There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding about funding models and how CERN and, at least, the US differ. In the early 90s I was briefly on a small team to sell IBM Federal products to the nascent US supercollider project. (With a background in physics, I was referred to as their throwdown physicist.)<p>Then the supercollider was canceled, and later we called on CERN in Geneva to brief them on storage systems software and hardware, like hierarchical mass storage and linear tape robots. CERN had a nice mockup of the proposed LHC, where you climbed down a ladder into a fake tube, like what is bored underground. While we were down there, our hosts shared a shocking factoid with us. The US government canceled the proposed $12 billion supercollider project, and to exit all the contracts and fill in the holes that had already been dug was costing $650 million. CERN told us that for $650 million, they could build the LHC. I didn't verify their numbers, but their capital efficiency was stunning.<p>CERN is funded by all the European countries with a steady budget, and they are allowed to spend it however they wish. When CERN needs to build something big, they put some part of their steady funding into the bank, and it just sits their for however long it takes until they need it. By having steady, stable funding, they can make much more efficient use of their funds. As far as I can tell, there is little or no political heat about CERN's budget like "what have you done for us lately?"<p>The US, on the other hand, funds large projects out of special legislation in Congress, and everyone has to get their constituents a piece of the pie. This has some gross inefficiencies for large science projects. Appropriate hype is the motive force.
It's worth considering the cultural context in which high-end physics operates, at least within the United States.<p>The U.S.'s greatest military victory--the last time we can cleanly call ourselves heroes--was World War II. The Nazis were an awful regime who did horrific things that no one can defend. And Japan directly attacked us. We had good reasons for fighting and we (with our allies) conclusively won.<p>And there is broad public sentiment that we won because of physics. High-end theoretical physics gave us futuristic tools like radio, radar, and of course the nuclear bomb. Lower-end physics gave us the tools for engineering the incredible machines we fought with, like airplanes, bombs, tanks, and ships.<p>So, in minds of U.S. citizens, and more importantly in the halls of U.S. government, discussions of high-end physics come with an implicit promise of military applications. Maybe we could figure out anti-gravity, people think, or ray guns, or teleportation, or force fields--if we only understood the particles and fields a bit better.<p>Physicists do not promise any of this, of course. But at least IMO it is a real phenomenon. I went to see Interstellar with someone who had worked in and with Congress for a long time. After we left, she said "do you think it's true that once we understand gravity, we'll be able to manage gravity and create antigravity?" I had to explain that just understanding a phenomenon does not grant magical powers over it.<p>But that has been the experience of the U.S. government! They gave money so physicists could better understand particles, and in return the scientists gave the government seemingly magical powers, like seeing in the dark (radar) and city-destroying explosions (nuclear fission and fusion).<p>So what happens when physics stops delivering military leaps forward? Or when the physics is superseded by another discipline that delivers military applications?<p>It looked like chemistry and biology might do that, but then the world managed to collectively decide that those should be illegal tools of war. But it seems totally obvious that the current top priority for military application is information technology.<p>So, I think the author is correct that particle physics faces a looming crisis, at least in funding and public confidence.
I think theoretical physics might be in need of a short dose of internal reflection and debate coupled with some side reading of contemporary philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. These sorts of debates around concepts like "naturalness" and "laws of nature" are philosophical bread and butter.<p>This isn't to say that modern philosophers aren't susceptible to alluring desert landscapes like "naturalness", but at least philosophers are trained to think about and critique these kinds of things. Physics needs to be capable of having this debating itself and recognise assumptions with wobbly metaphysical underpinnings.
> To justify substantial investments, I am told, an experiment needs a clear goal and at least a promise of breakthrough discoveries.<p>This is antithetical to science. If you're promising a breakthrough discovery, you're approaching the experiment with bias.<p>The fact that more new particles have not emerged at energy levels the LHC can produce <i>is</i> a discovery--if I'm understanding the blog post correctly[1], it's the beginnings of a disproof of naturalness in supersymmmetry. It's not as exciting as if they had discovered hundreds of new things to study, but it's equally important.<p>And that's exactly why I agree with the author: science is about finding what's <i>true</i> not about finding what's <i>exciting</i>. As a taxpayer, I think one of the most valuable things particle physics could do here is to educate people on that bias and lead by example. I get that they fear losing their funding to do science, but if you let that fear push you into pursuing exciting results over the truth, then you're not doing science anyway.<p>[1] I'm not a particle physicist--my post is about the social problem that physicists are facing, not about the physics.
> It’s a PR disaster that particle physics won’t be able to shake off easily.<p>I really don't see this. As a non-specialist, I assumed that the LHC was pottering along making useful if non-spectacular discoveries. The fact that naturalness is in doubt due to its data sounds exactly like the work it should be doing. Blame physics for not having a clutch of new particles ready for discovery, not physicists.
In recent decades, the high-energy physicists haven't produced much. But the low-energy physicists have been getting many new results. The action today seems to be down near absolute zero. The stranger predictions of quantum mechanics, from quantum entanglement to slow light, have not only been directly verified, but are approaching commercial use.<p><i>“If you can't measure it, you can't improve it”</i> (Lord Kelvin)
Please help me understand the logic of naturalness. Suppose we have one constant, alpha, approx= 1.425, and another (beta) approx=2.157 - such setup is deemed natural. And if the other constant is approx 2.157 times 10^40, it's not natural. and needs fine-tuning, right? The underlying assumption is that fine-tuning <i>is not needed</i> for a former setup, that is, if beta was about 0.5%, or 0.05% different from where it sits at 2.157, then we would be totally fine, Universe would look the same for all intents and purposes. I fail to see how this follows. Maybe the difference by 10^(-40) would make life impossible? how can we possibly know this?
