Low-energy tools underlie high-energy physics

Charles Roos (Physics Today, May 2012, page 10 ) has charged me with naiveté in claiming that high-energy particle physics has never produced jobs for anyone but HEP physicists (Physics Today, September 2011, page 10 ). In support of his charge he cites several developments stemming from HEP research that have contributed significantly to the economy and to job growth.

However, Roos appears to have inadvertently made my case for me: None of the contributions he cites has anything to do with HEP physics itself. All are tools engineered from lower-energy electron-volt physics, or byproduct results, or spinoffs. High-field and superconducting magnets are pure eV physics. Money spent on the thousands of them in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN would have benefited the country and the world more if the funds had instead been spent on developing superconducting transmission lines to convey electricity efficiently from the remote solar and wind farms generating it to urban centers using it.

All R&D programs generate unexpected byproduct results or spinoffs. That is an excellent reason for public support of science: You always get lagniappe—more than you paid for. However, the unpredictability of those results means that the expectation of them cannot be the basis for choosing to support one program over another. For example, the development of integrated-circuit microprocessors was greatly speeded by NASA’s need for extremely lightweight computers in triplicate for its space capsules. So the entire computer industry—for smartphones, cars, washing machines, and refrigerators—can be claimed to be a byproduct of the space program. Millions of jobs! (Memo to NASA: Ask for more money.)

All the jobs for which Roos credits HEP physics are applications of eV physics and result merely from the expenditure of vast sums of money, irrespective of the goal for which it was spent. They have nothing to do with HEP physics itself.