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.

Comments

Weaponization?

[LesFerg]

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.

Re:Weaponization?

[Provocateur]

The Higgs MASER will take out anything

Unless Han-Yung So Lee shoots first.

THAT, my boy, is science fiction.

Dr Yang Chen-ning

[turkeydance]

last words

Re:Dr Yang Chen-ning

[93 Escort Wagon]

This guy is 93. Yang married then 28-year-old Weng Fan in December 2004. You do the math.

What exactly is your point, and how is it relevant to this discussion?

Re: Dr Yang Chen-ning

[hackwrench]

Being right most of the time, does not mean you should be listened to all of the time.

Re: Dr Yang Chen-ning

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re: Dr Yang Chen-ning

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about?

Our President is a Nobel Laureate.

Re: Dr Yang Chen-ning

[thinkwaitfast]

I listen to everyone all of the time then judge what was said, I've found it works better than the alternative. Sometimes even idiots can make good points.

Re: Dr Yang Chen-ning

[thinkwaitfast]

Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the his Nobel Prize

Re: Dr Yang Chen-ning

[BundyGil]

You're only as old as the woman you feel.

Re: Dr Yang Chen-ning

[dj245]

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.

If he is that famous, all you would have to do is associate him with drugs. In 2010, [Charlie] Sheen was the highest paid actor on television. Now nobody respects him or cares about anything he says. Charlie Sheen actually is/was an addict but faking such a controversy can't be that difficult.

Re: Dr Yang Chen-ning

[hackwrench]

But that is not usually what is meant when it is said the way the previous post wrote it.

Re: Dr Yang Chen-ning

[dywolf]

I think he may be wrong about saying the US failed.
We didn't fail; our politicians put politics and money ahead of science.

The amount? A paltry 4.5 billion dollars.
Chump change when you consider the trillion we spent shoring up the banks and saving the economy, or the trillion+ spent on the F35, or the 2 trillion spent on the War on Terror.

Had we built the collider (or finished it, since 14 miles had already been bored) the advances that have come of the LHC could have come some 20 years sooner. China shouldn't back out or be afraid.

Hell, we managed to built a few giant facilities at quite some cost that existed solely to detect gravitational waves, that sat there, monitored, for years, generating tons of data that have to have every earth bound tremor removed from the data set, before confirmation FINALLY came in last year. that's the thing about science: there's not always a guarantee of concrete return on investment when it comes to science. sometimes the result is a lack of results, but that could either mean that your hypothesis wrong and the phenomena doesn't exist after all, or that your test setup just isn't good enough to detect it.

but its worth doing anyway, because we now know that gravity waves are real, just as we know the Higgs Boson does exist.
these may seem like minor data points to the lay observer, but these discoveries could be the turning points, the point when it first become possible to potentially manipulate gravity, or fold space, or some other far off scifi magic.

Re: Dr Yang Chen-ning

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

I'm not sure why this was modded troll - President Obama did, in fact, get the Nobel Peace Prize.

Re: Dr Yang Chen-ning

[WallyL]

I disagree with his receiving it, but, I do acknowledge that he did. So yeah, AC here is not trolling.

Cost benefit

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Cost benefit

[hey!]

I have a sneaking suspicion that there's simply no way to value any particular pure science project in any kind of precise terms. In aggregate pure science of course is a big part of our civilization's success.

Re: Cost benefit

[Anonymous Coward]

Similarly, I think it's almost impossible to justify any 10 billion dollar project in precise terms. Combine such a large cost investment with one pure science project/facility, and I think it's pretty fair to have some pointed questions and concerns before writing the check.

One particular question: what other science projects with tangible results may be underfunded or non-existant as a result of this one project?

Re:Cost benefit

[93 Escort Wagon]

I have a sneaking suspicion that there's simply no way to value any particular pure science project in any kind of precise terms.

That is a valid point. But, on the other hand, how many particle supercolliders does the world need? I think of myself as pro-science, but I'm also aware that funding is not unlimited. How much other basic, novel research projects could that $50 billion result in?

Countries should really find a way to maximize collaboration on huge-ticket items. It's not only a more efficient use of funds, but it also generates real world social and political benefits.

Re: Cost benefit

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. The cost/benefit on religion is atrocious. No returns at all. Best scrap it.

Re: Cost benefit

[r1348]

I'm all for.

Re:Cost benefit

[Oligonicella]

This is especially true for projects such as this. Fifty billion dollars. This is a very real zero-sum game going on. At this scale, things must be weighed against what other benefits can be accomplished with those funds.

Re: Cost benefit

[ytene]

I think you're right, but - and this thinking applies to ALL nations, not just PRC - $21 Billion spent on pure scientific research is $21 Billion not spent on arms or armaments.

Hey, if it were me, I would like to see more money diverted to alleviating the abject poverty and suffering of so many across the world, in ensuring that everyone has enough to eat, a roof over their heads.

But I also respect that sometimes we also need positive, aspirational developments to inspire our schoolchildren and stretch our university students. I would rather they built this than guns or bombs. And the cost projected is a small portion of what powerful nations spend on their military budget in one single year.

