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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

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?
  - JesseMReeves 6y ago
    It was edited, but the comment is still ad hominem and avoids talking about the specific criticism.
- sampo 6y ago
  > > She didn’t cut it and now is in a non-tenured position at a second rate institution. Lee Smolin, who did "cut it" and who worked in several first rate institutions, wrote about the same thing in his 2006 book The Trouble With Physics. So Sabine Hossenfelder is not alone with these opinions.
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    If you read Jacques Distler’s blog you might be excused for thinking Smolin didn’t make the cut
- orbifold 6y ago
  That was uncalled for, so I took it out.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    How dare you? None of us have ever said something in a comment that was over the line! Um... at least not so far this morning... I think... um... (furtively checks comment history) nope, not me. I don't do that kind of thing (mumbling) so far today... We've all been there. Props for recognizing it, admitting it, and dealing with it.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    It is pretty representative of the state of the academia. You should have left it in, if only as to serve as a reminder that science nowadays is all about status.
- spotinsun 6y ago
  Would FIAS (https://fias.institute/en/ https://fias.institute/en/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Institute_for_Advanced_Studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Institute_for_Advanc...) even be considered a second rate institution?
  - codethief 6y ago
    Ignoring the fact that this is another ad hominem attack, judging a researcher by her/his home institution won't get you anywhere. I know dozens of outstanding mathematicians and physicists who are very well known in their respective fields and reside at less-than-well-known institutions. (Often, because their family is from there and they took the chance to go back.) Generally speaking, in Central and Western Europe it doesn't matter which institution a researcher is from. They're all good and those at top-tier institutions are only marginally better at best.
rusticpenn 6y ago
I agree with you. I would still love to work in academia, but when the work required to get proper funding is tied to the extension of your contract it can lead to some sleepless nights. In the book God Particle, the author describes how the funding for colliders in USA stopped after the cold war and it was extremely demoralizing even as a reader.
amelius 6y ago
> Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. More structural funding for open source software would also be welcome. Software that deals with communication (browsers, protocols, email, filesystems, codecs, etc.) should be fully open and developed by universities and government institutions, imho.
- iguy 6y ago
  I think the argument being made there is that when you gather smart people together, with resources to work on a hard problem, they will tend to invent things on the side which we didn't know we needed. An academic committee to decide what software was worth funding, in the 80s, would probably have come up with a very different list to yours. And would have hired people from safer, more academic, backgrounds than Sir Tim.
- sgt101 6y ago
  >developed by universities and government institutions The NSA called to say that they like your thinking there!
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Legitimate security and cryptography work from the NSA is always welcome.
tokai 6y ago
>This is personal to me, some of my friends work at CERN That is very clear. You didn't engage her argument at all. Is is really too much to ask for scientific mega project to generate all that value, while at the same time same pursuing a central object that is scientifically viable?
- orbifold 6y ago
  Building a high energy collider is like building a larger telescope. The only things you can be sure of is that you will be able to understand whatever you have seen better than before. There is scientific consensus that we should be able to understand dark matter better by building one aswell. This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public. Attacking this communication to the general scientific community is different from attacking the substance of these technical arguments. One can be done by a blog post, the other would need to be accepted by a scientific journal. Physical review letters would be more than happy to publish substantive attacks on prevailing beliefs about dark matter.
  - sgt101 6y ago
    >>There is scientific consensus Really - I thought that we were debating an article by a scientist, who along with many other scientists disagrees with that position. >>This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public. And yet the general public is being asked to pay for it. Perhaps sorting out that gap and explaining how understanding dark matter will be as important as (for example) curing cancer or alzheimers disease, or more prosaically cystic fibrosis or malaria would be a good thing? Or even understanding ecologies and the global climate? Will the new accelerator be carbon neutral? Will understanding dark matter prevent the collapse of our planet and the deaths of our children? If I were a politician funding this project I would want some pretty cold, hard information on these things.
    - SiempreViernes 6y ago
      Well, it's a scientist in a different field. More importantly, it's by a scientists that doesn't engage with the technical arguments made by those actually in the field, so it's unclear what exactly the label "scientist" brings. If a physicist criticises recommendations by epidemiologist without reference to the theory of how diseases spread, should you count that as disagreement from the consensus of how to fight infectious diseases?
emailrhoads 6y ago
She addresses many of your rebuttals quite well here http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-for-building-bigger.html?m=1 http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Well, going on to see what should be done instead, we find she advocates for different experiments with the same type of argument she's so gleefully savaging here > You already know we haven’t found anything yet—otherwise you’d have heard of it. But even null results are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us that some ideas—for example, that spacetime might be a regular lattice—are simply incompatible with observations.[1] So this is really mostly about a "you had your chance with the toy, now it's time to let others play" argument, though she's very adamant that it's not. This is really the large problem with her criticisms: the case that exists is for particle physics getting less priority, but her argument is that it should stop completely, the collaborations disbanded, and everyone goes to find a new job because they can't be trusted to think clearly. [1]: http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/what-quantum-gravity-needs-is-more-experiments http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/what-quantum-gravity-needs-i...
  - judofyr 6y ago
