I'd guess Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder (herself a physicist, and a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) must be pretty annoyed, to put it politely. She posits that a lot of current physicists are working with outdated notions of "beauty": (quote) But if it’s clear that putting forward new hypotheses just because they are beautiful doesn’t mean they’re likely to be right, then why do theorists…
Dr. Hossenfelder is not a professor. I think it is poor practice to inflate her title when citing her as some sort of authority.
CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
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Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really not low single digit. Firstly it's a proposal for ~€100bn (not ~$100bn), the current program is ~€80bn. Secondly if you look at the spending[1] more than 50% of it by any reasonable measure is "soft" science funding (such as reinvesting in high-tech industry). I'm happy CERN is doing it's thing, but let's not hide the ball here, any way you look at it it's a huge portion of the EU's fundamental science re…
> Firstly it's a proposal for ~€100bn (not ~$100bn), the current program is ~€80bn. €100bn is $113bn; ~€80bn is $90bn. $100bn is close enough. > It's really not low single digit. EU budget != European science funding. The $100bn number was used to illustrate that the amount is not that huge, with the addition that "on top of that all the member states have their own projects, and non-EU European states have their own…
No it's not. We're in a thread where the cost of the LHC and its successors is being contrasted against funding for other comparable fundamental research, such as gravitational wave or neutrino detectors etc. Or other projects anyone might reasonably classify as fundamental research.
You're conflating that with R&D budgets. Let's take your example of Norway. 50% of its R&D budget is goes to industry, and 50% of that to the service industry. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that nobody in Norway's service industry is going to be getting a Nobel any time soon.
Due to how state subsidies are regulated in the EU's single market (and Norway, Iceland etc. count here too, they're in it through the EEA) R&D has become a backdoor for state subsidies. A supermarket paying a consultant to improve their billing system can be doing "research" and get a tax write-off or a state grant.
So you really shouldn't assume that you can conflate R&D in the EU's twisted definition with what is commonly understood to be R&D.
Now, back to Norway's numbers. In [1] you can see that around 20% of that $6bn goes to institutes, and around page 20 or so in [2] you can see where all this money goes.
Without going into a lot of detail I think it's fair to say the overall budget is mostly irrelevant to what we're discussing here. I'll let the fact that as [2] shows the industrial sector gets 50% of the funding but produces 2% of the scientific publications speak for itself.
Once you tease all this apart you'll find that by any sane definition the LHC and its successor project eat up a huge amount of the money that's spend on fundamental research of the sort that might yield a Nobel price any other measure you might use as a proxy for a fundamental new discovery in science.
And of course even the LHC/FCC blurs the line between the two. If CERN could spend that same money on more whiteboards and chalk for physicists and get the same results it would never be funded. The real purpose of the project includes being a subsidy for Europe's high-tech industries.
Once you peel back the curtains on how any of these projects are run you'll find that member states that kick in some % of funding expect and mandate that approximately that % works its way back to them in one way or another. In "The Large Hadron Collider: A Marvel of Technology" by Lyndon R. Evans it's mentioned that the initial construction plan for the LHC was rejected by member states since it didn't do a good enough job of spreading the pork around.
1. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YRYPqQ...
2. https://www.forskningsradet.no/contentassets/8f25adbfd4cb437...
Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider
#223Made this comment below but spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible. A few years ago, a bunch of physical philosophers tried to justify this turn of particle physics in general away from experiment, particularly suggesting the search of symmetries and mathematical beauty (I guess) was enough of a justification for the work even though it essentially is contrar…
The LHC has not been a failure. First you complain about the lack of experimentation, then you complain when they perform experiments. It is normal in science to formulate a theory, design an experiment, and then having to discard the theory in view of the experimental results. That's the scientific method, and that's what has happened with SUSY (kind of). You also claim the goal of new collider is to validate SUSY,…