Finally, there is always the possibility of ground-breaking discovery. A better understanding of gravity; the possibility of propulsion systems that do not rely on reaction mass; these are the development see will need if we are to reach for the stars. Bring it on.

Re: Cost benefit

[ytene]

Developments we will need... Doh!

Re: Cost benefit

[Rei]

It's important to not simply look at the total cost figure vs. the likely final results when comparing projects, but also what technologies you'll be developing to achieve said results - because, apart from things like pouring concrete and such, that's where the money goes. For example, there's a lot of people here who hate ITER and see it as a waste of money. But regardless of whether or not tokamak fusion eventually becomes economically viable, the work on superconducting magnets that's been spawned because of ITER is going to be of immense value. In particular, while the ITER design isn't going to use them because it's too far along (DEMO might), new high temperature superconducting tapes have made magnets that are much more powerful and energy efficient - and at the same time likely cheaper in bulk production, and cheaper to operate - a reality. Which obviously has huge implications everywhere from medicine to spaceflight. The size (and thus cost) of many technologies corresponds directly with the strength of the economically-achievable magnetic field.

When a project is expensive, it's good to ask why it's expensive. Is it expensive because you're pouring a lot of concrete / buying a lot of some raw material / doing research that only pertains to the given project, or because you have a lot of scientists' salaries going toward developing enabling technologies that also have significant applications elsewhere? And if so, how valuable are those technologies in addition to the main project?

It's not an easy assessment to make, but an important one.

Re: Cost benefit

[khallow]

But regardless of whether or not tokamak fusion eventually becomes economically viable, the work on superconducting magnets that's been spawned because of ITER is going to be of immense value.

Unless, it's not, of course. That's the problem with unfounded assertions.

And couldn't we have done the work you think is immensely valuable for a lot less than $14+ billion (ITER's cost in current US dollars)? Opportunity cost is the first sacrifice on the altar of Big Science boondoggles.

Re: Cost benefit

[Rei]

Unless, it's not, of course.

Except, of course, I just spelled out the reasons why it is. It's like someone saying "hey, they invented a cheap 300mpg car as a side effect of this project, that's going to be immensely valuable" and you responded "Unless, it's not, of course".

Higher magnetic field strengths, at higher temperatures, out of materials that should be well cheaper in mass production, is not some little "maybe, maybe not" sort of thing. For anything that uses powerful magnets (and that's a lot of things), that's a huge result.

And who else exactly do you think has the budgets and need to pump into high-power magnet research except for high-energy particle physics projects?

And couldn't we have done the work you think is immensely valuable for a lot less than $14+ billion (ITER's cost in current US dollars)?

Research on magnetic materials is just a single example of a tiny fraction of that cost. How many more examples do you want? Or will you be equally dismissive to all of them? Where do YOU think that $14+ billion is going? Do you think there's just some bonfire where they burn it all? It's mostly spent on researchers, working on the technology behind the various subsystems. Much if not most of which is multi-application.

If you want something to attack for budget reasons, direct your gaze upwards (ISS). I think $150B for that is a lot harder to justify.

Re: Cost benefit

[khallow]

Except, of course, I just spelled out the reasons why it is. It's like someone saying "hey, they invented a cheap 300mpg car as a side effect of this project, that's going to be immensely valuable" and you responded "Unless, it's not, of course".

Which is a ludicrous comparison since higher magnetic fields at higher temperatures, using helium-cooled superconductors, just isn't that valuable compared to lowering effective ground transportation costs of humanity by a factor of ten. That's like getting two orders of magnitude return on investment (assuming you spent $14+ billion for it) - which you aren't going to get with ITER.

Research on magnetic materials is just a single example of a tiny fraction of that cost. How many more examples do you want? Or will you be equally dismissive to all of them? Where do YOU think that $14+ billion is going? Do you think there's just some bonfire where they burn it all? It's mostly spent on researchers, working on the technology behind the various subsystems. Much if not most of which is multi-application.

I sure will be equally dismissive of the whole lot of them. If there was a serious benefit to ITER, we would have known about it by now. It wouldn't be vague talk of technological improvements or fusion break even in ten years.

If you want something to attack for budget reasons, direct your gaze upwards (ISS). I think $150B for that is a lot harder to justify.

Well, I googled myself about ISS and boy was I on fire in January 2014.

I'm sure there's useful stuff being studied. Who knows? It might even some day approach within an order of magnitude of the original cost of the station.

When I read posts like the above, I have to remind myself that not everyone realizes the extremely high value of what could have been done with the money spent on publicly funded research like the ISS.

For example, we could have built three or so ISSs for that price (at least half of the savings gained by cutting out the Space Shuttle and a similar amount gained by dropping the "international" from the ISS). But we prudently didn't because the research is far too valuable to triple the quantity produced without actually spending a cent more.

or

[Teancum] Treatiing the existing ISS structure as sunk costs

Can't because the ISS costs almost $2 billion a year just to keep operational. Also, the same sort of bad decision making that led to the Shuttle and the ISS leads to more recent bad decisions such as development of the Space Launch System.

