> so that Average Joe could download the slice of events investigated (and thus learn how to issue other slices of events) and bulk download them for analysis

Is there any precedent for such openness generating public support?

Not saying it wouldn't be scientifically productive. Or even engaging for enthusiasts. But I'm having trouble seeing a politically-relevant number of Average Joes diving into collision datal. (That is already publicly accessible [1].)

[1] https://opendata.cern.ch/record/80020

Tell Average Joe that CERN invented URLs.

The first big application of URLs was precisely this use case: distributed access to particle event data in databases and tape silos across different international institutions. The mainframes (mostly IBM 3090) would then crunch the data to analyze and filter the interesting collisions.

We already make the data available publicly...

http://opendata.cern.ch/

The problem isn't that there isn't money, but that there isn't enough money for scientific research. The view that building bigger and bigger LHCs is coming at the expense of more deserving research is IMO worth consideration and is something folks like Sabine Hossenfelder aggressively share. I don't think it's fair to just shout down and down-vote people just for raising the concern.

> $17bn is 2% of the US government annual defense budget

These are not fungible. Basic research, within the basic research budget, is. It's much easier to argue for $17bn being deliberated for the FCC (that's not going to happen, let's be real about European politics) to be re-allocated to the sciences than it is to shift Panzer production.

(As a rule of thumb, arguing for an expense relative to a military budget--the o.g. of state expenses--is a weak argument. And especially in Europe, where the American military is no longer a theoretical backstop, it's politically tonedeaf.)

> there's no shortage of money

There is always a shortage of money. Because human desires are infinite and our resources are not.

> lawmakers don't fear that putting too little money towards science will lose them an election

Do you really think the solution to flagging public support for the sciences is more synchrotrons? Where best case we discover a new particle, but probably not?

Science isn't a faith. There is value in exploring things we don't know. But that doesn't give every exploration mission infinite inherent value.

17bn is more or less NASA's budget if you suddenly want to discuss the European scientific budget with America as a baseline. It's also more than two times the budget of the ESA (European Space Agency)

17bn is casually the yearly R&D budget of the top 10 MedTech companies combined. MedTech is a field with immediate commercial and industry value in improving people's lives. https://www.statista.com/statistics/329064/global-medtech-re...

This is a single scientific project with the possibility of finding nothing new within a field of science that currently lacks commercial or industrial value outside of curiosity. And we're building it on the promise that "we may find something new" while lacking any established theory that would benefit from the higher energy level.

This is NOT chump change, and Using the American defence budget as a comparison is tone-deaf.

A few billion here, a few billion there, pretty soon we're talking real money.

>> The idea that there's a fixed-sized pie for science and every project takes away from something else is, frankly, defeatist.

What fraction of the workforce should be diverted to "forward-looking" (ie, no idea if or when it will result in anything useful) research?

Or how about what fraction of the much smaller part of the workforce who are capable of getting an advanced STEM degree? If we pay those people to switch to speculative research, what happens to whatever they're doing now that has enough proven value that private industry knows it's worth paying them to do?

The Bell experiment is one test of entanglement. There is a whole class of tasks that you can do only if you have access to entangled systems. Take another one to see how the implication you state doesn't follow.

For example, quantum teleportation is only possible if you have a source that produces entangled particles. If I want to test that you have such a source, I can give you a random state (which only I know), and ask you to teleport it to a far away location [1]. If you indeed have an entangled particle source, then you can successfully teleport the state 100% of the time. However, because measurements in quantum mechanics are probabilistic, I can't actually single-shot verify that you teleported the correct state. So we will have to repeat this task many times [2], and with each success I will be more and more sure that you have an entangled state source.

Now coming to your musing above: "rather indicates which types of statistics govern a class of systems produced en mass"

You can see why this is not consistent with the repeated teleportation experiment. If every single teleportation test succeeded individually, then every iteration must have involved an entangled state. The repeat is only because of my inability to verify in single-shot. Surely then, entanglement is a property of specific systems, rather one of a class of systems.

