Re:The World Doesn’t Need a New Gigantic Particle Collider
by philwelch on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @01:08AM
(#23686751)
I'm not sure that argument works out though.
It's like saying, we landed on the moon by flying less than 400,000km into space, so why don't we fly 800,000km into space and see if we can land on something else? When in reality, everything we know about astronomy tells us the next nearest thing we could expect to land on is Mars, and that's 77,000,000km away.
I know we don't understand particle physics as well as we understand astronomy, but, taking Dr. Hossenfelder at her word that the Higgs boson "completes" the "picture" and that the theoretical "loose ends" would actually require "energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test", it sounds like we're a lot closer to Mars than to the next breakthrough in terms of particle colliders.
The worst part is that the LHC has been a success. You don't stop after a success. You stop because you've hit a dead end. The only way to know if we need a bigger particle accelerator is by building it and then either seeing or not seeing any results. After doing this we can definitively agree on never building another accelerator. Giving up after finding the higgs boson is like winning a bronze medal and quitting instead of going after the silver medal.