
The Multiworse Is Coming - franzb
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-is-coming.html
======
tacon
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.)

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.

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?"

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.

~~~
athom
Apropos of nothing, I don't believe they filled in ALL the holes down there.
When I briefly worked for Dart Container, purveyors of the classic styrene
foam J Cup, I learned they had just opened a MASSIVE new warehouse down in
Texas, built in part of the tunnel system meant to become the home of the SSC.

I got to see part of their warehousing up near Lansing, MI. Imagine a building
the size of a jumbo jet hangar, packed to the rafters with NOTHING but boxes
on boxes of J Cups. Now imagine another. I'm pretty sure the Lansing facility
had at least two, and that still wasn't enough for the millions of cups they
move each year.

We use a lot of cups.

~~~
telchar
That's an obscene amount of polystyrene. Ugh. OT but I wish the stuff were
never used.

------
snowwrestler
It's worth considering the cultural context in which high-end physics
operates, at least within the United States.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

So what happens when physics stops delivering military leaps forward? Or when
the physics is superseded by another discipline that delivers military
applications?

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.

So, I think the author is correct that particle physics faces a looming
crisis, at least in funding and public confidence.

~~~
troymc
In the USA, a lot of funding for R & D (e.g. engineering and science) comes
from grants that are military grants (e.g. Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.). In
the US, about half (54%) of federal funding (coming from the public Federal
budget) is via "military" and the rest is from other federal agencies
("civilian").

Source: [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/how-science-fares-
us...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/how-science-fares-us-budget-
deal)

Is that an American thing?

~~~
troymc
Note: The above figures don't take classified funding into account. Because
it's secret. Most of the classified funding is military, so the proportion of
military funding is actually higher.

------
a_humean
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.

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.

~~~
thanatropism
This is so very important.

In particular, there's a long-accumulating need for a revision of the current
dogma on the philosophy of science and its operationalization -- Popper
falsificationism, peer review, publication-oriented research, freaking null
hypothesis...

Most of our current science has happened before Popper and falsificationism,
so there is nothing "essentially true" about the current M.O. of science. And
heck, was it falsificationism that brought us vaccines, nuclear energy and
computers? Because there's a replication crisis going on in many scientific
fields, and particle physics doesn't fit the mold of falsificationism at all.

I'm not coming forward with a solution in an HN comment, but I think we need
to stop equating science, the civilizational project, with this specific
philosophy of science and social system for organizing science.

~~~
fdej
Could you elaborate on what you perceive as the problem with falsificationism?
I'm familiar with the philosophical argument that Popper's demarcation of
science is too narrow. What is less clear is that this argument over the
definition of science currently has any influence on scientific practice. Are
there some examples where scientists (or funding agencies) have adhered to
"falsificationism" in a way that impeded progress? This is in contrast with
the other issues you mentioned: peer review, publication-oriented research and
abuse of the null hypothesis (by which I assume you mean p-hacking and its
cousins), which I agree are very real problems in practice.

~~~
thanatropism
> Could you elaborate on what you perceive as the problem with
> falsificationism?

Operationally? You have to pick a null hypothesis. You have to carve reality
in two, specify two possible universes and ask an experiment to tell you which
universe where you're in.

Darwinism (the one in Darwin's works) isn't like this. Adhesion to
falsificationism would have nipped that one in the bud.

Stuff like this is the way forward:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_holism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_holism)

~~~
dahauns
I always wonder where this naive falsificationism as a point of critique comes
from. Certainly not from Popper, as he already argued for holism in the sense
of Duhem and Quine from the beginning (Logik der Forschung was written in
1934!)...

~~~
Confusion
From addressing the great many naive falsificationists that have heard of, or
were taught, Popper’s basic idea without any of his elaborations and
footnotes, let alone those by people like Quine, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend,
... A little knowledge can be a dangerously misleading thing.

------
kerkeslager
> To justify substantial investments, I am told, an experiment needs a clear
> goal and at least a promise of breakthrough discoveries.

This is antithetical to science. If you're promising a breakthrough discovery,
you're approaching the experiment with bias.

The fact that more new particles have not emerged at energy levels the LHC can
produce _is_ 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.

And that's exactly why I agree with the author: science is about finding
what's _true_ not about finding what's _exciting_. 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.

[1] I'm not a particle physicist--my post is about the social problem that
physicists are facing, not about the physics.

