5 ms·

They know that it's a long way and a lot more money. Fundamental physics has a habit of paying off in utterly unexpected ways, but that's not really why we do t

They know that it's a long way and a lot more money. Fundamental physics has a habit of paying off in utterly unexpected ways, but that's not really why we do this. It's pure curiosity. They are grateful that the public seems willing to pay for curiosity. I don't know how long it will last. Though I can say that it's a rounding error in national budgets.

iamflimflam1 2y ago
Imagine how much money is spent on defence. And then imagine the tiny proportion that is spend on basic research that might result in offensive or defensive weapons.
- greenavocado 2y ago
  The fusion breakthrough in the National Ignition Facility was said to be essentially a program claiming to be for nuclear weapons research but instead they did fundamental research.
  - dotnet00 2y ago
    I think it'd be clearer to say they did fundamental research as part of nuclear weapons research. The goal of the facility is to perform testing that can help to validate the continued functioning and yield of the nuclear weapon stockpile without actually setting off a nuke. Since a hydrogen bomb achieves fusion ignition, being able to perform ignition at the facility is kind of part of the goal.
- AmericanChopper 2y ago
  Personally I can’t imagine not understanding that the defence funding is one of the most essential factors in enabling our modern way of life. It’s been so effective at providing the security needed to produce globalisation and highly democratic societies, that a lot of people have forgotten the reason we need it in the first place. Certainly worth the minuscule portion of GDP we allocate to it.
  - mptest 2y ago
    >enabling our modern way of life That's kind of their point, though? They're suggesting our "way of life" is backwards in some ways, which I think is a fair assessment. We find ourselves supporting financially things like what's happening in Israel or Gaza or happened in Iraq or Afghanistan or Sudan or Armenia or Haiti or insert the rest of the list of countries we've coup'ed here. While we fight over whether poor people deserve healthcare, or if school kids deserve not to starve. Over if public education is good or not. Or if women deserve medical autonomy... None of that is particularly democratic. Globalization happened because rich people wanted cheaper labor in the 'global south' not because of military bases. I don't know that it's obvious military is what's "produced globalization" and "highly democratic" societies. That seems a fairly large keep of faith.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - AmericanChopper 2y ago
      Funding Israel’s conflicts is not a fundamental part of our way of life. The ability to load a huge defenceless cargo ship full of billions of dollars worth of goods and send it anywhere in the world is. The ability to choose how we govern ourselves is. The fact that it’s a reasonable expectation that we will have most of the fundamental needs of life provided to us no matter what is. None of that is backwards, all of it very obviously depends on our defence capability, and regardless of what you think about the quality of western democracies, we have the most democratic and stable societies that have ever existed in the history of our species, as well as the highest quality of life. Most of the negatives you’ve listed here are a result of other countries defence force inadequacies.
      - mptest 2y ago
        >Most of the negatives you’ve listed here are a result of other countries defence force inadequacies. If there are inequalities of wealth, and a delineation of artificial constructs like race, religion or nationality, there will result an inequality of military force. This material inequality is reflected in reality by the negatives I've described. A world where we accept "stronger military = good" naively exacerbates that inequality. >we have the most democratic and stable societies that have ever existed in the history of our species, as well as the highest quality of life. I'm glad you brought this up. One might argue the material wealth of our nations is a direct result of utilizing inequity by building a domineering military presence globally. Of the exploitation of colonialism and slavery. Globalization in capitalism is the will of capital owners seeking more exploitable labor, not some desire to spread an ideology. That material/economic relationships are the oldest dated interactions between continents and societies seems obvious enough demonstration of that fact. We have indeed made a marked change in quality of life, but on societal scales is the lifestyle 'gains' of the comparative 1% worth the toil of the 99? We have to pay heed to this measure when using any analysis on quality of life or