Made this comment below but spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible. A few years ago, a bunch of physical philosophers tried to justify this turn of particle physics in general away from experiment, particularly suggesting the search of symmetries and mathematical beauty (I guess) was enough of a justification for the work even though it essentially is contrary to the basic scientific principles of relying on experiment and observation. Now, we're seeing real world consequences of that mistake, billions in resources and potentially decades of man-hours to be devoted to another super-collider.
Honestly, this money could be spent on myriad other projects, not to mention towards fusion research or alternative energies (solar, wind) in general especially in the face of climate change. Again, seeing the failure of the LHC and then deciding you're going to double down is just straight irresponsible. I honestly wonder what member states are thinking when they see CERN contemplate this especially after the LHC failed to find SUSY particles.
This is just another painful reminder of how narrow minded some scientists are and so focused on their own little niche. There are so many larger problems the world is facing today, it's upsetting but not surprising no one at the table even asked the most important questions when making these plans, "is this even necessary?"
Last tidbit, there are next generation acceleration schemes using lasers that could promise much cheaper acceleration of particles on a much smaller scale (centimeters) although the brightness and general beam quality isn't quite there yet. That could be a potential route forward and be much cheaper in the long run, it just would require a) some time and research but more importantly b) the current crop of experimental scientists at CERN might find it not their expertise and so might not get the grants. Again, reiterating the narrow mindedness of scientists these days.
First you complain about the lack of experimentation, then you complain when they perform experiments. It is normal in science to formulate a theory, design an experiment, and then having to discard the theory in view of the experimental results. That's the scientific method, and that's what has happened with SUSY (kind of).
You also claim the goal of new collider is to validate SUSY, but they say is to study the Higgs boson, the one that was discovered using the LHC.
It is also normal that scientists worry about their niche and try to find funding for research in that niche. Else, the only research we would do would be cancer treatments, but that would not be effective in the long run. Huge amounts of money like this one always call people attention, but it is not so much. If you compare the cost of the LHC with the amount spent in defense by the countries involved during the same period, these are peanuts. You will find all kind of reasons to spend this money somewhere else, and some of them may be valid, but fundamental research is still necessary.
The goal of every top-tier collider is new physics, that greater understanding that progresses mankind. What did the previous collider discover? It certainly validated current theories, but did it create anything new? If it did, why do we yet need a new one? If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two. If there is no new physics from the last experiment, why do we think that building a bigger microscope will be any different?
> If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two.
They are doing that, are are doing upgrades to get more use of out of the LHC. The new planned collider is for about a generation from now.
If this goes ahead, it will be starting construction in nearly 20 years from now.
> If there is no new physics from the last experiment, why do we think that building a bigger microscope will be any different?
CERN has a specific remit. They're planning for that remit. If their funding sources do not think the odds justifies the expense, they'll cut funding, but it's not CERNs job to sit back and not come up with plans for what to do next. It's CERNs job to look at what they can do to enable further science within their remit.
They've come up with this as one option and decided to move forward with planning. That does not mean it will happen - if they don't get funding in place it won't, or will be delayed.
In the meantime the shorter term upgrades to the LHC may or may not end up supporting their case for the new collider depending on the results they get.
CERN is very particular about what they go for. They are fully aware of their special status as a transnational research enterprise. They only seek out projects out of the reach of a single country.
> If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two.
The LHC was built between 1998 and 2008, but its design started in the 1980's. Many of the people who worked on the LHC at its early stages have either already retired, or will be expected to retire relatively soon. The FCC is still in its very early stages and similarly long timescales are predicted for its completion. Building and operating a huge, complex machine like this isn't something we can just stop for a generation or two and pick up where we left off. In my view, if we want to maintain the skills required to build these facilities we need to invest in new, large projects now.
1. Science is a low-odds, high-reward process; any given piece of work probably does nothing, but the overall impact is literally everything that happened since the agrarian era
2. Even successful research leads to papers with impenetrable names like “An MgB-Superconducting Shield Prototype for the Future Circular Collider Septum Magnet”, whose value I am not even qualified to comprehend unless someone explained it to me with a YouTube video
3. Because I don’t understand it and I can observe the value of it without understanding it, I’ll trust the physicists doing the experiments when they tell me they want a bigger and more expensive tool for their future experiments
Supercolliders are low-odds science. Other instruments are pretty much certain to generate new science. A hubble replacement would not be low-odds given that hubble itself is still making discoveries. A 23 billion-dollar push for new antibiotics would not be low-odds either. Dollars should be spent where they are most likely to generate the most science. That isn't new supercolliders.
Dollars shouldn't be spend where they are most likely to generate most new science. That is a quick way to find yourself in a dead-end. Imagine we would have ONLY invested in supercolliders after high-energy physics was very fruitful. Many other fields would have been completely starved and we would now be in the (possibly) super collider dead-end while other physics is woefully behind.
Why not evaluate (estimate) the expected value of sample information of the different experiments, and compare the costs of the different experiments to the EVSIs?
Any metric you can imagine is nothing more then a guess. That's why it's research. The researchers guess and tests. Some guesses can be observably better but that's not quantifiable. At least that's what I think.
That's why scientific projects are still judged by panels. It's not like money is thrown at any random project. It must have merit and be judged to actually be able to test a hypothesis.
I disagree, money should be spent were it's most likely to generate new science. But the people spending the money must take into account that we're really bad at putting good odds on where that is.
> If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two. If there is no new physics from the last experiment, why do we think that building a bigger microscope will be any different?
The LHC likely would keep running for a generation, even if this new collider is constructed. The article notes that construction wouldn't begin until 2038. It doesn't say how long construction would take, but my guess is at least a decade (the LHC took a decade to build). So that's 30 years between now and the likely earliest time a new collider would be constructed, or 40 years since the LHC first went operational. Since the new collider would require construction of a new ring, it's possible the LHC would continue to operate while the new one is under construction, collecting more data.
The reason one needs a "bigger microscope" is due how signal to noise typically increases. In a simplified scenario, you're talking about poisson noise (shot noise, counting noise) dominating the error budget. The Signal-to-noise goes as the square root of the number of counts. So in order to double the S/N, you need to quadruple the number of events. In the case of a particle accelerator, that means doubling the amount of time.
The proposed collider would be 100 TeV, so ~6x more powerful than the LHC. All else being equal, the LHC could do some of the same experiments, but it would take it 36x longer to do them to the same statistical significance. Put another way, 1 year of operation of this proposed collider could achieve results it would take 36 years of the LHC to build up. 4 years of the new collider (doubling the signal to noise over the 1 year) would require 144 years (4 * 36) of the LHC.
But particle physics isn't a slow ramp-up in energy. There are collisions that can only be accessed once you reach particular energy thresholds. Unfortunately my understanding is that there aren't predicted "interesting" features above the LHC's energy range which are even remotely accessible in the distant future. So if you want to build a facility solely to find things that theories predict, this new collider may not get you much. But science is often advanced by experiments which find unexpected things, and you don't find those unless you look.
