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Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
- rootw0rm 4y agoCouldn't agree more.
- throw457 4y agoAh... the yearly bigthink article that we should stop funding other experiments and put everything into fusion.
- sliken 4y agoFusion does remind me of the space program. Surprising new solutions in a wide range of sciences. Easy to produce superconducting ribbons being one of the big successes so far. Said ribbons have lead to significant improvements in electro magnets, improving both field strength and decreasing the magnet sizes. Said magnets are useful for a wide variety of applications (outside of fusion), like improved MRI machines. The ribbons have the potential to help transmit power across the grid with less losses. Significant improvements in predicting and shaping turbulence in plasma has a wide range of applications in producing more efficient engines. Using AI/ML to attack the complexity of the plasma flows that were otherwise computationally intractable. I'm all for the LHC, but it does seem like the world needs a bit better of an idea of the mysteries that the LHC++ might solve before spending $10-$100B on it. Does seem like science could be pushed further in other areas.
- throw457 4y agoIf we solve physics we solve everything if we solve fusion we have solved fusion.
- brazzy 4y ago> If we solve physics we solve everything A particle collider does not, in fact, "solve physics" in any meaningful way, especially not in terms of practical applicability. > if we solve fusion we have solved fusion. The comment you are replying to has explained in some detail why this is not true.
- throw457 4y agoWhy bother doing science at all if it's not practical applicable right? Such a nonsense argument I wonder how you think any scientific progress is made.
- sliken 4y agoResearch is never a sure thing, but ideally we'd push all areas of science equally. How many other areas of science have a $100B tool that may or may not reveal something interesting? Why should high energy physics get priority over any other area? It's the nature of high energy physics that the higher the energy the rarer the event. The standard model already explains our universe unbelievably accurately. Sure there are corner cases, and maybe, just maybe a LHC++ might give some evidence towards one model or another. But what happens if global warming, wars over fuel, lack of fertilizer, and lack of food makes it harder for humanity to survive let alone complete major science projects. Renewable and/or carbon neutral energy in all it's forms seems pretty important these days compared to slightly reinforcing one physical model over another. Maybe a fusion engine would let us explore the solar system enough to find planet 9, which might well be a black hole. That would open up particle energies well in excess of anything we could manage with LHC++.
- brazzy 4y agoThat was a small part of my argument. That you have to concentrate on that in this way shows that you don't really have any arguments yourself.
- waqf 4y agoIf we solve fusion, surely we have a lot of cheap energy (and attendant economic output) to throw at solving physics?
- ncmncm 4y agoNo. It would cost far, far more to extract useful energy from fusion than using well-understood renewables. And, we control plenty of energy. The project is to concentrate it in one spot.
- waqf 4y agoWhat is meant by "solving fusion" if not making fusion an economically viable source of power? And I didn't mean to suggest that available energy was the limitation on building LHC++, but rather that available economic surplus was.
- ncmncm 4y agoIn that case, fusion will never be solved, and any money spent toward that goal is money wasted.
- simion314 4y agoDidn't CERN and LHC had big contribution already related to magnets(though maybe LHC designers don't directly apply to fusion needs) ? There are projects related to fusion too but I am expecting that people agreeing to this article will also want to remove the funding for fusion and invest it in electric cars and solar panels or his pet project.
- sliken 4y agoI heard of some news in that area, but the breakthroughs I heard of where fusion related and at MIT: https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusion-energy-0908 https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusio... From what I can tell it's really is ground breaking, significant changes, well ahead of the normal projections for improved magnets. Literally with a single technology that allows magnet to be 40 times smaller. The easy to produce superconducting tape of arbitrary length is likely to find interesting applications as well. Sure, like all research, practical fusion is not guaranteed, but it does look promising, and real progress has been made, and not just the "few % better this year" that might lead to real progress in a decade or a few centuries. However Fusion is just an example, imagine 100 $1B projects, doesn't it seem likely for humanity to learn more from those then some particle that is hard to produce, last for a billionth of a second, and makes some models more likely and other models less likely? Maybe help with cancer, medicine, energy production, AI, space travel, faster computers, improving food production, mitigating global warning, energy storage or similar?
- brazzy 4y agoThat is the exact opposite of what the article argues. It says to stop putting everything (or rather, a ridiculous amount of money) into high energy particle physics and start funding other experiments.
- robga 4y agoRight, the article doesn't argue for fusion funding. But elsewhere the author has advocated it with "fusion power is a goal worth spending billions on". And in his "Why Particle Colliders Will Go Extinct" article, he supports the billions spent on fusion. The author's other writings include: - Gun Ownership Neither Increases Nor Decreases the Crime Rate - Fleeing Paris Accords Makes Scientific Sense - NSF Should Stop Funding Social 'Science'
- isaacfrond 4y agotl;dr. Because Supersymmetry is stupid theory that can be fit to any set of facts, there is no point in building LHC++. Besides it is so expensive you could give a 100.000 physicist a million bucks and that would be more productive.
- Avamander 4y ago> Besides it is so expensive you could give a 100.000 physicist a million bucks and that would be more productive. Would it? A bunch of the arguments in the article apply to pretty much all science funding.
- isaacfrond 4y agoNo! It would not. You could fund attic hobby projects all year long, but it's never going to give new data. It is one of the great perks of civilization that you can combine resources to make something truly awesome, whether it is pyramids, moon landings or large colliders.
- Havoc 4y ago> What it could discover is entirely speculative. Thats the point of discovery and arguably a point in favour of doing this
- gonzo41 4y agoFor the cost though, you should probably fund a lot of other science. Climate change mitigation perhaps?
