Recently, Mr. Yang Zhenning published an article opposing China’s construction of a super-large collider, turning the matter into a hot topic. The director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Wang Yifang, has already rebutted Mr. Yang’s arguments point by point, so I’ll just make a few offhand comments on what the two of them have said.
Mr. Yang Zhenning is a clear-headed man, and has always tended to think 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 thought that the usual saying that American education encourages creativity while Chinese exam-oriented education is rigid, and so on, was looking at the matter from the standpoint of elite education; but from the perspective of spreading knowledge among ordinary grassroots people, combined with China’s national conditions, Chinese education could be said to have been successful. Although I do not agree with Mr. Yang’s view, I do respect his position.
On this issue of the collider as well, I do not agree with Mr. Yang either, but he does indeed have his reasons. On the other hand, I do not entirely agree with Director Wang’s rebuttal either.
Mr. Yang’s first reason is that colliders cost too much—at least 20 billion US dollars—and may become a bottomless pit. Director Wang points out that the cost can be controlled; without taking inflation into account, the total is roughly 100 billion yuan. In fact, when converted, 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 within 100 billion, he will certainly still think it is too much. Anyway, it is still a matter of the same order of magnitude.
Whether money is a lot or a little is a very relative question. The key is who you compare it with. To small ordinary people, sums in the hundreds of millions are already astronomical, but this project is after all one that is being undertaken with the strength of the whole country; the whole nation is not going to build a second one.
How does it compare with the investment in grand national projects like the Olympics or the Asian Games? The exact investment in the Olympics has always been unclear. Foreign media, counting infrastructure and environmental measures, came up with 42 billion US dollars. Chinese media were unconvinced; perhaps only several billion dollars were directly invested in venues and facilities, but in any case it was still a considerable order of magnitude.
Then look at our real-estate projects. Entire “new towns” are being invested in and developed one after another. We can search at random and look at the corresponding scale of investment, for example: Yueyang investing 50 billion yuan to build Dongting New Town over 8 years, CITIC investing 50 billion yuan to build a coastal new town in Shantou, Fuzhou building a super new town with 100 billion yuan, the real-estate firm Zhuoda Group investing 100 billion yuan to build a new town in Heilongjiang, Kaifeng in Henan building a city with 100 billion yuan, 100 billion in capital creating Changzhou’s top lakeside new town, and so on and so on.
These new-town investments are all on the order of hundreds of billions or trillions, and not just one all-nation project, but “133 of the 144 prefecture-level cities are to build new towns” (and that was still the wording in 2013).
Then look at the newly announced land king: a plot in Shanghai’s Jing’an District was auctioned off to a real-estate company for 11 billion yuan. How big was this plot? — 31,034.1 square meters. What does that mean? A standard football field is 7,140 square meters. So for a piece of land only a few playgrounds in size, one company can invest 11 billion yuan. Compared like this, is 100 billion yuan really that much?
Of course, regardless of whether the money is much or little, someone will always say: wouldn’t it be better to spend it on more meaningful things? Mr. Yang’s second argument is that China still has many problems urgently needing solutions, and building a collider is not an immediate necessity. His fifth argument is similar: high-energy physics in the past few decades has not brought, and in the next few decades will not bring, any “real benefits” to human life.
Director Wang’s reply is also very simple: namely, colliders are meaningful, they are urgent, and they have benefits. Such an answer may seem to shift the issue toward an objective scientific evaluation, but in substance it makes the issue subjective, because even if one grants that high-energy physics really does have benefits, other scientific fields and practical sectors can also prove that their work has meaning, benefits, and urgency as well. So who exactly is more useful, who is more urgent, and who has the right to judge—these are questions that are destined to become hopelessly entangled.
In fact, regarding this sort of question, NASA’s famous 1970 reply to the nun in Zambia put it beautifully: “If countries would cease the arms race to develop bombers, rockets, and other weapons, and instead compete in the field of space exploration, humanity could be spared much suffering. Such competition could give rise to all kinds of exciting achievements; the losers would not have to suffer a tragic fate, and there would be no manufacturing of hatred and new wars.”
