I doubt anyone believes that the most pressing issues facing the nation include an insufficient understanding of the origins of the universe.
That’s not my quote. That’s House Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) speaking to congress in 1993 about the Superconducting Super Collider the United States was building in Texas. He, along with a chorus of other politicians and voters, believed this project was a waste of money and a distraction from the very real issues our nation faced. Which is why the house voted to shut down the project. It’s also why the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is in Switzerland and not in Texas.
The LHC explodes protons. It has gigantic magnetic tubes deep underground that create a racetrack for subatomic particles. At certain points on the track there are these mega-huge 5-story cameras, except they’re not exactly cameras. They are machines that take a snapshot of what happens when you smash particles together. Like watching a car crash in slow motion, except the car crash creates BILLIONS of pieces of debris you can’t see or measure. These giant machines can see and measure them. We hope. We think. I mean, that was the plan.
The point was to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang and help us understand how this whole universe came to be.
The LHC’s purpose was, and still is, research. In one of the most unexpectedly delightful documentaries of all time, Particle Fever, Professor David Kaplan admits there’s no direct military or commercial application to the LHC. In the movie, he explains that the LHC exists to help us understand things about the basic laws of physics.
Specifically, they were looking for a particle called the Higgs-Boson. The Higgs-Boson was the missing particle in the standard model of particle physics. In the 1960s, a theoretical physicist named Peter Higgs discovered it – sorry, no he predicted it, deep inside a whole lotta math that none of us will ever read.
According to the math, the Higgs is the particle responsible for why electrons bind together. And it was the linchpin holding together everything we thought we knew about particle physics. The Higgs (he hypothesized) is why we have people and planets and literally everything. Allegedly. Because before the LHC, all we had was math. Theory. No proof. No evidence.
We couldn’t find the Higgs because you need this huge giant (expensive) (complicated) machine to even start looking.
You can see why someone who is concerned with pressing domestic issues might file this under a “nice to have,” but not a need to have.
It would be very cool, but there are people who don’t have jobs and can’t pay medical bills. There are food deserts and mass shootings, heart disease and cancer. There is intimate partner violence, terrorism, racism, hate crimes, and hurricanes. So, while this little science experiment is very cool, you can’t put “very cool” on a P&L.
Science wants to spend billions of dollars on a HULK SMASH machine for particles, while homicide is still a thing? Thank you, next.
NASA got similar pressure to justify itself in the 1960s. It’s part of why they pushed the “let’s beat Russia!” story so hard. Space Race! There were many legitimate arguments for defunding NASA and they sounded eerily familiar to the criticisms of funding a Superconducting Super Collider.
It’s difficult to justify spending money, time, or energy on things that may or may not have a return, when you have so many pressing domestic issues that require your attention now. Especially when those pressing issues have clear paths to resolution, but are lacking sufficient funds.
Every research institution has the same problem of needing to justify itself.
They have to answer the questions: What’s the ROI? Why does this matter?
These are fair questions.
But they are the wrong questions.
They are the right question for business, which is where this conversation gets muddy. Research is expensive. As we saw with the Superconducting Super Collider, these machines can cost upwards of billions and billions of dollars. And in the world of business and budgets, it tends to be zero sum. If we put a billion here, we’re taking a billion away from there.
This zero-sum approach refers to government spending too, even though the government is not (and should not) be run like a business. Unless you mean “business” as a euphemism for “more efficiently,” in which case, fine, we agree. But the government has to take care of people, and participate in things that do not offer a return (financially). In this way, it is the opposite of a business. A business exists to be profitable, to yield a return, not *just* to solve a problem. You have to solve a profitable problem. There are plenty of problems to solve that are not profitable and therefore not businesses.
In a 2016 talk at Carnegie Mellon University, former President Barack Obama said, “Part of government’s job…is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.” He goes on to say that if he was producing an app, he wouldn’t need to worry about whether poor people could afford the app, where that is quite literally the job of the government.
Obama says the system’s not “inherently wrecked; it’s just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That’s not on your balance sheet, that’s on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that’s hard and it’s messy, and we’re building up legacy systems that we can’t just blow up.”
Business thinking complicates research for the sake of research because it leads us to a false comparison: pinning pressing domestic issues against investing in research. It’s like asking, “Should I have eggs for breakfast or go to law school?” They’re not mutually exclusive and it’s the wrong question.
If you’re going to give someone $1,000,000,000 you want to know what they’re going to do with the money. Or, put another way, you want to know: What do I get in return for giving you this billion dollars?
In the private sector, there are only two appropriate answers to this question:
Answer 1: MORE MONEY.
Answer 2: STATUS
The better answer is Answer 1. Answer 2 is a collection of answers because there are a lot of words for status: Fame, Legacy, Recognition, Appreciation, Validation, Notoriety, Good Will, Name on The Building, Etc. In a business context, it is important to ask these questions because if you don’t you lose your money and if you lose your money you can’t support yourself, your kids, or your life. Also, you lose your business, since, at its core, businesses exist to make money.
That’s why, “What’s the ROI on this?” is a great question for business. It is not a great question for research because the answer for, “What’s the ROI on this?” is quite simply: maybe nothing.
Putting up a billion dollars for “maybe nothing” is not a risk most sane people want to take.
In 1993, there was no way to know what discoveries would come out of the superconducting supercollider or if any discoveries would come out of it. We did end up finding the Higgs, btw. If you want to see one of the most heart-warming moments in scientific history, watch the scene where researchers reveal evidence supporting the existence of the Higgs in front of 83-year-old Peter Higgs. I cried my eyes out watching that little man look at how he inspired this entire room full of scientists to come together in search for the missing particle that explained the nature of the universe.
He won the Nobel Prize that year, too (2012).
But that’s not the most interesting part.
The most interesting part is that because this machine was SO BIG it required 100,000 computers across the world to communicate in order to make sense of it all. And that gave birth to something called the World Wide Web.
Yeah…The World Wide Web was invented at CERN out of necessity.
(NASA gets credit for inventing the internet but the WWW, that’s all CERN.)
So: What’s the ROI of creating the world wide web?!?!!?!?!?!??!!?
You see why it’s a bad question?
It’s almost impossible to find a link between the research you conduct and the subsequent results, and its impact on the world.
Could we have predicted that sending a man to the moon would lead us to cleaner drinking water? Water purification systems (aka iodine) came out of space travel. So did Camera Phones, LED lights, air sole tech (for your Nike’s), ear thermometers, baby formula, dust busters, CAT Scans (nbd), wireless headsets. And of course: MEMORY FOAM.
The significance of research, the value of it, isn’t quantifiable. Research works because it builds on the discoveries (or null results) that came before. The significance and application of those findings come later.
“When radio waves were discovered they weren’t called radio waves because there were no radios. They were discovered as some sort of radiation,” Kaplan explains. “Basic science for big breakthroughs needs to occur at a level where you’re not asking ‘What is the economic gain?’ you’re asking, ‘What do we not know and where can we make progress?’”
The question was never about the ROI. It was always about progress.
“So, what is the LHC good for?” Kaplan continues.
“Could be nothing…other than understanding everything.”
I think we should find out.
