17 ms·

The World Doesn’t Need a New Gigantic Particle Collider

146 points by zekrioca 6y ago

kiba 6y ago
I do not know if building colliders should be considered increasingly futile. However, there are other points the author made. First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance. Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination. What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard? I supposed that could be useful, but even more pressing was how to motivate the people of Earth to make the necessary changes. Also, the money offered doesn't seem that huge on scale of countries. 1 billion dollars per year for operating cost? I suppose we could make better use of money that would otherwise go to making a new collider, but so we can do so elsewhere as well.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  > First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance. Me either and often the technology you get on the back of it doesn't show up for decades and decades anyway.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    So is that an argument now to stop basic research? That we can't even look across the horizon of our own lifetimes anymore? Even the Romans thought bigger than that.
    - philwelch 6y ago
      Is there an actual theoretical question that will be answered by an even bigger collider, or is it just, “let’s see what happens?” It’s not a question of whether basic research is fundamentally valuable but rather whether building larger and larger particle colliders will deliver diminishing returns in exchange for increasing costs.
      - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
        It's just "Let's see what happens" - and that's why it's a bad idea. LHC was justified as a search for the Higgs. The Higgs was found. Everyone was happy. Fine. LHC 2.0++ is just banging rocks together for the sake of it. Something interest might fall out, or it might not. But considering that we still don't understand quantum origins, have no clue how to make a theory of quantum gravity, and have no idea what Dark Energy is, or even if it exists at all, it might be better to spend the money on pursuing creative theoretical leads in those other directions and coming back to country-sized experimental hardware when there are some new theories to test.
        henearkr 6y ago
        Today the axion is the new hypothetical fundamental particle that coincides with the status that had the Higgs boson two decades ago. It may very well be the next milestone.
        dnautics 6y ago
        What's the particle energy range needed to make an observation about axions?
        henearkr 6y ago
        Pretty tiny: 10−5 to 10−3 eV/c2 Though the utility of a big collider would be in diversifying the types of decays observed?
        seamyb88 6y ago
        Banging rocks together has been a very fruitful method which is always limited by the technology. Many physicists believe that the rock banging should be an ongoing exercise which itself guides the theoretical directions. They also believe that there is an almost guaranteed chance of finding something, if their advances to higher energy are achieved. All we need is one anomaly in the vast data processing. There are many things which are expected to be seen at higher energies. If they are not seen, it still says a great deal and will guide theoretical discussion.
    - noir_lord 6y ago
      Not what I meant, I was agreeing with the sentiment that we shouldn't stop doing science because it has no immediate application.
  - close04 6y ago
    > the technology you get on the back of it doesn't show up for decades That would be an argument to start even sooner rather than later or never. If you want to combat the usefulness of the research the only arguments you can make are that the results are not useful at all, or that they can be obtained cheaper, faster, or more reliably with other means. The "it takes decades to bear fruit" works even against education. And I'm sure nobody would agree to be barred access to any tech that was the result of decades of research or simply took decades to reach market. I'm also not a fan of this project simply because I don't think an incremental advance in colliders will bring anything new at all, certainly not because it will take too long to reach market. As the saying goes, you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. To achieve the next breakthrough we need something on a scale we're simply not capable of building now, or soon.
    - techphys_91 6y ago
      As a counter point, the gravitational wave discovery came about because of incremental upgrades to the detector. We don't know whats beyond that noise floor. Maybe there are better ways to measure the tiny signals that hint at new physics, but the question is what we can do now. I would personally say its optimistic to assume we'll get a big breakthrough if we don't invest in the incremental upgrades.
      - close04 6y ago
        I didn't want to imply that incremental updates in general aren't useful. Just that many physicists' educated assessment (guess) is that new physics and new particles require energy levels that are out of reach right now, substantial higher than this new accelerator's. So now the expected outcome is to give a more detailed look for a slightly better understanding of what we already know, with a hefty price tag. This cost/benefit is where the current controversy comes from.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    That's a big lie, it's extremely rare for big projects outside of wartime to create downstream tech that is generally usable. The big ones that are often claimed (Velcro for NASA and MRIs for the supercollider) are definitely lies. Usually big projects tend to need to be conservative and use off the shelf available materials (just in clever ways). Sabine's big point is not that we shouldn't do basic science, it's that we shouldn't do bad basic science; that is science that isn't driven by hypotheses. Historically in science you would create a new model that agrees with current facts, but makes an prediction that some unobserved event X would be observable. You build your apparatus or design an experiment to observe X, and then confirm of reject the model. In the case of a bigger collider, what is X?
    - jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
      > That's a big lie, it's extremely rare for big projects outside of wartime to create downstream tech that is generally usable. The big ones that are often claimed (Velcro for NASA and MRIs for the supercollider) are definitely lies. This quite mistaken based on what I've read. Historically NASA hovers at around a 10:1 ROI. SpaceX would not exist today without the huge benefit of all the material NASA has published historically. MRI may not have come from colliders, but modern medical imaging absolutely has benefited from these projects. There's a researcher that commented in a sibling thread with specific benefits to their project. > In the case of a bigger collider, what is X? Here's a quick summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q
      - redis_mlc 6y ago
        > Historically NASA hovers at around a 10:1 ROI. I suggest you look at what was spent on the Space Shuttle, which turned out to be non-reusable (it was re-manufactured after each flight for up to a year.) No ROI there. Fun facts: NASA knew from the very first flight that they were losing several tiles during launch, and no tiles were optional. Also, NASA managers were given photos of Columbia's damaged wing, which had a gaping hole in the leading edge, before re-entry, and sat on them. I wouldn't fly a Cessna 152 like that.) https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html That and the ISS sucked most of the funding out of US space research and is still going on. My constructive suggestion? Take a chain saw to the ISS on the next "mission."
- awinder 6y ago
  “Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination.” Yeah that argument was extremely dishonest. We don’t build a 1 billion dollar climate change center because that 1 billion is going to beget trillions of dollars in disruption. Throwing 20, 40 billion with staffing (which comes back into the economy) over a decade or more all-in is a total different ballgame.
- TwoNineA 6y ago
  "First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality" This is an extremely narrowminded view. Lasers, MRI, X-Ray machines, etc ... are all made by engineers after physicists tried to understand the fundamental nature of reality. One would argue that modern electronics are possible because research was done about Quantum Physics, a fundamental nature of reality.
  - wernercd 6y ago
    > at least not for a long time The very next part of his statement covers that... It could be decades before "society" sees fruits of the research. > To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance. His next sentence also says "research is good for research sake" - there doesn't need to be "real world results" for the research to be worth it. You talk about narrow mindedness... then ignore second part of the first sentence and completely ignore the second sentence... Seems narrow minded to do that? I tend to agree on both those points... It could be a long time to see results and research for research can be good.
  - radioactivist 6y ago
    While I sympathize with this viewpoint, as a physicist I think there is a fairly persistent misunderstanding in the public about just how disconnected current particle physics experiments are from application to everyday life. Essentially none of the particle physics done since the 1960s has had any application outside of fundamental knowledge, with no prospects for it having those applications in the future. At best, and even this is stretching a bit, there are indirect benefits of developing the machines that are needed to explore this frontier (i.e. like some of the argued benefits of space exploration). Whether that changes the calculus of whether these things are worth the price is still a question (in my opinion: they are), but I don't think making analogies to applications of discoveries of fundamental physics operating at very different energy scales is a good argument. The development of quantum physics (lasers, MRI, etc), while a frontier at the time, is essential to understanding commonplace things like the cohesion of solids or the properties of metals or semi-conductors (say) at room temperature. To my knowledge, there is nothing outside of astrophysical objects and the early universe that depends on knowing what is at the current frontiers in particle physics (or even what was the frontier in 50 years ago).
- fluffything 6y ago
  > What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard? No? Models are useful for making predictions. If somebody like the POTUS tells you that nuking thunderstorms would be great against climate change, you don't have to just take their word for it. You can input that into your climate change model, and it will tell you how much of an impact this will have, and whether the impact is good or bad. The difference between a better model and a worse model is that the better model will agree better with reality. A shitty model, like the one POTUS is using, might tell you that nuking all thunderstorms would be great. Then we go ahead and do it, and we all die. A better model, like the mental model that every 14 year old child that starts studying physics and radiation has, might tell you that nuking thunderstorms is a pretty bad idea that would kill us all due to dozens of reasons. Given that we cannot make accurate predictions today of what the weather tomorrow will look like. If you want to predict the 50 year impact of more subtle changes like, e.g., covering the Sahara with black mats, you need a pretty good model to get an output that isn't multiple orders of magnitude off. So..... what do we expect from better climate change models? Avoiding the apocalypse to begin with. Worth every penny.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
    >If somebody like the POTUS tells you that nuking thunderstorms would be great against climate change, you don't have to just take their word for it. You can input that into your climate change model, and it will tell you how much of an impact this will have, and whether the impact is good or bad. You have an odd concept of both how to determine if nuking a thunderstorm, which was not what was allegedly suggested, but also what large scale climate models actually capture.
  - trekrich 6y ago
    And this is the problem with climate change models, they are just models. And get changed to suit the narrative thats currently being portrayed. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dozens-failed-climate-predictions-stretch-80-years-back https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dozens-failed-climate-pr... All this based on models, and look how wrong they where.
- platz 6y ago
  I disagree with every premise in this comment.
- gonzo41 6y ago
  "First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality" About 10K construction jobs, from high tech to low tech over the life of the build phase of the project, which is overlapping a world wide downturn of unknown length of time. I mean they could build staircase to the top of the tall hill and still not have it be a waste if it keeps people in work and out of harms way. In this case we may get some physics as an upside to a neat way to stimulate industry.
  - rjmunro 6y ago
    Surely those 10K construction jobs could be used to build things with much more relevance, maybe things to reduce / mitigate climate change.
- cma 6y ago