~~~
fsloth
"This is antithetical to science. If you're promising a breakthrough
discovery, you're approaching the experiment with bias."

I think all experiments are began with some premonition of what to expect. For
example Michaelson and Morley very much expected to measure the speed through
which earth would pass through aether ... except they couldn't. An the results
pushed physics toward theory of relativity.

I disagree that's it's an entirely bad process to bankroll experiments based
on unproven promises. This is exactly how the Manhattan Project happened. The
physicists promised that it was very likely they could create a very large
explosion, but they did not _know_ if it would bang or fizzle. So, the US
government began a huge industrial scale operation to enrich uranium and to
assemble the bomb. The first atomic bomb explosion was very much empirical
science that was bankrolled by "unsound" promises.

In this sense going beyond LHC would be kinda ground breaking - big budget
science with _absolutely no clue_ on what to expect. It's how discoveries are
made, yes, but I'm not sure if any large scale scientific project has been
funded without at least some clue on what to expect.

~~~
kerkeslager
> I think all experiments are began with some premonition of what to expect.
> For example Michaelson and Morley very much expected to measure the speed
> through which earth would pass through aether ... except they couldn't. An
> the results pushed physics toward theory of relativity.

> I disagree that's it's an entirely bad process to bankroll experiments based
> on unproven promises. This is exactly how the Manhattan Project happened.
> The physicists promised that it was very likely they could create a very
> large explosion, but they did not know if it would bang or fizzle. So, the
> US government began a huge industrial scale operation to enrich uranium and
> to assemble the bomb. The first atomic bomb explosion was very much
> empirical science that was bankrolled by "unsound" promises.

What you're describing is the "hypothesis" step in the scientific process.
Properly done, a hypothesis _isn 't_ a promise--it's simply a statement of the
possibility you're testing, without any commitment to the possibility being
the reality or not.

A good hypothesis results in the same experiment as its negative: "There are
more supersymmetric particles at higher energies" is the same hypothesis as
"There are _not_ more supersymmetric particles at higher energies" because you
test both hypotheses in the same way. Contrast this with a promise: you can't
promise something _and_ its opposite.

> In this sense going beyond LHC would be kinda ground breaking - big budget
> science with absolutely no clue on what to expect. It's how discoveries are
> made, yes, but I'm not sure if any large scale scientific project has been
> funded without at least some clue on what to expect.

I don't think we have absolutely no clue what to expect--the article goes into
some of the possibilities.

~~~
philipov
> A good hypothesis results in the same experiment as its negative: "There are
> more supersymmetric particles at higher energies" is the same hypothesis as
> "There are not more supersymmetric particles at higher energies" because you
> test both hypotheses in the same way.

Actually, no, they are not the same. You are excluding the middle, as it is
necessary for an experiment to disprove the null hypothesis before any
conclusion can be made. Just because you don't prove your hypothesis doesn't
mean you prove its negation. Typically, an experiment will find no result at
all.

~~~
Retric
The negative of we "will see X via some experiment." Is not "X does not
exist," but rather, "we will _not_ see X via some experiment."

------
Angostura
> It’s a PR disaster that particle physics won’t be able to shake off easily.

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.

~~~
twoodfin
The problem as I understand it is that prior to natural-ness being in doubt,
it was expected that the LHC would make discoveries in supersymmetry that
would justify practically bigger (but hugely expensive) colliders. Without a
new frontier of supersymmetrical particles to explore, that next collider
doesn't offer much for anyone to get excited about, let alone the taxpayers
who might be asked to pay for it.

------
Animats
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.

 _“If you can 't measure it, you can't improve it”_ (Lord Kelvin)

------
resource0x
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 _is not needed_ 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?

~~~
blablabla123
It's not really about the values of constants but about where they appear and
about their size.

So imagine we have some Physics setup were certain laws should hold. There is
some magical formula called Lagrangian L = stuff. When you construct this L
from scratch, you add _everything_ you have. That is some e for the Electron
field function, some phi for the Higgs, some m for its mass etc etc. At first
this sounds like an insanely long and random equation. But because of all the
constraints in your setup its 'only' one page long for the Standard Model
case. Oh yes and then there are some stupid terms which must be really small
to only _softly_ violate the constraints. E.g. CP-symmetry for strong
interactions - violation of this symmetry hasn't been observed in nature
"Strong CP problem". That's where fine-tuning has to happen at the moment...