- mschuster91 4y agoThe claim that we need to "invest into science" is outright bullshit. We don't need more investment into climate change science - we already know what to do to mitigate climate change and we have known it for decades (hell there is an article from over a hundred years ago that warns of the dangers of CO2 emissions [2]): ban ICE vehicles and coal power plants, promote public transit, massively restrict other uses of fossil material, get rid of mass animal farming, prevent profiteers from burning down the Amazon rainforest. The problem is, politicians won't do anything because they are either bought out by the fossil fuel industry that is at the top of the CO2 emitter list [1] or because they are afraid of telling their voters that the only way to stay on track regarding climate change will be a drastic cut in their quality of life. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_contributors_to_greenhouse_gas_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_contributors_to_greenhouse... [2]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/13/fact-check-yes-1912-article-linked-burning-coal-climate-change/8124455002/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/08/13/fact...
- irthomasthomas 4y agoI wouldn't mind them building it if they just used their own money. Spinoff cern companies have earned a $trillion or more revenue and probably a hundred billions profit from things like medical imaging gear. They could well afford to fund themselves and a new collider without begging the public for money. Cern really should be investigated and audited publicly, but it would take Delloites and PWC to follow that paper trail and audit hundreds of companies going back 25-30 years. I've always said it, cern is a scam, they take public money to fund product research, and then spin off separate companies to cream off the profits. Then they act broke and beg us for more money. Edit: There is very little public information on this. The company accounts may be public, but like I said, there are hundreds of them going back 30 years, and no-one is motivated to do that kind of research. There is a recent study here[0] which looks at the economic benefit to companies that help build the research equipment. Obviously a lot of tech has to be invented just to build systems like this. But I haven't seen a similar study of the cern spin-off companies, or KT (Knowledge Transfer) partners in cern nomenclature, and that is where the real meat is. I don't see why it would be so controversial for cern to retain some share in those KT companies and use that money to be self sufficient. That seems like a win for science. [0] https://cds.cern.ch/record/2632083/files/CERN-ACC-2018-0022.pdf https://cds.cern.ch/record/2632083/files/CERN-ACC-2018-0022.... Further reading: https://kt.cern/success-stories/fostering-culture-entrepreneurship-cern https://kt.cern/success-stories/fostering-culture-entreprene... https://kt.cern/success-stories/managing-cern-intellectual-property https://kt.cern/success-stories/managing-cern-intellectual-p... One example company (out of hundreds): UK firm buys cancer-zapping spin-off from CERN collider "The spin-off, known as Adam, was established in 2007 by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to build low-cost innovative accelerators for proton beam therapy (PBT) and conventional radiotherapy. Advanced Oncotherapy will pay for Adam in shares, giving CERN scientist Alberto Colussi, who founded the CERN business, a continuing stake in the technology." https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-cancer-cern-advancedoncotherapy-idUKBRE93N0BQ20130424 https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-cancer-cern-advancedoncot... https://www.avoplc.com/en-gb/Investors/Share-Price-Information https://www.avoplc.com/en-gb/Investors/Share-Price-Informati...
- scandox 4y agoThat sounds kind of like what every government dreams of - an institution you fund that does important scientific work and also generates a thriving ecosystem of private sector companies? If that's a scam then please take the shirt off my back.
- ivanb 4y agoYeah, no. Only LHC can generate particle events in a highly controllable environment with enough energy. In physics there are energy thresholds. Below a certain level of energy a certain event just never happens. The low hanging fruit of discovering new physics looks like this. Build a bigger machine to collide particles with even more energy. Observe what comes out. It's a clear direction. Just throw money at the problem and get a result.
- uejfiweun 4y agoDoes this sort of thing give us tangible benefits? Is it worth the investment? I get things like materials science, supercomputers, AI research, etc. But these colliders are so expensive, all for the sake of discovering a tiny subatomic particle that we have no way of using, AFAIK. But I know nothing, am I wrong here?
- VaxWithSex 4y agoHossenfelder's critique is valid.
- serf 4y agothe collider itself lends itself to few directly tangible benefits, however the construction of the collider and analysis of the data is one of the largest innovation engines in the science world. a prolific amount of software, engineering, and material science has come from CERN, as well spinning off numerous high-tech startups.
- Avamander 4y agoLikely yes, a bunch of tech from the previous iteration has yielded very good returns. If we do find new particles we probably can't use them right away, yes, but that doesn't mean we can't later on. A lot of science has been like that.
- tiborsaas 4y agoWe can't directly use the particles that are being discovered, but we can use the theories that they can confirm to be correct. By confirming a theory you can use the entire framework to come up with useful ideas. This is what happened to General relativity. If people only asked "ok, that star is a little bit off, but will that lead us to faster horses?" would look funny in hindsight.
- rvieira 4y agoDriven by this post, out of curiosity I started looking at the price tag of some mega-projects around the world. Interestingly, the most expensive ones are almost always highway systems. Can someone briefly explain why? I'm my naive view it's mostly asphalt and terrain work.
- julienreszka 4y agoHighway systems are expensive projects because they require a lot of land, they are very labor intensive, and they require a lot of materials.
- rvieira 4y agoAh, yes. I forgot the "detail" of land purchasing/compensations...
- samwillis 4y agoAnything that involves digging holes in the ground is enormously expensive. If you take house building as an example, 25-30% of the cost is the foundations - digging it out then filling them with concrete. It’s labour, fuel, and material, intensive work.
- threeseed 4y agoAlso there is the wonderful element of surprise. Sometimes when they dig into the ground they find something unpredictable e.g. contaminated soil which can result in a major cost blowout, a legal fight between government and contractor and then unplanned delays which further increases costs.
