> The problem isn't that "finding nothing" isn't progress. The problem is that "finding nothing" is terrible progress-per-dollar.
> if you go on to argue about how vital it is to spend another 5x times as much money to build another particle collider that we have no reason to believe will find anything new, you will continue to be marginalized and find your influence waning to apparently no effect.
The first part is fine if by it you mean you think the physics-practitioner-theory of the collider advocates (a theory about what next research steps might be fruitful, not a theory of physics) is now implausible to you. On the other hand if you just think something like "We expect the future (of physics) to be 'like' the past (not making progress)", then that isn't an explanatory statement and is unrelated to whether we should fund a future collider. If you know what you're going to find in an experiment, you're not setting out to discover something new, so there is no such "future will be like the past" principle here.
The second really is an argument not to fund a future collider because it comes with an explanation: what good theory (of physics, this time) do we have that predicts we'll find new tests, or new problems? If there's no very good theory, new tests or new problems might come from other experiments instead, especially if they're a lot cheaper so we can do more of them. Personally I guess that it's a good argument you make here in this second part, but what do I know?
> The problem isn't that "finding nothing" isn't progress. The problem is that "finding nothing" is terrible progress-per-dollar.
> if you go on to argue about how vital it is to spend another 5x times as much money to build another particle collider that we have no reason to believe will find anything new, you will continue to be marginalized and find your influence waning to apparently no effect.
The first part is fine if by it you mean you think the physics-practitioner-theory of the collider advocates (a theory about what next research steps might be fruitful, not a theory of physics) is now implausible to you. On the other hand if you just think something like "We expect the future (of physics) to be 'like' the past (not making progress)", then that isn't an explanatory statement and is unrelated to whether we should fund a future collider. If you know what you're going to find in an experiment, you're not setting out to discover something new, so there is no such "future will be like the past" principle here.
The second really is an argument not to fund a future collider because it comes with an explanation: what good theory (of physics, this time) do we have that predicts we'll find new tests, or new problems? If there's no very good theory, new tests or new problems might come from other experiments instead, especially if they're a lot cheaper so we can do more of them. Personally I guess that it's a good argument you make here in this second part, but what do I know?