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This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips that ultimately enabled you to type t

This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips that ultimately enabled you to type this comment on your phone/computer. The return on that investment is obvious. But it is not just about making money: The entire field of radiation therapy for cancer exists and continues to improve because people figured out ways to control particle beams with extreme precision and in a much more economical way to study particle physics. Heck, commercial MRIs exist and continue to improve because physicists want cheaper, stronger magnets so they can build more powerful colliders. What if in the future you could do advanced screening quickly and without hassle at your GP's office instead of having to wait for an appointment (and possibly pay lots of money) at an imaging specialist center? And if they find something they could immediately nuke it without cutting you open? We're talking about the ultimate possibility of Star Trek level medbays here. Let the physicists build the damn thing however they want and future society will be better off for sure. God knows what else they will figure out along the way, but it will definitely be better for the world than sinking another trillion dollars on wars in the middle east.

brazzy 9mo ago
> This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips that ultimately enabled you to type this comment on your phone/computer. No. These two cases are absurdly different, and you're even completely misunderstanding (or misrepresenting) the meaning of the "tens of billions of dollars" figure. Microchips were an incremental improvement where the individual increments yielded utility far greater than the investment. For particle physics, the problem is that the costs have exploded with the size of facilities to reach higher energies (the "tens of billions of dollars" is for one of them) but the results in scientific knowledge (let alone technological advances) have NOT. The early accelerators cost millions or tens of millions and revolutionized our undestanding of the universe. The latest ones cost billions and have confirmed a few things we already thought to be true. > Let the physicists build the damn thing and future society will be better off for sure. Absolutely not.
- Iulioh 9mo ago
  I'm torn between "yes, these experinets are way too expensive and the knowlage is too niche to be really usefull" and "We said this about A LOT and we found utility in surprising ways so it could be a gamble worth taking" That's the problem with cutting edge reaserch....you don't even know if you will ever needed it or if a trilion dollar industry is waiting for just a number to be born
  - brazzy 9mo ago
    Yes, we don't really know. But at some point the gamble is just too big. Because the costs aren't just numbers. They represent hundreds or thousands of person-years of effort. You're proposing that a large number of people should spend their entire lives supporting this (either directly as scientists, or indirectly through funding it) - and maybe end up with nothing to show for it. And there's the opportunity costs. You could fund hundreds of smaller, yet still substantial scientific efforts in many different fields for the cost of just one particle accelerator of the size we think is sufficient to yield some new observations.
- plastic-enjoyer 9mo ago
  > Absolutely not Engineers not being able to fathom that by building this huge-ass and complicated machines to answer questions about the fundamentals of nature, other problems are solved or new things are invented that improve and change our life will never not be funny to me
  - brazzy 9mo ago
    Just as funny as armchair science enthusiasts not being able to fathom that research budgets are limited and it makes sense to redirect them into other, more promising fields when a particular avenue of research is both extremely expensive and has shown diminishing returns for decades.
    - hugh-avherald 9mo ago
      Does targeting research towards 'more promising' fields actually produce greater economic returns?
accidentallfact 9mo ago
I'm so sick of this "good guy approach". It didn't give us progress, it gave us those like Watt and Intel, highly celebrated bullshiters who stopped being relevant as soon as their IP deadlock expired. I suppose the only solution is undeground science. Do enough progress in silence, dont disseminare the results, unless the superiority becomes so obvious that an armed resistance becomes unthinkable.
gosub100 9mo ago
Why can't some of these trillion dollar companies invest back in the quantum tech that got them there, if it's so certain there will be benefits? Why not Apple and Nvidia fund the next particle collider, and give something back to society instead of letting tax payers fund it so billionaires can privatize the profits?
- davrosthedalek 9mo ago
  Do you want the results of the research be open and available to all, or should it become IP of nvidia or apple?
  - gosub100 9mo ago
    Why wouldn't it be open to all? The person I replied to just said how great it is for open information to trickle down to everyone.
    - davrosthedalek 9mo ago
      Why would nvidia/apple/whoever open up research they paid for to help anybody but them?
- boringg 9mo ago
  I think your starting premise is obviously false and where are you getting that billionaires are privatizing the profits from the particle collider (sounds like a talking point). No one can guarantee that there are benefits - we can surmise that there are but there are still massive risks associated with large form science experiments. Government has always been the backbone of basic science research - no one else can reasonably bear the risk and the advances are public domain.
- sigmoid10 9mo ago
  Fundamental physics research has an extremely profitable returns ratio, but it takes decades to amortize. This does not work with capitalist corporations who only care about immediate profits. Even for governments this is a difficult sell, but at least they don't have to soothe shareholders every quarter. Generational projects take a different kind of economic thinking.
carefree-bob 9mo ago
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild did not require tens of billions of dollars. Sherman Fairchild invested 1.3 million and the treacherous eight each put in $500. Fairchild did have the right to purchase the firm for $3 million, which of course he exercised. Similarly, Shockley's lab was funded by a $1 million grant in the 50s. There is a lot of handwaving going on here to justify the incredibly cheap, mostly privately funded investments that launched the computer generation with the massively expensive, extremely gradual gains we are making now with particle accelerators. Part of it is that people just can't imagine how little was invested in R&D to get these stunning results, given how much we have to invest today to get much less impressive results, so they just assume that semiconductors could not have been invented without tens of billion dollars of research. There is diminishing returns, just as a 90nm process is really all you need to get 90% of the benefits of computerization -- you can drive industrial automation just fine, all the military applications are fine, etc. But to go from a 90nm process to a 3nm process is an exponential increase in costs. In a lot of fields we are at that tail end where costs are incredibly high and gains are very low, and new fields will need to be discovered where there is low hanging fruit, and those fields will not require "tens of billions" of dollars to get that low hanging fruit. Even with particle accelerators, SLAC cost $100 million to build and generated a massive bounty of discoveries, dwarfing the discoveries made at CERN. To pretend that there is no such thing as a curve of diminishing returns, and to say that things have always been this way is to not paint an accurate picture of how science works. New fields are discovered, discoveries come quickly and cheaply, the field matures and discoveries become incremental and exponentially more expensive. That's how it works. For someone who is in a field on the tail end of that process, it's not good history to say "things have always been this way and have always cost this much".
- sigmoid10 9mo ago
  Duh. The first cyclotron was built for, like, a 1000 bucks. Many of the following colliders were also ridiculously cheap by comparison. But in the same way the semiconductor industry now spend billions on EUV research to keep making progress, particle physics spends billions on colliders. But when you account for real GDP growth, collider costs have actually been stagnating for decades.

brazzy 9mo ago

> This kind of slow, incremental improvement that costs tens of billions of dollars and takes decades gave us the microchips that ultimately enabled you to type this comment on your phone/computer. No. These two cases are absurdly different, and you're even completely misunderstanding (or misrepresenting) the meaning of the "tens of billions of dollars" figure. Microchips were an incremental improvement where the individual increments yielded utility far greater than the investment. For particle physics, the problem is that the costs have exploded with the size of facilities to reach higher energies (the "tens of billions of dollars" is for one of them) but the results in scientific knowledge (let alone technological advances) have NOT. The early accelerators cost millions or tens of millions and revolutionized our undestanding of the universe. The latest ones cost billions and have confirmed a few things we already thought to be true. > Let the physicists build the damn thing and future society will be better off for sure. Absolutely not.

Iulioh 9mo ago
I'm torn between "yes, these experinets are way too expensive and the knowlage is too niche to be really usefull" and "We said this about A LOT and we found utility in surprising ways so it could be a gamble worth taking" That's the problem with cutting edge reaserch....you don't even know if you will ever needed it or if a trilion dollar industry is waiting for just a number to be born
- brazzy 9mo ago
  Yes, we don't really know. But at some point the gamble is just too big. Because the costs aren't just numbers. They represent hundreds or thousands of person-years of effort. You're proposing that a large number of people should spend their entire lives supporting this (either directly as scientists, or indirectly through funding it) - and maybe end up with nothing to show for it. And there's the opportunity costs. You could fund hundreds of smaller, yet still substantial scientific efforts in many different fields for the cost of just one particle accelerator of the size we think is sufficient to yield some new observations.
plastic-enjoyer 9mo ago
> Absolutely not Engineers not being able to fathom that by building this huge-ass and complicated machines to answer questions about the fundamentals of nature, other problems are solved or new things are invented that improve and change our life will never not be funny to me
- brazzy 9mo ago
  Just as funny as armchair science enthusiasts not being able to fathom that research budgets are limited and it makes sense to redirect them into other, more promising fields when a particular avenue of research is both extremely expensive and has shown diminishing returns for decades.
  - hugh-avherald 9mo ago
    Does targeting research towards 'more promising' fields actually produce greater economic returns?

