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"Surely we're just a teensy bit away from that new physics, and if we can just a little bit more money^Wenergy into the system, we'll find that new physics for sure!"
They know that it's a long way and a lot more money. Fundamental physics has a habit of paying off in utterly unexpected ways, but that's not really why we do this. It's pure curiosity.
They are grateful that the public seems willing to pay for curiosity. I don't know how long it will last. Though I can say that it's a rounding error in national budgets.
Particle accelerators are pinging the deepest layers of reality that we can possibly reach. Deeper than anyone could have imagined just a few generations ago. That anyone can be cynical about that is hard to understand.
which is why it was a crying shame the Texas Supercollider got canceled. It would have done more useful science than ISS
Imagine how much money is spent on defence. And then imagine the tiny proportion that is spend on basic research that might result in offensive or defensive weapons.
Personally I can’t imagine not understanding that the defence funding is one of the most essential factors in enabling our modern way of life. It’s been so effective at providing the security needed to produce globalisation and highly democratic societies, that a lot of people have forgotten the reason we need it in the first place. Certainly worth the minuscule portion of GDP we allocate to it.
The US GDP is about $25 trillion. Our military costs about $1 trillion, even if you leave out things like the Veterans Administration or the funding of Ukraine's war. That's 4%, a number I'd be hard pressed to describe that as "minuscule". And it's close to the amount everybody else spends, combined.
The military is certainly necessary. But even a 25% cut would be a lot of money you could spend on other things, and still be by far the most advanced and expensive military in the world.
Historically, it is minuscule. It wasn’t too long ago that waging a war for too long would bankrupt most countries, but the US has been waging wars for almost the entire time it’s existed, and it’s managed to build the worlds largest economy while doing it. But you’re suggesting we debate whether defence spending should be 3 percent rather than 4 of GDP. If all of our allies properly contributed to our defence, it could probably be 2 or less. I’m not a big supporter of government spending, but the effectiveness of our defence spending for its tiny relative cost is remarkable compared to literally any other period in history.
>enabling our modern way of life
That's kind of their point, though? They're suggesting our "way of life" is backwards in some ways, which I think is a fair assessment.
We find ourselves supporting financially things like what's happening in Israel or Gaza or happened in Iraq or Afghanistan or Sudan or Armenia or Haiti or insert the rest of the list of countries we've coup'ed here. While we fight over whether poor people deserve healthcare, or if school kids deserve not to starve. Over if public education is good or not. Or if women deserve medical autonomy...
None of that is particularly democratic. Globalization happened because rich people wanted cheaper labor in the 'global south' not because of military bases. I don't know that it's obvious military is what's "produced globalization" and "highly democratic" societies. That seems a fairly large keep of faith.
Funding Israel’s conflicts is not a fundamental part of our way of life. The ability to load a huge defenceless cargo ship full of billions of dollars worth of goods and send it anywhere in the world is. The ability to choose how we govern ourselves is. The fact that it’s a reasonable expectation that we will have most of the fundamental needs of life provided to us no matter what is. None of that is backwards, all of it very obviously depends on our defence capability, and regardless of what you think about the quality of western democracies, we have the most democratic and stable societies that have ever existed in the history of our species, as well as the highest quality of life.
Most of the negatives you’ve listed here are a result of other countries defence force inadequacies.
The fusion breakthrough in the National Ignition Facility was said to be essentially a program claiming to be for nuclear weapons research but instead they did fundamental research.
I think it'd be clearer to say they did fundamental research as part of nuclear weapons research. The goal of the facility is to perform testing that can help to validate the continued functioning and yield of the nuclear weapon stockpile without actually setting off a nuke. Since a hydrogen bomb achieves fusion ignition, being able to perform ignition at the facility is kind of part of the goal.
I don’t think it’s pure curiosity. Maybe physicists are driven by passion, but everybody understands that new physics has historically unlocked a lot of new technology.
I also don’t think that the public really has much of a say in what gets tax payer funding. Governments are just bureaucratic behemoths and once they start paying for something, they can almost never find an acceptable way to stop. Additionally I’ve never met a tax funding recipient that was grateful to be getting it, if anything the perspective that they should be entitled to even more is a lot more common.
I am willing to pay for curiosity, I'm however, not willing to pay for thousands of bureaucrats of the system who are only employed because they somehow got hired into an unnecessary position.
Seriously, this headline is the quantum equivalent of "super expensive catapult observe tallest free fall yet." Or verifying Galileo's free fall experiment with more and more items. It's nice that Newton's laws still hold, but do we really need to test it on the one millionth object?
At high enough energies the laws of physics are actually different. Two of the four fundamental forces in physics, the electromagnetic force and the weak interaction, are actually a single force which only appears to be two separate forces at "low" energies/temperatures, with low being the pretty much all temperatures in the universe after the Big Bang.
