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

391–400 of 467 posts

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

#391

Post by Barrin92 »

kensai wrote: post #269
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…

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

the WWW had nothing to do with physics research in particular but with the need to document and exchange information across systems which was a secular trend. Hypertext as a user interface paradigm existed before the WWW. (Douglas Engelbart's NLS for example)

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

#392

Post by notriddle »

dylan604 wrote: post #253
chriswarbo wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get where you're coming from, but at the same time, we have to KNOW things before we can continue to theorize about new things. If you keep theorizing on things that turn out to not be true, then it's just a waste of everyone's time. Find things that are true, theorize on the next step, test, prove/disprove, lather, rinse, repeat. Just coming up with stuff and disproving it isn't always "learning a lot", it's just…

If "information is a measure of surprise", then you don't want every prediction to be wrong. You want every prediction to have a 50% chance of being wrong. Half of your experiments should be failures.

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

#393

Post by lupire »

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

Maybe if we spent a few more years improving computers and materials before so many launches, we could have done more with less money. Likewise for the disastrous Shuttle program.

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

#394

Post by lupire »

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.

Eh, Berners-Lee could have written that proposal for a different collaborative project, or someone else would have eventually.

We already had gopher. Web was an incremental step.

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

#395

Post by snowwrestler »

colinmhayes wrote: post #337
snowwrestler wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t think the moon landing is celebrated because it gave us Velcro and Tang. I don’t think Einstein is so famous because he helped create the foundation for cell phones.

Daily quality of life is important but I think there is a deeper feeling about life that most people share.

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

#396

Post by delusional »

gralx wrote: post #364
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Knock-on effects can just as well be ascribed to alternative targets for those Apollo funds. Those don't take much imagination to come up with, e.g. reducing the student-teacher ratios in schools.

Often politics is not a question of "funding this good thing or funding this great thing", but rather "funding this good thing that we can agree on, or funding nothing".

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

#397

Post by lupire »

thehappypm wrote: post #339
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”.

Hertz was humble or unambitious, but everyone else saw the obvious value. Radio was commercialized within 3 years.

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

#398

Post by lupire »

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.

Gopher came first. Berners-Lee used gopher while we was developing WWW.

https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...

But it doesn't matter. Lots of people all over the world were collaborating to build new Internet protocols.

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

#399

Post by lupire »

FredPret wrote: post #277
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…

As an engineer, my sole concern is making things useful in everyday life for real humans. However, I need the tools science gives me. I need scientists and mathematicians to think about how the universe and logic works, so that I can know how to make it work for people. Quantum foam will almost certainly feature in some product down the line. Edit: there have been some instances of engineers working out solutions bef…

How many orders of magnitude of energy inprovement are needed to make quantum foam accessible?

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

#400

Post by nix23 »

worik wrote: post #387
nix23 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But: https://interestingengineering.com/these-7-cern-spinoffs-sho... And i think the ISS was still much more expensive (especially over the years) then LHC/Atlas etc.

Those "practical" results were all due to the spending on technology. None were due to advances in physics, as far as I can tell (that website seems designed to obfuscate not illuminate)

>spending on technology

Like the Moon-landing right? None were due to advances in landing on the moon.

Post reply on HN