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(I'm not dismissing, your position, just adding context.) A very similar argument can be made for particle physics and their colliders. Yes, telescopes produce

by geuis 4y ago

(I'm not dismissing, your position, just adding context.) A very similar argument can be made for particle physics and their colliders. Yes, telescopes produce pretty pictures, but fundamental particle physics occasionally produces practical results. Well, they used to (the colliders I mean). Modern particle physics seems to be more in the confirmation stage of current theory rather than a discovery phase like it used to be maybe 40 years ago. Meanwhile astronomy keeps opening up new questions about the universe that require even better equipment to attempt to answer. Building better colliders and better telescopes are interesting end goals, but also consider what goes along with them. Building them means funding multiple generations of new theorists and engineers. A lot of those people do fundamental research and then branch out to both found new commercial companies based on those discoveries and to work for those companies. I think it's better to look at "big science" in a much broader perspective. The new collider or telescope might "cost" $10 billion, but that isn't the cost of building the machine and its materials. Most of that money goes into paying people across a very diverse field of professions to do the research and engineering required to make that big pretty picture machine work. That's the stuff that drives technical innovations at the edge of what we apes currently understand. When we fall back to asking why build pyramids, cathedrals, highways, rockets, or anything else that requires a vast number of people to work towards the same goal, don't forget about what everyone gets from the journey on the way.

hinkley 4y ago
Isn't Gorilla Glass effectively particle physics? There's a ton of surface treatment in materials science that amounts to firing a beam of atoms at a surface and/or bathing it in a plasma in order to get a unique chemical structure.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  the stuff you're talking about is what physicists call "low energy" particle physics. There is nothing wrong with that field but it's been around a while and it is not what CERN and other groups are doing.
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    CERN is all about breaking stuff into smallest bits and find out what makes it up, before it returns to the foam. Its basically a particle car crash factory, who tries to learn how a car works by watching millions of crash tests for outliers. And in a way it works.. The problem is to deduct second order laws and rules behind the observed bits and screws flying. Car factories, assembly lines and cnc machines.. By use of horrible metaphors, we summone the oh might particle physicists into the cycle of cyclotron.. PS: Material science wouldnt know what it would get away with outside of try and error - without particle physics..
    - eesmith 4y ago
      See, after the cars crash into each other, they create new cars, which go flying off. Some of these cars then turn into different cars. In some experiments, the cars create a sort of car soup, mimicking the time before the universe cooled enough to allow individual cars.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  gorilla glass is more like materials science than high energy particle physics.
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    Yeah but if you dig deeper you realize material science on itself would be rather medieval alchemy if not for all underlying knowledge coming also from particle physics. Now there isn't a clean 2-step line if-boson-then-gorilla, but knowledge spreads and fills the gaps otherwise filled with just question marks.
    - LegitShady 4y ago
      Well it's all quantum mechanics and so are we, except maybe gravity, so looking at things that way isn't a helpful way to classify reality.
bruce511 4y ago
Also, I guess it's worth pointing out, that the sums of money involved are in a relative sense very small. The James Webb telescope cost 10 billion, but that was spent over 17 years, and it should work for 20 years or so. Compared to the budget as a whole, it is insignificant. And the pretty pictures do serve a wider purpose. They will be part of the space inspiration for the next generation. Out there are kids dreaming of space, and the opportunities there etc. Who knows, maybe the first asteroid miner is already with us, inspired by some James Webb picture on his bedroom wall.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  > The James Webb telescope cost 10 billion, but that was spent over 17 years, and it should work for 20 years or so. > Compared to the budget as a whole, it is insignificant. No. A lot of the cost of the JWST was driven by the limitations of the launch vehicle. Engineers needed to come up with the very complex folding and unfolding mechanism, and that was for a thing produced in a quantity of 1. Once the SpaceX Starship gets going, these limitations disappear. All of a sudden. I predict that by the end of this decade there will be numerous telescopes in the sky with capabilities surpassing JWST's, and built and launched for dirt cheap compared to JWST. One problem with science is and will always be this: things that cost $10 billion now might very well cost $100 million in 2 decades. The question that nobody asks when funding mega scientific projects is not what is the bang for the buck, but is it worth to pay big bucks for a given bang now, or can we wait 2 decades and get the same bang for 100 times less money?
- anikan_vader 4y ago
  >> it is insignificant. But compared to the government’s science funding through the NSF, it is an order of magnitude larger than entire major fields of academia!
LegitShady 4y ago
>A very similar argument can be made for particle physics and their colliders. Yes, telescopes produce pretty pictures, but fundamental particle physics occasionally produces practical results. >Well, they used to (the colliders I mean). Modern particle physics seems to be more in the confirmation stage of current theory rather than a discovery phase like it used to be maybe 40 years ago. There are some good arguments as to why a muon collider might be a really good thing to build, and why it would be smaller than the LHC. CERN already has a program to look into it. If you have an hour this is a good talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed about muon colliders from last month. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwzezceGo&t=3379s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwzezceGo&t=3379s But to address your point about being in the confirmation phase, you can go to this particular time stamp, where he talks about why a muon collider is a good way to probe the higgs boson itself, which is new science. https://youtu.be/wKPwzezceGo?t=618 https://youtu.be/wKPwzezceGo?t=618

by geuis 4y ago

hinkley 4y ago

Isn't Gorilla Glass effectively particle physics? There's a ton of surface treatment in materials science that amounts to firing a beam of atoms at a surface and/or bathing it in a plasma in order to get a unique chemical structure.

sidewndr46 4y ago
the stuff you're talking about is what physicists call "low energy" particle physics. There is nothing wrong with that field but it's been around a while and it is not what CERN and other groups are doing.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  CERN is all about breaking stuff into smallest bits and find out what makes it up, before it returns to the foam. Its basically a particle car crash factory, who tries to learn how a car works by watching millions of crash tests for outliers. And in a way it works.. The problem is to deduct second order laws and rules behind the observed bits and screws flying. Car factories, assembly lines and cnc machines.. By use of horrible metaphors, we summone the oh might particle physicists into the cycle of cyclotron.. PS: Material science wouldnt know what it would get away with outside of try and error - without particle physics..
  - eesmith 4y ago
    See, after the cars crash into each other, they create new cars, which go flying off. Some of these cars then turn into different cars. In some experiments, the cars create a sort of car soup, mimicking the time before the universe cooled enough to allow individual cars.
LegitShady 4y ago
gorilla glass is more like materials science than high energy particle physics.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Yeah but if you dig deeper you realize material science on itself would be rather medieval alchemy if not for all underlying knowledge coming also from particle physics. Now there isn't a clean 2-step line if-boson-then-gorilla, but knowledge spreads and fills the gaps otherwise filled with just question marks.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    Well it's all quantum mechanics and so are we, except maybe gravity, so looking at things that way isn't a helpful way to classify reality.

bruce511 4y ago

Also, I guess it's worth pointing out, that the sums of money involved are in a relative sense very small. The James Webb telescope cost 10 billion, but that was spent over 17 years, and it should work for 20 years or so. Compared to the budget as a whole, it is insignificant. And the pretty pictures do serve a wider purpose. They will be part of the space inspiration for the next generation. Out there are kids dreaming of space, and the opportunities there etc. Who knows, maybe the first asteroid miner is already with us, inspired by some James Webb picture on his bedroom wall.

credit_guy 4y ago
> The James Webb telescope cost 10 billion, but that was spent over 17 years, and it should work for 20 years or so. > Compared to the budget as a whole, it is insignificant. No. A lot of the cost of the JWST was driven by the limitations of the launch vehicle. Engineers needed to come up with the very complex folding and unfolding mechanism, and that was for a thing produced in a quantity of 1. Once the SpaceX Starship gets going, these limitations disappear. All of a sudden. I predict that by the end of this decade there will be numerous telescopes in the sky with capabilities surpassing JWST's, and built and launched for dirt cheap compared to JWST. One problem with science is and will always be this: things that cost $10 billion now might very well cost $100 million in 2 decades. The question that nobody asks when funding mega scientific projects is not what is the bang for the buck, but is it worth to pay big bucks for a given bang now, or can we wait 2 decades and get the same bang for 100 times less money?
anikan_vader 4y ago
>> it is insignificant. But compared to the government’s science funding through the NSF, it is an order of magnitude larger than entire major fields of academia!

LegitShady 4y ago

>A very similar argument can be made for particle physics and their colliders. Yes, telescopes produce pretty pictures, but fundamental particle physics occasionally produces practical results. >Well, they used to (the colliders I mean). Modern particle physics seems to be more in the confirmation stage of current theory rather than a discovery phase like it used to be maybe 40 years ago. There are some good arguments as to why a muon collider might be a really good thing to build, and why it would be smaller than the LHC. CERN already has a program to look into it. If you have an hour this is a good talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed about muon colliders from last month. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwzezceGo&t=3379s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwzezceGo&t=3379s But to address your point about being in the confirmation phase, you can go to this particular time stamp, where he talks about why a muon collider is a good way to probe the higgs boson itself, which is new science. https://youtu.be/wKPwzezceGo?t=618 https://youtu.be/wKPwzezceGo?t=618