The Superconducting Super Circular Argument
Or maybe it's a firing squad
One of my more career-limiting personality traits, when it comes to the blogger/public intellectual side of things is that I get tired of topics way too easily. To really make it as a pundit, in basically any field, you need to be willing and able to bang out essentially the same 900-word column about your particular pet topic multiple times per year, with slightly different news hooks; once a month or so is probably ideal. I just can’t really do that with the frequency required to make the big time— I can get fired up about something for a little while, but eventually end up feeling like I’ve said what I need to say, and can’t work up any enthusiasm for saying it again.
As I said, this is a bit of a shame; I’d probably be raking in money from Forbes if I were willing to alternate “The Many-Worlds Interpretation is awesome!” and “Quantum entanglement is super cool!” pieces monthly in perpetuity. I burn out on this stuff pretty quickly, though, because there’s just not that much more to say. (For the record, here’s something close to my current take on Many-Worlds, and here’s something about entanglement, and here’s a post combining the two.)
If I wanted to add a third topic to that rotation, a good candidate would be “Is particle physics worth the money?” That’s a thing that comes around with depressing regularity, most recently in a Big Think piece by Tom Hartsfield this week with the not-at-all-clickbaity headline “Please, don’t build another Large Hadron Collider”. This, in turn, is a response to Ethan Siegel’s Betteridge-violating piece, also at Big Think, “Can the new-and-improved Large Hadron Collider save particle physics?”
This is exceptionally well-worn argumentative territory, with the battle lines essentially unchanged from when I tried to assess the situation in 2019. On the one side, we have the clearly true argument that the price tag for a next-generation accelerator is enormously huge, and there are other things you could conceivably spend that money on that have a higher probability of leading to an immediate payoff. On the other side, you have the possibility, however remote, of obtaining answers to incredibly Big Questions, and given that, is the price really that unreasonable?
As a non-particle-physicist, I’m necessarily looking over this argument from an extremely long distance, and there really doesn’t seem to be any significant shift in the situation over the last several year. My only changes in opinion are fairly transient shifts, based on whose rhetorical flourishes of the moment irritate me more. At the moment, that’s shifted me infinitesimally toward the “No new accelerator” side— Hartsfield does the mildly annoying thing of rounding the cost up an order of magnitude, while folks on the pro-accelerator side try to just wave the whole thing off as anti-string-theory prejudice:
And, you know, there’s a bit of truth to that— lots of people have axes to grind about the theory underlying all of this. At the same time, though, I find this dismissiveness annoying, because it feels like there’s a bit of bait-and-switch or motte-and-bailey thing going on here. When it’s time to write op-eds arguing for big colliders, it’s all about fundamental laws and new physics, but when that motivation is questioned, it’s not really about that at all, but instead is in service of some narrower goal that’s usually not spelled out all that clearly, but is asserted to be much more reasonable.
To his credit, Siegel gives about as clear a statement of what the actual results are likely to be in the lower reaches of his piece (Substack won’t let me block-quote this, so you get italics instead):
They’ll be able to create greater numbers of Higgs bosons than ever before, testing whether it decays according to the Standard Model’s predictions to better than ~1-part-in-100 precision.
They’ll be able to test lepton flavor universality, currently one of the three still-standing Standard Model anomalies (along with the W-boson’s mass and the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment), to unprecedented precision. If it’s a real problem with the Standard Model, this will undoubtedly push it over the “gold standard” 5-sigma threshold.
They’ll be able to test whether the CDF collaboration’s measurement for the W-boson’s mass matches their value, with much more (albeit less clean) data than Fermilab was ever able to collect.
They’ll be able to test top-quark and bottom-quark physics to better precision than ever, either confirming the Standard Model’s predictions or running counter to it.
That’s pretty clear about what can reasonably be expected. It’s also not anywhere near as sexy as the much more prominent list of Big Questions that comes much earlier in the piece. And the paragraph after the bulleted list I quoted is yet another “Hey, you never know!” pitch that the next accelerator might discover something really amazing.
But, you know, while that grates on my nerves a little (just enough to get me to write about this, in fact), the actual change in my position is pretty negligible. I continue to think that this is a legitimately important question about allocation of resources, and also end up slightly inclined toward the “go ahead and build it” side. But I get there by thinking of it less like an investment in science and technology than as a monumental art project— it’s worth doing not because there’s any reason to expect a positive return on the money spent, but because it’s just kind of awesome to be able to do it at all.
But mostly, I just wish we could find something more interesting to argue about.
If you like this and want more like it in your inbox, well, I profoundly hope you’ll be disappointed by clicking this link:
If you want to pasionately argue that I should be less jaded and weigh in more strongly for one side or the other I guess you can do that in the comments:
Setting aside space exploration, whenever this comes up I wonder if there are equivalently expensive big science instruments that could have been built, and could have answered specific questions, but weren't. I can think of other areas where instrumentation has steadily improved (scanning whatever microscopy) but it doesn't seem like a gigantic multi-billion dollar version would move the field forward.
I know it's a fallacy of sorts to think that there's some fixed pot of big-science money and that if we reject a new particle accelerator that we'd be able to re-direct the same money to some other project--that's not how these things get funded. But if I were in charge of directing big science money around, we'd build a lot more gravitational wave detectors.
My first thought would be to spend it on fusion research, something that would truly have a huge payoff if successful.