the LHC's energy range which are even remotely accessible in the distant future. So if you want to build a facility solely to find things that theories predict, this new collider may not get you much. But science is often advanced by experiments which find unexpected things, and you don't find those unless you look.
Overall I think the argument "let the LHC run for 40 years instead" is not a compelling one because of how shot noise works. The "maybe we'll find something new!" argument for a new collider is high-risk / high-reward, so I'm not sure how compelling I personally find it.
Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The goal of every top-tier collider is new physics, that greater understanding that progresses mankind. What did the previous collider discover? It certainly validated current theories, but did it create anything new? If it did, why do we yet need a new one? If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two. If there is no new physics from the last experimen…
>What did the previous collider discover? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson >why do we think that building a bigger microscope will be any different? Why do we think building a bigger telescope then Hubble will be any different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
(1) higgs was confirmed, proven rather than discovered. It wasnt new physics.
(2) Hubble is dieing. It will not last forever but still makes new discoveries, new science, regularly. A replacement is needed. And the JWST is a totally different device, not just bigger. We probably need both the JWST and a new Hubble.
Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
#74> It could be a hard sell, especially as the new collider wouldn’t have as clear a goal as the LHC did. However, particle physics and the Standard Model are at a place where the application of science is needed to validate theories. I mean I understand the need to keep pushing the boundaries of fundamental physics, but how long do you justify such spending on a single project? That same money could possibly be pumped…
Meanwhile, US's DOD budget in 2020 is 718 billion dollars.. So yeah..
Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
#75I see plenty of critical theory majors complaining about STEM in this thread. What has the world come to.
Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
The goal of every top-tier collider is new physics, that greater understanding that progresses mankind. What did the previous collider discover? It certainly validated current theories, but did it create anything new? If it did, why do we yet need a new one? If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two. If there is no new physics from the last experimen…
1. Science is a low-odds, high-reward process; any given piece of work probably does nothing, but the overall impact is literally everything that happened since the agrarian era 2. Even successful research leads to papers with impenetrable names like “An MgB-Superconducting Shield Prototype for the Future Circular Collider Septum Magnet”, whose value I am not even qualified to comprehend unless someone explained it t…
Supercolliders are low-odds science. Other instruments are pretty much certain to generate new science. A hubble replacement would not be low-odds given that hubble itself is still making discoveries. A 23 billion-dollar push for new antibiotics would not be low-odds either. Dollars should be spent where they are most likely to generate the most science. That isn't new supercolliders.
Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
#77I'd guess Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder (herself a physicist, and a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) must be pretty annoyed, to put it politely. She posits that a lot of current physicists are working with outdated notions of "beauty":
(quote)
But if it’s clear that putting forward new hypotheses just because they are beautiful doesn’t mean they’re likely to be right, then why do theorists in these fields focus so much on beauty? Worse, why do they continue to focus on the same type of beauty, even though that method has demonstrably not worked for 40 years?
... So I have historical evidence, math, and data. In my book I lay out these points and tell the reader what conclusion I have drawn: Beauty is not a good guide to theory-development.
I then explain that this widespread use of scientifically questionable but productive methodology is symptomatic to the current organization of academic research, and a problem that’s not confined to physics.
(/quote)
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I'd also recommend listening to the EconTalk podcast[2] where Hossenfelder was a guest.
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PS: I'm not judging this decision of funding, not least because I'm no where near qualified :-). I like what CERN does in general (and I sometimes interact with one of their Cloud Infrastructure teams.)
[1] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/10/you-say-theoretical...
[2] https://www.econtalk.org/sabine-hossenfelder-on-physics-real...
Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hint, they are not the same scientists. You're making a category error.
I’m well aware of the differences between particle physics and climatology. My point, which you have just made the logical fallacy of straw manning, still stands. Scientists of all fields have commented on climate change, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox, Neil Degrasse Tyson have all opined in climate change, yet also advocate for vanity projects such as the large hadron collider.
Do you think that some scientist if you give him a ton of money can invent a cheap way of removing Carbon from air?
The solution is much more simple, stop putting Carbon in the atmosphere, this is something society needs to solve not scientists.
Think it live Bob is throwing shit in the river and you blame scientists that they can't invent something to clean the water that is cheap.
We could build modern nuclear reactors, we can fund research into fusion at the same time but until fusion is ready we could at least stop closing nuclear plants and finish/upgrade the existing ones. Probably much more money is spent in the entertainment industry in a year then in all CERN history.
Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
#79HN: Governments don’t fund enough scientific research projects. Also HN: Governments shouldn’t be funding this scientific research project. Can’t win with this crowd.
Humans: Ah, they're doing some good stuff I like. Let's move on with my day.
Also humans: Oh no! They're doing some bad stuff I don't like! Let's tell'em off!
Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
#80Everyone complaining about funding of projects at CERN using a website running in the www[1] which might not exist if it wasn't for CERN... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
I think you need to distinguish between people complaining about CERN in general and people complaining about funding a new large hadron collider. The use of CERN and other scientific communities is well-known and, I think, widely acknowledged.