Interesting analysis from my favorite severe no nonsense physics youtuber gal (who also used to randomly post vids of her doing cover songs to peoples' general confusion lol).
Good bit at the end speculating on the material economic basis for this (useless) way of doing science. People make careers on this fluff that amounts to nothing.
I think the prevalence of :so-true: "bazinga science" among public consciousness also helped created this trend. Let's face it, the majority of the public thinks that the sole purpose of science is to discover and invent things that is useful for human exploitation, in a way thinking that science works like in Civilization games where you insert "cold fusion" into a slot and all the scientistcians fills up the progress bar until a you get a "research finished" pop up.
These research into particles is so well funded and well-publicized because the public and capitalist investors thinks that eventually the science guys will come across into some super particle that can be exploited into something "useful" (read: profitable).
edit: the first paragraph where the writer talks about how ridiculous zoology would be if they use particle physics' standard underline this. Noone is funding or publicizing research into arctic 12-legged purple spiders because even if it does exist capitalism have no use for such thing, while some bullshit particles are showered with grants and publicity because some of them might have potential for commercialization, whatever it is.
there's a hypothesized "island of stability" where elements in the atomic number 130s or something start being able to exist long enough to matter but that idea is kinda old and i don't know enough about this shit to speculate.
but even if we never find anything like that i say take the bllions of dollars for war away before you go after the particle accelerator nerds.
Yeah but that's just another likely example of people hearing about something in a popular science article and overblowing its usefulness for human exploitation. We know there's an island of stability, creating and studying those elements will surely improve our scientific models, but we don't know how long these elements would last. They will more likely have "long" half lives of milliseconds rather than applicable half lives of years. And even if it's the latter, manufacturing enough is a whole other nightmare. It'd be easier to make 100x as much plutonium!
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I don't agree with that. First off, I'm not at all convinced that the people providing the money have any sort of understanding about what the researchers are working on, and I think that's the biggest difference between a new particle and a 12-legged purple spider - anyone can understand what a 12-legged purple spider is and can imagine what it's implications might be, but for hypothetical new physics things, it's a lot more confusing. Researchers meanwhile may have incentives to exaggerate, obfuscate, and mislead to get more funding. If there's an exciting new thing going around, there's money in hyping it up, but often not much money in shooting it down.
New particles are a million steps away from being profitable or commercialized. I can't imagine an individual capitalist investing in a project like that, on something they don't understand and which may or may not even be possible, which might, potentially, hold some completely unknown and unpredictable use, and actually expecting a return on their investment. It seems more likely that any such investment is a passion project, or about the prestige rather than the immediate usefulness or marketability of the discovery.
Now the game designer in me is wondering what a more realistic (but still fun) research system in a game would look like.
Semi-random precursor concept events that unlock the ability to do focused engineering projects to actually apply those, but which will gradually happen eventually and which propagate rapidly once they become public knowledge. Pair it with a development of industrial capital thing, where you need the material capacity to actually do something with it too. That's probably the most concession to reality you can make while talking about a game genre where you're basically playing as an immortal alien spirit that can unilaterally shape entire civilizations and cultures to focus their efforts where you want.
So something like basic metallurgy would go something like: pottery "factory" spawns event about copper ore in glaze (AFAIK the actual theory about where people figured out basic metallurgy from to start with) yielding hard, sharp material or w/e, the player can focus artisans on building a prototype forge to make more crude copper, and from there it becomes more sophisticated with use until copper foundries become a normal thing that you can just have built, etc.
You fund random scientific research and get random results and whether or not they're useful is determined by what you do with the results?