As a (non-practicing) physicist, I've always disliked the penchant of some in the HEP community to say what this article says. They (the HEP community) tends to equate physics with HEP physics.
It's not.
When this is pointed out to the people espousing this odd viewpoint, they usually respond with some passive aggressive comment. I've seen/experienced much of this during my time in research.
New physics not requiring an accelerator would include quantum computing; the real stuff of entangled qubits, and the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits. More generally quantum mechanics interpretation and meaning. There are some unsettling things within QM, such as non-locality, and how to understand them.
There are many other examples, just listing 1 for brevity.
Basically, any text that begins with "the set of all physics is HEP physics" such as this article implies, is, pretty much by definition, incorrect.
I recall while the SSC was being built in Texas, that when the NSF asked for more money for researchers not involved in SSC, they were told that physics folks were getting enough. I remember my thesis advisor's grant that I was funded on, getting cut to help fund other things.
Equating the new physics with new HEP physics is, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, not even wrong. We don't need accelerators for most new physics.
As a practicing physicist in quantum information, I can say
(1) "New physics" is jargon understood by experts to mean new fundamental physics, i.e., new laws/forces/particles at the base of our theoretical edifice. This does not mean that non-fundamental physics is necessarily less important -- see for instance the late Phillip Anderson's "More is different" [ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/177/4047/393 ] -- but the distinction is real and meaningful. The use of this phrase does not equate physics with HEP physics. The reason you might make that mistake is because...
(2) To my knowledge, every single discovery of new physics in the past half century years has been made with a particle accelerator. I am confident that a new particle accelerator is a lot more likely to discover new physics than building a quantum computer or any other experimental work in quantum information. This, I'm sure, is the consensus view, even among people who put a low credence on the chance that new physics will be found at the next accelerator, or that such an investment is worthwhile.
(3) In my opinion, the strongest argument for pursuing quantum information experiments over HEP is that a departure from quantum mechanics would be more revolutionary than merely finding another set of particles and forces with largely unexplained parameters. In that sense, you need to make the reverse argument to the one you are trying to make, i.e., that quantum information is more fundamental than HEP. But for the very same reason, discrepancies with quantum mechanics are just very, very unlikely to be found.
Recent results have often depended on observations of light flashes in large bodies of water or ice. These have sometimes involved an accelerator, but present accelerators suffice.
Many people think gravitational wave observations matter.
It would not be surprising if completely new, unanticipated plasma fluid phenomena turn up, when someone looks.
People are still trying to understand superconductivity, and have not needed accelerators thus far.
Neutrino experiments are a good example! A mistake on my part. I think you're right that the CKM parameters have been bounded more tightly with non-accelerator based neutrino experiments. (Of course, that's still HEP, and it still gets plenty of funding, so it doesn't detract from my point.)
On the other hand, superconductivity is not a good example. It's a still-confusing phenomenon, but the vast majority of physicists believe to follows directly from the known laws of non-relativistic quantum mechanics.
Eh I disagree. I've never understood "new physics" to mean new fundamental physics. Anderson localization was "new physics." I mean, is discovering new Hadrons "new physics?" They're "just" new combinations of quarks. In that sense it's "just" quark chemistry! I think it's especially absurd since condmat systems can be interesting toy models for high energy systems.
But you know, whatever. The fact is that we as physicists are fighting over crumbs. We should instead be political outside our circle rather than fighting internally. The fact that our budget is orders of magnitude smaller than the defense budget is insane.
Also-also, there's plenty of tabletop fundamental experiments. Superconducting cavity based axion searches for instance.
Happy to agree that terminology may vary; for the purposes of my argument, I only need that a large fraction of physicists do use the term this way, and that that sense is meaningful and important.
> Also-also, there's plenty of tabletop fundamental experiments. Superconducting cavity based axion searches for instance.
Yes, sure, such experiments could find new fundamental physics. (And it should be funded!) But the Bayesian credence the overall field places on this happening is quite low, and certainly much lower than a next generation accelerator. No table-top experiments have found new fundamental physics in many decades.
(Of course, the accelerator is arguably a much worse deal given its extraordinary price.)
Not sure myself, but I wonder how much of the progress breaks down into theoretical vs experimental physics, and what types of experimental physics have paid off.
Also, are there other forms of experimental physics that don't have much coverage and could shine the light in other directions?
The rate at which new experimental input to fundamental physics is generated has slowed almost to a halt. How much you can trust theory in the absence of experimental confirmation is debated.
The only sensible way to define experimental guidance is by plausibility of the theories being falsified. (Otherwise, I rule out lots of theories every day on my walk to work because I don't witness the heretofore laws of physics melting down.) Post-Higgs and post-natural-SUSY, there are no theories that have much a priori credence. And just getting to Higgs and no-natural-SUSY, compared to the previous accelerator, took multiple decades.
This slow rate is to be compared to vastly faster rate at which new experimental input was rolling in in the '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s.
Well said. Whenever I bring up that point on physics subreddits I also get tons of passive aggressive comments. It's super toxic.
The HEP people in my own department also seem to believe that anything other than beyond the standard model physics isn't fundamental or isn't pure enough to care about.
I think a lot of it comes from the fact that they used to be the golden child of science, but the influence and prestige of HEP has been a victim of it's own success. HEP just doesn't hold the same importance it used to, and that stings for the people who dedicated their lives to it.
As they pushed to higher and higher energies and events with lower and lower cross sections, they're solving problems that matter less and less, and are increasingly less likely to be useful in any way.
Of course, it's still incredibly interesting to know about the fundamental building blocks of the universe, but without a promise of practical applications, or at least a convincing argument that they'll find something interesting with this new collider, I find it really hard to justify the price tag.
Would knowing what physics does at 100TeV be any more valuable to us than a great work of literature? I'm not sure.
> but without a promise of practical applications, or at least a convincing argument that they'll find something interesting with this new collider, I find it really hard to justify the price tag.
I mean, you can say that about people going to the moon, right? What data are they going to get? Something about rocks and the consistency of the moon dust, right? The technologies developed in going to the moon got us so many things we didn't see from the goal.
This is the same for a lot of things around the frontiers of science! More experimental data is beneficial to all levels of science. Look at how many papers have been written in obscure and 'irrelevant' fields of higher mathematics only to -- 40 or 200 years later -- be found extremely relevant and useful?
The point is we don't know. It's not like we can't afford it. If the United States, for example, distributed the defense budget into social care and the sciences, we wouldn't be having a conversation about monetary distribution. It's not inherently mutually exclusive, and it doesn't have to be at the moment, either.
> Would knowing what physics does at 100TeV be any more valuable to us than a great work of literature? I'm not sure.
> If the United States, for example, distributed the defense budget into social care and the sciences, we wouldn't be having a conversation about monetary distribution.
You tease us with such sweet words, something like Star Trek but more real.
> they're solving problems that matter less and less, and are increasingly less likely to be useful in any way
Can you expand on why you think this? I'm not a physicist, but I feel like one shouldn't discount the possibility of useful discoveries. I'd love to hear if there are reasons that's not true.
The problem is that the effects they're looking at are confined to such high energy and small length scales that they're utterly invisible to things even on the scale of a single proton. It's very difficult to imagine how (or even why) one would ever build a device that takes advantage of a TeV scale effect to do something useful, given that these effects are meaningless to the sorts of matter we care about and interact with.
Is it possible that we might discover something revolutionary at 100TeV that will have gigantic consequences to our daily lives? Sure. But that's like saying that it's possible that there's a treasure chest full of gold buried in your backyard. Yes, if you dug up your back yard it is possible you'll find something amazing and life changing. But for right now, we don't really have any convincing reason to think that's the case, and you'd probably just be spending a lot of effort to dig a big hole in the ground.
Arguing that it'd have good effects like increasing your fitness and "who knows, you might strike gold!" isn't really a convincing argument for me to dig up my yard.
