16 ms·

The Multiworse Is Coming

482 points by franzb 9y ago

castis 9y ago
> and at least a promise of breakthrough discoveries If we could promise a breakthrough discovery, we wouldn't need to build the machine. The author seems almost heartbroken at the absence of life-altering findings. No new discoveries means we at least know what we're doing a little bit, right?
- Ygg2 9y ago
  > This article seems almost heartbroken at the absence of life-altering findings. That's not my takeaway. I think they were talking about how scientist shouldn't lie to get grants that probably won't achieve much.
  - akie 9y ago
    That's (unfortunately) endearingly naïve.
- kilpikaarna 9y ago
  Maybe. But it could also mean the Standard Model is some sort of dead end. There are a lot of observed phenomena it doesn't explain, and absent new discoveries there's not much consensus on where to go next.
- evanb 9y ago
  I think the author meant "promise" in the sense of possibility. "He [or she] shows promise", rather than "I promise to pay."
Beltiras 9y ago
"Just do it" actually sounds like a good reason. Tackling difficult engineering problems always creates spinoffs even if the core activity is fruitless.
- evanb 9y ago
  It is a good reason, but it's a reason that's difficult to sell to people who make decisions about where to spend a few billion dollars.
  - Beltiras 9y ago
    Justify it with the benefits of previous activity.
    - sverige 9y ago
      What are the benefits of the LHC again? I mean, the benefits of spending billions that all of us can notice in our daily lives?
      - CamperBob2 9y ago
        The LHC was a project of unprecedented magnitude and complexity. During the planning stages, CERN devoted some resources to developing better ways for teams on LHC and other projects to communicate with each other and share documentation. That is the reason why the address in your browser's URL line starts with "http(s):" followed by "www." It's not an exaggeration to say that the work of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN led directly to the creation of trillions of dollars of economic value.
        John_KZ 9y ago
        Sure, spinoffs are nice, but they happen with all types of public access research. Why not create a project of a unprecedented magnitude and complexity that also creates very important results directly? It's like saying "spend vast amounts of resources on pursuing random goals, and eventually some of the resources, by accident, will create a ROI". Yes they will, but is it really the best way to do this? It's not like some version of hypertext wouldn't happen without CERN. I'm not saying CERN wasn't useful. It was. And the budget wasn't that big. But this kind of logic is not very sound. If we have a lot of money and a series of concrete problems, we should spend the money to solve them. Most of the money are to be spend directly on the problem, less to develop and build new tools to tackle the problem, and finally even less to discover new possible mechanisms that might or might not allow us to improve our tools in the future. There's a lot of uncertainty in the future, and it's best not to bet a lot of money on it.
thewizardofaus 9y ago
> Remember next time we come asking for money. Interesting point. Money drives research. It took over 400 years from the discovery of gun powder to be applied to the use of projectiles. While it only took 40 years from the mass-energy equation to create an atomic bomb.
stareatgoats 9y ago
Interesting article. In lieu of any qualification to verify the claims; the comment section seemed on superficial reading populated with experienced scientists that gave some support. Another takeaway was the introduction (for me) to the concept of "naturalness", with which the author has some issues. It is however not possible to do away with it (if I'm not mistaken about its meaning), except in cases where the assumptions of naturalness turn out to be wrong, as it seems it was in this case. It seems to me that some concept of "naturalness", is what we use to interpret empirical facts, without which we could not make sense of it at all. Examples of what I would consider "naturalness": that the past precedes the present, that large things contain smaller things (perhaps in infinity), ad that small things are contained in larger things (perhaps in infinity), etc. Granted, our sense of naturalness could be completely wrong, and empirical data constantly challenge what we consider natural, which is how it should be.
- platz 9y ago
  Your understanding of what naturalness is seems odd. If you get rid of naturalness, you just have fine tuning. Fine tuning is not beautiful but it is not a logical disaster as you describe.
  - stareatgoats 9y ago
    ok thanks, on further investigation I realize my interpretation of "naturalness" was a laymans uninitiated one: "In physics, naturalness is the property that the dimensionless ratios between free parameters or physical constants appearing in a physical theory"[0] I have no idea what that means atm [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalness_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalness_(physics)
    - auntienomen 9y ago
      Incomplete quote: '...dimensionless ratios between free parameters or physical constants appearing in a physical theory should take values "of order 1" and that free parameters are not fine-tuned.' It just means that theorists are suspicious of theories where the parameters have to be adjusted to high precision to match reality. That's reasonable grounds for suspicion, but it's not natural law.
diggan 9y ago
If just 3% of the data from the LHC has been analyzed so far, which means there is 97% more data to come in and be analyzed, and if the Higgs boson was discovered within these 3%, isn't it a bit quick to deem the experiment as failed already? Please note I most certainly have no idea about the subject at hand.
- ShorsHammer 9y ago
  The boffins were looking for the Higgs Boson, makes a big difference. Plenty of obscure and unintended findings came long after experiments have concluded. If history is anything to go by, LHC data will be useful far into the future.
kerkeslager 9y ago
> To justify substantial investments, I am told, an experiment needs a clear goal and at least a promise of breakthrough discoveries. This is antithetical to science. If you're promising a breakthrough discovery, you're approaching the experiment with bias. The fact that more new particles have not emerged at energy levels the LHC can produce is a discovery--if I'm understanding the blog post correctly[1], it's the beginnings of a disproof of naturalness in supersymmmetry. It's not as exciting as if they had discovered hundreds of new things to study, but it's equally important. And that's exactly why I agree with the author: science is about finding what's true not about finding what's exciting. As a taxpayer, I think one of the most valuable things particle physics could do here is to educate people on that bias and lead by example. I get that they fear losing their funding to do science, but if you let that fear push you into pursuing exciting results over the truth, then you're not doing science anyway. [1] I'm not a particle physicist--my post is about the social problem that physicists are facing, not about the physics.
- fsloth 9y ago
  "This is antithetical to science. If you're promising a breakthrough discovery, you're approaching the experiment with bias." I think all experiments are began with some premonition of what to expect. For example Michaelson and Morley very much expected to measure the speed through which earth would pass through aether ... except they couldn't. An the results pushed physics toward theory of relativity. I disagree that's it's an entirely bad process to bankroll experiments based on unproven promises. This is exactly how the Manhattan Project happened. The physicists promised that it was very likely they could create a very large explosion, but they did not know if it would bang or fizzle. So, the US government began a huge industrial scale operation to enrich uranium and to assemble the bomb. The first atomic bomb explosion was very much empirical science that was bankrolled by "unsound" promises. In this sense going beyond LHC would be kinda ground breaking - big budget science with absolutely no clue on what to expect. It's how discoveries are made, yes, but I'm not sure if any large scale scientific project has been funded without at least some clue on what to expect.
