Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

Comparing the cost against defense spending, which has a reputation for waste, doesn't convince me. If the cost is similar to two B-2 bombers and one thinks that the B-2 bomber is overpriced, one would probably also think that the LHC is overpriced.

To me, bringing up that the WWW, fancy PET scans, etc. came in part from HEP and therefore we should be grateful is missing one major point. In the WWW case, in an alternative history it seems likely to me that some other project would have developed something similar around the same time if the funding were allocated differently. As for the other benefits, I think if the money were allocated towards research in those areas it would have been more effectively spent.

Ultimately I think the worst "cost" for HEP in general (not just colliders) is that it encourages something like brain drain on other fields. I think that people interested in certain mostly non-practical areas of physics like HEP would do the world a lot more good if they instead got a PhD in some field of engineering or CS, or at the very least a more practical area of "physics". Here I refer to physics in the descriptive sense which doesn't align well with the prescriptive definition of physics. E.g., I don't understand why fluid dynamics is not "physics" in that it's rarely researched in physics departments (unless studied indirectly in chaos theory or plasma physics). Must be too Newtonian for people to care. (For what it's worth I'm at the end of a PhD in mechanical engineering studying fluid dynamics.)

I'll excuse you trying to make this personal and focus on the tangibles...

Losses in a waveguide are miniscule because plasma is almost as good a conductor as a superconductor. Most of the energy is carried in the dielectric anyway.

Technology is already being developed as ASIC PHYs for commercial applications as THz MIMO radios for the next generation of mobile networks. No doubt the next generation of accelerators will rely heavily on beam-forming, perhaps already in wakefield accelerators. If you are unfamiliar with ASICs, they are what enabled CD-ROM audio to use solomon-reed error correction while it was thought only a supercomputer could do that in realtime.

Lasers already constitute an strange accelerator principle, able to seemingly circumvent a naive understanding of thermodynamics by rectifying energy in space. So don't scoff it. Extreme Light Infrastructure currently under construction will be able to perform nuclear transmutation. Far beyond that, and far beyond the capabilities of any theoretical radio-frequency accelerator, lies lasers powered by nuclear isomers.

MOSFETs are simpler than bipolar transistors. Putting it very crudely, MOSFETs are based on the same space charge principles as vacuum valves, except they happen to use doped silicon instead of free electrons.

Bipolar transistors are more complex, but they still work by controlling the bulk geometry of moving charge.

None of this requires QM, except in the very simple sense that you need to know what a bandgap is and how doping changes it. Beyond that, the "mechanical" details of the charge dynamics are just calculus - even more crudely, very very small plumbing.

QM effects are only relevant when the simple space charge models start to break down at very small geometries. Your "mechanical" space charge model becomes soft, noisy, and more complicated. Essentially the plumbing develops waves and ripples that depend on the geometry, and the edges of the pools and pipes can start to leak. And that's where QM finally starts to make a real difference.

If nothing else it's bad timing. What we need right now is a giant global investment in pandemic vaccination factories and distribution systems.

Not to defend her, but to defend listening to her...

Often the people in a position to give the most important feedback are _not_ in a position to give feedback gently and tactfully.

So if you want to really know the world, you need to have a check in your mind that lets you take tactless feedback.

One example is when you hurt someone... a person you hurt is almost never going to be in a position to gently, calmly say what happened in a fair, generous way. That kind of feedback almost always comes with barbs, or inflations that accompany a person trying to talk to someone who hurt them.

If you ignore tactless feedback, you will mostly never be able to understand the people you hurt.

Another category like this is feedback about norms. People who are well versed in norms and good at operating within them generally won’t be the people who can see outside of those same norms. The people who can see alternatives to norms, who can give feedback on where they work and don’t work, often will not be able to give that feedback in a way that conforms to other norms.

So if you ignore tactless feedback, you will mostly never be able to understand broken norms.

If you can separate the content of the message from how it’s delivered you can dramatically increase your access to understanding.