To be fair to the scientific community, one more collider is probably more valuable to society than the equivalent cost of bombs and military equipment
Also, we did find the higgs-boson.
Yeah, people really focus on the fact that we don’t evidence for very exotic theories and completely ignore the LHC finally got experimental confirmation of the particle that gives mass to other particles within the standard model. (I guess Higgs mechanism technically wasn’t part of the standard model prior to experimental confirmation but styll)
disproving things is much more fundamental to the scientific process than actually confirming things. Confirming things is a bizarre byproduct, a happy accident. We must foster a culture that celebrates a killed hypothesis more than a confirmed one.
Something was disproven here, the null hypothesis of “the standard model without the higgs mechanism is sufficient to explain all known physical phenomena”.
the improvement to my life since this discovery is unquantifiable
Oh no, not fundamental science that cannot immediately be capitalised on!
Seriously, why do substantial parts of this forum immediately turn anprim the moment fundamental physics research is concerned?
The scientists should just focus on hard science like media analysis video essays on Rick and Morty
smol brain no understand make angry
I don’t think it’s wrong to see poverty and equality as a priority over that, if I’m honest. It shouldn’t be that surprising that people have an issue with billions of dollars being spent on things not currently improving lives when there are people living like hell.
But that’s entirely a problem of distribution of goods stemming from the predominant mode of economic organisation. Not building a larger particle collider would solve exactly zero problems which stem from capitalist distribution of goods and resulting artificial scarcity.
Sure. But that doesn’t change people being upset that this is prioritised over living standards and lifestyles. People want that solved first and that’s a perfectly ok emotion to be having that shouldn’t be chastised.
The thing to push is that with capitalism is that they would rather fund this than feed and house people, because not feeding people is the point, by design. Even if this is unprofitable, it’s still a thing they’d prefer to spend on than feed or house people.
Is there a world in which clearing land of animals, people, etc to make room for mines, extracting tons of ore from the ground, shipping(very harmful in and of itself in this society) it to a second place (cleared, etc) to be forged (at high temperatures requiring some energy source shipped from a third place (cleared etc)) and then shipping it to a fourth place (cleared, etc) to be built into a giant energy-consumer for perpetuity won’t be harmful?
In a leftist utopia we wouldn’t prioritize either because we’d do both. In a transitory state we could do plenty of both (see China), and the cost of this project is not large relative to national projects like housing, education (which this is part of anyway), or healthcare for all. In our current capitalist hellscape shutting this type of research down would reduce no poverty and win no allies.
We’re always going to allocate resources to projects that do not address the most basic of needs. Criticism of that comes from a much better place than reactionaries yelling “you can’t complain about being poor unless you live like a monk,” but you can make all the same arguments against it.
because its hard to see any value in fundamental physics research when we can’t even figure out how to live on this planet in a sustainable way that doesn’t involve killing hundreds of millions of people and destroying vast parts of its ecosystem and exterminating half+ of all species on earth?
The scientests doing this research have been screaming at the top of their lungs how we could live sustainably for 6 decades.
“Scientific research is a waste because capitalism exists” is up there with “why should I have to use paper straws when billionaires have private planes” level take
For real lol, just wild behavior to be honest
if we can manage that, though, it would be kinda useful to already have a head-start on the particle colliding. More practically, the absolute peak of money for the sciences is a drop in the bucket compared to heavy industry, which is were most of the sustainability work needs to be done.
This is literally chuds argument for defunding nasa.
“I dont understand it so it’s worthless to me”
the difference is with nasa we can name dozens of advancements that help people off the top of our heads but i cant even get someone to name something theoretical that might help the common man from the confirmation of the higgs-boson
so, maybe help out with that, what theoretically can we hope that we might improve our lives through confirming that particle
additionally chuds want to defund nasa to fund the military and prisons whereas id use the money from that particle thing to house homeless or invest in indigenous communities
so in short suck it nerd because it is in fact worthless to me, personally
Although I’m highly sympathetic to this argument until we have much better material conditions in socialism, I think your argument misses a significant dialectical process which must be taken into account and a reason that fundamental research is still necessary and good most of the time. Namely, the quantity -> quality relation. Fundamental research seems to have little effect until it’s quantity reaches a threshold where it becomes obvious how it can be used and what sort of benefits there will be in using it, whereupon the quality of that research shifts to no longer being called “fundamental research” and becomes now its own field of research or applied research. Finding where these will appear is a difficult, though hopefully possible, endeavor.
