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Here is something that should worry you. Each time I give a public lecture people come up to me and say they agree with me that building a bigger collider is currently a nonsense idea. It's a huge investment with little scientific benefit and basically no societal relevance 1/
I mostly get this from physicists of other disciplines (condensed matter physicists seem to feature prominently, but maybe just because there are many of them) but also from particle physicists who have left the field, both theoreticians and experimentalists 2/
Yet, there is not a single one of them on the public record willing to speak out. The reason I keep getting quoted by newspapers and magazines is simply THAT THEY CAN'T FIND ANYONE ELSE WILLING TO SPEAK OUT. 3/
I know that because I frequently get asked by journalists if maybe I can refer them to someone else willing to voice criticism. No one *wants* to constantly quote that weird German woman. But no one else seems to step forward. 4/
Now, one way you can look at this is to say, then that Hossenfelder person must just be nuts. Can't blame you for that because sometimes I believe that myself. 5/
However, I want to pause for a moment and ask how it can possibly be that you have such an almost complete consensus on a topic that requires making difficult decisions on scientific and societal relevance. How can it possibly be they all think the same thing? 6/
The answer is that of course if you ask particle physicists if you should put more money into particle physics the answer will be yes, so really you shouldn't ask particle physicists. But then everybody else will be discarded as a "non expert". 7/
Then you can go and look for people who worked in particle physics and who left, but the vast majority of them are no longer active in research and then you don't know where to look. It's not that they don't exist. You just don't know how to find them. 8/
So this supposed "expert consensus" is created by a combination of conflict of interest and a very narrow definition of "expertise". And this is why we are not having an honest discussion about the benefits of building a bigger collider. 9/
The bottom line is that if you have an education in physics and you can follow the scientific part of my argument (that going to higher energies is currently not promising and not the only thing we can do), then please, for the sake of progress, speak up. Thanks /end
