Recently, Mr. Yang Zhenning published an article opposing China’s construction of an ultra-large collider, turning the matter into a hot topic. The director of the High Energy Physics Institute, Wang Yifang, has already refuted Mr. Yang’s arguments point by point, so I’ll just offer a few casual comments on what the two of them have said.
Mr. Yang Zhenning is a clear-headed man, and he has always tended to think about problems from the standpoint of ordinary people at the bottom. I remember that when he gave a lecture at Peking University and spoke about the comparison between Chinese education and American education, he said that what people commonly call the creativity-inspiring nature of American education, or the rigidity of China’s exam-oriented education, is viewed from the perspective of elite education; but from the standpoint of the dissemination of knowledge among ordinary people at the grassroots level, and taking China’s national conditions into account, China’s education can be said to have been successful. Although I do not agree with Mr. Yang’s view, I respect his standpoint.
On this issue of the collider, I also disagree with Mr. Yang, but he certainly has his reasons. On the other hand, I do not fully agree with Director Wang’s rebuttal either.
Mr. Yang’s first reason is that the collider is far too expensive, costing at least 20 billion US dollars and possibly becoming a bottomless pit. Director Wang points out that the cost can be controlled, and that without considering inflation the total would be about 100 billion yuan. In fact, if you convert them, these two figures are not that far apart. Mr. Yang thinks 130 billion yuan is too much; if you tell him it can be controlled to 100 billion, he will certainly still think it is too much. In any case, it is still a matter of the same order of magnitude.
Whether money is much or little is a very relative question. The key is whom you compare it with. From the perspective of ordinary common people, anything over a hundred million yuan is already an astronomical figure; but after all, this project is being carried out with the resources of the whole nation, and the country will not build a second one.
Compared with the investment in state-wide projects like the Olympics or the Asian Games? The investment in the Olympics has always been impossible to pin down. Foreign media, counting both infrastructure and environmental measures, came up with 42 billion US dollars. Chinese media expressed disagreement, saying that the direct investment in venues alone may only have been a few billion dollars—but in any case, it was still a considerable order of magnitude.
And then let’s look at our real-estate projects. Entire “new cities” are being invested in and developed one after another. We can search casually to see the corresponding scale of investment, for example: Yueyang investing 50 billion yuan over 8 years to build Dongting New City, CITIC investing 50 billion yuan to build a coastal new city in Shantou, Fuzhou building a super new city with 100 billion yuan, the real-estate firm Zhuoda Group investing 100 billion yuan to build a new city in Heilongjiang, Kaifeng in Henan building a city with 100 billion yuan, and 100 billion yuan of capital creating a top-tier lakeside new city in Changzhou, and so on and so on.
These new cities involve investments of hundreds of billions or even trillions at a time, and not just the nation mobilized to build one single project, but rather “133 out of 144 prefecture-level cities are going to build new cities” (and that was still the wording in 2013).
Then look at the newly emerged new land king: a plot of land in Shanghai’s Jing’an District was auctioned off by a property developer for 11 billion yuan. How big is that plot? — 31,034.1 square meters. What does that mean? A standard football field is 7,140 square meters. So for this piece of land, only a few athletic fields in size, a company can投入 11 billion yuan. Compared this way, is 100 billion yuan really that much?
Of course, whether the money is much or little, someone is bound to say: wouldn’t it be better to use this money for something more meaningful? Mr. Yang’s second argument is that China still has many urgent problems to solve, and building a collider is not the top priority. His fifth argument is similar: over the past few decades high-energy physics has not brought, and in the coming decades will not bring, any “real benefits” to human life.
Director Wang’s response is also very simple: the collider is meaningful, it is urgent, and it brings benefits. Such an answer seems to shift the issue toward objective scientific assessment, but in essence it subjective-izes the issue, because even if one grants that high-energy physics does indeed have benefits, other scientific disciplines and practical sectors can also prove that their work is meaningful, beneficial, and urgent. So who is really more useful, who is more urgent, and who has the authority to judge? These are questions that are destined to become hopelessly entangled.
In fact, regarding this kind of question, NASA’s famous reply in 1970 to the Zambian nun said it extremely well: “If countries were no longer engaged in arms races to develop weapons such as bombers and rockets, but instead competed in the field of space exploration, humanity could avoid much suffering. Such competition could give birth to all kinds of exciting achievements, and the losers would not have to suffer a miserable fate, nor would it produce hatred and new wars.”
The significance of such large-scale projects cannot be judged only by the things directly produced by them; more important is the role of example and inspiration.
While weighing whether something is worth doing, a more basic question is often skipped over, namely: what exactly are we pursuing?
Modern popular value theory often rushes to discuss what is low down without first making clear what is highest. People only know that saving a bad living situation is a good thing, but they do not know what a good life ought really to be like.
Recently the State Administration of Radio and Television issued another ban, calling for the “prohibition of variety shows from lionizing Western lifestyles.” Of course, some overly entertainment-driven lifestyles really are not worth lionizing, but the question is, what kind of lifestyle do we actually want to lionize? Is it perhaps the kind of life lived by the protagonists in those positive-energy, mainstream films represented by anti-Japanese war films, where self-sacrifice and hard struggle are what make a good life? Then the question is: what, after all, were those “revolutionary martyrs” fighting so desperately for? Was it not precisely in the hope that their compatriots and descendants could live good lives?
In my article on the ethics of “the Way of Kings,” I already discussed this: this kind of ethics is dedicated to securing for others the most basic conditions for survival. As long as there are still people in the world who cannot get enough to eat, this ethics can thunderously denounce any form of wealth and glory. Yet it does not teach you how, after you have at least attained basic food and clothing, you should actually live.
Thus, paradoxically at first glance, what evolves out of this thoroughly public-spirited and selfless ethics of rescuing the poor is precisely money worship: because eating one’s fill comes first. “Should scientists and artists not eat? If the problem of eating is not solved, what pursuit can there possibly be? — Of course I quite agree with that point, but what they mean implicitly is that those activities that secure food are the ones of greater value, the primary ones.” Therefore, the most, or the only, meaningful thing is to secure and accumulate those most basic things, those most averaged-out forms of wealth, which in general is money. And all those other pursuits that “cannot be eaten” are meaningless before this world has completely solved the problem of subsistence; merely thinking about them is even sinful…
Of course poor people who cannot get enough to eat are worthy of help, but while doing everything possible to provide them with food, they are also, in a sense, providing us with a value system. The problem, however, is that the reason people who cannot get enough to eat are so miserable and pitiable is not only that they are tormented by hunger, but that they are so tripped up by hunger that they cannot see anything more beautiful than eating and drinking to their fill, cannot see anything more wonderful than merely maintaining bare subsistence.
People eat in order to live; it is not that human life exists in order to eat. “Virtue” means to climb higher; ethics should look upward, not downward.
A particle collider cannot put food in people’s bowls (except for the researchers involved), and its existence is itself an enactment of a kind of meaning.
Meaning is plural. The pursuits of scientists and those of artists are very different, and sometimes even head in opposite directions, but what all these various pursuits have in common is that they are things beyond eating and making money. Pursuit does not mean anything you do before you have eaten your fill; rather, it tells you what you can do after you have eaten your fill. No meaning is measured by money; on the contrary, precisely because without money nothing can be done, money is the lowest thing. Only after relying on it can one speak of pursuing what lies beyond it. You need to make money, but even more you need to know where to spend it once you have it.
An investment of 100 billion yuan to build a new real-estate district is not quite the same as building a collider, because when property developers invest, what they hope for is to earn the money back and make even more money, whereas a collider will probably just burn money without earning it back. But this precisely confirms that the collider represents a higher pursuit than real estate. What is truly meaningful in real-estate development is nothing more than creating an environment in which residents can settle down and thrive better, enabling more residents to pursue the life they want. Any activity is worth doing only in those links where it cannot be measured by averaged-out money.
Is building a collider worth it? I have not taken a definite affirmative position; I simply disagree with some opponents’ way of arguing. The construction of the collider itself provides a yardstick for judging what is worth doing, namely that the exploration of physics and the pursuit of the universe’s mysteries are worthwhile. Of course, others may have different opinions. Some will think that scientists’ pursuits amount to nothing more than raping nature, and that the poetic life of pastoral simplicity is more worthwhile; thus those romantics will not support building a collider. Others may think that scientists pondering away in ivory towers are simply boring, and that it would be better to develop arms and dominate the world; then they too will not support this project. But only protests such as “it cannot be eaten” and “it wastes money” are meaningless.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply