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Richard Milner on a new U.S. particle accelerator

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Re: Richard Milner on a new U.S. particle accelerator

#61
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you propose to measure the ROI of the completely unknown? This is not just related to your comment here, but it's a very general and important part of science. In the early part of the 20th century it was felt that physics was basically 'solved' and the only changes would come in refining values to another decimal point. Of course that was before the discovery of quantum mechanics or the explosion in particle…

Using probability is a good start I think. As I understand it, CERN should be able to find new particles below about 2–3 TeV in energy. It hasn't and physicists say it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more. You'll need to build and accelerator around the Sun to reach those energy levels. With that in mind, does it make sense to build some…

> physicists say it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more

This is an extremely pessimistic view. Yes, we're almost certainly going to find something there, but that doesn't mean there's nothing before then. I'd bet a reasonably large sum of money that there's something before around 10TeV.

Also, this collider isn't looking for new particles so much as trying to improve our understanding of ones we know about already.

Re: Richard Milner on a new U.S. particle accelerator

#63

Shouldn't we consider other possible ways of spending the moneys required, such as an AI endeavor perhaps? Wouldn't most alternatives be significantly cheaper and more likely to provide new scientific information? Finally, after seeing the politics of the Superconducting Super Collider, I don't envision any hope of a significantly larger accelerator within the next 100 years unless some incredible theoretical breakth…

Yea, isn't it about time someone spent some money on AI?

Well, that's the point. Its called "irony". Likely were the money spent on AI, it would be better spent.
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