  > First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance. Berners-Lee invented the web while working at CERN on organizing scientific information for collides and stuff. > The stage was being set for the invention of the World Wide Web, and future history books will recount how, almost alone, Sendall supported the pioneering work of Tim Berners-Lee, then working in his group. After reading Berners-Lee's prophetic 1989 proposal for what would become the Web, Sendall wrote on the cover "Vague but exciting", and added at the end - "And now?" The rest is already history.
- yojo 6y ago
  > Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination. What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard? I supposed that could be useful, but even more pressing was how to motivate the people of Earth to make the necessary changes. It's not either or. Knowing the impact is valuable for mitigating damage. You can allocate capital for mitigation more effectively if you have a more accurate model of the threats. Presumably at some levels funding more accurate models are net cost-saving, by increasing the efficiency of spend. I have no idea if we have or have not passed that level. Similarly, a better model might provide a better understanding of different strategies for curtailing climate change. e.g. planting trees takes carbon out of the air directly (easy to estimate), but also changes the albedo of the underlying terrain. The impact of the albedo change is less clear, particularly as to how it changes regional weather patterns. It might benefit from better models to guide the most impactful locations to reforest. Again, I'm not an expert/maybe this is a solved problem, but I can see how these cases might exist.
- ip26 6y ago
  If better models of climate change allow us to predict more precisely what will happen, we may be able to get people to care more. If we can say with a high degree of certainty that City X is going to see 4.5x as many terrible hurricanes every year, then the people of City X may have a more vested interest than if we say "there will probably be more hurricanes".
  - hannob 6y ago
    The counterexample is Australia. We can say with high certainty that the great barrier reef will die unless some miracle happens and the world limits warming to 1.5°. And even then most of the reef will be gone. Yet Australia is a country that basically has no real climate policy at all, they still plan for decades of new(!) coal extraction.
    - ip26 6y ago
      That is an excellent counterexample. It defies comprehension.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    The problem is that nobody cares about your model. If it's too grim then people will refuse to believe it. If it's too optimistic people won't do anything.
- f6v 6y ago
  Let's not make this a choice between colliders and "something good for society". We have so many other things we could take resources from: social media apps, fashion, luxury industry. Only when all of the parasitic industries are gone can we think whether we need a new particle accelerator, or, say, a new DNA sequencing technology.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    However those are all private enterprises? Are you saying that we need to eliminate privately owned assets/capitalism?
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  Resource allocation is a moot point when it comes to CERN projects because CERN manages their own funding and they have one mission, to do particle research. The fact that they manage their budget is exactly why they can do things like big accelerators, unlike the United States who destroyed their half-way dug accelerator before it even came online. And besides that, CERN is literally the only place on Earth with the foundations for this kind of research.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> I suppose we could make better use of money that would otherwise go to making a new collider, but so we can do so elsewhere as well. Tell that to the hundreds, thousands, of valid scientific projects that cannot find funding. This collider, if built, represents not only a lot of money but those hundreds of smaller projects that didn't happen. I once heard a physicist say that our society spends more on ring tones than it does fusion research. I suspect that this collider would yield an inverse. We will spend more on a narrow aspect of particle science than we do on vaccine research. More than on new antibiotics? More than on SETI? More than on detecting possible life in our own solar system? Particle science is great, but there are more efficient ways to spend billions.
- bsder 6y ago
  > First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality The Superconducting Supercollider would have had to figure out how to deal with fire ants (apparently the magnetic fields attracted them). That's the kind of really useful technology that spins out of projects like this.
mikro2nd 6y ago
The premise of this article is quite flawed. We don't need to spend the money "researching threats such as climate change", we need to get off our collective duff and actually do something to stop dumping Carbon into the air-ocean and to start removing some of that which we've already put there. Whether we build another giant particle accelerator or two (reminder: Not only CERN is interested, but China is already well down that path) is almost irrelevant if we don't fix our pollution and destruction of the ecosystems that allow Homo sap. to live comfortably (or, possibly, at all).
- philwelch 6y ago
  > We don't need to spend the money "researching threats such as climate change", we need to get off our collective duff and actually do something to stop dumping Carbon into the air-ocean and to start removing some of that which we've already put there. Figuring out how to do that economically and at scale includes a number of research problems. How do we generate power, produce concrete, do metallurgy, transport goods, fly airplanes, etc. without greenhouse gas emissions? How do we capture and sequester greenhouse gas emissions? How do we develop closed-loop sources for chemical fuels? How do we store energy in the power grid?
  - techphys_91 6y ago
    While I agree, I'm not sure the funding for many of these problems should come from the budget of fundamental physics.
    - philwelch 6y ago
      Where does the budget for fundamental physics come from, then?
  - adrianN 6y ago
    We have the technology to get at least to 80% carbon neutrality and we're on a very tight time schedule. Asking for "more research" before investing massively into the things we already know how to do is stupid. Improving the economics must come after we delayed the existential threat.
nxpnsv 6y ago
Typical Hossenfelder.
- pugworthy 6y ago
  What exactly is a "typical Hossenfelder"? Can you explain beyond the offhand personal slight comment?
  - nxpnsv 6y ago
    Just read some of her science opinion articles. This one is a typical example.
earthicus 6y ago
Here's a nice 20min presentation by Nima Arkani-Hamed in favor of a new collider: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q
- macleginn 6y ago
  TD;DL: we discovered Higgs, but we don't know much about it because LHC doesn't give us enough resolution, and its exact properties are crucial for the future of the whole of theoretical physics. Therefore, even if we do not hope to discover new particles, there's motivation enough to build bigger colliders.
aduitsis 6y ago
The article says something that is perfectly sensible. Reading it carefully, it seems that the author is doubtful whether building a 100km collider is the correct way forward, given its enormous cost. That is a very valid subject and totally worthy of serious discussion. In any case, we should never forget that without advancements in fundamental physics we are going nowhere as a species. We might be able to come up with better refinements, better techniques, slightly better computers, etc. But sooner or later we are going to hit a physical limit, and we are going to need to seriously enlarge our fundamental knowledge corpus of how the universe operates if we are going to keep moving forward.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  I would favor an argument not rooted in cost but in physics. Whether it is costly or not is not a factor in whether it is the correct way forward, if it gets results it is the way forward, even if it is costly unless a cheaper alternative can be found. If it can't get results then it is wasted money no matter what the cost.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    > I would favor an argument not rooted in cost but in physics. Did we read the same article? > New measurements brought up new puzzles, and they built bigger colliders until, in 2012, the picture was complete. The Standard Model still has some loose ends, but experimentally testing those would require energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test. The scientific case for a next larger collider is therefore presently slim. > Yes, one can hope. But there is no reason why the particles that make up dark matter or dark energy should show up in the new device’s energy range. And that is assuming they are particles to begin with, for which there no evidence. Even if they are particles, moreover, highly energetic collisions may not be the best way to look for them. Weakly interacting particles with tiny masses, for example, are not something one looks for with large colliders. > And there are entirely different types of experiments that could lead to breakthroughs at far smaller costs, such as high precision measurements at low energies or increasing the masses of objects in quantum states. Going to higher energies is not the only way to make progress in the foundations of physics; it’s just the most expensive one.
O5vYtytb 6y ago
The same argument said over and over again throughout history. Why spend effort on uncertain future outcomes when today's issues are most important?
- lostmsu 6y ago
  You don't know that. What if tomorrow physics can solve today's problems with nearly no effort?
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    What if tomorrow physics depend on funding not available because LHC2 ate the budget? Cf. "opportunity cost"
    - lostmsu 6y ago
      I did not say anything about LHC2 opportunity cost being better than no LHC2 for physics. I was giving a counterargument for specific flawed reasoning/question.
- pugworthy 6y ago
  It's a good argument, however I think it's pretty clear to a lot of people that today's issues (e.g., climate change) are indeed real and indeed important. But to your question of why to spend on them, it's because it's going to cost us a lot more (and not just money) down the line if we don't address it.
turbinerneiter 6y ago
I would really love to see other ideas for physics than going higher energy colliders. Granted, my knowledge is limited, but to me it feels like in experimental physics right now there is a bunch of expensive and complex experiments that look like they reached diminishing returns. Generally, in tech it feels like we keep eeking out small improvements in efficiency, but there is nothing that jumps us up a level. But also: * govs and central banks all over the world are printing money like crazy so the economy doesn't tank * important research projects still battle for funding * climate change battling measures, like building clean power plants and storage, are not built at large enough scale because money is not there Where is all the trillions going? Stock market and real estate? Cool. Do we get any value out of it? Is pensions funds all that matters anymore?
uaaiIbab 6y ago
Objectively, spending the money on covid research would be more beneficial than a particle collider. I don't see how anyone can even debate this. I know CERN doesn't specialise in that, but my question is why is our society so inefficient when it comes to spending money? If you had 20 billion euros, you're telling me you can't buy anything else more productive for physicists to work on with it? It's 20 billion euros. You could buy a small country with that.
- henearkr 6y ago
  Suppose you find a way to use some grand-unification energy source thanks to some new high-energy physics discovery. Then that would mean way more energy available to manufacture tests, medical supplies, synthetic coton and masks, electricity to perform new drugs research on computational models, etc. Of course, that's the best-case scenario, but the way progress goes has always been quite impredictable.
  - uaaiIbab 6y ago
    A bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. Having physicists continue work using the current collider and literally spending the 20b on education, would be a better use of their money than this.
    - henearkr 6y ago
      I understand your way of thinking, but if it had been meticulously followed throughout history, don't you think that almost no scientific research would have been made? Why should anyone spend time thinking when we have so much to do with our hands and readily available knowledge?
      - uaaiIbab 6y ago
        The difference is that most scientific breakthroughs didn't cost 20 billion euros. Not trying to be a smartass, i know the value of research without a certain end goal or outcome, i just think this is one exception where money is irresponsibly spent.
snissn 6y ago
Isn't this article the textbook definition of concern trolling?
- vikramkr 6y ago
  Isn't concern trolling when you pretend to support something but actually make arguments against it? This article seems to be pretty firmly against the idea of building a collider from the title on. I would think textbook concern trolling would be indicated by an argument like "I want a bigger particle collider, but I'm just concerned about the cost" while this article just says a particle collider is not going to be useful, lets fund something else instead of investing on inertia
- Avamander 6y ago
  Pretty much.
ReptileMan 6y ago
