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I'm not saying a new collider is the best use of our money. I'm saying that fighting over scraps, comparatively, for science investment is ignoring that far gre

I'm not saying a new collider is the best use of our money. I'm saying that fighting over scraps, comparatively, for science investment is ignoring that far greater sums of money are spent unthinkingly on other areas, and often wasted without regret. Nobody is ever going to say "I'm sure glad we spent two trillion dollars on the F-35." But we'll be writing about the Higgs until the end of humanity.

unwise-exe 2y ago
>> Nobody is ever going to say "I'm sure glad we spent two trillion dollars on the F-35." Nobody cares about your server backups either. Unless something goes wrong and you need them.
- brookst 2y ago
  Perfect analogy. Some companies overspend on disaster recovery preparedness. Most do not. But it’s very hard to call any spending in that area “wasted”.
  - bastawhiz 2y ago
    $2tn for 630 jets isn't "overspending"???
    - brookst 2y ago
      How much would you pay to deter a way that’s likely to go nuclear? You think maybe $500B tops? I’m not defending this program, I’m saying that money spend on insurance that goes unused is easy to call “wasted”, but that is bad logic.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Exactly! Why can we fund defense projects with no cap on budget that might never become operational but we have to pick and choose which areas of science we're going to put money towards? That's the whole point: nobody is glad we spent the money. Surely instead of inventing an almost unimaginably expensive jet, we could have spent that money on less ambitious jets that are many orders of magnitude cheaper? Ukraine doesn't have any F-35s and yet they're holding their own against Russia. Why is there a double standard?
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> we'll be writing about the Higgs until the end of humanity We had solid reason to believe the Higgs boson existed in the 1970s [1][2] as part of electroweak symmetry and the Standard Model, the most precise scientific theory ever proposed and confirmed. We built the LHC to find the Higgs, and it did. That was a good investment. The FCC has no similar theoretical backing. It's simply a deeper borehole. Maybe there are WIMPs in that mass range. But there is no theoretical reason to believe they're in that range. It's simply experimental deduction against infinity. If they aren't in the FCC's range, there is about equal likelihood they're in the next energy band. It's not totally worthless. But it's terrible bang for buck at $17bn estimated. The electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces merge into the electroweak force at 246 GeV [3]. The LHC fires at nearly 60x that [4]. (SPS and Fermilab fired above 246 GeV before that [5].) The electroweak force merges with the strong nuclear force into the electronuclear force around 10 ^ 16 GeV [6]. That is where we'll see truly groundbreaking physics. Using the LHC's construction, we'd need a 0.44 light year (27,800 AU) diameter synchrotron to generate those energies. Pluto orbits around 40 AU. Going back to the analogy, we either need a massive change in the scale of human engineering or a different approach to find the answers we're seeking. [1] https://cds.cern.ch/record/874049/files/CM-P00061607.pdf https://cds.cern.ch/record/874049/files/CM-P00061607.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Historical_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Historical_back... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction [4] https://home.cern/science/engineering/restarting-lhc-why-13-tev https://home.cern/science/engineering/restarting-lhc-why-13-... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Proton_Synchrotron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Proton_Synchrotron [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory

unwise-exe 2y ago

>> Nobody is ever going to say "I'm sure glad we spent two trillion dollars on the F-35." Nobody cares about your server backups either. Unless something goes wrong and you need them.

brookst 2y ago
Perfect analogy. Some companies overspend on disaster recovery preparedness. Most do not. But it’s very hard to call any spending in that area “wasted”.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  $2tn for 630 jets isn't "overspending"???
  - brookst 2y ago
    How much would you pay to deter a way that’s likely to go nuclear? You think maybe $500B tops? I’m not defending this program, I’m saying that money spend on insurance that goes unused is easy to call “wasted”, but that is bad logic.
bastawhiz 2y ago
Exactly! Why can we fund defense projects with no cap on budget that might never become operational but we have to pick and choose which areas of science we're going to put money towards? That's the whole point: nobody is glad we spent the money. Surely instead of inventing an almost unimaginably expensive jet, we could have spent that money on less ambitious jets that are many orders of magnitude cheaper? Ukraine doesn't have any F-35s and yet they're holding their own against Russia. Why is there a double standard?

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> we'll be writing about the Higgs until the end of humanity We had solid reason to believe the Higgs boson existed in the 1970s [1][2] as part of electroweak symmetry and the Standard Model, the most precise scientific theory ever proposed and confirmed. We built the LHC to find the Higgs, and it did. That was a good investment. The FCC has no similar theoretical backing. It's simply a deeper borehole. Maybe there are WIMPs in that mass range. But there is no theoretical reason to believe they're in that range. It's simply experimental deduction against infinity. If they aren't in the FCC's range, there is about equal likelihood they're in the next energy band. It's not totally worthless. But it's terrible bang for buck at $17bn estimated. The electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces merge into the electroweak force at 246 GeV [3]. The LHC fires at nearly 60x that [4]. (SPS and Fermilab fired above 246 GeV before that [5].) The electroweak force merges with the strong nuclear force into the electronuclear force around 10 ^ 16 GeV [6]. That is where we'll see truly groundbreaking physics. Using the LHC's construction, we'd need a 0.44 light year (27,800 AU) diameter synchrotron to generate those energies. Pluto orbits around 40 AU. Going back to the analogy, we either need a massive change in the scale of human engineering or a different approach to find the answers we're seeking. [1] https://cds.cern.ch/record/874049/files/CM-P00061607.pdf https://cds.cern.ch/record/874049/files/CM-P00061607.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Historical_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Historical_back... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction [4] https://home.cern/science/engineering/restarting-lhc-why-13-tev https://home.cern/science/engineering/restarting-lhc-why-13-... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Proton_Synchrotron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Proton_Synchrotron [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory