Added benefit, you will understand #gaza, #ice, #crypto, the #ai war in #Iran and how the current U.S. president has been unscrupulously riding the waves of cash of Russia and the tech-bros.

As you say new telescopes are needed but I would not rule out the wish for a new larger collider. There is still a lot of good science to be done at higher energies even without any new major findings. Although I suspect there are some things lurking out there....

In all cases the cost will be high but relative to the cost of all the weapons expanded in the last few weeks it's not that big.

What's next in science is always a problem when the question tries to pit one side of science against another. You simply have no idea where the next breakthrough comes from. My bet is somewhere in biology and brain science.

If it were me and here we are talking physics I would scrap all manned spaceflight and put that money into science missions and telescopes as well as basic science.

Well said.

Even though this realisation was what prompted the scientific method to be established in the first place, the systematic erosion of university education’s humanistic side as ”woke” has caused, even pretty smart people, to lose sight of that

What we have is ”speed” and ”intuition” being preferred, classic nazi traits i’m afraid

AI stays with it's stolen data always on the same level. Only human beings are able to make the transition to the next level of problem solving.

So we somehow re-run the classical discussions of ancient Greek philosophers again and again. While the "pure knowledge" school invented almost nothing in the field of pure knowledge, the mathematics and natural science, which built on the work of Erastothenes, Archimedes or Euclides, gave us all the technical tools, using which Elon now wants to return... to search for "pure knowledge", again.

At some moment, what used to be practical research, can turn into blindly followed rituals, workshops into temples, and so. I am afraid, that science is not immune to this process (the large colliders may be actually temples, we just don't see it). But while science may fall into this trap, with all the grace and glory of huge, timeless, established religion, the AI already is thriving as kind of pagan cult worship, based on ritual sacrifices.

The brute search of possible state space works only for system, where the models are precise enough, which is never possible for non-linear systems.

Somehow, Elons reminds me of the famous 19th century patent office. Just because he ran out of creativity, is stuck in his singularity mindset and cannot imagine any new discovery or progress by anything else then his AI, it doesn't mean, that it makes any sense.

Still, the AI is somehow the ad-absurdum extrapolation of the "statistical" era of science, and there is about to be any new era, not AI based, it will have to be different.

The LHC is itself is based on the way of thinking and data processing, which somehow, when applied on other type of data, gave rise to LLMs... so if we consider LLM AI a dead end, so...

Progress is a loaded term. In this case, it means him making money.

The point is not to debate science with some social media shadow of him, but to do science away from him.