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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.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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?
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?
#DeleteChrome
Being right most of the time, does not mean you should be listened to all of the time.
I'm all for.
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...
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.
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.
Congratulations, you two just invented the "Large Troll Collider"
Table-ized A.I.
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.
"I need swat, tactical, the guys with the flashlights on their guns, those guys with the big shield thingies"
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.
I'm not sure why this was modded troll - President Obama did, in fact, get the Nobel Peace Prize.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.