221–230 of 254 posts
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Oh yeah. In fact, that's exactly where there needs to be more research.
Get superconductivity working at say 0 deg C and you will be able to pick your accolade and price. Get it working at 100 deg C and you will have won the world.
Note for the wider audience: 77 K is liquid nitrogen, vastly easier to produce and handle than liquid helium.
Sounds like the particle collider people are having tunnel vision. "1 after the new particle collider": Guess what? we need an even bigger particle collider. What we really need is to build one on the moon.
It is not tunnel vision when the problem they're tackling is literally stuck in a tunnel. Bigger and bigger colliders are the only direct way we have to study high energy phenomena. It's not that physicists are lazy, it's that the problems they're studying are hard. I'm also seeing a lot resentment for the price tag of colliders in this thread. My personal opinion is that we shouldn't build a new one, but I'll point…
The LHC cost about 4.75 billion during construction, and requires a yearly operating budget of around 1 billion dollars.
The total cost estimate for finding the Higgs was about 13.25 billion.
The B-2 bomber program cost 44 Billion (or an average cost of 2.1 billion per unit), but it resulted in considerably MORE jobs over a much longer time span, also led to several innovations in manufacturing/radar/ECS/Material science, and it costs LESS to maintain per year at ~850 million a year for all 21 units.
This all for a program that had immediate and obvious applicability (we got a physical object out the other side with clear purpose), and it was STILL the object of intense budgetary concerns.
Basically - It was a costs DISASTER and it was only 4 times the cost.
Not saying I'd rather have more bombers than another collider, but this is not the argument I would make...
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It will be impossible to get an extra 10 billion dollars invested into science without a project like this. In other words probably 10% or less of that money would end up going into other fields of research. Considering all the other things governments spend money on, that is a good enough reason to do it in my book.
What do you mean with "the other things governments spend money on"? That's infrastructure, education, welfare. The 10 billion is not free money but taken from taxes, so please make a good case for spending it! Surely any intent of not being honest about the cost/benefit will backfire and discredit future scientific projects.
There is a huge double standard where some things undergo a stringent cost/benefit analysis and other things are not scrutinised at all. Also the upside or benefit of scientific investment can be astronomically and unpredictably high. How can you compare building more public housing to inventing the semiconductor industry?
As a (non-practicing) physicist, I've always disliked the penchant of some in the HEP community to say what this article says. They (the HEP community) tends to equate physics with HEP physics. It's not. When this is pointed out to the people espousing this odd viewpoint, they usually respond with some passive aggressive comment. I've seen/experienced much of this during my time in research. New physics not requiring…
As a practicing physicist in quantum information, I can say (1) "New physics" is jargon understood by experts to mean new fundamental physics, i.e., new laws/forces/particles at the base of our theoretical edifice. This does not mean that non-fundamental physics is necessarily less important -- see for instance the late Phillip Anderson's "More is different" [ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393 ] --…
No accelerators needed.
Bose-Einstein condensates have been observed and used in a variety of situations.
No accelerators needed.
And I could go on.
The point is though, fundamental foundational physics is available and accessible in all the various sub-fields.
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China has a lot of STEM expertise, I'm confident they could probably figure it out.
There's a difference between theoretical and practical expertise. I don't know much about particle accelerators, but I do know a bit about advanced manufacturing and I think you might be surprised at the degree to which Chinese industry is still functionally dependent on foreign machinery and expertise. This is a country that, until about two years ago, couldn't successfully produce an entire ballpoint pen using full…
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> an entire ballpoint pen using fully domestic processes Which countries can?
USSR was capable of doing it in 1980s.
People have failed to mention the fact that the LHC has turned out to be kind of a failure, at least it hasn't given the populist soundbites needed to support its' success. Nothing really 'new' came out of it and it was very expensive. People seem to be ignorant that everything has a populist aspect, and very expensive things always do. The politicians who foot the bill are thinking "We just spent bazillions and what…
When you fund a huge project using state money, not just physics projects but anything, it's as much about all the side-effects. A 10 year $10B project.. I mean, those $10B will not go into a bank account, they will be used to funnel work (both in related physics and engineering) down the years. It's amazing how they pushed some manufacturing methods to build LHC and I'm sure those methods will be used for some other…
(1) The Russians, EU, China, Japan might pursue HEP so the US does not want to appear to fall behind. So in part, the funding is "a matter of national pride".
(2) The funding has a constituency and keeps it and the university physics departments going. The US does want healthy university physics departments if only to teach physics for all the roles all of physics can play in national security, NASA, the economy, other sciences, e.g., medicine, engineering, e.g., computing, etc.
For the power of constituencies, notice that a lot of physics laboratories were started during WWII and are still operating. One way and another, somehow they keep getting funding.
(3) In the Manhattan Project the world, the power elite, all of civilization were surprised, shocked, felt blind-sided, afraid. The lesson they took was: It's a big, complicated universe out there; a good guess is that not nearly all of it is well understood (true or not); so we must pursue physics, at least keep up as insurance against another shocking discovery.
(4) The US likes to claim to have the best country, economy, culture, human rights, standard of living, roads, bridges, public health, Internet, ..., cars, hamburgers, milk, pizza, etc., basketball, Olympic athletes, pop music, etc., nearly the best of everything, in particular the best universities. So, can't have a great university without at least a good physics department, and very much want a great physics department.
Short version: The US wants to be the best, e.g., be the first to put a human with a flag on Mars, the Stars and Stripes.
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There's a difference between theoretical and practical expertise. I don't know much about particle accelerators, but I do know a bit about advanced manufacturing and I think you might be surprised at the degree to which Chinese industry is still functionally dependent on foreign machinery and expertise. This is a country that, until about two years ago, couldn't successfully produce an entire ballpoint pen using full…
If you believe that there is a country that could, seems to me you would be taking it on faith, and in my opinion, ignoring uncountable foreign inputs. Unless you wanted to argue North Korea?
I was trying to illustrate the broad chasm between theoretical and practical expertise. Just because someone "knows a lot of STEM" doesn't mean they can actually produce a useful thing. China already had perhaps the most highly concentrated amount of manufacturing engineering expertise anywhere in the world, yet still they needed help with what most people would consider a basic item.
This is fine! Most countries, as you noted, are in the same position. It's a desirable outcome of globalization.
It becomes problematic, though, when your goal is to build an incredibly complex machine that requires expertise beyond your own (like a particle accelerator, perhaps) and the people and countries whose help you require are unwilling to work with you.
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As a practicing physicist in quantum information, I can say (1) "New physics" is jargon understood by experts to mean new fundamental physics, i.e., new laws/forces/particles at the base of our theoretical edifice. This does not mean that non-fundamental physics is necessarily less important -- see for instance the late Phillip Anderson's "More is different" [ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393 ] --…
The Majorana fermion was just observed and reported this past year. Fundamental physics. Foundational physics. No accelerators needed. Bose-Einstein condensates have been observed and used in a variety of situations. No accelerators needed. And I could go on. The point is though, fundamental foundational physics is available and accessible in all the various sub-fields.
You might as well argue that new classes of molecules synthesized by chemists are new physics.