411–420 of 467 posts
I completely disagree, 100 billion might sound like a lot of money, but it's not. It's going to take like 20 years to build/assemble right? That's like 5 billion a year the EU GDP is 17.9 trillion per year. It's worth it just to keep all these physicists and engineers employed.
Ctrl-F, “Sabine” Well, if this isn’t predictable!
I fully agree. I’d even go one step further: don’t spend that 100 billion on physics at all. That’s taxpayer money that actually can be spent on feeding the hungry. That’s the humane thing to do, and I bet a much better investment in science too, since those hungry will have a chance to become scientists. PS. I have a masters in engineering physics and several friends who are physicists. I’m also a science nerd. But…
Cannot eat money, unfortunately it's far more durable and fungible than food.
Now, perhaps there are investments that can be made to improve the world's agriculture.
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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 h…
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.
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Good point with secondary benefits being equal.
WiFi > a secondary benefit was developed from speculative theoretical research in radio-astronomy : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiFi
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Dude, what is your definition of "democracy" ? Because your opinion about Poland state seems to be really, really brain-washed. At best. Democracy as in free election ? Perfect democracy here - one party won twice, other parties lost. You call it a problem ? Democracy as in free speech ? Dude ! Wake up ! In Poland is so much free speech that it's boarding with anarchy ! Eg. almost decade of opposition internally and…
> Furthermore it seems like anti-democratic behaviour is getting punished now, too, if you look over to Poland. They're saying anti -democratic behavior is being punished, which implies that Poland is pro-democracy.
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> 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 o…
But ultimately, yes. The entirety of modern physics is largely borne out of the unwillingness to accept the the world is simply as it appears and that there's no deeper unifying principles.
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The premise of this discussion is that those 1000 experiments would likely to be very scientifically vaaluable.
The premise of this subthread is that failing to fund another collider does not mean that those 1000 experiments will be funded. The person you're replying to is saying that even if money not thrown at a collider doesn't end up going to 1000 physics experiments, it will go to something. If that something is net-useful, it will be better than a new collider whose usefulness is questionable.
The direct scientific value may be limited; the spinoff of that much attention / funding isn't.
Not saying we should definitely fund a new collider. But the amount of effort needed is so huge, that even just the discussion will have positive impact for science.
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…