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Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises

188 points by chmaynard 6y ago

czzr 6y ago
I’m sympathetic to both sides here. Obviously we cannot indefinitely build larger accelerators, and if it turns out that there is no support to go at least one size bigger, then perhaps our best hope is to find more effective ways to use the existing ones we have. As a random example to illustrate what I mean: https://www.google.nl/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-07-plasma-size-limitations-large-hadron.amp https://www.google.nl/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-07-plasma-siz... Maybe stopping here will force more thinking along these lines? I hope so, anyway.
- m0zg 6y ago
  It's like engineers think about research. I worked in both engineering and research, so I could perhaps elucidate the difference. Basically if one idea out of a hundred major ones really takes off, that's considered a success for a researcher. We're talking one, maybe two real hits throughout the entire scientific career. Researchers are well aware that much of what they do and publish is of little consequence. And they have to make "empty promises" from time to time to continue getting funding from the easily distracted politicians and upper management. They also almost have to have lofty, aspirational goals to keep the motivation. Basically 99% percent of work of a good, hard working researcher consists of going down the alleys to see if they are blind, which they nearly always are. But the remaining 1% often makes the whole thing worthwhile to all parties involved. The question is, can you pull off that 1% hail Mary or not. The potential discoveries we're talking about in this case could upend industries, reshape the world economy, and bring about the post-scarcity future, at least when it comes to energy. If we're willing to strain credulity a little, they might even enable interstellar travel. Is that worth a few days of the Pentagon budget? To me, it is, as long as we maximize the chance of the aforementioned Hail Mary. In contrast, an engineer that doesn't succeed with her ideas at least 50% of the time would quickly find herself out of a job, so by definition the amount of risk engineers take on is as little as possible.
  - czzr 6y ago
    I agree, but the issue here is different I think. The linked article is also arguing for open ended research, the claim is that other open ended research is likely to be more fruitful, and that we have reached the limit of what we can learn from the particle accelerator route. This is a fair debate to have, even if my personal preferred answer is “do both”.
    - gus_massa 6y ago
      The problem is what "open ended" means. A typical experiment is to accelerate a lot protons and a lot of antiprotons (or other particle), make them collide, and see the "debris". The "debris" can be a lot of things. So you must filter some of them. For example pick only the one that produce exactly two photons and two "jets" of mixed particles that are difficult to identify. Now you calculate the energy of the photons and make a nice graph, of number of collisions versus energy of the photons. Using the standard theory you expect a smooth curve, but if there is a new particle you will see a peak somewhere. If you see something, you only see the peak. So good luck imagining what the particle can be and how it interact with the other particles. Another team peek another filter, like the experiment that produce two photons and electron and a positron. They make a nice graphic and hope to see an unexpected peak. Another team ... If the current theory predicts a peak somewhere you should find it, but if you find an unexpected peak yuo may have founded a new particle. The theoretical frameworks are useful to guess which filters may be interesting and give a chance to find a new particle. The problem is that there are just too many possible filters and you can't try all of them.
  - foldr 6y ago
    I completely agree, but at some point you do have to make an economic risk/benefit calculation. Almost any person or organization can truly say that they might do something really amazing and important if given lots of money and resources.
    - m0zg 6y ago
      You can't really make that calculation with truly open ended, fundamental research. Both the potential benefits, and the complexity/cost of obtaining these benefits (or finding out they can't be obtained) can be enormous. At best, you can improve the odds of getting something rather than nothing, by e.g. hiring the smartest people and letting them do their thing with ample funding, a-la the Space Race or Manhattan Project. It just pisses me off that we spend trillions on bombing random people in the desert, yet a few billion for e.g. fusion research is an insurmountable obstacle.
- chuckleMuscle 6y ago
  If you assume that accelerator technology remains the same then you do of course have to keep making your accelerators bigger. There are a fairly large number of people working on plasma accelerators which are more compact because they support a greater accelerating potential. The AWAKE experiment [1] is an example of such a project. As an aside, I think this is a great example of a role which fundamental science plays in society: It can facilitate step changes in technological progress. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWAKE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWAKE
sega_sai 6y ago
First here is the original letter to Nature about new colliders: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 I am certainly a supporter of new colliders, although there are other avenues of constraining particle physics models such as astrophysics, cosmic rays, direct detection experiments that need to be funded. But the authors of that letter to Nature and physicists in general need to be careful about promises, otherwise nobody is going to believe us in the future. And there is a tendency of promising a lot in order to get funding. And for the authors of the article to claim that "A good example of a guaranteed result is dark matter." is just blatant lie. I wish there was an experiment that would for sure tell us what dark matter is. (I'm an astrophysicist myself)
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Sure, if you really think that the next bit where they specify what sort of Dark matter they will provide results on is irrelevant context. I find it a bit rich that Hossenfelder can criticise particle physics for only ruling out some dark matter with words such as "a type nobody has seen". There are no direct detection of dark matter at all, so why does she insist that the models particle physics speak of are any worse than the others? At the core of the controversy around Hossenfelder is that from the fact there's not been any really _unexpected_ experimental results for four decades concludes that there's no point in doing particle physics. There is not really much more to the argument than that, the rest is just quoting the optimistic physicists over the pessimistic ones and pretend they don't agree on the need for more experiments.
aroberge 6y ago
Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder is an opiniated physicist who gets a lot of flak for constantly commenting on this issue. Yet, I believe she does society a service in doing so. I have yet to see anyone contradict her basic premise with factual information. I wish she were wrong, as I would love to see a breakthrough towards an experimentally verified Grand Unified Theory, including an explanation for what we currently identify as dark matter (similarly for dark energy). From what I read, physicists that criticize her take their own wishes for reality, and prefer to attack the messenger rather than confront the reality of the message.
- 6nf 6y ago
  Her opinion is totally legitimate and I’m glad people like her are speaking up. Everyone should agree that we need to spend money pushing the limits of science. That’s not the issue here. The point of Sabine’s criticism is that these empty promises need more scrutiny based on the failures of the recent past.