- slickrick216 4y agoNot an expert but I would say for the following reasons: - It’s a lot of asphalt - construction happens over a wide possibly remote area so all construction materials need transportation - materials are probably made to order so you are buying effectively a lot of custom components - engineering/architecture/construction talent isn’t cheap and there’s a lot of competing demand - hiring is even more difficult as the job isn’t in one place may require a lot of travel, bed and board for all types of workers - property itself is possible a significant cost to build it through. Even more if you get caught up in legal battles acquiring certain properties - grift, with large projects in any country at any time there’s always grift. Grift is a constant
- mehrdada 4y agoCannot disagree more. "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's just have 1000 people walk one mile and explore." Simply ridiculous comparison. But sure, let's find a way to build/experiment LHC++ less expensively. What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.
- yieldcrv 4y agoMy immediate skepticism is whether there is a dollar limit to your perspective $100,000,000,000 with afterthought of “sure lets see if we can do it less expensively *since its sooo annoying to some people”? Where is the line for you currently?
- moonchrome 4y agoYour analogy is fundamentally flawed. More realistically : we can only build one car in the entire world, where a tiny minority of people can even understand the potential benefit, and anything they see will be completely useless for everyone else in day to day life because we need a civilisation level effort to even detect the implications of their theory. If their theory had some real world implications - you wouldn't need this car. And this is expected to be funded by everyone. It's the modern equivalent of building pyramids.
- xcambar 4y agoWith this logic, I assume you'd call the ISS a useless project.
- inglor_cz 4y agoNot the OP, but this is a good example. ISS wasn't useless, but its successor should be much cheaper. We absolutely need to find ways how to do space research more efficiently, otherwise it will stay a luxury of the richest nations. Fortunately, at the very least, launch costs to orbit are dropping and we may hope for further drops in the future - if Starship works as intended.
- DeathArrow 4y agoScience costs. Big science costs more. So let's not do big sciences, let's do some small science. :D
- brazzy 4y agoNo, the idea is to do lots and lots of small science instead of one big one, because we'll probably learn more from that.
- musha68k 4y agoIt’s not a zero sum game though. Europe could pay for all of these projects. That would be even better, don’t you agree?
- rocqua 4y agoDoing this one thing but 10x bigger, has always given some extra science. So let's do the same thing but 10x bigger once again. It's not like we have many other great ideas for science experiments. Apparently.
- bjornsing 4y agoI fully agree. I’d even go one step further: don’t spend that 100 billion on physics at all. That’s taxpayer money that actually can be spent on feeding the hungry. That’s the humane thing to do, and I bet a much better investment in science too, since those hungry will have a chance to become scientists. PS. I have a masters in engineering physics and several friends who are physicists. I’m also a science nerd. But I still think this is the right thing to do.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoThe best way to feed the hungry is to implement systemic change which improves education, distributes productivity more evenly, invests in primary research across a broad range of domains, eliminates debt slavery, and - most of all for this three - keeps qualified physicists in research and out of fintech. You need to throw politics at poverty and homelessness, not just cash. Not incidentally, lowering the barriers to physics education and changing the incentives towards risky imagination and away from calculated academic careerism would also make breakthroughs in physics more likely.
- patrick0d 4y agoWhy not take the 100 billion from somewhere other than frontier physics research. I always consider these articles small minded since the people writing them don't consider projects outside of their domain that eat up more funding than something like LHC++. It's such a zero sum situation where there is a 100 billion grant for grabs and the author wants it spent on one project in place of this one. The more research we do the better and 100 billion spent over approx 20 years by over a dozen countries is a far cry from putting all our eggs in one basket.
- maerF0x0 4y ago> spent on feeding the hungry Cannot eat money, unfortunately it's far more durable and fungible than food. Now, perhaps there are investments that can be made to improve the world's agriculture.
- popinman322 4y agoThe LHC's development produced a number of new technologies (e.g. radiation resistant microcontrollers, and gas electron multipliers). Could the next generation produce more, valuable tech? I also don't have the expertise to tell whether the article is being overly reductive with the project's goals: are there other questions (besides new particles) that can only be answered with a larger collider? The summary of the FCC (Future Circular Collider) project's goals indicates that yes, there are unresolved questions that the FCC will address[0]. [0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-6904-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-69...
- black_puppydog 4y agoI see the same argument (secondary innovations) being made for war-time/military research. But I don't buy it there, and I don't buy it here. Investing the same money in something that has a known and positive primary effect will produce the same amount of secondary benefits. So if you can think of something more fruitful to do with these 100B, do that; the secondary benefits will keep coming anyhow.
- radu_floricica 4y agoGood point with secondary benefits being equal.
- News-Dog 4y agoWiFi > a secondary benefit was developed from speculative theoretical research in radio-astronomy : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiFi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiFi
- radu_floricica 4y agoI've read the history section in that page and I see nothing about that. WiFi had several competing implementation - at best, you could say the Radiophysics Division of CSIRO sped things up a bit. But since the next paragraph begins with "About the same time in The Netherlands in 1991" (aka a year earlier)...
- atemerev 4y agoCtrl-F, “Sabine” Well, if this isn’t predictable!
- sydthrowaway 4y agoShe is ruining Physics
- atemerev 4y agoI wouldn't say that, it's OK to be skeptical, even necessary sometimes, and I guess she is doing some useful work in some cases. But... well I can only hope her point of view won't become more popular.