I agree with your point but it skips over a different equally important thing completely: technology built to create and observe events at these energies are not without value, similarly to NASA going to the Moon and inventing Velcro while at it (yes, not true, but you get the idea).
Actually I don't think I skipped over that. I explicitly mentioned "spinoff technologies" and in my analogy to digging a hole in your back yard I said
> Arguing that it'd have good effects like increasing your fitness and "who knows, you might strike gold!" isn't really a convincing argument for me to dig up my yard.
What I mean by this is that I don't think that the spin off technologies or discoveries from high energy particle physics research (i.e. the fitness you might gain by digging up your yard) are a valid justification for doing it.
Spin off technologies and discoveries will be found in almost any research endeavour, including other particle physics experiments that aren't just "build another collider, but bigger", they're not a justification for the research, they're a bonus.
You could say the same during invention of quantum mechanics: "They are looking at the effects on the scale of single atom/electron, hardly ever useful in our everyday life." Or about going to the space. You can never know what new discoveries bring.
Quantum mechanics didn't require $10B (or whatever the equivalent would be in 1930-ish currency) to create. The "inventors" of QM were trying to explain measurements that were already made, quite inexpensively, that did not fit the model of nature that we had at that time.
Basically, the experiments were done, measurements made. Now the theorists were trying to understand what they needed in order to be able to provide a model that fit these results. This required a number of specific mental leaps of faith. Some of these are controversial even today. But they fit the experiments, so the issue for us is one of a mental model.
But ... and this is critical, not all of physics is quantum mechanical. Orbital calculations don't (normally) require QM. Steam engines, heat engines, etc. don't normally require QM.
The objections some of us have with classifying "all of physics being HEP" is that it is not, and the reality is that most physics do not require accelerators. Most new physics won't require accelerators.
A great example from earlier this year is the first sighting of a Majorana fermion[1]. Though this article also makes the mistake of "In particle physics, fermions are a class of elementary particles". Its not in particle (HEP) physics. Its in physics.
The federal government just wrote a $2T stimulus check of funny money they pulled out of thin air to (largely) cover for their incompetence in handling the pandemic. But $10B (that's a factor of 200x less!) for basic physics research is somehow too expensive? Our priorities are way off.
Except we know, and the founders of quantum mechanics also realized, that the properties of the matter we care about and interact with is driven by the properties of electrons and atoms.
That analogy has broken down. It’s not to say that we couldn’t learn something at 100TeV that could be useful or even revolutionary like QM was, but we also don’t really have any reason to believe that right now other than cheery optimism.
I’m all for finding high energy physics, I just don’t think it can justify it’s current budget in the quest for newer bigger colliders at higher and higher energies.
Yeah, but discovery costs resources, and on the margin a new accelerator is a less cost-effective means of producing productive new discoveries, sounds like.
That makes sense, thanks for the reply. At those energies, I guess you'd be hard pressed to make a useful 'finding' that could be utilized outside of a huge collider.
I remember at the University of Chicago there was a researcher studying "breakfast physics" - what governs the peak angle of granular piles (like salt piles or grain or sandpiles), what happens at the singularity when a drizzle of honey goes from a hyperboloid of one sheet to a hyperboloid of two sheets. I think he also measured the effect of vacuum on fluid splatters.
These are all quotidian problems in I guess "condensed matter" physics which are 0) largely unsexy and ignored 1) still largely unsolved, 2) liable to watershed huge, life- and money- saving innovations, while exotic HEP and Low Temp Condensed, are still what most physics students study their way into.
My friend's thesis was about optimal mixing of granular matter. It's pretty hilarious physics and I was said also practically important in pharmaceutics and cosmetics industry.
100% as a fellow non-HEP (practicing) physicist -- There's so much more to physics.
Science, at least from the funding perspective, has always leaned toward what's fashionable -- "nuclear" dominated following WW2, "particle" has had it's moment, and we're moving full force toward "quantum" (& "AI"!)
Scientists seeking funding bend themselves in knots to ensure they include all the key words in their grant applications
So, what other types of physics is not well understood and requires funding to further research. We know F=ma, things in motion stay in motion, blah, and so on. We know a current flowing down a path will generate a magnetic field. We electrons moving to a lower energy path will release energy. We know light bends in a lens, and how to make that useful. Essentially, the funding for pure research and discovery is going to be more exciting than how to take a current understanding of physics into a way of making money. Plus, that kind of research should be undertaken by private investment.
One very simple way to answer this question is that the American Physical Society publishes journals called Physical Review {A,B,C,D,E}. Of these, Phys Rev D is the one focused on high-energy physics.
If there was no other interesting physics requiring further research, how could those other fields be generating enough papers to fill 4 journals?
And this isn't even counting more recent journals like Phys. Rev. Fluids.
Super conductors, semiconductors, cosmology, qm (including computing), and optics to name a few. There's still significant research to be done in all these fields, and more.
Get superconductivity working at say 0 deg C and you will be able to pick your accolade and price. Get it working at 100 deg C and you will have won the world.
There's always new physics in the next digit of theory or experiment. It's not sexy, and doesn't fall into (subjective) notions of "fundamental." Discovery may be hard, but can't be ruled out.
I'm a big fan of Phil Anderson's article, More is Different[1] where he argues why he things this reductionist view (the view that the physics most worthy of understanding is the physics of the smallest things) is flawed. The fact of the matter is that at all sorts of scales regularities in the laws of nature emerge, and understanding the smaller and smaller building blocks is only one interesting path for physics research.
Condensed matter physics is, in my opinion, a far more interesting and varied field of study than high energy physics. Not only does it contribute to society in a way high energy physics no longer does, but in many senses it takes on a fundamental character like HEP. Every material in the long wavelength limit acts like its own little universe with its own set of fundamental particles and quantum fields.
The universes Condensed matter physics studies have supersymmetry, Majorana fermions, magnetic monopoles, dualities and any other genuinely interesting physical phenomenon you could want.
What's more is that by understanding the physics of these phenomena, we can create new technologies that really matter.
…and (if I may add) foundations of quantum mechanics (which may or may not be related to quantum gravity). And dozens of open questions in relativity alone (that have little to do with black holes).
I'm sorry, but I disagree with the label "fundamental" here.
One can observe anti-de Sitter spaces in superfluid systems. Is that not more "fundamental" than zoology of particles and their interactions? That has, literally to do with the metric tensor of space. Seems to be a bit more fundamental to me than things interacting in that space.
Put another way, the "fundamental" argument is very weak, and everyone outside of HEP knows this.
we haven’t really understood quantum theory yet on a theoretical level.
Everybody seems to agree with that, yet it seems most Physicists immediately refuse to spend any further thought on it and go back to modeling what happens if you double the number of particles and then crash them at 100 TeV
> the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits
Where is the innovation/research in this area happening? This is one of those topics that I find very interesting but any attempt to serious inquiry into it tends to result in ridicule from people I know with some expertise in physics and thermodynamics, as though it was just obviously nonsense.
We already have quantum computers, at this point that’s not new physics it’s engineering.
And if the well established frameworks don’t settle your thirst for understanding quantum mechanics, thats about philosophy not physics.
Well ... no. We have several interpretations of QM, one of which has been dominant for most of the last century. But the other interpretations have been getting deeper looks due to things that the current interpretation "hand waves" (particle wave duality, etc.)
We are generally willing to accept the interpretation, as long as we don't look to closely at it. Once we do, we have to start asking questions of nature as to which (set of) interpretation(s) are more likely correct. As in provides an understandable model, and provides correct calculation capability for predicting features given experiments.
That’s as silly as saying “we already have particle colliders, at this point they’re just an engineering problem”. It completely misses the forest for the trees.
My personal opinion (and I might be biased since I'm not a collider guy) is that it's time to take a break from the energy frontier and put our efforts into other kinds of physics. There's a whole world out there besides "fixing" the standard model.
I'm having a hard time finding it, but there's a quote from a famous physicist along the lines of "we already have a theory of everything we encounter in daily life, it's just that we can't apply it to practically anything". For instance, we still have no idea how unconventional superconductors work. Of course, they're completely described by plain old quantum mechanics without even using field theory. However, that still doesn't mean we understand them because the theory is too complex.
I'm personally interested in the rising complexity frontier of physics where increased computing power and new methods of approaching problems will help uncover emergent phenomena. Plus, there's other accelerators besides colliders that are essential to this field (x-ray light sources for instance).
We should come back to the energy problem experimentally when we can affordably make a revolutionary accelerator (like x100, not a factor of 2 or 3). That will come when we have mastered advanced acceleration techniques like plasma and wakefield.
My perception is that this is closer to the direction the field has been moving for the last half decade or so. Pushing the "energy frontier" was needed to experimentally find the higs and test supersymmetric theories. The higs was measured, and literally hundreds of proposed theories and particles, including very well-liked theories, have been eliminated. This is a big success.
However, it turns out that some of the same physics of extremely high energy scales is also accessible through extremely high precision/low background experiments like the many neutrinoless double beta decay searches, or the rapidly growing field of neutrino experiments.
In my oppinion, there is still compelling need for an accelerator specialized in colliding electrons with ions at lower energy than at the LHC. The nuclear physics community has been after this for some time now, and it looks like it will be built at Brookhaven. Now that FRIB is almost finished, this will probably be the big budget nuclear physics project for the next 5 years or so.
Oh, that's right. I wasn't really placing the electron ion collider (EIC) under the energy frontier umbrella, because they're moving in a different direction. I'm actually sort of involved with them too, but from a distance. I'm pretty sure it will happen, it's just a question of which of two proposals will succeed (more of a political question to be honest).
My own interest isn't in colliders at all, but in building atomic probes like x-ray light sources and fast electron diffraction apparatus, but at a scale accessible to universities instead of large facilities.
Huge segue, I'm a semi-retired web / data engineer just dipping my toes into research data software. I'm collaborating on a psychology paper, but I love physics. Can I ask you some questions? My email is in my profile.
Sure, I don't see your email though. I'm also only a grad student in one specialized field (accelerator physics) so not sure how much I can help with HEP questions.
Not quite... the two main technologies I'm talking about are free electron lasers (FELs) and ultrafast electron diffraction. New technologies that only exist at national labs right now. If we could bring access to them to the university scale, then I think it would be a revolution similar to what the wide access to electron microscopy provided.
There's so much unexplored physics in chemistry and biology happening at atomic time and length scales. Electron diffraction and FELs are right now the only good ways to study that, but right now they're locked away behind long waiting lists because they're too expensive to have a lot of them.
The field of x-ray light sources seems to be pretty well developed, lightsource.org lists 30 of them world wide, so adding one more doesn't look like it's going to critically impact anything except maybe the local community getting the extra jobs.
There was at one point truly a fight about the relative importance of the various fields, but the condensed matter people won that. Just look at lightsources.org again, that's 30 facilities worldwide, with 24000 users in Europe alone over the last five years. CERN has basically 1 facility for HEP, with maybe 9000 users worldwide.
At this point these call for shutting down particle physics for a few generations while the technology magically develops feel more like jealousy that protein structure isn't as sexy for the public as the search for beyond the standard model physics.
Considering that x-ray lithography still isn't a thing, I'd say that we have a lot more to do with x-ray research.
Also, according to CERN[0]
>As of 2017, more than 17 500 people from around the world work together to push the limits of knowledge. CERN’s staff members, numbering around 2500...comprising over 12 200 scientists of 110 nationalities, from institutes in more than 70 countries.
> The field of x-ray light sources seems to be pretty well developed, lightsource.org lists 30 of them world wide, so adding one more doesn't look like it's going to critically impact anything except maybe the local community getting the extra jobs.
And that's based on what? The number of lightsources in the world? There's dozens of research groups studying quantum computing. I guess they should just pack up and move on to less developed fields.
In reality, there are huge open problems with synchrotron light sources that people are spending their careers on (and I don't think they're jealous of HEP). What I'm more interested in, however, are university scale sources of xrays and matter for atomic scale physics. Even though there are a few dozen facilities around the world, all of them are oversubscribed. Many times if you apply for time on a synchrotron you'll be denied because there just isn't space for you. Even companies that pay for time (and yes these machines don't just impact local job counts) don't always get a slot. It would be transformative to take some of these techniques (and more advanced ones) to a wider audience.
That's based on you calling for HEP to be defunded in favour of X-ray sources, pretty heavily implying that CERN somehow blocks the x-ray field.
I'm just pointing out they it seems to be doing pretty well for itself, three dozen international facilities with commercial customers doesn't sound like particularly lean times.
If mere over-subscription is to be given such weight, then I call for x-ray sources to be fully commercialized and the public money going to build medium energy gamma ray satellites! We ain't got even one of those flying at the moment so we basically don't know what happens in the sky at those energies. Hows that for reasonable?
In reality the HEP people mostly actively chose that field in competition with atomic and molecular physics et al, and if you kill HEP for generation most of the new students will keep choosing something else.
X-ray lightsources are improving too, not just multiplying. They are an important tool for many areas of science, not just physics but chemistry, biology and pharmaceutics to name a few. Whether there's any "new physics" left to discover there I guess depends on your point of view, but there's still plenty to learn about how matter works.
Yeah, there seems to be a lot of interesting areas in, for example, condensed matter physics[1] such as topological insulators[2] which appear have a lot higher chance of having a measurable impact on our lives.
That said, there's a lot of know-how in building the complex parts that make up the accelerators and detectors, reducing the HEP investments could erode that know-how.
I'd contest that second point. I'm actually one of those people that builds the parts that make accelerators (accelerator physics PhD student). There's a lot more interesting accelerator tech outside of the energy frontier.
My specific interests for instance are how we can build university scale light and matter sources for atomic physics. It requires the same types of advances that will power future colliders, but enables different types of research.
> we still have no idea how unconventional superconductors work. Of course, they're completely described by plain old quantum mechanics without even using field theory
News to me - I thought that study of non-conventional superconductors relied heavily on effective field theories.
Also, I think this is a bit of a strawman - there's a ton of money and effort going into condensed matter physics right now.
> News to me - I thought that study of non-conventional superconductors relied heavily on effective field theories.
What they meant is that understanding the microscopic degrees of freedom, the electrons and ions in a superconductor, does not require field theory. The plain old particle based Schrodinger equations for N electrons interacting with N ions should be absolutely fine.
The problem is that we can't actually do anything with that description, so things like effective field theories help us distill the important parts away.
> Also, I think this is a bit of a strawman - there's a ton of money and effort going into condensed matter physics right now.
While I agree, and I would love to see more progress in particle physics, I also think that comparing the funding landscape of particle physics to condensed matter physics is a little misleading.
New discoveries and incremental improvements in condensed matter physics benefit the world in direct and tangible ways. The frontiers of particle physics left the regime where it can benefit the world long, long ago. The energies are just too high, there's no reason to believe that anything they discover will actually matter to anyone other than satisfying their intellectual curiosity (or spinoff technologies).
I don't want to sound dismissive of particle physics, because I really do believe in doing physics for its own sake, but honestly a better understanding of particle physics is unlikely to benefit us any more than a great new piece of literature, and the price tag on the next generation collider is just mind-bogglingly high.
I post this every time someone links to Hossenfelder, but please take her opinions with a grain of salt.
She seems more interested in attacking the "physics establishment" than in giving people a picture of the reality of our situation. Take a look at her articles on LIGO [1] for instance where she makes conspiracy theory level claims saying that the group is lying about their data and that "big physics" is in on it.
My opinion happens to be similar to hers on building the next big collider, but I'm not a high energy physics expert. Given how dishonest she was on the subjects I am familiar with, there's no way that I trust her to give an accurate portrayal of the ones I'm not.
