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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

#181

Post by onpensionsterm »

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.

>let's find a way to build/experiment LHC++ less expensively.

From the people who brought you compost fueled cars?

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

#182

Post by brazzy »

musha68k wrote: post #135
brazzy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the idea is to do lots and lots of small science instead of one big one, because we'll probably learn more from that.

It’s not a zero sum game though. Europe could pay for all of these projects. That would be even better, don’t you agree?

Allocation of science funding is a zero-sum game. Increasing science funding is a quite different game.

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

#183

Post by brazzy »

throw457 wrote: post #150
brazzy wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a small part of my argument. That you have to concentrate on that in this way shows that you don't really have any arguments yourself.

Quoted post unavailable.

No post body was provided.

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

#184

Post by Aerroon »

l33tman wrote: post #56
moonchrome wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And yet 15M people yearly are still visiting those "useless" pyramids 4600 years after they were built.

Sure, but the people 4600 years ago were the ones that paid the price for building the pyramids. How do 15M people visiting it today help them?

We're talking about using everybody's money for these science projects. And this is not money that's voluntarily given, it's taken.

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

#186

Post by macspoofing »

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.

> "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."

"Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's instead build an airplane."

The problem with next-gen LHC is that there are no guarantees of any new or interesting physics for that $100 billion. And particle accelerators are not the only way to spend large sums of money, so there is an opportunity cost. Why not spend that $100 billion to build more space telescopes or more sensitive LIGOs to detect gravitational waves, etc.

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

#187

Post by nix23 »

dTal wrote: post #172
levi_n wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations. Genuine question from an ignorant layperson: was confirming the existence of the Higgs boson not significant?

In a scientific sense - no. It was predicted, it was found. No theories needed rewriting. Significant would have been if they'd failed to find it.

So finding Black-holes is not significant because it was already predicted?

And btw there is so much money around...we should not fight against different project but the spending that goes into science itself. LHC and NASA is really just a small drop compared to military spending (in the US).

https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/p...

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

#188

Post by willis936 »

morbia wrote: post #174
levi_n wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations. Genuine question from an ignorant layperson: was confirming the existence of the Higgs boson not significant?

(Former PhD student in Particle Physics Pheno here, far from an expert) Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing. It's kind of weird because it was marketted as a success story to the public (and don't get me wrong, it was) but theorists were very confident that it was there by 2012. Thus far, it behaves exactly as expected accor…

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

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

#189

Post by morbia »

toxik wrote: post #178
morbia wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Former PhD student in Particle Physics Pheno here, far from an expert) Of course it was a significant discovery, but honestly it would have been a far more interesting if we detected literally nothing. It's kind of weird because it was marketted as a success story to the public (and don't get me wrong, it was) but theorists were very confident that it was there by 2012. Thus far, it behaves exactly as expected accor…

I’m pretty sure there remains a discrepancy between the predicted mass of the Higgs boson and the measured mass in experiments. Is this resolved then? I was under the impression that this was a smoking gun for something being off with the theory, a bit like the ultraviolet catastrophe that led to QM or the orbital aberration that was resolved by GR.

> I’m pretty sure there remains a discrepancy between the predicted mass of the Higgs boson and the measured mass in experiments. Is this resolved then?

Sort of.

The higgs boson mass is a parameter to the Standard Model. As far as the Standard Model is concerned, that is the end of the story. There are just a series of constants need to be fitted to data in the Standard Model and that's one of them.

However, the "problem" is why ~125GeV. If there are extremely high energy particles (which are expected in a Grand Unified Theory), then corrections to the Higgs mass would be enormous. This is a fine tuning problem where we arbitrarily tweak those corrections such that we magically end up at 125GeV. Supersymmetry and other Beyond Standard Models look to 'fix' this, and that's where my knowledge ends.

Honestly, when I was doing my PhD I took the pragmatic view on this. Trying to infer things at energy scales we can't probe struck me as more as a mathematical exercise than Physics. Many, many people would disagree with that though (and staked their careers on it).

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

#190

Post by orbifold »

ahoka wrote: post #180
orbifold wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe has an aging population, which is obese, smokes and has heart problems. It is a dying continent whose boomer generation has decided to transfer large amounts of IP to China for a short term profit, while refusing to have children, protesting against the establishment and being generally useless in their youth. The millennials and gen-z is royally screwed, the writing has been on the walls for years.

Baby boomers refusing to have children? What?!

Birth rates of children born during the baby boom (the baby boomers) is 2/3 to 1/2 of their parents generation.
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