- rlpb 4y agoMy understanding is that most (or at least many) very significant scientific discoveries were serendipitous. They were discovered while looking for something else. So statements like "When you don’t have much to go on, and limited resources, it’s better to aim at problems that you know are out there. Those things will lead you to new discoveries." don't make sense to me. I'd find this article and its opinion more credible if it could point out how this didn't apply to the LHC. Was every discovery and technology that came out of the LHC predicted in advance? If not, then this argument fails.
- ThePhysicist 4y agoFor serendipity to work its magic you need to be able to explore the solution space. In high energy physics that usually means putting more energy into a system, as (naively said) that will increase the amount of stuff that will happen. So I'm all for building bigger and bigger accelerators, even if they cost trillions of dollars to make, as we have only explored a tiny piece of the energy scale so far, and we're pretty sure very interesting stuff happens at higher scales (ultimately, grand unification of all forces). Also, there's a mutual relationship between theory and experiment in physics. The LHC was well motivated by theoretical predictions (most notably the Higgs boson) that needed experimental verification. In physics you have to put your theories to the test, otherwise they're not worth much. Each experimental result is like a nail that fixes a part of your theory space (by excluding possible alternative theories), and that then allows you to explore the space further with greater confidence. Hence the more nails, the better.
- radu_floricica 4y agoYou're missing the second part of his argument. Serendipitous discoveries can come from anywhere, so it does make sense to pay attention to cost. Which would you think would be a better bet for a random win, 100k separate experiments, or just one large experiment that's a scaled up version of something we already have? If you say the second, you have severe scope neglect: 100k is a huge number. Of course, one expensive experiment may be the right call in some situations, but only if you have good reason to think it'll pay off. Either because you're certain it will, or because the expected utility of unknown results is larger than the cost (expected utility being probability times value). This very much isn't the case here.
- viburnum 4y agoEnd manned space flight while you’re at it.
- LaGrange 4y agoThis, but unironically.
- theblazehen 4y agoWhy?
- viburnum 4y agoRobots are way better and you don’t have to bring them back home.
- dmpk2k 4y agoI have started calculating things in LHCs. The LHC is a massive machine with advanced technologies, took a decade to design and build, involving 10k scientists and the international community, and cost $9B. - Squadron of F-35 aircraft: ~0.2 LHCs - JWT: 1.1 LHCs - ITER: >2 LHCs - Elon Musk's wealth: 24 LHCs - Microsoft's market cap: 30 LHCs - US annual military budget: 90 LHCs - US national debt: 3389 LHCs Given the bizarrely huge numbers casually throw around nowadays, I think it's useful to keep some perspective.
- redleader55 4y agoAs someone born in a country near Russia, 5 squadrons of F-35 change my life in a more significant way that 1 LHC. Nit: MSFT market cap is ~210 LHC.
- postalrat 4y agoNot any more than 5 squadrons of MiGs.
- xcambar 4y agoAnything compared to the US annual military budget seems cheap and a good idea. PS: Dear commenter, please don't "how about X?" in comments. I know you're smart. So smart you can find a counter example. Congratulations, you're clever.
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoTongue slightly in cheek, these data point to the answer - get Musk to pay for this thing. It'd consume a big chunk of his wealth but it's probably at least pitchable given his interest set.
- inglor_cz 4y agoThe development of Raptor 2 was orders of magnitude cheaper and its likely impact on human technology is pretty huge.
- r3x_m 4y agoI'm just a layman who loves physics, but this article does make a point. The LHC was built to definitively prove or disapprove existing theoretical models, like the Higgs boson. If the exponential increasing of cost of the LHC++ can't even promise new proofs or discoveries, then isn't that money better spent on other scientific experiments that will advance science? I'd have no problem with Europe spending that money on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), or many other projects.
- datadata 4y agoThis article brings to mind the plot point [SPOILER ALERT] in "The Three-Body Problem" where the antagonistic and technologically superior aliens halt the progress of our entire civilization merely with nanotechnology that impedes science at our particle accelerators, thus preventing breakthroughs in physics.
- trasz 4y agoIt's a rather... alien way of doing something that can be achieved much easier, by "convincing" the leaders to spend that money on weapons instead.
- narrator 4y agoThat, or it's worth spending $100 billion on meaningless make work for smart people so we don't invent what comes after nuclear weapons.
- ainiriand 4y agoWell, the US spends more than 700B per year in military budget alone, I see this thing as much more important and necessary. In any case it will be built by a conglomerate of countries and the budget is not huge when splitting the bill. Heck I would even like to see a couple of these built per year instead of more planes and warships. Edit: Typo.
- KHRZ 4y agoWell, there are some urgent issues where the money could be better spent, like solving the climate disaster, starvation, wars, automating most work. But after that, LHC++ is pretty much a top priority.
- japanuspus 4y agoAs a low-energy quantum physicist, I completely agree: Experimental high-energy physics has become primarily an industrial subsidy scheme[1], and if we want the highest chance of reaching a grand unified theory, it seems the money would be much better spent elsewhere (cosmology, space-based observatories, research positions for young physicists without publish-or-perish incentives to run for the latest fad). The short history of physics in TFA is spot on: Einstein and the quantum pioneers added abstractions to build physical theories with prediction power, whereas current high-energy physics theory seems to be mostly a mathematical exercise. This has been confirmed by numerous insiders, including by Hossenfelder as mentioned in the article, and Lee Smolin ("The trouble with physics") who is also a theoretical physicist. Things have changed a lot since accelerators became a must-have for high-energy physics: Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned. I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations. [1]: The industrial subsidy angle is not touched upon in TFA, but it is clear that there is a large number of people and companies making a good living from mega-physics, and talking to colleagues in the field, I get the distinct impression that it is not always they physicist walking in the front when asking for more machines.