the worth of decisions like military strength. I'm not a sociologist, I just wanted to add that there is, to my knowledge, no evidence of an innate correlation between democracy, quality of life, and military strength. If you have literature that suggests otherwise I'd be happy to read it. >Funding Israel’s conflicts is not a fundamental part of our way of life. The specifics may not be, but the purpose of an extensive global military presence is fundamentally about creating or exploiting these inequalities wherever they arise for material aims. This is reflected by the fact that the action we take is directly proportional to the material value intervention would have to our bottom line. SA killing Kashoggi or contributing to direct attacks? Cool, long as they got $/oil. Israel doing war crimes? Cool, long as they keep buying their arms from us and their ire focused on those we don't care for. Country getting worked over by our 'rival' ie taiwan or ukraine? Give them all the money and arms. I'm not even trying to argue the merit of any of these decisions, I just don't agree any analysis is as simple as "stronger military = safer better happier fun time pax romana".
digbybk 2y ago
Particle accelerators are pinging the deepest layers of reality that we can possibly reach. Deeper than anyone could have imagined just a few generations ago. That anyone can be cynical about that is hard to understand.
- fnord77 2y ago
  which is why it was a crying shame the Texas Supercollider got canceled. It would have done more useful science than ISS
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Particle accelerators are pinging the deepest layers of reality that we can possibly reach Technically, yes. But imagine our focus is Earth science. The name of the game is drill the deepest borehold. Now, the Kola Superdeep team could rightfully claim they are digging into the deepest layers of our terrestrial reality that humans, heretofore, have ever reached. But if you only dig boreholes, you're not reaching our planet's iron core. At least not for, at the very least, centuries for materials science to catch up with science fiction. Instead, the secrets will be unveiled through seismology. Similarly, it's fair to ask whether building bigger and bigger synchrotrons is akin to trying to discover the secrets of Earth's interior by drilling deeper and deeper boreholes. (Disclaimer: I have zero background in particle physics.)
  - Timon3 2y ago
    Do we currently have more promising experimental approaches to unveil new physics that are being ignored due to particle accelerators? My understanding is that we keep "building bigger and bigger synchrotrons" because it's really the only approach we have to probe new physics on earth. Other avenues are being explored (e.g. with the JWST or dark matter detectors), but there's only so much funding you can put into these experiments before hitting diminishing returns (a slightly improved JWST will cost a ton and not have a high RoI). I'd be happy to hear about other promising experiments we're ignoring, but unless there are very promising and expensive alternative experiments we're ignoring, there's no good reason not to keep pushing particle accelerators. Why stop following the best approach we have so far?
AmericanChopper 2y ago
I don’t think it’s pure curiosity. Maybe physicists are driven by passion, but everybody understands that new physics has historically unlocked a lot of new technology. I also don’t think that the public really has much of a say in what gets tax payer funding. Governments are just bureaucratic behemoths and once they start paying for something, they can almost never find an acceptable way to stop. Additionally I’ve never met a tax funding recipient that was grateful to be getting it, if anything the perspective that they should be entitled to even more is a lot more common.
- robwwilliams 2y ago
  Most researcher who I know share my attitude. I am extremely grateful for the support I have gotten from NIH, NSF, Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the State of Tennessee for research support in experimental precision medicine and health care. I recognize this support as a “luxury” made possible by a wealthy and progressive American society that wants great science and progress with the potential to improve the quality and duration of healthy lives.
  - AmericanChopper 2y ago
    Having worked with a large number of researchers, this wasn’t my experience at all. A very common moan to hear was that they were underpaid, underfunded, and that if only the public was smart enough to understand the value of their work, then those problems would be immediately solved. This vague contempt for the public that funded them also seemed to be rather disconnected from any reasonable assessment of how valuable their work actually was.
dev1ycan 2y ago
