May be you will turn out to be right. But clearly they are on to something, if that 3 signal from the news article gets to 5 or more... they say they will have something groundbreaking.
Well we cannot say if it is a waste. It may turn out to be - many lives have been wasted and more will be throughout human history. But it is the fact that we accept potential waste which has brought us where we are now knowledge-wise.
You're sounding like a broken record, Dimiter. I'm saying nothing of the sort. (I like science--I'm a working physicist who has spent a significant portion of his career doing it full time.)
What I _am_ saying is that there is absolutely no reason to repeat the mistakes of the last thirty years just because some theoretician says "Gee, there ought to be supersymmetric partners near 70 TeV/c, because it would be so lame if there weren't." You aren't giving enough weight to the opportunity cost, and there are lots of areas of equally fundamental physics that are a lot cheaper and more promising.
For instance, a lurker sent me a link to this paper by G. O. Ludwig,
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(open access). I haven't gone through all the math, because that would probably take two weeks' work, but he purports to show that the rotation and luminosity curves of several galaxies can be reproduced by replacing the usual Newtonian model with one that takes GR effects (specifically gravitomagnetism) into account.
Nobody does galactic dynamics with the full GR formalism, because it's way too hard. Ludwig does a weak-field approximation that includes the leading-order GR effects, and comes up with a three-parameter model that seems to fit the observations very impressively without needing dark matter at all. (Whether that can extend to situations where the apparent excess mass appears displaced from the luminous galaxy, I don't know.)
We could also send a $20B probe to orbit aimlessly in the Solar System in hoping of finding something we have no reason to think is there. That would make about as much sense as a new collider at our present state of knowledge.
You could outfit quite a few caravels or Whitby colliers (Captain Cook's faves) for $20B. I'm all in favour of doing it.
I think the problem is that you don't like culture.
The LHC and LIGO are pushing technology harder and in more ways than the vaccine development.
The Oxford AstraZenica vaccine was independent of WarpSpeed. Its development started on 11th /January/ before the virus had a name. The first candidate was produced on 20th March, and the first human clinical trials started on 23rd April.
Warp Speed was merely announced on 15th May, so it was a latecomer to the party.
Note that I haven't attempted to defend any of those!
PTFE is fun. I think I had Tang /once/.
No, AWS does not do that. AWS is scale out of internet bandwidth and "embarrassingly parallel" independent computations.
High energy physics has always stress-tested high performance computation machinery.
Next waste is fusion. It will never deliver useful power and has serious radioactive contamination problems that will last for thousand of years. Go thorium. Essentially infnite supply. Walk-away safe, burns up existing nuclear waste. Doesn't need water and can be located anywhere it is needed, even in the desert.
Examples have already been built and ran without problems for years. No CO2 emissions. Thorium requires no processing - can be used as it is dug out of the ground. Works at atmospheric pressure and high temperature, ideal for conversion to electricity.
If part of the money spent on fusion were put into liquid thorium salt, every city could have their own supply and eliminate transmission losses, solar and wind farms, conventional coal, nuclear and gas plants, and still have enough power left over to feed the grid for other cities that have not converted yet or who never will.
China and other countries are going full steam on thorium. Research is restricted to 1 Megawatt or less in the US, so nothing is done.
Obama and Trump promised to do something but never did. Maybe nuclear and renewable lobbies killed it.
I'm all in favour of LIGO. That's a completely new observational window, assuming that their postprocessing isn't excessively strong, so that it generates reasonable-looking wrong answers. (There's been some indications that it might be, at various points, but I haven't kept up.)
But it isn't the new technology I'm talking about. (It's also got into the glue a bit lately.) Rapid development and deployment of mRNA vaccines is a potentially revolutionary technology.
A quixotic endeavour, that!
I didn't say that AWS does the exact same thing as the CERN data barns. Those are very impressive, I agree, but also very specialized to their precise task. If there were another application that needed that same capability, it could be built for that instead. Nothing special about HEP in that regard.
It's not like they're doing anything profitable like mining Bitcoin. ;)
We both sound like it - a frequent result of disagreement.
Of course there are other areas to explore. Probably a lot more than we know. Just like we discover things looking through telescopes we might discover things looking through "microscopes", let them finish what they started at CERN. At the very least a lot of tech must have been developed to make it feasible. Many years ago even I had a tiny touch to that, had built some coincidence box or something and got a midnight call at the firm in Cologne by the guys who were just starting their experiment and did not know how to setup the DIP switches inside. Luckily I work until 2-3 AM so I was there to take their call...
Oh come on, you know it is not the same thing.
Yeah, just like you don't like exploration. Come on.
Stop claiming that I said things I didn't say. Why do you keep doing that?
I'm a great fan of science, but giant accelerators and manned spaceflight are grossly inefficient version of science. They are more about politics and money than discovering things.
I've been suggesting that we could get MORE science and have better chances of discoveries if we managed the resources better.
You did not answer the question "how do we find out what protons can be broken into" if we spread the money on small units like you suggest. Answer that and I will answer your question.
This is your opinion. Mine is different.
Of course they are linked to politics being that big. How do you suggest to convince anyone we can put men on the moon, by telling them in a convincing voice "we can do that"?
I can agree with that as long as it does not involve killing the largest projects mankind has manage to get to. Nowadays science has advanced way beyond what you can do in the kitchen, and the further it advances the harder/costlier it is going to get to do new research.
No. But obviously being in nuclear spectrometry I feel closer to what they do than if I were doing something else.
There's nothing all that new about the vaccine technology. At least some of the vaccines had been worked up to deal with the SARS scare, and got minimally retooled to deal with Covid-19 aka SARS-2. And the pandemic wasn't all that unexpected - Trump may have dismantled the structures that the Obama administration had set up in anticipation of something like, but just mindless cheese-paring.
Theoreticians have always though that spinning theories was their particular scientific activity. Until you've got a theory, you can't come up with an experiment that might test it. let alone and estimate of the energy you need to run the experiment.
The search for dark matter doesn't involve high energies.
"Over the decades, teams of physicists set up ever larger targets, in the form of huge crystals and multi-ton vats of exotic liquids, hoping to catch the rare jiggle of an atom when a WIMP banged into it."
But it still depends on masks, which still seems to be written with an electron beam microfabricator, which does involve accelerating electrons (though not to a particularly higher speed - about c/10 when I was working on them).
So you cannot answer the question. Of course you know why you cannot. And you are against scientific research which you clearly know is our only way to understand that but you claim you are not against research. One of us is a liar indeed - and it is not me. Losing your temper only proves you know that, too.
Not so much a mistake as lamentable ignorance. There has been a lot of popular science stuff published about vaccine development over the past year, and Phil doesn't seem to have read any of it.
And will stay that way until somebody comes up with something interesting. Two of Einstein's four 1905 papers
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just took the idea of a single photon and discrete atoms seriously, and did something with each. Both were essentially philosophical steps.
Such as gravity
I've got it running on this computer. Haven't done anything much with it yet, but it looks promising.
You use relativistic electrons (not gammas) to generate a headlight effect on the (magnet-induced acceleration) radiative output. The result is very high brightness in few-keV X-rays from few-GeV electrons or positrons. You use UP the X-rays, you recycle the charges (for a few hours between refills).
I typically was using 7 keV X-ray beam generated from 4.5 GeV positron bunches.
So you generate low-energy gammas, cool. What's the benefit from using GeV electrons (which are very difficult to store in a ring, as you're no doubt aware) just to make keV gammas? The Argonne lab's 7-GeV electron storage ring is over a kilometer in circumference, so to make a practical litho tool, you must have very advanced magnet technology and a great deal of microwave power available to replace the losses to synchrotron radiation outside the wiggler region.
I'd be super interested in the details. What are the mask substrate and absorption layer, and what's the photoresist?
Ah, so you're an X-ray litho guy? Cool, sounds interesting. Do you have a publication we could look at?
Somehow I find it unlikely that argument carried much weight in getting the Large Hadron Collider funded.
And do get funded. More of them might get funded if we weren't spending as much on the Large Hadron Collider, but politicians are happier about coughing up lots of money for large. highly visible projects than they are about funding lots of smaller projects that never get their faces spread across the mass media.
That's an impressive bit of work, and if it is right (which strikes me as likely) it will be an impressive example of what you can do by taking your modelling seriously.
Not quite the same kind of project.
From your point of view.
But won't be able to get anything like as much money as you could get for a showier project.
There are quite few different cultures around, and some of them are distinctly unattractive.
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