5 ms·
James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way. Has theoretical
by Victerius 4y ago
James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way.
Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments?
What if we build a $200 billion collider that finds nothing?
What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?
That could be a line out of Asimov. "And so eventually the entire economy was exclusively focused on the construction of larger and larger particle accelerators. There was no room for anything else. Medical research was stopped. Movies stopped being made.Improving the lot of mortals was abandoned as a policy. The only thing that mattered to the 30 billion humans alive was to build and pay for the next accelerator."
Obviously an extreme extrapolation. But what if? Should we just ... give up on particle physics?
- throw93232 4y ago
- burmanm 4y agoWell, we also blow up billions in missiles that achieve nothing. So, why not smash some particles instead?
- Victerius 4y agoMissiles advance rocketry, electronics, composite materials, fuel chemistry, and precision guidance, all technologies we'll need more of in the future.
- Beltiras 4y agoWe probably wouldn't have the LHC now if the results hadn't been applicable to blowing stuff up for previous incarnations of it.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoI would absolutely prefer smashing particles over smashing missiles.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoIf building and paying for bigger and bigger accelerators would be the only things that matters for humanity, it wouldn't be that bad. First, servicing the accelerator is a major source of employment to the economy. I think it is a much better way to spend money than maintaining all the militaries in the world. Second, such a project will require a lot of highly educated personnel to run it, so it'll require a considerable investment in education.
- treyhuffine 4y agoThe Higgs itself was conceived on paper and proven in the LHC. Do we lack theories that can be conceived on pen and paper just the ability to test any of them?
- mr_mitm 4y ago> James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way. > Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments? That's a bit disingenuous. At the time, GR was an unconfirmed theory not unlike, say, String Theory is today. Except it only took a couple of years to confirm by experiment. Particle theorists and cosmologists have plenty of theories. But deciding which one describes reality best can only be done by data, no two ways about it. And yes, since most low hanging fruits have been found, experiments become harder and harder. Not to say more and more expensive. Your conclusion is correct though, that at some point a society has to decide whether they can afford further progress. Perhaps we also haven't found a theory as convincing as Einstein's GR because the math isn't there yet. GR was discovered shortly after differential geometry was formulated, and without it it would have been impossible. Similarly with Newton's theory and calculus. So maybe what we need is the right breakthrough in math?
- throw457 4y agoThe LHC cost was 2% of the yearly revenue of Apple I am fairly certain that we can "afford" it.
- macspoofing 4y agoApparently the next-gen LHC replacement will cost on the order of $100 billion. As a society (US, EU, or global), we can certainly 'afford it', but no-one is going to be writing that check anytime soon.
- l33tman 4y agoYet Musk was prepared to spend $42B on the twitter purchase which would almost have been a null-op for the world in comparison to funding basically any kind of venture or experiment with the same amount of money... If only Musk was more interested in the universe's structure :)
- im3w1l 4y agoIt's a question worth asking, but I think ultimately humanity needs a purpose. Something more than just survival and sensory pleasure. It's almost a given that we will have them both in abundance soon. And so increasingly the question we will face as immortal beings in eternal bliss is "well now what". Particle physics seems a reasonable way to pass time.
- dlsa 4y agoPaperclips are important! We need to optimise paperclip production! some time later The entire universe is one giant paperclip constructor.
- raverbashing 4y ago> James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way. They had tabletop experiments (and telescope observations) that gave them the clues they needed A lot of XX century physics was done in tabletop conditions (in the 19xx) with danger to the experimentalists. Also climbing mountains and capturing cosmic rays with photographic film We might still have something hidden but most of the low-hanging fruit was discovered already.
- pfdietz 4y agoIf you need a machine the size of a small country to observe an effect, chances are that effect is not going to have many practical applications. If it did, it would have shown up at the much smaller scale of those applications.
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago> James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way. This is hilarious, because these days the criticism of physics is that it's all "theories and ideas". > But what if? Should we just ... give up on particle physics? Should we just give up on learning?
- yread 4y agoReminds me of an old joke about our uni: Physicists keep coming to the head of the university with new requests for buying expensive machines. At some point it's one too many and he exclaims: "Can't you be more like the mathematicians? They need just pens, paper and a paper bin! Or the philosophers?! They need just pens and paper."
- piokoch 4y agoAnd how much time Maxwell or Einstein spent on their research and how much time on chasing grants and tenure positions? Were they required to publish X papers a year, target assigned by some university manager? Were they forced to amuse and be nice for their students, so they will look good on yearly teacher's assessment?
- Qem 4y agoI think we lack a "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach here. Just create a way to fund lots of individual researchers and teams with small grants to study whatever they find interesting, with no crazy deadlines, credential requirements, publish-or-perish demands, administrative overhead, etc. It doesn't matter if 999/1000 just produce garbage, if the one remaining hits something big. I suspect modern science is like a gold rush, with lots of people flocking around a few fad areas, and o lot of the search space uninhabited, because if you stray out of the fad-topics, you get no advisor, no funding, no lab, nothing.
- macspoofing 4y ago>Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over There are plenty of theories generated by theoretical physicists using pen and paper. The problem is that we can't reach the energy scales necessary to test those theories. >What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress? That's the problem with colliders now. We don't actually know if there are any interesting physics happening at energy scales that are within human reach. Maybe the next 'interesting' threshold can only come about from a galaxy-size collider - so $1 trillion collider isn't going to do squat for you. >Should we just ... give up on particle physics? I think we did. There was an article recently about how a next-gen collider to replace the LHC will cost on the order of $100 billion. No one is going to spend that kind of money, so we're done with collider physics for the next few decades.
- radicaldreamer 4y agoThe same thing happened when the Texas Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled (after >$2 billion spent) but we eventually got LHC. There'll be a winter in high energy physics but eventually the tide will turn.
- dotnet00 4y agoWhat's being overlooked in that number is that the money doesn't just disappear, it's going towards production of better electronics and sensors, funding research labs and universities, feeding back into other fields. Plus, it pays for researchers and PhDs who also contribute back to the system, often working on tangetially related projects in the process (eg the internet being a result of a need to better share data from CERN to researchers). The question to be asked should be if all that is comparable to the investment, which I think it is.
- bsder 4y ago> James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way. They also had quite solid experimental anomalies they were trying to explain. Black body radiation was an anomaly. Radioactivity was an anomaly. Photelectric effect was an anomaly. Mercury's orbit and rotation were anomalies. Particle physics isn't done, but colliders probably are. Terrestrial particle physics is effectively rudderless since there are no anomalies left for them to probe. It looks like it's going to be LIGO and the Webb to point to our new headings.
- Qem 4y ago>What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress? Well, if we could find a way to keep the GNP growing by at least 3.5% yearly, then in about 200 years a trillion dollars will be just like a billion today.