Actually climate change is the main reason we need bigger colliders - it's happening, we won't coordinate until it is too late, so unless we find new sources of energy of whole different magnitude we are doomed. I suggest we move to acceptance stage already. Right now most people are in anger or denial and it is getting boring.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
coliveira 6y ago
I disagree. Doing science is one of the best ways for us to spend money as a society. The money spent there is not "wasted", a lot comes back in jobs, training, better technologies. Moreover, it is money that goes into society, not into the pockets of a few scoundrels linked to billionaires. This is an extremely retrograde view of science, in my opinion.
- jfengel 6y ago
  I don't think they disagree that we should spend money on science. The question is which science. A bigger collider is a lot of money, following a lot of money on the existing collider. It could instead be spent in many other areas, with at least as good an opportunity to repay itself in jobs and technologies. Fundamental physics is sexy and has had tremendous success, but less sexy areas can also provide benefits.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  I'm all for spending money on science. But I can't imagine that throwing ever more billions into this particular very well funded science establishment is the best way to do it.
  - ozim 6y ago
    I think the problem is that this well funded science establishment is good at getting money where other science people are not that good at it. Maybe better to spend it on some science than on something else if other scientists would not manage to get that funding anyway.
  - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
    This well funded science establishment gets funding from universities based on positions available. CERN doesn't need grants.
- 08-15 6y ago
  Who cares where the money goes? Money is just worthless green paper. The fact is, highly trained people are fed by the government, which is turn steal that food from someone else, to research something of questionable value. All the effort that went into training those people, and the effort to feed them, and the good these people could otherwise do, may be wasted. "We as society" (What does that even mean?) shouldn't spend effort on science. You as an individual should.
cesaref 6y ago
I'm bothered by the attempt to suggest we either have a particle accelerator or a global warming research centre (or whatever it was called). I can't see why they are related, and imagine there is room for both. I don't think human knowledge and striving for it should be reduced to a question of what the practical benefits of it are - that sort of thinking didn't put man on the moon. So overall, not a very well argued position from my perspective.
kashyapc 6y ago
Related discussion here, from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611738 (CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider)
- dang 6y ago
  Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577124 from a few days earlier
  - njarboe 6y ago
    As quoted in this previous discussion, I think this is a key point: "particle physicists should focus on developing new technologies that could bring colliders back in a reasonable price range and hold off digging more tunnels." Creating just a bigger version of the current collider with incremental advancements in technology is very likely a poor use of science euros. The money should be used to investigate other methods for particle acceleration and investigation. Some linear accelerator concepts could be much less expensive than very large circular colliders, but I imagine research into those areas are not funded due to the particle physics budget being mostly consumed by CERN. This type of problem has happened in fusion research. The fundamental physics of how to build an economic fusion reactor still needs to be worked out, but almost all funding has been cut in fusion research to pour concrete and build magnets for the ITER project. It is clear that the $14 billion and rising reactor cannot lead to economically viable fusion reactors on any kind of reasonable timescale. ITER is currently planned to be fully operational in 2035 and, if the past is anything like the future, there will continue to be more delays.
    - knzhou 6y ago
      > Some linear accelerator concepts could be much less expensive than very large circular colliders, but I imagine research into those areas are not funded due to the particle physics budget being mostly consumed by CERN. That's not true; CERN has no particular commitment to circular colliders. Scientists from CERN have proposed linear colliders, along with more exotic options like muon colliders.
armitron 6y ago
It's surprising to see so many comments here entirely miss the point, or arguing against points Sabine never made. She's not arguing for stopping scientific research, but finding more optimal ways to do said research. She has continuously been pointing out that the particle physics community behaves like a cabal. There is little if any progress or evidence of future progress yet they keep increasing costs and forging ahead with their -surely by now flawed- interpretation of scientific research. Sabine Hossenfelder outlined a lot of unexplored scientific areas that are ripe for research and proposed a lot of alternatives. The main issue is clearly the sunk cost fallacy. At some point, scientists need to cut their losses short and re-align themselves with more promising avenues. The reproducibility crisis and string theory debacle proves that scientists are not immune to biases, short-termism and self-serving behavior.
- henearkr 6y ago
  I'm curious why you call the string theory a debacle. From what I followed, the debacle was rather with supersymmetry. And even though, the research in this domain stimulated the development of new mathematical tools. Finally, as with all failed research, it would have been pretty hard to rule it out without trying to search it before, so this negative result is as much positive result in favor of rival theories. (maybe super-asymmetry ;)
  - istorical 6y ago
    Probably because for the amount of time and money its absorbed it seems to produce very little of value in terms of applications, it's hard to perform real experiments with, and string theory and high energy particle collision physics both absorb the vast majority of grant money - and by extension - make it harder to do work in physics that doesn't pay homage to those two large bodies or continue that work.
    - lurkmurk 6y ago
      Also generations of students stuck in this hole because the supervisors that have paid positions stick to string theory deadend -- a feedback loop.
vaidhy 6y ago
I do not understand why it is a “either or” problem. We could fund CERN and climate research and other things. It just comes down to political will. Trying to phrase them as one for other is disingenuous and wrong. There is also a hidden assumption that all science work should have immediate social relevance and impact and one kind of science is replaceable by another. By that logic, we should not think about space exploration since the marine ecosystem is being over-fished.
- ChrisLomont 6y ago
  >Trying to phrase them as one for other is disingenuous and wrong. By this logic we can spend infinite money on infinite wants, but this is simply not true. Money spent on one project forces there to be less for other projects. As such it's reasonable to consider opportunity costs for a project.
  - henearkr 6y ago
    Let's say we stop international conflicts, make successful demographic transitions in all countries, and concentrate our time and efforts in making progress in biology, physics, and all? Yes I know that what I propose is impossible right know, but it makes me cringe that we are such an irrational species...
  - vaidhy 6y ago
    I do not believe this to be a zero sum game. You can argue for the merits of each one independently. Along with infinite wants, we also have infinite problems.
    - ChrisLomont 6y ago
      It’s not zero sum in the long run. But the converse of zero sum is not unlimited sum, especially in the foreseeable future. Thus spending on one project limits Spending for other projects.
hartator 6y ago
> But CERN’s plan, if fully executed, would cost tens of billions of dollars. I am generally against gov. spending, but it doesn't seem much compared to the waste on other industries.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  It indeed is not much for such a project because CERN doesn't need grants. Universities pay for staff positions instead.
nubero 6y ago
It’s a mystery to me how people with an outlook as parochial as Sabine Hossenfelder’s even get a job in the sciences. This is really mind bending and quite frankly unsettling.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  I'm not sure if you're being satirical or so unaware that you're actually just proving her point without even noticing it. Physics has been captured by so much rent-seeking activity that many people who feel like Hossenfelder don't even speak up any more because they're afraid of killing their career.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  So concentrating on science to "fix" climate change is less important than a new particle collider? What good will a particle collider do if the human race has radically changed the climate in the next 50 years? That's her point and it's very relevant.
- nubero 6y ago
  Looking at the replies to my comment, it seems clear that the brain rot is well advanced with some people. Therefore some random points in no special order: 23 billion is nothing for a project that has 23, mostly western European, member states paying for it. The GDP of Switzerland alone (which has a population of only 8.5 million) was around 700 billion in 2019. Climate change is not going to be solved by an “International Center for Climate Modeling”. That is so completely nonsensical that I didn’t even thought it worth pointing out. We already have climate models – that’s how we know we have a problem. Also, we have solar, wind, hydroelectricity and nuclear fission already. The first two could be refined a lot. The last one I am not a fan of but it’s either that or coal in many places. THAT is what’s going to solve our energy and thus climate problems. It will also solve some longstanding geopolitical problems as a bonus (no more western money for the Saudis). That being said, nuclear fusion could be developed much faster (than ITER is) with the right minds and organizational structure behind it. Just look at the Space Launch System (SLS) which still doesn’t exist, has cost 20 billion already and whose ultimate goal is throwaway rockets vs. what SpaceX has done with a fraction of the money, faster. Then there’s individual transportation which is being solved right now with electric cars and batteries. Both of which are just at the beginning of their development. More interesting to me however, is the loss of energy through badly built homes that have almost no insulation at all (U.S. and Japan come to mind). Hossenfelder rhetorically asking “why, you may have wondered recently, do we not have a center for epidemic modeling” is the worst kind of pandering to the fears of the people at this moment. It’s also wrong because epidemic modeling has been done for a long time at many universities and the pharmaceutical industry. Hossenfelder says a lot of extremely idiotic things in her piece but “the potential rewards are unclear” is on my number one spot: The potential rewards in experimental science are always unclear – that’s one of the key characteristics of experimental science. The only point she could potentially have would be the one about inertia in funding. That’s something I don’t see into as I don’t work in that field. Given, however, how ill-informed and, I have to assume, ill-intentioned her other twaddle in that article is, I would rather hear that information about funding problems from a more trustworthy source than her.
rytill 6y ago
Of all the expenditures to attack in order to fund climate change and emerging viruses, you choose a particle collider?
beamatronic 6y ago
Let's build telescopes in space instead. There's an endless variety of high-energy events to observe.
fbn79 6y ago
Reminds me of Interstellar synossy. Why spend money for the space when the world need farmers.
exclipy 6y ago
I would much rather see these billions spent on fusion research. Right now, we don't even know if humanity as we know it will be around in 100 years to reap the potential benefits of particle physics knowledge.
buboard 6y ago
Maybe she has a point, but for the wrong reasons. There's something to be said about "throwing more money" believing that it will end up in better science. It's politically easy to pass a bigger, huger accelerator: tons of jobs, recognizability of the effort by taxpayers , but scientifically it's a rather predictable bet. It's similar to rich people throwing megatons of money on startups believing that they are creating something useful. LHC size projects are not that exciting projects. They are mostly a welfare package for the hordes of decomissioned physicists who are left behind after the wild century of Physics. It's probably more fruitul to seek innovative accelerator designs or other kinds of stuff. Or, that money would probably better be spent if they just paid the scientists to work and compete on whatever they like. Perhaps physics needs more patent clerks who spent a lot of time thinking rather than submitting grants, catching flights to perpetual meetings and publishing 500-author papers.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Indeed, big colliders are like the Space Shuttle of science. The STS was an unmitigated disaster for everything associated with getting space-related things done. It sucked up all the money and gave net nothing back. A big collider will be good at soaking up budget with not much detail oversight needed, but will not deliver new insight. For that you need one a hundred times bigger, say straddling the moon. Which we would be better-equipped to build today, if not for the Space Shuttle.
