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Made this comment below but spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible. A few years ago, a bunch of physi

Made this comment below but spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible. A few years ago, a bunch of physical philosophers tried to justify this turn of particle physics in general away from experiment, particularly suggesting the search of symmetries and mathematical beauty (I guess) was enough of a justification for the work even though it essentially is contrary to the basic scientific principles of relying on experiment and observation. Now, we're seeing real world consequences of that mistake, billions in resources and potentially decades of man-hours to be devoted to another super-collider. Honestly, this money could be spent on myriad other projects, not to mention towards fusion research or alternative energies (solar, wind) in general especially in the face of climate change. Again, seeing the failure of the LHC and then deciding you're going to double down is just straight irresponsible. I honestly wonder what member states are thinking when they see CERN contemplate this especially after the LHC failed to find SUSY particles. This is just another painful reminder of how narrow minded some scientists are and so focused on their own little niche. There are so many larger problems the world is facing today, it's upsetting but not surprising no one at the table even asked the most important questions when making these plans, "is this even necessary?" Last tidbit, there are next generation acceleration schemes using lasers that could promise much cheaper acceleration of particles on a much smaller scale (centimeters) although the brightness and general beam quality isn't quite there yet. That could be a potential route forward and be much cheaper in the long run, it just would require a) some time and research but more importantly b) the current crop of experimental scientists at CERN might find it not their expertise and so might not get the grants. Again, reiterating the narrow mindedness of scientists these days.