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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sharemywin 9y ago
"Such a vacuum decay, however, wouldn’t take place until long after all stars have burned out and the universe has become inhospitable to life anyway. And seeing that most people don’t care what might happen to our planet in a hundred years, they probably won’t care much what might happen to our universe in 10100 billion years."
sigi45 9y ago
Its not that i personaly votet for building the LHC. Its not that a higgs discovery changed my life. I don't think that politics are influenced by this at all and building something like an even bigger LHC, ah come on every physicist would love something like that anyway.
gaius 9y ago
Physics research has got to focus on commercially viable fusion, that is the most urgent environmental and geopolitical problem facing the West if not the entire world.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  The commercially viable part will be the most difficult; even if they manage to get more power out of fusion than they put in, and do so in a stable fashion (e.g. always on), even then a reactor will cost in the order of tens of billions to build, and much more to maintain. I'll believe we'll have fusion power within 30-50 years, I can't yet believe it'll be economically viable in that period. It'll have to compete with relatively straightforward means of generating power, like solar. I expect it to be cheaper to just clad every roof in a country with solar panels - and it'll generate more power - than build a fusion reactor.
  - Veedrac 9y ago
    There are good arguments that new superconductors massively lower the cost of fusion. Old projections on the back of ITER are probably too conservative now.
- Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
  Isn't the cheap solar power already being developed as a solution? The prices go down, the processes are in place, there are no problems with legislation (like with nuclear power etc) - it looks like a perfect solution and the western world is rolling it out as we speak.
- doikor 9y ago
  What if a discovery (or a side discovery in the engineering work on the experiment) on some totally unrelated field leads to a breakthrough for getting to commercially viable fusion? This is the problem with science. You are never 100% sure what you are going to get (if you did why do the experiment?)
KnightOfWords 9y ago
"Like hair, trust is hard to split. And like hair, trust is easier to lose than to grow." Worth reading just for this quote.
panic 9y ago
The biggest problem with modern physics is that it's totally incomprehensible. People want to understand how the world works! The public would support physicists' work a lot more if they understood what was going on.
- gmueckl 9y ago
  Even physicists would like to have simple explanations instead of all these mind-bending models that they have to work with. If anything, you have to blame nature for being so incomprehensible.
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    I was reminded of an Einstein quote I'd heard multiple times before. Apparently there is some debate over this, but it has been claimed he said that, apart from maths, all physical theories "ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them.' Other physicists have said similar; while still others, like Feynman, have said what sounds like the opposite. Source: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22410 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22410
a_humean 9y ago
I think theoretical physics might be in need of a short dose of internal reflection and debate coupled with some side reading of contemporary philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. These sorts of debates around concepts like "naturalness" and "laws of nature" are philosophical bread and butter. This isn't to say that modern philosophers aren't susceptible to alluring desert landscapes like "naturalness", but at least philosophers are trained to think about and critique these kinds of things. Physics needs to be capable of having this debating itself and recognise assumptions with wobbly metaphysical underpinnings.
- thanatropism 9y ago
  This is so very important. In particular, there's a long-accumulating need for a revision of the current dogma on the philosophy of science and its operationalization -- Popper falsificationism, peer review, publication-oriented research, freaking null hypothesis... Most of our current science has happened before Popper and falsificationism, so there is nothing "essentially true" about the current M.O. of science. And heck, was it falsificationism that brought us vaccines, nuclear energy and computers? Because there's a replication crisis going on in many scientific fields, and particle physics doesn't fit the mold of falsificationism at all. I'm not coming forward with a solution in an HN comment, but I think we need to stop equating science, the civilizational project, with this specific philosophy of science and social system for organizing science.
  - fdej 9y ago
    Could you elaborate on what you perceive as the problem with falsificationism? I'm familiar with the philosophical argument that Popper's demarcation of science is too narrow. What is less clear is that this argument over the definition of science currently has any influence on scientific practice. Are there some examples where scientists (or funding agencies) have adhered to "falsificationism" in a way that impeded progress? This is in contrast with the other issues you mentioned: peer review, publication-oriented research and abuse of the null hypothesis (by which I assume you mean p-hacking and its cousins), which I agree are very real problems in practice.
sevensor 9y ago
Am I to understand from this article that the LHC is over? That the global community of particle physicists can't come up with anything interesting to do with the world's most powerful particle collider? I do hope I'm misinterpreting the article, because that would be a huge disappointment.
- tinco 9y ago
  You misunderstand, the particle physicists are having a blast discovering properties, they're just not finding any more particles. Finding particles is sexy, and sexy gets funding, so the risk is that they run out of funding with their run of the mill sciencing. That's why they're postulating, maybe if we had a slightly larger collider we could find sexy super symmetry. The author thinks that is disingenuous because the argument that a slightly larger collider would find supersymmetry is speculation, not based on real science. Anyway, even if there was a solid argument for there being supersymmetry just around the corner I don't think a larger collider would be funded, the LHC offered many many sexy things, so the stars aligned and it got funded, but would the stars align again for such a huge amount of funding, just for supersymmetry? I feel as a layman the idea of supersymmetry is not captivating enough. Not in the way the higgs boson was. Anyway, there's so much applied physics research just waiting to be done right now, maybe it's time for theoretical physics to chew on it for a bit.
  - sevensor 9y ago
    > the particle physicists are having a blast discovering properties I'm glad to learn that I was mistaken! As a layman myself, this is really all I want from the LHC: for it to continue to be a useful piece of equipment for scientific experments. From the article, it sounded like the attitude was, "we didn't find anything sexy, so we're done here," which would be a huge waste.
    - iamatworknow 9y ago
      For what it's worth, there are accelerators, colliders, and synchrotrons here in the US that were dwarfed by the LHC (and practically unheard of in popular culture) that are in use today. They're still running experiments on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab in New York, for example, even though it started operation 8 years before the LHC and runs at a fraction of the energy.
agumonkey 9y ago
I had no idea LHC was thought to provide more than Higgs' boson, and I don't think lots of people have any clue what it is.
sha1 9y ago
Boring.
Angostura 9y ago