Overall I think the argument "let the LHC run for 40 years instead" is not a compelling one because of how shot noise works. The "maybe we'll find something new!" argument for a new collider is high-risk / high-reward, so I'm not sure how compelling I personally find it.
The James Webb Space Telescope is an interesting case. It has gone hugely over budget. The original budget was $1.6 billion and is now around $10 billion. In 2010, the journal Nature called it "The telescope that ate astronomy" because its expanding budget was stopping other important astronomy projects. [1]
The JWST is also hugely behind schedule, to the point that XKCD mocks it [2]. Originally scheduled for 2007, the launch date repeatedly slipped. The latest date, 2021, is now in doubt.
I think there's a big risk that this CERN supercollider would have the same cost and schedule risks.
What a strange comparison. Why would you compare it to a space telescope when you could compare it to another supercollider, operated by the same organisation?
The Large Hadron Collider went over budget by about double, which is bad but frankly for these sorts of cutting edge systems hardly unprecedented. Some of that was ironically due to budget cuts causing delays which in the long term increased costs.
> Some of that was ironically due to budget cuts causing delays which in the long term increased costs.
If you want a prime reason things go over budget this is the prime one, not fully funding a project in order to save money. If you look at well executed projects they spend years setting up and then execute as fast as possible.
(1) higgs was confirmed, proven rather than discovered. It wasnt new physics.
(2) Hubble is dieing. It will not last forever but still makes new discoveries, new science, regularly. A replacement is needed. And the JWST is a totally different device, not just bigger. We probably need both the JWST and a new Hubble.
The point is more that we can do experiments where we expect to observe interesting things or experiments to validate existing theories. If you have an experiment to validate an existing theory, it doesn't really make sense to repeat the experiment on a much large scale unless you anticipate actually being part of the first category (new observation, no theory).
The problem with colliders is that the next energy thresholds where we expect to observe unexplained phenomena are a couple orders of magnitude greater than the proposed collider. So we could really only confirm existing theories unless something major is hiding in the energy gap. This seems unlikely.
Critics want to put the money towards avenues where we're likely to observe new things instead of confirming validated theories.
And no, the higgs was a theory, now proven right (maybe you mean that by 'new physics'?)
Sorry but your view on the world is just depressing, its like we need 'new science' 'new physics' whatever that means, but building the experiment to proof a theory is right, is too expensive?
And no the JWST is a space telescope NOT something completely different from hubble, it's a telescope.
JWST covers different wavelengths than Hubble, which is a meaningful difference as far as telescopes go. The proposed LUVOIR or HABEX telescopes would be the successors to Hubble.
I'm not the OP, but the thing that's depressing to me is putting so many of our resources into basically a repeat of what was already done, but slightly bigger and with no expectation of finding anything significant. I mean, are we out of ideas?
> The goal of every top-tier collider is new physics
I would argue that the goal of a top-tier collider is to go to new energy ranges, plain and simple. Absence of new phenomena is gained knowledge, albeit a bit boring, but still.
"spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible. A few years ago, a bunch of physical philosophers tried to justify this turn of particle physics in general away from experiment"
The proposed collider is an experiment. It might incidentally find support for SUSY (unlikely) but its purpose would be to produce precision data about high energy physics, whatever that physics is.
As others have noted, the Engadget article is also misleading, since what has been approved is not a collider, just a design study.
Not quite. The experiment has already been done, it was called the LHC. It found no evidence for SUSY, but instead of re-evaluating SUSY since it's needed for all modern particle phenomology as well as many unification theories, the argument is to "keep looking." Fine, keep looking, if you want, but it certainly won't be with a larger collider, especially since the last search failed. That failure demands a re-assessment of resource allocation.
Finally, another comment said the LHC was to study the higgs. I'm not sure about that since the higgs was already found before, it just wasn't at the significance level particle physicists like. Most of the people I talked who worked on the LHC told me the main thing behind the LHC was to see SUSY or general new physics beyond the SM.
> Fine, keep looking, if you want, but it certainly won't be with a larger collider, especially since the last search failed.
Just out of interest, why do you believe this to be true? There existed particle colliders before the LHC, none were able to experimentally verify the Higgs.
You are fixating on SUSY, not CERN. A new collider is needed to find out what's beyond the Standard Model, whether it's SUSY or something else entirely.
Your statement that "it certainly won't be with a larger collider, especially since the last search failed" frankly makes no sense, and the claim that "the higgs was already found before" is incorrect.
This is mostly true though: "the main thing behind the LHC was to see SUSY or general new physics beyond the SM" (I say "mostly" because the energy range was chosen to ensure that either the Higgs or something else would be found; if it existed, it had to be in that range, and if not, something else had to do its job).
And that statement remains true about the next collider. It will look for "SUSY or general new physics beyond the SM".
> Again, seeing the failure of the LHC and then deciding you're going to double down is just straight irresponsible.
Not to take away from your larger point, but describing the LHC as a failure may be wording it a little bit too strongly. The fact that it confirmed the Higgs Boson seems like a reasonably important experimental result.
> Honestly, this money could be spent on myriad other projects,
I used to feel the same way about The Big Dig, or many other Big projects. At the end of the day, they're all pork. It just depends whether you like this particular kind of pork. Pork, however, will always be with us. And given the choice of a pork-free society or a pork-laden society, I think the latter is more fair and easier to exist in.
Would you rather the Fed/ECB print money to "give" to the investor class, or would you rather the government borrow money to build stuff (even if not built in the most efficient manner).
> Made this comment below but spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible
I am in the same boat as you, more precisely I was, especially after reading guys like Jacques Ellul who had written against this particular project since back in the '80s.
But then I started thinking that keeping that many smart and motivated people busy working on stuff that will not be as societally disruptive as the work of many past great scientists is not the worst thing in the world, so I personally see those billions of euros as an acceptable opportunity cost that gives us the chance not to be the direct contemporaries of a nuclear weapons race like back in the '60s or the early '80s (because back then the "best" way to keep those scientists busy was to ask them to build bigger nuclear bombs and bigger rockets).
Incidentally I see the anti-competitive stance of the FAANG companies when it comes to their employees in the same vein. Better for a very smart engineer to spend his/her life doing menial work inside one of those companies than for him/her to build the next AI startup which in the wrong hands will not be good for society as a whole. And that type of technology always ends up in the "wrong" hands.
Spending tens of billions of dollars to keep scientists distracted so they might not potentially work on damaging projects is beyond absurd. For a start, I don't even think there's consensus that the Manhattan project wasn't beneficial as a whole, given the relative peace we've had since the second world war. What you said completely undermines a community that has undoubtedly advanced society more than any other.
> that has undoubtedly advanced society more than any other.
