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You have misunderstood my argument. I am all for experiments. I am just for running many, many smaller experiments instead of a few large ones. Exactly becau

by btilly 7y ago

You have misunderstood my argument. I am all for experiments. I am just for running many, many smaller experiments instead of a few large ones. Exactly because the unpredictability of the connection between experiment and final application means that running a large experiment the only thing that we are guaranteed of is spending lots of money, instead of getting a great result. And that is true whether you think of results are applications or pure science. Consider the discovery of transistors, type II superconductivity, buckyballs, gigantic magnetic resistance...none of these scientific advances were expensive experiments, and there was no particular reason to believe that we would learn anything like what we learned from those experiments.

mnl 7y ago
A "small experiment" needing like it or not 7 TeV for hadronic collisions or 126 GeV for leptonic collisions (now we know that, before the LHC we didn't, just that something had to happen with, say WW at 1TeV). And how exactly can you do that with a "small experiment"? And no, you can never see what happens at that scale with a low energy experiment, because actually you can't and the reason happens to be technical and related to effective theories and the behaviour of Nature you can only find out by doing experiments... At low/cheap energy you're stuck with Fermi's 1933 four fermion interaction and that's that. No massive vector bosons and no Higgs. I don't understand how when it comes to physics there are people who think they have a point but can't be bothered with acquiring the domain knowledge. Meaning being able to do some Math beyond the platitudes. It's actually insulting to professionals, not specially well paid, who make quite a few personal sacrifices by choosing research, with its slim chance of getting tenure, instead of tracking users, trading ads or pitching vaporware, for instance.

by btilly 7y ago

mnl 7y ago

A "small experiment" needing like it or not 7 TeV for hadronic collisions or 126 GeV for leptonic collisions (now we know that, before the LHC we didn't, just that something had to happen with, say WW at 1TeV). And how exactly can you do that with a "small experiment"? And no, you can never see what happens at that scale with a low energy experiment, because actually you can't and the reason happens to be technical and related to effective theories and the behaviour of Nature you can only find out by doing experiments... At low/cheap energy you're stuck with Fermi's 1933 four fermion interaction and that's that. No massive vector bosons and no Higgs. I don't understand how when it comes to physics there are people who think they have a point but can't be bothered with acquiring the domain knowledge. Meaning being able to do some Math beyond the platitudes. It's actually insulting to professionals, not specially well paid, who make quite a few personal sacrifices by choosing research, with its slim chance of getting tenure, instead of tracking users, trading ads or pitching vaporware, for instance.