> It’s a PR disaster that particle physics won’t be able to shake off easily. I really don't see this. As a non-specialist, I assumed that the LHC was pottering along making useful if non-spectacular discoveries. The fact that naturalness is in doubt due to its data sounds exactly like the work it should be doing. Blame physics for not having a clutch of new particles ready for discovery, not physicists.
- twoodfin 9y ago
  The problem as I understand it is that prior to natural-ness being in doubt, it was expected that the LHC would make discoveries in supersymmetry that would justify practically bigger (but hugely expensive) colliders. Without a new frontier of supersymmetrical particles to explore, that next collider doesn't offer much for anyone to get excited about, let alone the taxpayers who might be asked to pay for it.
squarefoot 9y ago
What about serendipitous discoveries then? Research rarely leads to planned breakthroughs.
- sirclueless 9y ago
  In experimental physics it does. Two recent planned breakthroughs: Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves, and LIGO detected them in 2016. Bell predicted that entangled quantum particles would exhibit fundamentally nonlocal properties, and in 2015 the first "loophole-free" test demonstrating violation of local realism occurred. These experiments were done with expectations of a result. That is not to say that they had foregone conclusions, just that there was some phenomenon that the scientists hoped to see, and confirmation one way or the other would be of interest to the community. Most experiments are like this -- of course scientists should keep their eyes open for unexpected discoveries, but in general pursuing expected results is more fruitful.
baxtr 9y ago
Maybe it’s time for a paradigm shift in particle physics as Thomas S Kuhn once predicted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
- fsloth 9y ago
  Kuhn's model is not a prediction, it's a statement of fact how human accepted knowledge moves sometimes forward in huge paradigm shifts. Everyone "knew" that the speed of light was constant, everyone "knew" earth had to be only couple of thousands of years old (e.g. Lord Kelvin was a firm believer in only a thousands of years based on his physically based estimates), atoms where quite a hard bargain to sell as anything as computational tools until you got some computations and Jean Perrin to do some experiments, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Perrin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Perrin, continental plates where supposed to be solid fixations, until they weren't, etc. It's nice of Kuhn to point this out. Maybe it's convenient for administrators or something to realize accepted facts tend to change - but it gives absolutely no clue on how exactly move science forward. I don't really understand the huge uproar about Kuhn - his ideas should be "obvious" to anyone familiar with history of science. But maybe as professional management and pathological "professionalism" made it's headway in his time it was nice to point out that Gant chartable progress was not all there was to it.
resource0x 9y ago
Please help me understand the logic of naturalness. Suppose we have one constant, alpha, approx= 1.425, and another (beta) approx=2.157 - such setup is deemed natural. And if the other constant is approx 2.157 times 10^40, it's not natural. and needs fine-tuning, right? The underlying assumption is that fine-tuning is not needed for a former setup, that is, if beta was about 0.5%, or 0.05% different from where it sits at 2.157, then we would be totally fine, Universe would look the same for all intents and purposes. I fail to see how this follows. Maybe the difference by 10^(-40) would make life impossible? how can we possibly know this?
- blablabla123 9y ago
  It's not really about the values of constants but about where they appear and about their size. So imagine we have some Physics setup were certain laws should hold. There is some magical formula called Lagrangian L = stuff. When you construct this L from scratch, you add everything you have. That is some e for the Electron field function, some phi for the Higgs, some m for its mass etc etc. At first this sounds like an insanely long and random equation. But because of all the constraints in your setup its 'only' one page long for the Standard Model case. Oh yes and then there are some stupid terms which must be really small to only _softly_ violate the constraints. E.g. CP-symmetry for strong interactions - violation of this symmetry hasn't been observed in nature "Strong CP problem". That's where fine-tuning has to happen at the moment...
  - resource0x 9y ago
    Please confirm that my understanding is correct. You have a number of "stupid" terms in Lagrangian, whose cumulative effect must be small in order for the whole theory to make sense at all. This small cumulative effect can be achieved in 2 ways: 1) each term is small 2) terms more or less cancel out. When each term is small, we call it naturalness, otherwise it's fine-tuning. If this is correct, then... say you have N random varaibles, and you know that the sum is small. What is more likely: that each of N variables is small, or that the sum is small because it just happens to be small? :)
    - 9y ago
chainReactor 9y ago
There’s a simpler argument in favor of high-powered facilities, but in geopolitics it is hypocritical, bestial and misanthropic: better physics facilities provide strength to intellectual backbone of your nuclear deterent, keeping it reliable, competant and accurate, so things really work if they need to.
blablabla123 9y ago
I guess the detection of the Higgs boson is already a great thing! That was the missing part of the Standard Model. Now that theory is complete -- within its limits/Energy scale. Too bad that the many years before the LHC there was an ever increasing backlog of theory to be tested against experiment. Damn, Physics has so much in common with Software Development... ;-)
snowwrestler 9y ago
It's worth considering the cultural context in which high-end physics operates, at least within the United States. The U.S.'s greatest military victory--the last time we can cleanly call ourselves heroes--was World War II. The Nazis were an awful regime who did horrific things that no one can defend. And Japan directly attacked us. We had good reasons for fighting and we (with our allies) conclusively won. And there is broad public sentiment that we won because of physics. High-end theoretical physics gave us futuristic tools like radio, radar, and of course the nuclear bomb. Lower-end physics gave us the tools for engineering the incredible machines we fought with, like airplanes, bombs, tanks, and ships. So, in minds of U.S. citizens, and more importantly in the halls of U.S. government, discussions of high-end physics come with an implicit promise of military applications. Maybe we could figure out anti-gravity, people think, or ray guns, or teleportation, or force fields--if we only understood the particles and fields a bit better. Physicists do not promise any of this, of course. But at least IMO it is a real phenomenon. I went to see Interstellar with someone who had worked in and with Congress for a long time. After we left, she said "do you think it's true that once we understand gravity, we'll be able to manage gravity and create antigravity?" I had to explain that just understanding a phenomenon does not grant magical powers over it. But that has been the experience of the U.S. government! They gave money so physicists could better understand particles, and in return the scientists gave the government seemingly magical powers, like seeing in the dark (radar) and city-destroying explosions (nuclear fission and fusion). So what happens when physics stops delivering military leaps forward? Or when the physics is superseded by another discipline that delivers military applications? It looked like chemistry and biology might do that, but then the world managed to collectively decide that those should be illegal tools of war. But it seems totally obvious that the current top priority for military application is information technology. So, I think the author is correct that particle physics faces a looming crisis, at least in funding and public confidence.
- stareatgoats 9y ago