From here [1]
> Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm,[1] and his decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol,[2] is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in a large-scale nuclear war.
There's a whole list of similar incidents (and I'm pretty sure not all of them have been officially reported). Personally I care more about the feelings of communities that don't bring us one button-push away from annihilating us as a species.
You know "spending" is not the correct expression, that money flows directly back into the economy (and supports thousand other scientific fields, like material science, sensor technology and often goes to small highly specialized corporations). And if you compare the money that flows into the military with ZERO gain for the World...those 23B are a water drop on a hot stone.
Don't apply the american model of funding that has resulted in failed colliders to how CERN is funded. CERN manages it's own money, that's the only reason why it managed to build LHC. Also not finding any evidence supporting a theory that up to that point consumed quite a lot of mental power in the physics world is a very important result on it's own.
CERN is also an important tool politically that helps keeping EU scientists in the EU. I see you are mentioning a lot of other random fields that are fashionable solutions to other problems. Besides the fact that it's the typical whataboutism response that anyone interested in a different field tends to give when a project gets funding, it completely misses how the CERN model works. CERN does particle research. If a member state doesn't like how it's funds are allocated they can choose to withdraw support and use them elsewhere. It's not CERN's job to increase solar panel efficiency.
This is $46 each for the population of the EU. You aren't going to solve climate change for the price of a tank of gas for everyone or it would be solved by now.
Search of symmetries and mathematical beauty can't 'justify' any theory in physics. The whole movement of justificationism of knowledge was dislodged after Popper's attack.
Experiments that seek anomalies are very important. Experiments that can discover new phenomena are important. Yes, it makes pragmatic sense to NOT invest $23B; and do something else.
In 1921 the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein won a Nobel, was blue-sky research with no practical applications. Fast forward a few decades and it was used as the basis for making laser: you know, those things that all modern communication uses to transfer information over long distances.
While it is up to debate how much to spend on "blue-sky research", cutting off funding to 'basic science' is rather short-sited as we cut off future 'practical' developments that can improve our lives if we don't have the foundations of the basics to build on.
photoelectric effect in 1921 was definitely not blue-sky research with no practical applications; it was one of the core problems in physics at the time.
photomultiplier tubes. At the time the effect was discovered, PE was recognized experimentally (and exploited), but unexplained, and once it was, development of PMTs (critical to a wide range of practical technologies) was greatly sped up. This led to high quality television cameras not long after...
Well, that's a bit of a strawman. There are very few people who think we shouldn't spend any money on blue sky research. It's more of a question of how much we should spend, which blue sky research we should fund, and how those projects are set up. There are neuroscientists who are critical of the Human Brain Project, not because they're against funding of neuroscience in general, but because they don't think this particular project isn't well designed. There are people that are supportive of a lot of the work NASA does, but don't think human space flight specifically is a good use of their budget.
> It could be a hard sell, especially as the new collider wouldn’t have as clear a goal as the LHC did. However, particle physics and the Standard Model are at a place where the application of science is needed to validate theories.
I mean I understand the need to keep pushing the boundaries of fundamental physics, but how long do you justify such spending on a single project? That same money could possibly be pumped into more immediately useful "hard" applied problems like fusion reactors, clean energy, propulsion systems or pretty much any problem on the technology horizon that won't be funded by private capital.
While it is one project it also is an umbrella to fund a large number of smaller projects. Whole institutes were funded and build in part to develop detector components for the LHC. A project like this gives everyone a common goal and pushes technology development in sectors that are critical to Europe's high tech economy. It also has consequences for the IT sector in Europe. Before cloud companies had to deal with PetaBytes of data, scientists at CERN and elsewhere developed techniques for filtering, storing and analysing this data with sophisticated statistical tools (and machine learning). You can easily scale your analysis run to thousands of machines all over the world and transparently get access to the huge experiment datastore.
There is no other scientific field in Europe that has developed a similar level of sophistication and scale. The initial idea behind the Human Brain Project was to build a similar infrastructure for Neuroscience research. But instead of the cooperation in Particle Physics it resulted in fierce opposition, out of fear that funding would be shifted away from national funding agencies and independent researchers and doubts over the ambitious goals of the project. If you think about it a project like CERN, that successfully contributed to understanding of the fundamental forces of nature is in some ways much more ambitious than a centralised program to understand the Human brain.
But the latter got badly derailed multiple times simply because the participants did not have the single minded will, focus and consensus that the Particle Physics community has been able to maintain for almost 70 years now.
> it also is an umbrella to fund a large number of smaller projects
Then justify the spending on those merits. Spending for the sake of spending isn’t a great argument.
Why is a new supercollider a better use of resources than, say, a new telescope? Or a suite of gravitational wave or neutrino detectors? A host of fusion research reactors?
The opportunity cost of spending shouldn’t be ignored just because it isn’t entirely useless.
It's not either or. E.g. ITER cost more than LHC, and the successor to ITER is in the works with construction expected to start years before this new collider would.
$23bn is a lot of money, but it also is a pittance when you're planning a project that will take ~30 years to be operational. E.g. for comparison the EU is planning ~$100bn for its science programs for the next 7 years; on top of that all the member states have their own projects, and non-EU European states have their own science funding.
As such, we're talking low single digits percent of overall European science funding, but even so CERN may not be able to fund $23bn from their own funding alone, and may seek out international sources of funding for this project.
It's really not low single digit. Firstly it's a proposal for ~€100bn (not ~$100bn), the current program is ~€80bn. Secondly if you look at the spending[1] more than 50% of it by any reasonable measure is "soft" science funding (such as reinvesting in high-tech industry).
I'm happy CERN is doing it's thing, but let's not hide the ball here, any way you look at it it's a huge portion of the EU's fundamental science research budget.
> Firstly it's a proposal for ~€100bn (not ~$100bn), the current program is ~€80bn.
€100bn is $113bn; ~€80bn is $90bn.
$100bn is close enough.
> It's really not low single digit.
EU budget != European science funding. The $100bn number was used to illustrate that the amount is not that huge, with the addition that "on top of that all the member states have their own projects, and non-EU European states have their own science funding."
As I pointed out elsewhere, e.g. Norway, which is one of the 23 CERN members but not an EU member, has an annual R&D budget of $6bn. Over the roughly 30 year period of this project, that's $180bn.
Even if you assume half of that is what you consider "soft" funding (quite likely), Norway alone could fund all of CERNand this new collider (of course that would devastate Norway's other science programs).
As it stands, Norway's contribution to CERN is about $30m/year, which adds up to the highest per capita contribution of any CERN member. The UK for example pays less than half as much per capita.
It is overall likely (I haven't checked) that CERN adds up to less than a single percent of the science budgets of its member states alone. The CERN member states make up less than half of European countries (though most of the biggest and richest), so it's fairly safe to assume it takes up less than a percent of overall European science funding.
