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.

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.

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.

> 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.

You are right. ChatGPT doesn’t catch this, instead catches things like CERN having 25 member states instead of 24.

I would have expected it to catch it but it did not. I’m sure pro version would have though.

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?”

Do you have a source on that?

I can't find anything besides he went to a Gala where he was in a photo with Maxwell and made an investment in a company her brother ran.

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.

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.

your comment made me smile like a grandpa :)

Also lighten up! oh... damn black hole...

There’s an abandoned one around Dallas, the SSC. Lots of sunken cost in that one.

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.

> 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.

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.

Cancer treatment goes back to particle physics research at CERN, the Web was born there, cloud was previously known as Grid Computing at CERN,

Three examples of how humanity would not be as we know it today without CERN.

As Alumni, there are many other changes that trace back to CERN.

We don't sit only on the H1 beer garden and go skiing.

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.

Less that and more "we built a really complex machine and we can apply those skills elsewhere".

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