There's the matter of political hygiene. Let's say I have an apartment and I leave the place a serious mess, with food and stuff lying around. It won't be long before rodents, bugs, and other vermin are squirming through my apartment. But by cleaning up the apartment and especially getting rid of the easy food sources, I greatly reduce my vermin problem.

I see the ISS as it currently stands as a pile of old, rotting food feeding the next generation of cockroaches and rats. If it weren't around, then things like the Shuttle, Constellation, and now SLS would have been greatly curbed.

and

[Princeofcups] You sad sick fuck. The world is not beholden to the economic views of market capitalism. Science and knowledge expansion requires the expenditure of resources that are NOT tied up in making the elite more elite. It's your viewpoint that has destroyed what was once the greatest scientific community and left nothing but a corpse picked over by weasels and hyenas.

Consider that the above complaint is made in the face of the greatest expenditures ev

Re:Cost benefit

[crimson tsunami]

If Apple had paid their taxes. Whatever lucky country they chose to pay could build a matching set of these things.

Re: Cost benefit

[thinkwaitfast]

Why not spend the money on developing superconducting magnets instead of indirectly?

Re: Cost benefit

[mrmatthewcarlson]

So in this case they should instead build a 20 storey tall pinball machine. It would be fun to play and just think of all the advancements that could be made figuring out how to propel a huge steel ball around.

Re:Cost benefit

[Maury Markowitz]

A particular project, perhaps not. But in general, it's easy to see that "new" fields will produce more output than "old" fields. It's simply a matter of how deeply the field has been mined.

For instance, thermal expansion of metal wad one a very serious field of study, and about a century ago was the topic of a Nobel prize. However, today there is basically nothing left in that field to dio, and if you proposed spending 10 million to study it you'd be laughed at.

The standard model has remained largely unchanged since the 70s, meaning it is approaching its 50th birthday. It had been largely mined out since the 1990s. Since then they had spent a lot of time and money proving things most people assumed wss true. For instance, pretty much everyone believed in neutrino oscillation and the higgs, but we spent tens of billions proving it. And science didn't advance at all as a result. So far it's 10 billion very poorly spent.

Now it is entirely possible that LHC will detect something new. But we have a lot of good ideas what that would look like. And LHC can't detect most of those. Neither will one that's four times as big. Yo really test any of these theories we need a machine that we have no idea how to build. And so, anything in the middle, like SSC out this Chinese machine is really a total waste, and everyone knows it.

What's a bit sad about all this is that HEP is really one very tiny part of physics as a whole. It hasn't been a practical one since the 1960s, nothing any off the machines since then answers anything but HEP questions. But HEP is the darling of the physics community, because that's where the big machines are. It's rather circular.

The good news I'd that there is plenty of real good physics going on. And better yet, it takes place at your local university on a lab the size of a closet on a budget about what you spend on coffee for a year. And those experiments are producing both new science and real practical results. Look at the blue led for instance. Yet there's no documentary on that, while there's dozens on the LHC.

Re: Cost benefit

[Rei]

Which is a ludicrous comparison since higher magnetic fields at higher temperatures, using helium-cooled superconductors

Someone doesn't know what a high temperature superconductor is.

The whole point is that you don't have to use helium cooling anymore. Do you understand why that's important now? The new tapes operate at liquid nitrogen temperatures. You can get very high field strengths with a very compact magnet with very little cooling cost, with capital costs also expected to be low in mass production (since the raw materials aren't that expensive). It is a big deal. Imaging. Proton beam therapy. Maglev. Motors. Generators. Transformers. NMR. Magnetic separation. Spacecraft propulsion. Power transmission. Magnetic energy storage (97+% efficiency, super-rapid discharge, indefinite lifespan). High energy physics. Everything becomes a lot more reasonable when you can make affordable superconducting wires/tapes at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Thanks to the research by and demand from the plasma physics community, prices are now down to the point that it's only about 6 times more expensive than copper per amp/meter. And that number has been falling at a good pace. There's already a number of places that use it in the power grid, where they need higher capacity within limited space constraints. And you could nearly double the strength of the LHC's central field with HTS magnets.

wasting time of fusion researchers

The majority of the fusion research community supports ITER. Which is why it came about and continues to receive heavy advocacy from the scientific community.

and risk of obsolescence from rival fusion technologies

Like?

... rival fusion research, some of which (Polywell)

Yes, and what percent of mainstream fusion researchers do you see lining up to back cutting ITER funding to support some massive Polywell project?

Polywell (and a few others, like Focus Fusion) are popular among armchair plasma physicists. Not so popular among actual plasma physicists. It does have some respectable backers, but not that many.

You can't just take Bussard's scaling claims at face value. Real-world phenomenon aren't limited to just linear and quadratic scaling curves. And the fact that the concept is 20 years old and has little peer-reviewed results doesn't exactly give it much credence vs. cutting something that's pretty well understood and which there's relatively little doubt about its ability to scale (ability to prove economic, that's a more up-in-the-air question).