For what it's worth, I usually find Sabine Hossenfelder to be insufferably critical and self-promoting, but I found that LIGO article fairly disturbing. As someone who has worked with complex analyses of large datasets, I know how easy it can be to fool yourself.
Certainly, and the LIGO is one big complicated dataset.
The problem is that Sabine Hossenfelder doesn't just make arguments about the data, but makes the researchers out to be villains. Not only that, but all of the problems she brings up have good community accepted resolutions that she selectively ignores.
I think that once we had multi-messenger confirmation of merger events, any doubt about gravitational wave detection vanished outside of some fringe groups. All of that happened and played out long before Hossenfelder's article, but she doesn't really give a fair representation of it.
Not to defend her, but to defend listening to her...
Often the people in a position to give the most important feedback are _not_ in a position to give feedback gently and tactfully.
So if you want to really know the world, you need to have a check in your mind that lets you take tactless feedback.
One example is when you hurt someone... a person you hurt is almost never going to be in a position to gently, calmly say what happened in a fair, generous way. That kind of feedback almost always comes with barbs, or inflations that accompany a person trying to talk to someone who hurt them.
If you ignore tactless feedback, you will mostly never be able to understand the people you hurt.
Another category like this is feedback about norms. People who are well versed in norms and good at operating within them generally won’t be the people who can see outside of those same norms. The people who can see alternatives to norms, who can give feedback on where they work and don’t work, often will not be able to give that feedback in a way that conforms to other norms.
So if you ignore tactless feedback, you will mostly never be able to understand broken norms.
If you can separate the content of the message from how it’s delivered you can dramatically increase your access to understanding.
The actual timeline for this is that when the first critiques of LIGO's analysis came out, there was a good reply from LIGO and a productive scientific discussion, at the end of which Sabine indicated she was satisfied. That was months before. That was good.
Then she came out with the linked post, which pretends LIGO had no reply to the substantive issues even though she already had blogged positively about their reply earlier, and disingenuously throws in a few complete non-issues just to make a gish-gallop. That's not science popularization, that's spreading FUD for the sake of self-promotion. Any field can be "taken down" with enough dishonesty.
In a scientific sense, NOT finding something should be equally valid as finding something. Just do proper work and write it up and we have increased our understanding of the world. If there was nothing, not even the Higgs, so what? There is nothing to defend or to attack. Where is this discussion coming from?
In the late 19th century people that went into science where actively discourage to study physics since many believed there was nothing left to find out. Without quantum mechanics we would not have the transistor, there would be no computers. The immense economic value delivered by fundamental research makes a 10 billion usd investment look like a microscopic peanut crumb compared to the potential value it can give. For comparison the combined world defense budget in 2018 was around 1.8 trillion usd.
It isn't that we wouldn't have transistors but that we wouldn't understand them. We wouldn't have the good transistors necessary for modern technology.
There is a similar debate around Newtonian physics. How far might the industrial revolution have gone without a perfect understanding of how things move? You don't need newton to build complex machines. Look at any early windmill or waterwheel. You need newton to understand machines well enough to build and run them efficiently. You don't always need theory before practical, but theory always makes practical better.
I found a Physics Stackexchange thread addressing this.[1] The science of quantum mechanics was not necessary for its invention. I’m still uncertain of its direct application other than “at <32nm QM effects are dominant”.
Hum... That thread goes a long way about diodes, but I couldn't find any such claim about transistors.
Yeah, somebody would probably invent them at some point. Somebody would probably even invent FETs, even if it took many decades more. MOSFETs are a completely different matter, I don't think anybody would invent them without understanding how they work.
What everybody seems to forget is modern chemistry, material engineering and medicine. The world would be a completely different place without quantum mechanics. Electronics is just a tiny part of the change.
MOSFETs are simpler than bipolar transistors. Putting it very crudely, MOSFETs are based on the same space charge principles as vacuum valves, except they happen to use doped silicon instead of free electrons.
Bipolar transistors are more complex, but they still work by controlling the bulk geometry of moving charge.
None of this requires QM, except in the very simple sense that you need to know what a bandgap is and how doping changes it. Beyond that, the "mechanical" details of the charge dynamics are just calculus - even more crudely, very very small plumbing.
QM effects are only relevant when the simple space charge models start to break down at very small geometries. Your "mechanical" space charge model becomes soft, noisy, and more complicated. Essentially the plumbing develops waves and ripples that depend on the geometry, and the edges of the pools and pipes can start to leak. And that's where QM finally starts to make a real difference.
So it really is where the particle phenomenon breaks down, thanks. Do you know if there are any kind of harmonic oscillator models used in this domain? I’m curious about a frequency-dependent characterization of the “energy” transport.
But if you can figure out diodes, you can figure out PN junctions. Well, a bipolar transistor is just two PN junctions. So the same claim should at least somewhat apply to transistors.
I agree and the enormous amount of knowledge build up is lost overtime when not actively used. Not investing in the next project is like no more space travel after we went to the moon. We should always push these projects further for the sake progress. Especially when you see it in the light of the defense budget.
No ,you are wrong. First of all we would still have vacuum tubes. Secondly, FETs (their physics is simple, and does not even need that much of quantum mechanics) were invented much earlier than BJTs (the quantum ones) and very possibly we would have been no more than 10-20 years behind from where we are now.
Difference is, the discovery of quantum mechanics did not require billion-dollar investment in equipment and manpower (not until work began on nuclear weapon, anyway). Besides, current research in high-energy physics, while being expensive, only brings scientific value and not much at all in the way of practical application (except, perhaps, as a side-effect of building more and more sophisticated equipment - but that would be like saying that wars are good for medicine, because obviously direct investment in medicine would be more efficient than investment in war).
I think its too dismissive to claim it will have 0 practical applications. Often this type of fundamental research take decades to result in something useful in an unexpected way. We can only go where the roads lead us, who are we to dismiss the roads not taken.
What is more likely to revolutionise physics - spending $20bn on an incremental increase in collider energies, on spending $20bn funding a new generation of PhDs and postdocs exploring quantum gravity fundamentals?
At this point practical HEP shows every signs of being a boondoggle. There are plenty of hard theoretical questions that haven't been answered, but with a few exceptions they're outside of the mainstream. Research into them has been actively discouraged, except at a few locations.
Physics doesn't need more hardware, it needs more ideas - more intellectual diversity, and more creativity.
I'm not sure just increasing funding to thep would generate new ideas, why would they not just funnel it into the same "safe" programmes as they have done the last 25 years? There are some small "fringe science" programmes here and there, but we probably shouldn't pour all money into those either..
The method itself, smashing ever more energetic particles into each other, makes it highly unlikely that any discovery will be applicable to human sized energy regimens.
Current high energy physics research brought us lots of big data advances, electronics advances, sensor advances, as well as the web itself. You dismiss too quickly the advances made when attacking large, hard problems.
>Wouldn’t direct investment in these areas more efficient?
Often not, because you don't know what areas to choose. Having a big, hard goal to solve usually requires building pieces to solve the problem, and these pieces end up being useful in themselves. Plus the big goal is often achieved.
Mankind could have done a lot of the stuff discovered along the way to big goals, but didn't, until the big goals were attempted.
Plus, it's often easier to get funding as a nation-state for big goals. Little side projects are often not individually worth chasing. The internet is a good example - it could have been done by industry before the govt decided to chase it as a piece of a big goal.
Yep - but that is not true for most high energy physics. The incredibly short lifetimes and low coupling of most new particles make them mostly unusable for anything we can forsee being useful.
Electrons were useful, because they have long lifetimes, are easy to make, and interact well. Higgs bosons are unlikely to be useful as technology ever since they are so ephermeral. And they're certainly not giving immediate benefits.
>> How can you be sure that the new science won't have any practical applications?
