Posted on 11/26/2007 5:45:08 PM PST by curtisgardner
High-energy particle accelerators cost taxpayers large sums but stand little chance of discovering anything of practical value. Promoted as quests for understanding of the universe, particle accelerators serve mostly as job programs for physicists, postdocs, and politically connected laboratories and contractors. Yes, abstract experiments of bygone days produced great discoveries, and yes, the quest for abstract knowledge is inherent to human nature. But most experiments from the bygone golden age of physics were done at private expense, not using tax subsidies. Albert Michelson and Edward Morley did not demand that Ohio taxpayers provide them with a decade of luxury while they refined their ideas.
Privately funded atom-smashers would be perfectly fine -- unless one inadvertently transforms the Earth into "an inert hyperdense sphere about 100 meters across," as this book by British astronomer Martin Rees claims is possible. The problem is that today's particle accelerators operate by hitting up taxpayers for millions to billions of dollars -- money used mainly for career featherbedding among the people advocating the expenditure. Sure we'd like to know whether the Higgs boson exists. But why should we be taxed to find out? Pure knowledge is of value to civilization, and so is literature. If I demanded that physicists be taxed to subsidize the writing of my novels, physicists would be outraged. Yet the same group believes others should be taxed to subsidize their divertissements, to say nothing of their choice of restaurants.
Congress probably hands out money for particle accelerators because senators and representatives understand little of science and believe they are funding projects that will aid the national defense, improve nuclear power or result in some breakthrough such as warp drive. Attention, House and Senate: Particle-accelerator research focuses almost exclusively on the abstract question of why matters exists, which is a really fascinating question but is unrelated to practical knowledge, military affairs or global economics. Last winter, Congress added millions of dollars to the National Science Foundation budget for atom smashers. Statements by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress from both parties suggested they believe particle accelerators have something to do with international economic competitiveness. This only shows that the House and Senate have no idea what they are throwing money at -- a long-standing flaw of Congress.
The National Science Foundation budget for the fiscal year that just ended contained about $135 million in tax dollars to operate the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a facility to which federal taxpayers forcibly have contributed about $1.1 billion total. In the previous year, fiscal 2006, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider stayed in operation partly owing to private donations given by science patrons of their own free will. Congress won't stand for that! Now, Brookhaven researchers are once again in the business of reaching into your pocket. Watch out for heavy-handed lobbying demanding that taxpayers who are struggling to pay for health insurance nevertheless support the National Synchrotron Light Source, another toy Brookhaven wants, and the wonderfully named Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Va. Jefferson was known to love religious freedom, the horticulture of Virginia and public subsidies for data on quantum chromodynamics!
The cost of the Brookhaven and Jefferson initiatives will be chump change if backers of the proposed International Linear Collider get their way. Over the winter, ILC proponents estimated their underground maze of mysterious gizmos, plus associated labs and countless administrators' offices, could be built for about $15 billion. That's roughly the same as is already being spent on the Large Hadron Collider being completed in Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider is mainly a project of European governments; if built, the ILC would be funded mainly by the United States, China and Japan. Already, those who stand to profit from the $15 billion ILC are saying it is needed for international competition -- normally clear-headed technical journal Science recently devoted not one but two articles to echoing the specious special-favors lobbyists' pleading that unless the United States throws money, the Large Hadron Collider would "secure Europe's ascendancy in particle physics for years to come." The proposed International Linear Collider in the United States would do approximately the same thing as the nearly complete European system: Why does the world need two super-expensive tax-subsidized advanced accelerators when neither is likely to accomplish anything other than providing payroll checks for staff? Why, because if the Europeans are wasting $15 billion, we've got to show our national resolve by wasting $15 billion, too! We can't let the French get all the credit for accidentally crushing the Earth into an inert hyperdense pinpoint!
