Is the LHC too big to fail?

There have been two stories in the news lately. One is the idea that the banks are "too big to fail", so we should break them up. The other is that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is apparently fated to fail, an idea I think is ridiculous. The LHC is the largest experimental project ever undertaken. It's purpose is to search for the Higgs boson, the "God particle", among other things. Maybe it was these stories, or maybe it was that last meeting with my supervisor, but I've been thinking about science and failure. Is the LHC too big to fail? Could a single idea bring down physics as a whole?

The magnets of the ATLAS detector at LHC.

In an earlier meeting Eric and I were discussing a new model for dark matter proposed at at talk he attended. It really wasn't a new model, but an attempt to fix a model that was severely broken. Eric referred to the work as "bullshit", but filtered through the rich molasses of his eastern Russian accent it comes out as "bu-shit", and is much more offensive. Coming from his mouth it also means that the theory is broken.

I won't go into the details of the theory, but it seems that many people are investing their time on science that is just plain wrong. Why does this happen? In particle physics it may have to do with the lack of experiments to tell people they're wrong. Doing is often the best way to determine how the world works, and unfortunately we haven't had the means to test these ideas. Communities build careers based on these ideas, but then someone comes along and points out a subtle detail that ruins it. If it happens to a large community, they'll spend the rest of their career trying to fix it any way they can. These patchwork fixes instead of just dropping the idea and moving on are what draw Eric's ire.

I was talking about this with my friend Matt and he joked about a string theory "bubble burst". I'm not sure if he was just joking, or was aware that this was a perfect analogy. For years string theorists were the great hope in physics and they got the faculty positions. Many of the brightest physicists worked relentlessly to fix a theory that had the potential to unify physics and as a result a large number of new students became string theorists. But now, thirty years later, people are becoming wary, and there are fewer jobs for these students trained in pure string theory. Having the bubble burst is what may happen to the dark matter particle theorists I mentioned earlier.

Toothpaste for dinner knows there's trouble.

These bubble bursts are unfortunate, but they aren't the end of physics. This is just what happens when a group of investors lose faith in a field of business like housing or dot-coms or physicists lose faith in a field of physics. These bubble bursts are unfortunate for the investors and the businessman but the rest of the economy keeps on going. The fields of condensed matter and cosmology are untouched by the happenings in particle physics. More importantly, the public perception of physics doesn't change.

The difference between investors losing faith and the public (i.e., all investors) losing faith is an important one. Imagine if we were unable to get the LHC started, or more likely, image we just didn't find the Higgs. With so much pop physics coverage of this experiment, laden with terms like "the God particle", would the public see this as a failure? Or would we be able to spin what we do find into some kind of success? If not, the public might want to stop funding such projects. And worse, they may lose faith in physics all together and cause an academic crash, just like when the public loses faith in the economy. Thousands of physicists would be out of jobs. Is this now considered too big to fail?

Of course this is all very alarmist of me and people might wonder why it matters if a bunch of geeks lose their jobs. Unlike an economic crash we're not losing money, we're losing ideas. When a bubble bursts we lose the ideas that aren't working anyway, but in an academic crash we would lose all the good ideas too. The kind that after 30 years lead to a new kind of plastic, the transistor, the internet, the types of technology that are so ubiquitous one couldn't even image them being invented.

So, faithful reader, is there this another lesson to learn from economics? We've already learned that we have to spend money to make ideas, and that gambling big leads to big ideas. Is there anything more? I suppose it's comforting to know that if we fail, there's a chance someone will bail us out.