yiyus 6y ago
The LHC has not been a failure. First you complain about the lack of experimentation, then you complain when they perform experiments. It is normal in science to formulate a theory, design an experiment, and then having to discard the theory in view of the experimental results. That's the scientific method, and that's what has happened with SUSY (kind of). You also claim the goal of new collider is to validate SUSY, but they say is to study the Higgs boson, the one that was discovered using the LHC. It is also normal that scientists worry about their niche and try to find funding for research in that niche. Else, the only research we would do would be cancer treatments, but that would not be effective in the long run. Huge amounts of money like this one always call people attention, but it is not so much. If you compare the cost of the LHC with the amount spent in defense by the countries involved during the same period, these are peanuts. You will find all kind of reasons to spend this money somewhere else, and some of them may be valid, but fundamental research is still necessary.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  The goal of every top-tier collider is new physics, that greater understanding that progresses mankind. What did the previous collider discover? It certainly validated current theories, but did it create anything new? If it did, why do we yet need a new one? If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two. If there is no new physics from the last experiment, why do we think that building a bigger microscope will be any different?
  - ben_w 6y ago
    1. Science is a low-odds, high-reward process; any given piece of work probably does nothing, but the overall impact is literally everything that happened since the agrarian era 2. Even successful research leads to papers with impenetrable names like “An MgB-Superconducting Shield Prototype for the Future Circular Collider Septum Magnet”, whose value I am not even qualified to comprehend unless someone explained it to me with a YouTube video 3. Because I don’t understand it and I can observe the value of it without understanding it, I’ll trust the physicists doing the experiments when they tell me they want a bigger and more expensive tool for their future experiments
    - sandworm101 6y ago
      Supercolliders are low-odds science. Other instruments are pretty much certain to generate new science. A hubble replacement would not be low-odds given that hubble itself is still making discoveries. A 23 billion-dollar push for new antibiotics would not be low-odds either. Dollars should be spent where they are most likely to generate the most science. That isn't new supercolliders.
      - rowanG077 6y ago
        Dollars shouldn't be spend where they are most likely to generate most new science. That is a quick way to find yourself in a dead-end. Imagine we would have ONLY invested in supercolliders after high-energy physics was very fruitful. Many other fields would have been completely starved and we would now be in the (possibly) super collider dead-end while other physics is woefully behind.
DC-3 6y ago
I tend to think of this xkcd [1] comic when people talk about 'solving the big problems we face' instead of doing blue-sky research. [1] https://xkcd.com/1232/ https://xkcd.com/1232/
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > [...] instead of doing blue-sky research. In 1921 the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein won a Nobel, was blue-sky research with no practical applications. Fast forward a few decades and it was used as the basis for making laser: you know, those things that all modern communication uses to transfer information over long distances. While it is up to debate how much to spend on "blue-sky research", cutting off funding to 'basic science' is rather short-sited as we cut off future 'practical' developments that can improve our lives if we don't have the foundations of the basics to build on.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    photoelectric effect in 1921 was definitely not blue-sky research with no practical applications; it was one of the core problems in physics at the time.
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      > it was one of the core problems in physics at the time. What were the specific "practical" problems that investigating and figuring it out that were solved?
      - dekhn 6y ago
        photomultiplier tubes. At the time the effect was discovered, PE was recognized experimentally (and exploited), but unexplained, and once it was, development of PMTs (critical to a wide range of practical technologies) was greatly sped up. This led to high quality television cameras not long after...
  - garmaine 6y ago
wincent 6y ago
> Again, seeing the failure of the LHC and then deciding you're going to double down is just straight irresponsible. Not to take away from your larger point, but describing the LHC as a failure may be wording it a little bit too strongly. The fact that it confirmed the Higgs Boson seems like a reasonably important experimental result.
paganel 6y ago
> Made this comment below but spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible I am in the same boat as you, more precisely I was, especially after reading guys like Jacques Ellul who had written against this particular project since back in the '80s. But then I started thinking that keeping that many smart and motivated people busy working on stuff that will not be as societally disruptive as the work of many past great scientists is not the worst thing in the world, so I personally see those billions of euros as an acceptable opportunity cost that gives us the chance not to be the direct contemporaries of a nuclear weapons race like back in the '60s or the early '80s (because back then the "best" way to keep those scientists busy was to ask them to build bigger nuclear bombs and bigger rockets). Incidentally I see the anti-competitive stance of the FAANG companies when it comes to their employees in the same vein. Better for a very smart engineer to spend his/her life doing menial work inside one of those companies than for him/her to build the next AI startup which in the wrong hands will not be good for society as a whole. And that type of technology always ends up in the "wrong" hands.
- e4325f 6y ago