If you argument is that fundamental research in particles will never result in that shift, I’m excited to hear how you reasoned that no contradiction/drive in the dialectics of nature found by colliders will be useful to our material conditions. I suspect you may be right but don’t think I’m one who could possibly credibly say so, and therefore don’t claim that it’s useless.
If your argument is that fundamental research is too far away from results to make such decisions, i would really like to hear how we measure and understand this, because it feels like you know more about the threshold than me.
If your argument is that we should not focus on that when problems exist now: this is true, but can we possibly even call this focus? The money is miniscule in relation to the huge sums elsewhere and your focus on this is the real problem. You’re then not necessarily wrong, but you’re not fighting the most important fights.
The study of molecules was fruitful once chemical relations started being understood and used and resulted in some people “wasting time” on studying atoms. Those theories were useless except to probe what chemicists were doing already. Until the understanding reached a point that its exploitation became possible. Then the researchers were doing a science to utilize the energy of those atoms beyond the point where chemistry could apply as a framework. When this will occur again I don’t dare claim.
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I’m not the original person you responded to, I just found your reasoning incorrect in asking for “ways it’ll help” as if that concrete answer can be given easily without deep expertise. Or even as if that can be said concretely. It’s missing the way the dialectical movement from quantity to quality works. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a hundred years, fundamental research into the particles instead finds a contradiction in the way we understand them which can be exploited for energy. We have many precedents for that at every major “level” above that.
i cant even get someone to name something theoretical that might help the common man from the confirmation of the higgs-boson
This is the type of research that can advance more immediate research into non-fossil fuel energy.
specifically, how?
Earlier versions of this same science helped us understand the theory behind nuclear power, then eventually engineer nuclear reactors. Neither of us know enough about physics to do much beyond extending that analogy into the future.
Have we? Have you seen one? I don’t know who these higgs and boson characters are but I find this “particle” of theirs extremely sus
These particles are… Among us
I was going tonsay are we arguing this is a bad thing?
This seems like a better use of money than 95% of America’s budget.
We’re not actually against scientific research are we?
As someone with a science background I think that this is exactly the type of project that humanity should engage in. Major public works like housing, healthcare, and food for all are critical to the body of a socialist future, but these big ambitious scientific endeavors are critical to the soul of a socialist future.
But, as someone with a making jokes background, this post is funny as shit and an A++ meme.
If it were up to me hard sciences could only get funding if soft sciences thought they deserved it. I want physicists to have to woo anthropologists.
anthropologists 🤢🤮
fuck you
Lol k
why?
Where are the raw materials (including energy!) for this project coming from? Are the miners in the global south or the indigenous peoples pushed off their lands not harmed by the constantly increasing demand for materials academics present? Will these people see any benefit, in their or their childrens’ lifetimes? Do the bourgeois, the mining and metalworking companies and all their friends, not make massive amounts of money selling these materials? Are the carbon emissions and environmental destruction not worth preventing?
The people will die mining the materials, the materials will be sold for pennies to the west, and the west will create next generation bombs to kill the miners’ children. And you will pay for it. I fucking love science!!
yeah biden is conjuring 5x this amount from the ether for some emergency bombs spending request. build ten of these things I don’t give a fuck. this has nothing to do with people being unhoused and us squandering limited resources on I Fucking Love Science bait, those people being unhoused is a policy decision and we shouldn’t wrangle over scraps for good things. honestly even if the particle collider finds nothing at least we will have paid for thousands of brilliant young people to do what they love for $30k/year for a decade, and that’s what civilization is all about baby
we shouldn’t wrangle over scraps for good things
Really sums it up
- No profit motive
- No immediate application to weapons manufacturing
- Cutting edge state-of-the-art science
- Foster international collaboration
- Help us understand the true nature of our universe
- Creates both blue collar jobs (electrician, mechanical engineering) as well as train future experimental physicists
What’s the downside again?
Maybe the particles don’t want to be found.
Maybe they act like a particle when observed because you’re rudely staring at them. Ever think about that science pervert
the particles be looking like your pfp when observed
Yes! And you also pissed off my cat!
physicists are annoying, trust me
but I’m a physicist
Sorry
we mjght prove strjng theory wrong
edjt: j js better than i
Fuck string theory. All my homeless hate string theory
That would require it to be testable.
It is we just need an even bigger collider
Extraction of raw material from the global south, the dispossession of indigenous peoples in those areas and ecocide that it’s all premised on come to mind.
Also of course the unequal exchange between the global south and north to create the superprofits funding the blue collar job-haver’s salary and benefits.
Academic science (not all science; empirical investigation good) is bourgeois. Its goal is constant growth of its industry, with little to no regard for the consequences (which are always displaced as far away from the scientist as possible). All of this is justified with an unproven faith that it will eventually be beneficial for the people whose land is dug up for the metals for the neat machines scientists play with.
You are describing modern technology in general. The amount of nickel or other REE (rare earth element) used in smartphones, laptops, cars, trains, airplanes, wind turbines, infrastructure grid, etc. needed to sustain modern capitalism far outweigh the amount of REE used to build once in 25 years one-off machine with zero commercial value (but of high cultural and scientific value).
I take your point that academia is a bourgeois institution where a few people in cushy tenured position benefit from bulk of labor done by postdocs, adjuncts, and grad students who are severely underpaid relative to their skillset and contribution. But something like the LHC and other large scale experimental science (think of NOAA and NASA satellites) will not be maintained by academic professors in ivory towers who benefit from broken academia system, it’ll mostly maintained by highly capable technical staffs (PRAs - professional research assistant) who are required to make project ‘werks’ and compensated fairly relative to their technical skill.
Governmental research institutions like NASA, NOAA in the US, ANSTO and CSIRO in Australia, the national labs in Livermore, Los Alamos, and their equivalent EU institutions like CERN ran by professional research staffs on “normal” government worker salaries and contracts are way more equal, less stratified, and less exploitative to the academic workers than the “ivory tower” academic university system.
nasa trivia
- the shuttle was designed to dod rather than civilian requirements because funding was contingent on launching space assets for the us military
- nasa flew ten classified shuttle missions for the dod, including one where they waived safety rules and launched north to put a keyhole spy satellite in an unusually inclined orbit. the same contractor that (probably) made the mirror for that satellite also made the hubble backup mirror
- radar satellites for topographical and oceanographical research were funded in part with the promise of collaboration with the us military to improve ballistic missile targeting
- eight apollo service modules flew classified cameras on loan from dod
- nasa collaborated with dod to maintain a cover story that the u2 was a nasa test aircraft when actually it was being used to obtain military intelligence on the soviet union
ran by professional research staffs on “normal” government worker salaries and contracts are way more equal, less stratified, and less exploitative to the academic workers than the “ivory tower” academic university system
the only good PMC is a…well, you know!
the only good PMC is a…well, you know!
Is this another one of those things where PMC isn’t real working class because they don’t have the right aesthetic?
You are describing modern technology in general
Yes, based on our resource consumption we need to radically restructure our entire society to be more ecological. Not sure what your point is; i would like extraction for all those other purposes reduced and minimized also because what we’re doing rn isn’t sustainable. Marx was fairly clear on this
it’ll mostly maintained by highly capable technical staffs
I addressed this in my original reply; “Also of course the unequal exchange between the global south and north to create the superprofits funding the blue collar job-haver’s salary and benefits.” I don’t think it’s inherently good that more technical jobs are opened up in the imperial core
Governmental research institutions
Friend you seem to have entirely missed the meaning of ‘academia is bourgeois’. I said: “Its goal is constant growth of its industry, with little to no regard for the consequences (which are always displaced as far away from the scientist as possible). All of this is justified with an unproven faith that it will eventually be beneficial for the people whose land is dug up for the metals for the neat machines scientists play with.”. I did not mention anything about the stratification of academic jobs, and governmental research institutions clearly fall into academic science as I defined it.
Critical support for CERN in their quest to disposess swiss farmers of their land.
Creates both blue collar jobs (electrician, mechanical engineering) as well as train future experimental physicists
Unless you’re the people producing the materials to be assembled in the west
No profit motive
PMC careerism and grant applications are free!!! lol
No immediate application to weapons manufacturing
“immediate” lol, lmao
Creates both blue collar jobs
(Liz Warren Reaganite jerking off motion)
Everything has a non immediate application to weapons manufacturing. Should doctors not exist because they reduce imperialist deaths??
Yes and we should ban scientific research because they’re bourgeois nerds
Death to four eyes
They have bug eyes
This is funny but also each new collider has done more for physics than any new lane has ever done for traffic.
i don’t even care if they don’t find anything, I just want them to dig a big ring under switzerland
nah give the german bits to the italians germany is already too big
They’re both wrong.
Just make Austria longer, they’re already good at mountains, having an archaic gov’t, and not having coasts.
of course, the “zweihänder austria” project
Make Austria the westernmost part of German speaking Europe, like how occupied Northern Ireland doesn’t reach as far North as Free Ireland
Why is it ostria and not sudria or mittlria anyway?
Don’t know why these nerds need to build high speed colliders when I can just point two flashlights towards each other and turn them on.
Don’t cross the streams.
Be careful
hell if this one actually has the chance to finally create a black hole and destroys earth im all for it
A stable black hole to destroy the Earth
An instable black hole for the fraction of a second in the middle of europe
Build it on TERF Island. BREXIT MEANS BREXIT, GOD DAMN IT!
Sea levels fixed with one weird trick.
Large Terf Collider
(Un)fortunately, any theoretical black holes created by a particle accelerator will evaporate via Hawking radiation nigh-instantaneously and be functionally undetectable even if they did stick around. It could probably shoot straight through your heart and you’d be completely unaware and healthy afterwards.
This is just a miss so I hope its just a meme. Pretty sure if it was a Chinese project the reaction would be exactly the opposite.
Anyway money is fake and doesn’t matter anyway. In the US case It isn’t a zero sum game, its not like money from say education is going to the military. The actual fact is they don’t want to spend it on those things. The US government can afford an essentially unlimited budget. The reasons things don’t get done are entirely ideological period.
At the end of the day, if you had the power to say, reduce the US military budget substantially and actually invest in the public good then you obviously already won the class war and the US is no longer ruled by capitalist class interests. In that case, sure go ahead and bean count, otherwise it really doesn’t matter. The alternative is to pretend the US is some liberal/sucdem shit country that must have a balanced budget, “oh noes money going to random stupid science project is money not going to public healthcare”. No that is not how it works at all, that is liberal/neoliberal economics shit.
These science projects are important IMO because quite literally nobody else would do them otherwise. Heck I would even say its one of the very few good things the US and co actualy do for humanity.
idk why we’re talking about the us since cern is mainly funded by western europe but anyway,
“oh noes money going to random stupid science project is money not going to public healthcare”. No that is not how it works at all, that is liberal/neoliberal economics shit.
the us federal budget goes to:
- contracts awarded to industry/military interests who have enough influence one way or other to sell themselves as a national priority or a job creator etc (e.g. building random stupid science project, or just roads or whatever)
- sops to the proletariat to keep us passive
so how do these things stay at the levels they do, instead of e.g. zero social spending or another $100 billion of military spending or transcontinental hsr? it’s reductive to say that they simply don’t want to spend more, there’s a dialectical interplay between opposing forces. mainly no bourgeois ever wants to pay taxes to benefit another unless they receive at least roughly equal benefits back from the system, and this equilibrium only holds up to some point where most segments can still make a profit organically since their capital can’t expand only (or at all) off tribute. the lowest segments (i.e. reactionary petty bourgeois) see relatively less direct benefit from spending relative to the taxes they pay and this is where you find the social basis of fiscal conservatism. fiscal hawks are false friends bc they’re so compromised by industrial capital that they generally try to rip the throat out of social programs first, but they do have an interest in lowering personal taxes (more take home pay means they have to pay their employees less) and especially in keeping bank capital circulating to provide them cheap credit (as opposed to being parked in treasuries to finance the federal deficit) - so when some porkbarrel contract is excessively enriching one slice of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the rest, they’re politically well positioned to go after it. big bourgeois move the needle less bc they’re so integrated with financial capital that they see benefit on either end anyway - e.g. food stamps cost money but they own shares of the grocery store etc
all this is to say that there is a tug and pull regulating taxation. some bourgeois want it higher bc they stand to benefit, some want it lower bc they don’t, others don’t mind either way. effective tax rates move up and down over time as the opposing pressures continually balance out. the poors are powerless in all of this up to the point that we can reproduce our labor power, but it should be obvious to at least say that we benefit when taxes are lower assuming that social spending doesn’t fall faster than net pay raises. in other words, it does help when they cut some useless spending that doesn’t benefit us, because that whets the appetite of some other bourgeois that would be putting upward pressure on taxation otherwise
(the mmt-brained counterargument you made, that money is fake and taxation doesn’t matter because the government can spend whatever it wants, only makes sense in this context if you forget that money is a claim on finite productive capacity in the first place. the state can either fund the budget directly with taxes, or it can print money and effectively “flat tax” everyone exposed to the currency through devaluation, or it can take on debt and withdraw money that would otherwise be putting downward pressure on interest rates. no matter what way you slice it the above inner connections between the forces at play are unchanged from what I described above)
so that all leaves us with an easy formula for telling if something is a worthwhile spending item: does it benefit us, i.e. as a class, or does it not?
These science projects are important IMO because quite literally nobody else would do them otherwise.
this still leaves the question open: does it benefit us, or not? you could just as well say that it’s important to build a giant snow globe around alaska bc nobody else would do it otherwise
Equatorial collider or bust.
Dyson sphere you coward
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Everyone here is missing the point that this would give every existing particle physicist 15 new 600 - coauthored papers. Think of the CV lines. Cosmic inflation has nothing on this.
EQUATORIAL COLLIDER WHEN?!?!?!
spoiler
on JUPITER
we’re just 5 years away from making string theory work bro trust me
edit: actually i probably shouldn’t lump particle physicists with string theorists
actually i probably shouldn’t lump particle physicists with string theorists
No, definitely do it, it’s hilarious
String theory is literally this meme but instead it’s “just ten more years bro. Ten more years and we can prove it” for like the last 30 years
yeah that’s why I made this comment. But at least particle physics produced some actual results
ITT: the redditor class composition of Hexbear is revealed (we already knew that!)
hexfront when 99% of global gdp is being used to build the torment nexus for the postdoc-youtuber industrial complex: this is nothing compared to the money we’re still spending to lock up the child slaves
building another collider is very silly imo. super cern would make sense if the ship hadn’t so thoroughly sailed on supersymmetry, but it sort of has, so it’s hard to see why such an undertaking would be worthwhile. The LHC has done a lot for less fundamental physics, but in terms of the Higgs, that’s kind of the only huge thing that the LHC has discovered. and the higgs is important, but not nearly as important as people make it out to be. the higgs field gives rise to the bare masses of particles, but most of the mass in the universe is actually held in the binding energy of quarks and gluons.
but in terms of the Higgs, that’s kind of the only huge thing that the LHC has discovered
Oh no the only huge thing the scientific project discovered is the thing it was built with the explicit intention of discovering, what a waste.
i don’t really mean to engage in much lhc bashing, i think it’s been a great success undoubtedly. but it was built on the promise of doing the higgs plus much much more, and i think for many, the much much more never materialized.
I worked on some SUSY models last decade and the LHC limits were a pretty big blow to everyone’s motivation, mine included. Maybe we find something at the next energy frontier, but there’s not a compelling reason to go there yet. One could say that it would be good to measure Higgs parameters, but we could also do that with an electron collider at the Higgs resonance for likely a lower cost. It’s a mess
who need they SUSSY ate
omg me
and the higgs is important, but not nearly as important as people make it out to be
well and exiting science brain for a second there’s the like human question of the cognitive dissonance of burning so much surplus on investigating mass generation models while so many people are hungry or unhoused or suffering from lack of access to basic medicines or clean water 😵💫
If you think money being diverted from scientific research would go to any of those things I have a bridge to sell you and all the profits will go to access to basic medicine and clean water.
describing it as putting some stolen-anyway surplus to better use sounds great but when that better use is just first-world phds getting their field coupling research funded there isn’t exactly a compelling case to frame it that way. does the research benefit the people paying for it or not? if I were a hungry peasant farmer and louis xiv strolled out into the fields and tried to persuade us that master sculptors chiseling marble for the enjoyment of his court would be a better use for the money than more campaigns in spain or whatever because advancing the arts is fundamentally good for all of humanity, I’d be crouched behind an oxcart with my phone frantically searching youtube for pitchfork sharpening tutorials
no i completely agree, i just didn’t want to kill the vibe. that’s the real main issue with building a big new collider. shit’s insanely, obscenely, mindbogglingly expensive. even just in terms of similar science, the cost to science ratio is absolute dogshit. even if it were worthwhile to continue spending large large amounts of money on fundamental physics research, colliders are objectively not a promising path to explore right now.
Maybe this time we can cross into a worldline that doesn’t suck
We’ll end up in a worldline without IBM
Tuturuuu