    > This is really the large problem with her criticisms: the case that exists is for particle physics getting less priority, but her argument is that it should stop completely, the collaborations disbanded, and everyone goes to find a new job because they can't be trusted to think clearly. Huh? Where is she saying this? Everything I've read from her suggests that she's against building bigger accelerators, not stop investigating particle physics. E.g. from http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-for-building-bigger.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...: > Science is exploratory and to make progress we should study what has not been studied before, true. But any new experiment in the foundations of physics does that. You can probe new regimes not only be reaching higher energies, but also by reaching higher resolution, better precision, bigger systems, lower temperatures, less noise, more data, and so on. > No one is saying we should stop explorative research in the foundations of physics. But since resources are limited, we should invest in experiments that bring the biggest benefit for the projected cost. This means the higher the expenses for an experiment, the better the reasons for building it should be. And since a bigger particle collider is presently the most expensive proposal on the table, particle physicists should have the best reasons.
mnl 6y ago
I usually have to bite my tongue when it comes to Sabine's ramblings. BTW, I would love if anyone could point me any phenomenology paper of hers, I can't find them. Maybe when she single-handedly finishes with the slaying of the particle physics dragon she might tackle idk, condensed matter physics, she has the same kind of background there so who knows. Anyway, I'd like to link Dorigo's post where this anti-science stirrup might have shown up first: https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/what_it_means_to_be_antiscience-250570 https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/what_it_means_to_be... I don't find it surprising tbh.
- orbifold 6y ago
  That is a nice article! Thanks for pointing it out. Most of the time I try to bite my tongue aswell. It is just sometimes really upsetting.
bnlpa 6y ago
I think it is wrong to cherry pick the HTML example. It would have been invented outside (wasn't SGML already a thing?). Compared to open source in general the CERN stacks are horrible, typical sloppy academic software of no use to the general public. Tons of stuff like the cling C++ interpreter that look interesting but are never polished to be generally useful.
- lovemenot 6y ago
  cling ? clang perhaps? Truth is, I did get your point. Perfect refinement is not necessary in every context. Your comment, like CERN's interpreter, though sloppy was fit for purpose.
  - sampo 6y ago
    https://github.com/root-project/cling https://github.com/root-project/cling
    - lovemenot 6y ago
      Thanks. I retract the specific objection.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  There have been a lot of bad ideas in markup languages. Check out some of the ideas tossed around in the creation of HTML. Plenty of disasters averted by pragmatic thinkers and good luck. The web browser enabled my whole very comfortable career so I'm willing to overlook a sloppy C++ interpreter here and there.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Depends on who you ask I guess, present value of root has been estimated[1] at around 2.8 billion Euro. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zpeh9wuzMs&feature=youtu.be&t=3125 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zpeh9wuzMs&feature=youtu.be...
  - 6y ago
sampo 6y ago
> Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Theory of Relativity was invented at the Swiss Patent Office.
- jhgb 6y ago
  Which is a curious argument since it compares the free time activities of a patent officer with the activities of a scientist trying to improve his workplace communication. I.e., apples with oranges.
  - Joker_vD 6y ago
    Well, apples are obviously superior, because you can't make an apple pie with oranges.
woah 6y ago
There are worthwhile undertakings other than particle physics
- ehvatum 6y ago
  But we wouldn’t know what the things explored by those undertakings are made of.
gglon 6y ago
> Isn’t it nice (...) advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature? The criticism is that the ROI = (the potential advance) / (invested money) is too small. As you pointed out it can be argued that the real goal is elsewhere: in the engineering / technology or science of complex systems. Creating a big machine that verifiably works brings many unexpected advances in many fields. And what is more important it is a symbol of human advancement which unites people and inspires them to pursue science. Since humans need a clear goal to invest much resources in a constructive endeavor. It may not be that important though that the ROI in fundamental physics is small, as long as people work hard together. But it can be argued that the whole process begins to resemble religion more than a scientific method; which can be problematic as religions have a bad reputation among scientific community.
- Joker_vD 6y ago
  > ROI = (the potential advance) / (invested money) is too small That's unknown in advance. To take example from maths, the conic sections, braid theory, number theory—they all used to be very abstract and un-applicable parts maths, until one day.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    If it's unknown in advance surely it's more rational to spread the research out instead of putting most of the available eggs in a single basket. CERN found Higgs - which was proposed decades before CERN was built. There is nothing like the Higgs proposal around today. That's the real problem. Spend $20bn on some new models, and then you can spend $20bn chasing the most interesting prospects. That's far more likely to get you somewhere exciting than the experimental equivalent of throwing more spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of it does something unexpected.
    - SiempreViernes 6y ago
      > Spend $20bn on some new models, and then you can spend $20bn chasing the most interesting prospects. This is a very incorrect description of the problem. The situation in basic particle physics is that models are super plentiful; Six months in 2016 saw 500 different papers written to explain a novel signal that ended up not being real, so it's not models that are missing.
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
One could argue that spending a lot of money on a hyper advanced anything would lead to a bunch of cool technologies, even if the primary objective yielded no results. Why spend many billions of euros on something speculative when one could spend the money on something much more likely to produce both primary and secondary benefits?
- orbifold 6y ago
  Point me to something that has these characteristics and hasn’t received funding. Anderson made the case to fund many small scale experiments when it came to funding the SSC, but that doesn’t have the same secondary benefits.
  - mdorazio 6y ago
    Off the top of my head... - Large-scale climate engineering - Digitizing human consciousness - Strong AI - True life extension - A replacement for the ISS If you limit your characteristics to "involves high energy particle physics" it's pretty easy to put blinders on and pretend there aren't large challenges facing humanity that could potentially be solved by hard science progress and a lot of funding.
    - orbifold 6y ago
      Well what I meant show me plans with 1000s of pages of itemized highly realistic goals that have a chance of succeeding and yield real technological advances over a period of 30 years with 100s of professors putting their professional careers on the line for a common goal. The overlooked value of the HEP community is that they have moved to the industrial age of scientific endeavour, while almost everyone else is stuck in the Middle Ages. It would be great if people managed to organized around any of the goals you mentioned, so far it hasn’t happened at a comparative scale for various reasons.
vikramkr 6y ago
Its not zero sum, but the sum isn't infinite, especially for research without direct commercial applications. It would be nice to fund everything, but scientists have to get lot more politically engages before that sort of political support is even on the table