  Ah thanks, a comment that makes sense to me (and doesn't require too much insight into the esoteric particle physics terms like 'Naturalness' :-P ). Agree, a break-through like the harnessing of nuclear energy was doesn't seem to be on the horizon (but who knows what we don't know?). And it might affect the perceived utility of physics by the military. But i'm wondering if there isn't a more menacing threat looming for these advanced sciences. We could actually be hitting a hard wall in our understanding of nature. We are using instruments created for us in our dimension to probe worlds that might be much too small (or large) for us to make any serious sense of, at least for the next millennium (maybe). Maybe it's time we accept that we can't understand everything, only a little more at the time, maybe (probably) in infinity. Meanwhile, there are a vast number of insights pertinent to the human scale waiting to be found.
nonbel 9y ago
Perhaps whats going on is they have been measuring their own collective prior probability that these particles exist. This is what would happen if you set your null model to be something that was false regardless of these particles existing. The way it works is more belief -> more effort put towards detection. It requires a certain amount of time and funding to cross the "discovery" threshold so this will only happen if there is enough prior belief.
lambdadmitry 9y ago
I wonder why the post doesn't mention a pretty recent potential deviation from Standard Model [1][2]. It seems that LHC may deliver some new physics after all, it just needs more data to rule out statistical anomaly [1]: https://youtu.be/edvdzh9Pggg?t=3124 https://youtu.be/edvdzh9Pggg?t=3124 [2]: https://home.cern/scientists/updates/2017/06/lhcb-flavour-anomalies-continue-intrigue https://home.cern/scientists/updates/2017/06/lhcb-flavour-an...
- astrolaw 9y ago
  This is of interest: https://thewire.in/science/hopes-for-new-physics-pave-the-road-to-rencontres https://thewire.in/science/hopes-for-new-physics-pave-the-ro...
deleted 9y ago
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ixtli 9y ago
Well, I’m a member of the public and I will always support basic research funding.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Since we have limited amounts of money to distribute to all kinds of basic research, you have to ask whether the money needed for a bigger collider might be better spent on say, high temperature superconductors or astrophysics or whatever.
88e282102ae2e5b 9y ago
The author is missing a major point: politicians may still support enormous projects like the LHC for the same reason they would support any pork barrel project: it gives them influence and the ability to direct money to their friends/constituents.
blauditore 9y ago
I'm not a physicist, so I might sound like a moron stating this: Isn't it possible that current theories in particle physics are just simply inaccurate models of the world? They're just hypothetical low-level explanations of observed high-level effects, and could have been empirically proved by the large colliders, which doesn't seem to have happened. So maybe we don't need new experiments, but new models. A negative result is a result too. On a related note, the assumption in quantum physics that particles have a probability distribution rather than an exact location has always bugged me. Why can't there be low-level mechanisms going on that are too quick/small to be measured (today)?
- wongarsu 9y ago
  The models are almost certainly inaccurate, we just don't know how inaccurate. It's quite possible that we need new models (or ditch supersymmetry), but physicists become invested in their models and try everything to tweak them to match observations, until it just doesn't work anymore and we have a major breakthrough. >On a related note, the assumption in quantum physics that particles have a probability distribution rather than an exact location has always bugged me. Why can't there be low-level mechanisms going on that are too quick/small to be measured (today)? It bugged a lot of other people too (Einstein's famous "God does not play dice" comes from the same corner). Experiments so far are only consistent with a probability distribution, unless you permit signals to go back in time. Of course how you interpret the model is an entirely different problem (do things only happen once observed, are we in a multiverse and all possibilities happen in some universe, are we simulated and those effects are caused by optimisations (both not calculating things until needed, and inaccuracies akin to floating point errors), etc. the possibilites are endless)
- kgwgk 9y ago
  > Why can't there be low-level mechanisms going on that are too quick/small to be measured (today)? There are (non local, contextual) “hidden variables” theories that can “complete” QM and restore determinism. But there is nothing to detect, the predictions are identical to “standard” QM (at least in equilibrium).
- Confusion 9y ago
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peter303 9y ago
Next World Collider will be built in China. They are about the only major country increasing government R&D funds. The only exception would be if there is a breakthrough technology 100x more cost effective, i.e. you could build a 10x power LHC for a tenth of the cost. I see press releases of breakthroughs using lasers or EMF. But very unclear if they'd scale up to a petavolt. Probably could build a pretty powerful accelerator using the world's electricity devoted to bitcoin mining :-)
Animats 9y ago
In recent decades, the high-energy physicists haven't produced much. But the low-energy physicists have been getting many new results. The action today seems to be down near absolute zero. The stranger predictions of quantum mechanics, from quantum entanglement to slow light, have not only been directly verified, but are approaching commercial use. “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it” (Lord Kelvin)
tacon 9y ago
There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding about funding models and how CERN and, at least, the US differ. In the early 90s I was briefly on a small team to sell IBM Federal products to the nascent US supercollider project. (With a background in physics, I was referred to as their throwdown physicist.) Then the supercollider was canceled, and later we called on CERN in Geneva to brief them on storage systems software and hardware, like hierarchical mass storage and linear tape robots. CERN had a nice mockup of the proposed LHC, where you climbed down a ladder into a fake tube, like what is bored underground. While we were down there, our hosts shared a shocking factoid with us. The US government canceled the proposed $12 billion supercollider project, and to exit all the contracts and fill in the holes that had already been dug was costing $650 million. CERN told us that for $650 million, they could build the LHC. I didn't verify their numbers, but their capital efficiency was stunning. CERN is funded by all the European countries with a steady budget, and they are allowed to spend it however they wish. When CERN needs to build something big, they put some part of their steady funding into the bank, and it just sits their for however long it takes until they need it. By having steady, stable funding, they can make much more efficient use of their funds. As far as I can tell, there is little or no political heat about CERN's budget like "what have you done for us lately?" The US, on the other hand, funds large projects out of special legislation in Congress, and everyone has to get their constituents a piece of the pie. This has some gross inefficiencies for large science projects. Appropriate hype is the motive force.
- dhimes 9y ago
  Appropriate hype is the motive force. You are exactly right on this. I was a physics grad student (not particles) when the Supercollider was being pitched. We had a colloquium on it, and the presenter kept repeating the slogan "5 years, 5 billion dollars." Most of us were savvy enough to know that such a claim was pure bullshit. But hey, if you convince them to start it they would never cancel it, right? And if you needed more money they would have to give it to you, right?
- morsch 9y ago
  They ended up requiring quite a bit more than 650 million USD to build the LHC. CERNs yearly budget is about a billion.
77pt77 9y ago
> the conclusions based on naturalness were not predictions, but merely pleas for the laws of nature to be pretty This is the main point. She totally nailed it.

