Comment by mike-the-mikado a day ago
As someone who supports pure science research, I would be interested to understand if any of the discoveries of CERN (and related projects) in the last 50 years (say) have proved to have practical application.
(Specifically, "discoveries", not technology developed in support of the research)
It’s an interesting question. After all we were using electricity, batteries, electric motors, radios and telegraphs long before we ever discovered electrons and photons.
But discovering the electron was necessary for us to develop vacuum tubes. And developing quantum mechanics was necessary for developing transistors.
Think about the relative impact of the telegraph vs the vacuum tube.
When we do eventually find something to do with the W and Z bosons, it’s likely to look more like a transistor-level tech than an immediately practical tool like a lightbulb. But the second-order effects from whatever that new tech turns out to be, have the potential to be world-shattering.
Quantum Mechanics, protons, electrons... That's the theory of everyday matter. You don't need very special situations to see their effects. Understanding the underlying equations enabled us to do more with what we already have.
High energy stuff only exists unstably for fractions of seconds. I find the idea that any of Standard Model physics, nevermind beyond standard model physics, could lead to a technological advance like the transistor extremely unconvincing.
Technological advance and scientific advance sometimes align. But there is no law that the former by necessity follows from the former. The expectation that they do is an extrapolation from a very brief period of human history.
I don't know why you were getting down voted for this. Discovery during technological development of scientific instrumentation is one of the greatest returns on investment of funding pure science research. And like your sibling comment says, the pure science helps direct applied science, eg cutting edge materials science. Long tail, if for no other reason, because its a whole other development process that happens after the pure science.
> Not all types of fundamental research have the same potential for material benefits, or the same cost.
It is hard to gauge this is in advance though. If you were sure what you were gonna find, it wouldn't be much of a discovery. Historically it has sometimes been decades before manufacturing and practical applications caught up to frontier research. For an extreme example, mankind knew of electricity in some form for 2400 years before doing anything practical with it. If all the people who prodded at it instead thought "man I can't imagine what this could be useful for" and found something else to do with their time, we'd live in a very different world.
Our civilization can afford to aim higher than incremental improvements on pixel density for screens on which to spectate people kicking a ball around. Personally I find frontier discoveries to also have much greater entertainment value than sports events and will happily fund them with a tiny fraction of my tax dollars.
> It is hard to gauge this is in advance though. If you were sure what you were gonna find, it wouldn't be much of a discovery.
Virtually all previous particle discoveries were predicted, and then we built devices to find them, eg. the Higgs was predicted in the 1960s. There is no such motivation here. There is no theoretical or significant practical benefit for the FCC, it's basically a jobs program.
There is better frontier research that could use those funds for much better payoffs. For instance, just sticking with particle physics, Wakefield accelerators would be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper than the LHC while achieving the same energies. We've also never built a muon collider, and so that's largely unexplored territory.
We just don't need another radio frequency particle collider, we've reached the limits of what they can do within a reasonable research budget.
> Virtually all previous particle discoveries were predicted
That's not true at all. To give just few examples.
Electron was not predicted but Thomson found it during first fundamental particle discovered came from cathode‐ray experiments, not from a prior microscopic theory of matte. Remember this was during thr 19th century.
Another one is the muon discovered in 1936 which was detected as "heavy electron" in cosmic rays. it did not fit any clear theoretical need in nuclear physics at the time, leading Rabi to quip “Who ordered that?”
Heck there are many more examples that I will bypass the comment limits if I tried to list them (resonances in particular will be very numerous).
You can of course move the goal target by narrowing what you mean by particle but this is exactly why physicists try to define what they talk about before making an argument.
> There is no such motivation here. There is no theoretical or significant practical benefit for the FCC, it's basically a jobs program.
Really? There is a huge volume of the feasibility study about the physics program of FCC. Are you claiming that it is false. Have you even read it?
This kind of thing always reminds me G. H. Hardy, a mathematician that famously took pride in working on pure number theory, which he described as having "no practical use" and therefore being morally superior to applied mathematics connected to war or industry.
This ended up as the theoretical bedrock upon which modern encryption algorithms are built, enabling trillions of dollars of economic activity (as well as spying and other nefarious or ethically questionable activities).
I noticed (as have others) that even the purest of pure fundamental research has this oddly persistent pattern of becoming applied to everyday problems sooner or later.
The x-ray telescope mirror design used for Chandra -- motived only by pure intellectual curiosity -- ended up being a key development stepping stone towards ASML's TWINSCAN tools that use focused x-rays for chip lithography. Arguably this is more important to the global economy now that even oil is!
Similarly, particle accelerators like CERN might be the next chip lithography beam sources. The technologies being developed for research physicists such as laser-driven "desktop" accelerators might be just the ticket to replace tin droplet x-ray light sources.
Who knows?
We certainly won't if we don't built these things for pure research first to find out!
With that kind of fundamental science I would expect no practical applications but guidance for researchers that work on practical applications.
There are many ideas on how the universe works, right? Knowing which ideas are closer to the truth must be helpful to people who work on nano scale stuff, like chips so fine that quantum effect are considerable.
It must be somewhere between knowing if there's alien life or not AND knowing that atoms can be split at sub particles at will.
What actually happens is, smart people are isolated from the problems of the general population and work towards meaningless goals at the cost of the everyday tax payer doing unglamorous work to earn a living. Decoupling science from the state will also reduce the meaningless competition of academia that leads to the publish-or-perish and replication crises, because the people who will be doing it, will do it for the love of the game, regardless of social status and money.
If you want to live in this world, you have to trade your time and provide value to others. You shouldn't get a free pass because, just because you convinced yourself and the government that you're smarter than everyone else.
Agree this reminds me of the level my Herman Hesse “The Glass Bead Game”. Academics and researchers have a moral duty to give back to the larger society that enables their endeavors .
This makes no sense.
"Decoupling science from the state" is just bullshit from "government icky, taxation is theft" morons.
No, governments should definitely fund scientific research. When it is public it is the only guarantee that it will benefit everyone. Scientific research done by private entities is kneecapped by their financial interests (and be very sure they will bury any advance that jeopardize their financial interests).
How are radio telescopes and mars rovers in my interest? How would you know what is in my interest? I worked for my money so the person in the best position to judge what is in my interest is me. I am sorry for you if that is such a hard concept to understand.
> Knowing which ideas are closer to the truth must be helpful to people who work on nano scale stuff, like chips so fine that quantum effect are considerable.
Sorry, no. That's solid state physics on inter-atomic scales: tenths of nanometers, a handful of electronvolts. The LHC probes physics at the electroweak scale: hundreds of billions of electronvolts, billionths of nanometers. It has zero relevance to anything of practical use.
In a few cases and in a simplistic sense, yes. But the point of the comment you’re replying to still stands completely. Quantum tunneling is nothing exotic and we have plenty of devices exploiting the principle (e.g. tunnel diodes). It was basically fully understood the moment the Schrödinger equation appeared.
These accelerators are as large as they are to try and find mismatches between theory and experiment. And even then, we can explain virtually every experiment that the LHC has conducted. If we did find something unexpected with one of these colliders, it would only really apply to experiments made in the collider. Particle physics is irrelevant for everyday stuff since we already fully understand everything involved.
This is such a weasel question because you can keep saying whatever was new was "just technology" not pure discoveries.
No, there hasn't been any big "new physics" since the standard model in the 70s, everything has been refinement and specifics. You can't go to Walmart and buy something that couldn't exist unless we knew the precise mass of the top quark or the Higgs boson.
There have been a tremendous amount of developments and technologies that have come out of CERN with varying degrees of closeness to particle physics, but depending on who you're talking to, most of them don't count.
>(Specifically, "discoveries", not technology developed in support of the research)
Ok, but Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN when he created HTTP, HTML, etc.
The Internet through web browsers as you know it was created at CERN in order to enable scientific communication and collaboration.
I was hoping that someone would be able to point me to some practical technical advance enabled by discoveries or measurements at CERN (or similar establishments).
It seems plausible to me that better understanding of the properties the subatomic particles might enable some previously unexploited technology (e.g. in quantum computing or sensing).
Before your edit:
The world wide web: https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web
certain medical imaging: https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/medipix-partic...
grid computing advances: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00104...
PIMMS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4724719/
Medicis: https://home.cern/news/news/accelerators/cern-accelerates-me...
FLASH radiotherapy: https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/cern-chuv-and-...
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After your edit:
No, not yet, but those are long tail efforts. The technologies are the short term yield.