> [...]it's fairly safe to assume it takes up less than a percent of overall European science funding.
No it's not. We're in a thread where the cost of the LHC and its successors is being contrasted against funding for other comparable fundamental research, such as gravitational wave or neutrino detectors etc. Or other projects anyone might reasonably classify as fundamental research.
You're conflating that with R&D budgets. Let's take your example of Norway. 50% of its R&D budget is goes to industry, and 50% of that to the service industry. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that nobody in Norway's service industry is going to be getting a Nobel any time soon.
Due to how state subsidies are regulated in the EU's single market (and Norway, Iceland etc. count here too, they're in it through the EEA) R&D has become a backdoor for state subsidies. A supermarket paying a consultant to improve their billing system can be doing "research" and get a tax write-off or a state grant.
So you really shouldn't assume that you can conflate R&D in the EU's twisted definition with what is commonly understood to be R&D.
Now, back to Norway's numbers. In [1] you can see that around 20% of that $6bn goes to institutes, and around page 20 or so in [2] you can see where all this money goes.
Without going into a lot of detail I think it's fair to say the overall budget is mostly irrelevant to what we're discussing here. I'll let the fact that as [2] shows the industrial sector gets 50% of the funding but produces 2% of the scientific publications speak for itself.
Once you tease all this apart you'll find that by any sane definition the LHC and its successor project eat up a huge amount of the money that's spend on fundamental research of the sort that might yield a Nobel price any other measure you might use as a proxy for a fundamental new discovery in science.
And of course even the LHC/FCC blurs the line between the two. If CERN could spend that same money on more whiteboards and chalk for physicists and get the same results it would never be funded. The real purpose of the project includes being a subsidy for Europe's high-tech industries.
Once you peel back the curtains on how any of these projects are run you'll find that member states that kick in some % of funding expect and mandate that approximately that % works its way back to them in one way or another. In "The Large Hadron Collider: A Marvel of Technology" by Lyndon R. Evans it's mentioned that the initial construction plan for the LHC was rejected by member states since it didn't do a good enough job of spreading the pork around.
Because sometimes it is better to keep a large number of people occupied with one specific goal instead of trying to convince them to do something else. This ultimately boils down to people, most of them are very smart and capable and could do any number of other things, but basically want to work on fundamental particle physics. You couldn't easily convince them to build a telescope instead (a totally different set of people finds that fascinating) or any of the other things you listed. Besides there are (smaller) collaborations that work on all of these other things you mentioned as well.
Furthermore there is good motivation to keep nuclear / particle physics research as centrally organised as possible because the people working on it would be equally capable of producing nuclear weapons. For example a good number of the people working with CERN in France sit right across the Institute that developed their nuclear weapons.
I dont think the idea is to keep these particle physicists occupied. I think the idea is to fund other underfunded areas of physics while the particle physicists keep playing with the LHC.
> That same money could possibly be pumped into more immediately useful "hard" applied problems like fusion reactors
Interesting, I just checked the number for ITER (i.e: Europe's main fusion project), the project has been estimated at around €20-30 billion (with some pessimistic estimates from the US at around €60 billion for the completion of the reactor). And that's considered a VERY HIGH cost and has been the main concern from participating countries. But somehow $23 billion for a new collider have been approved?
Edit: correction, $23 billion haven't been approved, the plans for a potential collider, estimated at $23 billion, have been approved.
Think of CERN more as a cultural endeavor. It's the big, permanent, multigenerational physicists jamboree. The big colliders are not the goal, they are merely the foundation. The meat is in the detectors and experiments that are attached and that would not be possible elsewhere. Sure, the flagship experiments are also important in their own right, but their function as a rallying point, as a halo product for everything else that is happening there is a big reason why they should be funded.
A reactor project is a much less colorful affair, focused on a single deliverable. More contractors, less postgrads. There should be money for both.
ITER is just a demonstration system, it will hopefully produce a modest energy surplus. As just one step towards an actual useful fusion energy source, Its a proof of concept and it's cost need to be considered in the context of the whole endeavour.
The new collider will be a fully functional 'production' system that we fully expect to probe new physics, and test specific scenarios that will require it's particular capabilities. It's an end product and the latest in a highly successful, proven series of systems. By itself that doesn't make it worthwhile, but I think a high cost for a final system is a different beast from a high cost from a test project.
ITER's successor, DEMO is in planning, with a similar planned timeframe as this new collider... If we wanted to assign them to "generations", ITER should be compared against LHC.
ITER is considered very expensive exactly because nobody wants to spend all their money on one type of project, but in fact are concerned about ensuring their science funding is well rounded.
In an ideal world, both happens at the same time. Applied physics require fundamental research.
It's impossible to say what will come out of it, but most of today's technologies comes from research that allowed us to understand our environment.
Fundamental research takes time, maybe this project will allow future generations to solve problems they are facing.
But it puts things into perspective. Humanity blows crazy amounts of money on war, entertainment, advertising and the financial industry, within a system where something like two dozen individuals can (collectively) amass trillions of dollars of personal wealth. But $20 billion for fundamental science, spread out among 23 comparatively wealthy nations is too much?
To expand on your point to illustrate how relatively little this is:
Norway alone spends about $6bn on research and development a year for a population of ~5m people... This project will take ~30 years to complete. Norway alone could fund it.
But there's as you say 23 members (and more associate members), and as a CERN member, Norway contributes ~$30m/year to CERN. That's 0.5% of the R&D budget, or about $6/year per person.
This is the highest per capita amount of any CERN member, since funding is determined based on GDP. E.g. the UK pays less than half as much per capita as Norway. As such, it's reasonable to assume that for most members of CERN, funding to CERN takes up less than a percent of their R&D budgets.
It is likely member states would have to pay more for this, but amortized over the project period, we're talking at most double even without an international (beyond the member states) consortium.
And of course it's not only the 23 member states that benefits from this. Overall in terms of worldwide science funding, CERN is a rounding error.
That isn't relevant. CERN isn't a US government project and the US doesn't provide funding. The cumulative budgets of the EDA member states €223 billion in 2018[1].
> CERN isn't a US government project and the US doesn't provide funding.
That's news to US taxpayers, which have provided money to CERN projects for decades, including LHC. Half a billion dollars for LHC was considered a lot of money back in 1997 (when US GDP was ~37% the size it was in 2019).
2008: "On Monday, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation announced that the United States has completed - on budget and ahead of the September 30, 2008 milestone - its contribution to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Under its agreement with CERN, the U.S. contributed $531 million of accelerator components and particle detectors for the LHC."
The US's contributions to CERN are equipment and services rather than money, but indeed they are a big contributor. They are certainly the largest participating country in the LHC by number of scientists.
Protontherapy alone is enough justification in my opinion. Add the many kinds of detector offshoots that find their way to industry. The web itself, if you wanna go back a bit further. Aren't those worth it you think?
