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RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#51

Post by ajays »

bane wrote: post #39
fragsworth wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this? What if these advanced particle accelerators reveal that we understand physics incorrectly (which would be the case if the Higgs doesn't exist)? What if, for instance, we discovered that faster-than-light travel is possible through portals that we can const…

"Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?" Might also be a good time to point out that the Internet did not fulfill it's intended goals either -- a communications network resistant to withstanding the loss of huge chunks of it's infrastructure most likely caused by large scale nuclear bombardment…

Maybe you should stop using the Internet, since it seems to have failed, in your opinion.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#52

Post by scott_s »

fragsworth wrote: post #32
jerf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the median United States income of $40,000/year, a single billion dollars is 25,000 person-years of work dedicated solely to that billion dollars. Multiply as appropriate. Nine billion-ish in this case, according to Wikipedia. Asking what we (the human race) got for nine billion dollars (225,000 person-years of work, at a generous 50 years in the workforce the life work of 4,500 people) deserves more than glib gen…

Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this? What if these advanced particle accelerators reveal that we understand physics incorrectly (which would be the case if the Higgs doesn't exist)? What if, for instance, we discovered that faster-than-light travel is possible through portals that we can const…

I believe jerf's point was that you have to be careful that your stated reasons couldn't be used to justify any research at any cost.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#53

Post by wtallis »

bane wrote: post #39
fragsworth wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this? What if these advanced particle accelerators reveal that we understand physics incorrectly (which would be the case if the Higgs doesn't exist)? What if, for instance, we discovered that faster-than-light travel is possible through portals that we can const…

"Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?" Might also be a good time to point out that the Internet did not fulfill it's intended goals either -- a communications network resistant to withstanding the loss of huge chunks of it's infrastructure most likely caused by large scale nuclear bombardment…

Great point. DARPA thought they were going to get a unified military communications system. Instead, they enabled a cultural revolution that has proven to be far better at fighting totalitarianism and promoting democracy than anything the military tried to invent.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#54

Post by linuxhansl »

tzs wrote: post #33
indrax wrote: post #2

>to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful This is infuriating. A negative result is a successful experiment. Don't hamper efforts to fund science with the argument that science might figure out it was wrong. Europe explored the universe where America did not.

> Europe explored the universe where America did not I guess you never heard of a little project called the International Space Station? The SSC was supposed to be a $4 billion project. That's what Congress was told in 1987. By 1993, it was projected as a $12 billion project. Guess where that $8 billion would have come from if the SSC project had continued? From other science projects--and most likely the ISS would h…

Are you seriously quibbling about $8bn when we happily spend $3500bn on bank bailouts, or $500bn/year for the military (not including the various wars)?

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#55

Post by jamesaguilar »

D_Alex wrote: post #47
jamesaguilar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it. How do you know that? Has all blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?

Seriously...? Not "all", but in general, "blue sky research" does deliver massive benefits (just look at what is in front of your face right now! It would not be there without quantum physics.). Also, take a look at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind96/chap_8.pdf , table 8.1, for estimates of rates of return on scientific research.

To be honest, I know very little of the history of LCDs. From what I can read on Wikipedia, the chain of research went something like:

- Liquid crystals observed. - Materials science research into the properties of liquid crystals, during which the TN-effect was discovered. - Industry scientists looking for a display technology that did not rely on vacuum tubes use the TN-effect to develop practical liquid crystal displays.

I don't see where the blue sky research on quantum mechanics plays into this, but it seems like you know more about this than I do so maybe you can point out the link I am missing. Maybe you mean the materials science research on liquid crystals, but it seems to me like materials science is largely a practical field whose main question is, "Is there anything useful we can do with this stuff." I don't think of it as blue sky research the same way I think of particle physics.

The study you linked is mostly about practical R&D in an industry setting and seems to suggest it's very difficult to measure the economic impact of basic research. But there was some interesting information in there, and thank you for that.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#56

Post by Jach »

fragsworth wrote: post #32
jerf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the median United States income of $40,000/year, a single billion dollars is 25,000 person-years of work dedicated solely to that billion dollars. Multiply as appropriate. Nine billion-ish in this case, according to Wikipedia. Asking what we (the human race) got for nine billion dollars (225,000 person-years of work, at a generous 50 years in the workforce the life work of 4,500 people) deserves more than glib gen…

Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this? What if these advanced particle accelerators reveal that we understand physics incorrectly (which would be the case if the Higgs doesn't exist)? What if, for instance, we discovered that faster-than-light travel is possible through portals that we can const…

Believing in God causing him to send you to heaven is a gamble. The potential rewards must outweigh any prior probability of God existing, or any cost to your time spent praying and doing other religious things, right?

All I'm meaning to do here is tell you that your argument does not work. It doesn't work for convincing people, and it doesn't work as a matter of practice the vast majority of the time anyway. Take a straw man: the human species joins together and pools all our resources and the planet's resources into some giant project that, while lots of credible people claim is very unlikely, everyone helps out anyway. But it doesn't work out, and by the time we call it quits we're so starved for resources that we go extinct. Repeat with variations in as many hypothetical worlds as you wish, and maybe 1 or 2 get it right and the payoff was totally worth it because it made humans rulers of the universe or something. That's not a good gamble.

Do you believe that if the possible positive utility to be gained wasn't so vast, we shouldn't do scientific research because then the improbability of that utility and/or the costs that factor in begin to weigh on it? If so, that's an interesting belief. For myself, I don't find the probabilities that unlikely nor the costs that high, I don't need to posit the possibility of untold fortunes due to scientific research to argue that we should continue doing it.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#57

Post by Jach »

jerf wrote: post #20
fragsworth wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose they got absolutely nothing out of it. This shouldn't matter. You cannot easily predict what rewards will come as a result of cutting-edge scientific research. It's a gamble. However, due to all the technologies we have right now as a result of expensive government spending on research, the general consensus is (or at least should be) that the benefits FAR outweigh the costs.

At the median United States income of $40,000/year, a single billion dollars is 25,000 person-years of work dedicated solely to that billion dollars. Multiply as appropriate. Nine billion-ish in this case, according to Wikipedia. Asking what we (the human race) got for nine billion dollars (225,000 person-years of work, at a generous 50 years in the workforce the life work of 4,500 people) deserves more than glib gen…

Alternatively, $9bn is about 11,250,000 dead children. ( http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html )

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#58

Post by jamesaguilar »

wtallis wrote: post #46
jamesaguilar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore. Not so. For example, it was hypothesized long before the first human-initiated fission event that the energy from fission would possibly be useful for creating a bomb. The research and physics that went into actually developing the thing was still cutting edge even though predictions had been made about its l…

They only calculated one side of the equation. What would have been the long-term effect if the Manhattan Project experiments had produced negative results and falsified the quantum mechanical models of the time? You can't just ignore that possibility and still have a valid expectation.

I don't really understand. My point is that they had some guesses about the possible uses if the experiments bore out. It's a disproof of the claim that you can't make some kind of predictions about these things. Whether the predictions are always correct is a completely different question that I am not trying to answer.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#59

Post by jamesaguilar »

D_Alex wrote: post #28
lucasjung wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The question isn't, "Did this experiment advance scientific knowledge," the question is, "Was this a prudent and appropriate use of tax money, especially in light of the enormous opportunity costs inherent in any expenditure of tax money?"

Yes, yes, good question. People who make the decisions to spend money on this scale - US$ 9 billion! - must be well qualified to make such decisions, and do so after careful consideration of various alternatives. I think it was the right decision. Of course opportunity cost must be considered - you could have had, instead: 1 new Nimitz class aircraft carrier (without the air wing), OR 4 new B-2 bombers OR 1 extra wee…

> people . . . must be well qualified . . . [so we should trust them].

Surely not an argument from authority. Before we can accept this reasoning, we have to have proof that the people allocating the research funds have interests that well match those of the public, not just the scientific community, and we must also have proof that they have a good track record of applying those interests to ends that match them.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#60

Post by jamesaguilar »

linuxhansl wrote: post #54
tzs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe explored the universe where America did not I guess you never heard of a little project called the International Space Station? The SSC was supposed to be a $4 billion project. That's what Congress was told in 1987. By 1993, it was projected as a $12 billion project. Guess where that $8 billion would have come from if the SSC project had continued? From other science projects--and most likely the ISS would h…

Are you seriously quibbling about $8bn when we happily spend $3500bn on bank bailouts, or $500bn/year for the military (not including the various wars)?

We should always be wary that we do not try to argue using whataboutism (http://edwardlucas.blogspot.com/2008/02/whataboutism.html).
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