~~~
resource0x
Please confirm that my understanding is correct. You have a number of "stupid"
terms in Lagrangian, whose cumulative effect must be small in order for the
whole theory to make sense at all. This small cumulative effect can be
achieved in 2 ways: 1) each term is small 2) terms more or less cancel out.
When each term is small, we call it naturalness, otherwise it's fine-tuning.
If this is correct, then... say you have N random varaibles, and you know that
the sum is small. What is more likely: that each of N variables is small, or
that the sum is small because it just happens to be small? :)

~~~
blablabla123
Fortunately there are not so many terms of this kind in the Standard Model
case. :)

However terms don't really cancel each other out. (I'm sure you could
construct a scenario where that happens but that doesn't generalize.) It's
part of the construction manual if you will to have only independent constants
and terms.

------
sevensor
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.

~~~
tinco
You misunderstand, the particle physicists are having a blast discovering
properties, they're just not finding any more particles. Finding particles is
sexy, and sexy gets funding, so the risk is that they run out of funding with
their run of the mill sciencing.

That's why they're postulating, maybe if we had a slightly larger collider we
could find sexy super symmetry. The author thinks that is disingenuous because
the argument that a slightly larger collider would find supersymmetry is
speculation, not based on real science.

Anyway, even if there was a solid argument for there being supersymmetry just
around the corner I don't think a larger collider would be funded, the LHC
offered many many sexy things, so the stars aligned and it got funded, but
would the stars align again for such a huge amount of funding, just for
supersymmetry? I feel as a layman the idea of supersymmetry is not captivating
enough. Not in the way the higgs boson was.

Anyway, there's so much applied physics research just waiting to be done right
now, maybe it's time for theoretical physics to chew on it for a bit.

~~~
sevensor
> the particle physicists are having a blast discovering properties

I'm glad to learn that I was mistaken! As a layman myself, this is really all
I want from the LHC: for it to continue to be a useful piece of equipment for
scientific experments. From the article, it sounded like the attitude was, "we
didn't find anything sexy, so we're done here," which would be a huge waste.

~~~
iamatworknow
For what it's worth, there are accelerators, colliders, and synchrotrons here
in the US that were dwarfed by the LHC (and practically unheard of in popular
culture) that are in use today.

They're still running experiments on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at
Brookhaven National Lab in New York, for example, even though it started
operation 8 years before the LHC and runs at a fraction of the energy.

~~~
minitoar
I always get excited when driving or flying over SLAC! Although I understand
that the facility is now half laser interferometry.

------
stareatgoats
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.

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.

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.

Granted, our sense of naturalness could be completely wrong, and empirical
data constantly challenge what we consider natural, which is how it should be.

~~~
platz
Your understanding of what naturalness is seems odd. If you get rid of
naturalness, you just have fine tuning. Fine tuning is not beautiful but it is
not a logical disaster as you describe.

~~~
stareatgoats
ok thanks, on further investigation I realize my interpretation of
"naturalness" was a laymans uninitiated one:

"In physics, naturalness is the property that the dimensionless ratios between
free parameters or physical constants appearing in a physical theory"[0]

I have no idea what that means atm

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalness_(physics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalness_\(physics\))

~~~
mikekchar
I'll take a stab (I Am Not A Physicist (in fact I couldn't handle the math and
moved to CS ;-) ). Parameters or constants in a theory generally have units
(i.e. speeds, density, whatever). But lots of things (usually ratios) have no
units because they all cancel out. Those are called "dimensionless". Pi is
dimensionless, as is e.

What the naturalness property seems to be saying is that these dimensionless
parameters (which you have to stick into the equations to make the math work
out) should all be around the same order of magnitude and not require too much
precision. If there is such a parameter that is super huge or super small (in
relation to the others) or requires a lot of precision, it's an indication
that the theory is incomplete. There should be an observable reason for that
difference/precision.

If I've gotten that right, then I can see why people would be sceptical of
naturalness. If naturalness was correct, I would actually be curious of _why_
it was correct.

~~~
manyoso
Moreover, "naturalness" is not mathematically well-defined even though many of
its most passionate proponents claim that it is. This is one of the primary
objections that Sabine has of "naturalness", not only might it be wrong, but
when you plumb the motivations for it and actually _try_ to make it
mathematically well-defined, the motivations turn out to all disintegrate.

------
KnightOfWords
"Like hair, trust is hard to split. And like hair, trust is easier to lose
than to grow."

Worth reading just for this quote.

------
baxtr
Maybe it’s time for a paradigm shift in particle physics as Thomas S Kuhn once
predicted

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions)

~~~
fsloth
Kuhn's model is not a prediction, it's a statement of fact how human accepted
knowledge moves sometimes forward in huge paradigm shifts.