It is completely reasonable to test whether phenomenon that hold at low energies still hold at high energies, and that may be the only way you're going to find more fundamental physical laws. Especially when we know quantum theory is incomplete, since it is currently incompatible with general relativity.
There are some effects that may show up only at very high energies. A large enough catapult and you would put something into orbit. Wouldn’t that be a novel outcome?
Or fast enough to break the sound barrier. I'd assume that's a new discovery when catapults were still relevant. Or heating of the projectile from drag...
How about a supersonic trebuchet? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gdXOS-B0Bus
Yes but clearly you couldn’t achieve that with normal catapult technology. You need some theory to be able to predict what energies are going to be significant.
Right now, we have two sets of laws, one at very small scales and one at macro scales. We don't yet have a theory to unify the two. Any and all experiments give data that can help with those and many other questions.
Hey, saying paradise is just around the corner with "just a bit more scale" works wonderfully for OpenAI, and these guys have much more modest claims and asks.
The people at cern are amazing at making you like science & gather money. I was there only for a student trip (non-related studies) and they had many slides about how awesome the international collaboration, science, funding etc is. And of course, they show you the huge site and machines and talk about stuff that you don't understand anything about.
I don’t know if that’s what people are saying, tho maybe part of convincing the public to fund such efforts involves strongly suggesting that could be the case. But what else can we do but poke them harder? It’s been working so far.
I have always wondered if quantum entanglement is the scientific explanation of why when you start thinking of someone (or stop thinking) suddenly they just text you.
It's a big chunk of confirmation bias (you don't remember all the times when that doesn't happen) and all sorts of less obvious behavioral correlations, like, if you tend to talk to someone weekly, and it's been a week since the last time, it wouldn't be surprising to have them reaching out to you around the same time you're thinking of them.
I think this also holds up with how ad tracking aims to hoover up all sorts of data to find correlations. There are probably a lot of non-obvious correlations in there, which causes ads to sometimes eerily seem to read minds. These same correlations may cause people to exhibit very similar thoughts without needing to invoke quantum entanglement.
I feel like that's just a combination of coincidence and confirmation bias
Kind of like how 99.99% of Alien Encounters were not aliens, but .01% were, tho amirite? :)
Answering in case this is not humor: no, it isn't.
From the top of my head, quantum entanglement is something:
1/ that happens at quantum level, so typically with measurable effects on a scale smaller than one atom (way smaller than one neuron);
2/ that requires specific operations on a specific group of particles (the probability that such entangled particles end up in two different brains of related people is infinitesimal);
3/ that requires many measures to confirm – and you can only do so once per group of particles (so it would not be sufficient to have two entangled particles one in each brain, you'd probably need tens of thousands).
I think it's possible that evolution still has some tricks up its sleeve which our physics isn't up to the task of explaining. You could be right.
My idiots understanding of quantum entaglement is that if you take two boxes A and B, and each gets either a plus or a minus stored in them and then those boxes get sent galaxies away from each other, the moment you open either of the boxes and see a plus in it, you know that the other box by necessity has minus in it - even if it's very far apart.
This simple observation is something physicists have hard time wrapping their head around for some reason. The reason I suspect being that it clashes with their religious beliefs about free will and whatnot.
It's weird.
Except that experiments have ruled out hidden variables. (Go read about Bell inequalities.)
> something physicists have hard time wrapping their head around for some reason
The problem is that it's fundamentally different from anything you can do in classical mechanics. And because of that, attempts to explain it in simple terms with casual language are doomed. And attempts to take shortcuts in reasoning by analogizing it to something from everyday life are doomed.
> Except that experiments have ruled out hidden variables. (Go read about Bell inequalities.)
Nobel Prize in physics 2022 “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”
It stops working nicely like that once you go to slightly more complicated than measuring two photons with spin up and spin down. Then you find correlations that make no sense at all if you assume that each photon has a definite state before you measure them (for example, it's as if some events have negative probabilities).
Joke aside, seems like a frequency illusion[1] to me.
Nobody ever texts me. Maybe you just text too much to realize that its unrelated.
Not likely. That's not what entanglement does.
I think once we fully understand consciousness (and physics in general) at a deeper level, then not all, but a very large amount of stuff that was previously labeled as "magical thinking", "ghosts", "telepathy", etc will turn out to have been not only real but perfectly explainable by science.
Of course I'll now be slammed for "woo woo" unscientific thinking as is always the case on HN, when someone who "knows all" encounters someone who doesn't.
I call it synchronicity
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Nope. That is coincidence paired with statistical priors. If you have certain relationships to people it is not unlikely that they would think: "I should text" in periods that overlap with you thinking a similar thing.
It’s not.
No, but it’s the very definition of new age pseudo science work that was all the rage in the 90s.