I am willing to pay for curiosity, I'm however, not willing to pay for thousands of bureaucrats of the system who are only employed because they somehow got hired into an unnecessary position.
tsimionescu 2y ago
If finding any new physics that would not be possible at LHC requires, say, a collider along the whole length of the equator, then building a collider twice the size of LHC is entirely useless. The only ways to justify a collider twice the size of the LHC are either (a) to say that it will be able to find phenomena that the LHC can't find, or (b) that it is a Pic stepping stone towards the equator collider. CERN is not claiming that FCC is merely an engineering PoC stepping stone towards some larger collider, though. They are explicitly claiming that the FCC will either find or rule out some existing theories. This is basically false: all of our theories either make the same predictions for LHC energy levels as for the FCC ones (e.g. the standard model), or they have unbounded parameters and thus can't be ruled out in this way (e.g. super symmetry appears at higher energy levels, but there is no bound on how much higher energy level is required; if the FCC doesn't find supersymmetric particles, then we only find out that they require more energy, we don't get to say "sypersymmetry is now ruled out". So what exactly are we supposed to build this thing for? The LHC had a very clear mandate: find or rule out the Higgs boson. What is the FCC going to either find or rule out?
- Jach 2y ago
  From a non-expert view with no influence on the matter in any way, I do find these sorts of arguments more compelling than anything I've seen put forward by proponents. "It will indirectly help with superconducting magnet tech" is a variant from the proponent side -- I even like this one, because it's needed for fusion. But ok, can we just fund that tech directly, with or without the purpose of enabling fusion plants, and not as pork (even if fundamentally necessary pork) to this collider project that needs to justify itself on its own merits? LHC reaches collision energy environments in the scale of 10^4 GeV = 10 TeV, the FCC proposal is shooting for 10^5 GeV = 100 TeV. Just one order of magnitude higher, and note this won't appear any time soon. The LHC itself took 10 years to construct, another 4 for the Higgs detecting experiment. The FCC would probably take at least that long, I've seen estimates of 20-30+ years. Is this really the thing to commit on? It's not just money and time, but also attention. The thousands of scientists involved in particle physics are smart people, is a bigger collider project the best way to use their talents, for deep probes into reality or otherwise? I don't know what's required for even higher energy levels -- like what would an equator sized one even be capable of? A quick google suggests with 30 T magnets, around the order of 10,000 TeV = 10^7 GeV would be achievable. Still a far cry short from the >= 10^(11±1) GeV level estimated to be the point where electroweak vacuum stability breaks down, and similar very high levels suggested by grand unified theory topics. Maybe decade+ projects should focus more on figuring out how to build (probably linear) accelerators in space to reach much higher energy levels than just 100 TeV? (Of course the max proton-proton collision energy isn't the only design parameter.) The lack of "mandate" is of course striking, too. Papers from the 90s related to the LHC proposal all mention the importance of the Higgs and how various calculations let them be confident the LHC could find it (or not find it and invalidate so much). But, to try and credit the FCC proponents, it's not like you can't easily find some justifications. Whether they're convincing to different audiences is another matter. Several years ago there were a series of 5 papers on uses of the FCC, to be turned into the current 4 volume CDR. Here's the one (a couple hundred pages) specifically on new physics: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00947 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00947 There's some classes of dark matter theories it could rule out (but not all, so ultimately a similar situation with supersymmetry), and the paper helpfully compares reach vs. the LHC. In the end I'm not even actively opposed to the FCC proposal, I just don't think it's adequately justified itself on its own merits or in comparison to potential other uses of funds and attention. (The latter being somewhat important because, while it'd be nice if there were more budget and more people, budget proportions probably aren't changing anytime soon, and birthrates are declining.) That's fine, what I think doesn't matter, and many things get funded that don't really justify themselves either. It's just nice when the benefits are much more direct and more easily explainable to non-experts.