  Spending tens of billions of dollars to keep scientists distracted so they might not potentially work on damaging projects is beyond absurd. For a start, I don't even think there's consensus that the Manhattan project wasn't beneficial as a whole, given the relative peace we've had since the second world war. What you said completely undermines a community that has undoubtedly advanced society more than any other.
  - paganel 6y ago
    > that has undoubtedly advanced society more than any other. From here [1] > Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm,[1] and his decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol,[2] is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in a large-scale nuclear war. There's a whole list of similar incidents (and I'm pretty sure not all of them have been officially reported). Personally I care more about the feelings of communities that don't bring us one button-push away from annihilating us as a species. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
T-A 6y ago
You are contradicting yourself here: "spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible. A few years ago, a bunch of physical philosophers tried to justify this turn of particle physics in general away from experiment" The proposed collider is an experiment. It might incidentally find support for SUSY (unlikely) but its purpose would be to produce precision data about high energy physics, whatever that physics is. As others have noted, the Engadget article is also misleading, since what has been approved is not a collider, just a design study.
- noobermin 6y ago
  Not quite. The experiment has already been done, it was called the LHC. It found no evidence for SUSY, but instead of re-evaluating SUSY since it's needed for all modern particle phenomology as well as many unification theories, the argument is to "keep looking." Fine, keep looking, if you want, but it certainly won't be with a larger collider, especially since the last search failed. That failure demands a re-assessment of resource allocation. Finally, another comment said the LHC was to study the higgs. I'm not sure about that since the higgs was already found before, it just wasn't at the significance level particle physicists like. Most of the people I talked who worked on the LHC told me the main thing behind the LHC was to see SUSY or general new physics beyond the SM.
  - asib 6y ago
    > Fine, keep looking, if you want, but it certainly won't be with a larger collider, especially since the last search failed. Just out of interest, why do you believe this to be true? There existed particle colliders before the LHC, none were able to experimentally verify the Higgs.
    - davrosthedalek 6y ago
      The Tevatron indeed saw something at the right mass, just after the first hints from LHC came in: https://news.fnal.gov/2012/03/tevatron-experiments-report-latest-results-search-higgs-boson/ https://news.fnal.gov/2012/03/tevatron-experiments-report-la... It's unclear to me if it could have ever pushed this to enough sigmas to claim discovery.
ReptileMan 6y ago
23B$ is pocket change. We are getting good bang for buck.
FriendlyNormie 6y ago
Their whole purpose in building these things is to call the attention of supernatural entities to this region of spacetime. Did you not notice the creepy rituals they performed before activating the last collider you stupid fucking idiot?
jgalt212 6y ago
> Honestly, this money could be spent on myriad other projects, I used to feel the same way about The Big Dig, or many other Big projects. At the end of the day, they're all pork. It just depends whether you like this particular kind of pork. Pork, however, will always be with us. And given the choice of a pork-free society or a pork-laden society, I think the latter is more fair and easier to exist in. Would you rather the Fed/ECB print money to "give" to the investor class, or would you rather the government borrow money to build stuff (even if not built in the most efficient manner). https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/ https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/
midrus 6y ago
Who is susy and why do we need to validate her?
- szatkus 6y ago
  For lazies: super-symmetry.
jeanvalmarc 6y ago
> failure of the LHC They detected the Higgs boson and incidentally invented the internet? https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/cern-searches-for-1st-web-page-1.1408276 https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/cern-searches-for-1st-web...
- Scaevolus 6y ago
  That was CERN in the 90s, not the LHC in the 2000s.
  - maxnoe 6y ago
    LHC planning, design and simulation studies began in the 80ties.
raincom 6y ago
Search of symmetries and mathematical beauty can't 'justify' any theory in physics. The whole movement of justificationism of knowledge was dislodged after Popper's attack. Experiments that seek anomalies are very important. Experiments that can discover new phenomena are important. Yes, it makes pragmatic sense to NOT invest $23B; and do something else.
op03 6y ago
If you follow science budgets and their growth around the world $23Billion is no big deal - http://uis.unesco.org/apps/visualisations/research-and-development-spending/ http://uis.unesco.org/apps/visualisations/research-and-devel...
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
Don't apply the american model of funding that has resulted in failed colliders to how CERN is funded. CERN manages it's own money, that's the only reason why it managed to build LHC. Also not finding any evidence supporting a theory that up to that point consumed quite a lot of mental power in the physics world is a very important result on it's own. CERN is also an important tool politically that helps keeping EU scientists in the EU. I see you are mentioning a lot of other random fields that are fashionable solutions to other problems. Besides the fact that it's the typical whataboutism response that anyone interested in a different field tends to give when a project gets funding, it completely misses how the CERN model works. CERN does particle research. If a member state doesn't like how it's funds are allocated they can choose to withdraw support and use them elsewhere. It's not CERN's job to increase solar panel efficiency.
cma 6y ago
This is $46 each for the population of the EU. You aren't going to solve climate change for the price of a tank of gas for everyone or it would be solved by now.

