April 28th, 2007 cern's large hadron collider

The newest particle accelerator at CERN, the LHC, has been put on delay again. The problem is a magnet that apparently wasn’t being cooled fast enough. During a high-pressure test, the part collapsed and is now being fixed. While the accelerator was planned to launch in November, it may not be running until next year. This just demonstrates what a tremendously complicated project the LHC is. You have to bring together engineers and physicists and make both understand each others’ worlds. The engineer has to understand particle physics somewhat to know how to implement designs, and the physicist has to know some engineering to know what is feasible. For something this complicated and large scale, it would be a surprising if some type of a failure didn’t occur.

I am also highly dubious about this approach to doing physics. One only needs to look to history to see that the major revolutions in science came from theoretical insight, not some gigantic experiment that produced unexpected data to be analyzed. All the major developments, Newton’s mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, and Einstein’s GR, were developed from theoretical insights and philosophical motivation. Not ONE of them were trying to explain some sort of puzzling data. Even for Quantum Mechanics, it took a little experimental surprises to jump start, but once it was off it was developed entirely theoretically. Schrodinger didn’t sit in a lab trying to empirically come up with the Schrodinger equation.

So to be spending this much money, time, and resources “just to see what happens” is wrong. One should have a theoretical prediction to go and test, not the other way around. Indeed, I fully believe that particle physics and the problem between GR and Quantum won’t be solved by these particle accelerators. I believe that someone smart will come along and come up with a new theory from amazing insight. This is the way physics has progressed for a while.

I find it very disturbing that physicists, and politicians convinced by physicists, are willing to spend the money and the resources to build something like this when it is likely that we will observe nothing new. We should at least have some theory to test, some reason for building the accelerator.

Now, I might be wrong. We may find unexpected data at CERN. But this won’t help in the least. Someone motivated enough might come up with some empirical equation that fits the data, but this is not progress. Physics needs unifying principles, philosophical ideas, that drive a theory to its inevitable conclusion. While new data may tell us that we are missing something, it can never tell us what is missing. And we already know that something is missing. There already are plenty of data unexplained. So why build another accelerator? At worst, it produces nothing. At best, it produces just another set of data we need to explain.

Where is the next Einstein?