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.
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.
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.
However, honesty about the situation should be rewarded; not punished.
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
Is it too difficult to estimate the EVSI ?
If you fail once, fail again but bigger... who cares it’s not our money and the bigger our project the more we pay ourselves...
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.
> In the case of a particle accelerator, that means doubling the amount of time.
This should say: "means quadrupling the amount of time" [to double the S/N].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
>why do we think that building a bigger microscope will be any different?
Why do we think building a bigger telescope then Hubble will be any different:
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.
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2010/101027/full/4671028a.html [2] https://xkcd.com/2014/
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.
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.
(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 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.
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.
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.
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.
It's unclear to me if it could have ever pushed this to enough sigmas to claim discovery.
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".
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.
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).
They detected the Higgs boson and incidentally invented the internet? https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/cern-searches-for-1st-web...
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.
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.
Program cost: 37.30 billion
Unit cost: 12.998 billion
Something like that?
Or 12 new Columbia-class Sub's?
109.8 billion
You see those 'lots' of resources should be cut somewhere else.
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.
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.
What were the specific "practical" problems that investigating and figuring it out that were solved?
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.