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No chance of getting funding by justifying 'this $multi-billion collider may or may not find new physics outside the Standard Model'. The LHC only got funding

No chance of getting funding by justifying 'this $multi-billion collider may or may not find new physics outside the Standard Model'. The LHC only got funding because it was guaranteed to answer the question 'is there a Higgs Boson'.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Your last statement needs a citation; I think that's the line mainly used to sell it to the public in pop sci headlines.
- sfifs 8y ago
  The people who funded it were politicians who cater to public who read the pop sci magazines. I wonder if any significant number of people who actually made the funding decision looked at anything beyond "this will make you look like you support Science"
  - targafarian 8y ago
    Funding on large science projects that I've seen, at least how the NSF does it, "filters up" where the proposal is passed through technically aware committee before being passed up to less technically aware people. And there is also the P5 committee which makes high-level recommendations about general directions and projects that can more holistically drive "important" (or at least what they deem to be so) science goals forward, where their advice tends to guide many levels of the funding process pretty strongly (if your proposal gets a low grade from them, you aren't getting funded, period). At the level of really big science, this "filtering up" process will go all the way to Congress, where of course you then have people with average-zero science knowledge making a final decision. But to get to that point, I'd wager most if not all science proposals will have passed many valid technical hurdles presented by knowledgeable people.
snowwrestler 8y ago
Nobody guaranteed anything with the LHC. It's good to have a clear hypothesis for an experiment (especially an expensive one), and the predictions for the mass of the Higgs boson was a good starting hypothesis for the LHC. But there was also the expectation that, colliding at higher energies than ever before, there would be the opportunity for unexpected discoveries. The proof that the brief for the LHC was more than just "find the Higgs" is that the LHC found the Higgs, yet is still operating--and is just about to get a time-consuming and expensive upgrade in luminosity.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

Your last statement needs a citation; I think that's the line mainly used to sell it to the public in pop sci headlines.

sfifs 8y ago
The people who funded it were politicians who cater to public who read the pop sci magazines. I wonder if any significant number of people who actually made the funding decision looked at anything beyond "this will make you look like you support Science"
- targafarian 8y ago
  Funding on large science projects that I've seen, at least how the NSF does it, "filters up" where the proposal is passed through technically aware committee before being passed up to less technically aware people. And there is also the P5 committee which makes high-level recommendations about general directions and projects that can more holistically drive "important" (or at least what they deem to be so) science goals forward, where their advice tends to guide many levels of the funding process pretty strongly (if your proposal gets a low grade from them, you aren't getting funded, period). At the level of really big science, this "filtering up" process will go all the way to Congress, where of course you then have people with average-zero science knowledge making a final decision. But to get to that point, I'd wager most if not all science proposals will have passed many valid technical hurdles presented by knowledgeable people.

snowwrestler 8y ago

Nobody guaranteed anything with the LHC. It's good to have a clear hypothesis for an experiment (especially an expensive one), and the predictions for the mass of the Higgs boson was a good starting hypothesis for the LHC. But there was also the expectation that, colliding at higher energies than ever before, there would be the opportunity for unexpected discoveries. The proof that the brief for the LHC was more than just "find the Higgs" is that the LHC found the Higgs, yet is still operating--and is just about to get a time-consuming and expensive upgrade in luminosity.