How is proton therapy a justification? The protons in PT have energies six orders of magnitude below that of this proposed FCC. Are you saying that the historical precedent of PT means FCC will also have that sort of spinoff? That's not a legitimate argument.
The top energy of the accelerator might not be a good judge of how practical its technology will turn out to be. The maximum center-of-mass energy of CLIC is 3 TeV [1], far in excess of what would currently be considered practical. Nevertheless the technology developed for CLIC is now being looked at for providing very high-energy electron beams for cancer therapy [2]. Making something like the FCC isn't just a matter of making a bigger copy of the LHC, it has its own specific challenges [3,4].
Accelerator physics would have been unlikely to have progressed as far as it has without HEP. Beam line components for cyclo-/synchrotrons up to proton therapeutic energies are not seen in non HEP facilities (material physics).
FCC of course will not produce spinoffs that have already spun off, but what exactly will spin off we obviously can't predict very precisely.
I think you're engaging in a bit of cargo cult thinking here. FCC is analogous to early HEP, but it's an error to think that analogy implies similar outcomes. The sheer scale of FCC argues against similar sorts of direct spinoff. And indirect spinoffs are a poor justification for anything -- they can come from anything, after all, so provide no justification for a specific approach.
I think you need to distinguish between people complaining about CERN in general and people complaining about funding a new large hadron collider. The use of CERN and other scientific communities is well-known and, I think, widely acknowledged.
I'm surprised it got through. $23B is a lot of money, and it will cost A LOT more when you start adding up the operational costs. In comparison, the space shuttle was $1.5B per launch "amortized" over 135 launches.
One of the effects of the Space Shuttle is that it hogged the budget of NASA (around 30%). Really worthwhile exploration and other space science programs got less funding because the Shuttle program was so big in cost.
Is the FCC going to do the same for Physics? There's an opportunity cost here that isn't getting addressed.
You should problably note that this collider is first planned to begin building around 30 years after the LHC was in put into operation. And it will probably take longer to build as well so put around 10 more years on that and you have 40 years after the LHC was put into operation.
It didn't get through yet though, the CERN council approved of a feasibility study for this particular idea after considering and rejecting several other ideas.
I don't really get what the FCC has to do with this?
Honest question, what are some engineering spin-offs that could come out of this? I'm asking because I'm reminded of a Peter Thiel interview where it's mentioned that, despite changing our view of the universe, no "real world" applications came out of the quark model discovered in the 1960s.
This is different from a project like ITER, which is also hugely expensive but could be a game changer.
Here's a concrete example. Some of CERN detector technology has been spun-off as Quantum Detectors [https://quantumdetectors.com/], which makes detectors for electron microscopy, x-ray scattering , and neutron detection I think.
I've personally beta-tested their MerlinEM and it's pretty damn cool. It's very different from other technologies that already exist (e.g. Gatan detectors). You can read out images at extremely fast rates (compared to traditional electron microscopy detectors anyway). I'm guessing that this comes from the need for CERN to read-out detectors fully for every collision. Who would have known that this would have been useful for unrelated ultrafast electron scattering experiments?
Understandably if you build a 15B$ machine, your engineers will come up with some clever stuff. The tech you mention is likewise tech that was developed to build the detector. I think he means to ask about actual physics we learned doing LHC experiments, that actually have a tangible real world application.
Ultimately the end goal is a grand unified theory of everything, all the forces and how they work together.
Maxwell's equations were completely theoretical (read: useless) and ahead of their time - but are fundamental to the invention of radio. Foundational research creates opportunity, it cant really be targeted.
For something like particle research, the fallout (pun not intended!) will take their time to shape anything our engineering cap availity can take advantage of.
Go on and look at it. Cross off composite particles like Antihelium-4 and antihydrogen, just look for the timeline of newly verified particles by decade. Note that each was predicted far in advance of the actual verification. (As a side question, ask "What newly predicted fundamental particles are we attempting to verify the existence of here?" You will largely hear crickets.)
Now, examine each particle and ask if we use them in industry. We have had forty-five years for the tau lepton, just as an example. We're not using it. We're not going to use it.
I majored in physics. I say this not by way of lending authority to my argument, but to highlight that I "ought" to be one of the very people slavering for more high-energy physics. But I am not. I just do not think we are going to get more interesting physics out of slamming particles together at ever nearer approaches to c.
We might get some interesting engineering out of it, but we can get that by doing other things that have more application. We cannot spend a dollar twice; let's pursue multiple approaches to fusion. Or, if one is of a pure research bent, we ought to be looking for more clever ways to break our known models, rather than just scaling our current methods up into Bigger Baryon Bashers.
Isn't the best way to try to see if the Standard Model breaks is by pumping more energy into it? (And watching for the decay channel anomalies and whatnot?)
No, not really. Diminishing returns. I've pointed it out elsewhere, but there's no stopping point for that approach. Make an accelerator that goes around the world. Dismantle the Solar system to make an even larger accelerator. Continue onward and use self-replicating probes to slowly convert, over millions of years, the Milky Way into another accelerator ring. Where do you stop? You can always do more until you paperclip replicator the observable universe into one big accelerator.
Like I said, I advocate for looking for more clever ways to look for new physics, rather than bigger ways. And you must accept the concept that at some point we may have discovered all fundamental particles that can be found in the Big Baryon Bashers and that all accelerators after that are completely wasted effort, but we'd never know that, because we would say, "Well, we didn't find anything there. Gotta build a bigger one!"
Well, given that the world wide web was developed at CERN and they have driven a lot of big-data topics in the past I would say that the collateral developments are non-negligible.
In the software field, CERN and particle physics in general, have driven quite some open source projects (both scientific and general ones).
You're not going to want to hear this but I think deep down a lot of these scientists who are so desperate for physics beyond the standard model, theoretical and experimental particle physicists don't view fusion or plasma science as a hard science as is their search for new physics.
Right, others have mentioned the WWW. But it doesn't look obvious to me how the existence of a high energy physics research facility was a necessary precondition for the development of the web. The idea of hypertext had already been floating around for some time (SGML, Xanadu, etc).
I was curious about things more directly related to the actual research done at CERN.
This is kind of a bullshit answer, but basic atom level understanding and experimentation leads to atomic bomb level outcomes. Now imagine you understand a few levels deeper. Do you think these types of engineering spin-offs are going to be widely known, or instead would they be kept very guarded?
I'd guess Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder (herself a physicist, and a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) must be pretty annoyed, to put it politely. She posits that a lot of current physicists are working with outdated notions of "beauty":
(quote)
But if it’s clear that putting forward new hypotheses just because they are beautiful doesn’t mean they’re likely to be right, then why do theorists in these fields focus so much on beauty? Worse, why do they continue to focus on the same type of beauty, even though that method has demonstrably not worked for 40 years?