- samstave 4y ago>As a low-energy quantum physicist... === Thats just how I read your comment to begin with. In Steven Wrights voice. "People ask me what I'm into... Low energy quantum physics... its basically everything"
- mhh__ 4y agoAren't Hossenfelder and Smolin basically paying their bills by being contrarians though?
- photoelectric 4y agoAt least for Hossenfelder, I think she's lost the message. She accused LIGO of fraud a while back. However, none of the points she made ended up being real. Even after being corrected, she kept pushing the narrative. I guess because it gets her more views.
- captainmuon 4y agoAs a former experimental particle physicist, I don't think string theory or supersymmetry is going to be a description of nature. I say that despite spending a couple of years searching for SUSY. But I still think the cost of building a LHC++ (that is, the FCC or the SPPC) is justified. The current theoretical "dead end" or maybe swamp fundamental physics is in is precisely due to a lack of data. Of course, there are a lot of smaller experiments that one could do, also in particle physics, that have great value. One example was the Muon g-2 measurement, another is anything neutrino physics. We can get a lot of interesting input and test our theories without going to the "energy frontier". Physicists understand this very well. But there are a bunch of questions that you can only really answer if you go to those higer energies. As for the costs, 100 billion is a lot, but not when you compare it to other large infrastructure projects, or especially military spending (and note the Chinese proposal SPPC would be a lot cheaper!). I think if we could shave off 100 billion of military expenses and put it into basic research, it would be a great win for society. That's not realistic you say, with all the threats out there? Great, I agree, but now we have a nice project! Lets put as a common goal that we want to be able to do this kind of research, and then improve our societies nationally and globally so that we can reduce our military spending and do this kind of research. 100 billion ($/€) is the amount that Germany is spending as a special budget in response to Russia's aggression, in order to become the nation with the 3rd highest military spending on the planet. If it weren't for the war in Ukraine, we could put it all into such a project. If we had averted COVID in it's early stages - like we did with SARS-1 and MERS - imagine all the resources we could have put into research instead.
- magicalhippo 4y agoBut if you have say 100 billion, why put it into "yet another collider" rather than say condensed matter physics and quantum information research? To me, a non-physicist, it seems those areas have a lot more potential to deliver science that will benefits us. Alternatively, if one really wants to pursue beyond the standard model physics, it seems to me multi-messenger astronomy has a much better chance of delivering decisive data, so shouldn't we put that money into better observatories?
- 4y ago
- wasmitnetzen 4y agoGovernment finances don't work the same way as other finances. A normally functioning democracy can basically invent as much money as it needs to (see Covid relief packages). If there's political will to do an LHC++, three ITERs and two ISS's, the money will appear. If there's opposition to the LHC++ and it gets scrapped, that doesn't mean that the funds will be re-allocated. They will just disappear.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y agoTrue, however printed money's not free free, it devalues all money so it's sort of a backdoor tax. Assuming that there is an upper bound on a nation's science budget (and in practice, there is), then the article makes a valid point - particle colliders have diminishing returns as it stands right now, and that money might be better spent on thousands of smaller studies. Forward thinking nations would take this approach, a single discovery in just one of these studies might unlock a huge amount of scientific, commercial or industrial value, and casting the net wide gives the greatest chance of making that discovery.
- inglor_cz 4y ago"A normally functioning democracy can basically invent as much money as it needs to" Sure. For some time period and amount of money, indeed. What happens once this limit is reached and people stop trusting that money? Currency collapses are nasty. Look at Weimar Germany after WWI.
- izacus 4y agoLHC costs are basically peanuts in comparison to any kind of spending the western countries do (especially if you compare it to spending on killing machines). Several LHCs, ITERs and ISSes won't bring any of the nations close to Weimar Germany. Aircraft carriers, F-35s, failing infrastructure projects and corruption have a larger chance of doing that.
- concordDance 4y agoI think there's a certain disconnect from the underlying reality here. If you didn't have those things then the people who design, build and operate the thing would be doing something else. Are you sure the other things they'd be doing are less valuable? Also, I'll note that inflation in the UK is at 9%. Printing money is essentially a tax on those with cash holdings, who are mostly poorer. Not to mention the wastage on repricing...
- oyoman 4y agoI think people needs to put a bit of perspective on this : the FCC is a project for the next 70 years. It is supposed to be operational after 2040 at the earliest if I recall correctly (20 years from now more or less), and to run for around 40 years. So if you do a very simplistic calculation on the first 20 years : 100 B euros over 20 years over 20 countries (there is 23 member states into the CERN) it is 250 M euros / year / country. This is not even calculated on the over-all project time, on on the different steps that will be happening: first FCC as electron-positron collider and then much later FCC hadron-hadron collider. And if you are really interested into the previewed outcomes (scientifically and new techs associated): https://indico.cern.ch/event/1040535/timetable/#20220503.detailed https://indico.cern.ch/event/1040535/timetable/#20220503.det... You can take look at the European research communities symposium that just happened recently on the future of the research topics in Europe. There are a lot of information for FCC and so on.
- cm2187 4y agoI am all for spending money on scientific research but to justify large investments, it needs to yield something useful in practice. Otherwise it’s a form of philosophy, minus the societal impact. XX century science has delivered plenty of practical applications. But is there any practical application to expect from another large Hadron collider? Wouldn’t that money be better used in bio science or something else?
