5 ms·

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 la

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 Or when the physics is superseded by another discipline that delivers military applications?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.
- sampo 9y ago
  At the end of the 19th century [...] it was generally accepted that all the important laws of physics had been discovered and that, henceforth, research would be concerned with clearing up minor problems and particularly with improvements of method and measurement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics
- Tuna-Fish 9y ago
  > esoteric particle physics terms like 'Naturalness' It just means "numbers involved in physics are short and simple". From wikipedia: > In physics, naturalness is the property that the 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. That is, a natural theory would have parameter ratios with values like 2.34 rather than 234000 or 0.000234. And the reason physicists tend to expect their theories to be natural is that in the history of physics uncovering new things, most things have been natural, to the point where significant amounts of knowledge has been derived based on the expectation of naturalness -- that is, when something could be natural or not, and we couldn't properly test it yet, we just assumed it was natural and went on to research other things. And then, possibly decades later, when it's finally possible to test the theory, the test just confirms that yes, it was natural.
lisper 9y ago
This is exactly right, and it's not just particle physics. Space exploration has the same dynamic. We went to the moon not because we thought it was scientifically interesting but because we were afraid the Russians would get there first. It's no coincidence that we haven't been back in 40 years. NASA now exists primarily as a mechanism for funneling pork into key congressional districts. Any science that it does is secondary.
- wongarsu 9y ago
  With US-China tensions on the rise, China's space program steadily progressing, and profits from asteroid mining on the horizon (with the associated national interests to secure and protect profits), space exploration is bound to profit again from this dynamic. It is indeed no coincidence that all the major space programs got interesting again all at the same time.
munificent 9y ago
> So what happens when physics stops delivering military leaps forward? Or when the physics is superseded by another discipline that delivers military applications? Particle physics winter, just like AI in the 80s [1]. (It's a weird coincidence/irony that this is happening just as AI is ascendent and delivering significant military applications.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
troymc 9y ago
In the USA, a lot of funding for R & D (e.g. engineering and science) comes from grants that are military grants (e.g. Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.). In the US, about half (54%) of federal funding (coming from the public Federal budget) is via "military" and the rest is from other federal agencies ("civilian"). Source: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/how-science-fares-us-budget-deal https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/how-science-fares-us... Is that an American thing?
- troymc 9y ago
  Note: The above figures don't take classified funding into account. Because it's secret. Most of the classified funding is military, so the proportion of military funding is actually higher.
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  Yes, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a European country where half the national research budget comes through military research.
troymc 9y ago
Yes, money determines the direction of modern science. (This isn't 1900 any more!) And a huge chunk of the funding money (in America anyway) comes from the military. You're right on: if it (whatever it is) looks like it might have a military application, then it's much more likely to get military funding, which for some researchers, means it's more likely to get funding period.
hardtke 9y ago
Another goal of particle and nuclear physics funding from the 60's through 90's was to produce a steady stream of highly qualified people to work at the defense labs (Los Alamos, Livermore, Lincoln Labs, etc). My colleagues would get prestigious fellowships to do research at these places, and eventually get sucked into the classified research area. Unfortunately, I don't think the best and brightest U.S. students are going into physics these days, so this rationale for research investment is no longer there.
- 77pt77 9y ago
  > I don't think the best and brightest U.S. students are going into physics these days Where do you think they are going to?
  - joejerryronnie 9y ago
    Ad tech
  - dbt00 9y ago
    physics PhD, then wall street HFT.
    - 77pt77 9y ago
      So still physics
  - neural_thing 9y ago
    Neuroscience is a big one. I would posit that understanding the brain is the biggest scientific frontier of my generation.
ggggtez 9y ago
>then the world managed to collectively decide that those should be illegal tools of war. There is good reason to believe that biochem would only have hurt western interests if it was researched. Countries with nukes don't need weapons like this to wage war.
wolfgke 9y ago
> 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. What is your opinion on the counter-thesis that the reason rather was the Sputnik crisis?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
stevenwoo 9y ago
One small quibble, physics only shortened the war in the Pacific, getting the Japanese to agree to an unconditional surrender without an invasion of the Japanese homeland and the concomitant estimated one million American casualties. The undamaged industrial might and natural resources available to the United States to continually contribute war fighting material to the frontlines help win the war in Europe and the Pacific theater more than anything else. The Pacific front was not the priority of the European front, we had a Germany first war plan even before the war started, the heavy dependence of Japan on imported natural resources made their defeat inevitable if America had the will to fight, especially after the first strike on Pearl Harbor did not work in the way the Japanese envisioned. It left America's carriers and most of the submarine fleet intact and did not crush America's morale.
- sizzle 9y ago
  Sources needed
  - thisrod 9y ago
    Why the allies won would be a good start
  - rf15 9y ago
    this is actually known in most of the world; that the US just cleanly won with raw superiority purely driven by what is good and right and no complex motives (including omitting the use of nukes to avoid having to do a proper invasion with their related losses and that they didn't want to join the party in europe, then were late to the party after things were already decided and THEN went home claiming they defeated the Nazis) is just the US-internal narrative. The other countries sadly didn't simply forget the political discussions that happened during the war period.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Read a lot of military history books when I was a child. Now I can google some things for a refresher - you can trust them or not, mostly wikipedia. There are many citations in the article about the US/UK strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_first The US oil embargo on the Japanese homeland had put them on their back foot before the war even started - and is often cited as a reason for the undelivered Japanese declaration of war prior to Pearl Harbor, and once we starting island hopping/pushing them off the Asian mainland they could only delay defeat and to make it as painful as possible for America to progress to discourage an invasion of Japan. Part of Germany's impetus for attacking on the Eastern front was the need for more fuel, the Allies had more in their homelands of the USA and the Soviet Union than was available to Germany. The somewhat disputed Yamamoto quote says it best(the movie version probably is what sticks in people's minds): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_attack_on_... The Soviets suffered more casualties than anybody to stop the Germans on the Eastern front and tying them up there helped reduce the German troops available for their Middle East push and beach/support defenses in France and Italy and the Soviets were able to build much of their own military hardware even after the German invasion but they still got our help, mainly for transport of material. We helped almost all the Allies, but most support went to the UK and Soviet Union. Kruschev quotes Stalin here: "He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have lost the war." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

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.

sampo 9y ago
At the end of the 19th century [...] it was generally accepted that all the important laws of physics had been discovered and that, henceforth, research would be concerned with clearing up minor problems and particularly with improvements of method and measurement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics
Tuna-Fish 9y ago
> esoteric particle physics terms like 'Naturalness' It just means "numbers involved in physics are short and simple". From wikipedia: > In physics, naturalness is the property that the 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. That is, a natural theory would have parameter ratios with values like 2.34 rather than 234000 or 0.000234. And the reason physicists tend to expect their theories to be natural is that in the history of physics uncovering new things, most things have been natural, to the point where significant amounts of knowledge has been derived based on the expectation of naturalness -- that is, when something could be natural or not, and we couldn't properly test it yet, we just assumed it was natural and went on to research other things. And then, possibly decades later, when it's finally possible to test the theory, the test just confirms that yes, it was natural.

lisper 9y ago

This is exactly right, and it's not just particle physics. Space exploration has the same dynamic. We went to the moon not because we thought it was scientifically interesting but because we were afraid the Russians would get there first. It's no coincidence that we haven't been back in 40 years. NASA now exists primarily as a mechanism for funneling pork into key congressional districts. Any science that it does is secondary.

wongarsu 9y ago
With US-China tensions on the rise, China's space program steadily progressing, and profits from asteroid mining on the horizon (with the associated national interests to secure and protect profits), space exploration is bound to profit again from this dynamic. It is indeed no coincidence that all the major space programs got interesting again all at the same time.

munificent 9y ago

> So what happens when physics stops delivering military leaps forward? Or when the physics is superseded by another discipline that delivers military applications? Particle physics winter, just like AI in the 80s [1]. (It's a weird coincidence/irony that this is happening just as AI is ascendent and delivering significant military applications.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

troymc 9y ago

In the USA, a lot of funding for R & D (e.g. engineering and science) comes from grants that are military grants (e.g. Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.). In the US, about half (54%) of federal funding (coming from the public Federal budget) is via "military" and the rest is from other federal agencies ("civilian"). Source: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/how-science-fares-us-budget-deal https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/how-science-fares-us... Is that an American thing?