482 points by franzb 9y ago

> and at least a promise of breakthrough discoveries If we could promise a breakthrough discovery, we wouldn't need to build the machine. The author seems almost heartbroken at the absence of life-altering findings. No new discoveries means we at least know what we're doing a little bit, right?

Ygg2 9y ago
> This article seems almost heartbroken at the absence of life-altering findings. That's not my takeaway. I think they were talking about how scientist shouldn't lie to get grants that probably won't achieve much.
- akie 9y ago
  That's (unfortunately) endearingly naïve.
kilpikaarna 9y ago
Maybe. But it could also mean the Standard Model is some sort of dead end. There are a lot of observed phenomena it doesn't explain, and absent new discoveries there's not much consensus on where to go next.
evanb 9y ago
I think the author meant "promise" in the sense of possibility. "He [or she] shows promise", rather than "I promise to pay."

Beltiras 9y ago

"Just do it" actually sounds like a good reason. Tackling difficult engineering problems always creates spinoffs even if the core activity is fruitless.

evanb 9y ago
It is a good reason, but it's a reason that's difficult to sell to people who make decisions about where to spend a few billion dollars.
- Beltiras 9y ago
  Justify it with the benefits of previous activity.
  - sverige 9y ago
    What are the benefits of the LHC again? I mean, the benefits of spending billions that all of us can notice in our daily lives?
    - CamperBob2 9y ago
      The LHC was a project of unprecedented magnitude and complexity. During the planning stages, CERN devoted some resources to developing better ways for teams on LHC and other projects to communicate with each other and share documentation. That is the reason why the address in your browser's URL line starts with "http(s):" followed by "www." It's not an exaggeration to say that the work of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN led directly to the creation of trillions of dollars of economic value.
      - John_KZ 9y ago
        Sure, spinoffs are nice, but they happen with all types of public access research. Why not create a project of a unprecedented magnitude and complexity that also creates very important results directly? It's like saying "spend vast amounts of resources on pursuing random goals, and eventually some of the resources, by accident, will create a ROI". Yes they will, but is it really the best way to do this? It's not like some version of hypertext wouldn't happen without CERN. I'm not saying CERN wasn't useful. It was. And the budget wasn't that big. But this kind of logic is not very sound. If we have a lot of money and a series of concrete problems, we should spend the money to solve them. Most of the money are to be spend directly on the problem, less to develop and build new tools to tackle the problem, and finally even less to discover new possible mechanisms that might or might not allow us to improve our tools in the future. There's a lot of uncertainty in the future, and it's best not to bet a lot of money on it.

thewizardofaus 9y ago

> Remember next time we come asking for money. Interesting point. Money drives research. It took over 400 years from the discovery of gun powder to be applied to the use of projectiles. While it only took 40 years from the mass-energy equation to create an atomic bomb.

stareatgoats 9y ago

Interesting article. In lieu of any qualification to verify the claims; the comment section seemed on superficial reading populated with experienced scientists that gave some support. Another takeaway was the introduction (for me) to the concept of "naturalness", with which the author has some issues. It is however not possible to do away with it (if I'm not mistaken about its meaning), except in cases where the assumptions of naturalness turn out to be wrong, as it seems it was in this case. It seems to me that some concept of "naturalness", is what we use to interpret empirical facts, without which we could not make sense of it at all. Examples of what I would consider "naturalness": that the past precedes the present, that large things contain smaller things (perhaps in infinity), ad that small things are contained in larger things (perhaps in infinity), etc. Granted, our sense of naturalness could be completely wrong, and empirical data constantly challenge what we consider natural, which is how it should be.

platz 9y ago
Your understanding of what naturalness is seems odd. If you get rid of naturalness, you just have fine tuning. Fine tuning is not beautiful but it is not a logical disaster as you describe.
- stareatgoats 9y ago
  ok thanks, on further investigation I realize my interpretation of "naturalness" was a laymans uninitiated one: "In physics, naturalness is the property that the dimensionless ratios between free parameters or physical constants appearing in a physical theory"[0] I have no idea what that means atm [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalness_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalness_(physics)
  - auntienomen 9y ago
    Incomplete quote: '...dimensionless ratios between free parameters or physical constants appearing in a physical theory should take values "of order 1" and that free parameters are not fine-tuned.' It just means that theorists are suspicious of theories where the parameters have to be adjusted to high precision to match reality. That's reasonable grounds for suspicion, but it's not natural law.

diggan 9y ago

If just 3% of the data from the LHC has been analyzed so far, which means there is 97% more data to come in and be analyzed, and if the Higgs boson was discovered within these 3%, isn't it a bit quick to deem the experiment as failed already? Please note I most certainly have no idea about the subject at hand.

ShorsHammer 9y ago
The boffins were looking for the Higgs Boson, makes a big difference. Plenty of obscure and unintended findings came long after experiments have concluded. If history is anything to go by, LHC data will be useful far into the future.

kerkeslager 9y ago

> To justify substantial investments, I am told, an experiment needs a clear goal and at least a promise of breakthrough discoveries. This is antithetical to science. If you're promising a breakthrough discovery, you're approaching the experiment with bias. The fact that more new particles have not emerged at energy levels the LHC can produce is a discovery--if I'm understanding the blog post correctly[1], it's the beginnings of a disproof of naturalness in supersymmmetry. It's not as exciting as if they had discovered hundreds of new things to study, but it's equally important. And that's exactly why I agree with the author: science is about finding what's true not about finding what's exciting. As a taxpayer, I think one of the most valuable things particle physics could do here is to educate people on that bias and lead by example. I get that they fear losing their funding to do science, but if you let that fear push you into pursuing exciting results over the truth, then you're not doing science anyway. [1] I'm not a particle physicist--my post is about the social problem that physicists are facing, not about the physics.

fsloth 9y ago
"This is antithetical to science. If you're promising a breakthrough discovery, you're approaching the experiment with bias." I think all experiments are began with some premonition of what to expect. For example Michaelson and Morley very much expected to measure the speed through which earth would pass through aether ... except they couldn't. An the results pushed physics toward theory of relativity. I disagree that's it's an entirely bad process to bankroll experiments based on unproven promises. This is exactly how the Manhattan Project happened. The physicists promised that it was very likely they could create a very large explosion, but they did not know if it would bang or fizzle. So, the US government began a huge industrial scale operation to enrich uranium and to assemble the bomb. The first atomic bomb explosion was very much empirical science that was bankrolled by "unsound" promises. In this sense going beyond LHC would be kinda ground breaking - big budget science with absolutely no clue on what to expect. It's how discoveries are made, yes, but I'm not sure if any large scale scientific project has been funded without at least some clue on what to expect.
- kerkeslager 9y ago

