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It is entirely about the allocation. LHC is a massive jobs program that wastes money and time, perhaps a hundred thousand experiments could fill its place. Lar

It is entirely about the allocation. LHC is a massive jobs program that wastes money and time, perhaps a hundred thousand experiments could fill its place. Large part of the jobs and $$$ go to someone other than a physicist.

defrost 4y ago
And for "all" that we can throw at this kind of program it should be pointed out that perhaps nothing of interest might happen until it scales to energy levels of several of our suns with observations over a scale a little longer than human evolution .. still barely a scratch on the breadth and depth of the universe.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  That's the crux with all kinds of fundamental research, isn't it? Everyone considers it a basically useless wild goose change until sometimes, something comes along that completely restructures our understanding of the universe. I wonder if people made the same argument against funding of research in nuclear fission...
  - ogogmad 4y ago
    The parent comment is saying that the next scale of actually useful particle colliders might be outside of practical reach. Note that by "useful", I mean capable of discovering new physics. His comment is therefore in agreement with Sabine, and not with yours.
  - defrost 4y ago
    USofA nuclear physcists certainly made such an argument against pursuing the development of nuclear fission weapons, they said such things were beyond the reach of US industry in argument against the intial pleas to do so from the UK MAUD committee and a following letter from Albert Einstein. They were eventualy persuaded by an Autralian nuclear scientist acting on behalf of the Commonwealth MAUD scientists. The issue with the endless(?) chase after ever more exotic particles is that every iteration levels up by some magnitude of effort, where nuclear fission weapons were once ( just out of | just within ) reach and subject to furious debate is more the case that ever fresh exotic particles expontentially escalate beyond actual resources. Once we ring the circumference of the planet and use all the PetaWatts we can currently generate .. what next? It'll take a while to level up to smashing suns together .. with no guarentee the rabbit hole is halfway plumbed.
- fjfaase 4y ago
  It could even be that there is nothing new to be found no matter how high the energy gets. But even more fundamentally, she seem to worry about the fact that there are currently no urgent 'holes' that require you to invent new particles. She points out that the method of inventing new particle that worked so well in the past, no longer seems reasonable, but that nevertheless, the high-energy physists stick to it out of tradition. It seems that the field of high-energy physists have become an incrowd that only continues to exist because everybody pads eachothers shoulders and that people on the outside believe that something must be true about it. It sounds as if she as a person is critized (and not her ideas) primarily because of her pointing this out.
cma 4y ago
The world wide web, which came out of the LHC project, alone was worth perhaps millions of experiments.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  It didn’t came out of the LHC project. (The LHC project was approved in 1994. There had been a decade of planning but that had nothing to do with the creation of the web.)
  - cma 4y ago
    Opps yeah, was mixing it up with CERN in general. All the work on WWW and earlier hypertext there wasn't just for early LHC planning stuff but it has been a noted thing: > Should China build the Great Collider? > Stephen Hawking and Gordon Kane 2018 > [...] > This has shown up in the past from the LHC in a number of well documented areas, including inventing the World Wide Web with its huge impact on economies world-wide and then grid computing. Someone said imagine that CERN (where the World Wide Web was invented for particle physics) had one penny for each use, then particle physics would have all the funding it could use. More industries include magnet technology and superconducting wire technology, a multi-billion dollar accelerator industry, a multi-billion dollar imaging industry that owes its existence to the development of particle physics detectors, other billion dollar industries, and many tangible benefits. Such technologies generate revenues far exceeding the investment for collider construction. > Arguably the third industrial revolution was triggered by the invention of the World Wide Web at CERN. The requirements for data acquisition and storage and access, and the materials and technologies needed for CEPC and SPPC could help lead to the fourth industrial revolution. For the first decades of the third industrial revolution High Energy Physics led, and only in recent years industry has overtaken HEP. History may repeat itself for the fourth. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.00682.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.00682.pdf
    - kgwgk 4y ago
      That someone has written that before doesn't make it true. The "World Wide Web" was invented at CERN but that happened in the LEP era. LHC has absolutely nothing to do with it. Not everything is the same in the context of this discussion: one may think that LEP was good, and even that LHC was good when it was approved, built and put in place and also think that it's a waste of resources now.

defrost 4y ago

And for "all" that we can throw at this kind of program it should be pointed out that perhaps nothing of interest might happen until it scales to energy levels of several of our suns with observations over a scale a little longer than human evolution .. still barely a scratch on the breadth and depth of the universe.

