I'm pretty bullish on science investments, but I've heard multiple arguments that this thing is probably not worth the money. The most prevalent argument I've heard to the contrary is basically "we could discover something that might be interesting." But like very little in terms of concrete measurable returns on investment for it.
If they already knew the intended results it wouldn’t make sense to do it. Science of this kind is like “here’s something we haven’t tried yet”, which itself is pretty difficult to even come up with.
Also, money spend on something like this doesn’t just disappear. It goes around the suppliers doing it and returns to the state eventually. Of course someone will pocket some money but when talking billions it’s more of an investment in the area than a cost or even an investment in the actual collider. A used collider isn’t worth that amount of money , so where’d it go? It didn’t disappear. Money goes round.
It creates a lot of jobs and when looking at the entire supply chain, it feeds a hell of a lot of people, even if the scientific result is “oh well it didn’t do anything at all.” That way, it might be cheaper than supplying social security/basic income for that amount of people.
At the end of the day, in the grand economic scale, we’re all riding on the shoulders of whoever digs out the the resources from the Earth, so we need to make these kind of very important projects to make it appear as if everyone else is actually producing anything at all. The science is just a nice side effect.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any advance that didn’t at some point depend on people just dicking around to see what they could see.
“What happens if we spin this stick really really fast against this other stick?”
“Cool! What happens if we put some dried moss around it?”
“That’s nuts, man! Hey, I wonder what happens if we toss some of our leftovers in there?”
“C’mon over here, guys. You gotta taste this!”
At worst, a project like this keeps a lot of curious people in one place where we can make sure they don’t cause harm with their explorations. At best, whole new industries are founded. Never forget that modern electronics would never have existed without Einstein and Bohr arguing over the behaviour of subatomic particles.
Say the actual construction cost is $100 billion over 10 years and operational costs are $1 billion a year. Compared to all the stupid and useless stuff we already spend money on, that’s little more than pocket lint. We could extract that much from the spending of one military alliance and it would look like a rounding error. Hell, we could add one cent to the price of each litre of soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and bottled water and have money left over.
Has the LHC resulted in any kind of tangible returns on investment so far? I know they proved the existence of the Higgs Boson, but all that did as I understand it was verify what we were already pretty sure of.
I'm just having a hard time understanding why we can't blow 30 or 100 billion or whatever on something else like fusion research. Or just something with a more concrete "if we pull this off it solves <gigantic international problem>" kinda prospect.
I understand science can walk and chew gum at the same time, but this in particular seems like a shitload to spend and a lot of land to disturb so that particle physicists can nerd out in an underground torus proving theories but maybe not moving the needle much for mankind.
The thing is, that you can’t predict, what fundamental science will lead to. In the case of the LHC the tangible returns are technologies, that can be adapted to other fields, like detectors. There are enough other arguments, why a bigger accelerator is a bad idea, where you do not need to trash fundamental research as a whole.
You have any links to info on these technologies? I've done some googling today and in the past and come up with little specifics on the LHC gave us X or helped lead to the development of X that is now being used for Y.
And I'm not saying we need to trash research. Just that research could be done on things that more directly answer some of the very real problems we have right now before this planet goes up in flames. Building another even bigger more expensive collider seems really indulgent from where I'm sitting.
And we can agree to disagree. I'm not big mad they're proposing this. I just don't think it makes a lot of sense based on the information I have available.
These things are really special interest. They developed small scale particle detectors, that are nowadays used in medical physics for example (PET scanners and so on). Then their electronics need to be very insensitive to radiation damage, that is also important for everything space related. There is probably some R&D on superconducting magnets as well, that can be adapted to other purposes, but I am not too up to date in this field and I am not sure, if Cern is a major player there.
I also think there are better places to put this kind of money, including on projects that we are certain have obvious potential to change the world for the better.
What I was getting at was the very idea that we absolutely have to know what the return is before we start. Just because we know the potential return doesn’t mean that it’s not research (as in your fusion example), but just because we can’t identify a return ahead of time doesn’t mean there won’t be one.
