This op-Ed in The NY Times suggests that we shouldn’t be wasting money looking for purely theoretical subatomic particles.
While the Higgs Boson was found, the LHC had higher aspirations that were not accomplished.
Thoughts?
For something to be a financial failure, first it must have been built with the intention of being a financial success.
Have I missed something? Has it closed? Has everything that could have been done with it already done? The LHC has been running for 10 years. Meanwhile, the first transuranium element was discovered in 1940 and the latest one in 2004.
That article complains that a lot of the science is “guesswork”. That’s the thing, though. If your best understanding of the science is guesswork, you need to do experiments to determine which guesses are on the right track, or you won’t make any progress.
It’s a stupid argument. If you only fund experiments that you know will produce a result, you won’t learn anything. What’s the point of that?
Not finding something that was predicted is a valid result. Maybe it doesn’t sell as many news articles, but it advances science, one way or another. It is better to know that your best theories are crap and you need to come up with better theories than it is to not know if your best theories are crap or not since you have only funded experiments that have a better chance of producing a positive result.
It had been said that the most boring thing the LHC could find would be the Higgs and nothing else. And, well, that’s pretty much what it’s done. Physicists aren’t nearly as happy with the results as we could have been.
But bad though boring physics might be, boring physics that we didn’t even know was boring would have been even worse.
Yes, I believe it’s being shut down for a couple of years for renovations. Plus, CERN apparently feels something more is eventually going to be needed: The Future Circular Collider | CERN
Whether the world is boring or not is one thing (better? worse? Leave that to the philosophers), but it is a consideration orthogonal to the finances of running an experiment, which costs what it costs and should be OK as long as the inevitable overruns were reasonable. In the grand scheme even this kind of big project costs nothing compared to a military budget.
Something bigger will always be useful–it isn’t like they thought this would be big enough then decided–oops!–it isn’t. We (meaning Americans) were once building something bigger and better than the LHC before people who think like the article writer killed it.
Basic research into science has paid off more in human history than any other endeavor. I have no idea why when idiots want to make a case for saving money, they always go for either basic science research or exploratory sciences as wasteful things that we don’t need.
Pretty much everything you use today was the ultimate result of basic science research that had no particular goal when they started and was probably called wasteful and pointless by someone. With all of the actual waste in the world, somehow these idiots go after what is clearly among the greatest of human endeavors.
In any case, I’d imagine a lot of what we’re learning in the LHC is stuff that only experts can understand and use. It’s hard to make huge, layman-understandable advances right now because we’ve already picked the low hanging fruit. So the LHC is likely tweaking and adding data and sending us in new directions to very advanced theories that most people have no familiarity with, but those will ultimately be what drives the knowledge and technological innovation for more and more advanced tools in the decades to come.
The underlying issue involves the proposed successor to the Hadron Collider. Given the few scientific surprises encountered at CERN and the overwhelming costs of these smashers, there’s a strong case for postponing the next generation collider for a couple of decades. There’s no shortage of exciting research areas.
Then again, maybe someone will dream up a successor to the Standard Model that’s testable with plausible energies. Or maybe big new puzzles will arise after the 2 year upgrade at CERN. But for the moment, scientific prospects of the unit currently on the drawing board appear vague. Punt.
The whole point of the modern scientific method is repeatability. If you do experiments where you already “know” the answer, and you get the expected result, then you can be reasonably sure that the previous experiments were done correctly.
You might as well criticize high school teachers for rehashing the same old tired experiments over and over, even though those are done for the purpose of showing students what science really is.
As soon as I saw this thread, I guessed it would be about something written by Sabine Hossenfelder. She’s got a book out on that sort of thing—Lost in Math—and her main concern is with arguments from naturalness. Putting things overly simple, she claims that (many) physicists have convinced themselves that a certain line of inquiry based on the notion of ‘naturalness’ of physical theories (which is a criterion that’s somewhat difficult to fully capture, but which revolves around the notion that dimensionless constants ‘should be’ of order 1, rather than very large or very small) is fruitful, when in fact, we really have no reason to think so.
