As a scientist I should support such a project, especially one located in the suburbs of Chicago. But at what cost? As a perspective, next year's proposed budget for the entire National Science Foundation is just over $6 billion.
This ILC reminds me of the Superconducting Super Collider, a project that spent $2 billion dollars digging a hole in Texas that was killed by Congress in 1993 once the projected costs topped $12 billion.
Putting large dollars into a single basket will take away the incentive to increase basic research funding in other scientific endeavors. The main argument for the ILC at Fermilab is not that the research won't get done, it just won't get done in the US. So let the Europeans or the Japanese have the flashy expensive collider and let the US do what it does best—basic research advancing science over a large range of disciplines.
Yet another one: acknowledge Irak was a mistake, withdraw all troops, save $100000 per minute, and let all complexity conferences be free for a year.
ReplyDeleteComplexity theorists will be reassured to learn that the success of the International Linear Collider is not orthogonal to important algorithmic complexity issues.
ReplyDeleteFor the collider to work, that 28-mile-long particle beam needs to collide with itself within a spatial tolerance of a few nanometers.
The algorithmic challenge is this: on a scale of nanometers, the earth is made of vibrating jello.
So making the collider work is a major challenge in control theory ... not just optimal control theory, but robust optimal control theory. Specifically, the near-optimal yet robust control of systems whose parameters are known only within ranges.
Many (even most?) such control problems are known to be in class NP-hard.
http://web.mit.edu/jnt/www/complex.html
So the ILC is a project within which applied complexity theorists (if there are such beasts) have a great deal to offer the physics community.
It has been said that beauty lies in simplicity. One then is forced to wonder about the name computational complexity theory. If the techniques used were really beautiful, it would probably have been called computational simplicity theory....
ReplyDeleteMaybe if it were called "simplicity theory" then we'd have to call the those who study the subject something related...simpletons?
ReplyDeleteHi, I read your blog practically 100 times a day, if possible. I was just going through some of your old posts and I feel the way you wrote has evolved. Initially posts used to be less assertive, and about 80% of them technical/professional. Ofcourse less people commented, because blogging culture was not so well developed. This doesn't fit as a comment to this blog, but anyhow. I really like your blog and I hope your writing style keeps evolving for ever.
ReplyDeleteya iraq would be the big problem here. not a supercollider.
ReplyDeleteThese large scale colliders come at increased costs and reduced results. In other words the bang for the buck is going down.
ReplyDeleteI also believe that if these scientists were starved from multibillion dollar funds, after a while they would find easier ways to produce the same results.
Is discovering some arcane particle worth the combined math and computer science budget several times over? most certainly not.
and yes, we should be out of Iraq too, and ground the ISS but that's a whole different bag of worms.
Though I don't know enough about the projects that might be funded as alternatives to the ILC, I, too, wish that other worthy projects would be funded as alternatives to the Space Shuttle program.
ReplyDeleteThere are at least a couple of kickers I can think of, though. Would multiple smaller alternative projects actually be funded if these bigger items were killed, or do projects like the Space Shuttle function as Great Attractors, keeping the agencies where they're housed in the minds of those in the White House and Congress who draw up budgets? And what is the role of the Department of Defense in keeping the Shuttle alive? (Can the scientific community convince the DoD that there's something in the ILC for them? "Yah, should allow us to develop a really cool intercontinental death ray in about 5 years.")
The DARPA Grand Challenge attracted a fair deal of media attention. Likely much more than a collider ever would.
ReplyDeleteThis week The Onion has a very clever article titled NASA Announces Plan To Launch $700 Million Into Space. As Homer Simpson said, it's funny because it's true. I liked the part about performing experiments on the effects of microgravity on $100 bills.
ReplyDelete