This is literally chuds argument for defunding nasa.
“I dont understand it so it’s worthless to me”
the difference is with nasa we can name dozens of advancements that help people off the top of our heads but i cant even get someone to name something theoretical that might help the common man from the confirmation of the higgs-boson
so, maybe help out with that, what theoretically can we hope that we might improve our lives through confirming that particle
additionally chuds want to defund nasa to fund the military and prisons whereas id use the money from that particle thing to house homeless or invest in indigenous communities
so in short suck it nerd because it is in fact worthless to me, personally
i cant even get someone to name something theoretical that might help the common man from the confirmation of the higgs-boson
This is the type of research that can advance more immediate research into non-fossil fuel energy.
Although I’m highly sympathetic to this argument until we have much better material conditions in socialism, I think your argument misses a significant dialectical process which must be taken into account and a reason that fundamental research is still necessary and good most of the time. Namely, the quantity -> quality relation. Fundamental research seems to have little effect until it’s quantity reaches a threshold where it becomes obvious how it can be used and what sort of benefits there will be in using it, whereupon the quality of that research shifts to no longer being called “fundamental research” and becomes now its own field of research or applied research. Finding where these will appear is a difficult, though hopefully possible, endeavor.
If you argument is that fundamental research in particles will never result in that shift, I’m excited to hear how you reasoned that no contradiction/drive in the dialectics of nature found by colliders will be useful to our material conditions. I suspect you may be right but don’t think I’m one who could possibly credibly say so, and therefore don’t claim that it’s useless.
If your argument is that fundamental research is too far away from results to make such decisions, i would really like to hear how we measure and understand this, because it feels like you know more about the threshold than me.
If your argument is that we should not focus on that when problems exist now: this is true, but can we possibly even call this focus? The money is miniscule in relation to the huge sums elsewhere and your focus on this is the real problem. You’re then not necessarily wrong, but you’re not fighting the most important fights.
The study of molecules was fruitful once chemical relations started being understood and used and resulted in some people “wasting time” on studying atoms. Those theories were useless except to probe what chemicists were doing already. Until the understanding reached a point that its exploitation became possible. Then the researchers were doing a science to utilize the energy of those atoms beyond the point where chemistry could apply as a framework. When this will occur again I don’t dare claim.
Oh no, not fundamental science that cannot immediately be capitalised on!
Seriously, why do substantial parts of this forum immediately turn anprim the moment fundamental physics research is concerned?
I don’t think it’s wrong to see poverty and equality as a priority over that, if I’m honest. It shouldn’t be that surprising that people have an issue with billions of dollars being spent on things not currently improving lives when there are people living like hell.
In a leftist utopia we wouldn’t prioritize either because we’d do both. In a transitory state we could do plenty of both (see China), and the cost of this project is not large relative to national projects like housing, education (which this is part of anyway), or healthcare for all. In our current capitalist hellscape shutting this type of research down would reduce no poverty and win no allies.
We’re always going to allocate resources to projects that do not address the most basic of needs. Criticism of that comes from a much better place than reactionaries yelling “you can’t complain about being poor unless you live like a monk,” but you can make all the same arguments against it.
But that’s entirely a problem of distribution of goods stemming from the predominant mode of economic organisation. Not building a larger particle collider would solve exactly zero problems which stem from capitalist distribution of goods and resulting artificial scarcity.
because its hard to see any value in fundamental physics research when we can’t even figure out how to live on this planet in a sustainable way that doesn’t involve killing hundreds of millions of people and destroying vast parts of its ecosystem and exterminating half+ of all species on earth?
The scientests doing this research have been screaming at the top of their lungs how we could live sustainably for 6 decades.
“Scientific research is a waste because capitalism exists” is up there with “why should I have to use paper straws when billionaires have private planes” level take
if we can manage that, though, it would be kinda useful to already have a head-start on the particle colliding. More practically, the absolute peak of money for the sciences is a drop in the bucket compared to heavy industry, which is were most of the sustainability work needs to be done.