If you want to read this more substantially (and you have graduate level of mathematics knowledge), quantum resource theories is the area you are looking into.

[1] There are some assumptions on your honesty required here.

[2] Each time using a different random state.

Kind of? Keep aside quantum mechanics for a second. In any classical experiment that has random outcomes, would you say that the probability distribution is a property of a single system or a bunch?

You can only deduce a distribution from repeated measurements. But most physicists would have no problem talking about a single experiment having many possible outcomes, governed by a probability distribution. It's almost a philosophical question about whether probability means anything in single systems.

It's the same way in quantum mechanics. The effects of entanglement can only be discerned if you take repeated samples. But we still feel okay talking about single systems governed by such entanglement.

Almost, but not quite.

It means something about a specific system, but it can only be verified statistically by producing copies of that system (not "class of systems") en mass.

The informal overview includes this caveat

> An important assumption going into the theorem is that neither Alice nor Bob is allowed, in any way, to affect the preparation of the initial state. If Alice were allowed to take part in the preparation of the initial state, it would be trivially easy for her to encode a message into it.

Couldn't the galactic emperor distribute a collection of entangled particles to a remote outpost, one for each day, that can be manipulated like a dead man's switch?

Every day, a light turns green, the emperor is alive?

I'm going to level with you. I read the informal overview and only understood about half of it.

I still have zero concept of why it's impossible. Help?

Your analogy with the apples is an oversimplification of what is going on that misses an important aspect of the system: the measurements aren't independent. The type of measurement you do effect the result of the measurement your friend does.

Question from a non-physicist:

If both sides measure the particle, both sides now know a fact that the other side knows. Let's say that both sides have previously agreed, at sub-light speeds, that "0" will mean "we both sell Microsoft stock" and "1" means "we both buy Microsoft stock". (Assume an entire list of actions so we have more than one bit of common knowledge.) Is this considered a form of FTL communication? Or just a hack?

Consider an excited luminescent atom, molecule or center.

For example consider a lasing medium but without mirrors, that was excited. There is a range of wavelengths (or outcomes) it could emit. However in a laser a specific wavelength (or wavelentghs) are selected for by the mirrors. A photon of a specific wavelength in the optical gain wavelength range cans stimulate the excited atom to emit the same wavelength.

So there exist conditions where the outcome of a quantum transition can be selected for (stimulated emission in this case).

There is an article that proclaims to do precisely that with a pair of phosphorescent samples, simultaneously irradiated by entangled light. They then arbitrarily call one sample the "master" and the other the "slave" sample.

They claim to observe simultaneous emission from the "slave" sample while stimulating emission at the "master" sample, even when separated at large distances in different places.

The authors themselves highlight this apparent violation of the "no-communication theorem" (which is never proven, only postulated), and how it apparently contradicts conventional wisdom about the impossibility of FTL communication. They do not however measure exact photon timings.

Curiously, no other group has disclosed attempting to reproduce or published results confirming or contradicting the proclaimed measurements (which is relatively cheap to execute).

Simple. Just walk around time, instead of through it.

Sigh 202024 and humans still wrestling with the basics.

Describing a phenomenon is not contemplating the science behind it. Without evidence or observations, it's not science.

> Except that experiments have ruled out hidden variables. (Go read about Bell inequalities.)

Nobel Prize in physics 2022 “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”

From a non-expert view with no influence on the matter in any way, I do find these sorts of arguments more compelling than anything I've seen put forward by proponents. "It will indirectly help with superconducting magnet tech" is a variant from the proponent side -- I even like this one, because it's needed for fusion. But ok, can we just fund that tech directly, with or without the purpose of enabling fusion plants, and not as pork (even if fundamentally necessary pork) to this collider project that needs to justify itself on its own merits?

