I was curious why the energy seems so low. I mean 500 GeV?! They can so do better than that! Maybe I am just spoiled after looking at the Tevatron and the LHC. Is there a particular reason for that energy or is it because they are not focusing only on the High Energy Spectrum and this sort of borders High and Medium?

Any info anyone might know would be appreciated. Thanks.

Of course the vision has to be compelling; that’s necessary but not sufficient. Arguments like Higgs–>Dark Energy–>new energy source don’t even pass the ha-ha test, at least not right now. The best sales pitch for the ILC will be if the LHC finds something that’s completely unexpected — another “who ordered that?” moment — that can be studied to death with the ILC. Finding nothing at all would generate a lot of work for theorists, but its hard to generate a lot of public excitement or bucks to go explore nothing (the manned space program notwithstanding).

By focusing very publicly on cost and design, the ILC has shot itself in the foot. People generally support great, visionary, sweeping projects. Not everyone… I remember marches in the late 1960’s to the effect that why are we spending money going to the moon when children in the US were subsisting on lead paint chipped from tenement walls… but witness the Iraq debacle. Lots of folks in the US still buy into the vision, and the Bush Admin has largely kept the cost and design buried. Odd that no demonstrators are regularly at the gates of General Dynamics for this war… they were during the Vietnam War. Proof of the successful PR slight of hand for the $500 billion or so squandered so far in Iraq.

What distinguishes particle physics is that its great vision has generally come in only 40-50% above budget. NASA? Probably 300% above budget. Iraq? 1000% above budget. Yet in particle physics we saddle ourselves overmuch with cost and budget. We should sell our vision, and simply reassure that we are dead serious in our design and costing. It is futile to refight the battle of Waxahachie… the real lesson of Waxahachie: keep ex-Military contractors out of the management team.

But if LHC finds nothing, it may well be the next step should rightly be another hadron machine. Depends on the mode of failure at the LHC… if the experiments are clean and capable, which is by no means proven yet, and if there is no new physics, another hadron machine is a smarter choice… more bang for the buck. But if LHC is kind of fiasco of `Nobel Dreams,’ sloppy backgrounds, blackened detectors then… ILC forever.

My impression… is that the complaints from physicists of the non-particle persuasion have a lot to do with “bang for your buck”.

Sean wrote:

I don’t think that bang-for-your-buck is the right way of thinking about it…

JoAnne wrote:

Jeff: The reason that the bang for the buck argument doesn’t work is that science funding is not a zero-sum game. If some fancy new accelerator project doesn’t get funded, the monies do not transfer to other areas of science. Instead, they transfer out of science and science as a whole is the loser.

Clearly, “bang for buck” is the only rational way to determine scarce resource allocation. The form of the problem, of course, is to allocate resources is such a way as to maximally contribute to some property X. Sean has implicitly defined X as human knowledge of particle physics. Joanne has implicitly defined it as the whole of scientific knowledge. Tax payers through their representatives could well have other definitions for X according to which it might be perfectly rational not to fund the ILC at all.

Robert: Ray Orbach, undersecretary of science for the US Department of Energy, has publicly stated enthusiasm for the ILC and expressed his support to construct it in the US if the price is right. In fact, the ILC is the top-priority mid-term project in the DOE 20 year strategic plan. Now the question is whether the price is right. The 20-yr plan can be found at http://www.science.doe.gov/Sub/Mission/Mission_Strategic.htm (my hypothesis is that including this as a link tripped the SPAM filter).

Tony, as I said, there are literally thousands of physics studies for the ILC, including most of what you suggest. Take a look at one of the reviews I quoted.

Sean said “… The point is that the only way to learn about high-energy particle physics is to spend billions of dollars. …
that’s the only way we know of to get the detailed information that really gives us clues about the next level …
If you decided to spend only half as much as the ILC would cost on building an accelerator,
you wouldn’t learn half as much - you would learn nothing.
That’s just the price of playing the game. …
If we want to learn this stuff, we need to spend the money;
whether or not it’s worth the money is an interesting question worth debating. …”.

So, as Sean says, we humans either build something like the ILC
or “learn nothing” about “the next level”.

