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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

#331

Post by whatshisface »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #305
cookingmyserver wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is important to remember the context of the discussion. I think I it is completely reasonable, and not odd at all, to have a utilitarian view of science, when you are talking about spending $100 Billion .

Alright. I agree, that's certainly a very valid point. So would you have cancelled the moon landing program? In 2020 dollars that program cost over $257B (over $400B if you count related programs and costs)[1], and that goal--landing humans on the moon--has demonstrated very little utility. [1]: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo

A lot of people wanted to cancel the moon landing program while it was happening, and they eventually did.

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

#332

Post by specialist »

chriswarbo wrote: post #245
matthewdgreen wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a particle physicist, but I think the entire history of human scientific discovery is set again that proposition. Namely: (1) that we have a fundamental theory that describes the Universe; (2) that it is within our technical capability to experimentally verify the reality of that theory; and (3) we choose not to do so. It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagin…

Information is a measure of surprise: we should choose to verify our predictions; but it's disappointing when our predictions turn out to be correct. We want our best predictions to be proven wrong, since we would learn a lot.

Yes and, riffing on your clarification, maybe also make a distinction between hypothesis and prediction. Both are based on models, but a hypothesis hasn't been experimentally validated yet.

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

#333

Post by BaseballPhysics »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #317
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright. I agree, that's certainly a very valid point. So would you have cancelled the moon landing program? In 2020 dollars that program cost over $257B (over $400B if you count related programs and costs)[1], and that goal--landing humans on the moon--has demonstrated very little utility. [1]: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo

It had utility to the US government in demonstrating to the Russians our ability to accurately move payloads on the planetary scale. Actually landing on the moon was just a conveniently goal-aligned PR win. Beyond that though, being able to put things at that scale in orbit has shown major dividends at in every sector.

> It had utility to the US government in demonstrating to the Russians our ability to accurately move payloads on the planetary scale. Actually landing on the moon was just a conveniently goal-aligned PR win. Beyond that though, being able to put things at that scale in orbit has shown major dividends at in every sector.

You don't need to put men on the surface of the moon to gain any of these benefits. The US government could've spent far less to achieve those same outcomes.

And that's ignoring the fact that, particularly regarding those "major dividends", much of those justifications can only be made in hindsight. At the time I think it would've been difficult to justify the moonshot on that kind of utilitarian basis.

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

#334

Post by gumby »

pyb wrote: post #237
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…

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

The money could be spent on telescopes looking at non-human sources of particles (hard to do for particles of short lifetimes, but then again you have whole galaxies to work with). This is how much of QM and cosmology in general have been investigated.

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

#335

Post by deanCommie »

AprilArcus wrote: post #293
esrauch wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's worth acknowledging that the fears of the cold war funded tremendous scientific and technological innovation on both sides of the iron curtain.

People had singular focus - not on the betterment of humanity in the abstract sense, but for primal SURVIVAL - because both sides believed that if given the chance the other would wipe them out.

This created a unifying focus (amongst two divided sides).

A lot of people have hoped for some event to unify humanity (like the space squid in the watchmen) towards a common goal again. Alas, COVID has shown that is just simply not possible any longer.

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

#336

Post by Teever »

pyb wrote: post #330
fennecfoxen wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes but if the person who is saying that those 1000 experiments won't be funded but the next large hadron collider will and the next LHC is a waste of money then the alternative is between funding a waste of money and funding possibly not a waste of money like maybe some social programs or something.

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

#337

Post by colinmhayes »

snowwrestler wrote: post #312
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…

Do we pursue knowledge to build a strong economy? Or do we build a strong economy so we can pursue knowledge? Although I’ve spent a lot of my career working for a strong economy, I lean strongly toward the latter. The highest achievement of humanity is not cheap cell phone plans, it’s more like General Relativity, or the Moon landing. What “use” is humanity? What is life for? Big questions for sure, and I won’t claim…

Most people care about knowledge for its ability to raise quality of living, a.k.a it's ability to strengthen the economy.

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

#338

Post by credit_guy »

XorNot wrote: post #311
cookingmyserver wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is important to remember the context of the discussion. I think I it is completely reasonable, and not odd at all, to have a utilitarian view of science, when you are talking about spending $100 Billion .

That $100 billion doesn't vanish into thin air. It principally goes into plant and equipment to build the machine, as well as research into high tech manufacturing for the same. The world wide web which we are currently using was invented at CERN. You can literally go look at the proposal manuscript.

Where does this argument stop? 1 trillion, 10 trillion?

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

#339

Post by thehappypm »

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…

Hertz on the discovery of radio waves: “I do not think that the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical application”.

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

#340

Post by ordu »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #239
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…

Not a particle physicist, but I think the entire history of human scientific discovery is set again that proposition. Namely: (1) that we have a fundamental theory that describes the Universe; (2) that it is within our technical capability to experimentally verify the reality of that theory; and (3) we choose not to do so. It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagin…

> It's easy to monday-morning quarterback a result that was successful and unexciting, but imagine how intolerable the world would be if we'd chosen not to verify it.

I once read a paper complaining that the most of psychology experiments are trivial in the sense that their results are predictable in advance. It is like all people know that angry people tend to make other people angry and so if angry person try to communicate then oftentimes communications ends with a conflict. What the point of making an experiment from this?

I'm not sure how much of a psychology fall victim of this, but sometimes I read a paper and think that I've found one more example of this. I personally get nothing from reading such a paper. I can get some ideas while reading about methods researchers used, but it means that the paper is not about how human mind works, but about how to measure psychological phenomena, or how to conduct an experiment. I bet that the most interesting part of the hypothetical paper with angry communicating people would be the trick researchers used to make people angry without violating ethics.

There is some value in experiments that try to prove something that everyone knows already, but not much of a value. So the question is: is it ok to spend $10G to conduct such an experiment?

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