How is it they can’t either go to Wikipedia or one of the LLMs (despite hallucinations, tend to get simple things right) and get some corroborating evidence before making such basic mistakes on an article?
Man I can’t even trust simple things these days from LLM’s. Hardly scientific but I just decided to do my own little test one time when I was on discord talking to some friends about The Game Awards back in December or so. ChatGPT would simply omit winners and/or categories - got it wrong (twice the same way, one unique way) 3 times. We tried Gemini, it gave 1 wrong answer and omitted 2 categories. It was impressive how much worse than a basic search they were at a simple “what were the results of the 2025 Game Awards?”
As someone who supports pure science research, I would be interested to understand if any of the discoveries of CERN (and related projects) in the last 50 years (say) have proved to have practical application.
(Specifically, "discoveries", not technology developed in support of the research)
It’s an interesting question. After all we were using electricity, batteries, electric motors, radios and telegraphs long before we ever discovered electrons and photons.
But discovering the electron was necessary for us to develop vacuum tubes. And developing quantum mechanics was necessary for developing transistors.
Think about the relative impact of the telegraph vs the vacuum tube.
When we do eventually find something to do with the W and Z bosons, it’s likely to look more like a transistor-level tech than an immediately practical tool like a lightbulb. But the second-order effects from whatever that new tech turns out to be, have the potential to be world-shattering.
Quantum Mechanics, protons, electrons... That's the theory of everyday matter. You don't need very special situations to see their effects. Understanding the underlying equations enabled us to do more with what we already have.
High energy stuff only exists unstably for fractions of seconds. I find the idea that any of Standard Model physics, nevermind beyond standard model physics, could lead to a technological advance like the transistor extremely unconvincing.
Technological advance and scientific advance sometimes align. But there is no law that the former by necessity follows from the former. The expectation that they do is an extrapolation from a very brief period of human history.
I don't know why you were getting down voted for this. Discovery during technological development of scientific instrumentation is one of the greatest returns on investment of funding pure science research. And like your sibling comment says, the pure science helps direct applied science, eg cutting edge materials science. Long tail, if for no other reason, because its a whole other development process that happens after the pure science.
Fundamental research is entwined with practical applications, you can’t have the later without the former. Europe is known for FR, while everyone else seems to be better at commercialising. It’s alright, progress for us is progress for everyone.
That's not an answer to the specific question asked. Not all types of fundamental research have the same potential for material benefits, or the same cost.
> Not all types of fundamental research have the same potential for material benefits, or the same cost.
It is hard to gauge this is in advance though. If you were sure what you were gonna find, it wouldn't be much of a discovery. Historically it has sometimes been decades before manufacturing and practical applications caught up to frontier research. For an extreme example, mankind knew of electricity in some form for 2400 years before doing anything practical with it. If all the people who prodded at it instead thought "man I can't imagine what this could be useful for" and found something else to do with their time, we'd live in a very different world.
Our civilization can afford to aim higher than incremental improvements on pixel density for screens on which to spectate people kicking a ball around. Personally I find frontier discoveries to also have much greater entertainment value than sports events and will happily fund them with a tiny fraction of my tax dollars.
> It is hard to gauge this is in advance though. If you were sure what you were gonna find, it wouldn't be much of a discovery.
Virtually all previous particle discoveries were predicted, and then we built devices to find them, eg. the Higgs was predicted in the 1960s. There is no such motivation here. There is no theoretical or significant practical benefit for the FCC, it's basically a jobs program.
There is better frontier research that could use those funds for much better payoffs. For instance, just sticking with particle physics, Wakefield accelerators would be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper than the LHC while achieving the same energies. We've also never built a muon collider, and so that's largely unexplored territory.
We just don't need another radio frequency particle collider, we've reached the limits of what they can do within a reasonable research budget.
> Virtually all previous particle discoveries were predicted
That's not true at all. To give just few examples.
Electron was not predicted but Thomson found it during first fundamental particle discovered came from cathode‐ray experiments, not from a prior microscopic theory of matte. Remember this was during thr 19th century.
Another one is the muon discovered in 1936 which was detected as "heavy electron" in cosmic rays. it did not fit any clear theoretical need in nuclear physics at the time, leading Rabi to quip “Who ordered that?”