As to what might be a “compelling argument” in “debating … whether or not it’s worth the money”, maybe it would be a good idea to base it on some really big possible thing that might await us at “the next level”,
so
what about:

1 - We know from astrophysics that 3/4 of our universe is Dark Energy;

2 - Dark Energy is related to gravity, and strong enough to expand our whole universe;

3 - Higgs, by giving mass to the Ordinary Matter that makes up 1/25 of our universe,
is also related to gravity;

4 - A Great Question is whether or not mutual connections to gravity might give a connection between the Higgs (and consequently the Standard Model) and Dark Energy;

5 - Detailed study by ILC of the Higgs (and the Standard Model) MIGHT show such a connection and MIGHT even point to a way to control Dark Energy
(in analogy to the way detailed study of nuclear reactions due to radioactivity gave Lise Meitner the idea of nuclear fission chain reactions); and

6 - Controlled Dark Energy might be as big an advance over Nuclear Energy
as was Nuclear Reactors (nuclear energy) over Fire (chemical energy).

That argument might be a long shot,
but
probably no longer than nuclear fission chain reactions would have seemed to be at the time of early observations of radioactivity
and
it brings together astrophysics and particle physics
and
the quest for control of Dark Energy (whether or not it eventually succeeds in the direct sense) is a clear BIG objective that could inspire people to undertake a peaceful great project - the ILC.

Tony Smith

Tony Smith asks above: “Whatever happened to the days of Benjamin Franklin (or was it Faraday?) when people could reply to demands for proof of usefulness of new stuff by saying: What use is a newborn baby?”

Perhaps those days were numbered when the public realized that newborn babies don’t cost well over $10 Billion each? Just asking.

Well, that’s a lot better, isn’t it?

Jeff: The reason that the bang for the buck argument doesn’t work is that science funding is not a zero-sum game. If some fancy new accelerator project doesn’t get funded, the monies do not transfer to other areas of science. Instead, they transfer out of science and science as a whole is the loser. We learned this lesson with the cancellation of the SuperCollider.

The ILC total looks to me more like $10 billion ($1.3 billion for people), or, $1.4 billon/year for the seven years it is supposed to take to construct the thing. If one (optimistically…) can get other countries to pay half, the US half is more or less the same as the current total US HEP budget. So, in principle, all you have to do is shut down all the rest of the HEP program… More realistically, you don’t need to double the HEP budget (funding everything going on now + ILC), but you do need some sizable increase if you want to fund the ILC + some reasonable amount of other HEP research.

The point is that the only way to learn about high-energy particle physics is to spend billions of dollars. At least, that’s the only way we know of to get the detailed information that really gives us clues about the next level; astrophysics and tabletop experiments can teach you something, but they’ll never find the Higgs boson(s), for example. If you decided to spend only half as much as the ILC would cost on building an accelerator, you wouldn’t learn half as much — you would learn nothing. That’s just the price of playing the game. Whereas, if you were funding a thousand smaller experiments and cut half of them, you might expect to get half the results.

And, regardless of the relative level of interestingness of particle physics compared to other fields, a lot of people think it is interesting in its own right. If we want to learn this stuff, we need to spend the money; whether or not it’s worth the money is an interesting question worth debating. (I think it is!)

Now, not all people will cost $100k. But when you include benefits and the typical costs of overhead and support staff, it’s probably not far off. So…20 billion value units?

This would be spread over about 10 years, or 2 billion per year. The US, if it hosts the machine, would have to cover perhaps half of that. That represents more than a doubling of the present high energy physics budget in the US…and in my opinion, that would be a laudable goal.

Particle physicists are expensive critters - an experiment like CDF at the Tevatron costs a few hundred million dollars (it’s hard to find an exact figure) and employs more than a thousand people. Over its lifetime it produces a few hundred publications. Some other scientists get annoyed with that cost-per-result ratio, and think of how much they could do with that money. The ratio could be even worse for more special-purpose experiments - MINOS probably produces fewer results-per-dollar than CDF, for example.

This assumes that all publications are created equal, of course. I would argue that particle measurements are of broader interest than some others, and that it’s worth the extra cost.

I agree with you completely on the scientific merit of the project, regardless of what is found at the LHC. However, it is a lot of money, and we have to provide a compeling argument to spend that much of the public’s money.