and the higgs is important, but not nearly as important as people make it out to be
well and exiting science brain for a second there’s the like human question of the cognitive dissonance of burning so much surplus on investigating mass generation models while so many people are hungry or unhoused or suffering from lack of access to basic medicines or clean water 😵💫
no i completely agree, i just didn’t want to kill the vibe. that’s the real main issue with building a big new collider. shit’s insanely, obscenely, mindbogglingly expensive. even just in terms of similar science, the cost to science ratio is absolute dogshit. even if it were worthwhile to continue spending large large amounts of money on fundamental physics research, colliders are objectively not a promising path to explore right now.
If you think money being diverted from scientific research would go to any of those things I have a bridge to sell you and all the profits will go to access to basic medicine and clean water.
describing it as putting some stolen-anyway surplus to better use sounds great but when that better use is just first-world phds getting their field coupling research funded there isn’t exactly a compelling case to frame it that way. does the research benefit the people paying for it or not? if I were a hungry peasant farmer and louis xiv strolled out into the fields and tried to persuade us that master sculptors chiseling marble for the enjoyment of his court would be a better use for the money than more campaigns in spain or whatever because advancing the arts is fundamentally good for all of humanity, I’d be crouched behind an oxcart with my phone frantically searching youtube for pitchfork sharpening tutorials