- krageon 4y ago> to justify large investment it needs to yield something useful in practice The really important scientific work doesn't follow this rule and demanding it does is short-sighted. Perhaps worse, it's refusing to learn from plenty of historical examples where you can see the work yielded nothing of immediate use but was still very important (that is to say, society would look vastly different without it). In a sense, it's this kind of goal-oriented thinking that led society to the mess that it has become in the last 15 years.
- musha68k 4y agoExactly. “Agile”, efficiency-over-everything, etc won’t save this planet.
- Aerroon 4y agoHow many of those historical examples cost so much though? With $100 billion you could give $10000 to 10 million people. Or spend it on retraining or some other education. Most previous science discoveries weren't throwing around oodles of money.
- hoseja 4y agoWe need to start building large-scale space-based experiments. Not experiments to study space necessarily but because they'd be too big to fit on the Earth.
- practice9 4y agoAlso, please no more Mars rovers. Sometimes it's good to do something radically different, instead of scaling up the same stuff
- yccs27 4y agoI feel like this article does not discuss the real reasons why LHC++ would or would not be a success. It absolutely depends on whether you expect it to provide tangible evidence of new physics; that is, physics beyond the standard model. It's easy to say "high-energy physics has become highly academic and mathematical", but if it provided results there wouldn't be a problem with that. Mathematical beauty has proven unreasonably effective at driving innovation in physics [1], and cutting-edge research being academic is nothing new. The fundamental problem for high-energy physics seems to be the "tyranny of the standard model", as one of my professors called it. We know that our current model of fundamental particles must be incomplete towards extremely high energies (trillions of TeV), because it conflicts with general relativity. However, almost all experimental results are consistent with the standard model. There are some barely-significant [2] results from muon spin and W-boson experiments, but the effect sizes are minuscule and and two data-points are in no way enough to guide new theory development. This leaves theorists with almost no experimental input, so they pursue purely mathematical ideas that are in some way elegant, able to describe the standard model as a low-energy limit, and in some cases include a description of gravity as well. But the more advanced and theoretical the ideas get, the more difficult it gets to make experimental predictions. The ones which predict non-standard-model measurements with current equipment are already ruled out anyway, because we did the measurements and the standard model just keeps getting validated. So what should we do? We can hope that a larger collider will find new evidence of beyond-standard-model physics, but (as I understand it) there is no concrete reason why there has to be anything interesting in the newly-accessible energy region. [1] As just one example from particle physics: Gell-Mann's "Eightfold Way", which uses advanced representation theory to describe hadrons and was successful at predicting new particles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_way_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_way_(physics) [2] Note that high-energy physics has an extremely high standard of significance at 5 sigma, so it's not comparable to "barely significant" in the social sciences.
- Jweb_Guru 4y agoI mean... dark matter exists (or MOND if you are into that). So there's no real question that there's physics beyond the standard model. Why not try our luck in the accessible regions to see whether that's where it lives?
- bullen 4y agoThe "best" thing to come out of CERN is HTTP. I think breakthroughs are often perpendicular to the energy, so the best investment in understanding the universe is probably to explore it. Unfortunately that also requires alot of energy. Rate of change is going to slow down with the price of energy going up.
- throwaway14356 4y agoThe "who should decide" question i find the most interesting. It's one of the rare setups where i lack thé arrogance to think my opinion would be relevant. (That said, if the goal was to burn the funds with minimal progress I couldn't imagine a better tool than the LHC BWANDO corporation.) If the tax payer is to fund the effort perhaps their opinion should have some non-zero influence on the choice? Im not entirely against theoretical efforts (which is like my opinion) but to alienate clearly productive effort under some "let industries do it" banner seems several bridges to far. Maybe the other way around: let industries decide. would be less sensless. useful things like wind solar wave tidal energy, clean water, agriculture etc all directly compete for the funds. Wait, i know. Lets spend an insane amount of money to research what we should be funding. Im sure we can figure out howmany apples an orange is worth.
- elashri 4y agoI read the article and wondered where the author got the next hadron collider to be LHC++ and how he got this estimation for the cost. Anyway I remember that a couple of years ago I was talking with my of my professors and he mentioned LHC++ which was a OOP software environment proposed (1). Anyway as someone inside experimental HEP field, I would encourage anyone who wants to understand more about finding and ideas to try to follow up the snowmass process as an example on how the dynamics of funding and new ideas for the future forms, discussed and gets priorities (at least in US) Snowmass process is basically a series of meeting for the US HEP community where they discuss the US strategy and funding requests for the coming decade. the last one was in 2014 and now this process which takes about 3 years (probably more this time thanks to covid). It is really insightful but technical in nature but try to read more about it and the final report that gets to DOE committee to act as advisory guideline from the community. [1] https://cds.cern.ch/record/451601/files/p59.pdf https://cds.cern.ch/record/451601/files/p59.pdf
- dontbenebby 4y agoBut if we don't, where will the next generation of birds drop their bagels? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/nov/06/cern-big-bang-goes-phut https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/nov/06/cern-big-ban... (Old physics meme :-) )
- macspoofing 4y ago>Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider ... A next-generation LHC++ could cost $100 billion. I don't think you need to worry about it
- rubyist5eva 4y agoHey, I don’t need even more Mandela Effects, ok?
- blablabla123 4y ago> The hypothetical machine could not truly test string theory Interesting point, there was a time where it wasn't even clear whether string theory should be considered part of Physics or rather Mathematics or even Metaphysics. That said, the LHC has continuously given additional insights into existing theories and also it's not the only collider in the world although probably there's no other where so many countries collaborate. Also an interesting read about the early history of CERN: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.1955503 https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.1955503
- spacemanmatt 4y agoAs much as I generally agree with the goal of knowing all the things, that goal exists in service to living a good life. And I definitely have to question the economic sense of spending $100B at the LHC store, compared with many other stores that sell $100B worth of good life for earthlings.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago$100B into basic cancer research (not even targeting a specific cancer per se) would be money better spent, for example.