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sharemywin 9y ago

"Such a vacuum decay, however, wouldn’t take place until long after all stars have burned out and the universe has become inhospitable to life anyway. And seeing that most people don’t care what might happen to our planet in a hundred years, they probably won’t care much what might happen to our universe in 10100 billion years."

sigi45 9y ago

Its not that i personaly votet for building the LHC. Its not that a higgs discovery changed my life. I don't think that politics are influenced by this at all and building something like an even bigger LHC, ah come on every physicist would love something like that anyway.

gaius 9y ago

Physics research has got to focus on commercially viable fusion, that is the most urgent environmental and geopolitical problem facing the West if not the entire world.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
The commercially viable part will be the most difficult; even if they manage to get more power out of fusion than they put in, and do so in a stable fashion (e.g. always on), even then a reactor will cost in the order of tens of billions to build, and much more to maintain. I'll believe we'll have fusion power within 30-50 years, I can't yet believe it'll be economically viable in that period. It'll have to compete with relatively straightforward means of generating power, like solar. I expect it to be cheaper to just clad every roof in a country with solar panels - and it'll generate more power - than build a fusion reactor.
- Veedrac 9y ago
  There are good arguments that new superconductors massively lower the cost of fusion. Old projections on the back of ITER are probably too conservative now.
Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
Isn't the cheap solar power already being developed as a solution? The prices go down, the processes are in place, there are no problems with legislation (like with nuclear power etc) - it looks like a perfect solution and the western world is rolling it out as we speak.
doikor 9y ago
What if a discovery (or a side discovery in the engineering work on the experiment) on some totally unrelated field leads to a breakthrough for getting to commercially viable fusion? This is the problem with science. You are never 100% sure what you are going to get (if you did why do the experiment?)

KnightOfWords 9y ago

"Like hair, trust is hard to split. And like hair, trust is easier to lose than to grow." Worth reading just for this quote.

panic 9y ago

The biggest problem with modern physics is that it's totally incomprehensible. People want to understand how the world works! The public would support physicists' work a lot more if they understood what was going on.

gmueckl 9y ago
Even physicists would like to have simple explanations instead of all these mind-bending models that they have to work with. If anything, you have to blame nature for being so incomprehensible.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  I was reminded of an Einstein quote I'd heard multiple times before. Apparently there is some debate over this, but it has been claimed he said that, apart from maths, all physical theories "ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them.' Other physicists have said similar; while still others, like Feynman, have said what sounds like the opposite. Source: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22410 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22410

a_humean 9y ago

I think theoretical physics might be in need of a short dose of internal reflection and debate coupled with some side reading of contemporary philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. These sorts of debates around concepts like "naturalness" and "laws of nature" are philosophical bread and butter. This isn't to say that modern philosophers aren't susceptible to alluring desert landscapes like "naturalness", but at least philosophers are trained to think about and critique these kinds of things. Physics needs to be capable of having this debating itself and recognise assumptions with wobbly metaphysical underpinnings.

thanatropism 9y ago
This is so very important. In particular, there's a long-accumulating need for a revision of the current dogma on the philosophy of science and its operationalization -- Popper falsificationism, peer review, publication-oriented research, freaking null hypothesis... Most of our current science has happened before Popper and falsificationism, so there is nothing "essentially true" about the current M.O. of science. And heck, was it falsificationism that brought us vaccines, nuclear energy and computers? Because there's a replication crisis going on in many scientific fields, and particle physics doesn't fit the mold of falsificationism at all. I'm not coming forward with a solution in an HN comment, but I think we need to stop equating science, the civilizational project, with this specific philosophy of science and social system for organizing science.
- fdej 9y ago
  Could you elaborate on what you perceive as the problem with falsificationism? I'm familiar with the philosophical argument that Popper's demarcation of science is too narrow. What is less clear is that this argument over the definition of science currently has any influence on scientific practice. Are there some examples where scientists (or funding agencies) have adhered to "falsificationism" in a way that impeded progress? This is in contrast with the other issues you mentioned: peer review, publication-oriented research and abuse of the null hypothesis (by which I assume you mean p-hacking and its cousins), which I agree are very real problems in practice.

sevensor 9y ago

Am I to understand from this article that the LHC is over? That the global community of particle physicists can't come up with anything interesting to do with the world's most powerful particle collider? I do hope I'm misinterpreting the article, because that would be a huge disappointment.

tinco 9y ago
You misunderstand, the particle physicists are having a blast discovering properties, they're just not finding any more particles. Finding particles is sexy, and sexy gets funding, so the risk is that they run out of funding with their run of the mill sciencing. That's why they're postulating, maybe if we had a slightly larger collider we could find sexy super symmetry. The author thinks that is disingenuous because the argument that a slightly larger collider would find supersymmetry is speculation, not based on real science. Anyway, even if there was a solid argument for there being supersymmetry just around the corner I don't think a larger collider would be funded, the LHC offered many many sexy things, so the stars aligned and it got funded, but would the stars align again for such a huge amount of funding, just for supersymmetry? I feel as a layman the idea of supersymmetry is not captivating enough. Not in the way the higgs boson was. Anyway, there's so much applied physics research just waiting to be done right now, maybe it's time for theoretical physics to chew on it for a bit.
- sevensor 9y ago
  > the particle physicists are having a blast discovering properties I'm glad to learn that I was mistaken! As a layman myself, this is really all I want from the LHC: for it to continue to be a useful piece of equipment for scientific experments. From the article, it sounded like the attitude was, "we didn't find anything sexy, so we're done here," which would be a huge waste.
  - iamatworknow 9y ago
    For what it's worth, there are accelerators, colliders, and synchrotrons here in the US that were dwarfed by the LHC (and practically unheard of in popular culture) that are in use today. They're still running experiments on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab in New York, for example, even though it started operation 8 years before the LHC and runs at a fraction of the energy.

agumonkey 9y ago

I had no idea LHC was thought to provide more than Higgs' boson, and I don't think lots of people have any clue what it is.

sha1 9y ago

Boring.