The significance of such large-scale projects cannot be judged only by the things they directly produce. More important is the role of example and inspiration.
When assessing whether something is worth it or not, there is a more fundamental question that is often skipped over: what exactly is it that we are pursuing?
Modern fashionable value theory is often in such a hurry to discuss how the lower levels should be handled without first figuring out what the highest thing is like. People only know that saving a bad life situation is a good thing, but they do not know what a good life should actually be like.
Recently the broadcasting authorities issued another ban, saying that “variety shows must be prohibited from glamorizing Western lifestyles.” Of course, certain over-entertained lifestyles really are not worth glamorizing, but the problem is: what kind of lifestyle do we actually hope to glamorize? Could it be that the lifestyle of those protagonists in so-called positive-energy, main-melody films represented by anti-Japanese war films—that is, sacrificing the self, enduring hardship, and fighting desperately—is the good lifestyle? Then the question is, what were those “revolutionary martyrs” desperately fighting and risking their lives for? Wasn’t it precisely in the hope that their compatriots and descendants could live a good life?
In my article on the ethics of “王道,” I already discussed this: such an ethics is committed to helping others win the most basic conditions for survival. So long as there are still people in the world who do not have enough to eat, this ethics can justifiably denounce any form of wealth and glory. Yet it does not tell you how one should live after obtaining at least a basic standard of food and clothing.
Thus, seemingly paradoxically, what derives from this supremely public-spirited, selfless ethics of rescuing the poor is precisely money-worship: because eating one’s fill comes first, “Scientists and artists, don’t they need to eat? If the problem of eating is not solved, what pursuit can there be? — Of course, I quite agree with this point, but what they imply is that those activities that guarantee food are what is more valuable, what is primary.” Therefore the most important, or the only meaningful, thing is to secure and accumulate those most bottom-line things—that is, the most averaged-out wealth, generally speaking money. And all those other pursuits that “cannot be eaten” are meaningless before the world has completely solved the problem of subsistence; even thinking about them is sinful…
Of course, poor people who cannot get enough to eat are worthy of rescue, but while trying every possible way to provide them with food, they also, in fact, provide us with a value orientation. 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 tripped up by hunger to the point where they cannot see anything more beautiful than simply eating and drinking to satiety, cannot see any life more splendid than merely maintaining subsistence.
People eat in order to live, not live in order to eat. “De” means to ascend high; ethics should look upward for its standards, not downward.
A particle collider cannot put food in people’s bowls (except for the researchers involved). Its existence is precisely a demonstration of a kind of meaning.
Meaning is plural. The pursuits of scientists and the pursuits of artists are vastly different, and sometimes even go 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 nothing can be done without money, money is the lowest thing of all, and only after using it as a means can one speak of those things to be pursued beyond it. You need to make money, but you need even more to know where to spend it once you have money.
Both involve an investment of 100 billion yuan, but building 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 get their money back and make even more money, whereas a collider is probably just burning money and not getting it back. But this precisely confirms that a collider is a pursuit higher than real estate. What is truly meaningful in real-estate development activity is nothing more than creating an environment in which residents can better live and work in peace and contentment, allowing more residents to pursue the lives they want. Only those aspects of any activity that cannot be measured by averaged-out money are worth doing.
Is it worth building a collider? I have not taken a positive position; I merely disagree with some opponents’ way of arguing. The construction of a collider itself provides a scale for measuring what is worth it: namely, that exploration in physics and the quest to probe the mysteries of the universe are worth it. Of course, other people may have different opinions. Some may think that the pursuit of scientists is nothing more than raping nature, and that a poetic pastoral life is more worth having; then those romantics will not support building a collider. Still others may think that scientists pondering away in an ivory tower are utterly 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 of the sort “it can’t be eaten” or “it wastes money” are meaningless.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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