CERN makes push to build €21B super-collider
What&#x27;s more interesting to me than HEP is how HEP became such a big deal. I asked on HN before why people find HEP interesting and the responses were enlightening to me as someone who finds HEP boring: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23322857" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23322857</a><p>Personally, I find turbulence much more interesting. The fact that it&#x27;s orders of magnitude more important than HEP <i>and</i> also very intellectually challenging should give pause to those who have dedicated their lives to HEP. But my impression is that cultural forces have unfortunately convinced many of our best and brightest to go into HEP or other similarly impractical areas of physics. I guess that&#x27;s better than working for Facebook to make people click on ads, but that&#x27;s setting the bar low. If you&#x27;re interested in physics, you can make a much better choice than HEP. (If you&#x27;re open to areas outside of physics you may be able to make an even better choice.)<p>I can see why someone might view the &quot;building blocks&quot; of the universe as fundamental or how there are interesting philosophical questions that HEP can address. But turbulence is fairly ubiquitous; certainly that makes it &quot;fundamental&quot; in some sense. And there are philosophical implications of chaos and statistical mechanics; turbulence is part of both.