nabla9 6y ago
You are repeating the nonsense arguments Sabine has countered before http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-for-building-bigger.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-... I agree with her. These are nonsense arguments. > Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. (2. The “No Zero Sum” argument) > new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack 5. It is not a waste of money 11. It may lead to spin-offs. 12. A big particle collider would benefit many tech industries and scientific networks.
- orbifold 6y ago
  BTW her examples of experiments that received insufficient funding is really curious: FAIR she just happens to work at a university that is pretty directly involved with it, the cost overruns were so bad that the original people lost management of the project . The James Webb Telescope was in part delayed because it shares the platform with the next gen of American spy sattelites. I happen to know someone that worked on the sensors for both. Sensors that btw. share a lot of similarities with the sensors used in particle detectors.
  - nabla9 6y ago
    Her main point is that from physics perspective there are better ways to use money. Whatever success and failures in projects, we should keep throwing money into places that are more likely solve important physical questions. Any argument that sidesteps that is nonsense. If goal of investing in fundamental physics is not R&D it's just a side effect as I assume. If I read your argument correctly it's "We can't give argument that this is the best way spend money if you want to solve these problems, but it will generate other side benefits that may help indirectly". It's honest argument if put that way.
    - SiempreViernes 6y ago
      The particle community has enumerated why new accelerators are the best way to answer particle physics questions, Hossenfelders position is however that those arguments aren't worth engaging with because particle physicists are slaves to "group think". As for the argument that cosmology or astronomy are more promising ways of yielding new insights, that's not something she ever bothers to discuss in detail. There's no articles about how the extremely noisy and uncertain constrains from astronomy are more worth to gamble on that than the much cleaner direct detections from accelerators. And there's certainly no arguments about how we should stop giving so much money to the exoplanet researchers and their instruments instead of making satellites to measure the cosmic radio background. (There's not even a little post about how SpaceX will hamper radio astronomy by making sure there's no radio quiet place left on earth).
pron 6y ago
> 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. I don't understand this argument. We should prefer a particular experiment not because it is more likely to answer a research question but because it, itself, is more challenging?
- orbifold 6y ago
  There are few other ways of probing high energy physics systematically and a lot of them are funded and done aswell. This is not a zero sum game. We can bury detectors in the antarctic, in mines and have CERN. In fact technology developed at CERN helps those other experiments aswell.
  - pron 6y ago
    Fine, but that's not the interesting part of Hossenfelder's claim. Suppose we couldn't do it all and could only do one thing first. What is wrong with her claim that a bigger collider shouldn't be that thing? Is she wrong that that is not the most promising investment for discovery or is she wrong that "most promising investment" should be the main criterion for choosing what to do first?
    - orbifold 6y ago
      But we can do it all. Moreover a large number of talented people really want to do it. Whatever money they are asking for is a fraction of the cumulative benefits these people have provided to humanity. When arguing about money you never argue about "science discoveries", no-one in their right mind cares about them when it comes to fundamental science, when you talk about this level of funding. If you manage to build a 100 TeV detector you need to figure out a mind boggling number of practical technical challenges along the way. All of those sum up to a value that is far larger than 10 billion. For other projects like the Human Genome project or the Brain projects the ROI seems more immediate. But in fact physics projects have routinely yielded higher ROIs. There is an extremely long tail of physics / technology research that is funded by a new detector. As another example take the EU quantum initiative, they managed to get ~1 Billion and have promised to get ~5000 people working on it for ~10 years. That works out to ~20000 per person / per year. This only works because a lot of these people are so passionate about this project, that they are willing to self exploit themselves for years.
aaron695 6y ago
> Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. Poor people "shouldn’t" die from simple diseases. Is this the game, we are wishing away things we don't like? Science 100% is zero sum. Especially talking the figures we are here. How about we start with creating free science text books (that are not garbage) for the world then we'll let you blow multi-billions on your religion?
- orbifold 6y ago
  Pretty simple neither Hossfelder, nor politicians, nor you get to tell people what they would like to do. At this point it becomes a power struggle and so far mainstream physics has won that power struggle, because we have good arguments on our side. Investment in particle physics has had large net positive effects on society at large. Why kill the golden goose just because you aren't interested in whatever these people are interested in. Science doesn't enter this argument at all, purely from a technology and human capital level this is close to optimal use of their talents. You have a bunch of high y motivated, talented people working towards a common goal. Even if you don't perfectly understand why they would do that, their results alone are convincing enough to let them continue.
  - mcall 6y ago
    Good arguments? It was won in the same manner that the first motorway built in GB happened to be between Oxford and London (in that order).
    - orbifold 6y ago
      Right good arguments in the political sense. A highly organized, well connected, motivated group of people that write excellent funding proposals, with a track record of Nobel price worthy results and the ability to execute on >10 billion dollar projects on the time scale of decades. There aren’t that many people like that around and they happen to like to smash atoms.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> Generally speaking developing a new [HUGE PROJECT] leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. It's true for accelerators and a huge number of other things too. If this isn't unique to accelerators, it's not really a case for accelerators specifically. > 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? This isn't a good faith argument. What if we got our smartest people working in hospitals or schools or orphanages instead of getting you to click ads? Maybe that's where the money should go. Think of the children.
- robocat 6y ago
  Agree. > 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. The exact same argument can be made for military spending. The internet was invented at... It is always such a dishonest argument to talk about spin-off benefits.
pierrefermat1 6y ago
People really need to stop quoting tangentially invented technologies as the justification for CERN to exist, if I was to gather the same group of scientists to ask them to build the best Lego set possible with 50bil they would have also produced the same tangential technologies.
andi999 6y ago
" Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC" ... wait... no love for HERA (DESY) here?

