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As 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

As 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 ago
Aren't Hossenfelder and Smolin basically paying their bills by being contrarians though?
- photoelectric 4y ago
  At 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.
- pfortuny 4y ago
  Well, the same way that String Theorists are paying their bills from the taxpayers, mostly by pushing that theory as Physics.
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    Given that they are physicists and no one has actually been able to properly find an alternative to string theory isn't that what they're supposed to be doing? Isn't the main alternative LQG which is apparently a dead end?
    - orbifold 4y ago
      In any case this is not how science works, you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not. Both Smolin and Hossenfelder have been somewhat successful in doing so themselves, but Hossenfelder specifically didn’t manage to secure a professorship for various reasons and I am sure she has some axe to grind (again probably partially justified, partially not).
      - Georgelemental 4y ago
        > you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer-reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not No, science is not the act of publishing in a peer-reviewed journals, science is using past observations to make models that predict future observations, and then evaluating those models after making the future observations. Peer review is just the industry standard quality control mechanism.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
> 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. Couldn't the LHC be upgraded then to take advantage of this? Sounds like a much cheaper option. But I'm not a physicist at all so I'm sure I'm oversimplifying.
- fnands 4y ago
  The detectors on the LHC get upgraded regularly, between every run some part gets updated. Computing-wise as well, better computing resources are there. The fundamental limitations isn't the detectors or computers, it's the energies you can reach with a collider of that size. Yes you can completely retool the LHC, which will probably allow you to do slightly better precision measurements, but won't strongly affect the energies you can probe. To get to really high energies you need to build bigger. As a (former) particle physicist, I am also a bit sceptical if going bigger is better; the LHC was a calculated risk, with the goal of finding SUSY, which was a very plausible theory at the time. The FCC seems to be a shot in the dark. There is the argument that if we don't build a bigger one now we'll lose a lot of expertise, but that feels like a knee-jerk reaction from the community.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > to get to really high energies you need to build bigger Superconducting magnets enable much higher energies in smaller (granted, theoretical) fusion reactor designs than previously possible. Does the same not apply to colliders?
    - rimunroe 4y ago
      Colliders already use superconducting magnets
      - xyzzyz 4y ago
        With new developments, you can use much smaller magnets.
musha68k 4y ago
How about thinking about this on a grander scale / in the open - and just have more and even larger “industrial subsidy schemes”? Wouldn’t you like to work on another BIG SCIENCE project that tries to find answers to something that seems more worthwhile (to you)?
- namaria 4y ago
  I'd much rather live on a planet with too many giant science projects than have top engineers and scientists with obscene budgets for blowing up whole countries into the middle ages for political gain.
  - lthornberry 4y ago
    Agree. The total US non-defense research budget has hovered below 2% of federal spending for the last four decades. The military budget has been around 15%. We need more research, not less.
yccs27 4y ago
> 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. I'm not sure there is a fundamental distinction here. The only difference is success: Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist. When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment. It feels like nature itself is against physicists here.
- pfortuny 4y ago
  Sorry but several of the most prominent string theorists have gone from “LHC will find this to be a fact” to “We need a bigger LHC” as time passed. Not very trustworthy.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    Gonna have to ask you to show your work here: who specifically made an LHC prediction and is now asking for as bigger LHC?
    - sanxiyn 4y ago
      Many did, but Gordon Kane is a standard example because he is kind of more brazen about it than most. In 2011: "This is a profound turning point in the quest for a fundamental unified theory of the physical world. The properties and mass of the LHC's Higgs boson suggest that physicists will soon find superpartners for particles, and that we have begun to connect string theory to the real world." from https://www.nature.com/articles/480415a https://www.nature.com/articles/480415a. We didn't find superpartners. In 2019: "One important lesson from studying such models is that we should not have expected to find superpartners at the LHC with masses below about 1500 GeV." from https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20190314a https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.2019031.... I mean, yes, you should not have expected that, but you totally did, so why should I believe when you say the next LHC will find superpartners?
- 4y ago
levi_n 4y ago
> ...than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations. Genuine question from an ignorant layperson: was confirming the existence of the Higgs boson not significant?
- dTal 4y ago
  In a scientific sense - no. It was predicted, it was found. No theories needed rewriting. Significant would have been if they'd failed to find it.
  - fsloth 4y ago
    I would claim finding it was equally significant. Theory is not reality but just a model until verified. I know there is a trend in physics where computing is supposed to suffice without actually verifying anything but that is just wrong - I presume this notion is driven by the incentives to focus on publishing more than tedious collaboration.
    - geysersam 4y ago
