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Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

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291–300 of 467 posts

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

#291
post #269

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

It's not, though.

> There are many known problems in physics right now. $100 billion could fund (quite literally) 100,000 smaller physics experiments.

$1M is a reasonable amount to build a prototype world wide web. There were 5,000 things like WWW we didn't do because we built LHC.

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

#292
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can be lots of new alternatives. Why not fund those instead, by creating “moonshine physics departments”? (That is just a comment, not a suggestion). The problem with String Theory is it unfalsifiability and that it has not even grown to explain 3D phenomena AT ALL. 40 years later. Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (both special and general) gave results in a single decade.

What do you mean by 3D phenomena? String theory is as far as I have ever read the only thing even close to a working theory in this area. That doesn't mean it's correct but in my admittedly limited understanding of the literature many alternatives are either dead or are similar to string theory only without the underlying principles. People do work on alternatives. there are a lot of smart people unhappy with string…

Newton explained interplanetary attraction.

Plank explained the black-body radiation.

Einstein explained too many things to say but predicted the precession of mercury which was unexplained.

Witten has explained either everything (which is to say nothing useful) or nothing at all (it depends on your position). In any of both cases, after 40 years and several LHC unfulfilled “expectations” it is time to accept the facts.

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

#293

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?

off the cuff, non-exhaustive list:

  1930s — video image tubes
  1940s — nuclear power, atomic clocks, transistors
  1960s — lasers, fiber-optic communications, PET-CT scans
  1970s — MRIs

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

#294
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gopher came slightly after WWW, so I'm not sure how much influence WWW had on it, but it makes me think you're right. Other people were working in the problem space.

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

#295

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…

Consider a hypothetical analogous argument against supporting fundamental science made in 1900: What they are working on is completely useless for humanity and doesn't help solve everyday problems... the "and so what?" about the photoelectric effect or quantum theory. Because those people in 1900 could not conceive of inventions like lasers and transistors. They didn't just lack imagination, they lacked total conceptual inability in that context. Just as you are seeming to do here. But of course, either of those two inventions have transformed human society on a level with fire, language, writing and metallurgy.

"Is there a comparable impact on knowing that the Higgs boson is +/- 10^-9 (or whatever) aligned with the theoretical model?" perhaps there is! Might not understanding the fine points of the theoretical model help with something like a reactionless thruster? Could this unlock the door on direct manipulation of spacetime? Assist in devising exotic materials, like say some sort of stable muonic matter and opening up a whole new world of chemistry/solid state physics? The potential is staggering, and by nature is almost completely unguessable until it happens.

If the world followed the lead of yourself or the Sabine Hossenfelders of the world we might never know. The argument that this hypothetical collider can only be used to explore unconfirmable symmetry theories is simply false. The cost of such a facility is insignificant compared to the potential.

My back-of-the-envelope game theory perspective is that humanity should double down on all fronts, at all cost, to push these boundaries. The only impediment is the folks like you, mired in the present and seemingly unable to realize that the unimaginable results are very much unimaginable. Just as those lasers and transistors were 100+ years ago.

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

#296
It's a good case made here. I don't disagree. But what it raises is interesting & challenging:

> There are many known problems in physics right now. $100 billion could fund (quite literally) 100,000 smaller physics experiments. There may not be enough physics labs on Earth to carry out that many experiments!

It's amazing & a bit problematic how big-biased we are. For reference, LHC cost a bit under $5B by compare. I have a hard time imagining what it would take to get $5B in funding for physics. How much effort would each physics project have to spend to go get funding, versus how much time did it take the LHC to get funding?

I really like the idea of diversity, of a range of medium & small projects. But it feels like structurally we are disposed towards bigger higher ticket tasks. That once the ball is rolling, once there's critical mass, we can get the checkbooks opening. But by compare the channels for getting small & medium funding is more case by case, that large pools of money aren't as available or accessible.

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

#297
post #55

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…

With this logic, I assume you'd call the ISS a useless project.

Would you rather have 1 ISS or 200 New Horizons?

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

#298
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Embryo selection"—is that a euphemism for "murdering any unborn child that doesn't have all the "right" genes? Because if so I think your definition of "people's lives" must be very different from mine.

No, it's just that; embryo selection. It's not an euphemism for what you wrote because an embryo is not a child and you cannot murder an embryo. From Wikipedia: "A child (plural children) is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty [...]" You are also conflating the abortion of an embryo with murder; only human persons can be murdered, embryos are not persons, therefore no murder. I sincerely ask you to…

It's hardly a polemic when it is a question of existential importance- what does it mean to be human, when does a human begin to exist, and at what point does a human have rights?

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... dark matter exists (or MOND if you are into that). So there's no real question that there's physics beyond the standard model. Why not try our luck in the accessible regions to see whether that's where it lives?

The high energy frontier the FCC targets is one of the more accessible regions: it's not like there's any viable way to travel the interstellar distances needed to really look for dark matter outside the solar systems. We're stuck on earth for the foreseeable future, and building 2 more of the instruments we're already building won't do anything to resolve the problems high energy physics struggle with.

Even if dark matter is (as seems quite possible) made up of unknown particles, you don't think probing the possibility space with a particle accelerator will help? I know many particle physicists disagree...

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

#300
post #160

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 added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise. I'm not sure there is a fundamental distinction here. The only difference is success: Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist. When new high-energy theories pre…

Sorry but several of the most prominent string theorists have gone from “LHC will find this to be a fact” to “We need a bigger LHC” as time passed. Not very trustworthy.
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