... So I have historical evidence, math, and data. In my book I lay out these points and tell the reader what conclusion I have drawn: Beauty is not a good guide to theory-development.
I then explain that this widespread use of scientifically questionable but productive methodology is symptomatic to the current organization of academic research, and a problem that’s not confined to physics.
(/quote)
---
I'd also recommend listening to the EconTalk podcast[2] where Hossenfelder was a guest.
---
PS: I'm not judging this decision of funding, not least because I'm no where near qualified :-). I like what CERN does in general (and I sometimes interact with one of their Cloud Infrastructure teams.)
Oh come on, every second sentence she writes outside of a book mentions her books. Do you really have to quote /that/ part.
I am a Prof. for Nuclear Physics, so maybe HEP-adjacent and biased. I don't think I will ever get much use of LHC/FCC myself (EIC will do that for the stuff I'm doing), but I'm happy if they will build it. It's a fallacy to believe that this money takes away from other research. There would be enough money to do all possible research if one really wants to. Just a point to consider: A lot of money for the military is essential to prop up the economy. The same, maybe more effectively, is true for research, with the added benefit that you educate people, and maybe find some cool new stuff.
Sorry, I didn't meant to quote "that" part (by that I take it that you're referring to the "beautiful theory" aspect — edit: I think you were referring to the mention about her book) to provoke. I just wanted to briefly mention Hossenfelder's position as I haven't seen it mentioned when I saw the thread.
And yeah, this might be a "piddling" amount compared to the military spending.
On the whole, we're in agreement; as the 'PS' in my first comment hints, I'm of course all for anything that instills scientific curiosity in the broader public, while discovering new stuff or carefully sussing out bogus hypotheses.
No offense taken! If anything, I'm annoyed by her, not by you quoting her.
I meant the "in my book" part. But thinking about it, it's important to give the context: she is trying to sell a book, and why I don't want to speculate whether it's her primary motivation, it is /one/ motivation, otherwise she wouldn't mention it all the time.
I know her book, and i think quantum theory is NOT beautiful nor is the string/M-Theory beautiful, she's for sure is partially right because everyone want's to find a Einstein equation, but she also has a big blind spot for the dirty stuff that is the quantum-theory.
> This is why they like Dark mater, dark energy, many worlds. Spooky action at a distance, string theory.
You are mixing apples and oranges.
-Dark matter: Observed phenomena, unexplained yet. Understanding of it is so little that mathematical beauty is a secondary concern.
-Dark energy: Observed phenomena, multiple conflicting explanations with huge calculation mismatch. Einstein already said dips on this with his cosmological constant.
-Many worlds: Unobserved and lacks a definitive consensus of what it could look like.
-Spooky action at a distance (entanglement): Observed and understood with incredible accuracy. Remaining questions are more philosophical than scientific unless we understand other not yet solved problems.
-String theory: This is an umbrella term for multiple theories, finally unified (kinda) under M-theory. Whether they are true or not doesn't change the fact that thinking about them has improved mathematics itself immensely. Leonard Susskind says string theory has been the best "calculator" ever invented to understand complex geometry spacetime "might" have.
When the time we understand how silly we were with our guesses comes and these theories become obsolete, it still will not prove that thinking about them were a useless enterprise.
Actually, the Standard Model is NOT considered to be "beautiful". What is considered to be beautiful are extensions that include supersymmetry for which no experimental evidence exist but which have been used as justification for building larger colliders.
Did you consider that it was an honest mistake? I was not trying to "inflate" her title, nor was I trying to cite her as an authority. I merely tried to state her position as a 'contrarian' voice.
I mean it's obviously all about funding the right projects isn't it? Going to an obviously hyperbolic extreme for the sake of the argument, say that the EU invested billions in determining if the moon is really made of cheese then that's obviously a waste of money even if it is a scientific investment.
There's a non negligible amount of people, even those who have worked at CERN previously, saying that it just doesn't make sense to put more investment into a new supercollider which might just show that there's an energy desert of particles in the regime it's testing.
You're also falling prey to the fallacy that HN acts as a single entity, in reality everyone here has different opinions and can't just be all lumped in one bucket saying HN thinks this or that. It's obviously going to seem contradictory if you view it as if it's a single person
==I mean it's obviously all about funding the right projects isn't it?==
So is everything in life, but that doesn't help us actually determine which are the "right projects".
==Going to an obviously hyperbolic extreme for the sake of the argument, say that the EU invested billions in determining if the moon is really made of cheese then that's obviously a waste of money even if it is a scientific investment.==
That you have to go to such a ridiculous argument seems to say something about your stance. What would we learn if we discovered the moon was made of cheese? Why would it matter? What is the scientific impact of a cheese moon? Without those answers it isn't really a scientific investment.
==There's a non negligible amount of people, even those who have worked at CERN previously, saying that it just doesn't make sense to put more investment into a new supercollider which might just show that there's an energy desert of particles in the regime it's testing.==
And a non-negligible amount of people, even those who currently work at CERN, think it is worthwhile. We could play this game all day (which is my entire point). If the test fails, we still get to learn something new. A foundation of the scientific method.
==You're also falling prey to the fallacy that HN acts as a single entity, in reality everyone here has different opinions and can't just be all lumped in one bucket saying HN thinks this or that. It's obviously going to seem contradictory if you view it as if it's a single person==
You seem to be falling prey to the fallacy that all people who worked at CERN act as a single entity. In reality, people who have worked at CERN have different opinions. Similarly, I've seen many posts about how HN is a hive mind. I guess that is just when it suits the narrative.
Well, crowds don't have opinions. People do. There in no hypocrisy when a group disagrees with itself - it is just people disagreeing with other people.
Crowds, of people, absolutely have opinions. It's the entire foundation of politics, business, and entertainment. What is a political party platform other than a series of opinions?
Well, _people_ have opinions, and therefore a group _contains_ opinions, but a group itself is incapable of thought - and therefore of forming opinions itself. A political party, like any other group, is simply a big pile of individuals who happen to fly the same flag. Disagreement between them is not hypocrisy of the group.
Man is not the member of one group only and does not appear on the scene of human affairs solely in the role of a member
of one definitive group. In speaking of social groups it must be remembered that the members of one group are at the same
time members of other groups. The conflict of groups is not a conflict between neatly integrated herds of men.
It is a conflict between various concerns in the minds of individuals.
Ludwig von Mises - Theory and History
most of the comments are about the cost-to-deliverable tradeoff, which is pretty high. But we have to consider that the new particle accellerator is not the only thing that will be created. An enormous amount of infrastructure will have to be developed and researched, including new hardware to handle all the events, new detector hardware, magnets, etc. All of these are pretty usable outside of a particle detector or even science environments, because many of the hard parts are engineering problems. I think the "useless" part of this 23B investment is far smaller than we think.