Angostura 9y ago

> It’s a PR disaster that particle physics won’t be able to shake off easily. I really don't see this. As a non-specialist, I assumed that the LHC was pottering along making useful if non-spectacular discoveries. The fact that naturalness is in doubt due to its data sounds exactly like the work it should be doing. Blame physics for not having a clutch of new particles ready for discovery, not physicists.

twoodfin 9y ago
The problem as I understand it is that prior to natural-ness being in doubt, it was expected that the LHC would make discoveries in supersymmetry that would justify practically bigger (but hugely expensive) colliders. Without a new frontier of supersymmetrical particles to explore, that next collider doesn't offer much for anyone to get excited about, let alone the taxpayers who might be asked to pay for it.

squarefoot 9y ago

What about serendipitous discoveries then? Research rarely leads to planned breakthroughs.

sirclueless 9y ago
In experimental physics it does. Two recent planned breakthroughs: Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves, and LIGO detected them in 2016. Bell predicted that entangled quantum particles would exhibit fundamentally nonlocal properties, and in 2015 the first "loophole-free" test demonstrating violation of local realism occurred. These experiments were done with expectations of a result. That is not to say that they had foregone conclusions, just that there was some phenomenon that the scientists hoped to see, and confirmation one way or the other would be of interest to the community. Most experiments are like this -- of course scientists should keep their eyes open for unexpected discoveries, but in general pursuing expected results is more fruitful.

baxtr 9y ago

Maybe it’s time for a paradigm shift in particle physics as Thomas S Kuhn once predicted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

fsloth 9y ago
Kuhn's model is not a prediction, it's a statement of fact how human accepted knowledge moves sometimes forward in huge paradigm shifts. Everyone "knew" that the speed of light was constant, everyone "knew" earth had to be only couple of thousands of years old (e.g. Lord Kelvin was a firm believer in only a thousands of years based on his physically based estimates), atoms where quite a hard bargain to sell as anything as computational tools until you got some computations and Jean Perrin to do some experiments, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Perrin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Perrin, continental plates where supposed to be solid fixations, until they weren't, etc. It's nice of Kuhn to point this out. Maybe it's convenient for administrators or something to realize accepted facts tend to change - but it gives absolutely no clue on how exactly move science forward. I don't really understand the huge uproar about Kuhn - his ideas should be "obvious" to anyone familiar with history of science. But maybe as professional management and pathological "professionalism" made it's headway in his time it was nice to point out that Gant chartable progress was not all there was to it.

resource0x 9y ago

Please help me understand the logic of naturalness. Suppose we have one constant, alpha, approx= 1.425, and another (beta) approx=2.157 - such setup is deemed natural. And if the other constant is approx 2.157 times 10^40, it's not natural. and needs fine-tuning, right? The underlying assumption is that fine-tuning is not needed for a former setup, that is, if beta was about 0.5%, or 0.05% different from where it sits at 2.157, then we would be totally fine, Universe would look the same for all intents and purposes. I fail to see how this follows. Maybe the difference by 10^(-40) would make life impossible? how can we possibly know this?

blablabla123 9y ago
It's not really about the values of constants but about where they appear and about their size. So imagine we have some Physics setup were certain laws should hold. There is some magical formula called Lagrangian L = stuff. When you construct this L from scratch, you add everything you have. That is some e for the Electron field function, some phi for the Higgs, some m for its mass etc etc. At first this sounds like an insanely long and random equation. But because of all the constraints in your setup its 'only' one page long for the Standard Model case. Oh yes and then there are some stupid terms which must be really small to only _softly_ violate the constraints. E.g. CP-symmetry for strong interactions - violation of this symmetry hasn't been observed in nature "Strong CP problem". That's where fine-tuning has to happen at the moment...
- resource0x 9y ago
  Please confirm that my understanding is correct. You have a number of "stupid" terms in Lagrangian, whose cumulative effect must be small in order for the whole theory to make sense at all. This small cumulative effect can be achieved in 2 ways: 1) each term is small 2) terms more or less cancel out. When each term is small, we call it naturalness, otherwise it's fine-tuning. If this is correct, then... say you have N random varaibles, and you know that the sum is small. What is more likely: that each of N variables is small, or that the sum is small because it just happens to be small? :)
  - 9y ago

chainReactor 9y ago

There’s a simpler argument in favor of high-powered facilities, but in geopolitics it is hypocritical, bestial and misanthropic: better physics facilities provide strength to intellectual backbone of your nuclear deterent, keeping it reliable, competant and accurate, so things really work if they need to.

blablabla123 9y ago

I guess the detection of the Higgs boson is already a great thing! That was the missing part of the Standard Model. Now that theory is complete -- within its limits/Energy scale. Too bad that the many years before the LHC there was an ever increasing backlog of theory to be tested against experiment. Damn, Physics has so much in common with Software Development... ;-)

snowwrestler 9y ago

It's worth considering the cultural context in which high-end physics operates, at least within the United States. The U.S.'s greatest military victory--the last time we can cleanly call ourselves heroes--was World War II. The Nazis were an awful regime who did horrific things that no one can defend. And Japan directly attacked us. We had good reasons for fighting and we (with our allies) conclusively won. And there is broad public sentiment that we won because of physics. High-end theoretical physics gave us futuristic tools like radio, radar, and of course the nuclear bomb. Lower-end physics gave us the tools for engineering the incredible machines we fought with, like airplanes, bombs, tanks, and ships. So, in minds of U.S. citizens, and more importantly in the halls of U.S. government, discussions of high-end physics come with an implicit promise of military applications. Maybe we could figure out anti-gravity, people think, or ray guns, or teleportation, or force fields--if we only understood the particles and fields a bit better. Physicists do not promise any of this, of course. But at least IMO it is a real phenomenon. I went to see Interstellar with someone who had worked in and with Congress for a long time. After we left, she said "do you think it's true that once we understand gravity, we'll be able to manage gravity and create antigravity?" I had to explain that just understanding a phenomenon does not grant magical powers over it. But that has been the experience of the U.S. government! They gave money so physicists could better understand particles, and in return the scientists gave the government seemingly magical powers, like seeing in the dark (radar) and city-destroying explosions (nuclear fission and fusion). So what happens when physics stops delivering military leaps forward? Or when the physics is superseded by another discipline that delivers military applications? It looked like chemistry and biology might do that, but then the world managed to collectively decide that those should be illegal tools of war. But it seems totally obvious that the current top priority for military application is information technology. So, I think the author is correct that particle physics faces a looming crisis, at least in funding and public confidence.

