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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.
People should listen to him.
People do listen to him. Most Americans would be challenged to name a living Nobel laureate. But in China, everyone knows who Chen-ning Yang is. He is a national icon. He is as well known in China as Kim Kardashian is in America. When he married Weng Fan, it was huge news. An American equivalent would be like when Brad Pitt married Angelina Jolie.
If he is speaking out against the collider, that carries a lot of weight. There is no way he can just be silenced. He has too much stature for that. Even Xi Jinping would not want to butt heads with him.
What are you talking about?
Our President is a Nobel Laureate.
Such large scale ignorance should be addressed, so let's start here:
"...and NMR existed before CERN."
Medical NMR is the direct result of the Superconductor Magnet research done at Berkeley for the ESCAR, (Experimental Superconducting Accelerator Ring), Project back in the mid-Seventies. Until then, no large Superconducting Magnet designs for Industrial production had been attempted. Note that ESCAR was itself a failure; that it was allowed to be, shows just how successful it was in the long term, even though not as originally imagined. NMR Sensor tech at Berkeley during the early Sixties came from the need to very precisely measure the Rigidity of a Particle Beam, and thus its Energy in a precisely measured magnetic field.
"The web surely could have arisen from any large-scale research effort, seeing as it's so universal."
And yet it didn't. You must be pretty young, because back in the early Nineties, there were many many ways to put and grab information off of the two-decades old Internet, some of them like Compuserve were quite proprietary and expensive. You can be damn sure that if Microsoft had developed the concepts behind the WWW, it would now be quite a different and certainly more miserable place.
"Likewise the invention of touch screens doesn't seem to have research in high energy physics as a prerequisite,..."
Well, you are right. It was low energy physics to blame here, starting in the late Sixties. By 1979, Programmable Touchscreens of Berkeley design were being used in many small LINACS and Cyclotrons. Check the biannual Cyclotron Proceedings for more info. It's interesting that they were used originally for Ergonomic reasons, to put rackfulls of knobs and switches within easy reach of the Operators.
"And...those couldn't have been invented in a different type of research facility?"
Give me one example of a different type of then-current Research Facility. NASA perhaps; we collaborated frequently. And that's it.
You really need to research the History of Science. Physics dominated Big Science for half a century for a reason, and some places like CERN are still dedicated to it. Also, you need to research the Failures. The Berkeley Electron Synchrotron was a failure, yet that failure led to Light Sources worldwide, which are at the cutting edge of Materials Science today. And note: No Light Source is in Private Hands. It is much cheaper for IBM or Boeing to buy Beam Time off of a Public Facility.
And consider Livermore's "Materials Test Accelerator". Never fully completed, it had only one real purpose- To produce a Gram of Neutrons a day, for purposes that still remain classified.
But a gram of Neutrons a day has other uses...