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?
- JesseMReeves 6y ago
  It was edited, but the comment is still ad hominem and avoids talking about the specific criticism.
sampo 6y ago
> > She didn’t cut it and now is in a non-tenured position at a second rate institution. Lee Smolin, who did "cut it" and who worked in several first rate institutions, wrote about the same thing in his 2006 book The Trouble With Physics. So Sabine Hossenfelder is not alone with these opinions.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  If you read Jacques Distler’s blog you might be excused for thinking Smolin didn’t make the cut
orbifold 6y ago
That was uncalled for, so I took it out.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  How dare you? None of us have ever said something in a comment that was over the line! Um... at least not so far this morning... I think... um... (furtively checks comment history) nope, not me. I don't do that kind of thing (mumbling) so far today... We've all been there. Props for recognizing it, admitting it, and dealing with it.
- outworlder 6y ago
  It is pretty representative of the state of the academia. You should have left it in, if only as to serve as a reminder that science nowadays is all about status.
spotinsun 6y ago
Would FIAS (https://fias.institute/en/ https://fias.institute/en/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Institute_for_Advanced_Studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Institute_for_Advanc...) even be considered a second rate institution?
- codethief 6y ago
  Ignoring the fact that this is another ad hominem attack, judging a researcher by her/his home institution won't get you anywhere. I know dozens of outstanding mathematicians and physicists who are very well known in their respective fields and reside at less-than-well-known institutions. (Often, because their family is from there and they took the chance to go back.) Generally speaking, in Central and Western Europe it doesn't matter which institution a researcher is from. They're all good and those at top-tier institutions are only marginally better at best.