LHC reaches collision energy environments in the scale of 10^4 GeV = 10 TeV, the FCC proposal is shooting for 10^5 GeV = 100 TeV. Just one order of magnitude higher, and note this won't appear any time soon. The LHC itself took 10 years to construct, another 4 for the Higgs detecting experiment. The FCC would probably take at least that long, I've seen estimates of 20-30+ years. Is this really the thing to commit on? It's not just money and time, but also attention. The thousands of scientists involved in particle physics are smart people, is a bigger collider project the best way to use their talents, for deep probes into reality or otherwise?

I don't know what's required for even higher energy levels -- like what would an equator sized one even be capable of? A quick google suggests with 30 T magnets, around the order of 10,000 TeV = 10^7 GeV would be achievable. Still a far cry short from the >= 10^(11±1) GeV level estimated to be the point where electroweak vacuum stability breaks down, and similar very high levels suggested by grand unified theory topics. Maybe decade+ projects should focus more on figuring out how to build (probably linear) accelerators in space to reach much higher energy levels than just 100 TeV? (Of course the max proton-proton collision energy isn't the only design parameter.)

The lack of "mandate" is of course striking, too. Papers from the 90s related to the LHC proposal all mention the importance of the Higgs and how various calculations let them be confident the LHC could find it (or not find it and invalidate so much). But, to try and credit the FCC proponents, it's not like you can't easily find some justifications. Whether they're convincing to different audiences is another matter. Several years ago there were a series of 5 papers on uses of the FCC, to be turned into the current 4 volume CDR. Here's the one (a couple hundred pages) specifically on new physics: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00947 There's some classes of dark matter theories it could rule out (but not all, so ultimately a similar situation with supersymmetry), and the paper helpfully compares reach vs. the LHC.

In the end I'm not even actively opposed to the FCC proposal, I just don't think it's adequately justified itself on its own merits or in comparison to potential other uses of funds and attention. (The latter being somewhat important because, while it'd be nice if there were more budget and more people, budget proportions probably aren't changing anytime soon, and birthrates are declining.) That's fine, what I think doesn't matter, and many things get funded that don't really justify themselves either. It's just nice when the benefits are much more direct and more easily explainable to non-experts.

> Particle accelerators are pinging the deepest layers of reality that we can possibly reach

Technically, yes. But imagine our focus is Earth science. The name of the game is drill the deepest borehold. Now, the Kola Superdeep team could rightfully claim they are digging into the deepest layers of our terrestrial reality that humans, heretofore, have ever reached.

But if you only dig boreholes, you're not reaching our planet's iron core. At least not for, at the very least, centuries for materials science to catch up with science fiction. Instead, the secrets will be unveiled through seismology.

Similarly, it's fair to ask whether building bigger and bigger synchrotrons is akin to trying to discover the secrets of Earth's interior by drilling deeper and deeper boreholes. (Disclaimer: I have zero background in particle physics.)

which is why it was a crying shame the Texas Supercollider got canceled. It would have done more useful science than ISS

Personally I can’t imagine not understanding that the defence funding is one of the most essential factors in enabling our modern way of life. It’s been so effective at providing the security needed to produce globalisation and highly democratic societies, that a lot of people have forgotten the reason we need it in the first place. Certainly worth the minuscule portion of GDP we allocate to it.

The fusion breakthrough in the National Ignition Facility was said to be essentially a program claiming to be for nuclear weapons research but instead they did fundamental research.

Most researcher who I know share my attitude. I am extremely grateful for the support I have gotten from NIH, NSF, Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the State of Tennessee for research support in experimental precision medicine and health care.

I recognize this support as a “luxury” made possible by a wealthy and progressive American society that wants great science and progress with the potential to improve the quality and duration of healthy lives.

Or fast enough to break the sound barrier. I'd assume that's a new discovery when catapults were still relevant. Or heating of the projectile from drag...

Yes but clearly you couldn’t achieve that with normal catapult technology. You need some theory to be able to predict what energies are going to be significant.