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I don't know of any promising prospects. I think nuclear physics provides an instructive example that sits in between some of these extremes. Here the energy s

I don't know of any promising prospects. I think nuclear physics provides an instructive example that sits in between some of these extremes. Here the energy scales are way way lower than current frontier standards, but also fairly divorced from things in everyday life. Yet nuclear physics has applications (in medicine, in power and [unfortunately] in war). These applications do tend however to be quite specialized (we don't have atomic cars, vacuum cleaners or whatever) so it didn't revolutionize the world the way our understanding of electromagnetism or quantum mechanics did. [I don't want to downplay the effect of nuclear science, but it isn't ubiquitous in our lives]. Barring a fundamental change in our understanding, I would expect that trade off between energy scale and specialization to continue to hold and any developments based on particle physics (of the 60s-present) to be very specialized. Let me be clear though -- you don't know what you don't know. It could be that what I think are reasonable expectations are wrong, and there are surprises waiting for us (this is one of the reasons I think particle physics is worth supporting).

emn13 6y ago
In a sense though - that's what we should have been expecting all along. Particle physics may have had surprises for the experts along the way, but what it did not have are hidden ways to use those newly discovered particles without those huge energies; and similarly for the weakly-interacting stuff. That may not hold forever; but it's not a crazy assumption. Something who's existence you cannot deduce without energies that need specialized billion dollar equipment to reach is almost by definition not ever going to create or influence ubiquitous tech. That's quite different from stuff like quantum mechanics; those effects are quite visible in fairly everyday situations (e.g. the double-slit experiment doesn't need anything too exotic, and obviously lots of modern tech relies on tricks classical physics might observe but not predict). That means that if particle physics is to be relevant, it's most likely going to be in places that are not ubiquitous. Maybe it'll help astronomers understand the universe, and maybe that has some application down the line. Or maybe it'll be in absurdly expensive high-energy devices that matter even with only a few copies in the world (and let's hope those aren't yet more weapons). Still, seems reasonable to be pessimistic about the usefulness of particle physics investments of this type.

emn13 6y ago

In a sense though - that's what we should have been expecting all along. Particle physics may have had surprises for the experts along the way, but what it did not have are hidden ways to use those newly discovered particles without those huge energies; and similarly for the weakly-interacting stuff. That may not hold forever; but it's not a crazy assumption. Something who's existence you cannot deduce without energies that need specialized billion dollar equipment to reach is almost by definition not ever going to create or influence ubiquitous tech. That's quite different from stuff like quantum mechanics; those effects are quite visible in fairly everyday situations (e.g. the double-slit experiment doesn't need anything too exotic, and obviously lots of modern tech relies on tricks classical physics might observe but not predict). That means that if particle physics is to be relevant, it's most likely going to be in places that are not ubiquitous. Maybe it'll help astronomers understand the universe, and maybe that has some application down the line. Or maybe it'll be in absurdly expensive high-energy devices that matter even with only a few copies in the world (and let's hope those aren't yet more weapons). Still, seems reasonable to be pessimistic about the usefulness of particle physics investments of this type.