Nobody is sure about anything. Nobody denies that high-energy physics might one day bring great things. The problem is cost. Other areas of science are much more likely to bring great things with far less money. If tens of billions are to be spent on a bigger microscope, let it be one that will give us better solar panels, or a direct treatment for viruses. Polishing the details of the standard model can wait.
This is just burden-shifting, and if it is the best argument that can be made, there would be essentially no case for a bigger accelerator at this point.
Things are not quite that bad, but the case is weaker now than it has ever been before.
We haven’t seen any evidence of that in the many years that have passed. We have good science, the Higgs and all, but, frankly, there’s little hope that the energies comparable to those that existed at the beginning of the Universe would be of practical consequence to us (other than the destruction of the Earth).
If they do it’s nothing we’ll ever be able to harness
Why should society at this day and time then plow millions of man hours and raw materials into proving it literally?
Perhaps when nanotechnology or AI is able to be put to the task, those peoples can then build a very specific machine to prove very specific questions
But this is throwing spaghetti at the wall for what to us will be a moment of excitement then having no clue how to make use of it and a big mess to clean up
It will be impossible to get an extra 10 billion dollars invested into science without a project like this. In other words probably 10% or less of that money would end up going into other fields of research. Considering all the other things governments spend money on, that is a good enough reason to do it in my book.
What do you mean with "the other things governments spend money on"? That's infrastructure, education, welfare. The 10 billion is not free money but taken from taxes, so please make a good case for spending it! Surely any intent of not being honest about the cost/benefit will backfire and discredit future scientific projects.
Military spending (eg USA, Russia, China), politically motivated public works (eg Japan), propping up failing industries for political reasons (eg car industry in Australia or USA), not to mention all the money that gets wasted on consultants, starting projects and not finishing them, poorly thought out stimulus packages...
There is a huge double standard where some things undergo a stringent cost/benefit analysis and other things are not scrutinised at all. Also the upside or benefit of scientific investment can be astronomically and unpredictably high. How can you compare building more public housing to inventing the semiconductor industry?
It’s interesting to see capitalism’s influence here. Like in many other areas of the economy, capitalism requires a concentration of control in science too, as a prerequisite for allocation of capital. Trapping us in a local
minimum of narrow hierarchies.
> I still believe that slamming particles into one another is the most promising route to understanding what matter is made of and how it holds together. But $10 billion is a hefty price tag. And I’m not sure it’s worth it.
When is it worth it? They tested many theories, and many of them were proven wrong, and some were proven right. What price can you attach to having this knowledge? Is there a maximum price tag for potentially knowing more about the universe?
> Is there a maximum price tag for potentially knowing more about the universe?
Yes. On the extreme end, there’s a finite amount of useful work that can be done before the heat death of the universe. An energy budget the size of the combined output of all power stations on the planet is much smaller than that, but also too much. At a more realistic scale, human knowledge is only valuable in so far as it improves the human condition in some way, now or in the future. Other research areas could be more important to progress right now and we only have so many scientists available to do the work. Allocating those scientists to research areas is an incredibly hard task, but it’s a necessary one.
Even if we accept that pure physics knowledge is a worthy goal in itself, diving straight into another megaproject isn’t necessarily the best way forward. Maybe it’s more valuable right now to find uses for the great theoretical leaps we’ve already made, for instance. Or maybe we should be focussing on training theorists so that we can have a better idea of what the next piece of giant scientific equipment needs to be. Or maybe we need to raise the global literacy rate so that we have more scientists available.
>Or maybe we need to raise the global literacy rate so that we have more scientists available.
Or maybe we start paying scientists living wages so anyone who can wipe their ass doesn't end up as a quant. Speaking as a quant with a physics phd working with another 400 phds in an hft firm.
I don’t have a day go by without thinking about doing something worthwhile with my (particle) physics phd. But that ridiculous combination of publish or perish, lousy pay and teaching not to mention the competition to stay in the field. Nah, I’ll choose living instead. But oh how I dream of a real career in physics with a higher goal than second-order marketing revenue.
Something that really sunk in for me while arguing with people on HN is that the entire Nuclear power industry is ~60 years old and provides around ~10% of humanity's electricity [0]. Even after the effective moratorium from 1985.
It seems very unlikely that we've really run up against the limits of what physics can do for us. That is an enormous change and it isn't even a lifetime ago. One more development like that would trivially justify investment values in the trillions of dollars range. Let alone all the other stuff that is likely to happen along the way.
Theoretical limits are all very well, but I strongly suspect the rational amount to spend on it is "everything we can". If I really wanted to start a fight I'll argue that diverting all welfare spending to scientific research would probably result in a greater net good over two generations.
> I strongly suspect the rational amount to spend on it is "everything we can".
By saying “everything,” you’re dodging the question of what sacrifices we should make to speed up basic science research. How do you draw the line between what we can and can’t afford?
Should we require everyone to pursue a Master’s degree? A PhD? Do we shut down university humanities departments? Do we halt all production that doesn’t directly support the basic sciences? Do we reduce food production to only that which is needed to support the scientific staff?
Some or all of these suggestions are probably beyond your idea of what’s acceptable. If so, you agree that there is some price that is too great to pay. The interesting question isn’t whether there’s a limit, it’s what it is.
> If I really wanted to start a fight I'll argue that diverting all welfare spending to scientific research would probably result in a greater net good over two generations.
Why welfare spending? Why not corporate subsidies? Or just forcefully seize the entire assets of some number of non-scientists, chosen at random? Cutting out welfare as a whole seems to be the single spending cut most likely to kill the largest number of people.
> Cutting out welfare as a whole seems to be the single spending cut most likely to kill the largest number of people.
Yes. I think the GP's point was that even on the worst case it would still pay off.
Personally, I doubt it. Increasing social risks would move things the other way around and decrease the speed of science advances, even with high investment.
Yes, this is the grandiose technocratic elite who believe they can save the world. A bit exaggerated, but I find these kinds of comments scary, misguided and naive, as well as very revealing of the underlying ideologies and oversimplified & mechanistic views of society.
> human knowledge is only valuable in so far as it improves the human condition in some way, now or in the future.
We have no idea how it will improve the human condition though. You could have said this to many scientists throughout history. Look at what the (much cheaper) fooling around at Bell Labs got us.
You’re absolutely right, and those projects were absolutely worth the cost to society in retrospect. It’s why I’m generally in favor of exploratory research.
I don’t have much of an opinion one way or the other about building another particle accelerator: the costs are significant, but manageable, and I haven’t followed the science enough to get a good idea of the likely benefit.
The question posed, however, was whether the cost could ever be too high. The only answer to that question is “yes,” regardless of the topic.
> Other research areas could be more important to progress right now and we only have so many scientists available to do the work. Allocating those scientists to research areas is an incredibly hard task, but it’s a necessary one.
That's not really how it works. People work on things they're interested in, not what they get assigned to.
That’s... a bit to simplistic of an understanding.
As a researcher, there are many problems I could find interesting and get passionate about working on, either with the right colleagues, funding, world implications, etc...
The scientist oblivious to the world and only interested in their little niche is not the majority. Give a problem funding at the early stage of careers (grad school, new tenure grants) and it gets worked on and some people get super passionate.
If you're talking about allocating existing scientists, it's a bit late for funding something at the point where someone is deciding what to do in grad school (or even undergrad, in the European system).
kd5bjo seemed to be talking about allocating people to entirely different fields which they likely have no existing experience in.
We’re in a capitalist system, so I had assumed that allocation would happen via the free job market: people with money write job descriptions for scientists to work on particular things, and the scientists decide which of those offers to pursue. Central control of this sort of thing hasn’t historically worked out well (though I may be biased on this point from growing up in the US).
As for switching fields, one of the key parts of scientific training is how to learn things, so scientists have a better chance of successfully changing felds than many other people. It also isn’t necessarily as big a leap as physics to biochem, like you suggested in another comment. Moving from theoretical particle physics to tokamak design seems like it should be doable, for instance.