For evidence of that look at the past, two projects that immediately come to my mind as being pushed by CERN: HTTP and KiCad. But there are surely some more.
This article and the title (and subject) seems invite uninformed speculation. Some people who are pro-particle-research will point out that you never know what is there till you look. Others will point out CERN has not achieved much with the LHC yet and that this research is highly speculative.
I have 2 questions:
Can anyone make a good case why this is necessary? The only experiment listed is Higgs Dark matter work. But that seems speculative and also is already being done at ATLAS.
If this is not speculative, is it still a good use of money compared to spending the same cash on (say) genetics or AI or nano materials, all of which seem to be areas both in need of funding and with high potential for break throughs?
This isn't starting tomorrow. This is going to take 2-3 decades, starting with a design study.
So part of the point here is future-proofing. Upgrades to LHC are due to take place. We don't know what the outcome of experiments after those upgrades will be. We don't know where other research will get us to over the next decade or two.
If we want a new collider in place 3 decades from now then it is time to start planning, so that if we find out a decade from now it is essential for future progress we've got a decade less to wait.
It's not a given this will be built - we have at least decade and a half to decide whether to put down the full amount. But that is not a justification for not spending a tiny fraction of the cost to take the project forward.
I take you're point, but this is all still entirely speculative as far as I can tell. Do we need it now? No but we might in 30 years! Or we might not. And there is no good reason to think we will.
Particle physics has felt very tapped out for a while. And we still have the LHC and LHC upgrades to answer the few questions left Remember.
It may be entirely speculative (I don't know), but that is CERNs leaderships job - if they don't plan ahead and spend small amounts on design studies now and it turns out new hardware is needed, and they need to start a project from scratch ten years down the line, then that's potentially 10k+ people (CERN currently has 2.5k on staff, of which a lot are not scientists, and ~12k external "users") having their experiments delayed for 10 years. Of course not all experiments would be affected.
CERNs yearly normal budget is ~$1.2bn. Spending a few million on design studies and planning now is a pittance as risk mitigation against delaying future experiments.
Once there's a need to commit serious cash, then these questions needs to be answered.
Sorry, I misunderstood your previous comment. I'm totally fine with them designing it and making the case for it. Actually having a good justification is a long way off imho. But a few mil for feasibility and a few more to work out what it could do is a smart exercise.
I guess this might be a stupid question, but how does the size of the circle matter ? I mean, the particles are going in a round, wouldn't that be like infinite from the particles prespective, so is it related to the turn rate or something ?
It is more related to the needed strength of the magnets to keep the particles on track and also the synchrotron radiation.
The first issue is that the lower the radius of the circle, the stronger magnetic field is needed because of the increased centrifugal forces.
The second issue is that synchrotron radiation leads to loss of energy. It is again proportional to the acceleration perpendicular to the vector of the velocity of the particle [0].
The particles are steered round the accelerator with magnetic fields from superconducting magnets.
Higher speeds (and thus energies) can be achieved by increasing the circular circuit radius by limiting the force that has to be applied and the energy loss in the acceleration (change of direction around the circle).
The particles that go around radiate their energy away, which is a function of the radius of the circle. It is called synchrotron radiation and is the main limitation factor of these kind of accelerators.
Aside from the gamble that any fundamental research represents, consider the immense amount of training CERN generates every year, with several thousand physicists and engineers continuously involved. That sort of a mix generates more learning than the sum of its parts, because everyone has opportunities to learn from many related fields. If the money was instead split into many smaller projects it wouldn't generate the same kind of learning, because each project would be a tiny silo compared to CERN.
> The aim is to start construction of the new tunnel by 2038
Why wait so long? Surely the tunnel is the easiest part of the project, and the Swiss are very good at digging tunnels. The article goes on to talk about funding issues, but I'd imagine they'd be able to start digging the tunnel now and round up funding over the years by expanding their organization or lobbying the EU harder.
Did you know that though vitrification, state of the art cryogenics researched have achieved to preserve 100% of the structure of a pig brain?
The science for preserving with 100% accuracy your brain is already here.
Those scientists use this technology to preserve organs and the cryogenic property is just a side effect. We simply need an enterprise that reproduce their results on human brains (shouldn't be different than a pig brain) and that commercialize it.
The process replace blood and other brain fluids with a chemically toxic fluid.
Which means that while the structure is preserved, any attempt at resurrecting the brain would need an advanced technique that would gradually replace the toxic fluid with fresh blood/Cerebrospinal fluid and the replacement should be 1) total 2) the replacement process should not destroy structure.
Intermediary new kinds of fluids in the process might make the transition easier/safer.
Once your brain is filled with the right amount of blood and of cerebrospinal fluid and has no toxic fluid left in order for the brain to function, a minimal level of hormones / molecules will need to be dispatched in the brain.
Once all of this is achieved remains the problem of interfacing your brain with a new body.
Happily once cryogenized (technically doable today) resolving all the others necessary steps will take time and you will have time.
With not so much money you could be kept vitrified (not frozen) for a millennium or two.
It seems unlikely but still is a possibility that an advanced civilization could not by design uncryogenize you without affecting your structure. But the structure being preserved they could make a copy of you (numeric or not), while this has its lot of metaphysical issues It's still a path far more hopeful than eternal death.
As a reminder our normal life is mostly as metaphysically weird as most of our cells are replaced every 5 years? What's define YOU is totally unclear and continuous
Has anyone considered a collider in space? It seems like you could have huge distances. And just let the particles fly in the vacuum between acceleration points?
If you want to store the beam, you need a ring. And the size of the ring is given by the minimum bending radius, which is given by maximum field strength you can achieve, and energy loss from bremsstrahlung in the bends, which you have to put back.
So space doesn't really help: You'll still need a circle of magnets. Approximating the circle with a polygon means you split up a smaller circle with straight segments. But these straight segments are not really useful.
Fairly good points. And I guess you would actually need twice the amount of energy for station keeping, unless you were to use an unstable orbit on-purpose, and use the gravity as an assist for accelerating particles, now that I think of it.
Well, in any case, so much for the circumsolar collider described in the Three Body trilogy. I guess it might still be doable/useful with some hypothetical future technology, though.
You can't easily reflect the beam, you can only bend it "with a small radius", but then you loose a lot of the energy via synchrotron radiation. You would also need /very/ strong fields.
But the basic idea in everything but linear accelerators is the same: You want to reuse the accelerating structure multiple times be recirculating the beam through it many times. Either in a ring/closed loop, like LHC, or in some form of wound up (open) path (Race track mictrotrons, for example)
It's more like hedging their bets. The Chinese proposals (CEPC + SppC) are simultaneously underwhelming in terms of performance specs and over-ambitious in terms of timescale. There's also always a chance that they will never materialise. If they do actually get built, construction of the FCC will be cancelled and CERN will participate in (and hopefully improve) CEPC+SppC. Similarly if Japan builds the ILC, FCC-ee will be cancelled and CERN will join that while bringing forward the FCC-hh.
The big one was the discovery of the Higgs boson, a missing piece of the so-called 'standard model' of particle physics, plus a bunch of other stuff (lack of evidence for super-symmetry so far, discovery of some tetra- and pentaquarks states, potentially some hints of physics beyond the standard model from B-meson decays, ...).
In large part, it 'merely' confirmed our current theories, disappointing people hoping for revolutionary discoveries.
I must say, that is a pretty weak result given the humongous amount of money sunk into it. And all those new understandings have no real world implications except for how some smart people think reality works. I'd say, let's not repeat this massively expensive debacle and fund some more promising fields that may actually solve some of the worlds problems.
I know this is not a popular opinion and I'm quite sure they'll build a bigger collider anyway. And after that, they'll build an even bigger one. And still a bigger one after that.
Compared to all the others things humanity chooses to waste money on, fundamental science is a steal, in particular considering that our ability to understand nature is what sets us apart from all other animals competing in the rat race that is existence.
It's a plausible idea, but there are no guarantees. The reasoning goes like this:
So far, the Standard Model is holding up quite well (too well in fact; it would be nice to have some glaring discrepancies pointing to new physics). According to the Standard Model, all fundamental particles with mass get that mass by interacting with the Higgs field. Now, assuming that dark matter also consists of particles with mass (plausible), it's a fair guess that those particles also get their mass by interacting with the Higgs field. And if they do, we should be able to produce them by making Higgs particles (excitations of the Higgs field); when those decay, they will produce pairs of any particle species which they interact with (provided that those particle pairs are less massive than the Higgs particle; and even if they are not, their existence should indirectly affect Higgs decay to other particle species in ways which may be possible to study).
An obvious way this idea could fail is that dark matter gets its mass from a different Higgs field than the Standard Model one (SUSY generally requires more than one Higgs field, and GUTs can have lots). Another is that dark matter is not just another particle but something more weird.
If you give 50k to half a million engineers they aren't going to beat the track record at the Nürburgring by magic.
Some science experiments are expensive - not only financially, they require intense cooperation between large groups of multi-discipline people. Theoretical Work takes a toll on the mind, experimental work does the same while draining the wallet at the same time.
Do you actually think that is a helpful comment? Mainstream publications tend to use the units commonly used in the country where they're located and may, depending upon style, also provide conversions. However, for casual everyday use, there's no particular advantage to km over miles just because it's based on powers of 10.
For what it’s worth, the usage of “retarded” as an insult is rapidly becoming as antiquated as the ridiculous measurement system in question. Usually implies either immaturity, ignorance, or in grouping with a certain, very online crowd.
Since LHC isn't a vanity project your whole argument breaks down. Also, climate change is largely not a topic for science, but for politics. Politicians know what to do, they just don't want to. No amount of science can fix this.
My point is, if it isn’t clear, is that scientists who think the world is being put in danger by climate change shouldn’t be requesting or otherwise accept money that would be better spent combatting said existential threat. To accept money on huge projects with no clear benefit to humanity when there are much more pressing matters at hand is either to deny those problems don’t exist or act with hypocrisy.
P.S. spending money on something that adds no clear value is the definition of a vanity project.
P.P.S. My argument also doesn’t hinge on whether the LHC or its successor is a vanity project or not, I think we can all agree spending 20bn+ on lifting people out of poverty or combatting climate change is a much more worthy recipient of tax payer dollars.
Following your logic we should just give up spending any money on any non climate science.
Science is what enabled us to lift billions out of poverty in the first place.
Do you think that some scientist if you give him a ton of money can invent a cheap way of removing Carbon from air?
The solution is much more simple, stop putting Carbon in the atmosphere, this is something society needs to solve not scientists.
Think it live Bob is throwing shit in the river and you blame scientists that they can't invent something to clean the water that is cheap.
We could build modern nuclear reactors, we can fund research into fusion at the same time but until fusion is ready we could at least stop closing nuclear plants and finish/upgrade the existing ones. Probably much more money is spent in the entertainment industry in a year then in all CERN history.
In order to stop pollution we need to invest money in an alternative, you simply can’t stop the economy to prevent pollution, Covid-19 style, forever and expect society not to regress to pre-industrial revolution. Hence, in order to fund an alternative you need the funds to fund an alternative, which necessitates not spending limited tax payer dollars on limited impact science experiments.
From my comment elsewhere: spending 20bn+ on lifting people out of poverty or combatting climate change is a much more worthy recipient of tax payer dollars
CERN invented the WWW, WWW lifted people from poverty like me that I work from a village in a third world country as a developer.
Maybe the super magnets,detectors, software, mathematics and who knows anti-mater or black holdes could also have a similar effect as WWW. There is a lot of money in he world that is pent in entertainment industry so make a carbon tax or invent some economic mumbo-jumbo to grab a percent from there and force electric car investments or fusion reactors. Take Apple money and should be enough
I’ll grant you that HTTP and HTML technologies did come out of CERN, but access to clean water and a sewage system amongst other things is what lifted you out of poverty. It’s no good having access to cat memes if you’re dying from dysentery. Developed countries were out of extreme poverty long before the internet and WWW was invented.
Besides, issues like climate change and resource contention will disproportionately affect impoverished countries. I think combatting those issues is a higher priority than investigating particle physics with no immediate or apparent benefit. Would you rather use that money for a particle accelerator or give everyone access to clean water?
Clean water, sewage, central hearing etc are not free, without a good paying job there are still people that have the toilet outside, do not have running water and use wood for heating.
So is a combination of more factors like local economy and government to grow and build roads,bring internet and natural gas but you also need the individuals to afford paying for those. The web helped a lot and if you see the remote working that is happening now you can't deny that CERN had a giant contribution. 1
Maybe the issue is not that CERN proposes this things but the fusion guys are not united in a big collaboration as CERN is.
Honestly, this money could be spent on myriad other projects, not to mention towards fusion research or alternative energies (solar, wind) in general especially in the face of climate change. Again, seeing the failure of the LHC and then deciding you're going to double down is just straight irresponsible. I honestly wonder what member states are thinking when they see CERN contemplate this especially after the LHC failed to find SUSY particles.
This is just another painful reminder of how narrow minded some scientists are and so focused on their own little niche. There are so many larger problems the world is facing today, it's upsetting but not surprising no one at the table even asked the most important questions when making these plans, "is this even necessary?"
Last tidbit, there are next generation acceleration schemes using lasers that could promise much cheaper acceleration of particles on a much smaller scale (centimeters) although the brightness and general beam quality isn't quite there yet. That could be a potential route forward and be much cheaper in the long run, it just would require a) some time and research but more importantly b) the current crop of experimental scientists at CERN might find it not their expertise and so might not get the grants. Again, reiterating the narrow mindedness of scientists these days.