      I agree. But isn't the issue that there is not really anything like Higgs for a new larger collider?
  - nix23 4y ago
    So finding Black-holes is not significant because it was already predicted? And btw there is so much money around...we should not fight against different project but the spending that goes into science itself. LHC and NASA is really just a small drop compared to military spending (in the US). https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/photo/1 https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/p...
    - _heimdall 4y ago
      Why hello again, tragedy of the commons! Modern monetary theory is its own can of worms, but justifying massive spending in one area because of even more massive spending elsewhere isn't solving anything.
dncornholio 4y ago
> 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. In my opinion, we are hitting diminishing returns.. It's harder to learn new things now than ever before. You need big machines to do anything interesting?
pyb 4y ago
True, but sadly, if you defund Big Physics, it doesn't mean the money will go to 1000 experiments. It's more likely that nothing will be funded. Same reason why nobody was able to effectively compete with YC: it's a lot less work for VCs to fund a few "big bets" than find 100 good early-stage startups. The VC strategy is a lot less effective, but they still earn their fees no matter what
- fennecfoxen 4y ago
  > it doesn't mean the money will go to 1000 experiments. It's more likely that nothing will be funded Perhaps it is reasonable to allow the money to remain unspent on topics related to physics! Spending has opportunity costs, after all; if these other experiments are not really the measure of the cost, then something else of value to society surely is.
  - pyb 4y ago
    The premise of this discussion is that those 1000 experiments would likely to be very scientifically vaaluable.
    - Teever 4y ago
      Yes but if the person who is saying that those 1000 experiments won't be funded but the next large hadron collider will and the next LHC is a waste of money then the alternative is between funding a waste of money and funding possibly not a waste of money like maybe some social programs or something.
    - ironmagma 4y ago
      There is other science we can do besides just physics.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      The premise of this subthread is that failing to fund another collider does not mean that those 1000 experiments will be funded. The person you're replying to is saying that even if money not thrown at a collider doesn't end up going to 1000 physics experiments, it will go to something. If that something is net-useful, it will be better than a new collider whose usefulness is questionable.
SiempreViernes 4y ago
> I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results. Or are you seriously imagining that there is a cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret? Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?
- dylan604 4y ago
  >Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results. This is coming from a forum where it's normal to see "something that already exists, but written in $newLanguage/Framework" as a thing to celebrate. So why not just redo science but with newShiny so we haven't actually achieved anything? /s
  - SiempreViernes 4y ago
    Just do "import SUSY" I don't know why you think it's hard to find!
    - dylan604 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure this is wrapped in all sorts of dependancy hell
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  It's also often said that science advances one funeral at a time. It's entirely possible for an entire field to be stuck in a local maximum and refuse to admit that they are not advancing, especially when huge money depends on it. A recent example is the amyloid hypothesis for Alzheimers, which has failed every single time it was tested in clinical trials, but is still being pushed again and again, mostly by a cabal of academics that refuse to accept that were wrong, and industry bureaucrats that are afraid to challenge the orthodoxy (no one was ever fired for approving research proposed by the foremost expert in their field!).
qiskit 4y ago
> Einstein and the quantum pioneers Einstein wasn't a 'quantum pioneer'. Einstein was a proponent of classical physics and against quantum physics.
- mikebenfield 4y ago
  I didn’t read that as intending to include Einstein in that group.
- hackinthebochs 4y ago
  Solving the photoelectric effect gave birth to the field. He just didn't like the monster he had created.
  - qiskit 4y ago
    No. He was working on the photoelectric effect because "the field" already existed. And he was working on it from a classical physics standpoint. What makes quantum physics revolutionary is it's non-classical nature. That's what einstein was against - quantum physics as we know it today. Einstein was a life long classic physicist. His relativity was grounded on classical physics. It's why many are working towards a quantum theory of gravity.
- tzs 4y ago
  His Nobel Prize was for his early quantum work (explaining the photoelectric effect). He was a major participant at the first Solvay conference. Bose-Einstein statistics didn't get that name just because someone though it looked cool. He of course fully knew that the world is quantum, not classical. His beef with the mainstream QM past the mid to late '20s was with the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein believed that a complete theory would have realism and so Copenhagen could not be the complete theory.
- ketralnis 4y ago
  That isn't true. Einstein's "breakout" paper was on the Photoelectric effect. He wasn't a fan of probabilistic interpretations of quantum mechanics but it's not accurate to say that he didn't have a hand in it
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> 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. What is interesting, is that a lot of the fundamental physics theories were discovered by amateurs. Einstein was a patent clerk, for example. Maybe we should work on democratizing data collection, and making more raw data available for people to work with. With the advent of cloud computing and on demand computing, maybe your hobby group could code up a an analysis and run it on AWS for a few hundred dollars and discover some new theory.