Praying for magic beans is not a reasonable way to approach science. You get funding by convincing your peers that your concept has merit. Polywell has not succeeded in this regard.

Re: Cost benefit

[Rei]

Why not aim that development toward something that's also a major goal (fusion power), and kill two birds with one stone?

Re: Cost benefit

[khallow]

So if ITER doesn't have to use helium-cooled superconductors any more and those arent' the future of fusion reactor design, then why do they?

Yes, and what percent of mainstream fusion researchers do you see lining up to back cutting ITER funding to support some massive Polywell project?

There's this conflict of interest between most of the researchers (whose work is based on the tokamak reactor design) and the most promising research.

You can't just take Bussard's scaling claims at face value. Real-world phenomenon aren't limited to just linear and quadratic scaling curves. And the fact that the concept is 20 years old and has little peer-reviewed results doesn't exactly give it much credence vs. cutting something that's pretty well understood and which there's relatively little doubt about its ability to scale (ability to prove economic, that's a more up-in-the-air question).

We won't need to take Bussard's claims at face value when we can build a scaled-up Polywell for a small fraction of the cost of the ITER project and find out for ourselves.

Re:Cost benefit

[khallow]

"Cost-benefit is an essential part of maximizing productive results in *any* endeavor in *any* industry, except perhaps, producing worthless luxury items."
Naive. "Cost/Benefit" is pure fiction, usually pushed by those who wish to cloak their motives and are lousy at Maths. "Cost" is easy to quantify, it is a quantifiable... quantity; time and resources usually predicted, (wrongly...), down to the second and the penny. "Benefit" is qualifiable; a matter of judgment as to whether the result of the Analysis is better or worse. This led to such nonsense as "Death Panels", a strictly Political talking point. This is dividing numbers by wishful thinking.

So you can't quantify the benefit of basic science research? Sounds like you have no business speaking of this topic then.

"Nevertheless, practicality is also important."
Unfortunately, you can't read the future, and neither can I. And that is the problem with practicality; what is pie-in-the-sky now may be essential to living a century from now, and there is just no way to know. Dick Tracy's Wrist Radio in 1946 was just cartoon nonsense for decades. Yet research in RF continued at a steady pace, along with the growth of technical and social infrastructures that have made cellphones ubiquitous. And yet we have no Flying Cars, which Henry Ford was tinkering with in the Twenties.

The wrist radio had obvious, significant value not "cartoonish nonsense". It just wasn't possible for decades.

I find it remarkable that our best understanding of the dynamics of human economics is assumed not to apply to basic scientific research because woo. We can't know for sure that indiscriminate funding of anything labeled research is going to be a disaster for human progress, but it's the safe bet.

Re: Cost benefit

[Rei]

So if ITER doesn't have to use helium-cooled superconductors any more and those arent' the future of fusion reactor design, then why do they [finances.gouv.fr]?

Why are you pointing out something I pointed out in my first post on the subject?

If ITER went and redesigned their magnets now after all of the other engineering work has been done the budget would go up and people like you would be raising hell about that. But you better bet that DEMO will use more advanced magnets.

Re: Cost benefit

[khallow]

Why are you pointing out something I pointed out in my first post on the subject?

Because high temperature superconductors have been around longer than that. It's a fairly obvious bad design decision even for the 90s.

If ITER went and redesigned their magnets now after all of the other engineering work has been done the budget would go up and people like you would be raising hell about that.

Their budget did go up and their schedule did slide by a number of years anyway, let us note.

But you better bet that DEMO will use more advanced magnets.

I wonder how much overbudget DEMO will be. But I'm sure, we'll have a better idea what a commercial power plant won't be by the time we've run DEMO for a while.

Re: Cost benefit

[Rei]

Because high temperature superconductors have been around longer than that. It's a fairly obvious bad design decision even for the 90s.

High temperature superconducting wires and tapes suitable for large superconducting magnets have most definitely not been around since the 90s. They went from 90 A-m to 300k A-m between 2002 and 2009, overwhelmingly due to research by and demand from high-energy plasma physics research projects, particularly tokamaks. But hey, I think it's wonderful how you feel qualified to lecture physicists on how dumb they are in their magnet designs!

Re: Cost benefit

[khallow]

Again, I disagree.

But hey, I think it's wonderful how you feel qualified to lecture physicists on how dumb they are in their magnet designs!

It's their designs. Being completely irrelevant to some future commercial operation is not my fault.

Re: Cost benefit

[khallow]

They went from 90 A-m to 300k A-m between 2002 and 2009, overwhelmingly due to research by and demand from high-energy plasma physics research projects, particularly tokamaks.

I should add here, this technological innovation was quite foreseeable. And there shouldn't have been such a long lead time to the start of ITER. It's remarkable how low our standards for design of multi-billion dollar projects are these days!

Re: Cost benefit

[Rei]

It absolutely was not "quite forseeable", any more than quantum computers and fusion power have been "quite foreseeable"; it was fraught with major technical challenges that had to be overcome, and there was no guarantee that they would be. High temperature superconductors are brittle and cannot be used as wires or tapes in any simple manner. More importantly, their grain boundaries act like "weak links" in their behavior; the more frequent the grain boundaries (aka, the smaller you make the grains, aka, the more you make it thinner to improve flexibility), and the more poorly aligned the grains are (aka, what happens when you try to use most non-lab-scale manufacturing techniques), the more sensitive they become to external magnetic fields, to the point of being worthless.

The first generation to work involved filament-filled tubes, but manufacture them required a long thermal cycling / stressing process to get the grains aligned, and more problematically, lots of silver. Even on this "simple" process there were lots of constraints, such as the silver having to let oxygen permeate through it, the grains partially melting on their exteriors but not all the way through (evenly throughout the entire wire) on each cycle, etc; there was little tolerance for error for the wires to function. Purity tolerances are very tight - even small carbon contamination for example ruins the wires. They were very expensive and offered poor performance, particularly in magnets. And that was the easier stage to get to.

It's taken a lot of work to turn flexible, durable, long HTS wires suitable for magnets into a reality. And that doesn't come cheap.

Re: Cost benefit

[khallow]

It absolutely was not "quite forseeable", any more than quantum computers and fusion power have been "quite foreseeable"; it was fraught with major technical challenges that had to be overcome, and there was no guarantee that they would be.

Sorry, I don't buy it. ITER threw money at a superconducting technology they knew wouldn't work for commercial purposes rather than one that merely needed some development to work.

It's taken a lot of work to turn flexible, durable, long HTS wires suitable for magnets into a reality. And that doesn't come cheap.

I bet $!4 billion would have gone a long way here and still have enough left over to put together a few fusion reactors. Opportunity cost is invisible.

Re:Cost benefit

[khallow]

"The wrist radio had obvious, significant value not "cartoonish nonsense". It just wasn't possible for decades."

That was rather my point. Elude you much?

Then why not say that rather than "Dick Tracy's Wrist Radio in 1946 was just cartoon nonsense for decades"? It wasn't cartoon nonsense ever as I noted.

And of course, your rebuttal to my point about being ignorant of economics is non sequitur derping about Trump. Why aren't you voting for Trump? Deliberate stupidity and all that.

My take on this continues to be that we don't have to be economically stupid about R&D. We can't evaluate the far future impact of most scientific research or engineering efforts. But we can evaluate the near future usefulness of such R&D (which need not be an explicit profit despite common assertions to the contrary), how much impact we get for the money spent, and the near future opportunity costs of that effort (both in funding less of other research and in drawing researchers and resources away from other endeavors).

We need sane economics and accountability in scientific research just like anything else particularly when other peoples' money is being spent. The rules don't go away because the universal economic problems don't go away.

Re:Cost benefit

[david_thornley]

If we spend research money only on the basis of near-future benefits, we might as well pack it in as a species. Learning more about how the Universe works tends to pay off very well in the more distant future. Disregarding those benefits because they're not easy to quantify is short-sighted and leads to bad decisions.

Re:Cost benefit

[Coren22]

They did, and no Ireland wasn't able to do so.

Re:Cost benefit

[khallow]

Learning more about how the Universe works tends to pay off very well in the more distant future.

Unless, of course, you're just burning money and not actually learning more about how the universe works. Big projects which take money, people, and resources away from better approaches can be worse than doing nothing at all IMHO.

Disregarding those benefits because they're not easy to quantify is short-sighted and leads to bad decisions.

Who said anything about disregarding future benefits? My point is to use near returns as a proxy for those distant benefits. If you're not generating near future benefits, you're probably not generate far future benefits either.

Re:Cost benefit

[crimson tsunami]

They did, and no Ireland wasn't able to do so.

This late in the piece, one can only assume you wish to remain willfully ignorant.
Have a nice day, and enjoy the rest of your trolling.

Re:Cost benefit

[Coren22]

There is no ignorance involved. They were given a tax rate to pay, and they paid it. Trying to act like they paid no taxes is silly, they paid all the taxes that the local government required them to pay.

Now, should Ireland raise the taxes on corporations to be more in line with other countries? Sure, but why is this suddenly an issue for a single company when there are thousands that do it? There is even a term for it, the double Irish, this is because it is so common in business as to have earned a term to define the procedure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Cost benefit

[david_thornley]

Who said anything about disregarding future benefits? My point is to use near returns as a proxy for those distant benefits. If you're not generating near future benefits, you're probably not generate far future benefits either.

And here is where I completely disagree with you. Near-term benefits are absolutely not a proxy for far-future benefits. By your reasoning, nobody would do basic research, and that would, sometime down the line, cripple applied research. Things we found out about the Universe decades and centuries ago enable us to figure how to direct applied research, and suggest ways to accomplish things. Quantum mechanics looked absolutely useless when we researched it initially, and lots of the stuff we use nowadays wouldn't have been developed yet without a good understanding of QM.

Re:Cost benefit

[khallow]

By your reasoning, nobody would do basic research, and that would, sometime down the line, cripple applied research.

Why would that happen? The definition of basic research is not research that appears useless in the present.

Basic research is systematic study directed toward greater knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena and of observable facts without specific applications towards processes or products in mind.

But OTOH, specific applications routinely create short term incentives for basic research. For example, the Black-Scholes model of option pricing created an incentive to study stochastic differential equations. The communications industry created a huge incentive to study digital signal processing, information theory and thermodynamics, and a huge amount of supporting mathematics. Construction and mineral/fossil fuel extraction created a huge incentive for basic geology and paleontology research. The need for better ocean navigation created a huge incentive for accurate time measurement and better astronomy observations.

Quantum mechanics looked absolutely useless when we researched it initially

Like using X rays to see inside the human body? Better understanding of physics, chemistry, or materials science? Better and brighter luminescent materials? It wasn't a long jump, for example, from quantum mechanics to broadcast television or plastics manufacture.

The idea that we need researchers to grope in the darkness for very long periods of time in order to find novel basic science results has never been supported in reality. And it should be readily apparent to be absurd because in addition to the tremendous opportunity costs, it ignores that we can cut the amount of effort required to do distant future research by merely doing a lot of productive near future science that happens to cut down on the obstruction to this more distance science.

It's like claiming that we should launch right now a probe towards Alpha Centauri (and other nearby stars) at Voyager level speeds (a few tens of kilometers per second), taking thousands to tens of thousands of years to complete the journey. This ignores that there probably will be advances of technology in the next few decades and centuries which will greatly reduce the travel time (and increase the capabilities of any probe you send).

So we could spend a lot of time and effort on a long shot today. Or we could develop near future technologies and research (with significant ROI I might add) that greatly curbs the difficulty and cost of the project in the future.

Re:Cost benefit

[crimson tsunami]

Are you at least a semi-intelligent person, living in a bubble of willful ignorance? Or did you just not have the understanding to comprehend what I wrote?
Purposefully implying I said Apple paid no taxes at all, just so you could argue, I would tend to think the former.
Lets see how well your bubble stands up to some information you don't wish to learn. POP

Apple Operations International (AOI) is the company's primary offshore holding company.
Apple owns 100% of AOI either directly or through controlled foreign corporations.
AOI's income made up 30% of Apple's total world profits from 2009- 2011.
Shockingly, AOI doesn't pay taxes. Anywhere. The holding company had a net income of $30 billion from 2009 to 2012, but has not declared tax residency in any jurisdiction.

Apple has held billions of dollars in profits in Irish subsidiaries to pay little or no taxes to any government. The main subsidiary, a holding company that includes Apple's retail stores throughout Europe, has not paid any corporate income tax in the last five years.
Apple had a tax holiday for the first 10 years in Ireland. They paid no taxes to the Irish government.

Let me say it again for you. Just in case you really did have trouble understanding what I had written.

If Apple had paid their taxes. Whatever lucky country they chose to pay could build a matching set of these things.

If Apple had chosen a country to pay taxes in, which they didn't. That lucky country would have lots of money. Money the country could use to build particle colliders. (simplified version for simple people to understand)

Now, should anyone even bother reading your second paragraph? Clearly not, as you're still just trolling. If you want to discuss it, Here is one prepared earlier or here or here , knock yourself out.
One wonders how you managed to miss them, well... not really...

Re:Cost benefit

[Coren22]

Ireland is a sovern nation. If they set the tax rates on certain entities at whatever they like, they are welcome to do so. Apple paid every bit of tax they were legally required to pay. The EU has issues with Ireland, and they are taking it out on Apple because they are a juicy target. This has nothing to do with unpaid taxes, or they would be going after all of the companies using the Irish tax system to pay less taxes.

You actually contradict yourself repeatedly with what you wrote, do you even realize it?

Shockingly, AOI doesn't pay taxes. Anywhere. The holding company had a net income of $30 billion from 2009 to 2012, but has not declared tax residency in any jurisdiction.

Apple had a tax holiday for the first 10 years in Ireland. They paid no taxes to the Irish government.

So, do they declare themselves stateless, or take advantage of tax laws that are on the books and perfectly legal in the host country? What taxes did they fail to pay? Why do these taxes only apply to Apple and not the thousands of other corporations? Why is the EU dictating the taxes a company should be paying in a country where they paid every cent in required taxes? If the EU cares so much about what each country's tax laws are, why don't they just write the tax laws for the countries? Why is Ikea allowed to benefit from the tax laws of Sweden, while Apple is an evil tax avoider?

An EU ruling, which makes no sense doesn't justify itself. If the US decided that Maryland didn't collect enough taxes from me, why would the US have any authority to tell me to pay more taxes to Maryland if I follow the laws of Maryland and pay every cent of taxes owed to the country.

It seems you are willfully ignorant that this is special treatment for a single company.

https://www.google.com/search?...

Where is the EU ruling that Ikea needs to pay billions of Euros in taxes? There are literally (not figuratively) thousands of companies using tax loopholes in Europe to pay little to no tax, but we are focusing on Apple, why?

I am not saying that what Apple is doing isn't scummy, I am saying that they aren't the only one, but they are being singled out.

You claim willful ignorance on my part, but how do you explain your ignorance of the other companies, and your focus on ONLY Apple in this?

Re:Cost benefit

[crimson tsunami]

So you've proven yourself willfully ignorant, with a very strong bubble.

Who would have guessed...

Re:Cost benefit

[Coren22]

Um, did you actually read anything I wrote? I know about the EU ruling, I understand what they are saying, there is no ignorance there. What I am saying is that the EU is out of line singling out Apple when there are tons of companies doing it.

If anyone is ignorant, it is people deriding Apple for this behavior, but ignoring Microsoft and Google who are using the exact same laws. There are many companies doing it, but Apple is evil!

Re:Cost benefit

[crimson tsunami]

I read the first little bit, just to make sure my suspicions were correct. But you're right I didn't bother with the rest.
Like I said right at the start, you're just trying to troll and argue against things I never even mentioned. Bringing in totally irrelevant things and purposefully misunderstanding what I said even when I used baby words for you.

Ain't no one got time for that.

I showed you three clear examples of Apple not paying tax. I explained how if they did pay that tax, the place they paid it to could have bought particle colliders.
Your willful ignorance was too strong for my clear facts to break.

I even showed you three other places you can go to, to get the argument you seem so desperate to have.

Spin-offs

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Re: Spin-offs

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the person using a device whose fabrication would be impossible if not for the earlier results of high energy physics. We've been smashing stuff together since the middle of the last century, and most modern tech relies in what we've already learnt. Who knows what cern will enable in the future?

Re:Spin-offs

[93 Escort Wagon]

He did, however, invent the environment and ride the mighty moon worm.

Re:Spin-offs

[r1348]

Could they? My opinion is as good as yours.
Did they? No.

Re:Spin-offs

[Solandri]

The initial motivation to create the web was as a way for scientists to access each others' research papers without having to go through the journals. When the cold fusion hype broke in 1989, the journals were too slow and researchers were using fax machines to send each other draft copies of their papers.

• Existing Internet-based information sharing services like Archie, Verionica, and WAIS were based on text. Research papers frequently have charts and graphs. So a way for sites to send both images and text was needed.
• ASCII text also didn't support more complex typography like mathematical symbols, which were everywhere in research papers. So more generic font support was needed. Not everyone had computers with similar graphics capabilities at the time - some had 640x480 displays, some used more cutting-edge 1024x768 or 1280x1024 displays. So a way for these fonts to be scaled to match the capabilities of your display device was needed.
• Finally, one thing you younger kids today don't have to suffer through is having to go to the library and dig through old journals trying to find another paper referenced by the paper you're reading. Apple's Hypercard in 1987 showed a lot of promise for indexing information on your computer. Tim Berners-Lee realized the exact same concept could be used to index distributed information. This gave it a leg up over PDFs (which were also invented around the same time).

So yeah, the web probably would've been developed eventually. But the factors which culminated in its development were most prevalent in the scientific community, and one of the biggest close-knit scientific communities who constantly needed to share a lot of information with each other were the folks at CERN.

Re:Spin-offs

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re: Spin-offs

[Crashmarik]

Says the person using a device whose fabrication would be impossible if not for the earlier results of high energy physics. We've been smashing stuff together since the middle of the last century, and most modern tech relies in what we've already learnt. Who knows what cern will enable in the future?

Funny thing those earlier accelerators were a hell of a lot cheaper. In dollars and constant dollars.

Hell the atomic bomb wasn't even the most expensive weapon system in WWII, that honor goes to the B-29

Re: Spin-offs

[HanzoSpam]

Well, it relies on the magnet technology that was developed as a byproduct of building colliders. Of course, it's not unreasonable to assume that a research project targeted at developing the magnets would have accomplished the same thing, without the expense of building the colliders.

Re: Spin-offs

[fredgiblet]

Though to be fair that's the total cost, and they built a hell of a lot more B-29s. I wonder where the Essex class carriers fall on that list...

Re: Spin-offs

[crimson tsunami]

So why didn't the obviously more efficient and sensible research project targeting magnets not get funding and develop those magnets first?

Re:Spin-offs

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Alan Kay appears to have had web-like ideas in the late 1960s/early 1970s.

Re: Spin-offs

[HanzoSpam]

Things get developed when they're needed. They were needed for the colliders before the MRI was developed. Had they not been, likely that work would have been done as part of MRI development.

Having the magnets available was convenient for the MRI developers, but they weren't a prerequisite. The theory behind MRI was developed independent of collider research.

http://www.two-views.com/mri-i...

Re:Spin-offs

[r1348]

CERN created the need for it. Watt invented his steam engine to drain flooded mines, not to move trains.

Sounds like Chinese Govt is having 2nd thoughts

[JoeyRox]

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.

Re:Sounds like Chinese Govt is having 2nd thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd have second thoughts too if you saw a "Made in China" label on something capable of ripping a hole in the fabric of space-time.

Re:Sounds like Chinese Govt is having 2nd thoughts

[aliquis]

You'd have second thoughts too if you saw a "Made in China" label on something capable of ripping a hole in the fabric of space-time.

The great Chinese singularity of equality.

Not just visible from space. It engulfed all of it.

Breakthrougs ?

[Crashmarik]

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.

Re: Breakthrougs ?

[cyber-vandal]

See ya then.

Re:Breakthrougs ?

[Crashmarik]

He didn't say CERN, he said high energy physics. High energy physics has been studied many times and many places. Without pure research in that field, all those inventions would've been missing foundational research and couldn't have happened.

Well lets look at that. Two out of three of those mentioned were from CERN, and they are being mentioned explicitly in the context of "How building big accelerators benefits most people". The foundational research for all those inventions didn't come from brobdingnagian accelerators.

So no your statement is in error and at best a distraction from the question what is the best way to use research funds.

Re: Breakthrougs ?

[Crashmarik]

< blink > ok < / blink>

Chinese people... the new muricans...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Chinese people... the new muricans...

[khallow]

Build something that's actually worth something, that would put them in a good position to advance science: nah, too expensive...

Read the criticism.

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...

If true, it doesn't advance science but instead hinders it. It's remarkable how people who supposedly are clued about science are clueless about the economics of science.

Highly political

[joe_frisch]

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.

Average to reduce Bias

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:Average to reduce Bias

[thinkwaitfast]

QM would lead to computers.

How so? Computers existed before 1900. QM did not have anything to do with transistors. It's all about energy band gaps in semiconducting material which was also known a long time before QM.

Re:Average to reduce Bias

[HuguesT]

You mean mechanical computers, surely not semiconductor based ones. I'm not sure if the energy band gap of semiconductors were known before 1900, but surely that was a curiosity and not well understood.

The transistor was conceived in 1926 by Lilienfeld and implemented for the first time in 1947 by Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, for which they won the Nobel prize. Notice that QM was the mainstay of physics by then, and that a complete explanation of semiconductor physics requires QM. In semiconductors, electrons behave more like waves than particles.

Re:Average to reduce Bias

[thinkwaitfast]

I took a few semi conductor materials classes for my EE degree and we never used QM for anything. Maybe for tunneling of diodes, but it was all about PN doping of Si. It took a decades of development (~1960) until devices became small enough where quantum started to have an effect.

Pocket change

[slowdeath]

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.

Re:The LHC is good enough

[HanzoSpam]

There's also the ILC, which is in the works, which will probably be built in Japan, and there are plans afoot for an even larger collider at CERN. But if China also wants to invest in a new collider, I have no problem with that. It's their money.

Re:would geneva turn into a ghetto?

[HanzoSpam]

Not likely. Anyway, particle physics isn't only about colliders. For example, Fermilab, former home of the Tevatron, is now primarily doing neutrino research. CERN will be around for a long, long time, even if they changed their focus away from colliders.

Re:Pros and cons of Big Physics

[khallow]

The other obvious argument against is that it's a lot of money spent for little value. Sure, China could waste that money in an even worse way, say invading some low value country. But they could also just not spend that money in the first place and reap the benefits of that.

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.

Just because someone blew a lot of public funds doesn't mean that anything you just mentioned was dependent on that any more than beating drums during a solar eclipse keeps the sky serpent from eating the Sun.

Sure, if I was given a couple of trillion dollars to build a better stone tool for digging roots and grubs from deeper soil layers, I might agree that low value, massive, publicly funded scientific/engineering projects are really important. But I'm not getting the sugar necessary to persuade me to go along with these boondoggles. Please fix.

Re:He's Not Wrong

[Tablizer]

Congratulations, you two just invented the "Large Troll Collider"

See why China needs censorship?

[golodh]

For any doubters among you, this is why China really needs the untiring services of its patriotic censors.

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!

What happens in Vegas...

[Hognoxious]

Conferences. In Las Vegas.

In fact, forget the conferences!

Yang does not understand it

[johanw]

> 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.".

Wrong info about cancelled US project

[ogre7299]

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.

Re:He's Not Wrong

[thinkwaitfast]

Yeah, but after the scsc was cancelled, all those physicists went to wall street. I had a few friends and classmates who did. And we all know what happened next.

Kinda gives new meaning to keeping the kids off the streets.

Obligatory quote

[HuguesT]

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.

Re:He's Not Wrong

[NicknameUnavailable]

HFT wasn't the issue, the rejiggering Clinton and Gore did of Acorn to encourage subprime lending was. It just happened to implode around the same time because the effects took time to manifest.

Re:He's Not Wrong

[NicknameUnavailable]

What utter gibberish. Have you any idea what the size of a LINAC would be to get to LHC Energies? This isn't SLAC, and these aren't Electrons. And WTF do "Phased Arrays" mean? Phased Arrays of... What? Little red cups?

First off, look up "LASER Plasma Accelerator." Second off, stop thinking you are qualified to speak about science.

Tenure!

[tmjva]

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.