stareatgoats 9y ago
Ah thanks, a comment that makes sense to me (and doesn't require too much insight into the esoteric particle physics terms like 'Naturalness' :-P ). Agree, a break-through like the harnessing of nuclear energy was doesn't seem to be on the horizon (but who knows what we don't know?). And it might affect the perceived utility of physics by the military. But i'm wondering if there isn't a more menacing threat looming for these advanced sciences. We could actually be hitting a hard wall in our understanding of nature. We are using instruments created for us in our dimension to probe worlds that might be much too small (or large) for us to make any serious sense of, at least for the next millennium (maybe). Maybe it's time we accept that we can't understand everything, only a little more at the time, maybe (probably) in infinity. Meanwhile, there are a vast number of insights pertinent to the human scale waiting to be found.

nonbel 9y ago

Perhaps whats going on is they have been measuring their own collective prior probability that these particles exist. This is what would happen if you set your null model to be something that was false regardless of these particles existing. The way it works is more belief -> more effort put towards detection. It requires a certain amount of time and funding to cross the "discovery" threshold so this will only happen if there is enough prior belief.

lambdadmitry 9y ago

I wonder why the post doesn't mention a pretty recent potential deviation from Standard Model [1][2]. It seems that LHC may deliver some new physics after all, it just needs more data to rule out statistical anomaly [1]: https://youtu.be/edvdzh9Pggg?t=3124 https://youtu.be/edvdzh9Pggg?t=3124 [2]: https://home.cern/scientists/updates/2017/06/lhcb-flavour-anomalies-continue-intrigue https://home.cern/scientists/updates/2017/06/lhcb-flavour-an...

astrolaw 9y ago
This is of interest: https://thewire.in/science/hopes-for-new-physics-pave-the-road-to-rencontres https://thewire.in/science/hopes-for-new-physics-pave-the-ro...

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ixtli 9y ago

Well, I’m a member of the public and I will always support basic research funding.

adrianN 9y ago
Since we have limited amounts of money to distribute to all kinds of basic research, you have to ask whether the money needed for a bigger collider might be better spent on say, high temperature superconductors or astrophysics or whatever.

88e282102ae2e5b 9y ago

The author is missing a major point: politicians may still support enormous projects like the LHC for the same reason they would support any pork barrel project: it gives them influence and the ability to direct money to their friends/constituents.

blauditore 9y ago

I'm not a physicist, so I might sound like a moron stating this: Isn't it possible that current theories in particle physics are just simply inaccurate models of the world? They're just hypothetical low-level explanations of observed high-level effects, and could have been empirically proved by the large colliders, which doesn't seem to have happened. So maybe we don't need new experiments, but new models. A negative result is a result too. On a related note, the assumption in quantum physics that particles have a probability distribution rather than an exact location has always bugged me. Why can't there be low-level mechanisms going on that are too quick/small to be measured (today)?

wongarsu 9y ago
The models are almost certainly inaccurate, we just don't know how inaccurate. It's quite possible that we need new models (or ditch supersymmetry), but physicists become invested in their models and try everything to tweak them to match observations, until it just doesn't work anymore and we have a major breakthrough. >On a related note, the assumption in quantum physics that particles have a probability distribution rather than an exact location has always bugged me. Why can't there be low-level mechanisms going on that are too quick/small to be measured (today)? It bugged a lot of other people too (Einstein's famous "God does not play dice" comes from the same corner). Experiments so far are only consistent with a probability distribution, unless you permit signals to go back in time. Of course how you interpret the model is an entirely different problem (do things only happen once observed, are we in a multiverse and all possibilities happen in some universe, are we simulated and those effects are caused by optimisations (both not calculating things until needed, and inaccuracies akin to floating point errors), etc. the possibilites are endless)
kgwgk 9y ago
> Why can't there be low-level mechanisms going on that are too quick/small to be measured (today)? There are (non local, contextual) “hidden variables” theories that can “complete” QM and restore determinism. But there is nothing to detect, the predictions are identical to “standard” QM (at least in equilibrium).
Confusion 9y ago

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peter303 9y ago

Next World Collider will be built in China. They are about the only major country increasing government R&D funds. The only exception would be if there is a breakthrough technology 100x more cost effective, i.e. you could build a 10x power LHC for a tenth of the cost. I see press releases of breakthroughs using lasers or EMF. But very unclear if they'd scale up to a petavolt. Probably could build a pretty powerful accelerator using the world's electricity devoted to bitcoin mining :-)

Animats 9y ago

In recent decades, the high-energy physicists haven't produced much. But the low-energy physicists have been getting many new results. The action today seems to be down near absolute zero. The stranger predictions of quantum mechanics, from quantum entanglement to slow light, have not only been directly verified, but are approaching commercial use. “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it” (Lord Kelvin)

tacon 9y ago

There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding about funding models and how CERN and, at least, the US differ. In the early 90s I was briefly on a small team to sell IBM Federal products to the nascent US supercollider project. (With a background in physics, I was referred to as their throwdown physicist.) Then the supercollider was canceled, and later we called on CERN in Geneva to brief them on storage systems software and hardware, like hierarchical mass storage and linear tape robots. CERN had a nice mockup of the proposed LHC, where you climbed down a ladder into a fake tube, like what is bored underground. While we were down there, our hosts shared a shocking factoid with us. The US government canceled the proposed $12 billion supercollider project, and to exit all the contracts and fill in the holes that had already been dug was costing $650 million. CERN told us that for $650 million, they could build the LHC. I didn't verify their numbers, but their capital efficiency was stunning. CERN is funded by all the European countries with a steady budget, and they are allowed to spend it however they wish. When CERN needs to build something big, they put some part of their steady funding into the bank, and it just sits their for however long it takes until they need it. By having steady, stable funding, they can make much more efficient use of their funds. As far as I can tell, there is little or no political heat about CERN's budget like "what have you done for us lately?" The US, on the other hand, funds large projects out of special legislation in Congress, and everyone has to get their constituents a piece of the pie. This has some gross inefficiencies for large science projects. Appropriate hype is the motive force.

dhimes 9y ago
Appropriate hype is the motive force. You are exactly right on this. I was a physics grad student (not particles) when the Supercollider was being pitched. We had a colloquium on it, and the presenter kept repeating the slogan "5 years, 5 billion dollars." Most of us were savvy enough to know that such a claim was pure bullshit. But hey, if you convince them to start it they would never cancel it, right? And if you needed more money they would have to give it to you, right?
morsch 9y ago
They ended up requiring quite a bit more than 650 million USD to build the LHC. CERNs yearly budget is about a billion.

77pt77 9y ago

> the conclusions based on naturalness were not predictions, but merely pleas for the laws of nature to be pretty This is the main point. She totally nailed it.