32 ms·

> 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

by brazzy 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
    Does targeting research towards 'more promising' fields actually produce greater economic returns?
    - bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
      The field of Elon Musk has been promising shit for years, what do you think?
      - danparsonson 8mo ago
        Well we definitely have a lot more Elon Musk now
      - verzali 8mo ago
        To be fair, he has delivered a lot of (bull)shit
        __patchbit__ 8mo ago
        How SpaceX and Tesla patent new industrial scale techniques and technologies for any competitor to use is the bullcase for bringing the future forward faster. Lookup at Starlink.
bayindirh 8mo ago
> Absolutely not. I'd not be so sure about that. Doing this research will probably allow us to answer "it works but we don't know exactly why" cases in things we use everyday (i.e. li-ion batteries). Plus, while the machines are getting bigger, the understood tech is getting smaller as the laws of physics allows. If we are going to insist on "Absolutely not" path, we should start with proof-of-work crypto farms and AI datacenters which consume county or state equivalents of electricity and water resources for low quality slop.
- brazzy 8mo ago
  That "probably" is really more of a "maybe" given the experience with the current big accelerators, and really needs to be weighed against the extreme costs - and other, more promising avenues of research. > If we are going to insist on "Absolutely not" path, we should start with proof-of-work crypto farms and AI datacenters which consume county or state equivalents of electricity and water resources for low quality slop. Who exactly is the "we" that is able to make this decision? The allocation of research budgets is completely unrelated to the funding of AI datacenters or crypto farms. There is no organization on this planet that controls both. And if you're gonna propose that the whole of human efforts should somehow be organized differently so that these things can be prioritized against each other properly, then I'm afraid that is a much, MUCH harder problem than any fundamental physics.
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    >and other, more promising avenues of research. Which are? Just asking for the purposes of this discussion.
bl0rg 8mo ago
> The latest ones cost billions and have confirmed a few things we already thought to be true. Yes, but we had hopes that it would lead to more. And had lead to more, something only known to be false in hindsight, who knows where that would have ended us up? What if it upended the standard model instead of reinforcing it? > Absolutely not. What are we supposed to do then? As humans, I mean. No one knows why we're here, what the universe really is like. We have some pretty good models that we know are wrong and we don't know what wonders the theoretical implications of any successor models might bring. That said, do we really need to motivate fundamental research into the nature of reality with a promise of technology? I'm not arguing for mindlessly building bigger accelerators, and I don't think anyone is - there has to exist a solid line of reasoning to warrant the effort. And we might find that there are smarter ways of getting there for less effort - great! But if there isn't, discrediting the venue of particle accelerators due to their high upfront cost as well as historical results would be a mistake. We can afford it, and we don't know the future.
- tokai 8mo ago
  >I'm not arguing for mindlessly building bigger accelerators, and I don't think anyone is But you are and they are. Just by the comments here its clear that even suggesting not to use untold billions on maybe pushing theoretical physics a little forward is meet with scorn. The value proposition either, in knowledge or technology, is just not well argued anymore besides hand waving.
  - bl0rg 8mo ago
    No, I'm not and neither is anyone else. It's common sense that we should explore options that require less effort, just as one would in any project. I'm saying that we can't discredit huge particle accelerators due to, in the grandest scheme of things, a small economic cost and past results of a different experiment.
  - davrosthedalek 8mo ago
    Or, you know, we have read the physics case and are of the opinion that it's worth it. Have you?
sigmoid10 8mo ago
>Microchips were an incremental improvement where the individual increments yielded utility far greater than the investment. You should look up how modern EUV lithography was commercialised. This was essentially a big plasma physics puzzle. If ASML hadn't taken on a ridiculous gamble (financially on the same order of magnitude as a new collider, esp. for a single colpany) with the research, Moore's law would have died long ago and the entire tech industry would be affected. And there was zero proof that this was going to work beforehand.
- varjag 8mo ago
  EUV lith would have absolutely been achieved if LHC wasn't ever built.
  - skeptic_ai 8mo ago
    Lhc mastered high vacuum, high precision lens from zeiss, precision lasers, specialized magnets which are needed by euv lith. So would have been delayed.
    - varjag 8mo ago
      High vacuum in enormous volumes maybe. Otherwise it was certainly a problem solved decades ago. Not sure what role of EUV optics was in LHC. But Zeiss would develop you anything on the frontier of optics if you have deep enough pockets. The rest I don't know enough to comment on, but as far as technology goes both LHC and EUV lithography are bespoke systems. Seriously doubt there is any path dependency. Huge part of LHC cost were earthworks and precision construction of complex machinery at enormous scale.
    - chuckadams 8mo ago
      EUV uses mirrors rather than lenses, and the precision surfaces on those are something that more likely came out of space programs. But honestly, I have no problem with throwing a few billion at basic science that might go nowhere. It's a drop in the ocean compared to war and corporate welfare.
crispyambulance 8mo ago
>> Let the physicists build the damn thing and future society will be better off for sure. > Absolutely not. And what do YOU mean, "absolutely not"? You have no more say in what happens than anyone else unless you're high level politician, who would still be beholden to their constituents anyway. And yet big science, like particle accelerators, STILL gets funding. There's plenty to go around. Sure, every once in a while a political imperative will "pull the plug" on something deemed wasteful or too expensive and maybe sometimes that's right. But we STILL have particle physics, we STILL send out pure science space missions, there are STILL mathematicians and theorists who are paid for their whole careers to study subject matter that has no remotely practical applications. Not everything must have a straight-line monetary ROI.
bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
>Absolutely not. A statement that certain needs some backing. You might say that the statement you were replying to also needs some backing, but they did give some, although you believe it was incorrect. It just seems that "absolutely not" goes against the conventional wisdom that knowledge for knowledge sake will lead to some greater return than was expended on getting that knowledge somewhere down the road which really is one of the main underlying ideas of Western Civilization since before Newton. Absolutely not means future society will not be better off! That seems to be a big weird absurdly pompous and conceited statement to make unless you have a time machine, or at least a big mess of statistics that can show that scientific advances in physics for a significant amount of time has failed to provide a return value on existence, although I would think that does not rise to the promise of "absolutely not".