Consequently, many theoretical developments of recent years are actually not as well motivated as they seem, and indeed, at least simple versions of naturalness haven’t stood up against experiment. This of course leads to the experiments justified by these theoretical developments to likewise be misguided—and indeed, none of the stuff naturalness would require (such as supersymmetry etc.) has cropped up in experiment, and there seems little good reason to expect that it eventually will.
On the whole, I think the argument has merit. However, she’s also been pushing this pretty hard, and I’ll leave it to the discerning reader to figure out whether that’s just due to her concern for the future of the field, or if book sales figure into that.
I’m guessing that 10 years ago the author, Dr. Hossenfelder (who used to work in the field of particle physics), probably had some funding cut, a project canceled, or a grant denied in favor of the LHC. And she’s still bitter.
Nah, she’s a theorist, so she wouldnt’t really have competed for the same funding pools. She simply transitioned to work in the phenomenology of quantum gravity, and has become a fairly well-known name in that field, partially also thanks to her blog, which is usually well worth reading, so long as she stays clear of philosophy.
I don’t think the complaint is about funding experiments that might yield null results. I think it’s about whether we are optimally allocating funds among all possible experiments that might yield null results. $10B could fund a lot of smaller experiments that approach the open questions in particle physics differently, so it makes sense to estimate (based on whatever you can) the probability that something new might be seen and/or the amount of scientific progress that might be made.
For sake of argument, imagine that the proposal for a bigger machine was to increase the center-of-mass energy over the current LHC by, say, 0.5% while spending $10B. This would be a bad use of money. Even if there is something new lurking at higher energies, the chance that it happens to live in the next 0.5% of energies is very low. In contrast, if the proposal were to spend $10B to increase the center-of-mass energy by a factor of, say, 10[sup]6[/sup], pretty much any sensible physicist would call that a fantastic bargain.
The actual cost/benefit ratio for the proposed FCC lives somewhere in between. There will be disagreement about how likely the machine is to advance our understanding (measured in some subjective way) versus advancements from other possible experiments that could be stood up with just a portion of that $10B.
The LHC as it has operated so far has, IMHO, been a great success. Actually seeing the Higgs boson and characterizing it (e.g.: that it is spin-0; that it has the tell-tale pattern of couplings to other particles, …) was an absolutely necessary step in our understanding of fundamental physics, and showing that the hierarchy problem is not going to be tidily solved with new “light” species has also been very productive.
Now, is the promise of discovery from a factor of seven increase in energy high enough to justify using essentially the entire worldwide particle physics budget? Well, that’s a tough question.* It deserves careful discussion, and we are doing exactly that in the field right now (in Europe at present and in the US soon, as happens every so many years).
[sup]* I have my opinions on the matter. There are also some meta issues. When the dollar values get big enough, large “nonlinearities” show up in the funding system. In general, the overall budget envelope is more likely to increase when there’s a big-ticket item with a clear mandate from the relevant physics community. Everyone asking for the same $1B sells better than ten subsets asking for $100M each. But you still need those $100M experiments. Smashing things at ever-higher energies is only one aspect of the particle physics landscape.[/sup]
It’s never really guesswork, though. You don’t just design an experiment based on some hunch; rather, you come up with a theory that makes predictions, which then indicate the type of experiments that might be worthwhile.
So the argument is that the process being used at the moment in order to come up with new theories is flawed and biased, and consequently, unlikely to lead to experiments with a high chance of worthwhile discoveries.
Anyone else fondly remember the days when LHC debate revolved around whether it was going to create a black hole and destroy the Earth? These “is it worth the money?” arguments seem tawdry in comparison.
Actually, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) wasn’t killed because people were concerned that it wouldn’t give any scientific return for the dollar; it was killed purely out of political spite for it having been located near Dallas as a fop to then-president George H.W. Bush. Although the project suffered from entirely predictable cost growth (as it had been deliberately low-balled, then schedule stretched out) the main opposition was just that as the Cold War was coming to a close there was no more need for the US to demonstrate technical dominance in physics over the Soviet Union, and the desire to free up Department of Energy monies to modernize the nuclear arsenal (already underway) even though there was no longer a pressing need to do so. The same thinking killed Space Station Freedom which barely got revived as the International Space Station, albeit in such a hobbled form that it took over two decades to complete a vastly scaled down version and removed the most valuable science modules and experiments.