iamflimflam1 2y ago

Imagine how much money is spent on defence. And then imagine the tiny proportion that is spend on basic research that might result in offensive or defensive weapons.

greenavocado 2y ago
The fusion breakthrough in the National Ignition Facility was said to be essentially a program claiming to be for nuclear weapons research but instead they did fundamental research.
- dotnet00 2y ago
  I think it'd be clearer to say they did fundamental research as part of nuclear weapons research. The goal of the facility is to perform testing that can help to validate the continued functioning and yield of the nuclear weapon stockpile without actually setting off a nuke. Since a hydrogen bomb achieves fusion ignition, being able to perform ignition at the facility is kind of part of the goal.
AmericanChopper 2y ago
Personally I can’t imagine not understanding that the defence funding is one of the most essential factors in enabling our modern way of life. It’s been so effective at providing the security needed to produce globalisation and highly democratic societies, that a lot of people have forgotten the reason we need it in the first place. Certainly worth the minuscule portion of GDP we allocate to it.
- mptest 2y ago
  >enabling our modern way of life That's kind of their point, though? They're suggesting our "way of life" is backwards in some ways, which I think is a fair assessment. We find ourselves supporting financially things like what's happening in Israel or Gaza or happened in Iraq or Afghanistan or Sudan or Armenia or Haiti or insert the rest of the list of countries we've coup'ed here. While we fight over whether poor people deserve healthcare, or if school kids deserve not to starve. Over if public education is good or not. Or if women deserve medical autonomy... None of that is particularly democratic. Globalization happened because rich people wanted cheaper labor in the 'global south' not because of military bases. I don't know that it's obvious military is what's "produced globalization" and "highly democratic" societies. That seems a fairly large keep of faith.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - AmericanChopper 2y ago
    Funding Israel’s conflicts is not a fundamental part of our way of life. The ability to load a huge defenceless cargo ship full of billions of dollars worth of goods and send it anywhere in the world is. The ability to choose how we govern ourselves is. The fact that it’s a reasonable expectation that we will have most of the fundamental needs of life provided to us no matter what is. None of that is backwards, all of it very obviously depends on our defence capability, and regardless of what you think about the quality of western democracies, we have the most democratic and stable societies that have ever existed in the history of our species, as well as the highest quality of life. Most of the negatives you’ve listed here are a result of other countries defence force inadequacies.
    - mptest 2y ago
      >Most of the negatives you’ve listed here are a result of other countries defence force inadequacies. If there are inequalities of wealth, and a delineation of artificial constructs like race, religion or nationality, there will result an inequality of military force. This material inequality is reflected in reality by the negatives I've described. A world where we accept "stronger military = good" naively exacerbates that inequality. >we have the most democratic and stable societies that have ever existed in the history of our species, as well as the highest quality of life. I'm glad you brought this up. One might argue the material wealth of our nations is a direct result of utilizing inequity by building a domineering military presence globally. Of the exploitation of colonialism and slavery. Globalization in capitalism is the will of capital owners seeking more exploitable labor, not some desire to spread an ideology. That material/economic relationships are the oldest dated interactions between continents and societies seems obvious enough demonstration of that fact. We have indeed made a marked change in quality of life, but on societal scales is the lifestyle 'gains' of the comparative 1% worth the toil of the 99? We have to pay heed to this measure when using any analysis on quality of life or the worth of decisions like military strength. I'm not a sociologist, I just wanted to add that there is, to my knowledge, no evidence of an innate correlation between democracy, quality of life, and military strength. If you have literature that suggests otherwise I'd be happy to read it. >Funding Israel’s conflicts is not a fundamental part of our way of life. The specifics may not be, but the purpose of an extensive global military presence is fundamentally about creating or exploiting these inequalities wherever they arise for material aims. This is reflected by the fact that the action we take is directly proportional to the material value intervention would have to our bottom line. SA killing Kashoggi or contributing to direct attacks? Cool, long as they got $/oil. Israel doing war crimes? Cool, long as they keep buying their arms from us and their ire focused on those we don't care for. Country getting worked over by our 'rival' ie taiwan or ukraine? Give them all the money and arms. I'm not even trying to argue the merit of any of these decisions, I just don't agree any analysis is as simple as "stronger military = safer better happier fun time pax romana".

digbybk 2y ago

Particle accelerators are pinging the deepest layers of reality that we can possibly reach. Deeper than anyone could have imagined just a few generations ago. That anyone can be cynical about that is hard to understand.

fnord77 2y ago
which is why it was a crying shame the Texas Supercollider got canceled. It would have done more useful science than ISS
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Particle accelerators are pinging the deepest layers of reality that we can possibly reach Technically, yes. But imagine our focus is Earth science. The name of the game is drill the deepest borehold. Now, the Kola Superdeep team could rightfully claim they are digging into the deepest layers of our terrestrial reality that humans, heretofore, have ever reached. But if you only dig boreholes, you're not reaching our planet's iron core. At least not for, at the very least, centuries for materials science to catch up with science fiction. Instead, the secrets will be unveiled through seismology. Similarly, it's fair to ask whether building bigger and bigger synchrotrons is akin to trying to discover the secrets of Earth's interior by drilling deeper and deeper boreholes. (Disclaimer: I have zero background in particle physics.)
- Timon3 2y ago
  Do we currently have more promising experimental approaches to unveil new physics that are being ignored due to particle accelerators? My understanding is that we keep "building bigger and bigger synchrotrons" because it's really the only approach we have to probe new physics on earth. Other avenues are being explored (e.g. with the JWST or dark matter detectors), but there's only so much funding you can put into these experiments before hitting diminishing returns (a slightly improved JWST will cost a ton and not have a high RoI). I'd be happy to hear about other promising experiments we're ignoring, but unless there are very promising and expensive alternative experiments we're ignoring, there's no good reason not to keep pushing particle accelerators. Why stop following the best approach we have so far?

