درس هایی از آنالیز هزینه-منفعت انرژی و محیط زیست  The probability of discovery

1. Introduction In 2004 a book appeared called “the Probability of God”. It claimed to give a scientific statistical analysis of the deriving the probability for a divine entity and the so-called ultimate truth, it by necessity is based on certain assumptions that cannot be really controlled, so ultimate any such calculation of a probability is not particularly inspiring, or even meaningful. In a similar, but nevertheless more controlled way the probability for a discovery is in many cases not strictly quantifiable, though there are exceptions. We’ll discuss both scenarios below, as these unfold in particle physics – or high energy physics – today. Scientific progress in modern times is only possible thanks to funding by national governments, funding agencies, international institutions such as the European community, and even private funding. Research is typically categorized as application-driven or curiosity-driven. The application-driven research is generally easy to motivate, pointing to the many technology developments that happened in, say, the last 50 years. This is no doubt correct but it is often overlooked that much of the application-driven research is based on our deep knowledge gained by curiosity-driven research. Big examples are quantum mechanics and relativity, which were new directions in our understanding of nature, discovered just over a hundred years ago and now the basis of many of our technological applications. Both application-driven research and curiosity-driven research are now, and will remain in the future, necessary to have new breakthroughs in progress, which will continue to be for the benefit of all of mankind.