by brazzy 8mo ago

Iulioh 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
  Does targeting research towards 'more promising' fields actually produce greater economic returns?
  - bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
    The field of Elon Musk has been promising shit for years, what do you think?
    - danparsonson 8mo ago
      Well we definitely have a lot more Elon Musk now
    - verzali 8mo ago
      To be fair, he has delivered a lot of (bull)shit
      - __patchbit__ 8mo ago
        How SpaceX and Tesla patent new industrial scale techniques and technologies for any competitor to use is the bullcase for bringing the future forward faster. Lookup at Starlink.

bayindirh 8mo ago

> Absolutely not. I'd not be so sure about that. Doing this research will probably allow us to answer "it works but we don't know exactly why" cases in things we use everyday (i.e. li-ion batteries). Plus, while the machines are getting bigger, the understood tech is getting smaller as the laws of physics allows. If we are going to insist on "Absolutely not" path, we should start with proof-of-work crypto farms and AI datacenters which consume county or state equivalents of electricity and water resources for low quality slop.

brazzy 8mo ago
That "probably" is really more of a "maybe" given the experience with the current big accelerators, and really needs to be weighed against the extreme costs - and other, more promising avenues of research. > If we are going to insist on "Absolutely not" path, we should start with proof-of-work crypto farms and AI datacenters which consume county or state equivalents of electricity and water resources for low quality slop. Who exactly is the "we" that is able to make this decision? The allocation of research budgets is completely unrelated to the funding of AI datacenters or crypto farms. There is no organization on this planet that controls both. And if you're gonna propose that the whole of human efforts should somehow be organized differently so that these things can be prioritized against each other properly, then I'm afraid that is a much, MUCH harder problem than any fundamental physics.
- pixl97 8mo ago
  >and other, more promising avenues of research. Which are? Just asking for the purposes of this discussion.

