60 minutes: LHC

[dannyf]

I saw the 60 minutes piece on the large hadron collider and failed to understand its motivation. decades of construction, countless of human capital, 100MW+ electric consumption, $10bn of costs, and what it has to show for? nothing. what it has proven is the standard model which is known to be faulty. no evidence for super-symmetry, which would have been cool.

I think the US decision of abandoning the supercollider looks smart, in spite of the sunk cost.

[hamster_nz]

That's a shame you feel this way.

Given that this big science project is < 2% of the annual US military budget, And the US DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of electricity.

I think that LHC is a pretty good project - it may be the only chance ever to muster the resources to probe the universe at such small scales.

 

[magetoo]

what it has proven is the standard model which is known to be faulty. no evidence for super-symmetry, which would have been cool.

If they'd just built a time machine instead all of this wasted effort could have been avoided.

[XOIIO]

That's a shame you feel this way.

Given that this big science project is < 2% of the annual US military budget, And the US DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of electricity.

I think that LHC is a pretty good project - it may be the only chance ever to muster the resources to probe the universe at such small scales.

 

No kidding, people think things like this and NASA are/were a waste of money but it is nothing compared to the amount the us government spends to blow up brown people.

(not just brown people, I was watching some George Carlin recently though lol)

Besides, who is to say that as other areas of tech advance we can't go back to this if needed for something, then we won't have to wait for it to be built, it will already be there.

[bitslice]

it is nothing compared to the amount the us government spends to blow up brown people.

And that's $13 Trillion that we are never going to get back 
Had we known that they'd happily kill themselves over a goat wearing lipstick, then we could have stayed home that year.

$10bn of costs

That's the entire build cost, meanwhile the world spends $7 billion on Hello Kitty merchandise every single year.
Without thinking too hard about it I'd say the LHC was more of a benefit to mankind than a cartoon cat.

I don't care if they find anything, I just see a lot of clever people getting funded every year. On the basis that stupid people aren't worth squat to humanity, then at least one organisation has got its priorities right for a change.

[dannyf]

If they'd just built a time machine instead all of this wasted effort could have been avoided.

$30bn is no small change, even for me,

the US did contribute meaningfully to LHC. vs. spending their own money, that contribution looks to be fairly good investment: the us still dominates in high energy physics, in spite of not having the supercollider.

[zapta]

Back to the topic, what was the return so far in new scientific knowledge?

[KE5FX]

Back to the topic, what was the return so far in new scientific knowledge?

Negative results (beyond the initial verification of the existence and nature of the Higgs boson) are still useful results. 

I would expect it to be necessary to explain that to the general TV audience watching '60 Minutes,' but not so much here.

Some older folks may remember that the principles behind useful devices from the transistor to the laser were abstract and irrelevant for decades, right up until they suddenly weren't.  Failure to continue investigating the fundamental nature of physical law amounts to eating our own seed corn.

[zapta]

Back to the topic, what was the return so far in new scientific knowledge?

Negative results (beyond the initial verification of the existence and nature of the Higgs boson) are still useful results. 

Can you articulate a few of those LHC negative results or is it just an abstract principle.

[AntiProtonBoy]

I saw the 60 minutes piece on the large hadron collider and failed to understand its motivation. decades of construction, countless of human capital, 100MW+ electric consumption, $10bn of costs, and what it has to show for? nothing. what it has proven is the standard model which is known to be faulty. no evidence for super-symmetry, which would have been cool.

I think the US decision of abandoning the supercollider looks smart, in spite of the sunk cost.

Are you kidding? Learning that the Higgs phenomena is real, and related to condensed-matter physics (an analog of superconductivity of metals) is huge.

Physics is not a bout doing experiments to meet your expectations, it's about trying to find out what's out there.

Not only that, the spin-off technologies emerging from large scale projects like these benefits society. We have the internet, courtesy of CERN.

[dannyf]

'We have the internet, courtesy of CERN.'

Wait a minute. Are you saying all these years Mr. Gore has been lying to us when he said that he invented the internet?

Seriously, the internet is so huge is it conceivable that CERN didn't in fact invent all and every piece of it but just parts of it?

If so, which parts did CERN in fact invent?

[KE5FX]

'We have the internet, courtesy of CERN.'

Wait a minute. Are you saying all these years Mr. Gore has been lying to us when he said that he invented the internet?

Seriously, the internet is so huge is it conceivable that CERN didn't in fact invent all and every piece of it but just parts of it?

If so, which parts did CERN in fact invent?

CERN didn't "invent the Internet," per se, but we have HTML and the WWW because Tim Berners-Lee was working on the team charged with organizing scientific collaboration on large-scale projects like the upcoming LHC. 

When Kennedy said, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills," he could have been speaking literally about CERN's influence on the early Web.

[KE5FX]

Can you articulate a few of those LHC negative results or is it just an abstract principle.

What comes to mind specifically is their recent failure to replicate the signal they (thought they) saw in December 2015. 

I believe it's a good thing to have a lot of smart people in one place, with their purposes aligned, observing and thinking about this stuff.  Especially now that we no longer have a Bell Labs-scale research establishment that can afford to look more than five or ten years down the road.  If these people weren't working on the LHC, they'd just be trying to come up with newer and better ways to sell ads.

[XOIIO]

Can you articulate a few of those LHC negative results or is it just an abstract principle.

What comes to mind specifically is their recent failure to replicate the signal they (thought they) saw in December 2015. 

I believe it's a good thing to have a lot of smart people in one place, with their purposes aligned, observing and thinking about this stuff.  Especially now that we no longer have a Bell Labs-scale research establishment that can afford to look more than five or ten years down the road.  If these people weren't working on the LHC, they'd just be trying to come up with newer and better ways to sell ads.

Sell ads, or kill people.

[helius]

If these people weren't working on the LHC, they'd just be trying to come up with newer and better ways to sell ads.

And five minutes ago you were saying how great it was to invent the WWW 

[XOIIO]

If these people weren't working on the LHC, they'd just be trying to come up with newer and better ways to sell ads.

And five minutes ago you were saying how great it was to invent the WWW 

There's a pretty big difference between targeted advertising to the masses and what is arguably the most profound invention in human history which has revolutionized communication and information.

[helius]

That is simply not what historically occurred. Both network communication and hypertext existed before the WWW; the difference is that they were not infested with ads and malware.

[zapta]

If these people weren't working on the LHC, they'd just be trying to come up with newer and better ways to sell ads.

And five minutes ago you were saying how great it was to invent the WWW 

There's a pretty big difference between targeted advertising to the masses and what is arguably the most profound invention in human history which has revolutionized communication and information.

I think you give CERN too much credit in the context of the internet. When you consider the technology stack involved, they contributed only a tiny portion of it. Basically a scaled down SGML and a text based IP based protocol similar to let's say SMTP.

Anyway, if HTTP/HTML (and Kicad?) are key CERN contribution, it doesn't look good for the science/physics aspects.

I doesn't matter if their basic research doesn't have current application, that's fine, what I am trying to understand is what contributions to science they had so far? (no effort, future promises, and sacred cows please)

[XOIIO]

That is simply not what historically occurred. Both network communication and hypertext existed before the WWW; the difference is that they were not infested with ads and malware.

They also weren't nearly as widely implemented, or as user friendly.

[zapta]

That is simply not what historically occurred. Both network communication and hypertext existed before the WWW; the difference is that they were not infested with ads and malware.

They also weren't nearly as widely implemented, or as user friendly.

This is also true for many other contributions by others to the current state of the internet. Overall it was an just another evolutionary step.

This thread is about significant contributions of LHC to science.

[daqq]

I saw the 60 minutes piece on the large hadron collider and failed to understand its motivation. decades of construction, countless of human capital, 100MW+ electric consumption, $10bn of costs, and what it has to show for? nothing. what it has proven is the standard model which is known to be faulty. no evidence for super-symmetry, which would have been cool.

For comparison, the US spent:

- Over 590 billion USD on the military
- Over 20 billion USD on pet food in 2015
- Over 700 million USD to see a film about blue cat people, and 200 million USD to make it
- Over 100 million USD on a museum for a fictional event ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_Encounter )

While I do not claim that either of these (aside from the last one) are without their uses, 1 billion EUR/year distributed over a number of countries to do large scale experiments that would have been otherwise impossible doesn't seem that bad, does it? If nothing else you get lots of spin off technologies. All in all, I'd MUCH rather finance this then lots of EU "social" projects.

[zapta]

... If nothing else you get lots of spin off technologies. All in all, I'd MUCH rather finance this then lots of EU "social" projects.

LHC and social project are not the only two options. The money could be invested for example in other science programs.

http://www.logicalfallacies.info/presumption/false-dilemma/

Let's keep the discussion focused. What contributions to science the LHC had so far?  Effort, jobs for smart people, and Kicad don't count.

[raptor1956]

Most of the major NASA probes cost at least a billion and many are several times that.  The race to the Moon cost $25B in 60's money or about $150B in today's money.  Something like 400,000 people worked on the program in one way or another.  It may have been the zenith of US power and prowess in a global sense.  We've not been so bold since then and we've been in decline since just about the time we stopped the Apollo program. 

If you're not moving forward you're falling backwards!


Brian

[dexters_lab]

I saw the 60 minutes piece on the large hadron collider and failed to understand its motivation. decades of construction, countless of human capital, 100MW+ electric consumption, $10bn of costs, and what it has to show for? nothing. what it has proven is the standard model which is known to be faulty. no evidence for super-symmetry, which would have been cool.

I think the US decision of abandoning the supercollider looks smart, in spite of the sunk cost.

the LHC is just the biggest machine at CERN, it's not all they do, there is a staggering amount of research goes on there.  It's not just about knocking protons together in the LHC.

It's a huge melting pot of disciplines; maths, engineering, physics, electronics, software, materials science to name a few with top people there passing on their knowledge to students and apprentices.

The day humanity stops research like this is the day it decays and dies IMO.

Having been and seen the ATLAS detector with my own eyes it's a testament to what we're capable of when we put our minds to it

[AntiProtonBoy]

'We have the internet, courtesy of CERN.'

Wait a minute. Are you saying all these years Mr. Gore has been lying to us when he said that he invented the internet?

Seriously, the internet is so huge is it conceivable that CERN didn't in fact invent all and every piece of it but just parts of it?

If so, which parts did CERN in fact invent?

A simple wikipedia lookup would've given you the insight:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web