Am I to understand from this article that the LHC is over? That the global community of particle physicists can't come up with anything interesting to do with the world's most powerful particle collider? I do hope I'm misinterpreting the article, because that would be a huge disappointment.
Interesting article. In lieu of any qualification to verify the claims; the comment section seemed on superficial reading populated with experienced scientists that gave some support.<p>Another takeaway was the introduction (for me) to the concept of "naturalness", with which the author has some issues. It is however not possible to do away with it (if I'm not mistaken about its meaning), except in cases where the assumptions of naturalness turn out to be wrong, as it seems it was in this case.<p>It seems to me that some concept of "naturalness", is what we use to interpret empirical facts, without which we could not make sense of it at all. Examples of what I would consider "naturalness": that the past precedes the present, that large things contain smaller things (perhaps in infinity), ad that small things are contained in larger things (perhaps in infinity), etc.<p>Granted, our sense of naturalness could be completely wrong, and empirical data constantly challenge what we consider natural, which is how it should be.
Maybe it’s time for a paradigm shift in particle physics as Thomas S Kuhn once predicted<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...</a>
"Just do it" actually sounds like a good reason. Tackling difficult engineering problems always creates spinoffs even if the core activity is fruitless.
The author is missing a major point: politicians may still support enormous projects like the LHC for the same reason they would support any pork barrel project: it gives them influence and the ability to direct money to their friends/constituents.
I'm not a physicist, so I might sound like a moron stating this:<p>Isn't it possible that current theories in particle physics are just simply inaccurate models of the world? They're just hypothetical low-level explanations of observed high-level effects, and could have been empirically proved by the large colliders, which doesn't seem to have happened.<p>So maybe we don't need new experiments, but new models. A negative result is a result too.<p>On a related note, the assumption in quantum physics that particles have a probability distribution rather than an exact location has always bugged me. Why can't there be low-level mechanisms going on that are too quick/small to be measured (today)?
> Remember next time we come asking for money.<p>Interesting point. Money drives research.<p>It took over 400 years from the discovery of gun powder to be applied to the use of projectiles. While it only took 40 years from the mass-energy equation to create an atomic bomb.
Next World Collider will be built in China.<p>They are about the only major country increasing government R&D funds.<p>The only exception would be if there is a breakthrough technology 100x more cost effective, i.e. you could build a 10x power LHC for a tenth of the cost. I see press releases of breakthroughs using lasers or EMF. But very unclear if they'd scale up to a petavolt.<p>Probably could build a pretty powerful accelerator using the world's electricity devoted to bitcoin mining :-)
> the conclusions based on naturalness were not predictions, but merely pleas for the laws of nature to be pretty<p>This is the main point.<p>She totally nailed it.
"Such a vacuum decay, however, wouldn’t take place until long after all stars have burned out and the universe has become inhospitable to life anyway. And seeing that most people don’t care what might happen to our planet in a hundred years, they probably won’t care much what might happen to our universe in 10100 billion years."
> and at least a promise of breakthrough discoveries<p>If we could promise a breakthrough discovery, we wouldn't need to build the machine.<p>The author seems almost heartbroken at the absence of life-altering findings. No new discoveries means we at least know what we're doing a little bit, right?
I wonder why the post doesn't mention a pretty recent potential deviation from Standard Model [1][2]. It seems that LHC may deliver some new physics after all, it just needs more data to rule out statistical anomaly<p>[1]: <a href="https://youtu.be/edvdzh9Pggg?t=3124" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/edvdzh9Pggg?t=3124</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://home.cern/scientists/updates/2017/06/lhcb-flavour-anomalies-continue-intrigue" rel="nofollow">https://home.cern/scientists/updates/2017/06/lhcb-flavour-an...</a>
Perhaps whats going on is they have been measuring their own collective prior probability that these particles exist.<p>This is what would happen if you set your null model to be something that was false regardless of these particles existing. The way it works is more belief -> more effort put towards detection. It requires a certain amount of time and funding to cross the "discovery" threshold so this will only happen if there is enough prior belief.
I guess the detection of the Higgs boson is already a great thing! That was the missing part of the Standard Model. Now that theory is complete -- within its limits/Energy scale. Too bad that the many years before the LHC there was an ever increasing backlog of theory to be tested against experiment. Damn, Physics has so much in common with Software Development... ;-)
If just 3% of the data from the LHC has been analyzed so far, which means there is 97% more data to come in and be analyzed, and if the Higgs boson was discovered within these 3%, isn't it a bit quick to deem the experiment as failed already? Please note I most certainly have no idea about the subject at hand.
Its not that i personaly votet for building the LHC. Its not that a higgs discovery changed my life.<p>I don't think that politics are influenced by this at all and building something like an even bigger LHC, ah come on every physicist would love something like that anyway.
The biggest problem with modern physics is that it's totally incomprehensible. People want to understand how the world works! The public would support physicists' work a lot more if they understood what was going on.
Physics research has got to focus on commercially viable fusion, that is the most urgent environmental and geopolitical problem facing the West if not the entire world.
There’s a simpler argument in favor of high-powered facilities, but in geopolitics it is hypocritical, bestial and misanthropic: better physics facilities provide strength to intellectual backbone of your nuclear deterent, keeping it reliable, competant and accurate, so things really work if they need to.