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Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

backreaction.blogspot.com

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Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#91

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Joker_vD wrote: post #80
gglon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> ROI = (the potential advance) / (invested money) is too small That's unknown in advance. To take example from maths, the conic sections, braid theory, number theory—they all used to be very abstract and un-applicable parts maths, until one day.

If it's unknown in advance surely it's more rational to spread the research out instead of putting most of the available eggs in a single basket.

CERN found Higgs - which was proposed decades before CERN was built. There is nothing like the Higgs proposal around today.

That's the real problem. Spend $20bn on some new models, and then you can spend $20bn chasing the most interesting prospects.

That's far more likely to get you somewhere exciting than the experimental equivalent of throwing more spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of it does something unexpected.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#92

Post by matthewdgreen »

krspykrm wrote: post #24

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…

Would you trade a European collider for a failed commercial alternative like FirefoxOS or PalmOS? Because keep in mind that commercial failure is the overwhelmingly likely outcome of the project you’re proposing. I’d rather fail at finding dark matter and learn things along the way than having a state-backed organization make lousy software that nobody uses.

Of course, the more fundamental point is that industry seems perfectly happy to try (and fail) at making Google competitors, while nobody in industry is going to do fundamental physics research.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#93

Post by pmontra »

jrumbut wrote: post #60
pmontra wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to be loved when one wants to take money away from other people and their projects. A more promising line of action would be building another community of particle physicists with different goals than building a bigger collider, possibly aligned with Hossenfelder's suggestions. In this way they'll have something to gain and will fight for the budget that otherwise would go into the collider.

I'm not sure we're improving anything when we discover some public good is flawed, mediocre, or maybe even a little corrupt and respond by tearing it down and replacing it with nothing. I think we've done enough of that. At this point I'm really only interested in positive proposals, what new stuff can we do? If we have a wave of new successes any old failures will fade out on their own.

Hossenfelder proposes the stuff at point 18 of http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...

I have no idea of they are something particle scientists do or if they belong to another branch of physics.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#94

Post by orbifold »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #56
orbifold wrote: 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…

One could argue that spending a lot of money on a hyper advanced anything would lead to a bunch of cool technologies, even if the primary objective yielded no results. Why spend many billions of euros on something speculative when one could spend the money on something much more likely to produce both primary and secondary benefits?

Point me to something that has these characteristics and hasn’t received funding. Anderson made the case to fund many small scale experiments when it came to funding the SSC, but that doesn’t have the same secondary benefits.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#95

Post by sgt101 »

orbifold wrote: post #29
tokai wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is personal to me, some of my friends work at CERN That is very clear. You didn't engage her argument at all. Is is really too much to ask for scientific mega project to generate all that value, while at the same time same pursuing a central object that is scientifically viable?

Building a high energy collider is like building a larger telescope. The only things you can be sure of is that you will be able to understand whatever you have seen better than before. There is scientific consensus that we should be able to understand dark matter better by building one aswell. This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public. Attacking this communication t…

>>There is scientific consensus

Really - I thought that we were debating an article by a scientist, who along with many other scientists disagrees with that position.

>>This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public.

And yet the general public is being asked to pay for it. Perhaps sorting out that gap and explaining how understanding dark matter will be as important as (for example) curing cancer or alzheimers disease, or more prosaically cystic fibrosis or malaria would be a good thing? Or even understanding ecologies and the global climate? Will the new accelerator be carbon neutral? Will understanding dark matter prevent the collapse of our planet and the deaths of our children?

If I were a politician funding this project I would want some pretty cold, hard information on these things.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#96

Post by tsimionescu »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #74
judofyr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is really the large problem with her criticisms: the case that exists is for particle physics getting less priority, but her argument is that it should stop completely, the collaborations disbanded, and everyone goes to find a new job because they can't be trusted to think clearly. Huh? Where is she saying this? Everything I've read from her suggests that she's against building bigger accelerators , not stop i…

Show we were she actually advocates for building any accelerator and you'd have a case. She violently opposes the FCC despite one of it's explicit goals being precisions measurements of the Higgs. In fact in the very post you link to she dismisses the idea of high precision measurements: "Yeah, except that I am the one saying we could do better things with $20 billion than measuring the next digits of some constants"

Accelerators aren't the be-all, end-all of particle physics. She explicitly advocates for investigating particle physics in new ways, such as astronomical interaction observations.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#97

Post by orbifold »

nabla9 wrote: post #62
orbifold wrote: 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 colli…

BTW her examples of experiments that received insufficient funding is really curious: FAIR she just happens to work at a university that is pretty directly involved with it, the cost overruns were so bad that the original people lost management of the project . The James Webb Telescope was in part delayed because it shares the platform with the next gen of American spy sattelites. I happen to know someone that worked on the sensors for both. Sensors that btw. share a lot of similarities with the sensors used in particle detectors.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#98

Post by matthewdgreen »

iainmerrick wrote: post #31
onhn wrote: post #19

I think we need more clever people making more predictions (and especially from people quoted in the article like Gross, Witten, Rattazzi etc), and fewer blog articles like this designed to discourage them. The last time a huge, costly, dedicated collider was built, it was in service of the Higgs prediction, and that worked out quite nicely.

I think you’re setting up a bit of a straw man there. I agree that people coming up with creative ideas and making bold predictions is good in general. But surely we’re allowed to point out when a) predictions have not in fact worked out, and b) nothing particularly useful was learned from the failure. That’s not the same as trying to discourage new ideas. For the LHC specifically, it was widely expected that it woul…

This appears to value the negative findings of the LHC at zero. I’m no physicist, but my understanding is that some variants and parameters of the theory have been excluded as a result of LHC experiments.

More to the point, what is the alternative strategy that’s more likely to produce useful data? “Don’t do experiments to validate or invalidate theory” doesn’t obviously seem like it’s going to produce better results.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#99

Post by nmlnn »

krspykrm wrote: post #24

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…

It would cost at least 3 times as much to get the same amount of talent working on something like that. Projects like the LHC are able to massively leverage the money spent just because smart people are happy to work on exciting/deep problems for much less.

Re: Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

#100

Post by sgt101 »

mnl wrote: post #73
cedilla wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's the Hossenfelder take on the scientific method for you: whereby you make the experiments to confirm the theory. Which is fantastic because if science had ever worked that way you would be done with all experiments as the sensible ones would give known results, so what's the point.

The point is that you can spend a lump of money to check things out in that way, and fine - especially when you have the Higgs to confirm as well. But if you want to double down you need to have better evidence and a better argument. This is the logic that applies in any lab; sure take a punt look at x or y, if you're right then you'll get a grant and your career will thrive. If you're wrong you're out.

That's happened to many people (Hossenfelder included?) but it's now happening to the community and no one likes it. But given that is how science as an institution operates they shouldn't be surprised.

Here's a thought experiment. Would there be a bid for a new 100Tev machine if super symmetry had been confirmed at LHC? My bet is :for sure. And the key argument would be "we told you that we were good last time, so you have to back us this time"

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