dannykwells 6y ago
Couldn't agree more. Obsession with fundamental physics as "the only way forward as a species" is absurd. Do any of our discoveries in CRISPR or check point inhibitors rely on the knowledge of the Higgs Boson or the fundamental theory? No. Stop the obsession with quixotic physics quests. Spend the same (or more!) resources on apied science focused on climate change, pandemics, longevity, clean energy, etc. Far more rewards in that direction.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  > Do any of our discoveries in CRISPR or check point inhibitors rely on the knowledge of the Higgs Boson or the fundamental theory? No. Well, yeah, because they're advances in medicine…
guerrilla 6y ago
Here's a video that she made on the subject in mid-2019 [1]. I really love her other videos and her philosophical pragmatism [2][3], but honestly I don't know why she's been spending so much energy on this particular subject. Regarding climate change, do we need more research? I don't know but it seems like if we're going to divert funds then maybe it should be toward action at this point. [1]. https://youtu.be/WIMGAFL8DVk https://youtu.be/WIMGAFL8DVk [2]. "the simplest assumption is no assumption" [3]. "an entity exists if it is useful to explain observed phenomena"
amatic 6y ago
Sabine is wonderful. Her blog has a recent guest post on the same topic by A. Strumia: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/06/guest-post-who-needs-giant-new-collider.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/06/guest-post-who-need...
fastball 6y ago
Humanity loses so much potential when discouraged by people that don't have an eye for the future. This reminds me of all the people that think we should stop all nuclear energy research because we have Wind, Solar, and Hydro. What if I want energy somewhere where those things are in short supply / don't exist at all (say, space?).
DrBazza 6y ago
This is one person's opinion vs. many other physicists in favour of building it. Building it serves two purposes: if either demonstrates that there's no new physics (within easy reach), or there is new physics. Both will trigger research for decades, regardless.
- jjtheblunt 6y ago
  Are you saying a purpose is to fund physicists with jobs?
  - craftyguy 6y ago
    Society generally gets more out of research than a bunch of gainfully employed physicists.
    - jjtheblunt 6y ago
      i totally agree (scientifically trained myself, took physics at Fermilab in fact); just wonder if that was the point
  - DrBazza 6y ago
    I'm just stating that without building it particle physics and industry around that will suffer. That includes material science, that develop the magnets and cooling, computer science that develop the systems and storage (no world wide web!), and so on.
hacknat 6y ago
The world doesn’t need anymore short-form opinion pieces, but here we are.
karmakaze 6y ago
Seems like a small price for trying to answer "What is the universe made of?" Similarly for space exploration (even if we weren't in need of a contingency plan) to know what's out there and satisfy natural curiosity. If there were projects to answer "what is our purpose for existence?"/"why do we exist?" or "do we exist?" I'd fund them too.
euix 6y ago
I haven't read the article but when I left the field 5 years ago it seemed like we were not going to find anything. By then most of the parameter space for SUSY had been excluded, dark matter didn't look promising, my area of expertise, strong gravity signatures was strongly excluded. So the margin for discovery and career advancement in the field was not great. Moreover if you didn't find anything around ~10 TeV you could make convincing theoretical arguments based on the Hierarchy problem you wouldn't find anything at 100 TeV or even 1000 TeV, the next energy regime where you might think you could find things would be something like 10^9 TeV where microscopic gravitational effects would become visible. Of course you are already near the limits of human engineering building a ~10-100 TeV collider. The only way you can probe higher energy would be in astrophysical processes or maybe cosmic rays. The other option is instead of going for higher center of mass energy you go for rates and try to channel high luminosity beams and do ultra precise measurements of physical parameters and try to deduce significant deviations from theory. That's the idea behind the ILC, electron beams are clean and with a linear collider you don't have synchrotron radiation background to worry about. Another way is the any number of fixed target neutrino experiments. Basically you setup an extremely sensitive detector somewhere with low background, like the bottom of a nickel mine and you wait to detect a once in a blue moon neutrino that interacts with the nucleus of an atom. But they too haven't found significant deviations from expectation to the best of my knowledge in recent years. All in all, I think high energy physics is in kind of a funk. Don't get me wrong, the technology of the modern world, including much of the big data techniques, what is used in the Big N tech companies was pioneered in particle physics but as a scientific field we are in kind of a funk. The LHC was supposed to guide the direction of theoretical research by excluding some and supporting other ideas but in the absence of any new discoveries the field is kind of without a clear direction. You have to have a strong theoretical argument for why you want to build a bigger collider.
- wespiser_2018 6y ago
  Great point. It seems like the money would go a lot further in advances science if spent doing running down other avenues for hypothesis driven research, not building a larger hammer.
jl6 6y ago
I wonder if there is a way to identify the side-effects of fundamental research and fund those instead? E.g. could the WWW have been created independently and better as a stand-alone project, rather than as a side-effect of CERN? Or are these side-effects more elusive, and the only way to generate them is to let smart people play with a problem?
jshaqaw 6y ago
One of the stranger spinoffs was the world of quantitative finance. Many of the physicists whose careers were killed when the SSC was cancelled found their way to Wall Street where their data analysis skills were put to use. Whether this was a net gain to society or not TBD.
RocketSyntax 6y ago
how much will it cost to maintain it?
RocketSyntax 6y ago
"a machine to collide electrons and positrons at energies similar to that of the LHC (which however uses protons on protons)"
jeffrallen 6y ago
Sour grapes.
08-15 6y ago
To Dr. Hossenfelder, climate change is more important that a bigger collider. But to the people actually funding the research with their own money, the perception may be the opposite. Oh, wait, the "people" funding it are actually governments who fund research using other people's money. That might explain why so much expensive nonsense like colliders or Neanderthal genomes is funded! Maybe we should change that.
fallingfrog 6y ago
When it comes to science in general, I’m a pessimist. I think we’re getting to the point of diminishing returns. But in this case, I’d say, do it- for this reason: there won’t be any better time than now, because we have a whole scientific and engineering community with experience building these things. If we wait 30 years before we make the next one, all that experience will have to be rebuilt from scratch. It’s a false premise that technology always marches forward; expertise gradually gets lost and infrastructure degrades if it is not used. In a sense, if you’re not moving forward, then you’re moving backwards. If we don’t build this now, then in 30 years we will turn around and discover that we couldn’t do it if we wanted to. Plus, we might actually discover something useful!
wizardforhire 6y ago
Obligatory oldie but goodie from the days of internet past[1] “WILLIAMSBURG DOESN'T NEED A SPACE ELEVATOR!” [1] https://boingboing.net/2005/02/01/brooklyn-residents-j.html https://boingboing.net/2005/02/01/brooklyn-residents-j.html
stormdennis 6y ago
This is very timely for me having just watched "Particle Fever" (2013) for the first time last night. I just want to reiterate the answer one of the theoretical physicists made when asked, what economic benefit the LHC will provide. His answer was "No idea" and then went on to the say that when radio waves were discovered, they weren't called "radio waves" and no one knew if those would be of any benefit either. You do the research to extend your knowledge for that reason alone. In a similar vein I heard an anecdote once, supposedly a toast that used to be made by academics in Oxford or Cambridge. "To pure mathematics and may it never be of any use to anyone". Later it turned out that without Number theory, practical secure communication over the internet would be impossible.
- codethief 6y ago
  > "To pure mathematics and may it never be of any use to anyone" That reminds me very much of G. H. Hardy. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy#Pure_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy#Pure_mathematics
at_a_remove 6y ago
If we find something, that's success, a reason to build another, larger collider. If we do not find something, we just didn't build big enough. The real challenge is to come up with a pro-collider argument that terminates. When do we stop? Do we make one which girdles the world? Do we disassemble the planets and encircle the Solar System for the one after that? Why not the Milky Way? The Local Group?
bawana 6y ago
I would suppport the building of a supercollider if its main mission was education. Imagine having dormitories on site where kids could live for 6 months while they learn by watching, doing, asking, helping. It could be a model for how we reshape our arthritic educational system that is SO INEFFICIENT. How many post docs actually get a job? And after what-30 years of toiling in an educational system that recreates serf labor and the fiefdoms of the Middle Ages?
knzhou 6y ago
> particle physicists should focus on developing new technologies that could bring colliders back in a reasonable price range and hold off digging more tunnels People keeping saying this, but we haven't been permitted to dig a single new tunnel since 1983. Multiple proposed colliders have been shot down, with the US's attempt defunded in the middle of construction. The LHC doesn't even have its own tunnel; it was put in the 1983 tunnel to save money. To save more money, the LHC is going to run for another 20 years, so any future collider's tunnel won't be dug until 2040 at the earliest. That is a nearly 60 year gap between new tunnels, which I find incredibly depressing. What I find almost incomprehensible, though, is that the people who successfully argued to defund earlier proposed colliders now argue to defund the next one on the basis that our field is progressing slowly! I wonder why that is?
- pugworthy 6y ago
  Not a facetious question, but what is the purpose of the tunnel? To protect the infrastructure of the collider?
  - osrec 6y ago
    I believe the tunnel contains the "track" that allows the particles to whizz around and be accelerated to very high speeds and eventually smash into each other, hopefully causing them to smash apart and reveal their inner contents.
  - knzhou 6y ago
    It helps shield the detectors from cosmic radiation, shields people living on the ground from radiation produced by the collider, and helps with vibrational isolation. But those are just nice bonuses. The most important reason is that there are already lots of people living a nice small-town life on the surface, and erecting a giant, dangerous ring would wreak havoc. It would require land rights, cut towns in half, split highways, trigger lawsuits, and probably end up costing more money and time than just digging.
pugworthy 6y ago
Just to brainstorm a bit, could one build a space-based collider at some point? Or lunar based? Certainly there are power requirements, but that is solvable. Same for structural rigidity, etc. Would there be any advantages of such a thing?
blablabla123 6y ago
> It would cost many billions of dollars, the potential rewards are unclear—and the money could be better spent researching threats such as climate change and emerging viruses ...and still there is no viable way to get rid of plastics out of the ocean, on how to treat Nuclear waste that remains active for centuries or how to get rid of the CO2 in the air. Not to speak of Nuclear fusion which would solve at least the CO2 emission side. Physics that was once new actually enables solar power, optical trash sorting with lasers and what not. New Physics could advance quantum computing which in turn could enable better weather simulations. The whole arguments seems pretty short-sighted and anti-scientific to me...
redis_mlc 6y ago
> The World Doesn’t Need a New Gigantic Particle Collider I can't comment on whether it's needed or not. But now is a great time to build it. War is the natural state, not peace, so a major international project like this should be done while possible. To balance the risk that little new is found, a rider could be attached to fund 10 small(er) projects. That would also allow continuous research while the new collider is being constructed or undergoing maintenance.
lumberingjack 6y ago
This is exactly what I was thinking when they were saying they're building a new one why are you wasting all of those resources
_ZeD_ 6y ago
I wonder what the opinion of the author of the article would have been if the collider had to be built in the US and not in the EU
blackrock 6y ago
When can we build them in the vacuum of space?

