Interesting/promising measurements at CERN

Yup.

I agree with Johannes Kepler, who said that what he valued most about his work was "thinking God's thoughts after Him." The content of my teasing Tom was precisely that--the comprehensibility of the world, and the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in capturing its workings, is a bit of a pointer, for sure.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Nonsense. Big collider physics was where we got the first fissionables, which revolutionarized both military and civilian technologies. The basic research at CERN isn't intended to produce rubber duckies this week, or profits in the next fiscal quarter, but what it DOES produce will prove useful eventually.

Amortize the expense over a few billion people for a few centuries, and it's not a bad investment, any more than the Volta work in the 1700s was wasted because batteries only came into their own a century or two later.

One can also claim other major technologies have been benefited by the simple fact of publication of techniques ancillary to the major accelerator projects, and production of items (superconductors, vacuum seals, ADC systems, ion sources) with specifications that probe unexplored corners of parameter space.

We woudn't be able to discuss maximum-entropy filtering, if the Hubble workarounds hadn't given us those shining examples...

Gee, I forgot that Enrico Fermi built a collider in the squash court at the University of Chicago, sure. Absolutely. And the calutrons and centrifuges of the Manhattan Project were bashing particles into each other at several TeV. Silly me. ;)

which revolutionarized both military and civilian

We've been waiting, going on on a century, for any practical application of physics at energy levels above about 20 MeV. There is no foreseeable scenario for technological applications of GeV level physics.

You can make a battery out of a potato. We live in the meV to eV world. Extrapolating up by nine orders of magnitude is a false analogy, as demonstrated by its complete failure in practice.

Maximum-entropy methods date from the 1960s.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I haven't come across that before, but I rather like it.

Yes indeed.

Plus the beauty/elegance of some maths. To avoid careless mistakes, I tend to mark my laptop/tablet/etc with a sticker of Euler's equation, which stuns me every time I see it.

I saw that part. I did not think you did not know what "science" means. Partying the money toying with interesting things is *not* science. Science deals with the unknown. Say, the Michelsen-Morley experiment is science - it discovered something we did not know. Working out the structure of the atom is science - we did not know what it was like prior to that. Understanding fusion and fission is science. Understanding what a proton is built of will be science - once we do that, if we do it, this is what they try to do at the LHC. Do you have a suggestion how to do this by small groups with scattered funding. I thought so, you don't.

OTOH designing cool things is not science. It can be as demanding to do, or more demanding, but it is just putting together things we know, i.e. it is derivable from what we know because of science.

"In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting."

Dimiter

Of course it was the same Max Planck who had accepted all four of Einstein's "Annus_Mirabilis" papers without bothering to send them out for peer review.

His funeral was dead loss.

His funeral wasn't one that advanced science in any way. He had quite a few less attractive contemporaries.

Science does have some mechanisms that help it get around the entrenched old boy network.

And then Archie and then Veronica, as I recall. Maybe Whois.

But the one we got works remarkably well. It was driven by the needs of particle physicists. so in at least one sense it has everything to do with particle physics.

I was swapping e-mails with my wife through the

in 1985, and she'd been e-mailing MIT from about 1979. The World Wide Web was an immense step forward. and it was the particle physicists at CERN that took it.

The politicians would hate having to justify it, and the Murdoch press would have a field day being rude about it.

Don't forget EMI Central Research in the UK. The brain scanner came from there, and the first commercial nuclear magnetic resonance imaging system.

But you need the big picture you can sell to the public to make it politically palatable.

They cost enough that politicians need to have message they can sell before they can shell out the money.

Since nobody has spent any money on finding that out, we don't know, and we'll probably never know.

I wish we'd got to the point of having a well-worked out way of dealing with fission waste. It has been building up for seventy years now, and nobody has worked out how to sequester it in a safe place that it is going to stay safe for the next 100,000 years. Generating more fission waste isn't a great idea until we work out how to deal with it.

First you need to discuss how much you should spend on research, then you need to discuss how you work out where you ought to spend it.

The whole point about research is that you don't know what you are going to find out, so it's a gamble. the only good part about the gamble is that history suggests that it is a positive sum game.

Venture capitalists invest in projects that may only have a 10% change of paying off, so they have to invest in at least ten of them to have a tolerable chance of getting their money back, but they go for projects likely to pay off more than ten times the capital invested, if they happen to work out.

At one level it's simple cost-benefit analysis, but the costs are much better defined than the potential benefits.

That is one way of looking at it. It is more sensible to think that we are changing our minds to make them more susceptible to the kinds of concepts that provide better and more economical explanations of the behavior of the bits of the universe we can perceive. It took a while before we got the idea that our galaxy was only one of many.

The idea that it - and others - are spinning faster than they should is even more recent.

Dark matter is the best explanation that we have come up with so far. A better one would be nice. "Better" is a rather subjective judgement. An explanation that explains more of what is going on, or fits more closely to what we can see might express "better" rather more precisely.

There's every reason - from the physicists' point of view. Beautiful theories are easier to sell.

Confusing the demands of the audience with the demands of physical science is merely sloppy thinking.

Everybody spends time making what they say as palatable as possible to the intended audience. You clearly can't say something that isn't true. but finding the most palatable way of expressing what you do have to say is essential.

But you've no idea how they might have got funded.

Because getting a lot of money together is a political problem.

But you didn't say anything about how we would fund them. Lots of different diverse science research projects already get funded through the research grant system.

Not enough of them, but you don't address the question of how we might funnel more money into them.

Sadly, it didn't say anything useful.

He would. He had had to defend his mother when she was charged with witchcraft, and he'd be more careful than most to avoid saying anything that might be construed as heretical.

It can be, if you have an inclination to think that way. If the religious have enough political power, it can be life-threatening to think anything else.

The other side of that point of view is that mathematics is supremely flexible, since it only exists inside our heads.

That's not quite true; good synchrotron X-ray sources from wiggler/undulator/X-ray lasers are in that ballpark, and another step forward in high-resolution chip fabrication will make them a likely necessity for those of us who want more and better widgets. All the prep work on that technology was accelerator work.

Fusion power is another example that couldn't be imagined without the big physics projects. Some technology is just NOT amenable to small-scale efforts.

Some technology is just NOT amenable to learn-today-and-make-product-this-year.

I said that the CERN money could fund hundreds of smaller SCIENCE RESEARCH PROJECTS.

16 lines above.

Very silly.

That's how fundamental research works. Nothing for a century or so, then society gets reorganised.

At the moment. The electron microscopes I worked on were kV devices, but they don't seems to have come to your attention, any more than the cathode ray tubes that used to be built into your television set.

Which failure was that?

But who knew about them?

Of course Ernest Rutherford got his Nobel Prize in Chemistry rather than physics, somewhat to his disgust. He was being a jerk when he made that claim.

Sorting out DNA and going from there to the human genome project might have been mere stamp-collecting, from a physicists point of view, but that kind of physicist regularly publishes rubbish electronic circuits in the Review of Scientific Instruments, and the equally up-themselves physicists who review the rubbish don't notice.

But you didn't say how. Paying for science is a political question, an area where you know even less than you do about science.

CERNs budget isn't all that huge. NASA's budget is ~20 times greater.

Jeroen Belleman

Dyestuffs industry wouldn't be a bad choice. They were just beginning to find synthetic things that had real therapeutic properties about then.

Lasers is another one. Who would have thought such an esoteric and exotic light source they would ever be in so many consumer items.