Comment on Ask an experimental physicist

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 18:00:41 GMT

For large-scale projects like the LHC that may be true, but that's not the only way to do particle physics. You can accomplish a lot with low energies, high luminosities, and a few hundred million dollars - pocket change, really, on the scale of modern governments.

That said, it is quite possible that redirecting funding for particle physics into other kinds of science is the best investment at this point even taking pure knowledge as valuable for its own sake. There's such a thing as an opportunity cost and a discount rate; the physics will still be out there in 50 years when a super-LHC can be built for a much smaller fraction of the world's economic resources. If you have no good reason to believe that there's an extinction-risk-reducing or Good-Singularity-Causing breakthrough somewhere in particle physics, you shouldn't allow sentiment for the poor researchers who will, sob, have to take filthy jobs in some inferior field like, I don't know, astronomy, or perhaps even have to go into industry (shudder), to override your sense of where the low-hanging fruits are.

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