bl0rg 8mo ago

> The latest ones cost billions and have confirmed a few things we already thought to be true. Yes, but we had hopes that it would lead to more. And had lead to more, something only known to be false in hindsight, who knows where that would have ended us up? What if it upended the standard model instead of reinforcing it? > Absolutely not. What are we supposed to do then? As humans, I mean. No one knows why we're here, what the universe really is like. We have some pretty good models that we know are wrong and we don't know what wonders the theoretical implications of any successor models might bring. That said, do we really need to motivate fundamental research into the nature of reality with a promise of technology? I'm not arguing for mindlessly building bigger accelerators, and I don't think anyone is - there has to exist a solid line of reasoning to warrant the effort. And we might find that there are smarter ways of getting there for less effort - great! But if there isn't, discrediting the venue of particle accelerators due to their high upfront cost as well as historical results would be a mistake. We can afford it, and we don't know the future.

tokai 8mo ago
>I'm not arguing for mindlessly building bigger accelerators, and I don't think anyone is But you are and they are. Just by the comments here its clear that even suggesting not to use untold billions on maybe pushing theoretical physics a little forward is meet with scorn. The value proposition either, in knowledge or technology, is just not well argued anymore besides hand waving.
- bl0rg 8mo ago
  No, I'm not and neither is anyone else. It's common sense that we should explore options that require less effort, just as one would in any project. I'm saying that we can't discredit huge particle accelerators due to, in the grandest scheme of things, a small economic cost and past results of a different experiment.
- davrosthedalek 8mo ago
  Or, you know, we have read the physics case and are of the opinion that it's worth it. Have you?

sigmoid10 8mo ago

>Microchips were an incremental improvement where the individual increments yielded utility far greater than the investment. You should look up how modern EUV lithography was commercialised. This was essentially a big plasma physics puzzle. If ASML hadn't taken on a ridiculous gamble (financially on the same order of magnitude as a new collider, esp. for a single colpany) with the research, Moore's law would have died long ago and the entire tech industry would be affected. And there was zero proof that this was going to work beforehand.

varjag 8mo ago
EUV lith would have absolutely been achieved if LHC wasn't ever built.
- skeptic_ai 8mo ago
  Lhc mastered high vacuum, high precision lens from zeiss, precision lasers, specialized magnets which are needed by euv lith. So would have been delayed.
  - varjag 8mo ago
    High vacuum in enormous volumes maybe. Otherwise it was certainly a problem solved decades ago. Not sure what role of EUV optics was in LHC. But Zeiss would develop you anything on the frontier of optics if you have deep enough pockets. The rest I don't know enough to comment on, but as far as technology goes both LHC and EUV lithography are bespoke systems. Seriously doubt there is any path dependency. Huge part of LHC cost were earthworks and precision construction of complex machinery at enormous scale.
  - chuckadams 8mo ago
    EUV uses mirrors rather than lenses, and the precision surfaces on those are something that more likely came out of space programs. But honestly, I have no problem with throwing a few billion at basic science that might go nowhere. It's a drop in the ocean compared to war and corporate welfare.

crispyambulance 8mo ago

>> Let the physicists build the damn thing and future society will be better off for sure. > Absolutely not. And what do YOU mean, "absolutely not"? You have no more say in what happens than anyone else unless you're high level politician, who would still be beholden to their constituents anyway. And yet big science, like particle accelerators, STILL gets funding. There's plenty to go around. Sure, every once in a while a political imperative will "pull the plug" on something deemed wasteful or too expensive and maybe sometimes that's right. But we STILL have particle physics, we STILL send out pure science space missions, there are STILL mathematicians and theorists who are paid for their whole careers to study subject matter that has no remotely practical applications. Not everything must have a straight-line monetary ROI.

bryanrasmussen 8mo ago

>Absolutely not. A statement that certain needs some backing. You might say that the statement you were replying to also needs some backing, but they did give some, although you believe it was incorrect. It just seems that "absolutely not" goes against the conventional wisdom that knowledge for knowledge sake will lead to some greater return than was expended on getting that knowledge somewhere down the road which really is one of the main underlying ideas of Western Civilization since before Newton. Absolutely not means future society will not be better off! That seems to be a big weird absurdly pompous and conceited statement to make unless you have a time machine, or at least a big mess of statistics that can show that scientific advances in physics for a significant amount of time has failed to provide a return value on existence, although I would think that does not rise to the promise of "absolutely not".