  - cedilla 6y ago
    I don't really understand that argument. What does a failed prediction about super-symmetry in 1996 have to do with the opportunities of the next collider? How does "we didn't find evidence for or against supersymmetry at LHC" connect to dark matter experiments in its successor? I'm also not really convinced of what she categorizes as failure. She enumerates quite a few incorrect predictions, but is that sufficient to show that the experiments were a failure? There are literally thousands of papers published because of the LHC and CERN claims hundreds of results. Maybe you can show that they are mostly worthless (which is not the same as boring or not spectecular), but she doesn't really seem to even try to do that.
    - ehvatum 6y ago
      > She enumerates quite a few incorrect predictions You make a good point - without the expensive accelerator data, we’d have no idea that these omg ridiculous stupid waaaa predictions are true or false!!!
nmlnn 6y ago
What a fucking waste of money, imagine if these resources for a new collider could instead be used to bolster the ECB/SNB/BOE programs for purchasing corporate debt and equity. My understanding is they've only had ~few hundred billion to a couple of trillion for that so far. THE MONEY SHOULD GO TO BAIL OUT BANKS AND THE CREDITORS OF LARGE CORPORATIONS, WHAT'S THE POINT OF TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSE ANYWAY.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  There's no way this isn't a troll.
  - thombat 6y ago
    Surely not so much a troll as a tub-thumping snort of sarcasm. The truism of sales is that if a customer comes looking to buy a suit and a pullover then you make sure to sell them the suit first, after which the price tag on the most exorbitant cashmere pulli will seem utterly reasonable. With that as a guide maybe science budgets are best discussed on the tails of bailouts?
    - anonytrary 6y ago
      Speak plainly. You'll increase your conversion rate.
- simonh 6y ago
  Sabine gave specific examples of scientific areas the money could be better spent on. Your bile is irrelevant to the discussion and has no place here.
  - nmlnn 6y ago
    My point is that money is fungible. It's weird to me to see this complete disconnect between science funding and the trillions being created and pumped into the financial system. She/we are treating science funding as zero sum, yet completely ignoring the trillions being wasted (relative to spending on fundamental research) by central banks.
orbifold 6y ago
Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and the data processing pipeline they feed into are at the pinacle of human engineering. The software infrastructure supports analysis of petabytes of data distributed across 100s of clusters around the world. This is because physicists working on colliders and particle physics are extremely passionate and intelligent people. Isn’t it nice that a fraction of the smartest people on the world are not working on getting you to click Ads and are using machine learning to advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature? Tremendous value has been created by their work and an institution like CERN is hard to replicate because it is hard to get brilliant people to a agree what to do for the next 30 years of their lives. I’ve been taught by professors that did precisely that. Whatever theorists predict is not the only reason for them to do it, higher energies are a technical challenge, a data processing challenge, something to focus your attention and creativity on. There is no question we should try to build better telescopes, a 100 TeV collider is a better microscope for High Energy Physics. This is personal to me, some of my friends work at CERN. I can’t help but feel it is personal to her. I actually met her once, she seemed nice enough, I just don’t understand why she focuses her time on work that is adversarial as opposed to constructive.
- JesseMReeves 6y ago
  > She didn’t cut it and now is in a non-tenured position at a second rate institution. What an awful reply to legitimate criticism. I infer that some of your friends at CERN talk about her (quite successful) book this way?
  - rusticpenn 6y ago
    I don't see that line in the original comment, was it edited?
    - 6y ago
onhn 6y ago
I think we need more clever people making more predictions (and especially from people quoted in the article like Gross, Witten, Rattazzi etc), and fewer blog articles like this designed to discourage them. The last time a huge, costly, dedicated collider was built, it was in service of the Higgs prediction, and that worked out quite nicely.
- iainmerrick 6y ago
  I think you’re setting up a bit of a straw man there. I agree that people coming up with creative ideas and making bold predictions is good in general. But surely we’re allowed to point out when a) predictions have not in fact worked out, and b) nothing particularly useful was learned from the failure. That’s not the same as trying to discourage new ideas. For the LHC specifically, it was widely expected that it would find evidence of supersymmetry, and that pinning down the details would help identify which extensions to the Standard Model are worth pursuing. But in fact a) no evidence of supersymmetry has been found, and b) no new lines of inquiry have been suggested. Most theorists have simply adjusted their existing models, moving the goalposts to account for the lack of experimental support. This is exactly what Hossenfelder is complaining about. Why double and triple down on the same strategy that hasn’t worked yet? Why not at least spread your bets across some different strategies?
  - matthewdgreen 6y ago
    This appears to value the negative findings of the LHC at zero. I’m no physicist, but my understanding is that some variants and parameters of the theory have been excluded as a result of LHC experiments. More to the point, what is the alternative strategy that’s more likely to produce useful data? “Don’t do experiments to validate or invalidate theory” doesn’t obviously seem like it’s going to produce better results.
    - iainmerrick 6y ago
      I’m no physicist, but my understanding is that some variants and parameters of the theory have been excluded as a result of LHC experiments. I'm no physicist either, so take my hot take with the appropriate pinch of salt. :) My understanding is that some variants and parameters should have been excluded, if you hold theorists to their ~2005 predictions, but in practice most theorists are essentially burying their heads in the sand, or ignoring their past predictions and just making new ones. Both Hossenfelder and Peter Woit (of the "Not Even Wrong" book and blog) have documented many such cases. Many theorists are still assuming supersymmetry as a basis for their work and essentially ignoring the fact that it didn't show up where expected. More to the point, what is the alternative strategy that’s more likely to produce useful data? I think it's "remove the focus from high-energy physics and particle colliders, bring more attention to less fashionable areas that might benefit more from huge big-budget experiments." I don't know of any specific proposals to do something completely different with the budget that might otherwise go to e.g. CERN's Future Circular Collider proposal. Hossenfelder has pointed to other big science projects that could produce more scientific bang-for-the-buck than the LHC, such as LIGO and the James Webb space telescope.
KingOfCoders 6y ago
I can also recommend her book.
krspykrm 6y ago
I somewhat agree with the premise, but the real kicker is the opportunity cost: there is so much Europe could be doing with this money that would have actual, real-world impact. There is a critical need for independent European software infrastructure - for this kind of money, they could fund their own web browser or OS or social media platform, which would exist independently of US-controlled tech. Would I trade a European-controlled alternative to Android and iOS for yet another particle collider in Geneva? Yes, absolutely.
- pmontra 6y ago
  I'd start from independence in basic electronics. Software is easier IMHO. But, as always, which Europe? It's Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. each one with different and competing goals (the UK will be on its own soon).
  - pabs3 6y ago
    The interesting thing about electronics is that the Dutch ASML company is basically have monopoly on producing the machines that silicon fabs use to produce chips. So everyone indirectly depends on the EU for hardware production.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Well, it does have actual real world impact: it trains a lot of people in data analysis and drives a lot of R&D in very technical fields among other things. In fact, the economic benefit[1] of CERN due to all these other things has been estimated as a net positive while excluding the value of science, which is either good or bad news depending on how you view it. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf82KOPvTOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf82KOPvTOk
  - feoren 6y ago
    And what's unique about that to Yet Another Particle Collider compared with the myriad other challenging, data-heavy experiments we could be investing in?
- 6y ago
rjmunro 6y ago
I think more should be spent on fusion research - I think it is just as likely to produce interesting random spin off technologies, but could also produce huge direct benefits to the earth if it can be made into a safe way to produce energy cheaply. JET has proved it is possible: https://ccfe.ukaea.uk/research/joint-european-torus/ https://ccfe.ukaea.uk/research/joint-european-torus/ ITER is taking JET's work to the next level https://www.iter.org/ https://www.iter.org/ Maybe it can't ever be made cheap or practical but worst case scenario it produces interesting results and spin offs like CERN does now.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  yeah or maybe ESA could start trying to capture some asteroids. I remember times when LHC was powered on. It was exiting and many things were speculated that this door would open. And well... it all fizzled out quite quickly. Building bigger collider feels like doubling down on a huge sunken cost fallacy.
cjfd 6y ago
If you sum up all the negative aspects of something you can make it look bad. If you sum up all the positive aspects of something you can make it look good. So you can make something look either good or bad by not saying anything that is untrue. It is really the onlookers who have to decide how to weigh both stories.
nxpnsv 6y ago
I don't agree with her initial gripe. Discovery or serious exclusion - it is not weasel words, it is the truth. The correct question to ask is if the exclusion would be enough to warrant the cost. And of course this is far from the only result one would expect from such a machine. So these are not empty promises and while she clearly is not stupid, Hossenfelder sure loves telling people their research is useless... Edit: are you downvoting because you don't think my comment contributes to the discussion, or because you don't agree?
- aaron695 6y ago
  > "Discovery or serious exclusion - it is not weasel words, it is the truth." This misrepresents what she says about weasel words. Also she specifically addresses the "Discovery or serious exclusion" I didn't downvote but I would guess you've only skimmed the written article, try watching the video.
  - nxpnsv 6y ago
    No, I did read it, but I also responded emotionally as my research was attacked. That is, I consider Higgs a significant discovery.
pif 6y ago
I am a particle physicist and when I worked at CERN I helped building the data acquisition software of the ATLAS experiment. The empty promises she is talking about are the equivalent of the promises by politicians during a campaign: they are for the larger public, for the people who (rightfully!) don't want to get more informed than that. In the background, both in science and in politics, technical folks know what they mean and, especially, where the money is actually going. In the case of politics, it happens unfortunately that big chunks of the money involved go into private pockets. Based on my experience, in the case of particle physics, that money invariably goes to wide technological improvement. Very few sane people really cared whether the Higgs boson existed, but the world is a better place because we got our efforts together in order to find an answer.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Which technological improvements?
  - nxpnsv 6y ago
    https://kt.cern/startups https://kt.cern/startups
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    For a start you can look at the list of technologies you can license from them: https://kt.cern/technologies https://kt.cern/technologies
  - orbifold 6y ago
    Get a beer with a particle physicist some time, you will find most of them didn't actually work on "finding dark matter" but worked on a myriad of specific technical challenges. - Superconducting magnets and power distribution - Radiation hard ASICs and detectors - CAD software like KICAD - ROOT - Grid computing infrastructure - Analog circuit design (1024 channel low power ADCs, pixel sensors) - FPGA design for data aggregation and communication
    - 6y ago
prof-dr-ir 6y ago
79 points as of now. And how many points would hacker news have given to the Nature comment by Giudice and Gianotti? It is both curious and sad to see the outsize attention given to bitter polemicists (and not just in physics). Please read https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 . Edit: downvotes? let me rephrase: if you care about particle physics then there was no reason to ignore the original proposal. if you care about outrage, on the other hand...
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  What are you highlighting? That article is a generic press releases saying they want $30B to look at particles.
  - prof-dr-ir 6y ago
    I am afraid that, no matter how well thought out a strategy or plan for the future really is, there is always a ranting blogger who will get more attention. And in that tradition I guess I should have expected a dismissive reply using 'generic press release' to describe the Comment that introduces an entire section of Nature Physics.
    - raziel2701 6y ago
      I think it's very interesting to see publicly a back and forth dialogue of two sides discussing the merits and demerits of a scientific proposal. It's a rare sight, and the contrarian view is necessary, we need red teams so that things don't become too one-sided and people can overcome their biases. I think the inherent structure in academia and in institutions like CERN make it difficult for dissenting voices to be heard, so I'm glad that the view that's going against the grain is getting more attention. In this era of censorship and punishing of whistleblowers I'm surprised she's freely critiquing their core arguments. Although I do see a lot of ad hominem attacks.
- gloftus 6y ago
  I think you are being down voted because you appear to have an ax to grind rather than a useful perspective on the issue.
wwarner 6y ago
I think observing the Higgs was worth the money. We're sort of rebounding from our overconfidence in string theory, so I think this kind of criticism is expected and appropriate, but in the long run this citizen wants to pay for more big physics.
deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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Mvandenbergh 6y ago
I think it is worth noting that while this is an opinion not widely shared within physics, Sabine is not some completely far-out crank writing bizarre rants in green ink either. In other words, we can all disagree. As it happens I do, but she's also not a lunatic whose ideas can just be dismissed as obviously uninformed.
mikewarot 6y ago
Why can't they increase the energy levels inside the existing tunnels? It just requires stronger magnets, right? Someone will figure out how to make 1000 Tesla electromagnets at some point, and it's off to the races again. Without the need for more construction.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Basically: making charged particles change direction causes them to emit radiation, and the more they turn the more they radiate. This gets worse and worse at higher energies, so increasing the magnets but keeping the same angle means you waste more energy and your magnets get destroyed by the intense radiation.
  - mikewarot 6y ago
    My understanding is that is true of Electrons, but not Protons, which is why SLAC is a straight line, the only way to get electrons up to high energies. [Edit]Wrong! Turns out protons do emit energy as well... up to 6.7 KeV per turn. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation
    - SiempreViernes 6y ago
      Yeah, the effect scales with the inverse mass of the particle, so heavier things radiate less. For this reason I've seen suggestions to do round electron-type accelerators but using the much heavier muons to get around the radiation problem.
xchip 6y ago
Physicist here, although it is nice to know what happens when we use very high energies, this is not something relevant for humanity, I'd invest that money on things that we really need, for example clean energies.
- aeternum 6y ago
  This seems somewhat shortsighted. Couldn't we have said the same thing about general relativity and QM? Which now have relevant implications for GPS and chip design. Couldn't a more thorough understanding of particle physics be relevant to things like nano-materials or better understanding superconductivity or possibly additional ways to contain plasma for fusion?
stevespang 6y ago
In 2016, Hossenfelder offered to act as a physics consultant on her blog—US$50 for twenty minutes of discussion—and had to recruit five extra physicists to deal with the demand.[30][31
iainmerrick 6y ago
Here’s a question I have that maybe somebody in this thread can help me with: what is the positive case for a new particle collider at much higher energies than the LHC? It seems to me that particle physics post-LHC is just the same as it was pre-LHC. We verified the existence of the Higgs, which is great, but that meant no revisions to the Standard Model were needed as it already assumed the Higgs. And no exotic or unexpected new particles have turned up. You can definitely argue that the technology spin-offs from the LHC have been great; but is that really an argument for another collider specifically, or just Big Science in general? To put it another way, what’s the argument for a collider that goes beyond “provide employment for hundreds of high-energy physicists, and throw some unprecedented engineering and logistical challenges at then”? Is there a pitch that’s based on the science rather than the technology?
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  The current standard model can't explain a number of observations. There was a rather detailed post over on PhysicsForums[1] detailing a number of issues. The LHC hasn't really shown us where to look, the hope is that a larger collider can give a more clear indication. That said, I have this feeling that we're approaching the limits of "going big". There was a very interesting talk[2] over at Perimeter Institute recently about larger colliders and their feasibility. [1]: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-are-the-most-important-phenomena-that-the-standard-model-cant-explain.992129/post-6376780 https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-are-the-most-impo... [2]: http://pirsa.org/20100056/ http://pirsa.org/20100056/
- magv 6y ago
  > verified the existence of the Higgs As a related tangent: we have verified the existence of the Higgs, but only partially. What was so far measured was the interaction strength between Higgs and W bosons, Z bosons, and the top quarks: these are the main channels of Higgs production at the LHC, and they fit the theory prediction within 20%. Yes, 20%. Not precise at all. What about interaction between Higgs and the other 5 kinds of quarks? Electrons? Muons? Tau? Itself? The data ranges from +-100% to none at all. In particular the measurement of Higgs-Higgs interaction is an important one: the assumption Standard Model makes about the strength of this interaction is not unique, and others are possible. We don't know yet: not enough data. Moreover models with multiple Higgs particles are possible. Again, we don't know yet, not enough data. This is why some cautious researchers claim that we have discovered "a scalar particle", "believed to be Higgs", but further measurement is needed to determine all of its properties. This is one of the main activities at LHC and among the theoreticians at the moment: measuring Higgs interactions with other particles. There is still way to improve precision with more data from LHC, but ultimately there is only so much it can do without increasing the energy.
thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
>The most likely outcome will be that particle physicists will swap their current theories for new theories according to which the supposed particles are heavier than expected. i.e. exactly what happened for the top quark, without proof of which we wouldn't have a working standard model. Why wasn't that the example?
- zamalek 6y ago
  Theory fitting also happened with epicycles. We got nothing from that. Everything looked progressively more correct until all of it was suddenly incorrect.
  - thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
    Well our most up-to-date understanding of the solar system's orbits is based on general relativity. That's how we explain Mercury's precession. Is that your failure case?
    - zamalek 6y ago
      Epicycles have nothing to do with orbits. They were state of the art science when Earth was at the center of the universe.
      - thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
        Then we built new technology that conclusively disproved them. As a result we have sat-nav and space travel. If that's the disaster that came from building bigger telescopes, keep it coming. 'We don't believe it because it's hard to test' is not science.
        zamalek 6y ago
        I can't argue with that, as you are correct. I was contending your example, as the standard model is ridden with theory fitting and is a really good example of science done badly.
KingFelix 6y ago
This is by far one of the best HN articles and discussions going on I've come across. Some really great conversations happening in the comments here, it would be great to open this conversation beyond the comments section in a more public forum.
adamc 6y ago
Good piece. I support science, but I wonder at times whether the really expensive experiments are really producing results worthy of the investment... it's not as though particle collisions are the only interesting experiments out there.
fallingfrog 6y ago
I think it’s unlikely that we’re ever going to find another particle as useful as, say, the electron. You need a particle collider to get free Higgs bosons; you can obtain free electrons by rubbing a balloon on your head. And electrons are the Swiss Army knife of technology, they are important in every chemical reaction and every electric device. Higgs bosons will likely never have a practical use. But- I still think we should keep doing particle physics, for a while longer. We have built up a huge global community of physicists and engineers who do particle physics, and without a way for them to conduct experiments there won’t be any jobs for those people to do, and in 2 generations all that expertise will be gone. The praxis will be gone. After all, that’s what technology really is; it isn’t a set of books on a shelf, it’s networks of people, with skills and connections to each other, who can get things done. Let’s make sure we don’t pull the plug early.

188 points by chmaynard 6y ago

czzr 6y ago

I’m sympathetic to both sides here. Obviously we cannot indefinitely build larger accelerators, and if it turns out that there is no support to go at least one size bigger, then perhaps our best hope is to find more effective ways to use the existing ones we have. As a random example to illustrate what I mean: https://www.google.nl/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-07-plasma-size-limitations-large-hadron.amp https://www.google.nl/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-07-plasma-siz... Maybe stopping here will force more thinking along these lines? I hope so, anyway.

m0zg 6y ago
It's like engineers think about research. I worked in both engineering and research, so I could perhaps elucidate the difference. Basically if one idea out of a hundred major ones really takes off, that's considered a success for a researcher. We're talking one, maybe two real hits throughout the entire scientific career. Researchers are well aware that much of what they do and publish is of little consequence. And they have to make "empty promises" from time to time to continue getting funding from the easily distracted politicians and upper management. They also almost have to have lofty, aspirational goals to keep the motivation. Basically 99% percent of work of a good, hard working researcher consists of going down the alleys to see if they are blind, which they nearly always are. But the remaining 1% often makes the whole thing worthwhile to all parties involved. The question is, can you pull off that 1% hail Mary or not. The potential discoveries we're talking about in this case could upend industries, reshape the world economy, and bring about the post-scarcity future, at least when it comes to energy. If we're willing to strain credulity a little, they might even enable interstellar travel. Is that worth a few days of the Pentagon budget? To me, it is, as long as we maximize the chance of the aforementioned Hail Mary. In contrast, an engineer that doesn't succeed with her ideas at least 50% of the time would quickly find herself out of a job, so by definition the amount of risk engineers take on is as little as possible.
- czzr 6y ago
  I agree, but the issue here is different I think. The linked article is also arguing for open ended research, the claim is that other open ended research is likely to be more fruitful, and that we have reached the limit of what we can learn from the particle accelerator route. This is a fair debate to have, even if my personal preferred answer is “do both”.
  - gus_massa 6y ago
    The problem is what "open ended" means. A typical experiment is to accelerate a lot protons and a lot of antiprotons (or other particle), make them collide, and see the "debris". The "debris" can be a lot of things. So you must filter some of them. For example pick only the one that produce exactly two photons and two "jets" of mixed particles that are difficult to identify. Now you calculate the energy of the photons and make a nice graph, of number of collisions versus energy of the photons. Using the standard theory you expect a smooth curve, but if there is a new particle you will see a peak somewhere. If you see something, you only see the peak. So good luck imagining what the particle can be and how it interact with the other particles. Another team peek another filter, like the experiment that produce two photons and electron and a positron. They make a nice graphic and hope to see an unexpected peak. Another team ... If the current theory predicts a peak somewhere you should find it, but if you find an unexpected peak yuo may have founded a new particle. The theoretical frameworks are useful to guess which filters may be interesting and give a chance to find a new particle. The problem is that there are just too many possible filters and you can't try all of them.
- foldr 6y ago
  I completely agree, but at some point you do have to make an economic risk/benefit calculation. Almost any person or organization can truly say that they might do something really amazing and important if given lots of money and resources.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    You can't really make that calculation with truly open ended, fundamental research. Both the potential benefits, and the complexity/cost of obtaining these benefits (or finding out they can't be obtained) can be enormous. At best, you can improve the odds of getting something rather than nothing, by e.g. hiring the smartest people and letting them do their thing with ample funding, a-la the Space Race or Manhattan Project. It just pisses me off that we spend trillions on bombing random people in the desert, yet a few billion for e.g. fusion research is an insurmountable obstacle.
chuckleMuscle 6y ago
If you assume that accelerator technology remains the same then you do of course have to keep making your accelerators bigger. There are a fairly large number of people working on plasma accelerators which are more compact because they support a greater accelerating potential. The AWAKE experiment [1] is an example of such a project. As an aside, I think this is a great example of a role which fundamental science plays in society: It can facilitate step changes in technological progress. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWAKE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWAKE

sega_sai 6y ago

First here is the original letter to Nature about new colliders: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 I am certainly a supporter of new colliders, although there are other avenues of constraining particle physics models such as astrophysics, cosmic rays, direct detection experiments that need to be funded. But the authors of that letter to Nature and physicists in general need to be careful about promises, otherwise nobody is going to believe us in the future. And there is a tendency of promising a lot in order to get funding. And for the authors of the article to claim that "A good example of a guaranteed result is dark matter." is just blatant lie. I wish there was an experiment that would for sure tell us what dark matter is. (I'm an astrophysicist myself)

SiempreViernes 6y ago
Sure, if you really think that the next bit where they specify what sort of Dark matter they will provide results on is irrelevant context. I find it a bit rich that Hossenfelder can criticise particle physics for only ruling out some dark matter with words such as "a type nobody has seen". There are no direct detection of dark matter at all, so why does she insist that the models particle physics speak of are any worse than the others? At the core of the controversy around Hossenfelder is that from the fact there's not been any really _unexpected_ experimental results for four decades concludes that there's no point in doing particle physics. There is not really much more to the argument than that, the rest is just quoting the optimistic physicists over the pessimistic ones and pretend they don't agree on the need for more experiments.

aroberge 6y ago

Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder is an opiniated physicist who gets a lot of flak for constantly commenting on this issue. Yet, I believe she does society a service in doing so. I have yet to see anyone contradict her basic premise with factual information. I wish she were wrong, as I would love to see a breakthrough towards an experimentally verified Grand Unified Theory, including an explanation for what we currently identify as dark matter (similarly for dark energy). From what I read, physicists that criticize her take their own wishes for reality, and prefer to attack the messenger rather than confront the reality of the message.

