If you work in base Pi it’s exactly 10.
That is a pretty good list. I can see a few I am guilty of.
I guess I have come to a somewhat cynical view of a lot of scientific research in the modern era. In a previous life I was on the inside of a lot of funding applications across a lot of disciplines. I eventually left academia in part due to disillusionment with the research and funding models, and the manner in which the tail wags the dog. I seriously worry about the state of research because of this. I don’t have an answer.
Any organisation with a remit to perform research tends to pivot to a management model where survival of the organisation takes precedence over the work done. The bigger the organisation the worse it becomes.
There are some really interesting questions wrt the fundamentals of doing science and the philosophy of science. Lots of people still cling to Karl Popper’s basic idea of falsifiable theory. Which itself was something of a product of its time, and just as much about telling you what science isn’t as about telling you what science is. Something Sabine really annoyed me about was a video where she basically said that unless there were major paradigm shifts, there was no science occurring. Which just retreaded Kuhn - and really not useful. Paul Feyerabend was probably more useful, but still attracted controversy. The manner in which physics became the exemplar for science done right is a story all of its own. Accidents of history.
What I’ve taken away from Hossenfelder’s videos on falsifiability is her objection to the limitless malleability of many speculative hypotheses; that every negative result just leads to the hypotheses being tweaked a bit to explain the lack of confirmation, test again, lather rinse and repeat. That in these cases falsifiability doesn’t give us much except to confirm that a long shot didn’t pan out. That for falsifiability to be significant there ought to be some a priori strong reason to think a hypothesis might be true, and that showing it isn’t is profound enough to have meaning in itself.
The falsifiability question seems to have become a bit of yet another tail wagging the dog. One of the ongoing criticisms of string theory and other grand unified theories is that they either made no predictions, or predictions that were infeasible to demonstrate. So, Popper would have said that these weren’t science. Popper explicitly tried to corral theories that kept adding new parameters to meet experimental results as not science. If you add a parameter you have a new theory, and that still needs to be falsifiable. He was particularly irked by Freudian psychology and Marxian political theory. At the time both claimed to be scientific theories.
What one ses now is theoretical physicists being a bit stung by the accusation they weren’t doing science - because there was no experimental validation or falsifiability possible. So, in a cart before the horse action, once any theory possibly predicted even a single result, that with huge effort might be tested, the claim was that the theory was suddenly science again. Which is missing the point. It also underlines why a straightforward application of Popper is problematic. Step outside the walls of physics, and science is a lot more nuanced anyway. Mostly characterised with hard slog and incremental gains. Not Kuhn like leaps.
The big problem string theory seemed to have in this model of science was the impossibility large space of theories and parameters. For a while acolytes would justify this with an anthropic argument, that we simply lived in one successful parameter set. No fine tuning needed. Which got us to the whole mess of m-brane universes, which has leaked into cosmology in some quarters, with IMHO, zero justification.
…and not really Kuhn, who believed most of science was “Normal science” and involved no paradigm shifts. Scientific revolution was a rare thing, which occurred when normal science was chronically unable to account for anomalies. Not that Kuhn is the final authority on this, though I think he did make a solid contribution.
There have been some excellent comments from a number of posters, including yourself, who know a lot more about particle physics research than I do. But, since we’re off on a somewhat philosophical tangent anyway, I think maybe some perspective is in order here.
The LHC was built on faith in exactly that sort of “vague promise” – not necessarily of a “new physics”, but certainly of important new discoveries. And it has delivered. The confirmed existence of the Higgs field is fundamental to our understanding of the universe. CERN is now planning to build a new “super collider” with far higher energies that is bound to expose new phenomena, even if there are no further fundamental particles to be discovered.
If we look at the costs involved – about $4.75 billion for the LHC (not adjusted for inflation) and a projected $23 billion for the new one – this is where some perspective might be useful. When one single individual, Elon Musk, can spend nearly twice that much to buy a social media company for no other purpose than to satiate his own ego, and billions more to undermine American democracy, it really may be time to think that the core problem isn’t how physics research is funded, but that if the $23 billion cost of an important particle physics facility is a non-starter, the problem is not with physics research but with the fact that we have a structural problem with society.
My apologies for going a bit off topic but this frustrates the ever-loving hell out of me.
You have taken away exactly what she wanted you to, but that doesn’t mean she is giving it to you in good faith. She gives a caricature of how particle physics works and then claims in exasperation that, therefore, it’s all nonsense. She buttresses her claim by sprinkling in lots of examples that aren’t like the caricature at all, hoping no one notices.
“I lost my keys on this hike” can lead to a theory that “It was probably in the first mile”, but when you don’t find them there, a reasonable follow-up theory (that may have been in the scope of the initial theory anyway) is “Perhaps it was when we stopped for lunch at mile 5”. All evidence still points to the idea that those keys are on the trail, and somewhere had to be the first place searched.
I also see that she multiple cases where one video is about how “Topic X is dumb; aren’t you glad I can tell you like it is?” and then another video nearby that talks for 20 minutes about how the same “Topic X is the most exciting thing and we should be doing more of it!”
Anyway, hold tight to your wallet around her content.
I was with you until this summary.
When it comes to new, vastly-expensive* science projects that may use public money, there is a need to communicate, to the public, the value of that work. It’s not sufficient to bat them away with “It’s complicated, you wouldn’t understand”. That conversation has to happen and yes, it will be at a kiddie level that physicists may find frustrating, but tough; particle physics is not unique in having to justify itself in this way.
And it’s not even that different if it’s all private money: because there are many alternative things that benefactors could be spending their money on.
So I think it’s legitimate for society to question whether the bang for buck of LHC was worth it, and whether the future collider will be worth it, and apply some pressure for alternatives.
* I think comparing anything to Musk’s purchase of Twitter is very misleading. Elon’s the (sometimes) richest man on the planet that overpaid for a worldwide household name.
Also real-world projects need to actually spend all the money and can overrun the projected costs. Whereas Twitter-like acquisitions can be done with values of money that the purchaser does not have access to.
But, in all seriousness, was it worth that much money? I don’t know. Knowing the Higgs has been confirmed is nice. It made for a nice story, and Peter Higgs got a Nobel before he died. Which everyone felt very pleased about.
That nothing else has been found by the LHC is probably a much bigger deal. (A very eminent physicist colleague of mine was quite adamant nothing would be found when we were talking just before it fired up. And he works in the field.) Change out of $5 billion is perhaps a lot to find out that the Standard Model actually holds up. Then again, maybe it it wasn’t.
The proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was nice to have as well. Or the Poincaré conjecture.
This is perhaps the wider question. Why does physics, and particle physics specifically, deserve the gigabucks to confirm stuff versus other fields? As I wrote above, it probably garnered a lot of support historically in part because there was real nervousness about new developments having a similar impact as nuclear weapons. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, it became critical to talk up the whole understanding the universe’s fundamentals as a thing. The popular physics press keeps public interest high, and that helps sway politicians into funding colliders. Which for the politicians become little more than vanity exercises.
I am torn on many of these things. Personally I cheer on a lot of astronomy, including the big telescopes, both earthbound and in space, LIGO etc. And it isn’t as if particle physics and cosmology aren’t really two sides of the same coin. If you want a really bad deal - the JWST was appallingly bad value, but that was due to gross mismanagement. However I am very pleased it is out there.
Perhaps compared to really expensive research the LHC isn’t too bad. Drug companies can blow a couple of billion on a drug that never makes it out of stage 3 trials. And the road is littered with such failures, versus the occasional massive success where the money rains from the sky - to fund the next decade of failures.
Sadly I have been witness to highly arbitrary decisions on science funding that by any metric delivered very poor science for the dollar. (A figure of merit that is about as bad as it sounds, but I was wont to use.) The metric du-jour is impact. How many cites in good journals does your work get? Which is also a terrible metric as it is gamed mercilessly by some. It shuts out many sincere and talented individuals that are not part of the current flavour. Which, IMHO, breaks the academic freedom tradition. But that bus left decades ago.
Like I said. I have no idea how to fix this.
(Shakes fist at sky.)
\end{grumpy_old_man_mode}
I think the comparison to astronomy though only highlights the problem.