At the level of picking a field, people absolutely work on what they are interested in (and have expertise in). You're not going to get particle physicists working on organic chemistry just because you've "allocated" them there (and they wouldn't be trained in it anyway).
> You're not going to get particle physicists working on organic chemistry just because you've "allocated" them there
If I consider what kinds of crappy jobs some excellent physicists who could not find a position in research had to take, I am not so sure.
The truth in my opinion thus rather is: Because, as you wrote, "they wouldn't be trained in it anyway", they won't be allocated for "organic chemistry" in your example.
On the other hand, if they were, I really believe that they would prefer this job over the one that they had to take.
The issue is, quite literally, what is the opportunity cost of this expenditure. If that money could help create a pandemic mitigation framework that would enable us to collectively respond faster and better to outbreaks, which is better to fund? If the money can help us build faster/more computers that enable us to better model many processes: weather, disease, materials, etc. is that a better expenditure?
I don't see anyone arguing that science is not a good investment.
I do see people asking the salient question of, is this the right science to fund right now, given all of societies needs.
The answer to that question should be obvious, we have other priorities at the moment.
Would you sacrifice all humanity for that knowledge? Since I’m guessing your answer is “no”, then there’s obviously a maximum price (even if my bound is ridiculously off)
Nima-Arkani Hamed likes to point out that particle colliders aren't getting more expensive at all, in relative terms. The price tags are going up for just the same reason that you can't buy a loaf of bread for a nickel anymore, but as a fraction of GDP, the next big collider has always been about 0.01%.
In fact, if there's any identifiable trend at all, it's that this fraction has been falling. The LHC, for instance, was slapped together after the last would-be supercollider was defunded, and reuses the LEP tunnel (built in the 1980s). If you're wondering why we took so long to find the Higgs boson, it's because the field has already been shrinking under the pressure of declining funding for 40 years.
People have failed to mention the fact that the LHC has turned out to be kind of a failure, at least it hasn't given the populist soundbites needed to support its' success. Nothing really 'new' came out of it and it was very expensive.
People seem to be ignorant that everything has a populist aspect, and very expensive things always do.
The politicians who foot the bill are thinking "We just spent bazillions and what did we get? Now we have to convince the proles to spend billions more?"
If LHS gave us some really fundamental new insights, the Round B would be easy. But right now it's like a startup with no 'product market fit' it's going to be hard.
When you fund a huge project using state money, not just physics projects but anything, it's as much about all the side-effects. A 10 year $10B project.. I mean, those $10B will not go into a bank account, they will be used to funnel work (both in related physics and engineering) down the years. It's amazing how they pushed some manufacturing methods to build LHC and I'm sure those methods will be used for some other good, for example.
You're literally talking about the benefits of employing people to dig holes in the ground. That could be a larger program; it doesn't have to be limited to particle accelerators.
More likely than not the next collider will be build in China, quite a few particle physicist luminaries have already made their case there. I for one am glad that I stayed clear of the siren call to join the 3000+ grad student workforce at CERN. Sifting through the heap of data that was assigned to you is about as fun as it sounds I think. You get to look for the J/Psi, Pomeron, Dark Matter how exciting! In reality most of the detectors are barely functional, Alice for example doesn’t produce useful data for most of the runs.
That’s just the nature of the machines. You spend so much effort to get to the nuggets, but you still get the nuggets.
Does China have experience making particle colliders? I’ve seen their magnetic confinement fusion research devices. Even in the design stage, there are lessons yet to be learned that are well documented in other machines. That doesn’t mean the people working on them are dumb, or that all fields of large-magnetic-confinement-machine-building physicists are in the same position, but I think we should be pretty sure whoever builds the next big particle collider is actually up to the task.
These don’t get built by countries. They get built in countries. The home country matters and they’ll need to put up funding, but it’s an international workforce.
> The home country matters...but it’s an international workforce.
Given the current state of the world and the trajectory of the West's relationship with the Chinese government, it may have to be built by China if it's going to be built in China.
There's a difference between theoretical and practical expertise.
I don't know much about particle accelerators, but I do know a bit about advanced manufacturing and I think you might be surprised at the degree to which Chinese industry is still functionally dependent on foreign machinery and expertise.
This is a country that, until about two years ago, couldn't successfully produce an entire ballpoint pen using fully domestic processes.
If you believe that there is a country that could, seems to me you would be taking it on faith, and in my opinion, ignoring uncountable foreign inputs. Unless you wanted to argue North Korea?
There probably is a country that could go from rocks to finished pen entirely domestically (Germany?) but that wasn't really my point.
I was trying to illustrate the broad chasm between theoretical and practical expertise. Just because someone "knows a lot of STEM" doesn't mean they can actually produce a useful thing. China already had perhaps the most highly concentrated amount of manufacturing engineering expertise anywhere in the world, yet still they needed help with what most people would consider a basic item.
This is fine! Most countries, as you noted, are in the same position. It's a desirable outcome of globalization.
It becomes problematic, though, when your goal is to build an incredibly complex machine that requires expertise beyond your own (like a particle accelerator, perhaps) and the people and countries whose help you require are unwilling to work with you.
I feel like any possible item that you claim is domestically produced only implies you're selectively ignoring the non-domestic inputs. If you pick up a stick off the ground and whittle it, where did you get the knife? How did you earn the money to buy the knife? Where did your food come from? What about the education that allowed you to get the job, was it contaminated by foreign influence...
Actual design and building of physics experiments is a lot more complicated than “just doing it”. There are thousands of places that one small oversight will cause the entire project to fail. You will never successfully make a city size particle accelerator if you cannot demonstrate the ability to design and build a tabletop version, let alone a room scale, let alone a building scale, let alone a city block scale. It is cheap to demonstrate at a small scale. It is expensive to fail at a large scale.
With respect, I have no idea what your link has to do with anything. Making a giant dish is absolutely trivial compared to a particle accelerator.
My point is that Chinese medium-scale magnetic confinement fusion research devices have not learned from 60 years of painful lessons that the fusion research community have learned and published. Magnetic confinement fusion research machines share a lot of similarities to particle accelerators. Is there any indication that China would succeed in making a particle accelerator other than “they are good at STEM” and have made a giant parabola? It’s not very convincing.
Is it supposed there are enterprises located in China exempt from oversight or control by the CCP? To what extent would decisions made within the enterprise be subject to President Xi's vision of complete control?
My understanding is, when it benefits them they will make a loophole to give some degree of autonomy. But they can revoke it as easily as they offer it.
I think people severely underestimate the scale, complexity, and time it takes to build large scale accelerators. There wont be some magical new accelerator popping up. Building them takes years, sometimes decades. Additionally you need a lot of experience in building, operating and designing those. Having worked in accelerator physics for quite some time my opinion is that China does not have the skills to do this. Research labs that built such machines had decades of prior experience and the community support. China has neither of those.
Imho the next big accelerator will be either some LHC upgrade, clic (very very unlikely) or the ILC.
Or even crazier stuff like wakefield accelerators and petawatt lasers. At this point the LHC is like ITER - advancements to the foundational technology have jumped leaps and bounds yet we're still stuck with a huge multi-billion dollar machine running on fairly outdated tech.
That is simply not true, the plasma wakefield accelerators are really a rather new technique but they are NOT meant to be used at such high energies, but rather for small experiments. Also (as far as I know), while they do have vastly superior energy gain per meter, you simply can't concatenate several of them (as you do with SRF cavities). So at the current state, if you want to reach TeV of colliosion energy, SRF is the only way to go.
Current plasma wakefield accelerators are in GeV range, we need TeV.
That is really vague. Even if there are interesting advancements in photonics, I seriously doubt that it will be able to accelerate particles to terra electron volts of colision energy in a controlled manner (in the next few years). Everybody I know that works in accelerator physics believes that for large machines, superconducting radio frequency cavities are the way to go.
> The higher the frequency, the steeper the gradient.
Losses also scale with frequency.
And while other acceleration principles have higher voltage gradient, they still can't reach TeV of collision energy, since you either can't concatenate them, or you can't control the beam sufficiently well.
As I wrote in another comment, stuff like plasma wakefield accelerators need to get better by a factor of 1000 before they reach the realms of SRF accelerators. This wont magically happen over night.
And most of these people have tenure, they hardly care for trends.
I have been to all major accelerator physics conferences over nearly the last decade. Despite clic there is no one seriously claiming to go beyond LHC energy without SRF. No one. Not the plasma wakefield guys, not some strange theoretical accelerator principle. No matter what you read on Wikipedia.
Your namedropping comments with very little actual content, disregarding the work of thousands of scientists show a certain arrogance that is super annoying.
> In reality most of the detectors are barely functional, Alice for example doesn’t produce useful data for most of the runs.
Do you really expect a detector/machine of the size of a building to have 100% availability ?
This is the sciences world, boy, not aerospace engineering. These detectors are ''home-made' and much closer to an experimental prototype than to anything "engineered". We do not name them "CERN experiments" for nothing.
And when you graduate you get a not in this field job because it's so competitive you probably were already ineligible by the time you started your PhD.
Well three of my friends are still hanging in there with a non-zero chance of success because they did their PhD in the right group. But yeah if you aren’t well connected or your advisor doesn’t like you this is a dead end.
Here is some reasoning for funding -- i.e., US Congress funding -- high energy physics (HEP), e.g., the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), I didn't see mentioned here:
(1) The Russians, EU, China, Japan might pursue HEP so the US does not want to appear to fall behind. So in part, the funding is "a matter of national pride".
(2) The funding has a constituency and keeps it and the university physics departments going. The US does want healthy university physics departments if only to teach physics for all the roles all of physics can play in national security, NASA, the economy, other sciences, e.g., medicine, engineering, e.g., computing, etc.
For the power of constituencies, notice that a lot of physics laboratories were started during WWII and are still operating. One way and another, somehow they keep getting funding.
(3) In the Manhattan Project the world, the power elite, all of civilization were surprised, shocked, felt blind-sided, afraid. The lesson they took was: It's a big, complicated universe out there; a good guess is that not nearly all of it is well understood (true or not); so we must pursue physics, at least keep up as insurance against another shocking discovery.
(4) The US likes to claim to have the best country, economy, culture, human rights, standard of living, roads, bridges, public health, Internet, ..., cars, hamburgers, milk, pizza, etc., basketball, Olympic athletes, pop music, etc., nearly the best of everything, in particular the best universities. So, can't have a great university without at least a good physics department, and very much want a great physics department.
Short version: The US wants to be the best, e.g., be the first to put a human with a flag on Mars, the Stars and Stripes.
These arguments were indeed used 30 years ago, but shortly after the USSR fell apart, the American Superconducting Supercollider was defunded midway through construction. The US was satisfied to become 2nd to Europe in this field then, I don't see why the US wouldn't be equally satisfied to be 4th to Europe, Japan, and China a little while later.
At some point, elementary particle physics will actually die as a field and the people who persist in building particle accelerators as if there is some new electroweak theory right around the corner will have to find something else to do. Of course, they'll probably continue with their pyramid building for decades after the subject has actually died.
Complete physics moron here, is there no way to use particle/anti-particle annihilation to drive collision energy up?
Also, i think if we invested the money for a new collider into an effort to develop what we've learned so far into a useful technology that inspires the general public, the funding for the next collider would take care of itself.
I'll drastically oversimplify here, but in a collider, the particles being collided are highly regimented. First, you have a very specific type of particle you want to move around, like a proton (and you had best hope you picked a charged particle so you and move it easily with an EM field). Second, you have a very specific direction for that particle so you can smash it against something else. Third, the energy the particle is at at the time of smashing is well-known and very high. It's all very specific.
Annihilation is too uncontrolled to help, often in terms of direction.
Accelerators are all about trying to add just a tiny bit more velocity to something already moving at 99.99% of the speed of light, in the exact direction that particle is already going in. So it is both precision and vanishing results.
LEP was annihilating electrons with positrons; LHC does not, as it only accelerates protons. FCC will have the option to do both: the plan includes two separate pipes in the same tunnel, one for protons, one for electrons.
This however does not increase the collision energy significantly: a single electron-positron pair has the (rest) energy of ~1MeV -- this is what is released during the annihilation, but the energies we want to go to at the next collider go up to 10TeV, so 10^7 times larger.
Perhaps counterintuitively, it makes little difference. At the energies we're considering, the mass-energy of the particles being collided is completely negligible. Switching to colliding protons and antiprotons does change the details of what you get out, but not the energy scales.
That's what the LEP did. It was replaced with the LHC.
Strange as it might sound, I think technology being developed for the next generation of mobile networks could be what opens up a new regime (with likely candidate theories) of high energy physics. - Terahertz beamforming for wakefield accelerators, to throw some lingo at you.
I was surprised by the possibility (raised by the article) that the Higgs could turn out to not actually be the Higgs, but just another particle with the right mass. Is that a real possibility?
Finding new physics will require removing a lot of dust on the politics of that field, and a vast re-evaluation of why and how people get funded. How important the is science versus everything else in the matter.
It's not going to happen overnight, but it's good that people are opening their eyes. Let's reevaluate in 2040 and see if we've moved the needle in fundamental physics even just a little compared to what was achieved in the first half of the 20th century.
Wait, so fusion, solar panels, semiconductors, and anything practically important is not considered physics anymore?
Well, people in HEP will necessarily use the definition "Physics=HEP" to get more funding. You can't have a meaningfull argument if your well being depends on its outcome.
Article is paywalled for me so I don't know if it's mentioned, but it's a shame the one in Texas was never finished. Was supposed to be 3x more powerful than the LHC.
It is not tunnel vision when the problem they're tackling is literally stuck in a tunnel. Bigger and bigger colliders are the only direct way we have to study high energy phenomena. It's not that physicists are lazy, it's that the problems they're studying are hard.
I'm also seeing a lot resentment for the price tag of colliders in this thread. My personal opinion is that we shouldn't build a new one, but I'll point out that colliders are incredibly cost efficient.
The whole LHC (which has been running and providing jobs to people for 12 years) costs a similar amount as just two B-2 bombers. The US owns like 20 of those and that money went somewhere into huge defense contractors profits as opposed to knowledge and tech which is now accessible to the whole world.
You might not know this, but a lot of the technology developed during the construction of the LHC is now used to improve medical imaging and power transmission to name a few applications. These all have a direct impact on the quality of our every day life. That fancy PET scan you received to diagnose your cancer was literally funded in part by the LHC.
Comparing the cost against defense spending, which has a reputation for waste, doesn't convince me. If the cost is similar to two B-2 bombers and one thinks that the B-2 bomber is overpriced, one would probably also think that the LHC is overpriced.
To me, bringing up that the WWW, fancy PET scans, etc. came in part from HEP and therefore we should be grateful is missing one major point. In the WWW case, in an alternative history it seems likely to me that some other project would have developed something similar around the same time if the funding were allocated differently. As for the other benefits, I think if the money were allocated towards research in those areas it would have been more effectively spent.
Ultimately I think the worst "cost" for HEP in general (not just colliders) is that it encourages something like brain drain on other fields. I think that people interested in certain mostly non-practical areas of physics like HEP would do the world a lot more good if they instead got a PhD in some field of engineering or CS, or at the very least a more practical area of "physics". Here I refer to physics in the descriptive sense which doesn't align well with the prescriptive definition of physics. E.g., I don't understand why fluid dynamics is not "physics" in that it's rarely researched in physics departments (unless studied indirectly in chaos theory or plasma physics). Must be too Newtonian for people to care. (For what it's worth I'm at the end of a PhD in mechanical engineering studying fluid dynamics.)
I think GP is saying that the value of LHC is greater than the marginal value of 2 bombers when you already have 18.
