In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for exist, says physicist Sabine Hossenfelder

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.

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    if governments stopped funding particle accelerators, that money would just go towards more bank bailouts and bombs

    One could argue that the pursuit of sub-atomic particles is simply the legacy of the Manhattan Project. Its just another Pentagon project in search of a new hypothetical super-weapon that's long since exceeded its point of utility.

    I don't think it is necessarily bad that we continue to fund particle physics. The nature of Blue Sky research has always been "We don't know what we're going to get until we find it". But I agree that none of this shit is really "science driven" and never has been. Particle Accelerators are simply a positive externality of a terrible system and not something we can really "take" or "leave" any more than we can shape any other national policy.

    Also if we established global communism tomorrow, there’d still be particle accelerators, because there’s enough people who want to work on particle physics and particle accelerators.

    Global Communism Tomorrow would truly be a foreign country. I can only imagine a world totally unyoked from the plow of capitalism and free to pursue utopian projects. Maybe we'd still have a vestigal program for the die-hards. Maybe we'd be building a series of tubes around the sun in pursuit of that next-smallest particle. Maybe we'd be scratching this off as overly ambitious and focusing more R&D on biology or chemistry. Maybe we'd scrap all the colliders for soccer stadiums, because that was determined to be a better way to spend our time. My money is on something from The Mystery Box that I haven't even considered.

    But I think modern particle research would likely see a significant overhaul simply because all the current proponents and benefactors of particle research would be gone.