James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way.
Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments?
What if we build a $200 billion collider that finds nothing?
What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?
That could be a line out of Asimov. "And so eventually the entire economy was exclusively focused on the construction of larger and larger particle accelerators. There was no room for anything else. Medical research was stopped. Movies stopped being made.Improving the lot of mortals was abandoned as a policy. The only thing that mattered to the 30 billion humans alive was to build and pay for the next accelerator."
Obviously an extreme extrapolation. But what if? Should we just ... give up on particle physics?
> James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way.
> Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments?
That's a bit disingenuous. At the time, GR was an unconfirmed theory not unlike, say, String Theory is today. Except it only took a couple of years to confirm by experiment.
Particle theorists and cosmologists have plenty of theories. But deciding which one describes reality best can only be done by data, no two ways about it. And yes, since most low hanging fruits have been found, experiments become harder and harder. Not to say more and more expensive.
Your conclusion is correct though, that at some point a society has to decide whether they can afford further progress.
Perhaps we also haven't found a theory as convincing as Einstein's GR because the math isn't there yet. GR was discovered shortly after differential geometry was formulated, and without it it would have been impossible. Similarly with Newton's theory and calculus.
So maybe what we need is the right breakthrough in math?
>So maybe what we need is the right breakthrough in math?
Funny you mention that, only recently I was reading a review paper on the state of constructive quantum field theory [0]. In the outlook section the author writes
>Why haven’t these models of greatest physical interest been constructed yet (in any mathematically rigorous sense which preserves the basic principles constantly evoked in heuristic QFT and does not satisfy itself with an uncontrolled approximation)? Certainly, one can point to the practical fact that only a few dozen people have worked in CQFT. This should be compared with the many hundreds working in string theory and the thousands who have worked in elementary particle physics. Progress is necessarily slow if only a few are working on extremely difficult problems
But they also say
> It may also be the case that a completely new approach is required
This kind of mathematical physics is generally considered a part of mathematics rather than physics, and this paper is talking about formulating a rigorous mathematical framework and elucidating conceptual ideas rather than about making new predictions, but the idea that new mathematics is required is certainly not a crazy one.
Apparently the next-gen LHC replacement will cost on the order of $100 billion. As a society (US, EU, or global), we can certainly 'afford it', but no-one is going to be writing that check anytime soon.
Yet Musk was prepared to spend $42B on the twitter purchase which would almost have been a null-op for the world in comparison to funding basically any kind of venture or experiment with the same amount of money... If only Musk was more interested in the universe's structure :)
>Yet Musk was prepared to spend $42B on the twitter purchase
Musk wasn't donating $42B to Twitter. He raised capital to purchase Twitter with the aim of actually making a return on that money.
A better example is someone like Warren Buffet donating ~$50B dollars to charity instead of building another particle collider. If only Buffet was more interested in the universe's structure eh.
And how much time Maxwell or Einstein spent on their research and how much time on chasing grants and tenure positions? Were they required to publish X papers a year, target assigned by some university manager? Were they forced to amuse and be nice for their students, so they will look good on yearly teacher's assessment?
I think we lack a "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach here. Just create a way to fund lots of individual researchers and teams with small grants to study whatever they find interesting, with no crazy deadlines, credential requirements, publish-or-perish demands, administrative overhead, etc. It doesn't matter if 999/1000 just produce garbage, if the one remaining hits something big. I suspect modern science is like a gold rush, with lots of people flocking around a few fad areas, and o lot of the search space uninhabited, because if you stray out of the fad-topics, you get no advisor, no funding, no lab, nothing.
If building and paying for bigger and bigger accelerators would be the only things that matters for humanity, it wouldn't be that bad. First, servicing the accelerator is a major source of employment to the economy. I think it is a much better way to spend money than maintaining all the militaries in the world. Second, such a project will require a lot of highly educated personnel to run it, so it'll require a considerable investment in education.
>Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over
There are plenty of theories generated by theoretical physicists using pen and paper. The problem is that we can't reach the energy scales necessary to test those theories.
>What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?
That's the problem with colliders now. We don't actually know if there are any interesting physics happening at energy scales that are within human reach. Maybe the next 'interesting' threshold can only come about from a galaxy-size collider - so $1 trillion collider isn't going to do squat for you.
>Should we just ... give up on particle physics?
I think we did. There was an article recently about how a next-gen collider to replace the LHC will cost on the order of $100 billion. No one is going to spend that kind of money, so we're done with collider physics for the next few decades.
The same thing happened when the Texas Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled (after >$2 billion spent) but we eventually got LHC. There'll be a winter in high energy physics but eventually the tide will turn.
> James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way.
They also had quite solid experimental anomalies they were trying to explain.
Black body radiation was an anomaly. Radioactivity was an anomaly. Photelectric effect was an anomaly. Mercury's orbit and rotation were anomalies.
Particle physics isn't done, but colliders probably are. Terrestrial particle physics is effectively rudderless since there are no anomalies left for them to probe.
It looks like it's going to be LIGO and the Webb to point to our new headings.
What's being overlooked in that number is that the money doesn't just disappear, it's going towards production of better electronics and sensors, funding research labs and universities, feeding back into other fields. Plus, it pays for researchers and PhDs who also contribute back to the system, often working on tangetially related projects in the process (eg the internet being a result of a need to better share data from CERN to researchers). The question to be asked should be if all that is comparable to the investment, which I think it is.
Missiles advance rocketry, electronics, composite materials, fuel chemistry, and precision guidance, all technologies we'll need more of in the future.
> James Clerk Maxwell united electricity and magnetism with a pen and paper. Einstein discovered special and general relativity in the same way.
They had tabletop experiments (and telescope observations) that gave them the clues they needed
A lot of XX century physics was done in tabletop conditions (in the 19xx) with danger to the experimentalists. Also climbing mountains and capturing cosmic rays with photographic film
We might still have something hidden but most of the low-hanging fruit was discovered already.
If you need a machine the size of a small country to observe an effect, chances are that effect is not going to have many practical applications. If it did, it would have shown up at the much smaller scale of those applications.
It's a question worth asking, but I think ultimately humanity needs a purpose. Something more than just survival and sensory pleasure. It's almost a given that we will have them both in abundance soon. And so increasingly the question we will face as immortal beings in eternal bliss is "well now what". Particle physics seems a reasonable way to pass time.
>What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?
Well, if we could find a way to keep the GNP growing by at least 3.5% yearly, then in about 200 years a trillion dollars will be just like a billion today.
Has theoretical physics advanced enough now that such pen and paper discoveries are all but over, and the only way to continue making progress is to dedicate an ever larger share of the global economy's productive capacity to building larger and more expensive experiments?
What if we build a $200 billion collider that finds nothing?
What if a $1 trillion collider is needed to continue making progress?
That could be a line out of Asimov. "And so eventually the entire economy was exclusively focused on the construction of larger and larger particle accelerators. There was no room for anything else. Medical research was stopped. Movies stopped being made.Improving the lot of mortals was abandoned as a policy. The only thing that mattered to the 30 billion humans alive was to build and pay for the next accelerator."
Obviously an extreme extrapolation. But what if? Should we just ... give up on particle physics?