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 ago

Aren't Hossenfelder and Smolin basically paying their bills by being contrarians though?

photoelectric 4y ago
At 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.
pfortuny 4y ago
Well, the same way that String Theorists are paying their bills from the taxpayers, mostly by pushing that theory as Physics.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Given that they are physicists and no one has actually been able to properly find an alternative to string theory isn't that what they're supposed to be doing? Isn't the main alternative LQG which is apparently a dead end?
  - orbifold 4y ago
    In any case this is not how science works, you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not. Both Smolin and Hossenfelder have been somewhat successful in doing so themselves, but Hossenfelder specifically didn’t manage to secure a professorship for various reasons and I am sure she has some axe to grind (again probably partially justified, partially not).
    - Georgelemental 4y ago
      > you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer-reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not No, science is not the act of publishing in a peer-reviewed journals, science is using past observations to make models that predict future observations, and then evaluating those models after making the future observations. Peer review is just the industry standard quality control mechanism.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

> 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. Couldn't the LHC be upgraded then to take advantage of this? Sounds like a much cheaper option. But I'm not a physicist at all so I'm sure I'm oversimplifying.

fnands 4y ago
The detectors on the LHC get upgraded regularly, between every run some part gets updated. Computing-wise as well, better computing resources are there. The fundamental limitations isn't the detectors or computers, it's the energies you can reach with a collider of that size. Yes you can completely retool the LHC, which will probably allow you to do slightly better precision measurements, but won't strongly affect the energies you can probe. To get to really high energies you need to build bigger. As a (former) particle physicist, I am also a bit sceptical if going bigger is better; the LHC was a calculated risk, with the goal of finding SUSY, which was a very plausible theory at the time. The FCC seems to be a shot in the dark. There is the argument that if we don't build a bigger one now we'll lose a lot of expertise, but that feels like a knee-jerk reaction from the community.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > to get to really high energies you need to build bigger Superconducting magnets enable much higher energies in smaller (granted, theoretical) fusion reactor designs than previously possible. Does the same not apply to colliders?
  - rimunroe 4y ago
    Colliders already use superconducting magnets
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      With new developments, you can use much smaller magnets.

musha68k 4y ago

How about thinking about this on a grander scale / in the open - and just have more and even larger “industrial subsidy schemes”? Wouldn’t you like to work on another BIG SCIENCE project that tries to find answers to something that seems more worthwhile (to you)?

namaria 4y ago
I'd much rather live on a planet with too many giant science projects than have top engineers and scientists with obscene budgets for blowing up whole countries into the middle ages for political gain.
- lthornberry 4y ago
  Agree. The total US non-defense research budget has hovered below 2% of federal spending for the last four decades. The military budget has been around 15%. We need more research, not less.

yccs27 4y ago

> 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. I'm not sure there is a fundamental distinction here. The only difference is success: Einstein's and Schrödinger's theories etc. predicted effects that were later experimentally proven to exist. When new high-energy theories predict something, the hypothetical effects are either not testable in the foreseeable future, or eventually disproven by experiment. It feels like nature itself is against physicists here.

pfortuny 4y ago
Sorry but several of the most prominent string theorists have gone from “LHC will find this to be a fact” to “We need a bigger LHC” as time passed. Not very trustworthy.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Gonna have to ask you to show your work here: who specifically made an LHC prediction and is now asking for as bigger LHC?
  - sanxiyn 4y ago
    Many did, but Gordon Kane is a standard example because he is kind of more brazen about it than most. In 2011: "This is a profound turning point in the quest for a fundamental unified theory of the physical world. The properties and mass of the LHC's Higgs boson suggest that physicists will soon find superpartners for particles, and that we have begun to connect string theory to the real world." from https://www.nature.com/articles/480415a https://www.nature.com/articles/480415a. We didn't find superpartners. In 2019: "One important lesson from studying such models is that we should not have expected to find superpartners at the LHC with masses below about 1500 GeV." from https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20190314a https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.2019031.... I mean, yes, you should not have expected that, but you totally did, so why should I believe when you say the next LHC will find superpartners?
4y ago

levi_n 4y ago

> ...than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations. Genuine question from an ignorant layperson: was confirming the existence of the Higgs boson not significant?

dTal 4y ago
In a scientific sense - no. It was predicted, it was found. No theories needed rewriting. Significant would have been if they'd failed to find it.
- fsloth 4y ago
  I would claim finding it was equally significant. Theory is not reality but just a model until verified. I know there is a trend in physics where computing is supposed to suffice without actually verifying anything but that is just wrong - I presume this notion is driven by the incentives to focus on publishing more than tedious collaboration.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    I agree. But isn't the issue that there is not really anything like Higgs for a new larger collider?
- nix23 4y ago
  So finding Black-holes is not significant because it was already predicted? And btw there is so much money around...we should not fight against different project but the spending that goes into science itself. LHC and NASA is really just a small drop compared to military spending (in the US). https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/photo/1 https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/p...
  - _heimdall 4y ago
    Why hello again, tragedy of the commons! Modern monetary theory is its own can of worms, but justifying massive spending in one area because of even more massive spending elsewhere isn't solving anything.

dncornholio 4y ago

pyb 4y ago

True, but sadly, if you defund Big Physics, it doesn't mean the money will go to 1000 experiments. It's more likely that nothing will be funded. Same reason why nobody was able to effectively compete with YC: it's a lot less work for VCs to fund a few "big bets" than find 100 good early-stage startups. The VC strategy is a lot less effective, but they still earn their fees no matter what

fennecfoxen 4y ago
> it doesn't mean the money will go to 1000 experiments. It's more likely that nothing will be funded Perhaps it is reasonable to allow the money to remain unspent on topics related to physics! Spending has opportunity costs, after all; if these other experiments are not really the measure of the cost, then something else of value to society surely is.
- pyb 4y ago
  The premise of this discussion is that those 1000 experiments would likely to be very scientifically vaaluable.
  - Teever 4y ago
    Yes but if the person who is saying that those 1000 experiments won't be funded but the next large hadron collider will and the next LHC is a waste of money then the alternative is between funding a waste of money and funding possibly not a waste of money like maybe some social programs or something.
  - ironmagma 4y ago
    There is other science we can do besides just physics.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    The premise of this subthread is that failing to fund another collider does not mean that those 1000 experiments will be funded. The person you're replying to is saying that even if money not thrown at a collider doesn't end up going to 1000 physics experiments, it will go to something. If that something is net-useful, it will be better than a new collider whose usefulness is questionable.

SiempreViernes 4y ago

> I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results. Or are you seriously imagining that there is a cabbal of old researchers that have found a much better way to explore things but for political reasons is keeping it secret? Why is it so impossible for you to believe that people have done honest attempts at finding new ways to do the fundamental physics they want to explore for decades and keep coming to the conclusion that they'll need big machines to do anything worthwhile on the timescale of a PhD position?

dylan604 4y ago
>Not entirely sure how this "lets ignore the knowledge we've accumulated and start over afresh" idea is supposed to mesh with the notion that science is a product that builds on earlier results. This is coming from a forum where it's normal to see "something that already exists, but written in $newLanguage/Framework" as a thing to celebrate. So why not just redo science but with newShiny so we haven't actually achieved anything? /s
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  Just do "import SUSY" I don't know why you think it's hard to find!
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure this is wrapped in all sorts of dependancy hell
tsimionescu 4y ago
It's also often said that science advances one funeral at a time. It's entirely possible for an entire field to be stuck in a local maximum and refuse to admit that they are not advancing, especially when huge money depends on it. A recent example is the amyloid hypothesis for Alzheimers, which has failed every single time it was tested in clinical trials, but is still being pushed again and again, mostly by a cabal of academics that refuse to accept that were wrong, and industry bureaucrats that are afraid to challenge the orthodoxy (no one was ever fired for approving research proposed by the foremost expert in their field!).

qiskit 4y ago

> Einstein and the quantum pioneers Einstein wasn't a 'quantum pioneer'. Einstein was a proponent of classical physics and against quantum physics.

mikebenfield 4y ago
I didn’t read that as intending to include Einstein in that group.
hackinthebochs 4y ago
Solving the photoelectric effect gave birth to the field. He just didn't like the monster he had created.
- qiskit 4y ago
  No. He was working on the photoelectric effect because "the field" already existed. And he was working on it from a classical physics standpoint. What makes quantum physics revolutionary is it's non-classical nature. That's what einstein was against - quantum physics as we know it today. Einstein was a life long classic physicist. His relativity was grounded on classical physics. It's why many are working towards a quantum theory of gravity.
tzs 4y ago
His Nobel Prize was for his early quantum work (explaining the photoelectric effect). He was a major participant at the first Solvay conference. Bose-Einstein statistics didn't get that name just because someone though it looked cool. He of course fully knew that the world is quantum, not classical. His beef with the mainstream QM past the mid to late '20s was with the Copenhagen interpretation. Einstein believed that a complete theory would have realism and so Copenhagen could not be the complete theory.
ketralnis 4y ago
That isn't true. Einstein's "breakout" paper was on the Photoelectric effect. He wasn't a fan of probabilistic interpretations of quantum mechanics but it's not accurate to say that he didn't have a hand in it

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> 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. What is interesting, is that a lot of the fundamental physics theories were discovered by amateurs. Einstein was a patent clerk, for example. Maybe we should work on democratizing data collection, and making more raw data available for people to work with. With the advent of cloud computing and on demand computing, maybe your hobby group could code up a an analysis and run it on AWS for a few hundred dollars and discover some new theory.