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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

#351

Post by timeon »

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…

> western society doesn't really believe in science at this point to save us, it believes in technology.

I'm afraid - not even in technology at this point.

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

#352

Post by SiempreViernes »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #299
SiempreViernes wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I do think it will help more than leaving it to the cosmologists.

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

#353

Post by xyzzyz »

yccs27 wrote: post #160
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 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…

> When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment.

One of the reasons LHC was built in the first place was to try to detect the theoretically predicted Higgs boson.

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

#354

Post by dekhn »

eastbound wrote: post #346
marcosdumay wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are some side-effects of running a place like CERN that benefit scientists (for example, CERN makes and stores antimatter for experiments, and they sometimes develop new tech to solve their problems that can be applied in the real world, but by-and-large, high energy physics doesn't contribute directly to applied science or products. Countries run projects like this for prestige, not applications.

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

#355

Post by esarbe »

zdragnar wrote: post #349
esarbe wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> Embryos are without a question human. [...] The question is whether they are persons.

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

I think we are pretty much in agreement what the contention is about.

> [..] the argument isn't in itself polemic.

The argument itself is not polemic. No argument in itself is polemic. Polemic is defined in the language used. I'm objecting the language in which the argument is phrased;

To quote the post I originally answered to:

> "Embryo selection"—is that a euphemism for "murdering any unborn child [...]

The phrasing is polemic for reasons I pointed out before.

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

#356

Post by BaseballPhysics »

whatshisface wrote: post #331
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

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

And yet many ascribe a whole range of knock-on benefits as a consequence of the Apollo missions. Had those people had their way, one wonders what technologies we wouldn't have today because, in the moment, no one could find a clear utilitarian justification for the program.

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

#357

Post by tomcatfish »

PietdeVries wrote: post #202
concordDance wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's it currently doing with that money? I guess we could get rid of funding healthcare and trying to help people out of poverty so that a small number of people get to use a very expensive toy... You know what would be an awesome big science project that would immeasurably improve future people's lives? Sequencing all genes and using that data provide free embryo selection services to everyone who wants to be a pa…

Well... The US Defense budget for 2021 alone is 7 times the money needed to build a new LHC (705 billion [1] for the US defense in 2021). Germany will spend a similar 100 billion dollars on weapons in the coming years. So while 100 billion looks like an amazing amount of money, the military spends this in the blink of an eye and without the slightest promise of a RoI... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_bud…

I like having something to scale 100B to, but this is a silly argument.

"Instead of cutting this program, just have every military cut funding at once" is not a very realistic path forwards, and we're not going to get the program funded on stuff like that.

In the hypothetical universe we're in here, where we have to convince people now.

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

#358

Post by xyzzyz »

rimunroe wrote: post #224
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to get to really high energies you need to build bigger Superconducting magnets enable much higher energies in smaller (granted, theoretical) fusion reactor designs than previously possible. Does the same not apply to colliders?

Colliders already use superconducting magnets

With new developments, you can use much smaller magnets.

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

#360

Post by cycomanic »

mhh__ wrote: post #101
pfortuny wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the same way that String Theorists are paying their bills from the taxpayers, mostly by pushing that theory as Physics.

Given that they are physicists and no one has actually been able to properly find an alternative to string theory isn't that what they're supposed to be doing? Isn't the main alternative LQG which is apparently a dead end?

The issue is not that nobody found an alternative to string theory, the problem is that nobody found a use for string theory. Essentially vast amount of funding and talent has been pushed into string theory (via the tenure processes at universities which favored string theory for a long time, because it was considered the cutting edge of theoretical physics), and what did we get from it? Not one falsifiable prediction, which as Popper would tell you is necessary to do science. So everything and nothing would be an alternative to string theory.
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