For large-scale projects like the LHC that may be true, but that’s not the only way to do particle physics. You can accomplish a lot with low energies, high luminosities, and a few hundred million dollars—pocket change, really, on the scale of modern governments.
That said, it is quite possible that redirecting funding for particle physics into other kinds of science is the best investment at this point even taking pure knowledge as valuable for its own sake. There’s such a thing as an opportunity cost and a discount rate; the physics will still be out there in 50 years when a super-LHC can be built for a much smaller fraction of the world’s economic resources. If you have no good reason to believe that there’s an extinction-risk-reducing or Good-Singularity-Causing breakthrough somewhere in particle physics, you shouldn’t allow sentiment for the poor researchers who will, sob, have to take filthy jobs in some inferior field like, I don’t know, astronomy, or perhaps even have to go into industry (shudder), to override your sense of where the low-hanging fruits are.
you shouldn’t allow sentiment for the poor researchers
The problem is that I’ve been planning to be such a researcher myself! (I’m in the final year of my MSc and probably I’m going to apply for a PhD afterwards. I’m specializing in cosmic rays rather than accelerators, though.)
Well, I am such a researcher, and so what I say to you applies just as much to myself: Sucks to be you. The privilege of working on what interests us in a low-pressure academic environment is not a god-given right; it depends on convincing those who pay for it—ultimately, the whole of the public—that we are a good investment. In the end we cannot make any honest argument for that except “Do you want to know how the universe ticks, or not?” Well, maybe they don’t. Or maybe their understanding-the-universe dollars could, right now, be spent in better places. If so, sucks to be us. We’ll have to go earn six-figure wages selling algebra to financiers. Woe, woe, woe is us.
For large-scale projects like the LHC that may be true, but that’s not the only way to do particle physics. You can accomplish a lot with low energies, high luminosities, and a few hundred million dollars—pocket change, really, on the scale of modern governments.
That said, it is quite possible that redirecting funding for particle physics into other kinds of science is the best investment at this point even taking pure knowledge as valuable for its own sake. There’s such a thing as an opportunity cost and a discount rate; the physics will still be out there in 50 years when a super-LHC can be built for a much smaller fraction of the world’s economic resources. If you have no good reason to believe that there’s an extinction-risk-reducing or Good-Singularity-Causing breakthrough somewhere in particle physics, you shouldn’t allow sentiment for the poor researchers who will, sob, have to take filthy jobs in some inferior field like, I don’t know, astronomy, or perhaps even have to go into industry (shudder), to override your sense of where the low-hanging fruits are.
The problem is that I’ve been planning to be such a researcher myself! (I’m in the final year of my MSc and probably I’m going to apply for a PhD afterwards. I’m specializing in cosmic rays rather than accelerators, though.)
Well, I am such a researcher, and so what I say to you applies just as much to myself: Sucks to be you. The privilege of working on what interests us in a low-pressure academic environment is not a god-given right; it depends on convincing those who pay for it—ultimately, the whole of the public—that we are a good investment. In the end we cannot make any honest argument for that except “Do you want to know how the universe ticks, or not?” Well, maybe they don’t. Or maybe their understanding-the-universe dollars could, right now, be spent in better places. If so, sucks to be us. We’ll have to go earn six-figure wages selling algebra to financiers. Woe, woe, woe is us.