rusticpenn 6y ago

I agree with you. I would still love to work in academia, but when the work required to get proper funding is tied to the extension of your contract it can lead to some sleepless nights. In the book God Particle, the author describes how the funding for colliders in USA stopped after the cold war and it was extremely demoralizing even as a reader.

amelius 6y ago

> Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. More structural funding for open source software would also be welcome. Software that deals with communication (browsers, protocols, email, filesystems, codecs, etc.) should be fully open and developed by universities and government institutions, imho.

iguy 6y ago
I think the argument being made there is that when you gather smart people together, with resources to work on a hard problem, they will tend to invent things on the side which we didn't know we needed. An academic committee to decide what software was worth funding, in the 80s, would probably have come up with a very different list to yours. And would have hired people from safer, more academic, backgrounds than Sir Tim.
sgt101 6y ago
>developed by universities and government institutions The NSA called to say that they like your thinking there!
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Legitimate security and cryptography work from the NSA is always welcome.

tokai 6y ago

>This is personal to me, some of my friends work at CERN That is very clear. You didn't engage her argument at all. Is is really too much to ask for scientific mega project to generate all that value, while at the same time same pursuing a central object that is scientifically viable?

orbifold 6y ago
Building a high energy collider is like building a larger telescope. The only things you can be sure of is that you will be able to understand whatever you have seen better than before. There is scientific consensus that we should be able to understand dark matter better by building one aswell. This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public. Attacking this communication to the general scientific community is different from attacking the substance of these technical arguments. One can be done by a blog post, the other would need to be accepted by a scientific journal. Physical review letters would be more than happy to publish substantive attacks on prevailing beliefs about dark matter.
- sgt101 6y ago
  >>There is scientific consensus Really - I thought that we were debating an article by a scientist, who along with many other scientists disagrees with that position. >>This is supported by technical arguments which are hard to communicate to the general public. And yet the general public is being asked to pay for it. Perhaps sorting out that gap and explaining how understanding dark matter will be as important as (for example) curing cancer or alzheimers disease, or more prosaically cystic fibrosis or malaria would be a good thing? Or even understanding ecologies and the global climate? Will the new accelerator be carbon neutral? Will understanding dark matter prevent the collapse of our planet and the deaths of our children? If I were a politician funding this project I would want some pretty cold, hard information on these things.
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    Well, it's a scientist in a different field. More importantly, it's by a scientists that doesn't engage with the technical arguments made by those actually in the field, so it's unclear what exactly the label "scientist" brings. If a physicist criticises recommendations by epidemiologist without reference to the theory of how diseases spread, should you count that as disagreement from the consensus of how to fight infectious diseases?

emailrhoads 6y ago

She addresses many of your rebuttals quite well here http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-for-building-bigger.html?m=1 http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...

SiempreViernes 6y ago
Well, going on to see what should be done instead, we find she advocates for different experiments with the same type of argument she's so gleefully savaging here > You already know we haven’t found anything yet—otherwise you’d have heard of it. But even null results are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us that some ideas—for example, that spacetime might be a regular lattice—are simply incompatible with observations.[1] So this is really mostly about a "you had your chance with the toy, now it's time to let others play" argument, though she's very adamant that it's not. This is really the large problem with her criticisms: the case that exists is for particle physics getting less priority, but her argument is that it should stop completely, the collaborations disbanded, and everyone goes to find a new job because they can't be trusted to think clearly. [1]: http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/what-quantum-gravity-needs-is-more-experiments http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/what-quantum-gravity-needs-i...
- judofyr 6y ago
  > This is really the large problem with her criticisms: the case that exists is for particle physics getting less priority, but her argument is that it should stop completely, the collaborations disbanded, and everyone goes to find a new job because they can't be trusted to think clearly. Huh? Where is she saying this? Everything I've read from her suggests that she's against building bigger accelerators, not stop investigating particle physics. E.g. from http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-for-building-bigger.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-...: > Science is exploratory and to make progress we should study what has not been studied before, true. But any new experiment in the foundations of physics does that. You can probe new regimes not only be reaching higher energies, but also by reaching higher resolution, better precision, bigger systems, lower temperatures, less noise, more data, and so on. > No one is saying we should stop explorative research in the foundations of physics. But since resources are limited, we should invest in experiments that bring the biggest benefit for the projected cost. This means the higher the expenses for an experiment, the better the reasons for building it should be. And since a bigger particle collider is presently the most expensive proposal on the table, particle physicists should have the best reasons.

mnl 6y ago

I usually have to bite my tongue when it comes to Sabine's ramblings. BTW, I would love if anyone could point me any phenomenology paper of hers, I can't find them. Maybe when she single-handedly finishes with the slaying of the particle physics dragon she might tackle idk, condensed matter physics, she has the same kind of background there so who knows. Anyway, I'd like to link Dorigo's post where this anti-science stirrup might have shown up first: https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/what_it_means_to_be_antiscience-250570 https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/what_it_means_to_be... I don't find it surprising tbh.

orbifold 6y ago
That is a nice article! Thanks for pointing it out. Most of the time I try to bite my tongue aswell. It is just sometimes really upsetting.

bnlpa 6y ago

I think it is wrong to cherry pick the HTML example. It would have been invented outside (wasn't SGML already a thing?). Compared to open source in general the CERN stacks are horrible, typical sloppy academic software of no use to the general public. Tons of stuff like the cling C++ interpreter that look interesting but are never polished to be generally useful.

lovemenot 6y ago
cling ? clang perhaps? Truth is, I did get your point. Perfect refinement is not necessary in every context. Your comment, like CERN's interpreter, though sloppy was fit for purpose.
- sampo 6y ago
  https://github.com/root-project/cling https://github.com/root-project/cling
  - lovemenot 6y ago
    Thanks. I retract the specific objection.
jrumbut 6y ago
There have been a lot of bad ideas in markup languages. Check out some of the ideas tossed around in the creation of HTML. Plenty of disasters averted by pragmatic thinkers and good luck. The web browser enabled my whole very comfortable career so I'm willing to overlook a sloppy C++ interpreter here and there.
SiempreViernes 6y ago
Depends on who you ask I guess, present value of root has been estimated[1] at around 2.8 billion Euro. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zpeh9wuzMs&feature=youtu.be&t=3125 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zpeh9wuzMs&feature=youtu.be...
- 6y ago

sampo 6y ago

> Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Theory of Relativity was invented at the Swiss Patent Office.

jhgb 6y ago
Which is a curious argument since it compares the free time activities of a patent officer with the activities of a scientist trying to improve his workplace communication. I.e., apples with oranges.
- Joker_vD 6y ago
  Well, apples are obviously superior, because you can't make an apple pie with oranges.

woah 6y ago

There are worthwhile undertakings other than particle physics

ehvatum 6y ago
But we wouldn’t know what the things explored by those undertakings are made of.

gglon 6y ago

> Isn’t it nice (...) advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature? The criticism is that the ROI = (the potential advance) / (invested money) is too small. As you pointed out it can be argued that the real goal is elsewhere: in the engineering / technology or science of complex systems. Creating a big machine that verifiably works brings many unexpected advances in many fields. And what is more important it is a symbol of human advancement which unites people and inspires them to pursue science. Since humans need a clear goal to invest much resources in a constructive endeavor. It may not be that important though that the ROI in fundamental physics is small, as long as people work hard together. But it can be argued that the whole process begins to resemble religion more than a scientific method; which can be problematic as religions have a bad reputation among scientific community.

Joker_vD 6y ago
> ROI = (the potential advance) / (invested money) is too small That's unknown in advance. To take example from maths, the conic sections, braid theory, number theory—they all used to be very abstract and un-applicable parts maths, until one day.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  If it's unknown in advance surely it's more rational to spread the research out instead of putting most of the available eggs in a single basket. CERN found Higgs - which was proposed decades before CERN was built. There is nothing like the Higgs proposal around today. That's the real problem. Spend $20bn on some new models, and then you can spend $20bn chasing the most interesting prospects. That's far more likely to get you somewhere exciting than the experimental equivalent of throwing more spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of it does something unexpected.
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    > Spend $20bn on some new models, and then you can spend $20bn chasing the most interesting prospects. This is a very incorrect description of the problem. The situation in basic particle physics is that models are super plentiful; Six months in 2016 saw 500 different papers written to explain a novel signal that ended up not being real, so it's not models that are missing.

PopeDotNinja 6y ago

One could argue that spending a lot of money on a hyper advanced anything would lead to a bunch of cool technologies, even if the primary objective yielded no results. Why spend many billions of euros on something speculative when one could spend the money on something much more likely to produce both primary and secondary benefits?

orbifold 6y ago
Point me to something that has these characteristics and hasn’t received funding. Anderson made the case to fund many small scale experiments when it came to funding the SSC, but that doesn’t have the same secondary benefits.
- mdorazio 6y ago
  Off the top of my head... - Large-scale climate engineering - Digitizing human consciousness - Strong AI - True life extension - A replacement for the ISS If you limit your characteristics to "involves high energy particle physics" it's pretty easy to put blinders on and pretend there aren't large challenges facing humanity that could potentially be solved by hard science progress and a lot of funding.
  - orbifold 6y ago
    Well what I meant show me plans with 1000s of pages of itemized highly realistic goals that have a chance of succeeding and yield real technological advances over a period of 30 years with 100s of professors putting their professional careers on the line for a common goal. The overlooked value of the HEP community is that they have moved to the industrial age of scientific endeavour, while almost everyone else is stuck in the Middle Ages. It would be great if people managed to organized around any of the goals you mentioned, so far it hasn’t happened at a comparative scale for various reasons.

vikramkr 6y ago

Its not zero sum, but the sum isn't infinite, especially for research without direct commercial applications. It would be nice to fund everything, but scientists have to get lot more politically engages before that sort of political support is even on the table

nabla9 6y ago

You are repeating the nonsense arguments Sabine has countered before http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-for-building-bigger.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/nonsense-arguments-... I agree with her. These are nonsense arguments. > Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. (2. The “No Zero Sum” argument) > new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack 5. It is not a waste of money 11. It may lead to spin-offs. 12. A big particle collider would benefit many tech industries and scientific networks.

orbifold 6y ago
BTW her examples of experiments that received insufficient funding is really curious: FAIR she just happens to work at a university that is pretty directly involved with it, the cost overruns were so bad that the original people lost management of the project . The James Webb Telescope was in part delayed because it shares the platform with the next gen of American spy sattelites. I happen to know someone that worked on the sensors for both. Sensors that btw. share a lot of similarities with the sensors used in particle detectors.
- nabla9 6y ago
  Her main point is that from physics perspective there are better ways to use money. Whatever success and failures in projects, we should keep throwing money into places that are more likely solve important physical questions. Any argument that sidesteps that is nonsense. If goal of investing in fundamental physics is not R&D it's just a side effect as I assume. If I read your argument correctly it's "We can't give argument that this is the best way spend money if you want to solve these problems, but it will generate other side benefits that may help indirectly". It's honest argument if put that way.
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    The particle community has enumerated why new accelerators are the best way to answer particle physics questions, Hossenfelders position is however that those arguments aren't worth engaging with because particle physicists are slaves to "group think". As for the argument that cosmology or astronomy are more promising ways of yielding new insights, that's not something she ever bothers to discuss in detail. There's no articles about how the extremely noisy and uncertain constrains from astronomy are more worth to gamble on that than the much cleaner direct detections from accelerators. And there's certainly no arguments about how we should stop giving so much money to the exoplanet researchers and their instruments instead of making satellites to measure the cosmic radio background. (There's not even a little post about how SpaceX will hamper radio astronomy by making sure there's no radio quiet place left on earth).

