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Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

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

#281

Post by giantrobot »

black_puppydog wrote: post #27
popinman322 wrote: post #24

The LHC's development produced a number of new technologies (e.g. radiation resistant microcontrollers, and gas electron multipliers). Could the next generation produce more, valuable tech? I also don't have the expertise to tell whether the article is being overly reductive with the project's goals: are there other questions (besides new particles) that can only be answered with a larger collider? The summary of the…

I see the same argument (secondary innovations) being made for war-time/military research. But I don't buy it there, and I don't buy it here. Investing the same money in something that has a known and positive primary effect will produce the same amount of secondary benefits. So if you can think of something more fruitful to do with these 100B, do that; the secondary benefits will keep coming anyhow.

There's a really wide gulf between building something in a lab and scaling production to some industrially useful level. The money spent on the LHC wasn't just lot on fire in a giant pit. It went to contractors that took lab scale prototypes or just paper designs and built them at scale.

Building a one inch super conductor in a lab might be straightforward but cost a million dollars. That lab process doesn't scale to building seventeen miles of superconductor. The LHC needed 4722 miles of superconducting cable. Simply manufacturing that much cable led to advances in superconductor manufacturing and design. Even then the LHC's particular superconductors only work if you've got the operating budget to use liquid helium to cool them.

The money spent went into research to develop the components necessary for the design and then into the production of those components. The LHC wasn't some item picked out of a catalog. Many of its components only existed on paper when it was designed.

No one is just going to pump development dollars into some paper design and hope someone somewhere finds a use for it. The LHC's superconductors advanced the state of superconductors in general but no one was going to do that work without an end goal and a budget.

Military development ends up with a similar model. Requirements for a desired capability are given to a contractor and they need to figure out how to build it. Sometimes that development is easy and other times it's difficult and expensive. Contractors definitely make a profit and pad co tracts but that money does pay people to do things. The requirements and funding create a market for the development for technologies that meet those requirements.

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

#282

Post by rocqua »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #241
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…

> I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results. Or are you seriously imagining that there is a cabbal of old researchers that have found a m…

> "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh"

The idea of getting young physicists to do lots of research is not at all about ignoring the old knowledge. These young people will have gotten a PhD in physics. They will have absorbed a lot of the relevant old knowledge. The idea is that, because they came to this knowledge quite quickly, they have a fresh view on it. You simply get a different view on knowledge you build over decades as opposed to knowledge you learnt in a few years. This different view could very well lead to new and valuable insights.

There is not a "cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret". But there is a "group of people who have been doing high energy physics that want to keep doing high energy physics". It makes sense that they want to keep doing it, even if other approaches would be more fruitful. They have invested lots of time into it, and they might not even know about the other approaches. And doing 'more of the old thing' is a safe bet.

It's just that by now 'more of the old thing' is getting really stupidly expensive. And it looks to be a lot more efficient to try a lot more new things. Give the people with a fresh look on it a change to come up with ideas.

> Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?

These people surely do exist. But there are plenty of others out there that have ideas for 10 million dollar machines rather than 100 billion dollar machines. Try some of the 10 million dollar machines rather than only the 100 billion dollar machines.

I think many of the 10 million dollar machines are currently not being funded because that level of funding requires clout, reputation, and political acumen to get. This currently lies with the people who like doing accelerators. They don't like building non-accelerators that cost 10 million dollars, so they don't help the 10 million dollar machines as much.

That is not malice, these people aren't evil. They just like a tool that is getting inefficient.

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

#283

Post by BeetleB »

esrauch wrote: post #274
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #265

As someone who did their PhD at CERN - I agree. The place is fantastic, you get to meet great people and life is cool. But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity. Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere. If someone could answer to this "and so what?" in a meaningful way I would be glad to change my mind. For the time being, the energy scale we are making these disc…

How long was the time gap from quantum machanics work in the 1920s until serious practical applications for that work?

Most semiconductor applications involve an understanding of QM. The transistor was invented in 1948. So not too long after.

Also, nuclear power...

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

#284

Post by Sakos »

fnands wrote: post #166
GekkePrutser wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The detectors on the LHC get upgraded regularly, between every run some part gets updated. Computing-wise as well, better computing resources are there. The fundamental limitations isn't the detectors or computers, it's the energies you can reach with a collider of that size. Yes you can completely retool the LHC, which will probably allow you to do slightly better precision measurements, but won't strongly affect th…

> we'll lose a lot of expertise, but that feels like a knee-jerk reaction from the community.

It's a valid concern that must always be considered. It's the kind of thing that's been biting Intel in the ass for the past 7 years. Even if your decision is "we'll lose a lot of expertise and that's okay", it needs to be a conscious, well-grounded decision, otherwise that is a knee-jerk reaction based on your own biases and assumptions that could have significant, even irrevocable, consequences for the future.