6nf 6y ago
Her opinion is totally legitimate and I’m glad people like her are speaking up. Everyone should agree that we need to spend money pushing the limits of science. That’s not the issue here. The point of Sabine’s criticism is that these empty promises need more scrutiny based on the failures of the recent past.
- cedilla 6y ago
  I don't really understand that argument. What does a failed prediction about super-symmetry in 1996 have to do with the opportunities of the next collider? How does "we didn't find evidence for or against supersymmetry at LHC" connect to dark matter experiments in its successor? I'm also not really convinced of what she categorizes as failure. She enumerates quite a few incorrect predictions, but is that sufficient to show that the experiments were a failure? There are literally thousands of papers published because of the LHC and CERN claims hundreds of results. Maybe you can show that they are mostly worthless (which is not the same as boring or not spectecular), but she doesn't really seem to even try to do that.
  - ehvatum 6y ago
    > She enumerates quite a few incorrect predictions You make a good point - without the expensive accelerator data, we’d have no idea that these omg ridiculous stupid waaaa predictions are true or false!!!

nmlnn 6y ago

What a fucking waste of money, imagine if these resources for a new collider could instead be used to bolster the ECB/SNB/BOE programs for purchasing corporate debt and equity. My understanding is they've only had ~few hundred billion to a couple of trillion for that so far. THE MONEY SHOULD GO TO BAIL OUT BANKS AND THE CREDITORS OF LARGE CORPORATIONS, WHAT'S THE POINT OF TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSE ANYWAY.

anonytrary 6y ago
There's no way this isn't a troll.
- thombat 6y ago
  Surely not so much a troll as a tub-thumping snort of sarcasm. The truism of sales is that if a customer comes looking to buy a suit and a pullover then you make sure to sell them the suit first, after which the price tag on the most exorbitant cashmere pulli will seem utterly reasonable. With that as a guide maybe science budgets are best discussed on the tails of bailouts?
  - anonytrary 6y ago
    Speak plainly. You'll increase your conversion rate.
simonh 6y ago
Sabine gave specific examples of scientific areas the money could be better spent on. Your bile is irrelevant to the discussion and has no place here.
- nmlnn 6y ago
  My point is that money is fungible. It's weird to me to see this complete disconnect between science funding and the trillions being created and pumped into the financial system. She/we are treating science funding as zero sum, yet completely ignoring the trillions being wasted (relative to spending on fundamental research) by central banks.

orbifold 6y ago

Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and the data processing pipeline they feed into are at the pinacle of human engineering. The software infrastructure supports analysis of petabytes of data distributed across 100s of clusters around the world. This is because physicists working on colliders and particle physics are extremely passionate and intelligent people. Isn’t it nice that a fraction of the smartest people on the world are not working on getting you to click Ads and are using machine learning to advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature? Tremendous value has been created by their work and an institution like CERN is hard to replicate because it is hard to get brilliant people to a agree what to do for the next 30 years of their lives. I’ve been taught by professors that did precisely that. Whatever theorists predict is not the only reason for them to do it, higher energies are a technical challenge, a data processing challenge, something to focus your attention and creativity on. There is no question we should try to build better telescopes, a 100 TeV collider is a better microscope for High Energy Physics. This is personal to me, some of my friends work at CERN. I can’t help but feel it is personal to her. I actually met her once, she seemed nice enough, I just don’t understand why she focuses her time on work that is adversarial as opposed to constructive.

JesseMReeves 6y ago
> She didn’t cut it and now is in a non-tenured position at a second rate institution. What an awful reply to legitimate criticism. I infer that some of your friends at CERN talk about her (quite successful) book this way?
- rusticpenn 6y ago
  I don't see that line in the original comment, was it edited?
  - 6y ago

onhn 6y ago

I think we need more clever people making more predictions (and especially from people quoted in the article like Gross, Witten, Rattazzi etc), and fewer blog articles like this designed to discourage them. The last time a huge, costly, dedicated collider was built, it was in service of the Higgs prediction, and that worked out quite nicely.

iainmerrick 6y ago
I think you’re setting up a bit of a straw man there. I agree that people coming up with creative ideas and making bold predictions is good in general. But surely we’re allowed to point out when a) predictions have not in fact worked out, and b) nothing particularly useful was learned from the failure. That’s not the same as trying to discourage new ideas. For the LHC specifically, it was widely expected that it would find evidence of supersymmetry, and that pinning down the details would help identify which extensions to the Standard Model are worth pursuing. But in fact a) no evidence of supersymmetry has been found, and b) no new lines of inquiry have been suggested. Most theorists have simply adjusted their existing models, moving the goalposts to account for the lack of experimental support. This is exactly what Hossenfelder is complaining about. Why double and triple down on the same strategy that hasn’t worked yet? Why not at least spread your bets across some different strategies?
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  This appears to value the negative findings of the LHC at zero. I’m no physicist, but my understanding is that some variants and parameters of the theory have been excluded as a result of LHC experiments. More to the point, what is the alternative strategy that’s more likely to produce useful data? “Don’t do experiments to validate or invalidate theory” doesn’t obviously seem like it’s going to produce better results.
  - iainmerrick 6y ago
    I’m no physicist, but my understanding is that some variants and parameters of the theory have been excluded as a result of LHC experiments. I'm no physicist either, so take my hot take with the appropriate pinch of salt. :) My understanding is that some variants and parameters should have been excluded, if you hold theorists to their ~2005 predictions, but in practice most theorists are essentially burying their heads in the sand, or ignoring their past predictions and just making new ones. Both Hossenfelder and Peter Woit (of the "Not Even Wrong" book and blog) have documented many such cases. Many theorists are still assuming supersymmetry as a basis for their work and essentially ignoring the fact that it didn't show up where expected. More to the point, what is the alternative strategy that’s more likely to produce useful data? I think it's "remove the focus from high-energy physics and particle colliders, bring more attention to less fashionable areas that might benefit more from huge big-budget experiments." I don't know of any specific proposals to do something completely different with the budget that might otherwise go to e.g. CERN's Future Circular Collider proposal. Hossenfelder has pointed to other big science projects that could produce more scientific bang-for-the-buck than the LHC, such as LIGO and the James Webb space telescope.