Everyone "knew" that the speed of light was constant, everyone "knew" earth
had to be only couple of thousands of years old (e.g. Lord Kelvin was a firm
believer in only a thousands of years based on his physically based
estimates), atoms where quite a hard bargain to sell as anything as
computational tools until you got some computations and Jean Perrin to do some
experiments,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Perrin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Perrin),
continental plates where supposed to be solid fixations, until they weren't,
etc.

It's nice of Kuhn to point this out. Maybe it's convenient for administrators
or something to realize accepted facts tend to change - but it gives
absolutely no clue on _how_ exactly move science forward.

I don't really understand the huge uproar about Kuhn - his ideas should be
"obvious" to anyone familiar with history of science. But maybe as
professional management and pathological "professionalism" made it's headway
in his time it was nice to point out that Gant chartable progress was not all
there was to it.

------
Beltiras
"Just do it" actually sounds like a good reason. Tackling difficult
engineering problems always creates spinoffs even if the core activity is
fruitless.

~~~
evanb
It _is_ a good reason, but it's a reason that's difficult to sell to people
who make decisions about where to spend a few billion dollars.

~~~
Beltiras
Justify it with the benefits of previous activity.

~~~
sverige
What are the benefits of the LHC again? I mean, the benefits of spending
billions that all of us can notice in our daily lives?

~~~
CamperBob2
The LHC was a project of unprecedented magnitude and complexity. During the
planning stages, CERN devoted some resources to developing better ways for
teams on LHC and other projects to communicate with each other and share
documentation.

That is the reason why the address in your browser's URL line starts with
"http(s):" followed by "www." It's not an exaggeration to say that the work of
Tim Berners-Lee at CERN led directly to the creation of trillions of dollars
of economic value.

~~~
John_KZ
Sure, spinoffs are nice, but they happen with _all_ types of public access
research. Why not create a project of a unprecedented magnitude and complexity
that _also_ creates very important results _directly_? It's like saying "spend
vast amounts of resources on pursuing random goals, and eventually some of the
resources, by accident, will create a ROI". Yes they will, but is it really
the best way to do this? It's not like some version of hypertext wouldn't
happen without CERN.

I'm not saying CERN wasn't useful. It was. And the budget wasn't that big. But
this kind of logic is not very sound. If we have a lot of money and a series
of concrete problems, we should spend the money to solve them.

Most of the money are to be spend directly on the problem, less to develop and
build new tools to tackle the problem, and finally even less to discover new
possible mechanisms that might or might not allow us to improve our tools in
the future.

There's a lot of uncertainty in the future, and it's best not to bet a lot of
money on it.

~~~
whatshisface
> _Why not create a project of a unprecedented magnitude and complexity that
> also creates very important results directly?_

This is not an option, if we had any project candidates like this they would
have already been funded. Everything that is not already done by the private
sector exists as a big step in to the unkown. (The private sector is _very_
good at allocating resources to projects that give immediate results, but it
will never do anything that can't.)

------
88e282102ae2e5b
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.

------
blauditore
I'm not a physicist, so I might sound like a moron stating this:

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.

So maybe we don't need new experiments, but new models. A negative result is a
result too.

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)?

~~~
wongarsu
The models are almost certainly inaccurate, we just don't know how inaccurate.
It's quite possible that we need new models (or ditch supersymmetry), but
physicists become invested in their models and try everything to tweak them to
match observations, until it just doesn't work anymore and we have a major
breakthrough.

>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)?

It bugged a lot of other people too (Einstein's famous "God does not play
dice" comes from the same corner). Experiments so far are only consistent with
a probability distribution, unless you permit signals to go back in time. Of
course how you interpret the model is an entirely different problem (do things
only happen once observed, are we in a multiverse and all possibilities happen
in some universe, are we simulated and those effects are caused by
optimisations (both not calculating things until needed, and inaccuracies akin
to floating point errors), etc. the possibilites are endless)

------
agumonkey
I had no idea LHC was thought to provide more than Higgs' boson, and I don't
think lots of people have any clue what it is.

------
thewizardofaus
> Remember next time we come asking for money.

Interesting point. Money drives research.

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.

------
peter303
Next World Collider will be built in China.

They are about the only major country increasing government R&D funds.

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.

Probably could build a pretty powerful accelerator using the world's
electricity devoted to bitcoin mining :-)

------
77pt77
> the conclusions based on naturalness were not predictions, but merely pleas
> for the laws of nature to be pretty

This is the main point.

She totally nailed it.

------
sharemywin
"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."

------
castis
> and at least a promise of breakthrough discoveries

If we could promise a breakthrough discovery, we wouldn't need to build the
machine.

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?

~~~
Ygg2
> This article seems almost heartbroken at the absence of life-altering
> findings.

That's not my takeaway. I think they were talking about how scientist
shouldn't lie to get grants that probably won't achieve much.

~~~
akie
That's (unfortunately) endearingly naïve.

------
lambdadmitry
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

[1]:
[https://youtu.be/edvdzh9Pggg?t=3124](https://youtu.be/edvdzh9Pggg?t=3124)

[2]: [https://home.cern/scientists/updates/2017/06/lhcb-flavour-
an...](https://home.cern/scientists/updates/2017/06/lhcb-flavour-anomalies-
continue-intrigue)

~~~
astrolaw
This is of interest:

[https://thewire.in/science/hopes-for-new-physics-pave-the-
ro...](https://thewire.in/science/hopes-for-new-physics-pave-the-road-to-
rencontres)

------
nonbel
Perhaps whats going on is they have been measuring their own collective prior
probability that these particles exist.

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.

------
blablabla123
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... ;-)

------
diggan
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.

~~~
ShorsHammer
The boffins were looking for the Higgs Boson, makes a big difference.

Plenty of obscure and unintended findings came long after experiments have
concluded. If history is anything to go by, LHC data will be useful far into
the future.

------
sigi45
Its not that i personaly votet for building the LHC. Its not that a higgs
discovery changed my life.

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.

------
panic
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.

~~~
gmueckl
Even physicists would like to have simple explanations instead of all these
mind-bending models that they have to work with. If anything, you have to
blame nature for being so incomprehensible.

~~~
wallace_f
I was reminded of an Einstein quote I'd heard multiple times before.
Apparently there is some debate over this, but it has been claimed he said
that, apart from maths, all physical theories "ought to lend themselves to so
simple a description 'that even a child could understand them.'

Other physicists have said similar; while still others, like Feynman, have
said what sounds like the opposite.

Source:
[https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22410](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22410)

------
gaius
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.

~~~
Cthulhu_
The commercially viable part will be the most difficult; even if they manage
to get more power out of fusion than they put in, and do so in a stable
fashion (e.g. always on), even then a reactor will cost in the order of tens
of billions to build, and much more to maintain. I'll believe we'll have
fusion power within 30-50 years, I can't yet believe it'll be economically
viable in that period. It'll have to compete with relatively straightforward
means of generating power, like solar. I expect it to be cheaper to just clad
every roof in a country with solar panels - and it'll generate more power -
than build a fusion reactor.

~~~
Veedrac
There are good arguments that new superconductors massively lower the cost of
fusion. Old projections on the back of ITER are probably too conservative now.

------
squarefoot
What about serendipitous discoveries then? Research rarely leads to planned
breakthroughs.

~~~
sirclueless
In experimental physics it does.

Two recent planned breakthroughs: Einstein's theory of general relativity
predicted the existence of gravitational waves, and LIGO detected them in
2016. Bell predicted that entangled quantum particles would exhibit
fundamentally nonlocal properties, and in 2015 the first "loophole-free" test
demonstrating violation of local realism occurred.

These experiments were done with expectations of a result. That is not to say
that they had foregone conclusions, just that there was some phenomenon that
the scientists hoped to see, and confirmation one way or the other would be of
interest to the community. Most experiments are like this -- of course
scientists should keep their eyes open for unexpected discoveries, but in
general pursuing expected results is more fruitful.

------
ixtli
Well, I’m a member of the public and I will _always_ support basic research
funding.

~~~
adrianN
Since we have limited amounts of money to distribute to all kinds of basic
research, you have to ask whether the money needed for a bigger collider might
be better spent on say, high temperature superconductors or astrophysics or
whatever.

------
chainReactor
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.

