Comments

*sigh* Cox parrots the same tired line that the HEP world has been spinning for decades now: we get to the modern world from fundamental research, and LCH is research in that spirit. To support this bromide he quotes a speech from 1966! Make no mistake about it: contrary to the claims of this article, the modern world is the result of extremely focused industrial research. The internet, spread spectrum telephony, IC's and processors, CCFLs, car engines, GMR hard drives, everything around you that is new from the last 50 years is the result of industrial research. Cox uses the transistor as one of his examples, claiming that it sort of fell out of QM. Either he is being disingenuous or really doesn't know the history of it's development. Semiconductor radios pre-date a real understanding of QM by some decades, and the transistor itself was the result of a very focused research program to develop that device specifically. In fact, branches of QM exist _because_ of the development of the transistor, not the other way around. You can get bogged down in one-off examples though, so let's step back a bit and look at the bigger picture. It is true that in 1966 much of the scientific progress up to that point was due to fundamental, even non-commercial, research. That's because there was no industrial science until the 1940s. But what if you look beyond that date? Well clearly its no longer true. Very little of modern high-energy physics, which is what the LHC studies, has any relation to the real world at all. I can't think of a single fundamental discovery in the last 40 years that has any bearing on our lives at all. Be sure you understand what I'm saying there. Modern physics is delivering a constant stream of changes to the world in an ever-increasing rate. But *high-energy physics* is not. HEP is way out on that asymptote, way past the point of diminishing returns. It's mined out. This isn't a bad thing, it demonstrates how great our understanding of the world is. But to expect that this $6 billion will have some sort of spin-off effect due to the *physics it discovers* is ridiculous. If someone wanted to spend $6 billion refining the 40th decimal place of Boltzmann's constant they'd be laughed at. Yet this is precisely what LHC is doing, refining a model we already claim to understand. The historical parallels with the development of mathematics is a good one. Calculus opened up a huge amount of the natural world to study for the first time, and the handling of linear equations and matrix techniques helped too. But the study of close-packing spheres in 32 dimensions? Well it's interesting, sure, but not practical. Unlike the HEP world, however, the mathematicians aren't claiming that some great advance will magically appear out of their most esoteric work. So why does the HEP field keep trying to do so?