101–110 of 467 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't Hossenfelder and Smolin basically paying their bills by being contrarians though?
Well, the same way that String Theorists are paying their bills from the taxpayers, mostly by pushing that theory as Physics.
Isn't the main alternative LQG which is apparently a dead end?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Europe is so rich it can easily afford all of the great project ideas outlined in the article in addition to a new LHC (and then some). Let's think big indeed, the author unfortunately has a very reductive vision for the future. Instead how about: A renaissance of funding - BIG SCIENCE - education, jobs. That was basically the promise of the EU - peace through wealth - let's create some more. Let's bring back the exc…
I thought I was an optimistic but you dwarfed me on this to the point of skepticism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that you don't know what the secondary benefits are until you find them so you should keep every avenue open A short story about the discovery of microscopes from https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/ Had the rich noble simply invested his money in doctors instead of the person with a hobby of playing with glass, they might have instead discovered more uses for leeches
Well I agree that big projects make sense in many cases, and I don't want to be misunderstood as arguing against basic research. Frankly, given the amounts we spend on things I fundamentally disagree with, I'd even say "sure let them have at it and let's find another 100B somewhere in the military budgets of the world, divert them to more research." But even if you want to focus on "big, milestone" projects like the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Allocating resources worth billions on one avenue is not keeping every avenue open, it is forgoing thousands of avenues that don't force you to decide like this.
Is it just one avenue? While I'm not a particle physicist, my layman understanding of LHC is that it can be used to test many theories that would otherwise go unsolved. Should we only research things that are cheap to test and eventually mass producible?
Of course not we should choose avenues according to what they are likely to achieve being better than alternative allocations. For another LHC that is a huge burden to overcome.
What is so great about LHC2 that you want to keep space exploration going at a crawl with commercial companies showing how to do it on a shoestring budget? Maybe the LHC2 will cause a discovery the LHC won't but is that probability of learning something worth sacrificing a huge portion of our resources on? Or is this that we made people gain an expertise and they want to continue with its path even though it's a pretty bad one to continually invest more and more in?
Personally, I have mixed feelings about learning fission and I would rather explore space and have functionally independent colonies before we blow ourselves up with a new subatomic discovery.
tl;dr. Because Supersymmetry is stupid theory that can be fit to any set of facts, there is no point in building LHC++. Besides it is so expensive you could give a 100.000 physicist a million bucks and that would be more productive.
> Besides it is so expensive you could give a 100.000 physicist a million bucks and that would be more productive. Would it? A bunch of the arguments in the article apply to pretty much all science funding.
It is one of the great perks of civilization that you can combine resources to make something truly awesome, whether it is pyramids, moon landings or large colliders.
This article brings to mind the plot point [SPOILER ALERT] in "The Three-Body Problem" where the antagonistic and technologically superior aliens halt the progress of our entire civilization merely with nanotechnology that impedes science at our particle accelerators, thus preventing breakthroughs in physics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The claim that we need to "invest into science" is outright bullshit. We don't need more investment into climate change science - we already know what to do to mitigate climate change and we have known it for decades (hell there is an article from over a hundred years ago that warns of the dangers of CO2 emissions [2]): ban ICE vehicles and coal power plants, promote public transit, massively restrict other uses of f…
Ban ICE vehicles, coal power plants and get rid of mass animal farming? And then we do what, go back to the caves?
It’s not “living in caves”, in fact, it’s not any different from the life of anyone else. It’s only a handful of tiny changes and suddenly your climate impact is massively reduced.
Ah... the yearly bigthink article that we should stop funding other experiments and put everything into fusion.
Fusion does remind me of the space program. Surprising new solutions in a wide range of sciences. Easy to produce superconducting ribbons being one of the big successes so far. Said ribbons have lead to significant improvements in electro magnets, improving both field strength and decreasing the magnet sizes. Said magnets are useful for a wide variety of applications (outside of fusion), like improved MRI machines. T…
I wouldn't mind them building it if they just used their own money. Spinoff cern companies have earned a $trillion or more revenue and probably a hundred billions profit from things like medical imaging gear. They could well afford to fund themselves and a new collider without begging the public for money. Cern really should be investigated and audited publicly, but it would take Delloites and PWC to follow that pape…
I don't think that's true. CERN itself didn't create many (any?) successful companies. People who worked at CERN went on to create companies, but that doesn't create any money for CERN. Happy to be corrected.