146 points by zekrioca 6y ago

kiba 6y ago

I do not know if building colliders should be considered increasingly futile. However, there are other points the author made. First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance. Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination. What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard? I supposed that could be useful, but even more pressing was how to motivate the people of Earth to make the necessary changes. Also, the money offered doesn't seem that huge on scale of countries. 1 billion dollars per year for operating cost? I suppose we could make better use of money that would otherwise go to making a new collider, but so we can do so elsewhere as well.

noir_lord 6y ago
> First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance. Me either and often the technology you get on the back of it doesn't show up for decades and decades anyway.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  So is that an argument now to stop basic research? That we can't even look across the horizon of our own lifetimes anymore? Even the Romans thought bigger than that.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    Is there an actual theoretical question that will be answered by an even bigger collider, or is it just, “let’s see what happens?” It’s not a question of whether basic research is fundamentally valuable but rather whether building larger and larger particle colliders will deliver diminishing returns in exchange for increasing costs.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      It's just "Let's see what happens" - and that's why it's a bad idea. LHC was justified as a search for the Higgs. The Higgs was found. Everyone was happy. Fine. LHC 2.0++ is just banging rocks together for the sake of it. Something interest might fall out, or it might not. But considering that we still don't understand quantum origins, have no clue how to make a theory of quantum gravity, and have no idea what Dark Energy is, or even if it exists at all, it might be better to spend the money on pursuing creative theoretical leads in those other directions and coming back to country-sized experimental hardware when there are some new theories to test.
      - henearkr 6y ago
        Today the axion is the new hypothetical fundamental particle that coincides with the status that had the Higgs boson two decades ago. It may very well be the next milestone.
        dnautics 6y ago
        What's the particle energy range needed to make an observation about axions?
        henearkr 6y ago
        Pretty tiny: 10−5 to 10−3 eV/c2 Though the utility of a big collider would be in diversifying the types of decays observed?
      - seamyb88 6y ago
        Banging rocks together has been a very fruitful method which is always limited by the technology. Many physicists believe that the rock banging should be an ongoing exercise which itself guides the theoretical directions. They also believe that there is an almost guaranteed chance of finding something, if their advances to higher energy are achieved. All we need is one anomaly in the vast data processing. There are many things which are expected to be seen at higher energies. If they are not seen, it still says a great deal and will guide theoretical discussion.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    Not what I meant, I was agreeing with the sentiment that we shouldn't stop doing science because it has no immediate application.
- close04 6y ago
  > the technology you get on the back of it doesn't show up for decades That would be an argument to start even sooner rather than later or never. If you want to combat the usefulness of the research the only arguments you can make are that the results are not useful at all, or that they can be obtained cheaper, faster, or more reliably with other means. The "it takes decades to bear fruit" works even against education. And I'm sure nobody would agree to be barred access to any tech that was the result of decades of research or simply took decades to reach market. I'm also not a fan of this project simply because I don't think an incremental advance in colliders will bring anything new at all, certainly not because it will take too long to reach market. As the saying goes, you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. To achieve the next breakthrough we need something on a scale we're simply not capable of building now, or soon.
  - techphys_91 6y ago
    As a counter point, the gravitational wave discovery came about because of incremental upgrades to the detector. We don't know whats beyond that noise floor. Maybe there are better ways to measure the tiny signals that hint at new physics, but the question is what we can do now. I would personally say its optimistic to assume we'll get a big breakthrough if we don't invest in the incremental upgrades.
    - close04 6y ago
      I didn't want to imply that incremental updates in general aren't useful. Just that many physicists' educated assessment (guess) is that new physics and new particles require energy levels that are out of reach right now, substantial higher than this new accelerator's. So now the expected outcome is to give a more detailed look for a slightly better understanding of what we already know, with a hefty price tag. This cost/benefit is where the current controversy comes from.
- dnautics 6y ago
  That's a big lie, it's extremely rare for big projects outside of wartime to create downstream tech that is generally usable. The big ones that are often claimed (Velcro for NASA and MRIs for the supercollider) are definitely lies. Usually big projects tend to need to be conservative and use off the shelf available materials (just in clever ways). Sabine's big point is not that we shouldn't do basic science, it's that we shouldn't do bad basic science; that is science that isn't driven by hypotheses. Historically in science you would create a new model that agrees with current facts, but makes an prediction that some unobserved event X would be observable. You build your apparatus or design an experiment to observe X, and then confirm of reject the model. In the case of a bigger collider, what is X?
  - jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
    > That's a big lie, it's extremely rare for big projects outside of wartime to create downstream tech that is generally usable. The big ones that are often claimed (Velcro for NASA and MRIs for the supercollider) are definitely lies. This quite mistaken based on what I've read. Historically NASA hovers at around a 10:1 ROI. SpaceX would not exist today without the huge benefit of all the material NASA has published historically. MRI may not have come from colliders, but modern medical imaging absolutely has benefited from these projects. There's a researcher that commented in a sibling thread with specific benefits to their project. > In the case of a bigger collider, what is X? Here's a quick summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      > Historically NASA hovers at around a 10:1 ROI. I suggest you look at what was spent on the Space Shuttle, which turned out to be non-reusable (it was re-manufactured after each flight for up to a year.) No ROI there. Fun facts: NASA knew from the very first flight that they were losing several tiles during launch, and no tiles were optional. Also, NASA managers were given photos of Columbia's damaged wing, which had a gaping hole in the leading edge, before re-entry, and sat on them. I wouldn't fly a Cessna 152 like that.) https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html That and the ISS sucked most of the funding out of US space research and is still going on. My constructive suggestion? Take a chain saw to the ISS on the next "mission."
awinder 6y ago
“Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination.” Yeah that argument was extremely dishonest. We don’t build a 1 billion dollar climate change center because that 1 billion is going to beget trillions of dollars in disruption. Throwing 20, 40 billion with staffing (which comes back into the economy) over a decade or more all-in is a total different ballgame.
TwoNineA 6y ago
"First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality" This is an extremely narrowminded view. Lasers, MRI, X-Ray machines, etc ... are all made by engineers after physicists tried to understand the fundamental nature of reality. One would argue that modern electronics are possible because research was done about Quantum Physics, a fundamental nature of reality.
- wernercd 6y ago
  > at least not for a long time The very next part of his statement covers that... It could be decades before "society" sees fruits of the research. > To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance. His next sentence also says "research is good for research sake" - there doesn't need to be "real world results" for the research to be worth it. You talk about narrow mindedness... then ignore second part of the first sentence and completely ignore the second sentence... Seems narrow minded to do that? I tend to agree on both those points... It could be a long time to see results and research for research can be good.
- radioactivist 6y ago
  While I sympathize with this viewpoint, as a physicist I think there is a fairly persistent misunderstanding in the public about just how disconnected current particle physics experiments are from application to everyday life. Essentially none of the particle physics done since the 1960s has had any application outside of fundamental knowledge, with no prospects for it having those applications in the future. At best, and even this is stretching a bit, there are indirect benefits of developing the machines that are needed to explore this frontier (i.e. like some of the argued benefits of space exploration). Whether that changes the calculus of whether these things are worth the price is still a question (in my opinion: they are), but I don't think making analogies to applications of discoveries of fundamental physics operating at very different energy scales is a good argument. The development of quantum physics (lasers, MRI, etc), while a frontier at the time, is essential to understanding commonplace things like the cohesion of solids or the properties of metals or semi-conductors (say) at room temperature. To my knowledge, there is nothing outside of astrophysical objects and the early universe that depends on knowing what is at the current frontiers in particle physics (or even what was the frontier in 50 years ago).
fluffything 6y ago
> What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard? No? Models are useful for making predictions. If somebody like the POTUS tells you that nuking thunderstorms would be great against climate change, you don't have to just take their word for it. You can input that into your climate change model, and it will tell you how much of an impact this will have, and whether the impact is good or bad. The difference between a better model and a worse model is that the better model will agree better with reality. A shitty model, like the one POTUS is using, might tell you that nuking all thunderstorms would be great. Then we go ahead and do it, and we all die. A better model, like the mental model that every 14 year old child that starts studying physics and radiation has, might tell you that nuking thunderstorms is a pretty bad idea that would kill us all due to dozens of reasons. Given that we cannot make accurate predictions today of what the weather tomorrow will look like. If you want to predict the 50 year impact of more subtle changes like, e.g., covering the Sahara with black mats, you need a pretty good model to get an output that isn't multiple orders of magnitude off. So..... what do we expect from better climate change models? Avoiding the apocalypse to begin with. Worth every penny.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
  >If somebody like the POTUS tells you that nuking thunderstorms would be great against climate change, you don't have to just take their word for it. You can input that into your climate change model, and it will tell you how much of an impact this will have, and whether the impact is good or bad. You have an odd concept of both how to determine if nuking a thunderstorm, which was not what was allegedly suggested, but also what large scale climate models actually capture.
- trekrich 6y ago
  And this is the problem with climate change models, they are just models. And get changed to suit the narrative thats currently being portrayed. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dozens-failed-climate-predictions-stretch-80-years-back https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dozens-failed-climate-pr... All this based on models, and look how wrong they where.
platz 6y ago
I disagree with every premise in this comment.
gonzo41 6y ago
"First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality" About 10K construction jobs, from high tech to low tech over the life of the build phase of the project, which is overlapping a world wide downturn of unknown length of time. I mean they could build staircase to the top of the tall hill and still not have it be a waste if it keeps people in work and out of harms way. In this case we may get some physics as an upside to a neat way to stimulate industry.
- rjmunro 6y ago
  Surely those 10K construction jobs could be used to build things with much more relevance, maybe things to reduce / mitigate climate change.
cma 6y ago
> First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality, at least not for a long time. To me, it isn't necessary for every research to have social relevance. Berners-Lee invented the web while working at CERN on organizing scientific information for collides and stuff. > The stage was being set for the invention of the World Wide Web, and future history books will recount how, almost alone, Sendall supported the pioneering work of Tim Berners-Lee, then working in his group. After reading Berners-Lee's prophetic 1989 proposal for what would become the Web, Sendall wrote on the cover "Vague but exciting", and added at the end - "And now?" The rest is already history.
yojo 6y ago
> Also, I thought climate change was pretty much a problem of social coordination. What exactly do we gain from building better model of climate change? Knowing where it's going to hit us hard? I supposed that could be useful, but even more pressing was how to motivate the people of Earth to make the necessary changes. It's not either or. Knowing the impact is valuable for mitigating damage. You can allocate capital for mitigation more effectively if you have a more accurate model of the threats. Presumably at some levels funding more accurate models are net cost-saving, by increasing the efficiency of spend. I have no idea if we have or have not passed that level. Similarly, a better model might provide a better understanding of different strategies for curtailing climate change. e.g. planting trees takes carbon out of the air directly (easy to estimate), but also changes the albedo of the underlying terrain. The impact of the albedo change is less clear, particularly as to how it changes regional weather patterns. It might benefit from better models to guide the most impactful locations to reforest. Again, I'm not an expert/maybe this is a solved problem, but I can see how these cases might exist.
ip26 6y ago
If better models of climate change allow us to predict more precisely what will happen, we may be able to get people to care more. If we can say with a high degree of certainty that City X is going to see 4.5x as many terrible hurricanes every year, then the people of City X may have a more vested interest than if we say "there will probably be more hurricanes".
- hannob 6y ago
  The counterexample is Australia. We can say with high certainty that the great barrier reef will die unless some miracle happens and the world limits warming to 1.5°. And even then most of the reef will be gone. Yet Australia is a country that basically has no real climate policy at all, they still plan for decades of new(!) coal extraction.
  - ip26 6y ago
    That is an excellent counterexample. It defies comprehension.
- imtringued 6y ago
  The problem is that nobody cares about your model. If it's too grim then people will refuse to believe it. If it's too optimistic people won't do anything.
f6v 6y ago
Let's not make this a choice between colliders and "something good for society". We have so many other things we could take resources from: social media apps, fashion, luxury industry. Only when all of the parasitic industries are gone can we think whether we need a new particle accelerator, or, say, a new DNA sequencing technology.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  However those are all private enterprises? Are you saying that we need to eliminate privately owned assets/capitalism?
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
Resource allocation is a moot point when it comes to CERN projects because CERN manages their own funding and they have one mission, to do particle research. The fact that they manage their budget is exactly why they can do things like big accelerators, unlike the United States who destroyed their half-way dug accelerator before it even came online. And besides that, CERN is literally the only place on Earth with the foundations for this kind of research.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> I suppose we could make better use of money that would otherwise go to making a new collider, but so we can do so elsewhere as well. Tell that to the hundreds, thousands, of valid scientific projects that cannot find funding. This collider, if built, represents not only a lot of money but those hundreds of smaller projects that didn't happen. I once heard a physicist say that our society spends more on ring tones than it does fusion research. I suspect that this collider would yield an inverse. We will spend more on a narrow aspect of particle science than we do on vaccine research. More than on new antibiotics? More than on SETI? More than on detecting possible life in our own solar system? Particle science is great, but there are more efficient ways to spend billions.
bsder 6y ago
> First, I don't expect anything relevant to society at large when it comes to doing research on the fundamental nature of reality The Superconducting Supercollider would have had to figure out how to deal with fire ants (apparently the magnetic fields attracted them). That's the kind of really useful technology that spins out of projects like this.