KingOfCoders 6y ago

I can also recommend her book.

krspykrm 6y ago

I somewhat agree with the premise, but the real kicker is the opportunity cost: there is so much Europe could be doing with this money that would have actual, real-world impact. There is a critical need for independent European software infrastructure - for this kind of money, they could fund their own web browser or OS or social media platform, which would exist independently of US-controlled tech. Would I trade a European-controlled alternative to Android and iOS for yet another particle collider in Geneva? Yes, absolutely.

pmontra 6y ago
I'd start from independence in basic electronics. Software is easier IMHO. But, as always, which Europe? It's Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. each one with different and competing goals (the UK will be on its own soon).
- pabs3 6y ago
  The interesting thing about electronics is that the Dutch ASML company is basically have monopoly on producing the machines that silicon fabs use to produce chips. So everyone indirectly depends on the EU for hardware production.
SiempreViernes 6y ago
Well, it does have actual real world impact: it trains a lot of people in data analysis and drives a lot of R&D in very technical fields among other things. In fact, the economic benefit[1] of CERN due to all these other things has been estimated as a net positive while excluding the value of science, which is either good or bad news depending on how you view it. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf82KOPvTOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf82KOPvTOk
- feoren 6y ago
  And what's unique about that to Yet Another Particle Collider compared with the myriad other challenging, data-heavy experiments we could be investing in?
6y ago

rjmunro 6y ago

I think more should be spent on fusion research - I think it is just as likely to produce interesting random spin off technologies, but could also produce huge direct benefits to the earth if it can be made into a safe way to produce energy cheaply. JET has proved it is possible: https://ccfe.ukaea.uk/research/joint-european-torus/ https://ccfe.ukaea.uk/research/joint-european-torus/ ITER is taking JET's work to the next level https://www.iter.org/ https://www.iter.org/ Maybe it can't ever be made cheap or practical but worst case scenario it produces interesting results and spin offs like CERN does now.

me_me_me 6y ago
yeah or maybe ESA could start trying to capture some asteroids. I remember times when LHC was powered on. It was exiting and many things were speculated that this door would open. And well... it all fizzled out quite quickly. Building bigger collider feels like doubling down on a huge sunken cost fallacy.

cjfd 6y ago

If you sum up all the negative aspects of something you can make it look bad. If you sum up all the positive aspects of something you can make it look good. So you can make something look either good or bad by not saying anything that is untrue. It is really the onlookers who have to decide how to weigh both stories.

nxpnsv 6y ago

I don't agree with her initial gripe. Discovery or serious exclusion - it is not weasel words, it is the truth. The correct question to ask is if the exclusion would be enough to warrant the cost. And of course this is far from the only result one would expect from such a machine. So these are not empty promises and while she clearly is not stupid, Hossenfelder sure loves telling people their research is useless... Edit: are you downvoting because you don't think my comment contributes to the discussion, or because you don't agree?

aaron695 6y ago
> "Discovery or serious exclusion - it is not weasel words, it is the truth." This misrepresents what she says about weasel words. Also she specifically addresses the "Discovery or serious exclusion" I didn't downvote but I would guess you've only skimmed the written article, try watching the video.
- nxpnsv 6y ago
  No, I did read it, but I also responded emotionally as my research was attacked. That is, I consider Higgs a significant discovery.

pif 6y ago

I am a particle physicist and when I worked at CERN I helped building the data acquisition software of the ATLAS experiment. The empty promises she is talking about are the equivalent of the promises by politicians during a campaign: they are for the larger public, for the people who (rightfully!) don't want to get more informed than that. In the background, both in science and in politics, technical folks know what they mean and, especially, where the money is actually going. In the case of politics, it happens unfortunately that big chunks of the money involved go into private pockets. Based on my experience, in the case of particle physics, that money invariably goes to wide technological improvement. Very few sane people really cared whether the Higgs boson existed, but the world is a better place because we got our efforts together in order to find an answer.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Which technological improvements?
- nxpnsv 6y ago
  https://kt.cern/startups https://kt.cern/startups
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  For a start you can look at the list of technologies you can license from them: https://kt.cern/technologies https://kt.cern/technologies
- orbifold 6y ago
  Get a beer with a particle physicist some time, you will find most of them didn't actually work on "finding dark matter" but worked on a myriad of specific technical challenges. - Superconducting magnets and power distribution - Radiation hard ASICs and detectors - CAD software like KICAD - ROOT - Grid computing infrastructure - Analog circuit design (1024 channel low power ADCs, pixel sensors) - FPGA design for data aggregation and communication
  - 6y ago

prof-dr-ir 6y ago

79 points as of now. And how many points would hacker news have given to the Nature comment by Giudice and Gianotti? It is both curious and sad to see the outsize attention given to bitter polemicists (and not just in physics). Please read https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6 . Edit: downvotes? let me rephrase: if you care about particle physics then there was no reason to ignore the original proposal. if you care about outrage, on the other hand...

srtjstjsj 6y ago
What are you highlighting? That article is a generic press releases saying they want $30B to look at particles.
- prof-dr-ir 6y ago
  I am afraid that, no matter how well thought out a strategy or plan for the future really is, there is always a ranting blogger who will get more attention. And in that tradition I guess I should have expected a dismissive reply using 'generic press release' to describe the Comment that introduces an entire section of Nature Physics.
  - raziel2701 6y ago
    I think it's very interesting to see publicly a back and forth dialogue of two sides discussing the merits and demerits of a scientific proposal. It's a rare sight, and the contrarian view is necessary, we need red teams so that things don't become too one-sided and people can overcome their biases. I think the inherent structure in academia and in institutions like CERN make it difficult for dissenting voices to be heard, so I'm glad that the view that's going against the grain is getting more attention. In this era of censorship and punishing of whistleblowers I'm surprised she's freely critiquing their core arguments. Although I do see a lot of ad hominem attacks.
gloftus 6y ago
I think you are being down voted because you appear to have an ax to grind rather than a useful perspective on the issue.

wwarner 6y ago

I think observing the Higgs was worth the money. We're sort of rebounding from our overconfidence in string theory, so I think this kind of criticism is expected and appropriate, but in the long run this citizen wants to pay for more big physics.

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Mvandenbergh 6y ago

I think it is worth noting that while this is an opinion not widely shared within physics, Sabine is not some completely far-out crank writing bizarre rants in green ink either. In other words, we can all disagree. As it happens I do, but she's also not a lunatic whose ideas can just be dismissed as obviously uninformed.

mikewarot 6y ago

Why can't they increase the energy levels inside the existing tunnels? It just requires stronger magnets, right? Someone will figure out how to make 1000 Tesla electromagnets at some point, and it's off to the races again. Without the need for more construction.