accidentallfact 9mo ago

I'm so sick of this "good guy approach". It didn't give us progress, it gave us those like Watt and Intel, highly celebrated bullshiters who stopped being relevant as soon as their IP deadlock expired. I suppose the only solution is undeground science. Do enough progress in silence, dont disseminare the results, unless the superiority becomes so obvious that an armed resistance becomes unthinkable.

gosub100 9mo ago

Why can't some of these trillion dollar companies invest back in the quantum tech that got them there, if it's so certain there will be benefits? Why not Apple and Nvidia fund the next particle collider, and give something back to society instead of letting tax payers fund it so billionaires can privatize the profits?

davrosthedalek 9mo ago
Do you want the results of the research be open and available to all, or should it become IP of nvidia or apple?
- gosub100 9mo ago
  Why wouldn't it be open to all? The person I replied to just said how great it is for open information to trickle down to everyone.
  - davrosthedalek 9mo ago
    Why would nvidia/apple/whoever open up research they paid for to help anybody but them?
boringg 9mo ago
I think your starting premise is obviously false and where are you getting that billionaires are privatizing the profits from the particle collider (sounds like a talking point). No one can guarantee that there are benefits - we can surmise that there are but there are still massive risks associated with large form science experiments. Government has always been the backbone of basic science research - no one else can reasonably bear the risk and the advances are public domain.
sigmoid10 9mo ago
Fundamental physics research has an extremely profitable returns ratio, but it takes decades to amortize. This does not work with capitalist corporations who only care about immediate profits. Even for governments this is a difficult sell, but at least they don't have to soothe shareholders every quarter. Generational projects take a different kind of economic thinking.

carefree-bob 9mo ago

Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild did not require tens of billions of dollars. Sherman Fairchild invested 1.3 million and the treacherous eight each put in $500. Fairchild did have the right to purchase the firm for $3 million, which of course he exercised. Similarly, Shockley's lab was funded by a $1 million grant in the 50s. There is a lot of handwaving going on here to justify the incredibly cheap, mostly privately funded investments that launched the computer generation with the massively expensive, extremely gradual gains we are making now with particle accelerators. Part of it is that people just can't imagine how little was invested in R&D to get these stunning results, given how much we have to invest today to get much less impressive results, so they just assume that semiconductors could not have been invented without tens of billion dollars of research. There is diminishing returns, just as a 90nm process is really all you need to get 90% of the benefits of computerization -- you can drive industrial automation just fine, all the military applications are fine, etc. But to go from a 90nm process to a 3nm process is an exponential increase in costs. In a lot of fields we are at that tail end where costs are incredibly high and gains are very low, and new fields will need to be discovered where there is low hanging fruit, and those fields will not require "tens of billions" of dollars to get that low hanging fruit. Even with particle accelerators, SLAC cost $100 million to build and generated a massive bounty of discoveries, dwarfing the discoveries made at CERN. To pretend that there is no such thing as a curve of diminishing returns, and to say that things have always been this way is to not paint an accurate picture of how science works. New fields are discovered, discoveries come quickly and cheaply, the field matures and discoveries become incremental and exponentially more expensive. That's how it works. For someone who is in a field on the tail end of that process, it's not good history to say "things have always been this way and have always cost this much".

sigmoid10 9mo ago
Duh. The first cyclotron was built for, like, a 1000 bucks. Many of the following colliders were also ridiculously cheap by comparison. But in the same way the semiconductor industry now spend billions on EUV research to keep making progress, particle physics spends billions on colliders. But when you account for real GDP growth, collider costs have actually been stagnating for decades.