mikro2nd 6y ago

The premise of this article is quite flawed. We don't need to spend the money "researching threats such as climate change", we need to get off our collective duff and actually do something to stop dumping Carbon into the air-ocean and to start removing some of that which we've already put there. Whether we build another giant particle accelerator or two (reminder: Not only CERN is interested, but China is already well down that path) is almost irrelevant if we don't fix our pollution and destruction of the ecosystems that allow Homo sap. to live comfortably (or, possibly, at all).

philwelch 6y ago
> We don't need to spend the money "researching threats such as climate change", we need to get off our collective duff and actually do something to stop dumping Carbon into the air-ocean and to start removing some of that which we've already put there. Figuring out how to do that economically and at scale includes a number of research problems. How do we generate power, produce concrete, do metallurgy, transport goods, fly airplanes, etc. without greenhouse gas emissions? How do we capture and sequester greenhouse gas emissions? How do we develop closed-loop sources for chemical fuels? How do we store energy in the power grid?
- techphys_91 6y ago
  While I agree, I'm not sure the funding for many of these problems should come from the budget of fundamental physics.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    Where does the budget for fundamental physics come from, then?
- adrianN 6y ago
  We have the technology to get at least to 80% carbon neutrality and we're on a very tight time schedule. Asking for "more research" before investing massively into the things we already know how to do is stupid. Improving the economics must come after we delayed the existential threat.

nxpnsv 6y ago

Typical Hossenfelder.

pugworthy 6y ago
What exactly is a "typical Hossenfelder"? Can you explain beyond the offhand personal slight comment?
- nxpnsv 6y ago
  Just read some of her science opinion articles. This one is a typical example.

earthicus 6y ago

Here's a nice 20min presentation by Nima Arkani-Hamed in favor of a new collider: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4zv80qs3Q

macleginn 6y ago
TD;DL: we discovered Higgs, but we don't know much about it because LHC doesn't give us enough resolution, and its exact properties are crucial for the future of the whole of theoretical physics. Therefore, even if we do not hope to discover new particles, there's motivation enough to build bigger colliders.

aduitsis 6y ago

The article says something that is perfectly sensible. Reading it carefully, it seems that the author is doubtful whether building a 100km collider is the correct way forward, given its enormous cost. That is a very valid subject and totally worthy of serious discussion. In any case, we should never forget that without advancements in fundamental physics we are going nowhere as a species. We might be able to come up with better refinements, better techniques, slightly better computers, etc. But sooner or later we are going to hit a physical limit, and we are going to need to seriously enlarge our fundamental knowledge corpus of how the universe operates if we are going to keep moving forward.

jacquesm 6y ago
I would favor an argument not rooted in cost but in physics. Whether it is costly or not is not a factor in whether it is the correct way forward, if it gets results it is the way forward, even if it is costly unless a cheaper alternative can be found. If it can't get results then it is wasted money no matter what the cost.
- philwelch 6y ago
  > I would favor an argument not rooted in cost but in physics. Did we read the same article? > New measurements brought up new puzzles, and they built bigger colliders until, in 2012, the picture was complete. The Standard Model still has some loose ends, but experimentally testing those would require energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test. The scientific case for a next larger collider is therefore presently slim. > Yes, one can hope. But there is no reason why the particles that make up dark matter or dark energy should show up in the new device’s energy range. And that is assuming they are particles to begin with, for which there no evidence. Even if they are particles, moreover, highly energetic collisions may not be the best way to look for them. Weakly interacting particles with tiny masses, for example, are not something one looks for with large colliders. > And there are entirely different types of experiments that could lead to breakthroughs at far smaller costs, such as high precision measurements at low energies or increasing the masses of objects in quantum states. Going to higher energies is not the only way to make progress in the foundations of physics; it’s just the most expensive one.

O5vYtytb 6y ago

The same argument said over and over again throughout history. Why spend effort on uncertain future outcomes when today's issues are most important?

lostmsu 6y ago
You don't know that. What if tomorrow physics can solve today's problems with nearly no effort?
- ncmncm 6y ago
  What if tomorrow physics depend on funding not available because LHC2 ate the budget? Cf. "opportunity cost"
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    I did not say anything about LHC2 opportunity cost being better than no LHC2 for physics. I was giving a counterargument for specific flawed reasoning/question.
pugworthy 6y ago
It's a good argument, however I think it's pretty clear to a lot of people that today's issues (e.g., climate change) are indeed real and indeed important. But to your question of why to spend on them, it's because it's going to cost us a lot more (and not just money) down the line if we don't address it.

turbinerneiter 6y ago

I would really love to see other ideas for physics than going higher energy colliders. Granted, my knowledge is limited, but to me it feels like in experimental physics right now there is a bunch of expensive and complex experiments that look like they reached diminishing returns. Generally, in tech it feels like we keep eeking out small improvements in efficiency, but there is nothing that jumps us up a level. But also: * govs and central banks all over the world are printing money like crazy so the economy doesn't tank * important research projects still battle for funding * climate change battling measures, like building clean power plants and storage, are not built at large enough scale because money is not there Where is all the trillions going? Stock market and real estate? Cool. Do we get any value out of it? Is pensions funds all that matters anymore?

uaaiIbab 6y ago

Objectively, spending the money on covid research would be more beneficial than a particle collider. I don't see how anyone can even debate this. I know CERN doesn't specialise in that, but my question is why is our society so inefficient when it comes to spending money? If you had 20 billion euros, you're telling me you can't buy anything else more productive for physicists to work on with it? It's 20 billion euros. You could buy a small country with that.

henearkr 6y ago
Suppose you find a way to use some grand-unification energy source thanks to some new high-energy physics discovery. Then that would mean way more energy available to manufacture tests, medical supplies, synthetic coton and masks, electricity to perform new drugs research on computational models, etc. Of course, that's the best-case scenario, but the way progress goes has always been quite impredictable.
- uaaiIbab 6y ago
  A bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. Having physicists continue work using the current collider and literally spending the 20b on education, would be a better use of their money than this.
  - henearkr 6y ago
    I understand your way of thinking, but if it had been meticulously followed throughout history, don't you think that almost no scientific research would have been made? Why should anyone spend time thinking when we have so much to do with our hands and readily available knowledge?
    - uaaiIbab 6y ago
      The difference is that most scientific breakthroughs didn't cost 20 billion euros. Not trying to be a smartass, i know the value of research without a certain end goal or outcome, i just think this is one exception where money is irresponsibly spent.

snissn 6y ago

Isn't this article the textbook definition of concern trolling?

vikramkr 6y ago
Isn't concern trolling when you pretend to support something but actually make arguments against it? This article seems to be pretty firmly against the idea of building a collider from the title on. I would think textbook concern trolling would be indicated by an argument like "I want a bigger particle collider, but I'm just concerned about the cost" while this article just says a particle collider is not going to be useful, lets fund something else instead of investing on inertia
Avamander 6y ago
Pretty much.

ReptileMan 6y ago

Actually climate change is the main reason we need bigger colliders - it's happening, we won't coordinate until it is too late, so unless we find new sources of energy of whole different magnitude we are doomed. I suggest we move to acceptance stage already. Right now most people are in anger or denial and it is getting boring.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

coliveira 6y ago

I disagree. Doing science is one of the best ways for us to spend money as a society. The money spent there is not "wasted", a lot comes back in jobs, training, better technologies. Moreover, it is money that goes into society, not into the pockets of a few scoundrels linked to billionaires. This is an extremely retrograde view of science, in my opinion.

jfengel 6y ago
I don't think they disagree that we should spend money on science. The question is which science. A bigger collider is a lot of money, following a lot of money on the existing collider. It could instead be spent in many other areas, with at least as good an opportunity to repay itself in jobs and technologies. Fundamental physics is sexy and has had tremendous success, but less sexy areas can also provide benefits.
BurningFrog 6y ago
I'm all for spending money on science. But I can't imagine that throwing ever more billions into this particular very well funded science establishment is the best way to do it.
- ozim 6y ago
  I think the problem is that this well funded science establishment is good at getting money where other science people are not that good at it. Maybe better to spend it on some science than on something else if other scientists would not manage to get that funding anyway.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  This well funded science establishment gets funding from universities based on positions available. CERN doesn't need grants.
08-15 6y ago
Who cares where the money goes? Money is just worthless green paper. The fact is, highly trained people are fed by the government, which is turn steal that food from someone else, to research something of questionable value. All the effort that went into training those people, and the effort to feed them, and the good these people could otherwise do, may be wasted. "We as society" (What does that even mean?) shouldn't spend effort on science. You as an individual should.

cesaref 6y ago

I'm bothered by the attempt to suggest we either have a particle accelerator or a global warming research centre (or whatever it was called). I can't see why they are related, and imagine there is room for both. I don't think human knowledge and striving for it should be reduced to a question of what the practical benefits of it are - that sort of thinking didn't put man on the moon. So overall, not a very well argued position from my perspective.

kashyapc 6y ago

Related discussion here, from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611738 (CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider)

dang 6y ago
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577124 from a few days earlier
- njarboe 6y ago
  As quoted in this previous discussion, I think this is a key point: "particle physicists should focus on developing new technologies that could bring colliders back in a reasonable price range and hold off digging more tunnels." Creating just a bigger version of the current collider with incremental advancements in technology is very likely a poor use of science euros. The money should be used to investigate other methods for particle acceleration and investigation. Some linear accelerator concepts could be much less expensive than very large circular colliders, but I imagine research into those areas are not funded due to the particle physics budget being mostly consumed by CERN. This type of problem has happened in fusion research. The fundamental physics of how to build an economic fusion reactor still needs to be worked out, but almost all funding has been cut in fusion research to pour concrete and build magnets for the ITER project. It is clear that the $14 billion and rising reactor cannot lead to economically viable fusion reactors on any kind of reasonable timescale. ITER is currently planned to be fully operational in 2035 and, if the past is anything like the future, there will continue to be more delays.
  - knzhou 6y ago
    > Some linear accelerator concepts could be much less expensive than very large circular colliders, but I imagine research into those areas are not funded due to the particle physics budget being mostly consumed by CERN. That's not true; CERN has no particular commitment to circular colliders. Scientists from CERN have proposed linear colliders, along with more exotic options like muon colliders.

armitron 6y ago

It's surprising to see so many comments here entirely miss the point, or arguing against points Sabine never made. She's not arguing for stopping scientific research, but finding more optimal ways to do said research. She has continuously been pointing out that the particle physics community behaves like a cabal. There is little if any progress or evidence of future progress yet they keep increasing costs and forging ahead with their -surely by now flawed- interpretation of scientific research. Sabine Hossenfelder outlined a lot of unexplored scientific areas that are ripe for research and proposed a lot of alternatives. The main issue is clearly the sunk cost fallacy. At some point, scientists need to cut their losses short and re-align themselves with more promising avenues. The reproducibility crisis and string theory debacle proves that scientists are not immune to biases, short-termism and self-serving behavior.

henearkr 6y ago
I'm curious why you call the string theory a debacle. From what I followed, the debacle was rather with supersymmetry. And even though, the research in this domain stimulated the development of new mathematical tools. Finally, as with all failed research, it would have been pretty hard to rule it out without trying to search it before, so this negative result is as much positive result in favor of rival theories. (maybe super-asymmetry ;)
- istorical 6y ago
  Probably because for the amount of time and money its absorbed it seems to produce very little of value in terms of applications, it's hard to perform real experiments with, and string theory and high energy particle collision physics both absorb the vast majority of grant money - and by extension - make it harder to do work in physics that doesn't pay homage to those two large bodies or continue that work.
  - lurkmurk 6y ago
    Also generations of students stuck in this hole because the supervisors that have paid positions stick to string theory deadend -- a feedback loop.

vaidhy 6y ago

I do not understand why it is a “either or” problem. We could fund CERN and climate research and other things. It just comes down to political will. Trying to phrase them as one for other is disingenuous and wrong. There is also a hidden assumption that all science work should have immediate social relevance and impact and one kind of science is replaceable by another. By that logic, we should not think about space exploration since the marine ecosystem is being over-fished.

ChrisLomont 6y ago
>Trying to phrase them as one for other is disingenuous and wrong. By this logic we can spend infinite money on infinite wants, but this is simply not true. Money spent on one project forces there to be less for other projects. As such it's reasonable to consider opportunity costs for a project.
- henearkr 6y ago
  Let's say we stop international conflicts, make successful demographic transitions in all countries, and concentrate our time and efforts in making progress in biology, physics, and all? Yes I know that what I propose is impossible right know, but it makes me cringe that we are such an irrational species...
- vaidhy 6y ago
  I do not believe this to be a zero sum game. You can argue for the merits of each one independently. Along with infinite wants, we also have infinite problems.
  - ChrisLomont 6y ago
    It’s not zero sum in the long run. But the converse of zero sum is not unlimited sum, especially in the foreseeable future. Thus spending on one project limits Spending for other projects.

hartator 6y ago

> But CERN’s plan, if fully executed, would cost tens of billions of dollars. I am generally against gov. spending, but it doesn't seem much compared to the waste on other industries.

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
It indeed is not much for such a project because CERN doesn't need grants. Universities pay for staff positions instead.

nubero 6y ago

It’s a mystery to me how people with an outlook as parochial as Sabine Hossenfelder’s even get a job in the sciences. This is really mind bending and quite frankly unsettling.

Barrin92 6y ago
I'm not sure if you're being satirical or so unaware that you're actually just proving her point without even noticing it. Physics has been captured by so much rent-seeking activity that many people who feel like Hossenfelder don't even speak up any more because they're afraid of killing their career.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
So concentrating on science to "fix" climate change is less important than a new particle collider? What good will a particle collider do if the human race has radically changed the climate in the next 50 years? That's her point and it's very relevant.
nubero 6y ago
Looking at the replies to my comment, it seems clear that the brain rot is well advanced with some people. Therefore some random points in no special order: 23 billion is nothing for a project that has 23, mostly western European, member states paying for it. The GDP of Switzerland alone (which has a population of only 8.5 million) was around 700 billion in 2019. Climate change is not going to be solved by an “International Center for Climate Modeling”. That is so completely nonsensical that I didn’t even thought it worth pointing out. We already have climate models – that’s how we know we have a problem. Also, we have solar, wind, hydroelectricity and nuclear fission already. The first two could be refined a lot. The last one I am not a fan of but it’s either that or coal in many places. THAT is what’s going to solve our energy and thus climate problems. It will also solve some longstanding geopolitical problems as a bonus (no more western money for the Saudis). That being said, nuclear fusion could be developed much faster (than ITER is) with the right minds and organizational structure behind it. Just look at the Space Launch System (SLS) which still doesn’t exist, has cost 20 billion already and whose ultimate goal is throwaway rockets vs. what SpaceX has done with a fraction of the money, faster. Then there’s individual transportation which is being solved right now with electric cars and batteries. Both of which are just at the beginning of their development. More interesting to me however, is the loss of energy through badly built homes that have almost no insulation at all (U.S. and Japan come to mind). Hossenfelder rhetorically asking “why, you may have wondered recently, do we not have a center for epidemic modeling” is the worst kind of pandering to the fears of the people at this moment. It’s also wrong because epidemic modeling has been done for a long time at many universities and the pharmaceutical industry. Hossenfelder says a lot of extremely idiotic things in her piece but “the potential rewards are unclear” is on my number one spot: The potential rewards in experimental science are always unclear – that’s one of the key characteristics of experimental science. The only point she could potentially have would be the one about inertia in funding. That’s something I don’t see into as I don’t work in that field. Given, however, how ill-informed and, I have to assume, ill-intentioned her other twaddle in that article is, I would rather hear that information about funding problems from a more trustworthy source than her.

rytill 6y ago

Of all the expenditures to attack in order to fund climate change and emerging viruses, you choose a particle collider?

beamatronic 6y ago

Let's build telescopes in space instead. There's an endless variety of high-energy events to observe.

fbn79 6y ago

Reminds me of Interstellar synossy. Why spend money for the space when the world need farmers.

exclipy 6y ago

I would much rather see these billions spent on fusion research. Right now, we don't even know if humanity as we know it will be around in 100 years to reap the potential benefits of particle physics knowledge.

buboard 6y ago

Maybe she has a point, but for the wrong reasons. There's something to be said about "throwing more money" believing that it will end up in better science. It's politically easy to pass a bigger, huger accelerator: tons of jobs, recognizability of the effort by taxpayers , but scientifically it's a rather predictable bet. It's similar to rich people throwing megatons of money on startups believing that they are creating something useful. LHC size projects are not that exciting projects. They are mostly a welfare package for the hordes of decomissioned physicists who are left behind after the wild century of Physics. It's probably more fruitul to seek innovative accelerator designs or other kinds of stuff. Or, that money would probably better be spent if they just paid the scientists to work and compete on whatever they like. Perhaps physics needs more patent clerks who spent a lot of time thinking rather than submitting grants, catching flights to perpetual meetings and publishing 500-author papers.

ncmncm 6y ago
Indeed, big colliders are like the Space Shuttle of science. The STS was an unmitigated disaster for everything associated with getting space-related things done. It sucked up all the money and gave net nothing back. A big collider will be good at soaking up budget with not much detail oversight needed, but will not deliver new insight. For that you need one a hundred times bigger, say straddling the moon. Which we would be better-equipped to build today, if not for the Space Shuttle.

dannykwells 6y ago

Couldn't agree more. Obsession with fundamental physics as "the only way forward as a species" is absurd. Do any of our discoveries in CRISPR or check point inhibitors rely on the knowledge of the Higgs Boson or the fundamental theory? No. Stop the obsession with quixotic physics quests. Spend the same (or more!) resources on apied science focused on climate change, pandemics, longevity, clean energy, etc. Far more rewards in that direction.

saagarjha 6y ago
> Do any of our discoveries in CRISPR or check point inhibitors rely on the knowledge of the Higgs Boson or the fundamental theory? No. Well, yeah, because they're advances in medicine…

guerrilla 6y ago

Here's a video that she made on the subject in mid-2019 [1]. I really love her other videos and her philosophical pragmatism [2][3], but honestly I don't know why she's been spending so much energy on this particular subject. Regarding climate change, do we need more research? I don't know but it seems like if we're going to divert funds then maybe it should be toward action at this point. [1]. https://youtu.be/WIMGAFL8DVk https://youtu.be/WIMGAFL8DVk [2]. "the simplest assumption is no assumption" [3]. "an entity exists if it is useful to explain observed phenomena"

amatic 6y ago

Sabine is wonderful. Her blog has a recent guest post on the same topic by A. Strumia: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/06/guest-post-who-needs-giant-new-collider.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/06/guest-post-who-need...

fastball 6y ago

Humanity loses so much potential when discouraged by people that don't have an eye for the future. This reminds me of all the people that think we should stop all nuclear energy research because we have Wind, Solar, and Hydro. What if I want energy somewhere where those things are in short supply / don't exist at all (say, space?).

DrBazza 6y ago

This is one person's opinion vs. many other physicists in favour of building it. Building it serves two purposes: if either demonstrates that there's no new physics (within easy reach), or there is new physics. Both will trigger research for decades, regardless.

jjtheblunt 6y ago
Are you saying a purpose is to fund physicists with jobs?
- craftyguy 6y ago
  Society generally gets more out of research than a bunch of gainfully employed physicists.
  - jjtheblunt 6y ago
    i totally agree (scientifically trained myself, took physics at Fermilab in fact); just wonder if that was the point
- DrBazza 6y ago
  I'm just stating that without building it particle physics and industry around that will suffer. That includes material science, that develop the magnets and cooling, computer science that develop the systems and storage (no world wide web!), and so on.

hacknat 6y ago

The world doesn’t need anymore short-form opinion pieces, but here we are.

karmakaze 6y ago

Seems like a small price for trying to answer "What is the universe made of?" Similarly for space exploration (even if we weren't in need of a contingency plan) to know what's out there and satisfy natural curiosity. If there were projects to answer "what is our purpose for existence?"/"why do we exist?" or "do we exist?" I'd fund them too.

euix 6y ago

I haven't read the article but when I left the field 5 years ago it seemed like we were not going to find anything. By then most of the parameter space for SUSY had been excluded, dark matter didn't look promising, my area of expertise, strong gravity signatures was strongly excluded. So the margin for discovery and career advancement in the field was not great. Moreover if you didn't find anything around ~10 TeV you could make convincing theoretical arguments based on the Hierarchy problem you wouldn't find anything at 100 TeV or even 1000 TeV, the next energy regime where you might think you could find things would be something like 10^9 TeV where microscopic gravitational effects would become visible. Of course you are already near the limits of human engineering building a ~10-100 TeV collider. The only way you can probe higher energy would be in astrophysical processes or maybe cosmic rays. The other option is instead of going for higher center of mass energy you go for rates and try to channel high luminosity beams and do ultra precise measurements of physical parameters and try to deduce significant deviations from theory. That's the idea behind the ILC, electron beams are clean and with a linear collider you don't have synchrotron radiation background to worry about. Another way is the any number of fixed target neutrino experiments. Basically you setup an extremely sensitive detector somewhere with low background, like the bottom of a nickel mine and you wait to detect a once in a blue moon neutrino that interacts with the nucleus of an atom. But they too haven't found significant deviations from expectation to the best of my knowledge in recent years. All in all, I think high energy physics is in kind of a funk. Don't get me wrong, the technology of the modern world, including much of the big data techniques, what is used in the Big N tech companies was pioneered in particle physics but as a scientific field we are in kind of a funk. The LHC was supposed to guide the direction of theoretical research by excluding some and supporting other ideas but in the absence of any new discoveries the field is kind of without a clear direction. You have to have a strong theoretical argument for why you want to build a bigger collider.

wespiser_2018 6y ago
Great point. It seems like the money would go a lot further in advances science if spent doing running down other avenues for hypothesis driven research, not building a larger hammer.

jl6 6y ago

I wonder if there is a way to identify the side-effects of fundamental research and fund those instead? E.g. could the WWW have been created independently and better as a stand-alone project, rather than as a side-effect of CERN? Or are these side-effects more elusive, and the only way to generate them is to let smart people play with a problem?

jshaqaw 6y ago

One of the stranger spinoffs was the world of quantitative finance. Many of the physicists whose careers were killed when the SSC was cancelled found their way to Wall Street where their data analysis skills were put to use. Whether this was a net gain to society or not TBD.

RocketSyntax 6y ago

how much will it cost to maintain it?

RocketSyntax 6y ago

"a machine to collide electrons and positrons at energies similar to that of the LHC (which however uses protons on protons)"

jeffrallen 6y ago

Sour grapes.

08-15 6y ago

To Dr. Hossenfelder, climate change is more important that a bigger collider. But to the people actually funding the research with their own money, the perception may be the opposite. Oh, wait, the "people" funding it are actually governments who fund research using other people's money. That might explain why so much expensive nonsense like colliders or Neanderthal genomes is funded! Maybe we should change that.

fallingfrog 6y ago

When it comes to science in general, I’m a pessimist. I think we’re getting to the point of diminishing returns. But in this case, I’d say, do it- for this reason: there won’t be any better time than now, because we have a whole scientific and engineering community with experience building these things. If we wait 30 years before we make the next one, all that experience will have to be rebuilt from scratch. It’s a false premise that technology always marches forward; expertise gradually gets lost and infrastructure degrades if it is not used. In a sense, if you’re not moving forward, then you’re moving backwards. If we don’t build this now, then in 30 years we will turn around and discover that we couldn’t do it if we wanted to. Plus, we might actually discover something useful!

wizardforhire 6y ago

Obligatory oldie but goodie from the days of internet past[1] “WILLIAMSBURG DOESN'T NEED A SPACE ELEVATOR!” [1] https://boingboing.net/2005/02/01/brooklyn-residents-j.html https://boingboing.net/2005/02/01/brooklyn-residents-j.html

stormdennis 6y ago

This is very timely for me having just watched "Particle Fever" (2013) for the first time last night. I just want to reiterate the answer one of the theoretical physicists made when asked, what economic benefit the LHC will provide. His answer was "No idea" and then went on to the say that when radio waves were discovered, they weren't called "radio waves" and no one knew if those would be of any benefit either. You do the research to extend your knowledge for that reason alone. In a similar vein I heard an anecdote once, supposedly a toast that used to be made by academics in Oxford or Cambridge. "To pure mathematics and may it never be of any use to anyone". Later it turned out that without Number theory, practical secure communication over the internet would be impossible.

codethief 6y ago
> "To pure mathematics and may it never be of any use to anyone" That reminds me very much of G. H. Hardy. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy#Pure_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy#Pure_mathematics

at_a_remove 6y ago

If we find something, that's success, a reason to build another, larger collider. If we do not find something, we just didn't build big enough. The real challenge is to come up with a pro-collider argument that terminates. When do we stop? Do we make one which girdles the world? Do we disassemble the planets and encircle the Solar System for the one after that? Why not the Milky Way? The Local Group?

bawana 6y ago

I would suppport the building of a supercollider if its main mission was education. Imagine having dormitories on site where kids could live for 6 months while they learn by watching, doing, asking, helping. It could be a model for how we reshape our arthritic educational system that is SO INEFFICIENT. How many post docs actually get a job? And after what-30 years of toiling in an educational system that recreates serf labor and the fiefdoms of the Middle Ages?

knzhou 6y ago

> particle physicists should focus on developing new technologies that could bring colliders back in a reasonable price range and hold off digging more tunnels People keeping saying this, but we haven't been permitted to dig a single new tunnel since 1983. Multiple proposed colliders have been shot down, with the US's attempt defunded in the middle of construction. The LHC doesn't even have its own tunnel; it was put in the 1983 tunnel to save money. To save more money, the LHC is going to run for another 20 years, so any future collider's tunnel won't be dug until 2040 at the earliest. That is a nearly 60 year gap between new tunnels, which I find incredibly depressing. What I find almost incomprehensible, though, is that the people who successfully argued to defund earlier proposed colliders now argue to defund the next one on the basis that our field is progressing slowly! I wonder why that is?

pugworthy 6y ago
Not a facetious question, but what is the purpose of the tunnel? To protect the infrastructure of the collider?
- osrec 6y ago
  I believe the tunnel contains the "track" that allows the particles to whizz around and be accelerated to very high speeds and eventually smash into each other, hopefully causing them to smash apart and reveal their inner contents.
- knzhou 6y ago
  It helps shield the detectors from cosmic radiation, shields people living on the ground from radiation produced by the collider, and helps with vibrational isolation. But those are just nice bonuses. The most important reason is that there are already lots of people living a nice small-town life on the surface, and erecting a giant, dangerous ring would wreak havoc. It would require land rights, cut towns in half, split highways, trigger lawsuits, and probably end up costing more money and time than just digging.

pugworthy 6y ago

Just to brainstorm a bit, could one build a space-based collider at some point? Or lunar based? Certainly there are power requirements, but that is solvable. Same for structural rigidity, etc. Would there be any advantages of such a thing?

blablabla123 6y ago

> It would cost many billions of dollars, the potential rewards are unclear—and the money could be better spent researching threats such as climate change and emerging viruses ...and still there is no viable way to get rid of plastics out of the ocean, on how to treat Nuclear waste that remains active for centuries or how to get rid of the CO2 in the air. Not to speak of Nuclear fusion which would solve at least the CO2 emission side. Physics that was once new actually enables solar power, optical trash sorting with lasers and what not. New Physics could advance quantum computing which in turn could enable better weather simulations. The whole arguments seems pretty short-sighted and anti-scientific to me...

redis_mlc 6y ago

> The World Doesn’t Need a New Gigantic Particle Collider I can't comment on whether it's needed or not. But now is a great time to build it. War is the natural state, not peace, so a major international project like this should be done while possible. To balance the risk that little new is found, a rider could be attached to fund 10 small(er) projects. That would also allow continuous research while the new collider is being constructed or undergoing maintenance.

lumberingjack 6y ago

This is exactly what I was thinking when they were saying they're building a new one why are you wasting all of those resources

_ZeD_ 6y ago

I wonder what the opinion of the author of the article would have been if the collider had to be built in the US and not in the EU

blackrock 6y ago

When can we build them in the vacuum of space?