Heck there are many more examples that I will bypass the comment limits if I tried to list them (resonances in particular will be very numerous).
You can of course move the goal target by narrowing what you mean by particle but this is exactly why physicists try to define what they talk about before making an argument.
> There is no such motivation here. There is no theoretical or significant practical benefit for the FCC, it's basically a jobs program.
Really? There is a huge volume of the feasibility study about the physics program of FCC. Are you claiming that it is false. Have you even read it?
With that kind of fundamental science I would expect no practical applications but guidance for researchers that work on practical applications.
There are many ideas on how the universe works, right? Knowing which ideas are closer to the truth must be helpful to people who work on nano scale stuff, like chips so fine that quantum effect are considerable.
It must be somewhere between knowing if there's alien life or not AND knowing that atoms can be split at sub particles at will.
> Knowing which ideas are closer to the truth must be helpful to people who work on nano scale stuff, like chips so fine that quantum effect are considerable.
Sorry, no. That's solid state physics on inter-atomic scales: tenths of nanometers, a handful of electronvolts. The LHC probes physics at the electroweak scale: hundreds of billions of electronvolts, billionths of nanometers. It has zero relevance to anything of practical use.
What actually happens is, smart people are isolated from the problems of the general population and work towards meaningless goals at the cost of the everyday tax payer doing unglamorous work to earn a living. Decoupling science from the state will also reduce the meaningless competition of academia that leads to the publish-or-perish and replication crises, because the people who will be doing it, will do it for the love of the game, regardless of social status and money.
If you want to live in this world, you have to trade your time and provide value to others. You shouldn't get a free pass because, just because you convinced yourself and the government that you're smarter than everyone else.
"Decoupling science from the state" is just bullshit from "government icky, taxation is theft" morons.
No, governments should definitely fund scientific research. When it is public it is the only guarantee that it will benefit everyone. Scientific research done by private entities is kneecapped by their financial interests (and be very sure they will bury any advance that jeopardize their financial interests).
This is such a weasel question because you can keep saying whatever was new was "just technology" not pure discoveries.
No, there hasn't been any big "new physics" since the standard model in the 70s, everything has been refinement and specifics. You can't go to Walmart and buy something that couldn't exist unless we knew the precise mass of the top quark or the Higgs boson.
There have been a tremendous amount of developments and technologies that have come out of CERN with varying degrees of closeness to particle physics, but depending on who you're talking to, most of them don't count.
>(Specifically, "discoveries", not technology developed in support of the research)
Ok, but Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN when he created HTTP, HTML, etc.
The Internet through web browsers as you know it was created at CERN in order to enable scientific communication and collaboration.
As a non physicist I like the idea of a moun collider more - more compact (thus should be cheaper) as well as something which haven't done in similar energy scales and therefore more likely to need new technology in building it and finding something new.
What changeable vectors are there except to scale up the energy levels? Can particles be altered prior to collission with the existing system to observe interesting effects?
Wakefield accelerators would be orders of magnitude smaller and higher energy than radio frequency colliders like the FCC. If it has to go to particle physics, this money would be better spent on that research.
What a waste. So many more science experiments with better expected ROI could be funded for the money needed for the FCC, and we're not even expecting any significant new insights from it.
1. That's not an argument unless the evidence for these payoffs is so huge as to dwarf the payoffs of 1000 smaller experiments. There is no evidence of this.
2. There is no world in which this applies to particle physics at this point, especially using radio frequency particle collider tech. This is known physics and there are no mysteries in the regime the FCC would reach.
Said the grumpy grandpa, shaking his hand at the cloudy sky.
I dont know what value that comment contributed, funding research is always a long shot. And often times it fails, but that is kinda its purpose, we dont know what we dont know.
You could use the same argument to justify spending $1B on searching for the Loch Ness Monster. The problem is, you can only spend money once. If you're spending $1B on the FCC you aren't spending that same $1B on all kinds of other research.
With the LHC there was a very clear goal: verify the Standard Model and prove (or disprove) the existence of the Higgs boson - and hopefully discover some unexpected stuff along the way. On the other hand, the FCC is mainly a shot in the dark: they aren't validating a widely-accepted theory, they are just hoping that if you spend enough money on a bigger collider something interesting will fall out.
