[Anon84]

> The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today.

The question is, how much better would "MRI and other diagnosis tools" if that money had been spent actively trying to improve them instead of mostly going to detecting gravity waves? That's the question you need to answer to justify spending billions chasing physicists latest "fetish".

"Big physics" proponents always justify wasting (in my opinion) billions in colliders and observers by the unintended benefits that accidentally derive from them but they never mention how much more progress those other ares could make by directly using that money.Instead of spending $40B in the next big collider, what if we were spent developing CRISPR and related technologies? Or on a "moon-shot" for AGI? On developing new tools and techniques to study and understand large scale social systems?

P.S.: I have a BS/MS/PhD in Theoretical Physics

[pas]

If you put a team to make a better MRI, you'll get the same MRI maybe a bit faster or smaller.

If you want the MRI 2.0, you start with something monstrously different, otherwordly, like gravitational wave detection. There you reach metrological precision, DSP, optics, waveguides, EM shielding, thermal noise compensation, and other incremental advancements that taken together gives you MRI 1.5, and then you can bring in those who make it work into a nice and shiny improved MRI.

The problem with moon-shots (eg. AGI) is that you don't know where to go. With physics at least you sort of do. Higher energy. More sensitivity. Better experiments.

[roca]

Exactly.

Arguments for "spinoff benefits" from research always seem really weak to me. If you want lighter, imperishable food, invest in food preservation, not a space program that might happen to produce freeze-dried food.

[theossuary]

I'm not 100% convinced. I think it's hard to get really smart people to work on problems that aren't interesting. Asking a team to make food preservation 10% better won't invite the creativity and determination that asking them to preserve food to Mars would.

I think, when you take humans into account, you're better off setting interesting and challenging goals, with many useful byproducts.

[roca]

That is the best argument for "spinoffs" that I've heard. Well done.

I still think it's pretty weak though; the inspiration benefit seems unlikely to overcome the lost efficiency, in general. And different people find different problems inspiring; some people can be inspired by practical problems (e.g. "how can we lighten the backpacks of trampers").

[pbhjpbhj]

Do you (always?) realise that need before the product is made?

[mannykannot]

Are you suggesting these spin-offs are (always?) after-the-fact justifications using issues that were not pressing concerns?

The problem with attempting to justify space exploration with spin-off examples like food preservation is that it risks provoking a 'so what?' response. Piling on unimpressive claims does not strengthen one's argument, it dilutes it, and gives the opposition an easy target to dispute.

When Clarke came up with the idea of communications satellites, he, and others, thought he had come up with a before-the-fact justification for space travel, as he expected these relays would need regular maintenance, but another claimed-spinoff-but-not-really, semiconductor electronics, obviated the need.

[friendlybus]

Why is the general public wasting millions of dollars on an opioid epidemic? Why does shrekli's 710$ medicine still cost 700$ after he left and was charged?

There is plenty of wasted money in the pharma sector that can be spent and profited from in crispr technologies. I'm not sure why you're taking physics money for that.

The physics funding programs have already moved on from big budget tags in some spaces. ITER will probably be the last big white whale project in fusion. There are a bunch of smaller fusion projects being funded at smaller scales to prove their efforts before going big. The iterative tech model is bleeding over into science funding.

[dekhn]

I think the right way to think about science investment is the multi-armed bandit. There's a lot of uncertainty, but you also know that if you fund a portfolio with a good distribution, you'll have a chance of maximizing the total good science results that come out of it.

I've always been very skeptical of claims that heavy investment in the space sciences advacnced other technologies, more than if we had just invested that money directly in the other technology. I also see a lot of money wasted in space sciences running experiments on the ISS that aren't really that useful (like crystallography- sure, you can grow nice crystals in space and then bring them back down to earth, but for the money you spent on that, you could have funded 10 PIs, and also crystal structures aren't that useful for advancing science).

Interestingly, if you look at modern science funding, it does basically treat it as a multi-armed bandit and there is a portfolio of project funding that includes both large particle physics experiments and individual investigators.

[pbhjpbhj]

Isn't the 'problem' (for the wider population) that physicists are motivated towards answering the big questions (that's a valid outlay for $billions IMO, just like, say how we spend billions on football/soccer). So effectively what we're doing is allowing that because we know there are positive repercussions that come along with such exploration.

(Also a BSc in TPhys (& maths), fwiw.)