troymc 9y ago
Note: The above figures don't take classified funding into account. Because it's secret. Most of the classified funding is military, so the proportion of military funding is actually higher.
semi-extrinsic 9y ago
Yes, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a European country where half the national research budget comes through military research.

troymc 9y ago

Yes, money determines the direction of modern science. (This isn't 1900 any more!) And a huge chunk of the funding money (in America anyway) comes from the military. You're right on: if it (whatever it is) looks like it might have a military application, then it's much more likely to get military funding, which for some researchers, means it's more likely to get funding period.

hardtke 9y ago

Another goal of particle and nuclear physics funding from the 60's through 90's was to produce a steady stream of highly qualified people to work at the defense labs (Los Alamos, Livermore, Lincoln Labs, etc). My colleagues would get prestigious fellowships to do research at these places, and eventually get sucked into the classified research area. Unfortunately, I don't think the best and brightest U.S. students are going into physics these days, so this rationale for research investment is no longer there.

77pt77 9y ago
> I don't think the best and brightest U.S. students are going into physics these days Where do you think they are going to?
- joejerryronnie 9y ago
  Ad tech
- dbt00 9y ago
  physics PhD, then wall street HFT.
  - 77pt77 9y ago
    So still physics
- neural_thing 9y ago
  Neuroscience is a big one. I would posit that understanding the brain is the biggest scientific frontier of my generation.

ggggtez 9y ago

>then the world managed to collectively decide that those should be illegal tools of war. There is good reason to believe that biochem would only have hurt western interests if it was researched. Countries with nukes don't need weapons like this to wage war.

wolfgke 9y ago

> 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. What is your opinion on the counter-thesis that the reason rather was the Sputnik crisis?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

stevenwoo 9y ago

One small quibble, physics only shortened the war in the Pacific, getting the Japanese to agree to an unconditional surrender without an invasion of the Japanese homeland and the concomitant estimated one million American casualties. The undamaged industrial might and natural resources available to the United States to continually contribute war fighting material to the frontlines help win the war in Europe and the Pacific theater more than anything else. The Pacific front was not the priority of the European front, we had a Germany first war plan even before the war started, the heavy dependence of Japan on imported natural resources made their defeat inevitable if America had the will to fight, especially after the first strike on Pearl Harbor did not work in the way the Japanese envisioned. It left America's carriers and most of the submarine fleet intact and did not crush America's morale.

sizzle 9y ago
Sources needed
- thisrod 9y ago
  Why the allies won would be a good start
- rf15 9y ago
  this is actually known in most of the world; that the US just cleanly won with raw superiority purely driven by what is good and right and no complex motives (including omitting the use of nukes to avoid having to do a proper invasion with their related losses and that they didn't want to join the party in europe, then were late to the party after things were already decided and THEN went home claiming they defeated the Nazis) is just the US-internal narrative. The other countries sadly didn't simply forget the political discussions that happened during the war period.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Read a lot of military history books when I was a child. Now I can google some things for a refresher - you can trust them or not, mostly wikipedia. There are many citations in the article about the US/UK strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_first The US oil embargo on the Japanese homeland had put them on their back foot before the war even started - and is often cited as a reason for the undelivered Japanese declaration of war prior to Pearl Harbor, and once we starting island hopping/pushing them off the Asian mainland they could only delay defeat and to make it as painful as possible for America to progress to discourage an invasion of Japan. Part of Germany's impetus for attacking on the Eastern front was the need for more fuel, the Allies had more in their homelands of the USA and the Soviet Union than was available to Germany. The somewhat disputed Yamamoto quote says it best(the movie version probably is what sticks in people's minds): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_attack_on_... The Soviets suffered more casualties than anybody to stop the Germans on the Eastern front and tying them up there helped reduce the German troops available for their Middle East push and beach/support defenses in France and Italy and the Soviets were able to build much of their own military hardware even after the German invasion but they still got our help, mainly for transport of material. We helped almost all the Allies, but most support went to the UK and Soviet Union. Kruschev quotes Stalin here: "He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have lost the war." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease