Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
Science shouldn’t be a zero sum game. As a physicist I love that we get a huge chunk of science funding for all kinds of stuff. Generally  speaking developing a new accelerator leads to excellent technical advances at all levels of the stack. Web browsers and HTML were invented at CERN. Super conducting magnets at scale were pioneered for LHC. The detectors with custom radiation hard ASICs for particle detection and the data processing pipeline they feed into are at the pinacle of human engineering. The software infrastructure supports analysis of petabytes of data distributed across 100s of clusters around the world. This is because physicists working on colliders and particle physics are extremely passionate and intelligent people. Isn’t it nice that a fraction of the smartest people on the world are not working on getting you to click Ads and are using machine learning to advance our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature?<p>Tremendous value has been created by their work and an institution like CERN is hard to replicate because it is hard to get brilliant people to a agree what to do for the next 30 years of their lives. I’ve been taught by professors that did precisely that. Whatever theorists predict is not the only reason for them to do it, higher energies are a technical challenge, a data processing challenge, something to focus your attention and creativity on. There is no question we should try to build better telescopes, a 100 TeV collider is a better microscope for High Energy Physics.<p>This is personal to me, some of my friends work at CERN. I can’t help but feel it is personal to her. I actually met her once, she seemed nice enough, I just don’t understand why she focuses her time on work that is adversarial as opposed to constructive.