The superconducting magnets of Europe's 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider, near Lake Geneva, are scheduled to turn on in 2008, and we can hope that a sizable chunk of the France-Switzerland border does not dematerialize at that instant. The goal of the Large Hadron Collider is to slam together beams of protons traveling in opposite directions at roughly 99 percent of the speed of light: It is assumed the collision will simulate the subatomic energy levels that existed during the Big Bang. Europe's Large Hadron Collider is circular, and veering around in a circle slightly limits the top speed of protons. America's proposed International Linear Collider would have its mysterious gizmos in a straight line and thus be able to accelerate protons slightly closer to the speed of light, coming slightly closer to approximating the assumed conditions of the assumed Big Bang. A straight-line setup with slightly more speed is the main difference between the proposed International Linear Collider and the nearly finished Large Hadron Collider. Set aside whether $15 billion should forcibly be removed from taxpayers' pockets in order to cause proton beams to move a bit faster. Are we really sure it is history's greatest idea to be re-creating the conditions that existed when the universe exploded?
Assume the Big Bang was how it all began. During this event, vast amounts of matter and radiation materialized from nowhere, the light-speed barrier was broken, space became curved, matter-antimatter annihilation destroyed millions of times the mass of the present universe, and other fairly wild stuff happened. A localized Big Bang Lite caused by a particle accelerator is unlikely, but why are we going out of our way to engage the risk? Given that very expensive particle accelerators have little chance of ever producing social benefits, Western governments appear to be building these devices solely to stop physicists from complaining about the level of tax subsidies they receive. Is this really a sound public-policy reason to engage a risk of calamity?
Physics featherbedding note: Normally clear-headed Science magazine, flagship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, last winter ran an article on why physicists privately are hoping the new ultraexpensive atom smashers won't find the ultimate elementary particle, the very thing they are designed to find. Wait -- they are hoping the $30 billion worth of projects will fail? Here's the reasoning: If the machines actually do discover what causes matter, how will science lobbyists justify billions more euros and dollars for additional atom-smasher subsidies in the future? Science wrote with a straight face, "Many particle physicists say their greatest fear is that this grand new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, will spot the Higgs boson and nothing else. If so, particle physics could grind to a halt." If the mystery of matter is solved, how could taxpayers be compelled to continue paying the restaurant tabs of physicists! Come on American Association for the Advancement of Science, you assert rationalism, so it would be nice if you took a detached, rational view of the financial self-interests of science.
Search note: The above link to Rees' book is from the Google Library Project, which I once opposed but now support. The project allows anyone to scan the text of books. In theory, you can use Google Library to read entire copyrighted books without the author receiving a royalty, which is why I initially opposed the effort. But realistically, who's going to read an entire book in a computer browser pane? I've switched over to thinking Google Library is a good idea because it might raise enthusiasm about books and increase sales. Here, you can browse my 2002 novel "The Here and Now," which has nothing to do with sports, space aliens or cheerleaders. "The Here and Now" got rave reviews in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times -- and barely sold 2,000 copies. Maybe Google Library will help revive it.
Not if the road leads out of Boston...
As a physicist, I have never met a secular or religious peer who has said this about evolution, ever. And I have discussed the topic widely, at universities and at national laboratories.
As for the Higgs boson, it's understandable that some physicists would express the desire not to find it--or rather, to find that it doesn't exist. The purpose of any experiment is not to verify a theory, but to disprove it, if it can. If the Higgs is found, it's a long-expected event, an anticlimax. If no Higgs is found, it means our theories are spectacularly wrong, and that there are undreamt-of vistas of physics waiting to be explored.
I’ve sometimes wondered about the obvious. Why not find a suitable underground location or set of locations in which to set off fusion explosions, and tap the resulting heat. And as a bonus we get to keep up to the minute with nuclear weapon research....
Perhaps the difference is that physics specialists tend to see all other sciences as ‘more soft science’ than physics? Math specialists tend to think physics is “softer’ than pure math, though the more theoretical realms of both tend to be somewhat “detached”, shall we say?
Most scientists seem to consider the soft sciences like psych and sociology as “all soft, no science’.
Physicists might not live a cushy existence, but it might be just the life they desire. Should they be funded on the public dime? Can you make a case that HEP deserves the billions of taxpayer money that it receives, without using the argument that many other unquestionably wasted billions are also spent on other things?
Not if the road leads out of Boston...
Depends on which side of the city limits you are on, methinks. (8^D)
Yes, but to do a proper job of it would take more time than I have.
Instead I'll leave you with one thought: by my calculations, sometime in 1997 the additional wealth created by ONE spin-off technology of high-energy physics--the World Wide Web you are using now--became larger than the amount of money spent by the human race on the entire science of high-energy physics up to that point in time. (And it has exponentially diverged since then.) The science has paid its mortgage in full; the rest is gravy, and you're welcome.
(Many more arrows in that quiver.)
Bingo. The Apollo program didn't pay out by getting us to the moon. It payed out by learning everything needed to get there, which could then be applied to all sorts of things.
No, it simply means that no Higgs was found. Perhaps that is because it doesn't exist. Perhaps it is because the $15B tool didn't work as anticipated. Either way, you can't prove a negative.
Good enough. Thanks.
If no Higgs is found, it means our theories are spectacularly wrong, and that there are undreamt-of vistas of physics waiting to be explored.
No, it simply means that no Higgs was found. Perhaps that is because it doesn't exist. Perhaps it is because the $15B tool didn't work as anticipated. Either way, you can't prove a negative.
I stand by my statement. According to the theory, the Higgs particle spectrum should not only be observable by the LHC, but should be obvious. As for the LHC not working, either it's colliding protons, or it isn't. If it isn't colliding protons, or the detectors aren't reconstructing the collisions, nobody will draw any physics conclusions from that. The machine might fail in many ways, sure, but there's no way for the machine to fail such that the only symptom would be that the Higgs particle is missing.
If the LHC is colliding protons at the specified (and easily measured) energy, either the Higgs particles are evident, or they're not. If they're not evident, it means that either they don't exist, or they're much rarer than thought, or they're hidden in the data somehow, but in any of these cases, the theory is still wrong.
The LHC is as close to guaranteed discovery as science gets.
I know that it fulfills the practical purposes, and eliminates a massive range of other possibilities, but I find it irksome when anyone claims they can prove something doesn't happen or isn't there. The best that can ever be done is to prove that you did not observe it or it did not happen as anticipated.
Personally, I think the failure to take into account the effect of the ether on the phlogiston is going to skew the results. ;^)
That's true, but I'm not saying that if they don't find the Higgs, it doesn't exist. I'm saying that if they don't find the Higgs, the theory is wrong.
The danger, in fact, is not that they'll miss an existing Higgs particle, but rather the other way around: it has been said (by Chris Quigg) that the LHC will discover the Higgs whether it exists or not! If you simply erase the Higgs particle from the theory by fiat, it causes the W particles to become strongly interacting, forming a bound state (called a "technirho") that experimentally behaves very much like a Higgs particle, and which indeed plays a very similar role in breaking the electroweak symmetry.
Measurement difficulties (and recovery/salvage of the measurement devices) is just one of the “practical” problems that prevent this approach.
A fusion bomb of course is immensely destructive, and produces a wide variety of particles from the instigating explosion (typically a fission bomb), then more debris and partial particles from the compressed secondary bomb (the hydrogen bomb itself), plus “junk” from the Lithium, tritium, and other internals. All of this stuff is being blown out in random directions away from the bomb.
Plus instantaneous heat and light and blast forces - as you noted.
For physics research you need many minutes of observation of specific energy level particles coming from a known direction - then you “sort” through the many images to find the ones that tell you something. (Kind of like colliding two trucks and looking for the pistons and bearings and fragments of engine castings.) If the detectors only have a few microseconds before they themselves are destroyed, then you have very little chance of finding the reaction you need.
You must have controlled high energy reactions in front of the detectors to that, so using fusion bombs will create heat and light, but not (unfortunately) usable research.
Thanks to all contibutors. Thread more interesting than article BUMP!
Music to read this thread by...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVpLLmD98os
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