I'm a particle physics grad student. My god, what utter nonsense. The only reasonably accurate paragraph is this:
"And, more importantly, the lower energy range from 114 to just under 145 billion electron volts, a region of energy that Fermilab has determined, through earlier experiments, may harbor the Higgs, has not been ruled out. But the Higgs is quickly running out of places to hide."
The region of higher Higgs mass is indeed ruled out (at 95% confidence), and currently the bound is even stronger than stated -- the Higgs mass is expected to be between 114-130 GeV if it exists.
The article's main flaw is its assumption that, because the remaining mass window is "small", it decreases our chances of finding the Higgs. This is not the case for several reasons. Most importantly, it has been known since the planning stages of the accelerator that a Higgs with such a low mass is more difficult to find, in the sense that it requires running the experiment for longer, collecting more statistics, before we can decide whether or not it exists. So it comes as no surprise that we first have conclusive results about the higher mass range. It just happens that the Higgs, if it exists, doesn't have a high mass, so we keep looking.
It is expected that in 1-2 years we will have enough statistics to either discover or rule out the Higgs in the remaining mass window.
The second mistake the article makes is in claiming that not finding the Higgs is somehow a bad thing. That it means the LHC was a waste of taxpayer money. I would say quite the opposite. If the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing else, then it will only confirm our existing model and we will learn nothing new about the world (except for the value of the Higgs mass). This is the worst possible outcome. On the other hand, not finding the Higgs would be an extremely exciting result, since it would open the way to less well-explored ideas about the origin of mass. The goal of the LHC is to teach us about the world, not stroke physicists' egos and tell us how clever our existing theories are.
I am reminded of an observation made by my former boss, a planetary scientist at NASA, about that same statistical effect:
When a new Earth-crossing asteroid or comet is discovered, it's orbit is rarely known with any great certainty. The cross sectional area of the Earth divided by the area of space the object might possibly pass through yields the chance of a collision. With each successive night of observation, the orbital characteristics are determined to greater accuracy, and the cone of potential trajectories is reduced. As a not-so-intuitive result, the reported probability of a doomsday scenario grows geometrically higher with each successive night of observation. In some cases it makes national or world-wide news as the probability of mass extinction grows from 1 in a billion, to 1 in a million, to one in 10,000... Obviously there's a trend there, right? Some journalists think so, then mass hysteria ensues and NASA receives correspondence from mothers asking if they should euthanize their children to protect them from the horrific event (a true story, sadly).
Then at the height of mass hysteria, the next night's observation brings the circle of uncertainty just small enough to exclude the passage of the Earth, and instantly the probability of Armageddon drops to zero. Those media outlets who hyped the doomsday scenario then accuse the scientists of fear mongering (ironic), and the public forgets until the next big object is found looming our way, and the cycle continues.
It's sad, but not unexpected that the general public lacks the mathematical literacy to understand these statistical quirks. It's truly sad, and perhaps even criminal that journalists, and especially science journalists fall victim to those same misconceptions.
"It's truly sad, and perhaps even criminal that journalists, and especially science journalists fall victim to those same misconceptions."
"Journalists"? You are being moderated in your high praise of 'journalists', that is, professional members of the highly professional journalistic profession?
Cruel. SO cruel. How can you be so CRUEL?
I mean, while we're discussing particle physics, don't you believe that the English, drama, theater, and communications majors also need to eat?
And it's even worse, you are being even more cruel: You are suggesting that the journalistic profession should pay attention to technical information and, thus, push out the main technique of journalism back over 100 years: Use communications of human experience and emotion to grab people by the heart, the gut, and below the belt.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how is this argument flawed? Bayesian probability says that eliminating possible universes increases the probability of other ones (given everything else as constant). So reducing the probability that the Higgs Boson lies in some energy range (which is what this experiment did) increases the probability that a) the Higgs Boson doesn't exist and b) the Higgs Boson exists at some other energy level, which is what this article is saying.
I think we should be careful with Bayesian inference for the usual reason -- there is only one universe with one (or zero) Higgs particle. You can't really collect statistics over universes, so what is the meaning of probability in this case?
More concretely, what prior probability would you assign to the distribution of the Higgs mass? This depends on your theory. For instance, supersymmetric theories tend to favor a lower Higgs mass, so if you are a proponent of such theories you wouldn't expect a heavy Higgs anyway.
Note that physicists themselves do not phrase their results in these terms. The statement "Higgs excluded above 130 GeV at 95% confidence" does not mean there is 95% chance the Higgs isn't there. Rather, this statement has a precise meaning based on frequentist reasoning.
But perhaps more importantly, the tone of the article is sensationalist and seems to imply that we are about to give up hope. This isn't true at all. I mean, look:
"while CERN will continue it's search at least until the end of this year, if no positive results about the Higgs should come out, Stephen Hawking ... would be able to cash in on his wager."
Bayesian inference is applicable here, because we are talking about the subjective probability - ie, confidence - that one single fact is true. There is no way to reduce a single "event" (that there is Higgs particle or there isn't) to a frequentist, or "objective", probability.
As you correctly say, the influence that the results we already got about the possibility that Higgs boson exists with a high mass have on the global possibility that there is a Higgs boson depend on the a-priori (to the current experiment) confidence that we give to the high mass/low mass hypotheses. So there is for sure not a 95% drop in confidence, but there is indeed a drop, unless you gave 0 confidence to the high-mass hypothesis before the experiment.
I'm not saying Bayesian inference isn't applicable, I'm just cautioning against an careless interpretation of its results. But if you insist on interpreting it in this way then yes, it means the probability of finding a Higgs is lower.
However, as I said above the term "95% confidence" is not related to this reasoning at all. Saying for example "the Higgs mass is not 140 GeV at 95% CL" means precisely: If the Higgs were at 140 GeV, it would have 5% probability of producing the results we measured experimentally. It does not mean "we are 95% sure the Higgs isn't at 140 GeV".
Of course not, but we should discount our belief that the Higgs has a mass at 140GeV by a factor roughly proportionate to the 95% confidence of the result. And I don't think anyone in this thread was actually claiming that we are 95% sure the Higgs is not at 140GeV, that's usually precisely the sort of mistake that relying on Bayesian methods helps you avoid.
"we should discount our belief that the Higgs has a mass at 140GeV by a factor roughly proportionate to the 95% confidence of the result"
I'm sorry but I don't understand what this means in practice. The first part is a Bayesian belief, while the 95% confidence result comes from frequentist analysis. I'm not sure how you can mix the two.
The difference is that frequentist practice would be to stop at the 95% confidence interval and leave it there, whereas a Bayesian would use that observation to update their probability estimate of the theory being true.
"If the Higgs were at 140 GeV, it would have 5% probability of producing the results we measured experimentally" is the same as
P(Observation | Higgs at 140Gev) = .05
So given that getting your new belief about the probability of a Higgs Boson at some energy is going to be updated based on your observation, you can see that it ends up being scaled by that exact confidence result. That's sort of an oversimplification, since really you end up calculating the P(O) scaling factor based on P(O|H) among other things, but I hope you can see how they're closely related in practice.
Thank you, now I understand what you meant. I concede (again) that using Bayesian analysis the new results do lower the probability that the Higgs exists. Personally I don't subscribe to this point of view since, if the Higgs exists and has a low mass, the most likely chain of events is: Bayesian probability for Higgs existence starts at some subjective value, goes down (with a subjective slope that depends on your priors), then goes up and reaches 1. Not only is it subjective, this just doesn't feel to me like it is describing anything "real"; it seems like we're just playing with numbers. But I guess this is already way off topic for this discussion.
For me the important point to communicate was that the article is, let's say, mostly nonsense. Just consider the title:
> A Higgs Setback: Did Stephen Hawking Just Win the Most Outrageous Bet in Physics History?
Never mind the superlatives. There was no "Higgs setback", and the answer to the question is "No". The article does not leave out the correct details, but I'm quite certain it leaves the layman with the feeling that the Higgs search is all but doomed.
I agree with you about the article being just sensationalistic non-journalism.
About not using a Bayesian approach, though, I don't understand how could you infer the existence or not of the Higgs without it, considering that we can only measure something that is probabilistically correlated to what we want to find.
In other words, what should happen for you to say that we have verified that there is a Higgs boson? I'm pretty confident that it would be some application of Bayes theorem :)
I'm not saying there's a 95% chance the Higgs isn't there. I'm saying there was some non-zero probability that it was in the specified energy range before, and given these results the probability that it's now in that range is now 5% of the value it was before. Or more precisely, the probability that we're in the universe where the Higgs is in the specified energy range and it's detectable with this experiment just went down to 5% of it's original value. Even if we can't accurately identify what the value of the probability is, we can still say it went down to 5% of its original value on the basis of the evidence from this experiment. I would also argue that prior to this experiment the probability of the Higgs appearing in this energy range given our state of evidence of how the universe works was significant (more than 15% I'd say) otherwise we wouldn't have built the LHC. I understand you can't say this with a frequentist approach because we don't have a sample of universes to draw on to estimate priors.
Finally we're not talking about the probability of some state of the universe in the absolute (as frequentists claim, we can't meaningfully talk about such things), we're talking about some state of the universe given the evidence we have.
I'm not sure I follow your first argument. The probability of finding the item in the remaining 5% of the search space is independent of the time required to search different sections of the search space (unless of course you have additional prior information about where the item is more likely to be located).
The fact that it may take you, say, 90% of the time to search a particular 10% section of a search space doesn't increase the probability of finding the item in that section.
The difference is that physicists have a good idea of where the Higgs should be, and the search isn't quite intuitive. They don't just have to find a single particle, they have to look at a large collection of events and perform statistical analysis. Also, the time it takes to search for lower energy particles may not be the same as for high energy particles.
It's a little more complicated, but "all" the energies ranges are searched in parallel.
It is easier to discard the ranges that are very far from the mass of the Higgs' boson. So initially the expected range is very broad, something like:
* More than 114GeV, because if it's smaller we would have seen the Higgs boson in another smaller accelerator (LEP)
* Less than 185GeV, because we saw small corrections that are probably due Higgs boson in the (LEP)
So you get a lot of money to build another accelerator, and you are confident that the maximal energy of the collider is enough to see something.
In some ranges, the experiments doesn’t show anything interesting, so it is possible to discard that the mass of the Higgs boson is in that range. It is easier to do this when the range is more far away from the "real" value. So you can discard with a 95% of confidence that range, get some papers published, perhaps a few Ph.D. thesis, compare the data to another more indirect calculations, show some progress, and ask for more money because the accelerator is really big.
The problem is that some energy ranges are more difficult to test, because other well known particles appear but the final results is very similar to what is expected from a Higgs boson. So it is important to choose some strange phenomenon where there is easier to see the difference between a Higgs boson and another particles. So with more experiments you can discard with a 95% of confidence a new range, ..., because the accelerator is really big.
But some ranges are more difficult to discard. There are a lot of interesting phenomenons. Some of them are due to other particles. The other particles are well known, so it is possible to calculate how many of these are expected to appear sadistically. But the experiments show that there are more than expected. It can be a statistical fluke, or it can be corrections that appear because the mass of the Higgs boson is near that range. The real problem is that if the Higgs boson really exists, a lot of corrections appear in the nearby mass ranges, so these ranges are more difficult to discard with a 95% confidence ...
The most difficult range is the one that includes the actual mass of the Higgs boson. It should be impossible to discard :). But it is not enough to not be able to discard it with a 95% confidence, because it can be a statistical fluke. To "prove" that the Higgs boson exists wits a 99.99997% confidence, more and more experiments are necessary to see the difference between a statistical fluke produced by the background process of the other particles and a real signal produced by the Higgs bosons. So you need more time to find it where it really is, than to discard it where it isn’t. (So you need more money to run the accelerator, so you need to dhow some preliminary results.)
So, next year we will probably see something like "RIP^2 Higgs Boson, 99% of the initial search range discarder forever with 95% confidence, only a minuscule 1% remaining." and it will be really a good new. And in a few (5?) years something like "Zombie Higgs Boson found, returned from 99.9% dead." and it will be a really good new.
> On the other hand, not finding the Higgs would be an extremely exciting result, since it would open the way to less well-explored ideas about the origin of mass. The goal of the LHC is to teach us about the world, not stroke physicists' egos and tell us how clever our existing theories are.
Maybe the Higgs boson is the new aether[1] which, after many experiments failing at observing its existence, was replaced by relativity and quantum physics. By which I concur that an experiment built for, yet failing to demonstrate a point is not necessarily a failed experiment.
So whatever the results of the LHC, I'm confident that it's a worthwhile task to undertake.
There is a big difference. The experiments showed that the ether didn’t exist. But there is no experiment that shows that there is no Higgs boson. IIRC the expected roadmap is to find the Higgs boson in 3-5 years (from now) in the LHC, so don’t expect to see it sooner. (It is expected to see it in sooner in 2-3 years in the Tevatron, if it were kept open.)
The experiments show that if the Higgs boson exists, it is not very heavy (not heavier than 145GeV). And there is some indirect and inconclusive evidence that it exist and the real mass is near ~120GeV (probably +-10GeV), but it can be a statistical fluke, so we have to wait a few years.
Didn't the author of the article shoot himself in the foot with this statement:
> These assessments carry a probability measure, such as 95%, 99%, or—as traditionally required in particle physics for a “definitive” conclusion about the existence of a new particle: 99.99997% (this is the infamous “five-sigma” requirement).
So...the five-sigma requirement means that your run-of-the-mill physicists won't accept a claim until there's statistical evidence accurate to 99.99997%. From 95% to ...that number is still a significant number of tests, no? Doesn't this paint the title as sensationalist with the author's own words?
For discovering an effect the standard is indeed 5-sigma. But here we are discussing excluding an effect, namely deciding that a suggested effect isn't there. For this the standard is lower.
The article did not hide any of these facts though, so it's not "utter nonsense". The title of the original article is "A Higgs Setback: Did Stephen Hawking Just Win the Most Outrageous Bet in Physics History?", nothing like "RIP Higgs". The article, at best, is trying to be provocative. But, more importantly, you believe in god?
>to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful
This is infuriating. A negative result is a successful experiment. Don't hamper efforts to fund science with the argument that science might figure out it was wrong.
Europe explored the universe where America did not.
> Europe explored the universe where America did not
I guess you never heard of a little project called the International Space Station?
The SSC was supposed to be a $4 billion project. That's what Congress was told in 1987. By 1993, it was projected as a $12 billion project. Guess where that $8 billion would have come from if the SSC project had continued? From other science projects--and most likely the ISS would have been the first on the chopping block.
America continued exploring the universe just fine--but with a broad approach instead of putting everything toward exploring one narrow area.
We're seeing a repeat of this with the new space telescope, although the outcome may be different this time. The projected costs have grown massively, and the projected launch date has been pushed WAY out. It's been defunded this year, with Congress specifically calling it out by name as to receive no funding. The Congressman who put that language in has said that this is meant to be a warning to the project's managers that they need to get their act together, and then funding can come back.
Are you seriously quibbling about $8bn when we happily spend $3500bn on bank bailouts, or $500bn/year for the military (not including the various wars)?
Budgets tend to be somewhat compartmentalized. If a project in compartment X goes over its budget, that tends to come at the expense of other things in compartment X.
$8 billion was a huge amount in the science compartment. It is completely irrelevant that some other compartments might have had much bigger budgets.
It is completely irrelevant that some other compartments might have had much bigger budgets.
While you may consider this point unrealistic or unhelpful to the argument, it cannot be characterised as irrelevant. Adding the word 'completely' only weakens your case.
It's completely relevant if your point is that we nickel-and-dime essential scientific funding but spare no expense when killing brown people across the globe. You don't have to go to too much effort to understand that's what the grandparent was driving at.
Your definition of 'essential' and my definition of essential are vastly different, and we are both very interested in science. Imagine the difference between your definition and most Americans who wind up paying for the thing. I personally would rather see the $8 billion go to medical research or energy research with a closer time horizon than physics research.
Agreed. I'd like to see the energy industry fumble around with maps trying to locate oil deposits because this new fangled GPS-thing doesn't quite work right.
Personally I don't have a very strong opinion on where the funding should go at all, just that it should exist and that it should be increased by an order of magnitude at least. Even experts in a field can have a hard time deciding where to allocate resources, what hope do I have? And more importantly what the hell business does Congress have providing for these allocations? They don't know shit.
I would rather shovel billions at universities with little more than an unenforced request that they spend it on pure research, than allow Congress any control over scientific funding at all.
Mainly I just think that drawing attention to scientific funding as some kind of waste of taxpayer money when it is such a drop in the bucket is more about serving the interests of the American conservative establishment in villainizing intellectuals than actually solving a problem.
Somehow you added two zeros on to your $3,500bn on bank bailouts! In 2009, it looked like the actual cost would be about $350bn, which is a lot, for sure, but literally an order of magnitude less.
According to the treasury department, by 2010, projected cost of TARP was $30-50bn. That's /two/ orders of magnitude out.
You also handily miss out the multiplier effects of military spending, and act like the government is taking the money and shoving it up the ass of a small animal. In fact, the vast majority is given to US industry and to US citizens. I'm sure if you Google'd you'd find the source I'm looking for who described the US Military as the world's largest welfare system.
He is right. 3.45T are total costs of bailout. $2T Emergency Fed Loans (you can give shit-sandwich and exchange it to get real $$). $700B TARP. $300B Hope Now program. $310B Fannie/Freddie and AIG. And ya... we also added $140B Tax Breaks for Banks.
Did you intentionally ignore the $80bn to AIG? TARP was just one program of many used in the bank bailout. The OP didn't say TARP was 3500bn s/he said the total bailout(s) were that amount. Including the government taking on all the junkbonds.
What my peer means to say is that the Govt. spent a ton more than the TARP amount on buying what basically amounts to garbage debt - almost a pure gift. It's a less reported but much more important number. The banks, of course, like to claim that the TARP stuff was just a loan, to misdirect your eyes from the elephant in the room.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting indrax's comment, but I'm fairly sure it wasn't meant to be a jab at the United States. He was stating that while America chose to focus its exploration on the cosmos, Europe's exploration endeavors focus on the sub atomic level.
Europe's exploration of the universe has a different focus, not a better one.
If you look into commercial space research, you'll find that a lot of it (maybe most) is done under non-disclosure. We usually don't get to hear about it until there is a successful product to show.
Indeed. Bean-counters are looking at things totally upside down.
A few billion to further the human understanding of the world around us vs the 1.4 trillion spent on the war effort. I know which I'd rather have backed.
> Europe explored the universe where America did not.
What did they get out of it? (Honest question.) Also, supposing the Higg's Boson did exist and this experiment found it, how much benefit would the average European derived? How much less benefit would people from other countries enjoy?
There are a number of replies telling you that a better understanding of physics is what we get out of this. I completely agree, but that argument won't convince everybody.
I don't have numbers at hand, but a large amount of the data the detectors spew out is un-necessary, and needs to be sorted quickly (think real-time or very nearly), so that the back end computing resources can actually keep up with storing it. There is a huge grid infrastructure (data transfer and compute resources) dedicated to the LHC. The problems the scientists and engineers had to solve to get the LHC running will come up in some shape down the road, and we'll benefit from this.
We can list off a whole lot of advances that were made for pure science that are ridiculously useful for us today (spectroscopy, lasers, atomic clocks, nuclear reactors, even particle accelerators, off the top of my head). We may also wish to keep in mind that solving the infrastructure problems scientists face also gives society great payoffs.
I thank you for your point about advances made from pure scientific research before. However, I think in many of these cases some applications of the pure research were hypothesized as well, long before the pure research was actually completed. I worry that we are simply picking examples of blue sky research that ended up being practical, and ignoring examples that were not because they are less available. (Which makes sense, since research that had no practical use would probably not come to mind when you try to think of examples where research ended up having a practical use.)
Of course, even such a conclusion would not suggest that we should cease all blue sky research. Obviously that would be very silly. But it might make sense to think about whether it is possible to guess ahead of time what research is likely to have practical benefits and what research is not. This way we can spend more money on research likely to have benefits and less on research that is probably useless except for the knowledge's own sake.
I'm baffled by your last paragraph ("it might make sense to think about whether it is possible to guess ahead of time what research is likely to have practical benefits and what research is not").
You seem to think that a $10B collider was built just because it was possible, not as part of a deliberative/strategic process, partly influenced by a European/American contest for intellectual leadership in this area?
Surely you know that the worldwide particle physics community has been contemplating the value of this research for about 20 years? (Since the SSC planning stages.) And that European political bodies have deliberated it at length?
I'm not in that community, but my friends who are, are spending a lot of time in Geneva the last couple of years! The value of bringing all that talent in to contribute ideas, and some of them to stay for years, is hard to estimate, but it must be huge. I'm sure Europe is a great place for physics PhDs and postdocs these days.
What they got out of it was
a) gaining a greater knowledge about the way our world functions,
b) training a new generation of scientists at a level of advanced research which goes beyond what was previously achieved.
c) developed an advanced engineering industry which has broken new ground in materials science, not only in superconductivity and cooling, but in practically all engineering disciplines.
d) developed a new level of sophistication in computer analysis and processing ability.
Many universities and advanced research facilities around the world contribute to a project as large as LHC, so the benefits are spread worldwide. However the location of LHC makes a huge impact on the scientific abilities and human resources of Europe.
As for how much benefit the average European derives from LHC, the question is really how much they benefit from the advancement of general scientific ability and human resources. Besides the innumerable everyday fruits of the advancement of science which average people enjoy today as compared with, say, 1803, there is the even more important fact that their future ability to establish a high quality of life, and to solve major problems, depends on their having an incredible skill and wisdom in dealing with the actual, factual world.
This is, I think, a dishonest question, because we can't know "what they [got] out of it". There is a 5% probability that they might "get something out of it" in the future, and an unknown (likely greater than zero) probability that they will "get" a great deal out of it through readjustments of previously invincible models of how the universe is constructed.
Remember, we're trying to figure out why things have mass here, (which, I think, is rather prima facia a very important question to answer) and if we're wrong about how that phenomenon arises, we now have a very big clue to look somewhere else.
In short, they got petabytes of data out of it, and frankly, that will most likely prove to be invaluable in and of itself.
Of course not. Only when this is ancient history will we truly know the results of the experiment in a practical sense. But we can hazard guesses, and if we are informed (which I am not) those guesses have some chance of being right. Anyway, your consequent doesn't follow: an inability to know the concrete answer to any given question does not make the question dishonest.
> which, I think, is rather prima facia a very important question to answer
Important for what purpose? Human happiness? Some concrete goal of technology or economics? The abstract advancement of knowledge? Some mix of all of these things?
I agree that it would be nice to know where mass comes from, but that fact absent any useful application (or a probability of a useful application) is of limited value to me.
> that will most likely prove to be invaluable in and of itself
It is hard for me to believe that the data itself will be something anyone would be willing to pay money for. Do you mean invaluable in some other sense?
I agree that it would be nice to know where mass comes from, but that fact absent any useful application (or a probability of a useful application) is of limited value to me.
I guess if you don't see potential applications of understanding where mass comes from, we're at a bit of an impasse here. It is difficult (if not impossible) to make predictions about what the discovery will bring, but the mere possibility that this research could or might lead to the ability to manipulate mass seems rather valuable to me, in many concrete ways.
[UPDATE:
I guess if you want to see this as a gamble, you need to take into account the very good track record of abstract scientific discovery leading to enormous benefits. Given that understanding electricity, magnetism, relativity, and countless other scientific discoveries have brought incalculable value to the human race, I guess I don't understand why one wouldn't believe that science was worth the gamble.]
Only because I don't know the science behind it. I asked the question to be informed. Everyone is so busy trying to show that I am wrong to ask the question that no one has taken time to answer it.
What potential applications are there of knowing where mass comes from in the level of detail we are speaking about here (i.e. the proof of the SM or the suggestion of one of the Higgless theories)? Of course, you could give me science fiction, but I'm hoping for applications that are likely.
RE: your update, excellent, and I agree, although people were able to make predictions about technologies arising from much of the abstract research of the past long before it became practical. I am asking for such predictions, if they exist, or confirmation that no such predictions currently exist. I have not been able to find any in all my searchings, but perhaps I am looking in the wrong places.
OK, I'm not a physicist, so my first thought when I hear "manipulate mass" is Star Trek. Specifically, inertial dampers. One of the big impediments to interstellar travel is the length of time and amount of energy it takes to accelerate to near-light speed. But if we could manipulate mass, perhaps we could create a field that reduces the mass of a spacecraft thus reducing its inertia? Science fiction? Probably. But it'll sure be a concrete advancement when I'm sending you a (mass-less) postcard from Alpha Centauri.
Edit: Someone who knows more may be able to give you something less fictional that could result. The problem is, there's really no way of knowing until long after the experiment has been finished (which is what everyone else here is saying). Scientific funding is already too dependent on whether an experiment appears to be likely to yield marketable results. Recently there was an article on HN about how the experimental leukemia cure that has been in the news almost didn't get funding, because it was viewed as not likely enough to be successful. It's still too early to tell, but this method of manipulating T-cells to destroy cancer cells could lead to an out-and-out cure for many types of cancer, which would be a huge milestone in medical history.
All of which has little to do with CERN, except to say that only funding things that are likely to lead to new technology would probably prevent us from making discoveries that lead to new technology.
There's a lot of potential applications for mass manipulation, if it's possible. You'll be hard pressed to find specific examples, because a lot of them depend on how mass manipulation would be possible.
Potential applications could be in energy generation or the creation of ultra light materials, which could open the doors for affordable space travel (or just better more fuel efficient travel here on earth). Understanding how mass works is one of the final puzzle pieces in physics, and could lead to countless breakthroughs in a number of areas. It's not a trivial theoretical pursuit.
> although people were able to make predictions about technologies arising from much of the abstract research of the past long before it became practical
Just about everybody in this thread is arguing the opposite of that.
The value is not really in the finding, but more in the seeking. It's the surprise discoveries that happen along the way that have huge practical applications, not just what we thought we were looking for.
You have to seek to find. Even if they are on the wrong track it's better to seek than not.
> You have to seek to find. Even if they are on the wrong track it's better to seek than not.
I guess this sentiment, which is seen throughout this thread, is my main objection to the whole thing. This is spiritualism, pure and simple. Science, no matter about what, is good, because it's science. We know this because of our history, and we embrace it like a totem.
What I wish is that we had a scientific mindset about our science, about determining what science is most useful, etc., but all I can see here are variations on the assumption that, if it's an expensive science project, it must be useful somewhere down the line.
The rational perspective is to look at history and realize that every attempt to predict long-term technological progress has gone laughably wrong. Lacking reason to believe we are now much better predictors, we should simply not allow our research efforts to be directed much by where we think they will lead.
Take the example of Vannevar Bush's memex, one of the most impressive attempts at technological prognostication. If you, during the 1930's and 40's, seriously believed in the potential of his ideas, would you have advocated for research into microfilm, or semiconductors? Or would you have dismissed the memex as science fiction too far out of reach to be used as a reasonable goal, when in reality it was less than half a century away? The man who best saw the value of the invention got all the implementation details wrong.
The basic underlying assumption is that more knowledge is inherently more valuable than less knowledge, even if you don't have a specific application in mind for that knowledge.
How many people could have forseen GPS recievers as a consequence of General Relativity?
How is the GSP receiver a consequence of GR (honest question)? I know internal clocks of the satellites have to compensate for time dilation, but to be honest I don't see why that couldn't have been 'fixed' with an empirical solution devoid of theoretical basis. After the first launch, of course.
I think the empirical solution would not be as straight-forward as you proclaim. Namely, because lacking any clear understanding of the science any number of theories might crop up that attempt to explain the perceived anomaly thus hindering efforts at finding a workable solution. Some of the emergent theories might actually lead to declaring outright that the concept is flawed and unsolvable.
On the other hand, having a clear conceptual framework allows these people to pin-point what areas might be causing problems. It allows for effort to be focused and justifies certain fixes. Especially in costly scenarios such as this one, where there might not have been a second launch given the failure of the first.
However, my limited knowledge of the problem precludes me from understanding if a simple 24 hour re-sync would address the underlying problem.
From what I do understand the accuracy/precision of the GPS system would be affected. I'm also inclined to believe that even with a regular re-synch, the overall usefulness of the system would be affected. As I don't believe the re-synch itself would be exempt from the underlying problem.
What I do know is that given our better conceptual framework we're able to leverage very precise location information; this leads to a more useful and productive GPS system than we would have otherwise.
Apologies - it's actually SR that's key to the whole idea (though GR corrections are also very important to the accuracy). Without the observed SoL being independent of the relative motion of the user and the satellites, the entire concept is pretty unworkable.
Indeed. The question isn't, "Did this experiment advance scientific knowledge," the question is, "Was this a prudent and appropriate use of tax money, especially in light of the enormous opportunity costs inherent in any expenditure of tax money?"
People who make the decisions to spend money on this scale - US$ 9 billion! - must be well qualified to make such decisions, and do so after careful consideration of various alternatives.
I think it was the right decision. Of course opportunity cost must be considered - you could have had, instead: 1 new Nimitz class aircraft carrier (without the air wing), OR 4 new B-2 bombers OR 1 extra week of Bush tax cuts....
> people . . . must be well qualified . . . [so we should trust them].
Surely not an argument from authority. Before we can accept this reasoning, we have to have proof that the people allocating the research funds have interests that well match those of the public, not just the scientific community, and we must also have proof that they have a good track record of applying those interests to ends that match them.
No, not an argument from authority, but an appeal for putting the "right" people in positions of authority. What I meant was "people must be well qualified (and also consider alternatives carefully ) so that we CAN trust them".
That is ridiculous, ROI is relevant if you're talking about applied research where you have a short-term goal and can make the calculation.
But the LHC is basic research, you can't do ROI calculations on that. Instead, you dump as much money as you can into it, and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it.
I asked the question I meant to ask. The point is not that we should stop doing blue sky research if examples exist where it has produced no benefit. It is quite obvious that blue sky research has been useful to us over the course of time. That fact does not give anything called blue sky research carte blanche to spend taxpayer money.
The point is to weigh the likely benefits of all the various types of blue sky research available to us at any given time and try to spend more on research that is likely to be useful.
> Neither does any known investment vehicle.
And like any investment vehicle, I ask that we consider whether any given piece of blue sky research is likely to appreciate or be a money sink. This was, if you'll read back, my original query. I don't understand why the people in this forum consider this question so outrageous.
The difficulty is that much of the time, blue sky research projects appear at the time they are being funded, to have absolutely no known possible applications, nor any sense that future applications will come along. It is not possible in the present to know what the benefit will be. This is basically the definition of basic research, and if we just said "ok, no funding for stuff that has no known application" then we would be sitting around with very very smooth wheels on our carriages.
all blue sky research, by definition, is likely to be a money sink then by that purposely obtuse set of requirements.
Ask any lab director what the risk level (of failure) of pure R&D is and they'll happily respond "very high". Pure R&D is such a high gamble that its virtually not commercially viable. And history shows that successful research often does not immediately benefit the organization that conducted the research.
But nearly everything you interact with on a daily basis was blue sky research at some point. The electricity you use, the car you drive, the networks you communicate on, the rf technology that underpins that, the processors that control your devices, the components that make up a modern microprocessor, the storage and memory technologies in your electronic devices, probably much of the food you eat, the products you clean yourself with, nearly all of the medicine you might take and pretty much any modern medical techniques you may benefit from, the water you drink, the plumbing and sewage systems you use and on and on and on and on.
Unless you live in a purposely technologieless enclave (and even those groups benefit from time-to-time from pure R&D), you personally benefit in uncountable ways from the research that was the result of what many people thought was pouring money down a hole.
But your point That fact does not give anything called blue sky research carte blanche to spend taxpayer money.
Is also absolutely true. That's why its important to put knowledgeable people in the decision making process to pull the trigger on something like this and we don't end up burning money on perpetual motion machines or faith healers.
I think ironically the more obvious the return on investment of the research is, the less sense it makes for government to fund it - the private sector is more likely to fund something where the route to commercialisation is clear.
Or: basic science is a public good, and is underinvested in by free markets.
DARPA's rule is that if more than 10% of their projects succeed, they're not taking enough risks. Blue sky projects are presumably much, much lower probability than that.
Seriously...? Not "all", but in general, "blue sky research" does deliver massive benefits (just look at what is in front of your face right now! It would not be there without quantum physics.).
To be honest, I know very little of the history of LCDs. From what I can read on Wikipedia, the chain of research went something like:
- Liquid crystals observed.
- Materials science research into the properties of liquid crystals, during which the TN-effect was discovered.
- Industry scientists looking for a display technology that did not rely on vacuum tubes use the TN-effect to develop practical liquid crystal displays.
I don't see where the blue sky research on quantum mechanics plays into this, but it seems like you know more about this than I do so maybe you can point out the link I am missing. Maybe you mean the materials science research on liquid crystals, but it seems to me like materials science is largely a practical field whose main question is, "Is there anything useful we can do with this stuff." I don't think of it as blue sky research the same way I think of particle physics.
The study you linked is mostly about practical R&D in an industry setting and seems to suggest it's very difficult to measure the economic impact of basic research. But there was some interesting information in there, and thank you for that.
I was thinking about the transistor (and hence computers etc), rather than the LCD.
As for the study - yes, such returns are very difficult to measure or even estimate accurately, as the range of estimates suggest. But won't you agree that a) the consensus is that R&D is extremely valuable, and b) this can probably be extrapolated to basic scientific research?
(I feel that I am about to gain a convert to the cause of supporting scientific research... my time here has been well spent).
He was referring to everything that uses transistors ( in this specific case not only the monitor but also the computer and all the internet infrastructure that you're using to criticize blue sky research)
>...you can't do ROI calculations on that. Instead, you dump as much money as you can into it, and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it.
I could apply this quote to all kinds of other ways of spending money, and it would hold true (e.g. infrastructure or social programs). And while you can't do ROI calculations on long-range programs, you can make informed decisions about which are more likely to provide the greatest benefits. In fact, if you are talking about spending billions of dollars of other people's money, you have a moral and ethical obligation to do exactly that.
First, let's draw an analogy to the territorial expansion of the human race. Engineering is like building cities, while basic research is like exploration and mapping. Before Columbus set sail there was an inkling that he might be able to find something of value, but nobody knew whether it would be gold, spices, etc., and certainly nobody foresaw the creation of an eventual world superpower. Plus, city builders need explorers to identify suitable sites for new cities, and to make sure that an expanding city isn't about to run itself off a cliff (or into some other unforeseen territorial hazard).
Second, imagine that engineering is like exploring a pitch black cave. Basic research is a flashlight we can shine in various directions. Engineers can make incremental steps forward, but without science lighting the way, we won't know whether we're about to run into a wall.
Third, grandiose projects like the LHC or ISS serve as an inspiration to scientists and engineers in all fields. Even if the primary activity of a giant project yields no useful results ("Not finding the Higgs" in the case of the LHC, and "Being in space" in the case of ISS), the supporting research and engineering teams will develop useful technologies to solve related problems (like the grid computing systems others have mentioned).
To sum up, basic research like that done at the LHC is necessary to expand the possible solution space for further scientific research and engineering. The further we push the limits of human understanding, the more branching-off points we create for the minds of applied scientists and engineers. The more different things we have to think about, the more likely we are to think useful thoughts that haven't been thought before. We need the LHC et. al. to be at the forefront of knowledge to provide plenty of well-traversed, fertile ground for applied science and engineering.
If work doesn't produce anything of value (which isn't the case here, just hypothetically), then the "created" jobs are bad for the economy because they divert resources from productive areas. It's another form of the broken window fallacy.
Job creation is just about the worst 'benefit' that can be ascribed to a project. Practically any expenditure can be tied to it. Using this argument just puts your project on par with digging ditches and filling them back again. This is not something a LHC promoter should be proud of, in and of itself.
Suppose they got absolutely nothing out of it. This shouldn't matter.
You cannot easily predict what rewards will come as a result of cutting-edge scientific research. It's a gamble. However, due to all the technologies we have right now as a result of expensive government spending on research, the general consensus is (or at least should be) that the benefits FAR outweigh the costs.
At the median United States income of $40,000/year, a single billion dollars is 25,000 person-years of work dedicated solely to that billion dollars. Multiply as appropriate. Nine billion-ish in this case, according to Wikipedia.
Asking what we (the human race) got for nine billion dollars (225,000 person-years of work, at a generous 50 years in the workforce the life work of 4,500 people) deserves more than glib generalities about how wonderful science is or vaguely handwaved "benefits" far outweighing the much-harder-to-handwave "costs".
I'm not saying these questions can't be answered. I'm saying the glittering, glib generalities being offered here ring very hollow against that level of real cost, and you need to brush your arguments up.
(Also, feel free to apply this to any other billion dollars you care to name. I think we take our spending of billions and trillions way too casually, personally. We can and in some sense must spend it (dollars can be hoarded but much of what they represent, like man-hours, can not), but more thought put into it would be nice.)
Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?
What if these advanced particle accelerators reveal that we understand physics incorrectly (which would be the case if the Higgs doesn't exist)? What if, for instance, we discovered that faster-than-light travel is possible through portals that we can construct out of quantum materials? And then 10-15 years later we have a functional portal device? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs cars? planes? trains?)
What if we discover a new computing method based on the research started by these particle accelerators, better than quantum computing, that eventually gives us so much computing power that we are capable of developing human-like AI? Or an AI that is many times more powerful than humans? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs to work anymore?)
Who knows what we will be capable of? It's a fucking gamble. As it stands, we don't know. But the potential rewards outweigh the costs so much as to render them ridiculous.
Believing in God causing him to send you to heaven is a gamble. The potential rewards must outweigh any prior probability of God existing, or any cost to your time spent praying and doing other religious things, right?
All I'm meaning to do here is tell you that your argument does not work. It doesn't work for convincing people, and it doesn't work as a matter of practice the vast majority of the time anyway. Take a straw man: the human species joins together and pools all our resources and the planet's resources into some giant project that, while lots of credible people claim is very unlikely, everyone helps out anyway. But it doesn't work out, and by the time we call it quits we're so starved for resources that we go extinct. Repeat with variations in as many hypothetical worlds as you wish, and maybe 1 or 2 get it right and the payoff was totally worth it because it made humans rulers of the universe or something. That's not a good gamble.
Do you believe that if the possible positive utility to be gained wasn't so vast, we shouldn't do scientific research because then the improbability of that utility and/or the costs that factor in begin to weigh on it? If so, that's an interesting belief. For myself, I don't find the probabilities that unlikely nor the costs that high, I don't need to posit the possibility of untold fortunes due to scientific research to argue that we should continue doing it.
More glittering, glib generalities, by the way. You reach for FTL by the fourth sentence of your post; this is not a sign of strength, it's a sign of desparation. This is not a compelling, practical argument. This whole line of argument is just Pascal's Wager, with "scientific discoveries" instead of "heaven", and roughly as compelling from a logical point of view.
"Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?"
Might also be a good time to point out that the Internet did not fulfill it's intended goals either -- a communications network resistant to withstanding the loss of huge chunks of it's infrastructure most likely caused by large scale nuclear bombardment by the Soviets.
Great point. DARPA thought they were going to get a unified military communications system. Instead, they enabled a cultural revolution that has proven to be far better at fighting totalitarianism and promoting democracy than anything the military tried to invent.
Normally I don't feed trolls, but I think the point still has to be made. Just because something didn't succeed in it's initial intent doesn't mean it was valueless. Quite often, the secondary use of the thing is far more valuable.
While I agree with your sentiment, your second paragraph is quite telling of probably everyone in this thread: a bunch of geeks secretly hoping [yet consciously knowing it's probably nonsensical], that LHC research will lead to faster-than-light travel/communication and/or time machines.
Even gambles have odds. And, to me at least, it does matter if we get something valuable out of our tax dollars.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not some slobbering hard-line libertarian who believes that any experiment with a negative result is wasted money. On the other hand, if the odds are that a positive or negative result is nowhere likely to benefit the public in a concrete manner (either directly or via its successor events and discoveries), then I do question whether it's wise to spend money on it.
If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore. It would be engineering.
You can't make valid predictions about the expected benefit of any single experiment before running it for the first time. All we have to go on is the history of major scientific undertakings, and the technologies they have eventually lead to.
That history primarily shows two things: sustained serious scientific research correlates with technological advances and breakthroughs, and governments are usually the only ones willing and able to throw large amounts of cash at a project for a long time before the results start coming in or making money.
> If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore.
Not so. For example, it was hypothesized long before the first human-initiated fission event that the energy from fission would possibly be useful for creating a bomb. The research and physics that went into actually developing the thing was still cutting edge even though predictions had been made about its long term practical applications.
They only calculated one side of the equation. What would have been the long-term effect if the Manhattan Project experiments had produced negative results and falsified the quantum mechanical models of the time? You can't just ignore that possibility and still have a valid expectation.
I don't really understand. My point is that they had some guesses about the possible uses if the experiments bore out. It's a disproof of the claim that you can't make some kind of predictions about these things. Whether the predictions are always correct is a completely different question that I am not trying to answer.
Often, we do have a fairly good idea what the ramifications will be if an experiment goes a certain way. But we almost never also have a good idea what the ramifications would be if things go the other way. Without knowledge of what the benefit might be if the outcome surprises you, how can you say that the experiment doesn't have enough potential benefit to be worth the time and money?
There's no way to place an easy upper bound on the payoff of the less-expected outcome, so your cost-benefit analysis can't simply ignore the possibilities that you consider unlikely.
Funny, cause if the Spanish crown didn't fund Columbuses search for alternative route to East-Indies, we wouldn't be talking about American science right now.
"Congress may feel that even though its 1993 decision to cancel the American alternative to CERN—the Superconducting Super Collider—was generally met with chagrin by the American physics community, it may have been the right move one after all: to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful."
I'm a little surprised by that comment. The SSC would have be almost 3x more powerful than the LHC. I still feel like particle physics has been set back decades.
That's an utterly misleading headline. The Higgs boson is not excluded in the mass range 115-145 GeV, and there won't be enough evidence for a null result (or discovery) until at least November.
I don't know how likely other accelerators are to have found the Higgs-Boson, but the article at least makes an attempt to back up its claim:
"Lower energy levels have been accessible to smaller accelerators, such as the Tevatron at Fermilab and the LEP—the LHC’s predecessor at CERN—and neither collider had found it. Perhaps the Higgs does not exist at all."
You bet even odds. Does this mean you are equally likely to expect a Higgs as not, or simply that your belief of there being no Higgs is equal to that of RolfAndreassen's belief that there is one? Genuinely curious here.
The odds (and size of bet) were proposed by the other party. So all you can deduce is that Eliezer thinks Pr(Higgs)<1/2. (If you have a good estimate of Eliezer's risk aversion level for bets of that size, you might be able to get a slightly better estimate, but my guess is that it's extremely close to zero.)
This is rather beside the point, but why must they call it the "God Particle"? According to Wikipedia, it was coined in a popsci book when the writer's editor wouldn't let him call them "goddamn particles". So now we're stuck with this hollow, cliché, uninformative phrase for eternity.
Maybe its irrational, but kind of hope they don't find it. It's almost gratifying, definitely exhilarating, to know that particle physics is still a fresh frontier with plenty of territory to be discovered. Supersymmetric particles seem to be unlikely too. It seems like we're almost back at the drawing board.
So if it turns out that it doesn't exist, where do we go from here? What are the alternative theories? It's been a while since I went into particle physics at all deeply, so I don't know all the leading theories and their pros and cons.
Particle physics has been chugging along for thirty years without a major discovery. Everything fits the Standard Model to a depressing degree. The worst-case scenario is that we'll actually find a Higgs boson in the expected range... and then nothing else.
It's perfectly possible that further interesting physics takes place at energy scales too far beyond the reach of any accelerator we can build in the next few hundred years.
The Higgs boson has essentially nothing to with dark matter, as far as we know. In fact, they're not even in the same category: the Higgs boson is a theoretical prediction that has yet to be observed (or conclusively ruled out), whereas dark matter is a real, observable thing in the cosmos that we don't yet have a theory to explain.
No, it's called "dark matter" because it appears not to interact with electromagnetic radiation but has mass. We can observe it indirectly through its gravitational influence, such as altered galactic rotation curves and weak lensing. (If we hadn't somehow observed it, and we didn't have a theory that predicted it, why would we think it exists at all?)
Regardless, the point I was getting at is that confirming or denying the existence of the Higgs boson would have little or no direct impact on our understanding of dark matter. (I'm not a physicist, but this is my layman's understanding of the situation, and I haven't heard any physicists claiming otherwise.)
Its gravitational effects have been observed, that is how we know it is there. Nobody has seen it, but little in the sky is actually accessible via visible wavelengths.
A gravitational anomaly has been observed, but the source of this anomaly is not just invisible to the visible wavelengths but from all wavelengths we can measure. "Dark matter" sounded a bit better than "unicorn turds" I guess, but at the moment each is equally likely.
Impossible. Unicorn turds would be a variety of dark matter; if most of the apparent mass in the universe were made of unicorn turds, the dark matter hypothesis would be correct. (Unless they were very sparkly unicorn turds, emitting enough light for us to detect from far off.)
Further: they'd be a very boring kind of dark matter: the same kind of stuff as we, the earth, the moon, etc., are made of. And there's very good reason already to believe that there isn't enough of that to account for the gravitational anomalies you get if you assume no dark matter.
I therefore declare: Pr(anomaly comes from unicorn turds) is much smaller than Pr(anomaly comes from dark matter).
The should/shouldn't argument is really about Free Riding basic research. For most companies this problem means deferring basic rEsearch to govt. Both directly (funding research) and indirectly (IP protection and care policy) governments free ride each others research. The US isn't perfect but generally we are the the horse and not the rider.
The article's main flaw is its assumption that, because the remaining mass window is "small", it decreases our chances of finding the Higgs. This is not the case for several reasons. Most importantly, it has been known since the planning stages of the accelerator that a Higgs with such a low mass is more difficult to find, in the sense that it requires running the experiment for longer, collecting more statistics, before we can decide whether or not it exists. So it comes as no surprise that we first have conclusive results about the higher mass range. It just happens that the Higgs, if it exists, doesn't have a high mass, so we keep looking.
It is expected that in 1-2 years we will have enough statistics to either discover or rule out the Higgs in the remaining mass window.
The second mistake the article makes is in claiming that not finding the Higgs is somehow a bad thing. That it means the LHC was a waste of taxpayer money. I would say quite the opposite. If the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing else, then it will only confirm our existing model and we will learn nothing new about the world (except for the value of the Higgs mass). This is the worst possible outcome. On the other hand, not finding the Higgs would be an extremely exciting result, since it would open the way to less well-explored ideas about the origin of mass. The goal of the LHC is to teach us about the world, not stroke physicists' egos and tell us how clever our existing theories are.