Most research gives you at least some insight. With the FCC there is a very real possibility that the insight will be "our $20B collider found absolutely nothing, now give us $1T to build an even bigger one". Sure, funding research is a long shot, but at a certain point you're just setting money on fire.
I see your point, but thats a really bad comparison. We are pretty certain that there is no giant dinosaur in a lake, but in terms of fundamental research there is a lot we cannot really explain a great many things. We dont even know if we are "looking" correctly, with the right concept in mind.
I agree that money spending must be carefully considered, but for this research there really is no replacement. You can shuffle public spending around, but an Experiment not dont will explain no part of the Universe. If the countries and Supranationals that are able to dont fund them we will be stuck with what we know now until they do.
It is a lot of money, but it is also the only way. Does that meaningfully stop the EU and all others from doing their thing? I would argue no. We can still afford it and so we should.
A thousand gpus running a thousand LLMs will one day soon give us the next shakespeare. It will all be worth it in the end. Maybe we can try putting in on a blockchain.
“ Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species - the unique species - is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.”
Higgs boson was predicted in theory in 1964, and found in LHC in CERN in 2012-2013. With this, all elementary particles in the standard model of particle physics have been found.
From the 1970s to 2010s, physicists believed in a theory called supersymmetry, which predicted supersymmetric partner particles for the known elementary particles. But these should have been already found in the energies used in LHC.
For the first time, there is no mainstream theory that would predict any new findings. Maybe the next bigger particle collider will find no new particles at all?
> Higgs boson was predicted in theory in 1964, and found in LHC in CERN in 2012-2013. With this, all elementary particles in the standard model of particle physics have been found.
Before LHC Large Hardron Collider (CERN), there were other experiments with lower raw and final recorded data rates: SppS (CERN; MB/s; 1-10 Hz), SLC (SLAC (Stanford); 50 MB/s; 2 Hz), LEP (CERN; 100 MB/s; 1-5 Hz), Tevatron (Fermilab (Chicago); 250 GB/s, 100-400 Hz), HERA (DESY; 500 MB/s; 5-20 Hz), LHC CMS/ATLAS (CERN; 40 TB/s; 1000 Hz).
HL-LHC (CERN; 10X LHC;)
FCC-ee (CERN), FCC-hh (CERN)
Non-confirmed non-elementary particles of or not of the Standard Model?
What about Superfluids and Supersolids (like spin-nematic liquid crystals)? Are those just phases? Is the phase chart for all particles complete?
A collider produces far more than new particles or explanations. They produce papers and phds. In effect, thier primary goal is to produce stem careers. The new particles are just the public announcements. The collider doesnt even need to be functional. Much/most of the work occures before first light, before anyone turns it on. The design of the ring and its innumerable detectors and subsystems takes decades. So a great many people want the next collider to be funded regardless of its potential for scientific discovery.
The same discussion can happen re the ISS. Its primary purpose was not science. It existed to give shuttle a parking spot, to keep the US manned space program ticking along and to keep a thousand russian rocket people from going to work for rando countries. The ISS will soon end. Are we going to put up a new one? A place to park starliner and dragon? Or are we going to shut down low earth orbit spaceflight? The decision will not turn on the potential for new science, rather it will be about supporting and maintaining a flagship industry.
>The same discussion can happen re the ISS. Its primary purpose was not science.
But it's worth noting that many experiments took place on ISS covering few domains, examples being AMS (cosmology), CAL (quantum physics), SAFFIRE (combustion), and Veggie (botany/sustainability).
> thousand russian rocket people from going to work for bad people.
Just like for the Germans before!
I agree with you that it is an educational tool, but if that's all it is, there are cheaper ways to educate that might also have a higher likelihood for scientific discoveries. To build a new collider, we should have some things we're trying to do/find.
How can they alter humanity? What's the difference for humanity since CERN found Higgs particle? In what ways could the potential dark matter particle detection alter humanity?
It’s a place where extremely skilled people work highly motivated on humanities hardest problems at scale.
CERN pushed distributed computing and storage before anyone else hat problems on that scale.
CERN pushed edge computing for massive data analysis before anyone else even generated data at that rate.
CERN is currently pushing the physical boundaries of device synchronisation ( Check „ White Rabbit“ ), same for data transmission.
