Feb 5, 2019 08:03 PM
The Thorny Question Of Whether To Build Another Particle Collider
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2...-collider/
EXCERPT: In my previous post, I made reference to the raging controversy over what's next for particle physics, sparked in part by Sabine Hosenfelder's argument in Lost in Math that there's no reason to expect dramatic discoveries from a next-generation particle accelerator. In the week and a bit since that post, well, the controversy continues to rage on, with fellow Forbes blogger Ethan Siegel weighing in with lofty rhetoric, noted quantum computing physicist Scott Aaronson offering a more qualified defense, and Hossenfelder understandably expressing frustration at the whole business. This clearly isn't going away as quickly as one might like.
As I mentioned in that earlier post, though, this is a tricky topic to write about because it's posing a genuinely difficult question about research priorities and resource allocation. As a result, while many of the arguments for and against are delivered with great passion and conviction, I don't find any of them fully convincing. It's just too easy to poke holes in most of the arguments being thrown around.
[...] Personally, at the end of the day, I tend to think that while tens of billions of dollars is a big sum compared to most grant budgets, on a global scale, it's actually not all that much money-- a billion-ish dollars a year over twenty-odd years is something we could easily afford. It's not a great investment, maybe, in terms of expected future economic payoff, but not everything needs to be an investment. The Standard Model is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs in the history of human civilization, and going beyond it would be similarly spectacular. It might best be viewed as an art project on the scale of global civilization, and that's probably worth $0.20 per living human per year.
That said, I'm not hugely committed to this view, and can easily see how one might come down on the other side. It is, as I said at the beginning, a genuinely difficult question to answer, and none of the many arguments being thrown around in the recent exchanges are truly decisive....
MORE (details): https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2...-collider/
We Must Not Give Up On Answering The Biggest Scientific Questions Of All
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswitha...ns-of-all/
INTRO: There are fundamental mysteries out there about the nature of the Universe itself, and it's our inherent curiosity about those unanswered questions that drives science forward. There's an incredible amount we've learned already, and the successes of our two leading theories — the quantum field theory describing the Standard Model and General Relativity for gravity — is a testament to how far we've come in understanding reality itself.
Many people are pessimistic about our current attempts and future plans to try and solve the great cosmic mysteries that stymie us today. Our best hypotheses for new physics, including supersymmetry, extra dimensions, technicolor, string theory and more, have all failed to yield any experimental confirmation at all. But that doesn't mean physics is in crisis. It means it's working exactly as we'd expect: by telling the truth about the Universe. Our next steps will show us how well we've been listening....
MORE: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswitha...ns-of-all/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2...-collider/
EXCERPT: In my previous post, I made reference to the raging controversy over what's next for particle physics, sparked in part by Sabine Hosenfelder's argument in Lost in Math that there's no reason to expect dramatic discoveries from a next-generation particle accelerator. In the week and a bit since that post, well, the controversy continues to rage on, with fellow Forbes blogger Ethan Siegel weighing in with lofty rhetoric, noted quantum computing physicist Scott Aaronson offering a more qualified defense, and Hossenfelder understandably expressing frustration at the whole business. This clearly isn't going away as quickly as one might like.
As I mentioned in that earlier post, though, this is a tricky topic to write about because it's posing a genuinely difficult question about research priorities and resource allocation. As a result, while many of the arguments for and against are delivered with great passion and conviction, I don't find any of them fully convincing. It's just too easy to poke holes in most of the arguments being thrown around.
[...] Personally, at the end of the day, I tend to think that while tens of billions of dollars is a big sum compared to most grant budgets, on a global scale, it's actually not all that much money-- a billion-ish dollars a year over twenty-odd years is something we could easily afford. It's not a great investment, maybe, in terms of expected future economic payoff, but not everything needs to be an investment. The Standard Model is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs in the history of human civilization, and going beyond it would be similarly spectacular. It might best be viewed as an art project on the scale of global civilization, and that's probably worth $0.20 per living human per year.
That said, I'm not hugely committed to this view, and can easily see how one might come down on the other side. It is, as I said at the beginning, a genuinely difficult question to answer, and none of the many arguments being thrown around in the recent exchanges are truly decisive....
MORE (details): https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2...-collider/
We Must Not Give Up On Answering The Biggest Scientific Questions Of All
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswitha...ns-of-all/
INTRO: There are fundamental mysteries out there about the nature of the Universe itself, and it's our inherent curiosity about those unanswered questions that drives science forward. There's an incredible amount we've learned already, and the successes of our two leading theories — the quantum field theory describing the Standard Model and General Relativity for gravity — is a testament to how far we've come in understanding reality itself.
Many people are pessimistic about our current attempts and future plans to try and solve the great cosmic mysteries that stymie us today. Our best hypotheses for new physics, including supersymmetry, extra dimensions, technicolor, string theory and more, have all failed to yield any experimental confirmation at all. But that doesn't mean physics is in crisis. It means it's working exactly as we'd expect: by telling the truth about the Universe. Our next steps will show us how well we've been listening....
MORE: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswitha...ns-of-all/