pron 6y ago

> 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. I don't understand this argument. We should prefer a particular experiment not because it is more likely to answer a research question but because it, itself, is more challenging?

orbifold 6y ago
There are few other ways of probing high energy physics systematically and a lot of them are funded and done aswell. This is not a zero sum game. We can bury detectors in the antarctic, in mines and have CERN. In fact technology developed at CERN helps those other experiments aswell.
- pron 6y ago
  Fine, but that's not the interesting part of Hossenfelder's claim. Suppose we couldn't do it all and could only do one thing first. What is wrong with her claim that a bigger collider shouldn't be that thing? Is she wrong that that is not the most promising investment for discovery or is she wrong that "most promising investment" should be the main criterion for choosing what to do first?
  - orbifold 6y ago
    But we can do it all. Moreover a large number of talented people really want to do it. Whatever money they are asking for is a fraction of the cumulative benefits these people have provided to humanity. When arguing about money you never argue about "science discoveries", no-one in their right mind cares about them when it comes to fundamental science, when you talk about this level of funding. If you manage to build a 100 TeV detector you need to figure out a mind boggling number of practical technical challenges along the way. All of those sum up to a value that is far larger than 10 billion. For other projects like the Human Genome project or the Brain projects the ROI seems more immediate. But in fact physics projects have routinely yielded higher ROIs. There is an extremely long tail of physics / technology research that is funded by a new detector. As another example take the EU quantum initiative, they managed to get ~1 Billion and have promised to get ~5000 people working on it for ~10 years. That works out to ~20000 per person / per year. This only works because a lot of these people are so passionate about this project, that they are willing to self exploit themselves for years.

aaron695 6y ago

> Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. Poor people "shouldn’t" die from simple diseases. Is this the game, we are wishing away things we don't like? Science 100% is zero sum. Especially talking the figures we are here. How about we start with creating free science text books (that are not garbage) for the world then we'll let you blow multi-billions on your religion?

orbifold 6y ago
Pretty simple neither Hossfelder, nor politicians, nor you get to tell people what they would like to do. At this point it becomes a power struggle and so far mainstream physics has won that power struggle, because we have good arguments on our side. Investment in particle physics has had large net positive effects on society at large. Why kill the golden goose just because you aren't interested in whatever these people are interested in. Science doesn't enter this argument at all, purely from a technology and human capital level this is close to optimal use of their talents. You have a bunch of high y motivated, talented people working towards a common goal. Even if you don't perfectly understand why they would do that, their results alone are convincing enough to let them continue.
- mcall 6y ago
  Good arguments? It was won in the same manner that the first motorway built in GB happened to be between Oxford and London (in that order).
  - orbifold 6y ago
    Right good arguments in the political sense. A highly organized, well connected, motivated group of people that write excellent funding proposals, with a track record of Nobel price worthy results and the ability to execute on >10 billion dollar projects on the time scale of decades. There aren’t that many people like that around and they happen to like to smash atoms.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

> Generally speaking developing a new [HUGE PROJECT] leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. It's true for accelerators and a huge number of other things too. If this isn't unique to accelerators, it's not really a case for accelerators specifically. > 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? This isn't a good faith argument. What if we got our smartest people working in hospitals or schools or orphanages instead of getting you to click ads? Maybe that's where the money should go. Think of the children.

robocat 6y ago
Agree. > 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. The exact same argument can be made for military spending. The internet was invented at... It is always such a dishonest argument to talk about spin-off benefits.

pierrefermat1 6y ago

People really need to stop quoting tangentially invented technologies as the justification for CERN to exist, if I was to gather the same group of scientists to ask them to build the best Lego set possible with 50bil they would have also produced the same tangential technologies.

andi999 6y ago

" Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC" ... wait... no love for HERA (DESY) here?