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Sounds like the particle collider people are having tunnel vision. "1 after the new particle collider": Guess what? we need an even bigger particle collider.

Sounds like the particle collider people are having tunnel vision. "1 after the new particle collider": Guess what? we need an even bigger particle collider. What we really need is to build one on the moon.

Nbox9 6y ago
Is it turtles all the way down, or is there a theoretical maximum size of a particle collider where no larger size would yield interesting results?
- pacala 6y ago
  I've heard 'solar system size' and even 'galaxy size'. Maybe we should take a step back and realize that funding for high energy physics is rooted in the Cold War's nuclear arm's race. We already have nuclear devices more powerful than we'd ever need, not clear why we'd fund ever larger particle colliders.
djaque 6y ago
It is not tunnel vision when the problem they're tackling is literally stuck in a tunnel. Bigger and bigger colliders are the only direct way we have to study high energy phenomena. It's not that physicists are lazy, it's that the problems they're studying are hard. I'm also seeing a lot resentment for the price tag of colliders in this thread. My personal opinion is that we shouldn't build a new one, but I'll point out that colliders are incredibly cost efficient. The whole LHC (which has been running and providing jobs to people for 12 years) costs a similar amount as just two B-2 bombers. The US owns like 20 of those and that money went somewhere into huge defense contractors profits as opposed to knowledge and tech which is now accessible to the whole world. You might not know this, but a lot of the technology developed during the construction of the LHC is now used to improve medical imaging and power transmission to name a few applications. These all have a direct impact on the quality of our every day life. That fancy PET scan you received to diagnose your cancer was literally funded in part by the LHC.
- thysultan 6y ago
  I'm all for building particle colliders, it'll just be a bit more exciting sell if they ventured into building one in the vaccum of space – like the moon. It solves two issues with one stone*, and it'll provide leaps of advancement more than the minutiae incremental development cycle we're stuck in. Particle colliders seem to have reached a moore's law threshold on earth, thus the connotation of tunnel vision.
- btrettel 6y ago
  Comparing the cost against defense spending, which has a reputation for waste, doesn't convince me. If the cost is similar to two B-2 bombers and one thinks that the B-2 bomber is overpriced, one would probably also think that the LHC is overpriced. To me, bringing up that the WWW, fancy PET scans, etc. came in part from HEP and therefore we should be grateful is missing one major point. In the WWW case, in an alternative history it seems likely to me that some other project would have developed something similar around the same time if the funding were allocated differently. As for the other benefits, I think if the money were allocated towards research in those areas it would have been more effectively spent. Ultimately I think the worst "cost" for HEP in general (not just colliders) is that it encourages something like brain drain on other fields. I think that people interested in certain mostly non-practical areas of physics like HEP would do the world a lot more good if they instead got a PhD in some field of engineering or CS, or at the very least a more practical area of "physics". Here I refer to physics in the descriptive sense which doesn't align well with the prescriptive definition of physics. E.g., I don't understand why fluid dynamics is not "physics" in that it's rarely researched in physics departments (unless studied indirectly in chaos theory or plasma physics). Must be too Newtonian for people to care. (For what it's worth I'm at the end of a PhD in mechanical engineering studying fluid dynamics.)
  - throwawaylabor 6y ago
    I think GP is saying that the value of LHC is greater than the marginal value of 2 bombers when you already have 18. LHC would be one way to use that some of that "waste" in defense spending more wisely. Regarding "practical" study-- Where you see value in the output of engineering work, those guiding the work of engineers see value in the output of scientific work. If we had more people of the latter type that appreciated the value of scientific work, we might have more productive engineers and developers.

Nbox9 6y ago

Is it turtles all the way down, or is there a theoretical maximum size of a particle collider where no larger size would yield interesting results?

pacala 6y ago
I've heard 'solar system size' and even 'galaxy size'. Maybe we should take a step back and realize that funding for high energy physics is rooted in the Cold War's nuclear arm's race. We already have nuclear devices more powerful than we'd ever need, not clear why we'd fund ever larger particle colliders.

djaque 6y ago

It is not tunnel vision when the problem they're tackling is literally stuck in a tunnel. Bigger and bigger colliders are the only direct way we have to study high energy phenomena. It's not that physicists are lazy, it's that the problems they're studying are hard. I'm also seeing a lot resentment for the price tag of colliders in this thread. My personal opinion is that we shouldn't build a new one, but I'll point out that colliders are incredibly cost efficient. The whole LHC (which has been running and providing jobs to people for 12 years) costs a similar amount as just two B-2 bombers. The US owns like 20 of those and that money went somewhere into huge defense contractors profits as opposed to knowledge and tech which is now accessible to the whole world. You might not know this, but a lot of the technology developed during the construction of the LHC is now used to improve medical imaging and power transmission to name a few applications. These all have a direct impact on the quality of our every day life. That fancy PET scan you received to diagnose your cancer was literally funded in part by the LHC.

thysultan 6y ago
I'm all for building particle colliders, it'll just be a bit more exciting sell if they ventured into building one in the vaccum of space – like the moon. It solves two issues with one stone*, and it'll provide leaps of advancement more than the minutiae incremental development cycle we're stuck in. Particle colliders seem to have reached a moore's law threshold on earth, thus the connotation of tunnel vision.
btrettel 6y ago
Comparing the cost against defense spending, which has a reputation for waste, doesn't convince me. If the cost is similar to two B-2 bombers and one thinks that the B-2 bomber is overpriced, one would probably also think that the LHC is overpriced. To me, bringing up that the WWW, fancy PET scans, etc. came in part from HEP and therefore we should be grateful is missing one major point. In the WWW case, in an alternative history it seems likely to me that some other project would have developed something similar around the same time if the funding were allocated differently. As for the other benefits, I think if the money were allocated towards research in those areas it would have been more effectively spent. Ultimately I think the worst "cost" for HEP in general (not just colliders) is that it encourages something like brain drain on other fields. I think that people interested in certain mostly non-practical areas of physics like HEP would do the world a lot more good if they instead got a PhD in some field of engineering or CS, or at the very least a more practical area of "physics". Here I refer to physics in the descriptive sense which doesn't align well with the prescriptive definition of physics. E.g., I don't understand why fluid dynamics is not "physics" in that it's rarely researched in physics departments (unless studied indirectly in chaos theory or plasma physics). Must be too Newtonian for people to care. (For what it's worth I'm at the end of a PhD in mechanical engineering studying fluid dynamics.)
- throwawaylabor 6y ago
  I think GP is saying that the value of LHC is greater than the marginal value of 2 bombers when you already have 18. LHC would be one way to use that some of that "waste" in defense spending more wisely. Regarding "practical" study-- Where you see value in the output of engineering work, those guiding the work of engineers see value in the output of scientific work. If we had more people of the latter type that appreciated the value of scientific work, we might have more productive engineers and developers.