> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
This is a pretty common mistake - why not invest directly in trying to solve those problems instead of hoping to learn something by chance from different activities?
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.
There is no way to answer that - we have limited money/people/time. Whatever we fund - we will get whatever the returns are - but there is no way to know what we don't have because we didn't fund some other thing. Even if in a few years we fund that other thing - what we get out of those funds is influenced by the other things we already know and so whatever we get out of it also shows the results of the other research that we already have.
The only exception is if some research reveals nothing. Though this isn't a useful claim: "it doesn't work" still revealed something.
Given that you can do a lot more research in different fields at the same time for the amount of money the next bigger particle accellerator would cost, the answer is very likely yes.
Ok, which field? How much money will be needed? What potential experiments are lined up in those fields that need money to go forward?
Particle physics has told us a lot about the base nature of our model and the affirmation of the standard model. The fruits of these labors still take decades to make their mark on our world.
And, we still are working on those other things at the same time too. It turns out with 8 billion people on the planet and modern technology we can get an absolute fuckload done at once.
Real scientists don’t call others armchair scientists, it’s just belittling. Do you resort to ad hominem because you feel like your argument is not strong enough, so you have to try to attack the person as well?
The more important question is, are you content with simply dismantling any progress in accelerator science at all for the next century? Because the LHCs successors won't be online till the 2050s at least. If you don't fund them now though and start the work, then no one does the work, no one studies the previous work (because there's no more grant money in it) and the next generation of accelerator engineers and physcists doesn't get trained and the knowledge and skill base withers and literally dies.
Because the trade off of no new accelerators is the definite end of accelerator science for several generations.
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".
> 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.
>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.
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.
> 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?
Sure, but it didn't. Which is knowledge that really should factor into the decision to build the next, bigger one.
> What are we supposed to do then? As humans, I mean.
Invest the money and effort elsewhere, for now. There are many other fields of scientific exploration that are very likely to yield greater return (in knowledge and utility) for less. You could fund a hundred smaller but still substantial intiatives instead of one big accelerator. And be virtually guaranteed to have an exciting breakthrough in a few of them.
And who knows, maybe a breakthrough in material science or high-voltage electrophysics will substantially reduce the costs for a bigger particle accelerator?
> Which is knowledge that really should factor into the decision to build the next, bigger one.
It was always factored in, and of course it would be in any next iteration.
> Invest the money and effort elsewhere, for now. There are many other fields of scientific exploration that are very likely to yield greater return (in knowledge and utility) for less. You could fund a hundred smaller but still substantial intiatives instead of one big accelerator. And be virtually guaranteed to have an exciting breakthrough in a few of them.
I agree with this to a large extent. I'm just not against particle accelerators as a venue for scientific advancement and in the best of worlds we could do both.
>> 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?
>Sure, but it didn't. Which is knowledge that really should factor into the decision to build the next, bigger one.
Not this week, no. And if, next week (or next year or next decade) we resolve some of the most significant problems in modern physics, any expenditures in those fields were a waste?
You've repeatedly bashed particle physics based on your perception of a lack of progress vis-a-vis the costs, and claimed that other fields should be prioritized. Which fields? What would you hope to gain from those fields?
Is there no room for basic research that attempts to validate the bases (Standard Model, Quantum Field Theory, the marriage of the former with General Relativity, etc.) of modern physics? If not why not? Our models are definitely wrong, but they're measurably less wrong than previous models.
Should we not continue to hone/probe those models to find the cracks in the theories underpinning those models? If we don't, how will we solve these extant issues?
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.
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.
>> 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.
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
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.
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.