DocTomoe 4y ago
That's the crux with all kinds of fundamental research, isn't it? Everyone considers it a basically useless wild goose change until sometimes, something comes along that completely restructures our understanding of the universe. I wonder if people made the same argument against funding of research in nuclear fission...
- ogogmad 4y ago
  The parent comment is saying that the next scale of actually useful particle colliders might be outside of practical reach. Note that by "useful", I mean capable of discovering new physics. His comment is therefore in agreement with Sabine, and not with yours.
- defrost 4y ago
  USofA nuclear physcists certainly made such an argument against pursuing the development of nuclear fission weapons, they said such things were beyond the reach of US industry in argument against the intial pleas to do so from the UK MAUD committee and a following letter from Albert Einstein. They were eventualy persuaded by an Autralian nuclear scientist acting on behalf of the Commonwealth MAUD scientists. The issue with the endless(?) chase after ever more exotic particles is that every iteration levels up by some magnitude of effort, where nuclear fission weapons were once ( just out of | just within ) reach and subject to furious debate is more the case that ever fresh exotic particles expontentially escalate beyond actual resources. Once we ring the circumference of the planet and use all the PetaWatts we can currently generate .. what next? It'll take a while to level up to smashing suns together .. with no guarentee the rabbit hole is halfway plumbed.
fjfaase 4y ago
It could even be that there is nothing new to be found no matter how high the energy gets. But even more fundamentally, she seem to worry about the fact that there are currently no urgent 'holes' that require you to invent new particles. She points out that the method of inventing new particle that worked so well in the past, no longer seems reasonable, but that nevertheless, the high-energy physists stick to it out of tradition. It seems that the field of high-energy physists have become an incrowd that only continues to exist because everybody pads eachothers shoulders and that people on the outside believe that something must be true about it. It sounds as if she as a person is critized (and not her ideas) primarily because of her pointing this out.

cma 4y ago

The world wide web, which came out of the LHC project, alone was worth perhaps millions of experiments.

kgwgk 4y ago
It didn’t came out of the LHC project. (The LHC project was approved in 1994. There had been a decade of planning but that had nothing to do with the creation of the web.)
- cma 4y ago
  Opps yeah, was mixing it up with CERN in general. All the work on WWW and earlier hypertext there wasn't just for early LHC planning stuff but it has been a noted thing: > Should China build the Great Collider? > Stephen Hawking and Gordon Kane 2018 > [...] > This has shown up in the past from the LHC in a number of well documented areas, including inventing the World Wide Web with its huge impact on economies world-wide and then grid computing. Someone said imagine that CERN (where the World Wide Web was invented for particle physics) had one penny for each use, then particle physics would have all the funding it could use. More industries include magnet technology and superconducting wire technology, a multi-billion dollar accelerator industry, a multi-billion dollar imaging industry that owes its existence to the development of particle physics detectors, other billion dollar industries, and many tangible benefits. Such technologies generate revenues far exceeding the investment for collider construction. > Arguably the third industrial revolution was triggered by the invention of the World Wide Web at CERN. The requirements for data acquisition and storage and access, and the materials and technologies needed for CEPC and SPPC could help lead to the fourth industrial revolution. For the first decades of the third industrial revolution High Energy Physics led, and only in recent years industry has overtaken HEP. History may repeat itself for the fourth. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.00682.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.00682.pdf
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    That someone has written that before doesn't make it true. The "World Wide Web" was invented at CERN but that happened in the LEP era. LHC has absolutely nothing to do with it. Not everything is the same in the context of this discussion: one may think that LEP was good, and even that LHC was good when it was approved, built and put in place and also think that it's a waste of resources now.