The cancellation of the SSC had larger impacts than just delaying the discovery of the Higgs boson, though; it was a death knoll for the United States leadership in high energy physics, and with limited exceptions like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider there is very little advances going on within the US. The US is a significant contributor to the LHC both in terms of budget and scientific personnel, and in a sense the international nature of the project is beneficial in getting a more global involvement and perspective, but it also means that those technical jobs (not just the scientists but all of the technical support behind it) are not coming to the United States and everything else that comes along with it.
Yeah, but it took nearly a century and a half between James Clerk Maxwell quantifying the principles of electrodynamics and you being able to post stupid cat pictures to Instagram using your iPhone. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
What we are learning at the LHC is at the very fringes of what we can even understand, much less anticipate, about the fundamental nature of reality. And we’re learning this very slowly because both the level of energy we can direct is limited by our technology, and because we’re essentially doing the particle physics equivalent of catapulting rocks at each other in the hopes that we’ll be able to figure out their composition by seeing what color of sparks they make. Having a more fundamental understanding of mechanics at the level of fundamental particles may mean that we may one day be able to directly control the intranuclear interactions, and while we can’t know what technology that will develop, it will make the technology based upon electromagnetic foreces look more primitive than flint knapping.
There as never a “debate” about whether the LHC would someone destroy the world except in the minds of a tiny minority of conspiranoia and anti-intellectual types. Anyone who understands anything about particle physics is quite aware that the planet experiences particle impacts in the upper atmosphere that are many orders of magnitude higher than anything we can produce (>1 ZeV vs the ~13 TeV), so the energies that are produced by the LHC are not unique in nature.
Stranger
I disagree with both of these claims. The US is still the clear world leader in high energy physics, although perhaps not as overwhelmingly as it might have been. Even that is hard to say, though, as the US HEP program is also unusually diverse in terms of research thrusts, and many of the existing research thrusts in the US may not have been possible if the US played host to (and thus suffered a large cost burden for) the SSC. Italy, Germany, USA, and Russia are all close to one another in terms of the number of particle physicists involved in LHC activities, but the US is unique among these countries in that the LHC represents only a fifth of its total particle physics investment. As counterpoint, LHC research accounts for ~90% of German particle physics.
In this vein, the claim that advancements aren’t happening in the US is missing not only the advancements under the LHC umbrella (which are significant) but also the rest of particle physics, including precision flavor, neutrinos, and dark matter. If one wants to focus purely on Big Science (scale over $1B), then LBNF/DUNE is the biggest project under development in the US at the moment, an effort that has required technological and computational leaps forward over the past decade (and continuing).
The flow of personnel and resources is more subtle than this. Counterintuitively, having the machine on-shore is bad for the aspect you mention. The original US allocation for the LHC was $530M. This allowed the development and construction of massive superconducting magnets, muon trackers, hadronic calorimeters, big-data computing infrastructure, and more. This technical work happened on-shore at US labs and universities, and so the bulk of that $530M stayed on-shore.
However, building anything big requires a lot of civil construction and non-technical spending. When you host a big project, you are burdened with that cost. The US allocation for the SSC was not much more than its LHC allocation, yet the LHC contributions are primarily technical and scientific whereas the SSC contributions would be dominated by, well, digging a tunnel and pouring concrete.
I was a physicist at the time, and I strongly disagree with your characterization of the reason for the cancellation, and the cost over-runs. The costs for the SSC were exploding. A machine pitched at $4B was hitting $12B in projected build cost, with no end in sight. The project team was in utter denial about the over-runs. The CBO reported to Congress that the magnets for the collider - one of the largest expenses - would double in cost per unit. No, said SSC management, ‘cuz we’re smart guys. When SSC management was forced to admit the truth of the CBO projection within months, their credibility on Capital Hill collapsed to a singularity. Even though the tunnel had been started, there was no reason to believe the build cost of the SSC would only be three times the initial estimate. That was the primary reason Congress pulled the plug.
Had SSC management controlled costs, or had they controlled expectations of Congress, or had they shown they had a clue what they were doing for basic project management, the SSC might have survived.
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