Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
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Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
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Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#2I’m sympathetic to both sides here.
Obviously we cannot indefinitely build larger accelerators, and if it turns out that there is no support to go at least one size bigger, then perhaps our best hope is to find more effective ways to use the existing ones we have.
As a random example to illustrate what I mean: https://www.google.nl/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-07-plasma-siz...
Maybe stopping here will force more thinking along these lines? I hope so, anyway.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#3First here is the original letter to Nature about new colliders: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6
I am certainly a supporter of new colliders, although there are other avenues of constraining particle physics models such as astrophysics, cosmic rays, direct detection experiments that need to be funded. But the authors of that letter to Nature and physicists in general need to be careful about promises, otherwise nobody is going to believe us in the future. And there is a tendency of promising a lot in order to get funding. And for the authors of the article to claim that "A good example of a guaranteed result is dark matter." is just blatant lie. I wish there was an experiment that would for sure tell us what dark matter is. (I'm an astrophysicist myself)
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#4I’m sympathetic to both sides here. Obviously we cannot indefinitely build larger accelerators, and if it turns out that there is no support to go at least one size bigger, then perhaps our best hope is to find more effective ways to use the existing ones we have. As a random example to illustrate what I mean: https://www.google.nl/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-07-plasma-siz... Maybe stopping here will force more thinking…
It's like engineers think about research. I worked in both engineering and research, so I could perhaps elucidate the difference.
Basically if one idea out of a hundred major ones really takes off, that's considered a success for a researcher. We're talking one, maybe two real hits throughout the entire scientific career. Researchers are well aware that much of what they do and publish is of little consequence. And they have to make "empty promises" from time to time to continue getting funding from the easily distracted politicians and upper management. They also almost have to have lofty, aspirational goals to keep the motivation.
Basically 99% percent of work of a good, hard working researcher consists of going down the alleys to see if they are blind, which they nearly always are. But the remaining 1% often makes the whole thing worthwhile to all parties involved. The question is, can you pull off that 1% hail Mary or not.
The potential discoveries we're talking about in this case could upend industries, reshape the world economy, and bring about the post-scarcity future, at least when it comes to energy. If we're willing to strain credulity a little, they might even enable interstellar travel. Is that worth a few days of the Pentagon budget? To me, it is, as long as we maximize the chance of the aforementioned Hail Mary.
In contrast, an engineer that doesn't succeed with her ideas at least 50% of the time would quickly find herself out of a job, so by definition the amount of risk engineers take on is as little as possible.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#5Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder is an opiniated physicist who gets a lot of flak for constantly commenting on this issue. Yet, I believe she does society a service in doing so.
I have yet to see anyone contradict her basic premise with factual information. I wish she were wrong, as I would love to see a breakthrough towards an experimentally verified Grand Unified Theory, including an explanation for what we currently identify as dark matter (similarly for dark energy). From what I read, physicists that criticize her take their own wishes for reality, and prefer to attack the messenger rather than confront the reality of the message.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#6What a fucking waste of money, imagine if these resources for a new collider could instead be used to bolster the ECB/SNB/BOE programs for purchasing corporate debt and equity. My understanding is they've only had ~few hundred billion to a couple of trillion for that so far.
THE MONEY SHOULD GO TO BAIL OUT BANKS AND THE CREDITORS OF LARGE CORPORATIONS, WHAT'S THE POINT OF TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSE ANYWAY.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#7Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder is an opiniated physicist who gets a lot of flak for constantly commenting on this issue. Yet, I believe she does society a service in doing so. I have yet to see anyone contradict her basic premise with factual information. I wish she were wrong, as I would love to see a breakthrough towards an experimentally verified Grand Unified Theory, including an explanation for what we currently identi…
Her opinion is totally legitimate and I’m glad people like her are speaking up. Everyone should agree that we need to spend money pushing the limits of science. That’s not the issue here. The point of Sabine’s criticism is that these empty promises need more scrutiny based on the failures of the recent past.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#8I’m sympathetic to both sides here. Obviously we cannot indefinitely build larger accelerators, and if it turns out that there is no support to go at least one size bigger, then perhaps our best hope is to find more effective ways to use the existing ones we have. As a random example to illustrate what I mean: https://www.google.nl/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-07-plasma-siz... Maybe stopping here will force more thinking…
It's like engineers think about research. I worked in both engineering and research, so I could perhaps elucidate the difference. Basically if one idea out of a hundred major ones really takes off, that's considered a success for a researcher. We're talking one, maybe two real hits throughout the entire scientific career. Researchers are well aware that much of what they do and publish is of little consequence. And t…
I agree, but the issue here is different I think. The linked article is also arguing for open ended research, the claim is that other open ended research is likely to be more fruitful, and that we have reached the limit of what we can learn from the particle accelerator route.
This is a fair debate to have, even if my personal preferred answer is “do both”.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#9Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and the data processing pipeline they feed into are at the pinacle of human engineering. The software infrastructure supports analysis of petabytes of data distributed across 100s of clusters around the world. This is because physicists working on colliders and particle physics are extremely passionate and intelligent people. Isn’t it nice that a fraction of the smartest people on the world are not working on getting you to click Ads and are using machine learning to advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature?
Tremendous value has been created by their work and an institution like CERN is hard to replicate because it is hard to get brilliant people to a agree what to do for the next 30 years of their lives. I’ve been taught by professors that did precisely that. Whatever theorists predict is not the only reason for them to do it, higher energies are a technical challenge, a data processing challenge, something to focus your attention and creativity on. There is no question we should try to build better telescopes, a 100 TeV collider is a better microscope for High Energy Physics.
This is personal to me, some of my friends work at CERN. I can’t help but feel it is personal to her. I actually met her once, she seemed nice enough, I just don’t understand why she focuses her time on work that is adversarial as opposed to constructive.
Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
#10I’m sympathetic to both sides here. Obviously we cannot indefinitely build larger accelerators, and if it turns out that there is no support to go at least one size bigger, then perhaps our best hope is to find more effective ways to use the existing ones we have. As a random example to illustrate what I mean: https://www.google.nl/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-07-plasma-siz... Maybe stopping here will force more thinking…
It's like engineers think about research. I worked in both engineering and research, so I could perhaps elucidate the difference. Basically if one idea out of a hundred major ones really takes off, that's considered a success for a researcher. We're talking one, maybe two real hits throughout the entire scientific career. Researchers are well aware that much of what they do and publish is of little consequence. And t…
I completely agree, but at some point you do have to make an economic risk/benefit calculation. Almost any person or organization can truly say that they might do something really amazing and important if given lots of money and resources.