CERNS accelerator cooling tech paves the way for industrial super cooling, magnet coils push super conduction…
Companies are always late in the game, they come once there is money to be had:
No one founded a fusion startup until we were close enough to the relevant tripple product.
Sure, but if experimental physics don't matter, wouldn't it be a far better idea to develop all those kinds of technology without actually building the expensive collider itself?
You are perfectly right, this has been similar to the "space industry" (which includes 'ballistic nukes' knowhow maintainance). The thing with a bigger collider is it seems there are, not that honnest, scientists retro-fitting models in order to reach 'appropriate for this new collider' energy ranges where 'new physics' could be found.
What does that even mean? The FCC is essentially the next plausible energy range we can probe with a collider.
Going larger would cost more, and add risk.
So like, yes? The obvious thing to do is to analyze our models and come up with experiments to do within energy ranges which are plausibly accessible with near future technology.
This is where there is a questionable issue: some network of dishonest scientists may have retro-fitted the models in order to get realitic energy ranges for this new collider.
I understand how linacs and even small compact syncrotrons can have practical medical and industrial applications, and I understand that in the past CERN has developed technology and produced research which is relevant to hardon therapy.
What I don't understand, and maybe you can clarify, is how the very largest gargantuan accelerators can ever have practical relevance. How can effects and products which can only be studied with accelerators that are many miles large ever have application in hospitals unless those hospitals are also many miles large? Not going to lie, I get "NASA invented Tang" vibes whenever this subject comes up; like the medical applications of small accelerators are obvious and parsable to the public, so they are used to sell the public on accelerators the size of small countries.
Because of the engineering effort required to build such systems, that no one has built before, means there is a gigantic amount of R&D discoveries that can be eventually applied in other fields outside particle physics.
Hence why CERN eventually created an industry collaboration office, responsible for finding business partners that would like to make a business out of such discoveries.
The internet existed, hypertext existed, it was just happenstance that it was put together there. It would have happened somewhere, maybe not exactly the same protocol but the same end result.
I disagree that any new possibility for treatments should be lauded. The theoretical side of things is fine, but many new treatments are far more expensive than existing options without offering improved outcomes.
This is orthogonal to your point about CERN being useful.
> Some people also believe praying beats vaccination programs.
> Unfortunately I have got to know people that are only still around me thanks to this technology that you find needless.
There is no way to know whether these people would have been served better by receiving radiation therapy. Your statement is tantamount to believing in prayer.
What do you mean by 'any evidence that works better Than alternatives'?
It can deliver radiations to the brain that will peak at the exact position of the cancer, and reduce irradiation in sane tissues.
The 'better' is 'less irradiation to sane tissues' that in turn reduces the risk for new cancers.
Note: I'm not expert on the matter, but I had technical visits to IBA and know several PhDs that work there
> What do you mean by 'any evidence that works better Than alternatives'?
I mean exactly that, clinical trials demonstrating that proton therapy is superior to radiation therapy. This is not a question about the physics but about how patients respond (and whether the expense of delivering proton therapy outweighs the expected marginal benefits).
But on the subject of discoveries and practical uses, the IBA cyclotrons are also used for other purposes than proton therapy: cleaning exotic fruits from dangerous substances and personalized medicine.
This may be one of the good cases, then. I'm not an expert in cancer but I am a biologist and physician. The head and neck cancer (here) and various pediatric indications get the most attention but it has felt that proton therapy has been seeking an indication for almost 40 years now.
The study was designed to show non-inferiority, which doesn't preclude their ability to show an improvement. It would be helpful to see other studies before determining that proton therapy is better (or even non-inferior) to radiation therapy. It's certainly much more expensive, which shows up in the study as many subjects being denied insurance coverage.
Edit: This is now in the weeds, but the per-protocol participants didn't fare better than the intention-to-treat participants, which one might expect since insurance approval lead to dozens of subjects changing treatment arms.
In what way would studying black body radiation alter humanity? Oh just the basis for quantum mechanics and thus transistors, lasers, MRIs, photovoltaics, and more.
The point is, you don't know in advance. I admit it's a bit more far fetched with these experiments that are so far removed from everyday life, but they're still worthwhile.
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