yiyus 6y ago

The LHC has not been a failure. First you complain about the lack of experimentation, then you complain when they perform experiments. It is normal in science to formulate a theory, design an experiment, and then having to discard the theory in view of the experimental results. That's the scientific method, and that's what has happened with SUSY (kind of). You also claim the goal of new collider is to validate SUSY, but they say is to study the Higgs boson, the one that was discovered using the LHC. It is also normal that scientists worry about their niche and try to find funding for research in that niche. Else, the only research we would do would be cancer treatments, but that would not be effective in the long run. Huge amounts of money like this one always call people attention, but it is not so much. If you compare the cost of the LHC with the amount spent in defense by the countries involved during the same period, these are peanuts. You will find all kind of reasons to spend this money somewhere else, and some of them may be valid, but fundamental research is still necessary.

sandworm101 6y ago
The goal of every top-tier collider is new physics, that greater understanding that progresses mankind. What did the previous collider discover? It certainly validated current theories, but did it create anything new? If it did, why do we yet need a new one? If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two. If there is no new physics from the last experiment, why do we think that building a bigger microscope will be any different?
- ben_w 6y ago
  1. Science is a low-odds, high-reward process; any given piece of work probably does nothing, but the overall impact is literally everything that happened since the agrarian era 2. Even successful research leads to papers with impenetrable names like “An MgB-Superconducting Shield Prototype for the Future Circular Collider Septum Magnet”, whose value I am not even qualified to comprehend unless someone explained it to me with a YouTube video 3. Because I don’t understand it and I can observe the value of it without understanding it, I’ll trust the physicists doing the experiments when they tell me they want a bigger and more expensive tool for their future experiments
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    Supercolliders are low-odds science. Other instruments are pretty much certain to generate new science. A hubble replacement would not be low-odds given that hubble itself is still making discoveries. A 23 billion-dollar push for new antibiotics would not be low-odds either. Dollars should be spent where they are most likely to generate the most science. That isn't new supercolliders.
    - rowanG077 6y ago
      Dollars shouldn't be spend where they are most likely to generate most new science. That is a quick way to find yourself in a dead-end. Imagine we would have ONLY invested in supercolliders after high-energy physics was very fruitful. Many other fields would have been completely starved and we would now be in the (possibly) super collider dead-end while other physics is woefully behind.

DC-3 6y ago

I tend to think of this xkcd [1] comic when people talk about 'solving the big problems we face' instead of doing blue-sky research. [1] https://xkcd.com/1232/ https://xkcd.com/1232/

throw0101a 6y ago
> [...] instead of doing blue-sky research. In 1921 the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein won a Nobel, was blue-sky research with no practical applications. Fast forward a few decades and it was used as the basis for making laser: you know, those things that all modern communication uses to transfer information over long distances. While it is up to debate how much to spend on "blue-sky research", cutting off funding to 'basic science' is rather short-sited as we cut off future 'practical' developments that can improve our lives if we don't have the foundations of the basics to build on.
- dekhn 6y ago
  photoelectric effect in 1921 was definitely not blue-sky research with no practical applications; it was one of the core problems in physics at the time.
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > it was one of the core problems in physics at the time. What were the specific "practical" problems that investigating and figuring it out that were solved?
    - dekhn 6y ago
      photomultiplier tubes. At the time the effect was discovered, PE was recognized experimentally (and exploited), but unexplained, and once it was, development of PMTs (critical to a wide range of practical technologies) was greatly sped up. This led to high quality television cameras not long after...
- garmaine 6y ago

wincent 6y ago

> Again, seeing the failure of the LHC and then deciding you're going to double down is just straight irresponsible. Not to take away from your larger point, but describing the LHC as a failure may be wording it a little bit too strongly. The fact that it confirmed the Higgs Boson seems like a reasonably important experimental result.

paganel 6y ago

> Made this comment below but spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible I am in the same boat as you, more precisely I was, especially after reading guys like Jacques Ellul who had written against this particular project since back in the '80s. But then I started thinking that keeping that many smart and motivated people busy working on stuff that will not be as societally disruptive as the work of many past great scientists is not the worst thing in the world, so I personally see those billions of euros as an acceptable opportunity cost that gives us the chance not to be the direct contemporaries of a nuclear weapons race like back in the '60s or the early '80s (because back then the "best" way to keep those scientists busy was to ask them to build bigger nuclear bombs and bigger rockets). Incidentally I see the anti-competitive stance of the FAANG companies when it comes to their employees in the same vein. Better for a very smart engineer to spend his/her life doing menial work inside one of those companies than for him/her to build the next AI startup which in the wrong hands will not be good for society as a whole. And that type of technology always ends up in the "wrong" hands.

e4325f 6y ago
Spending tens of billions of dollars to keep scientists distracted so they might not potentially work on damaging projects is beyond absurd. For a start, I don't even think there's consensus that the Manhattan project wasn't beneficial as a whole, given the relative peace we've had since the second world war. What you said completely undermines a community that has undoubtedly advanced society more than any other.
- paganel 6y ago
  > that has undoubtedly advanced society more than any other. From here [1] > Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm,[1] and his decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol,[2] is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in a large-scale nuclear war. There's a whole list of similar incidents (and I'm pretty sure not all of them have been officially reported). Personally I care more about the feelings of communities that don't bring us one button-push away from annihilating us as a species. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

T-A 6y ago

You are contradicting yourself here: "spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible. A few years ago, a bunch of physical philosophers tried to justify this turn of particle physics in general away from experiment" The proposed collider is an experiment. It might incidentally find support for SUSY (unlikely) but its purpose would be to produce precision data about high energy physics, whatever that physics is. As others have noted, the Engadget article is also misleading, since what has been approved is not a collider, just a design study.

noobermin 6y ago
Not quite. The experiment has already been done, it was called the LHC. It found no evidence for SUSY, but instead of re-evaluating SUSY since it's needed for all modern particle phenomology as well as many unification theories, the argument is to "keep looking." Fine, keep looking, if you want, but it certainly won't be with a larger collider, especially since the last search failed. That failure demands a re-assessment of resource allocation. Finally, another comment said the LHC was to study the higgs. I'm not sure about that since the higgs was already found before, it just wasn't at the significance level particle physicists like. Most of the people I talked who worked on the LHC told me the main thing behind the LHC was to see SUSY or general new physics beyond the SM.
- asib 6y ago
  > Fine, keep looking, if you want, but it certainly won't be with a larger collider, especially since the last search failed. Just out of interest, why do you believe this to be true? There existed particle colliders before the LHC, none were able to experimentally verify the Higgs.
  - davrosthedalek 6y ago
    The Tevatron indeed saw something at the right mass, just after the first hints from LHC came in: https://news.fnal.gov/2012/03/tevatron-experiments-report-latest-results-search-higgs-boson/ https://news.fnal.gov/2012/03/tevatron-experiments-report-la... It's unclear to me if it could have ever pushed this to enough sigmas to claim discovery.

ReptileMan 6y ago

23B$ is pocket change. We are getting good bang for buck.

FriendlyNormie 6y ago

Their whole purpose in building these things is to call the attention of supernatural entities to this region of spacetime. Did you not notice the creepy rituals they performed before activating the last collider you stupid fucking idiot?

jgalt212 6y ago

> Honestly, this money could be spent on myriad other projects, I used to feel the same way about The Big Dig, or many other Big projects. At the end of the day, they're all pork. It just depends whether you like this particular kind of pork. Pork, however, will always be with us. And given the choice of a pork-free society or a pork-laden society, I think the latter is more fair and easier to exist in. Would you rather the Fed/ECB print money to "give" to the investor class, or would you rather the government borrow money to build stuff (even if not built in the most efficient manner). https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/ https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/

midrus 6y ago

Who is susy and why do we need to validate her?

szatkus 6y ago
For lazies: super-symmetry.

jeanvalmarc 6y ago

> failure of the LHC They detected the Higgs boson and incidentally invented the internet? https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/cern-searches-for-1st-web-page-1.1408276 https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/cern-searches-for-1st-web...

Scaevolus 6y ago
That was CERN in the 90s, not the LHC in the 2000s.
- maxnoe 6y ago
  LHC planning, design and simulation studies began in the 80ties.

raincom 6y ago

Search of symmetries and mathematical beauty can't 'justify' any theory in physics. The whole movement of justificationism of knowledge was dislodged after Popper's attack. Experiments that seek anomalies are very important. Experiments that can discover new phenomena are important. Yes, it makes pragmatic sense to NOT invest $23B; and do something else.

op03 6y ago

If you follow science budgets and their growth around the world $23Billion is no big deal - http://uis.unesco.org/apps/visualisations/research-and-development-spending/ http://uis.unesco.org/apps/visualisations/research-and-devel...

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago

Don't apply the american model of funding that has resulted in failed colliders to how CERN is funded. CERN manages it's own money, that's the only reason why it managed to build LHC. Also not finding any evidence supporting a theory that up to that point consumed quite a lot of mental power in the physics world is a very important result on it's own. CERN is also an important tool politically that helps keeping EU scientists in the EU. I see you are mentioning a lot of other random fields that are fashionable solutions to other problems. Besides the fact that it's the typical whataboutism response that anyone interested in a different field tends to give when a project gets funding, it completely misses how the CERN model works. CERN does particle research. If a member state doesn't like how it's funds are allocated they can choose to withdraw support and use them elsewhere. It's not CERN's job to increase solar panel efficiency.

cma 6y ago

This is $46 each for the population of the EU. You aren't going to solve climate change for the price of a tank of gas for everyone or it would be solved by now.