Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

bigthink.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 467 posts

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

#341

Post by staticassertion »

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…

> 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 discoveries is not useful.

How many things were discovered by ancient Greeks that only became useful in the last 100-200 years? The Sieve of Eratosthenes comes to mind - I can't imagine that was really helping anyone out until we had modern cryptography.

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

#342

Post by Cd00d »

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…

Are you claiming that no knowledge or technology has come out of CERN that benefits humanity in any way?

I find that hard to believe considering how much technical innovation came out of the space race that has had an impact on our everyday lives [0].

[0] https://www.aii.org/how-the-space-race-built-todays-technolo....

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

#343

Post by JanisErdmanis »

morbia wrote: post #189
toxik wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "pro…

> 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.

When I was undergraduate at CERN summer school program I got that this was one of main themes to justify existence of SUSY. However I am still puzzled even after having obtained a PhD (condensed matter) how does this arbitrary tweaking of corrections does look like.

Is it simply unwillingness to accept for world as we live know some parameters of the world like particles masses are not that independent from each other?

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

#344

Post by kensai »

dehrmann wrote: post #294
orhmeh09 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It came because it was somewhere inspired. WWW was the initial spark. And it could have only come in some big time, blue sky lab.

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

#345

Post by esarbe »

zdragnar wrote: post #298
esarbe wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Embryos are without a question human. So is my little toe. The question is whether they are persons.

The importance of the topic doesn't make it impossible to be polemic. I can talk about a very serious topic and be polemic and I can also talk about a trivial matter and not be polemic. The question of polemic is decided by contentious rhetoric.

Equating embryos with children and abortion with murder is polemic.

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

#346

Post by eastbound »

marcosdumay wrote: post #327
LordDragonfang wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Noob here, can we discuss about what are the practical effects of understanding high-energy theories? ie have we invented anything practical based on those colliders?

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

#347

Post by ketralnis »

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.

That isn't true. Einstein's "breakout" paper was on the Photoelectric effect. He wasn't a fan of probabilistic interpretations of quantum mechanics but it's not accurate to say that he didn't have a hand in it

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

#348

Post by ironmagma »

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.

There is other science we can do besides just physics.

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

#349

Post by zdragnar »

esarbe wrote: post #345
zdragnar wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Embryos are without a question human. So is my little toe. The question is whether they are persons. The importance of the topic doesn't make it impossible to be polemic. I can talk about a very serious topic and be polemic and I can also talk about a trivial matter and not be polemic. The question of polemic is decided by contentious rhetoric. Equating embryos with children and abortion with murder is polemic.

The question is not are embryos human, the question is whether they are independent human life with their own rights.

I don't think it is polemic to disagree on this point, but it rationally follows that if embryos are unique life forms, which are also human, then aborting them is murder.

Personally, I don't agree with that line of reasoning either, but the argument isn't in itself polemic.

Edit: I suppose I should add that I am not treating "human" as a collective noun, the way we might talk about bread or water. "A human" is not merely a little toe, for example.

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

#350

Post by esarbe »

Alenycus wrote: post #301
esarbe wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it is no less polemical and ideological than the comment you are responding to. I beg to differ. I don't think that using dictionary definitions to make ones arguments can be counted as polemic (as in; to use contentious rhetoric). I might be wrong though. > I'm assuming the previous comment meant human and not child No, I actually meant 'child'. An human embryo is - obviously - human. No discussion about that.…

Loads of people disagree with you and believe it is murder and can quote science to back up their argument. You also don't have any definition with a clear line when this switch from non human to human happens. It almost always boils down to "when it's convenient for me"

> Loads of people [...]

Quotation needed. Outside of religious circles there's very little debate about this. Scientific consensus is that fetal viability is considered to begin at 23 or 24 weeks gestational age. That's long after the embryo stage.

Just to make communication easier; are you aware that there's a difference between embryo and fetus?

> You also don't have any definition with a clear line when this switch from non human to human happens.

I never proposed that a embryo is not human. But we can talk about the line dividing persons from non-persons, if you like.

Post reply on HN