When we’re building telescopes like JWST we know we’ll see something we couldn’t see before. There will be new knowledge; if galaxies look the same going right back to the first couple billion years, that’s a surprise. If they are different, how they are different, will tell us a lot too.
And we’ve learned so much; a few decades ago we had no idea whether planets went around other stars, and we assumed that the universe’s expansion must be decelerating. Not only have we now inferred thousands of exoplanets and found that actually the expansion is accelerating, but we’ve imaged a black hole, detected gravitational waves etc etc.
When I said upthread about projects needing to justify themselves, I didn’t mean they needed to have tangible benefits to everyday life; in this regard particle colliders win hands down. Heck I used to work in proton therapy.
But finding new insights about the universe is justification too, particularly for private benefactors.
The issue is that LHC didn’t tell us very much new, and I think many are skeptical that FCC will either. (and the aforementioned practical benefits seem unlikely too)
That is a really interesting one. If the metric was lives saved for the money, proton therapy machines would probably never be built. There is one being built here. To be honest I just could not conceive that the money could be found. But it was. The value proposition is not linear. Society eventually puts a value on a life that does cross the threshold. Yet we still don’t fund basic health needs for many. But that isn’t as sexy and directly saving lives.
Well it’s complicated.
Firstly there are some cases which can only be effectively treated by PT e.g. many spinal tumors. And secondly, even for the cases which can be treated with surgery or conventional (linear) accelerators, a good case can be made, as the per-treatment cost is similar to a linear accelerator, and side effects / complications way better than either.
Obviously I’m going back into my salesman mode, but like I say, it’s complicated. I don’t envy the people who have to make these funding decisions. If you build a proton accelerator and then only use it for a handful of patients a year, you look like a crazy person who wasted tens of millions. So much safer to use more tried and tested workflows, and tools with a cheaper initial outlay.
Og: Thag give mammoth tusks help make better pointy stick.
Thag: Give Og sabretooth skin and Megaloceros antlers already. Pointy stick no better yet.
Og: Now know longer pointy stick no better. Need mammoth tusks try heavier stick.
Thag: No believe heavier stick theory falsifiable.
Og: Mammoth tusks for basic research very important. Better pointy stick change world.
Put another way, buying a house isn’t the same as building a house. One is an exchange of assets (cash for house). The other is creation of new assets (building a new house). Different.
Paying billions to undermine democracy is comparable, since you are paying for actual activity of one kind or another. I see Musk is up to $75 million now, which is less than 1/10th of 1 billion, so we’re at a lower order of magnitude (though Bloomberg pegs total plutocrat donations to Trump at 1/2 billion.)
Cite from Bloomberg
Charitably speaking, I suspect there is a Peter Principle at work with big science projects. If the last project was successful, you build another larger and more expensive version of it. Repeat until big project contributes little. This is an optimistic take.
ETA: TBH, I want more pictures. 4K shots of Mars, Jupiter, and the moon. Yes, this would mean expanding NASA’s data intake capacity, probably with satellites. Do that too.
Pictures. Lots and lots of gorgeous pictures. No collider can offer those and pictures are preferred by the public a thousand times over a few lines in a detector.
If anyone thinks that pretty pictures don’t trump new scientific findings, I have a $100,000 solid gold Trump watch to sell you.
We appear to disagree on a few fundamental points. Possibly the most important is that research in the pure theoretical sciences expands our knowledge in ways similar to applied sciences, and more knowledge is always a good thing, often leading directly or indirectly to unexpected technological advances later on. It elevates the stature of humanity as much as any art form, with the bonus of also potentially improving the quality of our lives in the future. So when it comes to the question of why, for example, we should fund CERN’s request for a new super-collider, the simple answer is “because we will gain new knowledge”. If that were not so, and considered valuable in its own right, pure science would never be funded.
Is it worth $23 billion? That’s a different question, but in my mind the only cost that matters is displacement cost – that is, if the super-collider is funded, will it displace something else that might be potentially more important?
My point in mentioning Elon Musk is to suggest that $23 billion is just not that big a cost in the great scheme of global and international events. If you don’t like my Musk example, consider that the damage caused by hurricane Helene – a single rather unexceptional hurricane – was estimated at around $250 billion. That cost alone would pay for ten super-colliders with enough left over for two James Webb Space Telescopes. It’s not a discretionary cost, of course, but the US economy just takes it in stride.