LHC would be one way to use that some of that "waste" in defense spending more wisely.
Regarding "practical" study-- Where you see value in the output of engineering work, those guiding the work of engineers see value in the output of scientific work. If we had more people of the latter type that appreciated the value of scientific work, we might have more productive engineers and developers.
Defense spending is inefficient, but why should that money be spent on HEP rather than something else? I'm not even convinced that projects like the LHC are a net positive for humanity for the last reason I mentioned.
As for your final paragraph, I'm not really sure what you're getting at. If you believe I have misunderstood you, I'm interested in learning how. Most physicists I've met seem to severely underestimate the amount of scientific research conducted by engineers. If you get a PhD in engineering, you're typically doing primarily (if not exclusively) science. The main difference is that this research keeps in mind the applications. That's what makes it useful. I think it's a shame that so many very smart people choose to study HEP rather than engineering where they would do better in the world. And I don't think people working in HEP (for example) make engineers or programmers more productive.
I'd love it if we'd re-allocate some defense spending, but I find this argument pretty disingenuous.
The LHC cost about 4.75 billion during construction, and requires a yearly operating budget of around 1 billion dollars.
The total cost estimate for finding the Higgs was about 13.25 billion.
The B-2 bomber program cost 44 Billion (or an average cost of 2.1 billion per unit), but it resulted in considerably MORE jobs over a much longer time span, also led to several innovations in manufacturing/radar/ECS/Material science, and it costs LESS to maintain per year at ~850 million a year for all 21 units.
This all for a program that had immediate and obvious applicability (we got a physical object out the other side with clear purpose), and it was STILL the object of intense budgetary concerns.
Basically - It was a costs DISASTER and it was only 4 times the cost.
Not saying I'd rather have more bombers than another collider, but this is not the argument I would make...
I'm all for building particle colliders, it'll just be a bit more exciting sell if they ventured into building one in the vaccum of space – like the moon.
It solves two issues with one stone*, and it'll provide leaps of advancement more than the minutiae incremental development cycle we're stuck in.
Particle colliders seem to have reached a moore's law threshold on earth, thus the connotation of tunnel vision.
I've heard 'solar system size' and even 'galaxy size'. Maybe we should take a step back and realize that funding for high energy physics is rooted in the Cold War's nuclear arm's race. We already have nuclear devices more powerful than we'd ever need, not clear why we'd fund ever larger particle colliders.
One cannot leave smooth articles or headlines un-contradicted, for the unfortunate reason that if humans read something often enough, it tends to become the truth.
I'm pretty sure that anyone who reads HN regularly is quite well aware of the issue of housing costs in cities. It doesn't need to be inserted into an article about particle accelerators for us to be able to remember that there's problems in housing.
Look, I completely agree with you that the housing crisis is terrible and needs to be fixed, but sniping at proposals for particle accelerators is not the way to express that view! Let's make political comments in contexts where they are appropriate.
Building a new particle accelerator is inherently political, asking why there is money for X and not for Y is legitimate for every political discourse.
Being weary of the media framing every issue as a multicultural one could have been left out, but is a human reaction.
Let's step back an perfect the physics we know. Perfect fission and fusion first! The short and long term benefits of that is more important the verifying for example the next Higgs boson.
While verifying the Higgs is nice there are no practical applications for the knowledge.
In a way, the demand created for tech for the new age of particle accelerators like detectors and magnets will be the thing that eventually cracks fusion. The entire value prop of CFS is predicted on the fact that magnetics have advanced faster than ITER could be built. The LHC is a big driver of that advancement.
Superconducting magnets were in use well before their use in HEP colliders.
FPGA computing was in use in industry well before it was in use in HEP colliders.
Particle detectors have existed for more than 100 years. When was the first collider built?
Seriously, this is one of the issues I take with HEP advocates claiming that their field yielded all of these advances. Works well with politicians they have to lobby for funding their stuff. Doesn't work so well with other physicists.
HEP has utility, as all science does. Investment in it generally turns out useful items, even if the science is esoteric, and not applicable to problems in the world now.
However, and this is the crux of the problem, we have many items of significant priority. Which means we have to triage our expenditures. Is HEP and collider physics one of these high priorities right now?
One of the main goals[1] of the LHC was finding the Higgs, which it has done. Another goal was to look for the matter-antimatter asymmetry, where it has[2] and will likely continue to find interesting things.
So as such it has had decent success I think.
Another goal was to look for supersymmetry. While the LHC so far has excluded large sections of the possible parameter space for supersymmetry, I don't think it was unreasonable to think at the time LHC was designed that it had a decent chance of finding evidence for supersymmetry.
However given how things are looking currently, maybe effort should be focused on the areas where we know there's something weird, such as neutrinos[3], as well as astronomical searches such as LIGO[4] which can constrain Beyond Standard Model physics.
> A minifigure, 3 blocks high, is repesentative of an average American adult, at 1.753 meters tall
Shouldn't it be the height of an average adult from Denmark? At 1.672m (edit: closer to 1.8) it's a big enough difference to matter. The inaccuracies in this article are disgusting! This is a serious matter that has numerous implications, and is definitely not a joke.
Used to be breakthroughs could be made by a lens maker accidentally discovering micro biology or the president of the treasury thinking through the mathematics behind his observations and discovering the law of gravity or a patent clerk resolving contradictions between data and theory in his spare time to discover relativity or a barely employed artist describing in detail inventing concepts that would not be created until centuries after his death.
Now we need billions of dollars and all the best minds to even hypothetically make progress.
Maybe something is wrong in the state of scientific research.
What you've said makes no sense. Why shouldn't new tech be required? You're not even comparing similar science topics to modern physics. When you're pushing the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe, there's no human perception that can itself detect anything new.
Math and humans modeled the Higgs before technology “found it”
IMO like with space ships this is just not a useful engineering endeavor in general
We probably could iterate on engineering AI and nanotechnology so future people could programmatically build specific machines
But let’s go on a whim and prematurely optimize a machine to maybe produce new insights at scale that, unlike with the Higgs, we’re still trying to find consensus mathematics to define
We’re putting the cart before the horse this time and the fact the LHC hasn’t produced much else even with all the mathy theories has shown on paper we’re so off the mark a giant new machine would be built just to titillate a generation that is addicted to being titillated
Maybe we could just get our own imaginations back for a bit before we keep following the imaginings of yesterday
Not sure if you’ve noticed but pandemic life is making building such a thing a non-starter. How do you design, plan, and assemble such a thing when groups of people have to work on a basement?
It's always our theoretical perception that pushes the boundaries, regardless of what tech we have. I would say our theoretical imagination is lacking these days. Probably because scientists aren't trained in broad rigorous thought with philosophy. Instead, the memorize some mathematical formula and the latest tech, and go off trying different permutations thereof in order to get published and get grants. In my many years in academia I see very little imaginative original thought. In the commercial world there is more innovation, but not much deep understanding or theory beyond optimizing some market. Altogether, the leading thinkers are very narrow minded and short sighted.
Academia is also much less religious these days. Perhaps there is a correlation.
It's not.
When this is pointed out to the people espousing this odd viewpoint, they usually respond with some passive aggressive comment. I've seen/experienced much of this during my time in research.
New physics not requiring an accelerator would include quantum computing; the real stuff of entangled qubits, and the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits. More generally quantum mechanics interpretation and meaning. There are some unsettling things within QM, such as non-locality, and how to understand them.
There are many other examples, just listing 1 for brevity.
Basically, any text that begins with "the set of all physics is HEP physics" such as this article implies, is, pretty much by definition, incorrect.
I recall while the SSC was being built in Texas, that when the NSF asked for more money for researchers not involved in SSC, they were told that physics folks were getting enough. I remember my thesis advisor's grant that I was funded on, getting cut to help fund other things.
Equating the new physics with new HEP physics is, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, not even wrong. We don't need accelerators for most new physics.