I always figured that the bigs supercolliders were just a big job creation program -- the money isn't spent in a vacuum (no pun intended, well ok, a little), but the money is going toward paying people and vendors to do $100B of work, with a little raw materials thrown in. So even if you're not getting $100B of science out of it, it's not a total waste.
Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
321–330 of 467 posts
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#322Cannot 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.
"Rather than building yet another city-sized internal combustion engine, but even bigger to carry more further, how about we fund a lot of blue-sky research to determine if there's a way to carry scientists forward without city-sized internal combustion engines?"
It appears we suspect there is a better way.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#323Cannot 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 agree, it reads like a variation of 'there's nothing left to discover so lets all go home and not bother'
>I agree, it reads like a variation of 'there's nothing left to discover so lets all go home and not bother'
I don't think that's quite right. The big problem isn't that there is 'nothing left to discover' because we know there are interesting physics at higher energy scales. What we don't actually know if there is anything interesting at the energy scales that this particle accelerator could achieve. You could literally spend two decades building this, and in the end, all you would do is rule out a tiny energy-scale slice.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#324They could even pay scientists a more reasonable wage and make funding easier to get with all that money and maybe not have an unsustainable university system where even amazing researchers can't get multi-year reliable funding (in the US, I know it is less bad elsewhere). But sure, go build a $100B machine out of habit.
The article's pretext is a false dilemma. You can "fix" lots of science issues with money as well as have more of these large scale scientific efforts. It's up to the European funding and the extension of it. There is enough money to go around in one of the richest economic zones in the world.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#325[deleted]
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Several people have answered this from the angle of why the cost is large, but missed the other (necessary) angle - the benefits are also massive and well understood. Plenty of potential projects have huge costs but they don't exist because the benefits aren't big enough, highways exhibit a sort of survivor bias in the mega project world. Highway systems create massive economic benefits that are relatively simple to…
It's reasons like this that I don't necessarily see LHC or whatever rev of it as a problem per se. If the technologies developed to get there pay back the cost of the collider then it could end up being a very expensive toy and I wouldn't care. To me it's about the journey and getting there, because for big science in many case the real science is not the tool produced at the end but the science and engineering that…
> If they truly believe in the project they'll have a dozen technologies that need to be developed to make their project happen, all of which have practical applications beyond their experiment.
I don't think one should even have to demonstrate "practical applications beyond the experiment" beforehand. Just that it is a complete problem that can be solved independently from the entire project.
If there are a lot of those, it's much better to fund those and get the results that will push the cost of the full thing down. Even if the total costs turn up to be higher than focusing on the collider from the start.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist. Nope. It's the other way around. The most important theories from Einstein an Schrödinger were created to explain effects there were experimentally known. The ones where they predicted the effects first and found them later were much less impactful.
Right, but a theory's inferred veracity is only as good as its testable, falsifiable predictions.
Let me turn this around.
A scientific theory is only as valuable as much as it can guide the action of some person.
Popperism is an incredibly successful simplification that made it viable to judge a theory. But at the end of the day, it's just a proxy that nobody really cares about.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#328This article summarized by xkcd: https://xkcd.com/401/
Side note: this is comic number 401. Comic number 404 is particularly good.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#329Government finances don't work the same way as other finances. A normally functioning democracy can basically invent as much money as it needs to (see Covid relief packages). If there's political will to do an LHC++, three ITERs and two ISS's, the money will appear. If there's opposition to the LHC++ and it gets scrapped, that doesn't mean that the funds will be re-allocated. They will just disappear.
> see Covid relief packages And after this the US has hit levels of inflation that it hasn't seen for 50 years. Before that inflation was that high in WW2. Printing money is not free, neither is tax money.
I didn't check if that's the actual (main?) reason for the inflation we are seeing since before February 2022. But let's suppose it is, there are still some entities who have been earning tons of money during this pandemic so far. Maybe Amazon, Pfizer & co just need to be taxed higher.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but sadly, if you defund Big Physics, it doesn't mean the money will go to 1000 experiments. It's more likely that nothing will be funded. Same reason why nobody was able to effectively compete with YC: it's a lot less work for VCs to fund a few "big bets" than find 100 good early-stage startups. The VC strategy is a lot less effective, but they still earn their fees no matter what
> it doesn't mean the money will go to 1000 experiments. It's more likely that nothing will be funded Perhaps it is reasonable to allow the money to remain unspent on topics related to physics! Spending has opportunity costs, after all; if these other experiments are not really the measure of the cost, then something else of value to society surely is.
The premise of this discussion is that those 1000 experiments would likely to be very scientifically vaaluable.