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Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

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Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#61

79 points as of now. And how many points would hacker news have given to the Nature comment by Giudice and Gianotti? It is both curious and sad to see the outsize attention given to bitter polemicists (and not just in physics). Please read https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 . Edit: downvotes? let me rephrase: if you care about particle physics then there was no reason to ignore the original proposal.…

What are you highlighting? That article is a generic press releases saying they want $30B to look at particles.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#62
post #9

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…

You are repeating the nonsense arguments Sabine has countered before http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...

I agree with her. These are nonsense arguments.

> Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game.

(2. The “No Zero Sum” argument)

> new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack

5. It is not a waste of money

11. It may lead to spin-offs.

12. A big particle collider would benefit many tech industries and scientific networks.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#63
post #50

I am a particle physicist and when I worked at CERN I helped building the data acquisition software of the ATLAS experiment. 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…

Which technological improvements?

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#64
post #10
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't really make that calculation with truly open ended, fundamental research. Both the potential benefits, and the complexity/cost of obtaining these benefits (or finding out they can't be obtained) can be enormous. At best, you can improve the odds of getting something rather than nothing, by e.g. hiring the smartest people and letting them do their thing with ample funding, a-la the Space Race or Manhattan Project.

It just pisses me off that we spend trillions on bombing random people in the desert, yet a few billion for e.g. fusion research is an insurmountable obstacle.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#65
post #51
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really understand that argument. What does a failed prediction about super-symmetry in 1996 have to do with the opportunities of the next collider? How does "we didn't find evidence for or against supersymmetry at LHC" connect to dark matter experiments in its successor? I'm also not really convinced of what she categorizes as failure. She enumerates quite a few incorrect predictions, but is that sufficient t…

> She enumerates quite a few incorrect predictions

You make a good point - without the expensive accelerator data, we’d have no idea that these omg ridiculous stupid waaaa predictions are true or false!!!

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#67

I somewhat agree with the premise, but the real kicker is the opportunity cost: there is so much Europe could be doing with this money that would have actual, real-world impact. There is a critical need for independent European software infrastructure - for this kind of money, they could fund their own web browser or OS or social media platform, which would exist independently of US-controlled tech. Would I trade a E…

Well, it does have actual real world impact: it trains a lot of people in data analysis and drives a lot of R&D in very technical fields among other things. In fact, the economic benefit[1] of CERN due to all these other things has been estimated as a net positive while excluding the value of science, which is either good or bad news depending on how you view it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf82KOPvTOk

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#69
post #42
post #9

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…

> Isn’t it nice (...) advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature? 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 impo…

An organisation like CERN is extremely hard to replicate and easily destroyed and dragged down by a thousand cuts. The EU is funding similar moonshots in Neuroscience , Graphene, Quantum Computing and most recently machine learning. They all provide case studies what can go wrong in such a big science project (in fighting, diverging goals, huge administrative overhead, bureaucracy, political grand-standing).

The people working at CERN directly and their collaborators truly belief in the goal of understanding the fundamental forces of nature. And they had tremendous success doing so. They are the gold standard for a well managed long running big science project. Just recently they found the Higgs boson. Hossfelder worked for years on extremely speculative ideas in quantum gravity, they weren’t super well received, most people liked string theory better. Bottom up and top down reasoning in particle physics phenomenology suggests there are more discoveries to be made at the energy frontier. I like to see a future where eventually we build a solar system sized particle accelerator not stop at a radius of ~100 km

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can you seriously make an argument about efficient allocation without discussing the alternatives you choose between? Is it even logically possible to define efficiency without comparing alternatives?

Have you defined the word "seriously" before making that comment? Ridiculous.
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