Also, I don’t know if there have been any tangible benefits from the LHC. Precision manufacturing? Improvements in large-scale, multi-jurisdiction project management? Data analytics techniques? More efficient superconducting magnets? I don’t know if those are actual side effects of the project and, if they are, I don’t know that the LHC was the only way to get them.
Edit: or, like the quantum physics underlying our electronics, maybe we won’t know for 50-100 years just how important that proof was.
Yeah, but you could also fund a lot of other research with this budget. The point is, physicists just don’t know, if there are more particles existing. There is no theoretical theory there predicting particles at a certain mass with certain decay channels. They won’t know what to look for. That’s actually already a problem for the LHC. They have this huge amount of data, but when you don’t know, what kind of exotic particles you are looking for and how they behave, you can’t post-process the data accordingly. They are hidden under a massive amounts of particles, that are known already.
Yes, with finite resources, we have to make choices. As long as there are some resources for people to just poke around, I’m good with whatever. If we’re actually looking for some place to drop a few billion, I actually don’t think another collider should be on the list, let alone at the top.
The problem as I see it is that “but what good is it” is used to limit pretty much all fundamental research.
So why don’t they just use post processing to remove all the known particles and start looking at the particles that remain, discover a new one, remove it, continue until there’s none left?
There are multiple reasons for that. We don’t know the decay channels of already discovered particles precisely. So there might be very rare processes, that contribute to already known particles. It is all a statistical process. While you can give statements on a large number of events, it is nearly impossible to do it for one event. Most of the particles are very short-lived and won’t be visible themselves in a detector (especially neutral particles). Some will not interact with anything at all (neutrinos). Then your detectors are not 100% efficient, so you can’t detect all the energy, that was released in the interaction or the decay of a particle. The calorimeters, that are designed to completely stop any hadrons (particles consisting of quarks) have a layer of a very dense material, to force interactions, followed by a detector material. All the energy lost in the dense material is lost for the analysis. In the end you still know, how much energy was not detected, because you know the initial energy, but everything else gets calculated by models, that are based on known physics. A neutral weakly interacting particle would just be attributed as a neutrino.
It wasn’t NASA tho - it was the International Astronomical Union (IAU):
NASA’s New Horizons mission made a close pass of Pluto this week. For more than 70 years, Pluto was one of nine planets recognised in our Solar System.
But in 2006, it was relegated to the status of dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). So why was Pluto demoted?
Kinda related, in the company I used to work everything was done in SAS, an statistical analysis software (SAS duh) that fucking sucks. It’s used to be great, but once your on their environment you are trapped for fucking forever. I hated it and refuse to learned it over what was basic for my daily tasks. A couple of months I moved to another company that used to pay a consulting firm for my job, so my boss and me had to start everything fresh and the first thing we did was to study what are going to use as statistics software and I fight tooth and nails for Python and one of the points I pushed was that if in the future we decide to move out of Python we could easily can do it, while other solutions could locked up us with them.
If you rely on free packages in Python for processing, those are as likely to become obsolete as anything else (if not more likely). I also really dislike the compatibility issues with different versions of different packages, the whole environment aspect. Buying new computer with different version of windows? Who knows what will work there.
In this sense for scientific computation I prefer something like MATLAB. Code written 40 years ago, most likely would still work. New computer? No problem, no configuration, just install Matlab, and it runs! Yes, it costs money, but you get what you paid for. Mathematica is another option, but I mean ugh!
I mostly use pandas that I don’t think is going anywhere, we’re also going to start tests with a library called ‘chainladder’ that is used for some actuarial reserves calculations, from everything else I’m programming custom functions because as far as I know, there’s not a lot of actuarial mathematics libraries on Python (R have much more support for that, but I prefer the flexibility of Python, like a good portion of my job is scrapping our regulatory body website for information and not sure how good R work on that).
Matlab is ugly because it’s so backwards compatible. And it only is backwards compatible until someone decides to use it to interface with external hardware that you need a specific version of some library for.
If you really don’t want to spend money, there’s always GNU Octave. Sure, it doesn’t have the thousands of matlab toolboxes, but if you’re running code from 40 years ago it shouldn’t need those anyway. I wrote a couple of scripts recently and then rewrote them slightly so that they would be compatible with octave.
In spanish questions intonation changes occur only on the last word(s), not the whole sentence. I’m not a linguistic, but I think it’s so you can be sure a sentence is a question from the start.
When reading english sometimes I assume a sentence is an affirmation until I see the question mark, and then I have to reinterpret the sentence. I wonder how it is for native english speakers. Do they assume nothing until the sentence is finished?
In English most questions stay flat and only raises the pitch on the last syllable, if any. In Spanish we can raise the pitch on the first word and stay flat for the rest of the question. That’s what’s useful about the ¿
In spanish questions intonation changes occur only on the last word(s), not the whole sentence. I’m not a linguistic, but I think it’s so you can be sure a sentence is a question from the start.
That might be the case in the dialect you’re familiar with, but “¿Me dijiste que no te moleste?” has a different intonation to “Me dijiste que no te moleste.” in my Spanish (starting from “dijiste”).
As for English, questions normally start either with a question word or a (auxiliary) verb, while affirmations normally start with the subject. See “You told me not to bother you.” vs. “Did you tell me not to bother you?”. Using just intonation is possible (“You told me not to bother you?!??”), but when in writing, it’s usually formatted in a way that highlights it because it usually indicates outrage/disbelief.
Interesting. Afaik what determines a question is a higher pitch, so in your sentence I wouldn’t think of the sentence as a question until I hear the intonation of the last word.
Like, toda la oracion puede tener cualquier tono, pero si la última palabra tiene un tono mas agudo (molesteee en vez de moleste) recien cuenta como pregunta.
Me puse a pensar y escuchar conversaciones, fijandome si el tono cambia siempre en la ultima palabra, o en algun otro lado, y en donde vivo (casi) siempre el tono cambia en la ultima palabra, incluso solo la ultima silaba.
Me pregunto si de donde eres toda la oracion (o, desde “dijiste”) el tono es más agudo, o si usan otra forma para diferenciar?
The higher pitch for the entire sentence is another option in my Spanish, but indicates outrage.
The version where you hear it’s supposed to be a question from the word “dijiste” is more of a request for information, like if your mom yelled something and you’re not sure if she said “No me molestes” or “No te sorpreses” or something else that sounds vaguely similar or if she was actually yelling at a fly that was going on her nerves.
The sentence overall becomes more melodic, with the stressed syllables getting a higher pitch and more defined stress.
In Spanish questions are phrased the same way as affirmations, when you are speaking the only difference is the intonation. Without a mark to say you are starting to read a question it’s possible that the meaning changes in the end which would be annoying. (Source: Portuguese is the same but has no inverted question mark, and sometimes it’s mighty annoying, especially with long questions)
Not really. In my language subject and verb get switched around in a question. So you immediately know it’s a question when you start reading the sentence.
Yeah that’s initially why I thought there was no difference to Spanish. But the difference is Spanish actually doesn’t have an option where you switch subject and verb. Didn’t know that :)
É de facto irritante. Nada como estar na escola e um prof pede para ler. Estás calmamente a ler o texto e de repente tens de forçar a porcaria da entoação para sobrecompensar o facto de que não reparaste que era uma pergunta
All have different intonations and punctuation but are otherwise the same. Internet lingo does compensate for this somewhat but at least in “proper” form the above holds true for all kinds of situations
Imagine if you could ask questions like “James, Mary, and Jack went to the market last Saturday to buy a shovel, a black bag, and some gloves, to bury Karen’s corpse in the deep dark woods?”
No no no, James, Mary, and Jack went to the market last Saturday to buy a shovel, a black bag, and some flashlights, to bury Karen’s corpse in the deep dark woods
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