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China's Expensive Super Particle Collider Jeopardized By Criticism (scmp.com)
China's plan to build a particle collider that's four times the size of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe "may be in jeopardy" after criticisms of its cost went viral. Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear quotes the South China Morning Post:
On Sunday, Dr Yang Chen-ning, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1957...released an article on WeChat opposing the construction of the collider. He said the project would become an investment "black hole" with little scientific value or benefit to society, sucking resources away from other research sectors such as life sciences and quantum physics... Yang's article hit nearly all social media platforms and internet news portals, drawing tens of thousands of positive comments over the last couple of days...
Yang's main argument was that China would not succeed where the United States had failed. A similar project had been proposed in the U.S. but was eventually cancelled in 2012 as the construction far exceeded the initial budget... Yang said existing facilities including the Large Hadron Collider contributed little to the increase of human knowledge and was irrelevant to most people's daily lives. But Dr Wang Yifang, lead scientist of the project with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of High Energy Physics, argued research in high energy physics lead to the world wide web, mobile phone touch screens and magnetic resonance imaging in hospitals, among other technological breakthroughs.
The collider is expected to cost $21 billion, and won't be completed until 2050.
Yang's main argument was that China would not succeed where the United States had failed. A similar project had been proposed in the U.S. but was eventually cancelled in 2012 as the construction far exceeded the initial budget... Yang said existing facilities including the Large Hadron Collider contributed little to the increase of human knowledge and was irrelevant to most people's daily lives. But Dr Wang Yifang, lead scientist of the project with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of High Energy Physics, argued research in high energy physics lead to the world wide web, mobile phone touch screens and magnetic resonance imaging in hospitals, among other technological breakthroughs.
The collider is expected to cost $21 billion, and won't be completed until 2050.
Says Alex Trebek
Just wait til somebody works out how to fire a coherent beam of Higgs bosons.
The Higgs MASER will take out anything, once you pump a little extra mass at a concentrated spot.
This could, of course, be science fiction.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
last words
Pure science is great, I think most geeks would agree, for a large number of reasons including eventual practical applications resulting from pure research.
Nevertheless, practicality is also important. A scientist can't objectively weigh the value of their own work to society as a while and neither can a politician. But, some kind of accounting clearly needs to take place.
Cost-benefit is an essential part of maximizing productive results in *any* endeavor in *any* industry, except perhaps, producing worthless luxury items.
There was a pretty good thread on this recently on eevblog, with various arguments being made in both directions. As far as I'm concerned, the only valid arguments against LHC-scale projects are that they pull huge amounts of funding away from other research efforts. It's one thing to spend $10 billion a year on physics research, but how much of that should be dumped into a single project or facility? If a legitimate scientist complains about having to compete for funding with giant monolithic projects like the LHC, it's hard to say they're wrong.
The other arguments against large-scale research funding are just a bunch of monkeys thumping their chests on computers they wouldn't have if the politicians had listened to their chest-thumping parents, while connected to a network that wouldn't exist.
But Dr Wang Yifang, lead scientist of the project with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of High Energy Physics, argued research in high energy physics lead to the world wide web, mobile phone touch screens and magnetic resonance imaging in hospitals, among other technological breakthroughs.
And...those couldn't have been invented in a different type of research facility? The web surely could have arisen from any large-scale research effort, seeing as it's so universal. Likewise the invention of touch screens doesn't seem to have research in high energy physics as a prerequisite, and NMR existed before CERN.
Ezekiel 23:20
No way that article gets published without the imprimatur of the communist government, which must mean the government wants to back out of the plan. Having Dr Yang Chen-ning kill the project let's the government save face.
and that's with cheap chinese slave^H^H^H^H^H labor and manufacturing? holy fuck, that's like $500+ billion anywhere else.
", sucking resources away from other research sectors such as life sciences and quantum physics."
I would like to know what these other sciences would do with a big budget, maybe they already have big budgets, or maybe they don't need a big budget.
Fund the project even if there aren't any short-term benefits. China could use a reduction in their military budget, just like most of the world.
world wide web, mobile phone touch screens and magnetic resonance imaging in hospitals, among other technological breakthroughs.
NMR not so much, magnetic resonance was an old result that Damadian had the vision to move forward when people were saying it was impossible
Touch Screens ? BS Cern was hardly the only place working on the tech
WWW ? Few tens of million Frenchmen would argue minitel was well on its way. Teletext was available here. Personally I could live without the craptastic kluge of CSS/Javascript/Html.
Maybe they should team up with Elon Musk and build a Large Hyperloop Collider. Two birds with one stone.
Building entire cities, with all utilities and buildings for every service needed, that no one will ever use: sure, why not!
Build something that's actually worth something, that would put them in a good position to advance science: nah, too expensive...
I need the Jackie Chan meme to express my frustration...
The criticisms are crippling. We cannot stomach those criticism and they make our muscles spasm and our brains think incoherently. These nasty criticisms destroy entire cultures and devastate forests.
Someone please stop these criticisms.
Seriously. This is China. Does anyone really think the public opinion matters. Will they vote differently? Will they buy different products? Will they cause a revolution? All populations like US, China, Brazil, Russia, are the same. The difference is the shades of apparent control that the government gives you.
A revolution requires blood and destruction. Not some lame posts on Facebook, a lengthy incoherent blog, a fucking tweet, or a boycott of a product for some lame-ass gripe that you have. Even my lame /. post is shit.
>But Dr Wang Yifang, lead scientist of the project with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of High Energy Physics, argued research in high energy physics lead to the world wide web, mobile phone touch screens and magnetic resonance imaging in hospitals, among other technological breakthroughs
I really resent this argument that so many people use. Yes, the _field of study_ has produced practical benefits for the people who pay for its research (i.e. taxpayers); that doesn't guarantee this _particular project_ will. Instead of trying to ride off the coat-tails of research that has had more immediate applications, present ways this facility might have applications itself. If you don't, then don't be surprised when funding goes to research that does instead.
The LHC is good enough, as are the upcoming 30 meter telescopes. Let the economy grow for another century before building something bigger.
The LHC is dumb physics. That isn't to say physics is dumb, it's to say it's the physics of "we have no sound theory to test so we're going to smash shit and see what happens." It's borderline anti-science and it can be done far cheaper with linear accelerators and phased arrays anyway - at the same scale with recent breakthroughs. Colliders like the LHC are as a result the equivalent of welfare for people with physics degrees who can't actually hack it.
If they made a better one elsewhere, and all the smart people left.. would the region go ghetto? Like a swiss detroit?
then all the undesirable people stuck there would get tired of the high crime/unemployment and make a swiss robocop?
The world of next generation high energy physics machines is highly political. There are plans for LHC luminosity and energy upgrades. The long delayed ILC (international linear collider) project, proposed for Japan. Competing designs for a lower energy circular lepton collider (maybe China) to be upgraded to a very high energy hadron collider. Laser and beam driven plasma accelerators - neither anywhere near practical yet. CLIC, Muon collider, VLHC, etc.
There really are two issues: Is it worth ~10B$ to build the next generation high energy physics machine, and if it is, which of the many machines should be built. With machine development likely to take a generation, people on any project know that success of another will doom their machine.
Neither question is easy to answer. There is no clear way to measure the value of fundamental physics measurements. The likely technological value is zero, though spin-offs can be valuable.
To me personally, learning about the most basic structure of the universe from high energy physics, or astrophysics is valuable, even if it has no imaginable application. I view learning about the universe as one of the goals of civilization, not a means.
Too bad no-one will be able to verify all the remarkable discoveries they are going to make with this.
A scientist can't objectively weigh the value of their own work to society as a while and neither can a politician.
This is why giving any one scientist's voice - even one with a Nobel prize - too much weight is a very bad idea. We all have biases. This is why funding decisions nee to be made by committees where biases average out and the decisions are hopefully made on scientific merit (although no human process is perfect).
Cost-benefit is an essential part of maximizing productive results in *any* endeavor in *any* industry, except perhaps, producing worthless luxury items.
The problem is that you can't really do this with fundamental research because we have no idea what we will discover. Even after discovery it often takes 50+ years before the applications come out. For example from the discovery of quantum mechanics to the transistor took 50 years and nobody at the time could have predicted that QM would lead to computers. Similarly early particle physics an their detectors are now used in medical applications.
It would be great if we could do a cost-benefit analysis because when fundamental research pays of the benefits are huge - our modern word is built on the results. However we cannot predict which fundamental research will give those results.
US$21B over the next 35 years? Pocket change even if it ends up costing 10X as much. Better than building useless islands in the South China Sea.
With one message an unauthorised non-party member held up the entirety of the Chinese scientific leadership to ridicule! One can only suspect that his motives are thoroughly un-patriottic, aimed at fomenting dissent, perhaps even sedition, unrest, and a dispute of the Mandate of Heaven currently held by the Communist Party.
We must support China's censors and help them to monitor private communications more closely. Slip-throughs like this must be avoided!
Conferences. In Las Vegas.
In fact, forget the conferences!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
> Yang said existing facilities including the Large Hadron Collider contributed little to the increase of human knowledge and was irrelevant to most people's daily lives
So what? Even if it were true, I'd like to quote Richard Feynman: "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.".
I think the post is confusing the shutdown of the Tevatron at Fermilab with the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider. The Super Collider was cancelled in late 1993, which would have been larger than the Large Hadron Collider, comparable to the proposed collider in China. The Tevatron at Fermilab had been running from the 1980's until late 2011 when the project was ended once the LHC ramped up to higher energies.
See section 3,5 on use of microgram quantities of antimatter as a detonation trigger for potential pure fusion nuclear weapons.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0510071v4.pdf
This is what China is after. Generation and containment research. The west is doing this too. The LHC wasn't just built for pure research. It has secondary military application too. Dual use.
Clarke's first law
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
No doubt the Professor has tenure, he (and his successors) will never lose their jobs even if the project is a dismal failure.
Given the 34 year life span of construction. I'd look to see what relatives (and PLA Generals) have ties to the construction industry.
I say go for it.
Now if the Professor was based in North Korea, there is a different penalty for failure.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT