Interesting/promising measurements at CERN

Yup. Encouraging smart youngsters to pour their careers down a rathole like that is cruel.

Applications of physics are ubiquitous in the meV to eV range, important in the keV to low-MeV range (X-rays, nuclear power, nuclear medicine), and so far completely absent above about 20 MeV, despite the fact that Lawrence built a 730-MeV synchrotron in 1945: we've been waiting 75 years now.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

How about discovering a new force of nature? How about understanding 95% of the universe? (?85%?)

Experts reveal ‘cautious excitement’ over unstable particles that fail to decay as standard model suggests. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva have spotted an unusual signal in their data that may be the first hint of a new kind of physics. But the standard model does not describe everything. It does not explain the fourth force, gravity, and perhaps more strikingly, says nothing about the 95% of the universe that physicists believe is not constructed from normal matter.

Scientists well understand that phenomena; famously Max Planck described it in 1950

The informal pharaphrase is "Science progresses one funeral at a time". At least it does progress, albeit slowly.

The ultimate old boy network with the characteristics you describe above is organised religion.

Grin.. no problem, it's hard to be subtle online.

Yeah we know all that though. There's nothing to be done with 'quark' physics. (things made of stuff besides up and down quarks.. neutron/ proton and cousins) Look I'm not saying that quark physics might not have some use in the future. Controlled fusion still looks way off in the future to me. I do wish we were doing a lot more with fission.

Hmm, I'm trying to understand what we disagree about? Can we discuss where to spend our research dollars?

George H.

The moon landing wasn't a boondoggle--it was a way of asserting American prestige, which had been badly dented by the Soviets' apparent lead in missile technology. Missiles have a lot more practical applications than the Higgs.

NASA has been a cancerous bureaucracy for a long, long time, and the ISS is a useless money pit. However, space exploration (including manned spaceflight) is an important cultural activity--just not $22B per year worth. (That's for NASA alone.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The dark matter thing is completely up in the air--there's no reason to suppose that it's even made of particles. Sabine Hossenfelder (Backreaction) has a lot of discussion of GR-ish phase transitions in spacetime and so forth.

Until that situation gets clearer, it makes zero sense to pour oceans of cash into a purely speculative machine design.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yeah I wonder about the super genius types too. I've heard Ed Witten described as the smartest of our time. And I kinda wish his mind had been bent in a different direction, maybe if he'd had lunch with Harry Nyquist? :^)

George H.

Oh I agree, let's send a probe way out into space to see how gravity works... or some better idea. (to do a test... the probe idea takes decades, ) I love Sabine, it's a sad statement on the current state of science that it's an internet star doing important research. Oh do you read Triton Station. The External Field Effect (EFE) looks real, AFAICT. You don't do that with dark matter.

George H.

What a loonie idea. How does putting money into CERN not create jobs? How does it not create industries?

You ideas remind me of a gal I dated long ago. She thought there should be no government funded research of any kind. Let private business fund it all, ignoring the fact that most of these things would simply never exist or come many, many years later.

Should the government get out of healthcare too? Let people create their own vaccines. Let them eat bleach!

Dark matter and dark energy are profoundly unsatisfying concepts, just like luminiferous æther.

Maybe "sorting out" dark energy/matter questions will be as world-changing as dealing with æether. Who knows, but it is an exciting possibility.

I'll accept any way of determining what dark matter/energy might be.

To such people I ask a simple question. "It is 1890. Where should I invest my money to revolutionise diagnostic medicine?"

A good answer, which they never give, is "the fundamental physics in which the mysterious cathode rays hit a metal block in a vacuum".

Although people on this group will understand that, very few members of the general public can.

Careful there, Tom--demanding that the universe be based on satisfying concepts is perilously close to asserting that it was made by a mind having certain simililarites with ours. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Two responses: - oh, that's cruel I tell you, cruel - pah, elegance is everything, and I am the universal arbiter of good taste (Schizophrenia? Neither of me has heard of that)

I said that the huge CERN budget could fund hundreds of different, diverse science research projects. I think we'd be much more likely to learn things new and useful if we did that.

You didn't see that part? It's 26 lines up.

John

It was symbolic at best. I doubt that it gained us anything.

It doesn't help American prestige to pay Russia to schlepp our astronauts.

What can humans do better than robots in space, except die?

I don't think we can put humans on Mars for a very long time; with chemical rockets, radiation will kill them on the way. The idea of a self-sufficient colony is crazy.

We could have developed some dynamite robotics for the cost of the moon landings and the deadly shuttle and ISS.

Have you read Sabine's book Lost In Math?

One good point she makes is that physicists want their theories to be beautiful, but there is no reason they should be.

Indeed, but I defy anyone to find anything elegant in a concept which is - defined by what it isn't, not by what it is - is merely a frig-factor introduced to reconcile observations

Removing those two inelegant points one way or another is a worthwhile objective.

Yes, telescopes! That's what we need, more telescopes!!! We don't need to be looking at small stuff, we need to look at the stuff that is really, really, really far away. That is much more practical.

WTF?

Absolutely right. We need to spend the money on telescopes.