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Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

bigthink.com

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Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#111

Post by [deleted] »

tormeh wrote: post #40
irthomasthomas wrote: post #6

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…

Your criticism applies to basically all STEM research. Personally I like progress.

[deleted]

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#112

Post by sliken »

throw457 wrote: post #90
brazzy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we solve physics we solve everything A particle collider does not, in fact, "solve physics" in any meaningful way, especially not in terms of practical applicability. > if we solve fusion we have solved fusion. The comment you are replying to has explained in some detail why this is not true.

Why bother doing science at all if it's not practical applicable right? Such a nonsense argument I wonder how you think any scientific progress is made.

Research is never a sure thing, but ideally we'd push all areas of science equally. How many other areas of science have a $100B tool that may or may not reveal something interesting?

Why should high energy physics get priority over any other area?

It's the nature of high energy physics that the higher the energy the rarer the event. The standard model already explains our universe unbelievably accurately. Sure there are corner cases, and maybe, just maybe a LHC++ might give some evidence towards one model or another. But what happens if global warming, wars over fuel, lack of fertilizer, and lack of food makes it harder for humanity to survive let alone complete major science projects.

Renewable and/or carbon neutral energy in all it's forms seems pretty important these days compared to slightly reinforcing one physical model over another.

Maybe a fusion engine would let us explore the solar system enough to find planet 9, which might well be a black hole. That would open up particle energies well in excess of anything we could manage with LHC++.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#113

Post by oyoman »

I think people needs to put a bit of perspective on this :

the FCC is a project for the next 70 years. It is supposed to be operational after 2040 at the earliest if I recall correctly (20 years from now more or less), and to run for around 40 years.

So if you do a very simplistic calculation on the first 20 years : 100 B euros over 20 years over 20 countries (there is 23 member states into the CERN) it is 250 M euros / year / country. This is not even calculated on the over-all project time, on on the different steps that will be happening: first FCC as electron-positron collider and then much later FCC hadron-hadron collider.

And if you are really interested into the previewed outcomes (scientifically and new techs associated):

https://indico.cern.ch/event/1040535/timetable/#20220503.det...

You can take look at the European research communities symposium that just happened recently on the future of the research topics in Europe. There are a lot of information for FCC and so on.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#114

Post by GekkePrutser »

japanuspus wrote: post #73

As a low-energy quantum physicist, I completely agree: Experimental high-energy physics has become primarily an industrial subsidy scheme[1], and if we want the highest chance of reaching a grand unified theory, it seems the money would be much better spent elsewhere (cosmology, space-based observatories, research positions for young physicists without publish-or-perish incentives to run for the latest fad). The shor…

> Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned.

Couldn't the LHC be upgraded then to take advantage of this? Sounds like a much cheaper option. But I'm not a physicist at all so I'm sure I'm oversimplifying.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#115

Post by cm2187 »

I am all for spending money on scientific research but to justify large investments, it needs to yield something useful in practice. Otherwise it’s a form of philosophy, minus the societal impact.

XX century science has delivered plenty of practical applications. But is there any practical application to expect from another large Hadron collider? Wouldn’t that money be better used in bio science or something else?

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#116

Post by peoplefromibiza »

moonchrome wrote: post #26
mehrdada wrote: post #11

Cannot disagree more. "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's just have 1000 people walk one mile and explore." Simply ridiculous comparison. But sure, let's find a way to build/experiment LHC++ less expensively. What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.

Your analogy is fundamentally flawed. More realistically : we can only build one car in the entire world, where a tiny minority of people can even understand the potential benefit, and anything they see will be completely useless for everyone else in day to day life because we need a civilisation level effort to even detect the implications of their theory. If their theory had some real world implications - you would…

> It's the modern equivalent of building pyramids.

I wish it was true, it would be much easier to convince people to have ten of them.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#117

Post by krageon »

cm2187 wrote: post #115

I am all for spending money on scientific research but to justify large investments, it needs to yield something useful in practice. Otherwise it’s a form of philosophy, minus the societal impact. XX century science has delivered plenty of practical applications. But is there any practical application to expect from another large Hadron collider? Wouldn’t that money be better used in bio science or something else?

> to justify large investment it needs to yield something useful in practice

The really important scientific work doesn't follow this rule and demanding it does is short-sighted. Perhaps worse, it's refusing to learn from plenty of historical examples where you can see the work yielded nothing of immediate use but was still very important (that is to say, society would look vastly different without it). In a sense, it's this kind of goal-oriented thinking that led society to the mess that it has become in the last 15 years.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#118

Post by musha68k »

japanuspus wrote: post #73

As a low-energy quantum physicist, I completely agree: Experimental high-energy physics has become primarily an industrial subsidy scheme[1], and if we want the highest chance of reaching a grand unified theory, it seems the money would be much better spent elsewhere (cosmology, space-based observatories, research positions for young physicists without publish-or-perish incentives to run for the latest fad). The shor…

How about thinking about this on a grander scale / in the open - and just have more and even larger “industrial subsidy schemes”? Wouldn’t you like to work on another BIG SCIENCE project that tries to find answers to something that seems more worthwhile (to you)?

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#119

Post by aeroman »

mschuster91 wrote: post #13
gonzo41 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the cost though, you should probably fund a lot of other science. Climate change mitigation perhaps?

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…

Isn't this a reason to understand more about the climate though? How big cuts are needed, and how fast? What is the consequence of leaving those cuts an extra 10 years? What if we put our energy into cutting methane now and leave CO2 for later? Does black carbon matter in the long term? What amount of warming is acceptable?

These are the kind of questions we need answers to. Just saying 'we need to stop all emissions today' is not good enough. There is always a trade-off and we need to work out where this lies.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#120

Post by peoplefromibiza »

discreteevent wrote: post #33
mehrdada wrote: post #11

Cannot disagree more. "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's just have 1000 people walk one mile and explore." Simply ridiculous comparison. But sure, let's find a way to build/experiment LHC++ less expensively. What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.

I read it as: "Instead of building one really expensive car to continue to explore in one direction let's build lots of cars and explore in all directions". To me that shows an attitude full of curiosity.

except there are terrains where a car won't do and you need a giant expensive off-road vehicle.

You wouldn't go to the north pole with a VW Beetle.

Same thing applies here, smaller cars that explore in all direction can probably find a local maxima and get stuck there.

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