AmericanChopper 2y ago

I don’t think it’s pure curiosity. Maybe physicists are driven by passion, but everybody understands that new physics has historically unlocked a lot of new technology. I also don’t think that the public really has much of a say in what gets tax payer funding. Governments are just bureaucratic behemoths and once they start paying for something, they can almost never find an acceptable way to stop. Additionally I’ve never met a tax funding recipient that was grateful to be getting it, if anything the perspective that they should be entitled to even more is a lot more common.

robwwilliams 2y ago
Most researcher who I know share my attitude. I am extremely grateful for the support I have gotten from NIH, NSF, Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the State of Tennessee for research support in experimental precision medicine and health care. I recognize this support as a “luxury” made possible by a wealthy and progressive American society that wants great science and progress with the potential to improve the quality and duration of healthy lives.
- AmericanChopper 2y ago
  Having worked with a large number of researchers, this wasn’t my experience at all. A very common moan to hear was that they were underpaid, underfunded, and that if only the public was smart enough to understand the value of their work, then those problems would be immediately solved. This vague contempt for the public that funded them also seemed to be rather disconnected from any reasonable assessment of how valuable their work actually was.

dev1ycan 2y ago

I am willing to pay for curiosity, I'm however, not willing to pay for thousands of bureaucrats of the system who are only employed because they somehow got hired into an unnecessary position.

tsimionescu 2y ago

If finding any new physics that would not be possible at LHC requires, say, a collider along the whole length of the equator, then building a collider twice the size of LHC is entirely useless. The only ways to justify a collider twice the size of the LHC are either (a) to say that it will be able to find phenomena that the LHC can't find, or (b) that it is a Pic stepping stone towards the equator collider. CERN is not claiming that FCC is merely an engineering PoC stepping stone towards some larger collider, though. They are explicitly claiming that the FCC will either find or rule out some existing theories. This is basically false: all of our theories either make the same predictions for LHC energy levels as for the FCC ones (e.g. the standard model), or they have unbounded parameters and thus can't be ruled out in this way (e.g. super symmetry appears at higher energy levels, but there is no bound on how much higher energy level is required; if the FCC doesn't find supersymmetric particles, then we only find out that they require more energy, we don't get to say "sypersymmetry is now ruled out". So what exactly are we supposed to build this thing for? The LHC had a very clear mandate: find or rule out the Higgs boson. What is the FCC going to either find or rule out?

Jach 2y ago
From a non-expert view with no influence on the matter in any way, I do find these sorts of arguments more compelling than anything I've seen put forward by proponents. "It will indirectly help with superconducting magnet tech" is a variant from the proponent side -- I even like this one, because it's needed for fusion. But ok, can we just fund that tech directly, with or without the purpose of enabling fusion plants, and not as pork (even if fundamentally necessary pork) to this collider project that needs to justify itself on its own merits? LHC reaches collision energy environments in the scale of 10^4 GeV = 10 TeV, the FCC proposal is shooting for 10^5 GeV = 100 TeV. Just one order of magnitude higher, and note this won't appear any time soon. The LHC itself took 10 years to construct, another 4 for the Higgs detecting experiment. The FCC would probably take at least that long, I've seen estimates of 20-30+ years. Is this really the thing to commit on? It's not just money and time, but also attention. The thousands of scientists involved in particle physics are smart people, is a bigger collider project the best way to use their talents, for deep probes into reality or otherwise? I don't know what's required for even higher energy levels -- like what would an equator sized one even be capable of? A quick google suggests with 30 T magnets, around the order of 10,000 TeV = 10^7 GeV would be achievable. Still a far cry short from the >= 10^(11±1) GeV level estimated to be the point where electroweak vacuum stability breaks down, and similar very high levels suggested by grand unified theory topics. Maybe decade+ projects should focus more on figuring out how to build (probably linear) accelerators in space to reach much higher energy levels than just 100 TeV? (Of course the max proton-proton collision energy isn't the only design parameter.) The lack of "mandate" is of course striking, too. Papers from the 90s related to the LHC proposal all mention the importance of the Higgs and how various calculations let them be confident the LHC could find it (or not find it and invalidate so much). But, to try and credit the FCC proponents, it's not like you can't easily find some justifications. Whether they're convincing to different audiences is another matter. Several years ago there were a series of 5 papers on uses of the FCC, to be turned into the current 4 volume CDR. Here's the one (a couple hundred pages) specifically on new physics: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00947 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00947 There's some classes of dark matter theories it could rule out (but not all, so ultimately a similar situation with supersymmetry), and the paper helpfully compares reach vs. the LHC. In the end I'm not even actively opposed to the FCC proposal, I just don't think it's adequately justified itself on its own merits or in comparison to potential other uses of funds and attention. (The latter being somewhat important because, while it'd be nice if there were more budget and more people, budget proportions probably aren't changing anytime soon, and birthrates are declining.) That's fine, what I think doesn't matter, and many things get funded that don't really justify themselves either. It's just nice when the benefits are much more direct and more easily explainable to non-experts.