SiempreViernes 6y ago
Basically: making charged particles change direction causes them to emit radiation, and the more they turn the more they radiate. This gets worse and worse at higher energies, so increasing the magnets but keeping the same angle means you waste more energy and your magnets get destroyed by the intense radiation.
- mikewarot 6y ago
  My understanding is that is true of Electrons, but not Protons, which is why SLAC is a straight line, the only way to get electrons up to high energies. [Edit]Wrong! Turns out protons do emit energy as well... up to 6.7 KeV per turn. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    Yeah, the effect scales with the inverse mass of the particle, so heavier things radiate less. For this reason I've seen suggestions to do round electron-type accelerators but using the much heavier muons to get around the radiation problem.

xchip 6y ago

Physicist here, although it is nice to know what happens when we use very high energies, this is not something relevant for humanity, I'd invest that money on things that we really need, for example clean energies.

aeternum 6y ago
This seems somewhat shortsighted. Couldn't we have said the same thing about general relativity and QM? Which now have relevant implications for GPS and chip design. Couldn't a more thorough understanding of particle physics be relevant to things like nano-materials or better understanding superconductivity or possibly additional ways to contain plasma for fusion?

stevespang 6y ago

In 2016, Hossenfelder offered to act as a physics consultant on her blog—US$50 for twenty minutes of discussion—and had to recruit five extra physicists to deal with the demand.[30][31

iainmerrick 6y ago

Here’s a question I have that maybe somebody in this thread can help me with: what is the positive case for a new particle collider at much higher energies than the LHC? It seems to me that particle physics post-LHC is just the same as it was pre-LHC. We verified the existence of the Higgs, which is great, but that meant no revisions to the Standard Model were needed as it already assumed the Higgs. And no exotic or unexpected new particles have turned up. You can definitely argue that the technology spin-offs from the LHC have been great; but is that really an argument for another collider specifically, or just Big Science in general? To put it another way, what’s the argument for a collider that goes beyond “provide employment for hundreds of high-energy physicists, and throw some unprecedented engineering and logistical challenges at then”? Is there a pitch that’s based on the science rather than the technology?

magicalhippo 6y ago
The current standard model can't explain a number of observations. There was a rather detailed post over on PhysicsForums[1] detailing a number of issues. The LHC hasn't really shown us where to look, the hope is that a larger collider can give a more clear indication. That said, I have this feeling that we're approaching the limits of "going big". There was a very interesting talk[2] over at Perimeter Institute recently about larger colliders and their feasibility. [1]: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-are-the-most-important-phenomena-that-the-standard-model-cant-explain.992129/post-6376780 https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-are-the-most-impo... [2]: http://pirsa.org/20100056/ http://pirsa.org/20100056/
magv 6y ago
> verified the existence of the Higgs As a related tangent: we have verified the existence of the Higgs, but only partially. What was so far measured was the interaction strength between Higgs and W bosons, Z bosons, and the top quarks: these are the main channels of Higgs production at the LHC, and they fit the theory prediction within 20%. Yes, 20%. Not precise at all. What about interaction between Higgs and the other 5 kinds of quarks? Electrons? Muons? Tau? Itself? The data ranges from +-100% to none at all. In particular the measurement of Higgs-Higgs interaction is an important one: the assumption Standard Model makes about the strength of this interaction is not unique, and others are possible. We don't know yet: not enough data. Moreover models with multiple Higgs particles are possible. Again, we don't know yet, not enough data. This is why some cautious researchers claim that we have discovered "a scalar particle", "believed to be Higgs", but further measurement is needed to determine all of its properties. This is one of the main activities at LHC and among the theoreticians at the moment: measuring Higgs interactions with other particles. There is still way to improve precision with more data from LHC, but ultimately there is only so much it can do without increasing the energy.

thrwyoilarticle 6y ago

>The most likely outcome will be that particle physicists will swap their current theories for new theories according to which the supposed particles are heavier than expected. i.e. exactly what happened for the top quark, without proof of which we wouldn't have a working standard model. Why wasn't that the example?

zamalek 6y ago
Theory fitting also happened with epicycles. We got nothing from that. Everything looked progressively more correct until all of it was suddenly incorrect.
- thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
  Well our most up-to-date understanding of the solar system's orbits is based on general relativity. That's how we explain Mercury's precession. Is that your failure case?
  - zamalek 6y ago
    Epicycles have nothing to do with orbits. They were state of the art science when Earth was at the center of the universe.
    - thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
      Then we built new technology that conclusively disproved them. As a result we have sat-nav and space travel. If that's the disaster that came from building bigger telescopes, keep it coming. 'We don't believe it because it's hard to test' is not science.
      - zamalek 6y ago
        I can't argue with that, as you are correct. I was contending your example, as the standard model is ridden with theory fitting and is a really good example of science done badly.

KingFelix 6y ago

This is by far one of the best HN articles and discussions going on I've come across. Some really great conversations happening in the comments here, it would be great to open this conversation beyond the comments section in a more public forum.

adamc 6y ago

Good piece. I support science, but I wonder at times whether the really expensive experiments are really producing results worthy of the investment... it's not as though particle collisions are the only interesting experiments out there.

fallingfrog 6y ago

I think it’s unlikely that we’re ever going to find another particle as useful as, say, the electron. You need a particle collider to get free Higgs bosons; you can obtain free electrons by rubbing a balloon on your head. And electrons are the Swiss Army knife of technology, they are important in every chemical reaction and every electric device. Higgs bosons will likely never have a practical use. But- I still think we should keep doing particle physics, for a while longer. We have built up a huge global community of physicists and engineers who do particle physics, and without a way for them to conduct experiments there won’t be any jobs for those people to do, and in 2 generations all that expertise will be gone. The praxis will be gone. After all, that’s what technology really is; it isn’t a set of books on a shelf, it’s networks of people, with skills and connections to each other, who can get things done. Let’s make sure we don’t pull the plug early.