41–50 of 204 posts
Science 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 t…
Science 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 t…
The criticism is that the ROI = (the potential advance) / (invested money) is too small. As you pointed out it can be argued that the real goal is elsewhere: in the engineering / technology or science of complex systems. Creating a big machine that verifiably works brings many unexpected advances in many fields. And what is more important it is a symbol of human advancement which unites people and inspires them to pursue science. Since humans need a clear goal to invest much resources in a constructive endeavor. It may not be that important though that the ROI in fundamental physics is small, as long as people work hard together. But it can be argued that the whole process begins to resemble religion more than a scientific method; which can be problematic as religions have a bad reputation among scientific community.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
She addresses many of your rebuttals quite well here http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...
Well, going on to see what should be done instead, we find she advocates for different experiments with the same type of argument she's so gleefully savaging here > You already know we haven’t found anything yet—otherwise you’d have heard of it. But even null results are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us that some ideas—for example, that spacetime might be a regular lattice—are simply incompatible…
Huh? Where is she saying this? Everything I've read from her suggests that she's against building bigger accelerators, not stop investigating particle physics.
E.g. from http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...:
> Science is exploratory and to make progress we should study what has not been studied before, true. But any new experiment in the foundations of physics does that. You can probe new regimes not only be reaching higher energies, but also by reaching higher resolution, better precision, bigger systems, lower temperatures, less noise, more data, and so on.
> No one is saying we should stop explorative research in the foundations of physics. But since resources are limited, we should invest in experiments that bring the biggest benefit for the projected cost. This means the higher the expenses for an experiment, the better the reasons for building it should be. And since a bigger particle collider is presently the most expensive proposal on the table, particle physicists should have the best reasons.
Dr. 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…
Time to spend some money else well.
Edit: are you downvoting because you don't think my comment contributes to the discussion, or because you don't agree?
Dr. 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…
In my opinion the problem with her messaging is that while she says that we should not fund the next collider, I think the argument should be, what's the best allocation of money in physics? And there are legitimate reasons to have the next collider even if we have no guarantee that it will deliver GUT or whatever. We have to venture into the unknown. We just should not lie that it will prove supersymmetry or is guar…
But apparently the only point worth making is progress in particle physics has been slow. Well, to be fair the point Hossenfelder tries to make is that there's been no progress, and since that's not actually true convincing people of it regardless takes more work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion the problem with her messaging is that while she says that we should not fund the next collider, I think the argument should be, what's the best allocation of money in physics? And there are legitimate reasons to have the next collider even if we have no guarantee that it will deliver GUT or whatever. We have to venture into the unknown. We just should not lie that it will prove supersymmetry or is guar…
Let's not pretend that we can't find some other way to allocate billions of collider dollars. I don't see it as a problem with her argument that she doesn't promote an alternative, because I'm sure then the critics would say that the alternative isn't promising enough. Yes we need to go into the unknown, but the point is that at some point, it's not cost effective to do that, and we live in a world with constrained r…
Science 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 t…
> Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Theory of Relativity was invented at the Swiss Patent Office.
Science 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 t…
I think it is wrong to cherry pick the HTML example. It would have been invented outside (wasn't SGML already a thing?). Compared to open source in general the CERN stacks are horrible, typical sloppy academic software of no use to the general public. Tons of stuff like the cling C++ interpreter that look interesting but are never polished to be generally useful.
Truth is, I did get your point. Perfect refinement is not necessary in every context. Your comment, like CERN's interpreter, though sloppy was fit for purpose.
The empty promises she is talking about are the equivalent of the promises by politicians during a campaign: they are for the larger public, for the people who (rightfully!) don't want to get more informed than that.
In the background, both in science and in politics, technical folks know what they mean and, especially, where the money is actually going.
In the case of politics, it happens unfortunately that big chunks of the money involved go into private pockets.
Based on my experience, in the case of particle physics, that money invariably goes to wide technological improvement.
Very few sane people really cared whether the Higgs boson existed, but the world is a better place because we got our efforts together in order to find an answer.