I also take issue with the idea that the public must be consulted about big science projects, or that in most cases they ever have been. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a current budget of over $47 billion. Does the general public know the first thing about what any of that money is spent on, besides the presumption that it probably has something to do with medical research? Do they care?
It’s true that some large projects have captured the public imagination, like the manned space program of the 60s, or the Voyager or Mars missions that were focused on planetary imaging. But the vast, vast majority of science isn’t like that. I don’t think it’s unseemly or elitist to take the position that all that the public needs to know – or more accurately, all that lawmakers need to know – is that independent distinguished researchers believe the project is worthwhile and will create valuable new knowledge. There’s a reason we don’t assess the value of research proposals through public referendums.
Yep.
Obviously I don’t disagree with this though. The point is, there are countless projects that we could be spending our effort and money on; we as a society cannot pursue them all, so yes they absolutely need to justify their likely benefit. And I did, explicitly, say that knowledge is itself a benefit; they don’t need to result in, I dunno, quantum chainmail.
But if I am proposing a project to send a probe on a round trip to a volume of the solar system that we think is most likely completely empty, and the proposed budget is $10 billion, and I am going cap in hand to donors and governments, I absolutely expect them to say “Wait, what?”
And I don’t think it necessarily matters whether there’s another project specifically competing for that $10 billion. The people with those funds can simply decide it’s not a good use of that money.
And I stand by my belief that that is misleading. It remains a lot of money, that could pay for hospitals, schools, and multiple, likely more promising, science enterprises.
I would definitely care if there was a single project that was going to occupy half of that budget, yes. And actually I do think it would potentially be a scandal if that much was spent on something with an acknowledged low likelihood of developing any new findings.
Anyway, my focus was mostly on the people funding the projects. I used the term “public” because I needed to encompass both governments and private organizations and of course the government is influenced by public opinion, but I wasn’t trying to imply projects go through some kind of general referendum.
And those people are going to need to be convinced that the bang for buck of FCC is going to be much better than LHC was.
Just a drive-by observation:
Some apples and oranges are being compared in this cost/benefit discussion. Large total project costs span many years and many countries. For instance, the LHC took over a decade to build and had dozens of countries contributing (though each within its means). So, comparing the LHC total project cost to the NIH annual budget in the US is apples-to-oranges in two different ways.
Adjusted for inflation, the average annual US LHC construction cost was about $90M per year. That’s a number that can be more fairly compared to the $47B NIH annual budget. That is, LHC construction costs in today’s dollars is about 0.2% the NIH budget. I’m making no judgment statement here. Just clarifying the numbers.
Adding a similar cost into today’s US particle physics budget is about a 6% change. To be sure, construction costs are not actually flat over time, there are future committed operations and research costs that aren’t insignificant, construction costs aren’t magically fungible with other parts of the portfolio, etc. But “sticker price” seems to be the general proxy you have been using.
Before the LHC was fired up, those in the know said that the most boring possible outcome of it was that it would find the Higgs and nothing else. There was a very long list of other things that it might find: Micro-black-holes, monopoles, SUSYs, sterile neutrinos, etc, any of which would have opened up entirely new fields of fascinating research. And if it hadn’t found the Higgs, that would have been exciting, too, because while models differed in what mass it would have, they all put it at below the LHC’s limit, so if it hadn’t shown up, that would have meant that all of our models needed to be replaced.
But, sadly, what it found was the Higgs and nothing else. Which, well, if that’s the way the Universe is, better to know that… but it’s still boring.
That’s a pretty good case for the LHC though; we don’t know until we try, and any one of those could have delivered lots of new physics. But if I remember right, there was already doubts that it would find any of those things, and hearing such doubts voiced after a project has been greenlit is unusual.
I dunno, I might be misremembering. The clearest memory I have is of the press hyping up the “might destroy the world” crap.
If most particle physicists had good expectations for the project then absolutely it made sense to do it. FCC though being an order of magnitude more and after LHC disappointed…may struggle to get the support it needs and I think it’s right we make such tough calls.