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by jomamaxx 3607 days ago
I think disappointment is ok here.

They just spent 24 Billion and 30 years to discover nothing.

So next time they go to the governments of the world and say 'hey give us 24 Billion for the greatest experiment ever' ... what's going to happen?

Maybe we should give it to them, but there likely will be more scrutiny.
3 comments
danielmorozoff 3607 days ago
This forms the basis of what's wrong with scientific funding imo. Saying that it's ok to be disappointed because they did not 'discover' is like equating science to a sport and winning a medal- that analogy is fundamentally wrong.

Performing scientific experiments is not about winning first place, it's about creating abstractions/ models in order to achieve deeper insight. As such failing to find that your model is wrong is not like loosing a race. Ex: a bunch of fantastic physics was discovered and described with Newtonian mechanics , though inherently that model is flawed, it took a while to realize it.

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spullara 3607 days ago
Think of it as an experiment to confirm or deny the standard model. So far it is confirming it.
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jomamaxx 3607 days ago
"Think of it as an experiment to confirm or deny the standard model. So far it is confirming it."

I understand that very well.

But most of the Standard Model was well confirmed.

Really what we got was confirmation of Higgs.

The 'non confirmation' of a bunch of interesting theories is not a very big win.

But don't forget the politics of it all: this is bordering on a 'big lose'.

They spent 24 Billion and really didn't get much out of it. There was a lot of hope, maybe even promise, and really - we got the 'lowest outcome' possible.

Ask yourself: would we have spent 24 Billion to 'confirm Higgs'?

Anyhow - I'm glad it was done, and if it were up to me I'd have spent it, knowing the outcome, but the optics of this are bad.

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akiselev 3607 days ago
Ask yourself: would we have spent 24 Billion to 'confirm Higgs'?

Yes. The Higgs field/boson is a fundamental feature of our best theory at the quantum scale and we needed to know whether we are right. Now we have another crucial bound for the theory that will supplant the standard model except now we can waste less time and money with theories that can't explain our results.

We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a large metal can flying at an altitude of 400km essentially to do microgravity research; I think we can afford to spend a tenth of that on a particle accelerator to probe the frontier of high energy physics.

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jomamaxx 3607 days ago
"We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a large metal can flying at an altitude of 400km essentially to do microgravity research;"

This is not true. The space program has countless research opportunities, direct and indirect, with the underlying endeavour of objective of putting people on other planets, which is a pretty big opportunity in of itself.

I'm not sure paying $24 Billion to prove Higgs was worth it. I suggest maybe there were other, much less expensive ways to do that, were we to know up front that was the objective.

It's hard to say how much 'disproving a bunch of theories' is worth.

I suggest that much of theoretical physics is total rubbish speculation, which in some ways is 'ok', but it'd be nice to see some progress. If you add in String Theory to the pile ... it looks really bad for modern theoretical physics. Not much has happened in a very long time ... it seems there have been countless PhD's minted in fiction. Not good.

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akiselev 3607 days ago
This is not true. The space program has countless research opportunities, direct and indirect, with the underlying endeavour of objective of putting people on other planets, which is a pretty big opportunity in of itself.

I'm not talking about the space program, I'm talking about the ISS. What, exactly, are those direct and indirect opportunities? Looking at NASA's own PR material, it boils down to effects of deep space on humans (microgravity and radiation), effects of microgravity on biotechnology, environmental monitoring (which can be done cheaper with satellites), and .... effects of microgravity on everything else. I'm not saying it's not worth it as a human endeavor, but let's not kid ourselves: it was an insanely expensive project just like the LHC that doesn't really seem to have resulted in much.

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hiuwwgiubi 3607 days ago
not "to" discover nothing, they set out to discover something but discovered nothing, they couldn't have known that would be the outcome
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