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

#285

Post by runarberg »

larryett wrote: post #264
musha68k wrote: post #67

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…

The problem is western society doesn't really believe in science at this point to save us, it believes in technology. All our problems are just the engineering problem of AGI. Why waste money on something like this when AI will be "smarter" than us by the time it is built? We should just do nothing and wait for AI to build the instruments it wants. Maybe there is the slightest hope in this "overpriced" and long delay…

I’m not an expert on AI but I was under the impression that AI is just a fancy way to fit data with massive computative power. So if you wanted AI to do science for us it would basically just return the result we expected in a fancy and unexpected way, and even then we might be overfitting. If an AI would return new science we didn’t expect—I don’t see how but lets imagine—we would reject it as a miss.

Take the Event Horizon Telescope as an example here. It requires a massive amount of computational modeling to create those images from a huge dataset. Humans did their science to figure out how the supermassive black holes would look like and created their models (AI if you will) based on this knowledge. Even so they are not free from criticism that they might be overfitting onto a conformation bias and many scientists are waiting for an independent confirmatory observation before they believe the image. Now if you replace the humans in that equation with more models (AGI if you will) how do you even know what you are looking at is even sensical?

I’m not a fan of the LHC++ project either, but I think you might have too much faith in AI and AGI.

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

#286

Post by philipov »

orangesite wrote: post #266
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #265

As someone who did their PhD at CERN - I agree. The place is fantastic, you get to meet great people and life is cool. But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity. Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere. If someone could answer to this "and so what?" in a meaningful way I would be glad to change my mind. For the time being, the energy scale we are making these disc…

There's a point at which theory needs to catch up to observations before it makes sense to gather more observations.

My understanding is that theory has blasted way past observations and what we need now are more precise observations.

And developing the technology capable of making such precise observations has immense utility outside of the particular experiment that drives their invention. Even if superparters are useless, more powerful magnets are useful. Better sensors are useful. Better data processing technology is useful. And that stuff gets invented by the people probing to find superpartners.

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

#287

Post by orhmeh09 »

kensai wrote: post #269
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #265

As someone who did their PhD at CERN - I agree. The place is fantastic, you get to meet great people and life is cool. But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity. Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere. If someone could answer to this "and so what?" in a meaningful way I would be glad to change my mind. For the time being, the energy scale we are making these disc…

It's ironic that you write this comment on the World Wide Web. An invention made in the "useless for humanity" CERN... :-/ https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

I have no doubt we’d have gotten basically the same thing within five years from elsewhere if CERN didn’t exist.

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

#288

Post by tzs »

qiskit wrote: post #262
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…

> Einstein and the quantum pioneers Einstein wasn't a 'quantum pioneer'. Einstein was a proponent of classical physics and against quantum physics.

His Nobel Prize was for his early quantum work (explaining the photoelectric effect). He was a major participant at the first Solvay conference. Bose-Einstein statistics didn't get that name just because someone though it looked cool.

He of course fully knew that the world is quantum, not classical. His beef with the mainstream QM past the mid to late '20s was with the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein believed that a complete theory would have realism and so Copenhagen could not be the complete theory.

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

#289

Post by BeefWellington »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #265

As someone who did their PhD at CERN - I agree. The place is fantastic, you get to meet great people and life is cool. But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity. Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere. If someone could answer to this "and so what?" in a meaningful way I would be glad to change my mind. For the time being, the energy scale we are making these disc…

I understand your point of view here but I think I disagree.

If you restrict your view only to the particular targeted research in question you are missing much of the pie. Going to the Moon did not help the average person in their day to day lives on its own but numerous side technologies emerged as a result of the engineering and research efforts required to solve problems.

LHC and CERN as a whole have led to a number of technological improvements[1], even if the research goals themselves do not seem oriented towards anything an individual should care about today.

It is certainly possible that similarly funded fusion research or carbon sequestration research would yield similar technologies, it's not a given.

[1]: https://kt.cern/technology-portfolio

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

#290

Post by bnralt »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #271
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #265

As someone who did their PhD at CERN - I agree. The place is fantastic, you get to meet great people and life is cool. But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity. Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere. If someone could answer to this "and so what?" in a meaningful way I would be glad to change my mind. For the time being, the energy scale we are making these disc…

> yes it is, but where does this fundamental science helps in everyday problems? PhD or not, this is an oddly utilitarian view of science. I suspect there would be countless discoveries that never would have been made had we only ever weighed an experiment based purely on its ability to "help in everyday problems". I mean, why, say, develop the theory of evolution? At the time that was irrelevant to "everyday problem…

At a certain point we have to make choices about what gets funded. Even if you think much more money should be going into science, you still have to decide what takes priority, and you're going to eventually run into some limits. One can take the view (as many seem to) that if it's science it should be funded, but that's not useful for any discussion of resource allocation. If someone doesn't have a preference, then it makes sense for the people who do have preferences to decide.

Also keep in mind that some scientific endeavors can make other ones much more productive, so prioritizing things correctly can increase the overall output by a large amount (and neglecting to prioritize things correctly can significantly slow output).

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