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- _ph_ 4y agoI think the question whether to build a new collider deserves more than a simple "yes" and "no". Indeed, it looks as if particle physics right now is a bit in a dead end, there are no obvious and imminent discoveries to be expected from such an instrument. And with the enormous amount of money it would require, a lot of other experiments could be financed, which short term are much more likely to advance science. On the other side, I unless there is evidence that we cannot discover any more by building a new collider, we shouldn't just stop research into that direction. We don't know what lies there and might be missing the true discoveries to be made. Also, these colliders do finance a lot of science around them. Just designing and building them fills plenty of thesises and papers. A lot of adjacent science is involved. Detector design, data processing just to name a few. The web we are using has been invented at CERN :) Consequently, the cost trade-off isn't as clear-cut as the article might make it sound. Which for me leads to the obvious answer: yes, we should build another, larger collider. But probably not right now. There should be plenty of funding for the current one and also quite a bit of theoretical preparation before it is getting planned/built. In this time, other projects should get priority funding. But eventually, we should build another collider. We should never stop researching.
- throwawayffffas 4y agoI completely disagree, 100 billion might sound like a lot of money, but it's not. It's going to take like 20 years to build/assemble right? That's like 5 billion a year the EU GDP is 17.9 trillion per year. It's worth it just to keep all these physicists and engineers employed.
- maerF0x0 4y agomight have localized effects though. Like rentals, pubs, cost of trucking, in the regions which it's being built
- neltnerb 4y agoThey could even pay scientists a more reasonable wage and make funding easier to get with all that money and maybe not have an unsustainable university system where even amazing researchers can't get multi-year reliable funding (in the US, I know it is less bad elsewhere). But sure, go build a $100B machine out of habit.
- musha68k 4y agoThe article's pretext is a false dilemma. You can "fix" lots of science issues with money as well as have more of these large scale scientific efforts. It's up to the European funding and the extension of it. There is enough money to go around in one of the richest economic zones in the world.
- yboris 4y agoWe are currently living in a very important time in humanity's history that the philosopher Toby Ord calls The Precipice. We likely have a 1 out of 6 chance over the next century to end humanity (all human life is destroyed), so this century we absolutely must decrease the chances of existential threats to humanity or perish. This should be humanity's #1 priority, yet at the moment we spend less on it than we do on ice cream. https://theprecipice.com/ https://theprecipice.com/ Please read this book, which is in my opinion the most important book written this century.
- jmartin2683 4y agoIt’s a good thing guys like him didn’t have any say back in the 1920s and 30s.
- rkwasny 4y agoThe target never is to just "build" bigger LHC. The important part is "building" which pumps billions into research programs for improving materials/electronics etc. Sure we can defund all expensive science and maintain the status quo, last time we did this dark ages happened.
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoAs someone who did their PhD at CERN - I agree. The place is fantastic, you get to meet great people and life is cool. But what you are working on is completely useless for humanity. Knowing that there is a quantum foam is knowledge that brings us nowhere. If someone could answer to this "and so what?" in a meaningful way I would be glad to change my mind. For the time being, the energy scale we are making these discoveries is not useful. "yes, but this is fundamental science..." → yes it is, but where does this fundamental science helps in everyday problems? Have we had a case where the Higgs boson changed anything in our life? The quantum mechanics of the 1920's changed our everyday world. We could build a whole technology on it, and understand things that changes our everyday life. Is there a comparable impact on knowing that the Higgs boson is +/- 10^-9 (or whatever) aligned with the theoretical model? We have so many problems where physics is needed (energy production to start with, and then exploring biology), the money should go there instead. Even if it means having less particle physicists the same way we have less philosophes.
- orangesite 4y agoThere's a point at which theory needs to catch up to observations before it makes sense to gather more observations.
- louissan 4y agowhat about trying to see such advanced fields of studies as (extremely?) long-term investments (for the species?). I'm sure that 20,000 years ago some crazy shaman was frowned upon for trying to "melt rocks and see what happened", or "ate some weird/unknown/sacred plants" or "what if I push this seed into this little corner of land and look after it (water, sun, defend if against herbivores)"? etc, etc, etc?
- philipov 4y agoMy understanding is that theory has blasted way past observations and what we need now are more precise observations. And developing the technology capable of making such precise observations has immense utility outside of the particular experiment that drives their invention. Even if superparters are useless, more powerful magnets are useful. Better sensors are useful. Better data processing technology is useful. And that stuff gets invented by the people probing to find superpartners.
- rektide 4y agoIt's a good case made here. I don't disagree. But what it raises is interesting & challenging: > There are many known problems in physics right now. $100 billion could fund (quite literally) 100,000 smaller physics experiments. There may not be enough physics labs on Earth to carry out that many experiments! It's amazing & a bit problematic how big-biased we are. For reference, LHC cost a bit under $5B by compare. I have a hard time imagining what it would take to get $5B in funding for physics. How much effort would each physics project have to spend to go get funding, versus how much time did it take the LHC to get funding? I really like the idea of diversity, of a range of medium & small projects. But it feels like structurally we are disposed towards bigger higher ticket tasks. That once the ball is rolling, once there's critical mass, we can get the checkbooks opening. But by compare the channels for getting small & medium funding is more case by case, that large pools of money aren't as available or accessible.
- Johnny555 4y agoI always figured that the bigs supercolliders were just a big job creation program -- the money isn't spent in a vacuum (no pun intended, well ok, a little), but the money is going toward paying people and vendors to do $100B of work, with a little raw materials thrown in. So even if you're not getting $100B of science out of it, it's not a total waste.
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- gumby 4y agoThis article summarized by xkcd: https://xkcd.com/401/ https://xkcd.com/401/ Side note: this is comic number 401. Comic number 404 is particularly good.
- Invictus0 4y agoThere are more bad takes in this comment section than perhaps any other comment section I've seen in the last two years.
- sandworm101 4y agoOk, we don't want to another LHC as a physics experiment, but what about all the engineering coming out of such projects? From superconductors to data science, the LHS has done lots of new stuff. Whether the core science experiments succeeds or fails might be beside the point. There are other outcomes to such projects than pure science answers. One can argue that the ISS hasn't produced much science, but without that space station we probably wouldn't have seen nearly as much progress in lowering the costs of accessing space. The link between CERN and the web is a great example of something that had nothing to do with the core science but was certainly worth more than the investment.
- godelski 4y agoI hate these economic arguments. They throw around big numbers to scare you away but really they aren't big. Let's look at the LHC, which cost $4.75bn to build and costs $5.5bn/yr[0]. This may sound like a lot, but also consider that it took a decade to build ($0.5bn/yr for the first 10 years). Then consider that it is a joint multinational effort. If you're a member state (European) here's what your country contributes yearly[1]. The highest is Germany which does 20% of the member state contributions, at a whopping total of $236 million/yr (it is in CHF, but it is almost identical to the USD so I swapped). The US gives some grants in the half billion orders but I am having a harder time finding good logs. The other thing I hate about this is that the numbers reported in the article are clearly inflationary. The use the precise phrasing " It’s entirely possible that the price could swell to $100 billion." while highlighting the big number. Well let's check another source. CNET says $23bn. So that would require a 5x over budget, which would be quite high. I know HN loves Hossenfelder, but she is overly pessimistic. At least in my group of physicists, we don't know other physicists who like her much (not that I hate her, just more ambivalent). Pessimists are good, but they shouldn't dominate conversations the same way optimists shouldn't. Either way, it is clear that this type of money is very small when we are discussing country budgets. It should not be inflated and should not be sold as if there is a single country buying it (which it is well cheap enough to be done. Hell, Bezos and Musk could each have one, or several. Hell, there's at least 20 billionaires that wouldn't have issues building their own and funding them for significant periods of time). So the real question is if we should build it, not the cost. As a former physicist, I do think the argument for building one is weak. It is correct that we don't have any great things to test. But there are reasons to do so. We need to consider it will take at least another decade to build, which theorists will hopefully come up with something in that time. If they don't, we can still test precision levels which is highly helpful. But there are other intangible things that are hard to evaluate. Anytime we humans tackle difficult problems and push the boundaries of what we can do, we learn a lot. That's where spinoffs come from and we've seen them in every major scientific endeavor (NASA, CERN, LIGO, and many more). Also, what happens when you put a bunch of smart people from many countries in a room together? There's political advantages (and why I think it is a shame Bush killed the American accelerator). There's also the fact that if we stop doing this, we'll lose talent and skill. So yeah, the upsides aren't crazy good like finding a new fundamental particle, but it also isn't that expensive. That's the real conversation that needs to be had. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-does-it-cost-to-find-a-higgs-boson https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d... [1] https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.cern_budget https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.cern... [2] https://www.cnet.com/science/cern-wants-to-build-a-new-23-billion-super-collider-thats-100-kilometres-long/ https://www.cnet.com/science/cern-wants-to-build-a-new-23-bi...
- hexo 4y agoI'd rather see my tax poured into new much larger collider than into politicians pockets, olypmic stadiums or agriculture subsidies...
- Animats 4y agoBut build medium-sized synchrotrons for IC fabs.[1] That paper describes a design for a 160 meter ring synchrotron to produce "extreme ultraviolet" for IC fabs in the 7nm and below range. Some large research accelerators have been used for that experimentally, including SLAC at Stanford. So the concept is known to work. It just needs to come down in price and size. ASML's tin-vaporization light source, which is a mechanical and optical nightmare made to work by throwing a few billion dollars at it, is the current technology. This may be how China leapfrogs the West in IC technology. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z
- TrapLord_Rhodo 4y agoThis is why we can't get anything done. Everyone has a million other ideas on where this $100B should go and they would all be right. That shouldn't ever be the argument because you can argue about the exact peice of fecundity that the dollar value can have until you are blue in the face on X, Y, Z projects. When it comes to government spending, my reactions seems to be the opposite of most. I actually think that these big audacious projects is the only use for government. Fund big things that individually and within the private market would never be a thing. Do Hubble, Do LHC++, do scientific exploration missions because that is what makes you proud to be part of what is going on around you. That sense of inspiration in the air of progress is all that is required for a functioning society.
- LeoNatan25 4y ago“What it could discover is entirely speculative.” This has been said, in one form or another, about almost any invention and experiment, shortly before actual discoveries were made. Scientific conservatism at its worst.
- antonvs 4y ago> The only good argument for the LHC++ might be employment for smart people. And for string theorists. We're going to need that $100 billion for burn cream.
- michaelcampbell 4y agoI've often wondered if there was a point at which we know "enough". That is to say, any knowledge beyond that point, while perhaps "true" and legitimate, can in no way influence anything anyone possibly does, has access to, or can base any decision on. In other words, is there a level of knowledge that can't be used for literally anything? Is this that?
- freemint 4y agoYes and please build 10 of these instead: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652618307522 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...