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0 pointseigenspace6y ago0 comments

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.

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7 comments · 2 top-level

battery_cowboy6y ago· 4 in thread

> 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.

eigenspaceOP6y ago

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.

baq6y ago

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).

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fsflover6y ago

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.

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battery_cowboy6y ago

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.

fao_6y ago· 1 in thread

> 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.

Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

mycall6y ago

> 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.

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