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Finding new physics will require a new particle collider

103 points by seagullz 6y ago

DrBazza 6y ago
Time to resurrect the SSC? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
- raverbashing 6y ago
  What physics needs is a revolutionary (not evolutionary like the SSC or the LHC) particle accelerator. There are promising works with high-powered lasers, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcGgaa2mFc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcGgaa2mFc4 But it seems the "spin particles really fast in a very long circular tube" is reaching the end of its life.
- Random_ernest 6y ago
  A senior scientist told me they grow mushrooms now in that tunnel ;-)
quchen 6y ago
Is there a non-paywalled link?
- kristianp 6y ago
  https://outline.com/aVuwpX https://outline.com/aVuwpX
ajflores1604 6y ago
Article is paywalled for me so I don't know if it's mentioned, but it's a shame the one in Texas was never finished. Was supposed to be 3x more powerful than the LHC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
orbifold 6y ago
More likely than not the next collider will be build in China, quite a few particle physicist luminaries have already made their case there. I for one am glad that I stayed clear of the siren call to join the 3000+ grad student workforce at CERN. Sifting through the heap of data that was assigned to you is about as fun as it sounds I think. You get to look for the J/Psi, Pomeron, Dark Matter how exciting! In reality most of the detectors are barely functional, Alice for example doesn’t produce useful data for most of the runs.
- xondono 6y ago
  I’m with you. Not only the job didn’t seem to match the prospect, the “large organization politics” drove me away pretty quickly.
- willis936 6y ago
  That’s just the nature of the machines. You spend so much effort to get to the nuggets, but you still get the nuggets. Does China have experience making particle colliders? I’ve seen their magnetic confinement fusion research devices. Even in the design stage, there are lessons yet to be learned that are well documented in other machines. That doesn’t mean the people working on them are dumb, or that all fields of large-magnetic-confinement-machine-building physicists are in the same position, but I think we should be pretty sure whoever builds the next big particle collider is actually up to the task.
  - rubidium 6y ago
    These don’t get built by countries. They get built in countries. The home country matters and they’ll need to put up funding, but it’s an international workforce.
    - culturestate 6y ago
      > The home country matters...but it’s an international workforce. Given the current state of the world and the trajectory of the West's relationship with the Chinese government, it may have to be built by China if it's going to be built in China.
blargmaster33 6y ago
Let's step back an perfect the physics we know. Perfect fission and fusion first! The short and long term benefits of that is more important the verifying for example the next Higgs boson. While verifying the Higgs is nice there are no practical applications for the knowledge.
- peteradio 6y ago
  Yes, let's "just" do that. But I guess we should make some restrictions: 1) Can't use the any of the theorists or experiementalists who had anything to do with the useless research of the LHC. 2) Can't use any of the hardware research required to make that discovery (all apparently useless): 2a) superconducting magnets 2b) high performance fpga computing 2c) particle detectors 3) Understanding of background physics (i.e. perfecting understanding of physics we know)
  - jkelleyrtp 6y ago
    In a way, the demand created for tech for the new age of particle accelerators like detectors and magnets will be the thing that eventually cracks fusion. The entire value prop of CFS is predicted on the fact that magnetics have advanced faster than ITER could be built. The LHC is a big driver of that advancement.
  - hpcjoe 6y ago
    Superconducting magnets were in use well before their use in HEP colliders. FPGA computing was in use in industry well before it was in use in HEP colliders. Particle detectors have existed for more than 100 years. When was the first collider built? Seriously, this is one of the issues I take with HEP advocates claiming that their field yielded all of these advances. Works well with politicians they have to lobby for funding their stuff. Doesn't work so well with other physicists. HEP has utility, as all science does. Investment in it generally turns out useful items, even if the science is esoteric, and not applicable to problems in the world now. However, and this is the crux of the problem, we have many items of significant priority. Which means we have to triage our expenditures. Is HEP and collider physics one of these high priorities right now? In short, no. It shouldn't be.
QuesnayJr 6y ago
I was surprised by the possibility (raised by the article) that the Higgs could turn out to not actually be the Higgs, but just another particle with the right mass. Is that a real possibility?
- sp332 6y ago
  Sure, it's not like the particle stuck around long enough for us to test any of its other properties. We just know that its decay products add up to a plausible energy level. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/12/rolling-the-dice-understanding-how-physicists-hunt-for-the-higgs/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/12/rolling-the-dice-und...
_fizz_buzz_ 6y ago
A counter point by Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/particle-physics-large-hadron-collider.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/particle-physics-...
- Deukhoofd 6y ago
  > I still believe that slamming particles into one another is the most promising route to understanding what matter is made of and how it holds together. But $10 billion is a hefty price tag. And I’m not sure it’s worth it. When is it worth it? They tested many theories, and many of them were proven wrong, and some were proven right. What price can you attach to having this knowledge? Is there a maximum price tag for potentially knowing more about the universe?
  - adrianN 6y ago
    The question is, what kind of other interesting knowledge might we acquire with ten billion?
  - kd5bjo 6y ago
    > Is there a maximum price tag for potentially knowing more about the universe? Yes. On the extreme end, there’s a finite amount of useful work that can be done before the heat death of the universe. An energy budget the size of the combined output of all power stations on the planet is much smaller than that, but also too much. At a more realistic scale, human knowledge is only valuable in so far as it improves the human condition in some way, now or in the future. Other research areas could be more important to progress right now and we only have so many scientists available to do the work. Allocating those scientists to research areas is an incredibly hard task, but it’s a necessary one. Even if we accept that pure physics knowledge is a worthy goal in itself, diving straight into another megaproject isn’t necessarily the best way forward. Maybe it’s more valuable right now to find uses for the great theoretical leaps we’ve already made, for instance. Or maybe we should be focussing on training theorists so that we can have a better idea of what the next piece of giant scientific equipment needs to be. Or maybe we need to raise the global literacy rate so that we have more scientists available.
mlag10 6y ago
Finding a new apartment in any major European city will require 40-50% of a person's income. But let's go for new particle colliders with pretty multicultural pictures.
- Deukhoofd 6y ago
  So you propose we just stop trying to discover new things until all issues with government policies are resolved?
  - axla 6y ago
    "So, what you are saying ..." is rarely correct. Prioritizing issues that benefit humans does not mean that research ceases. By the way, Edward Teller is on record saying that throwing money at technology produces results, whereas throwing money at science does not. He was obviously biased by living in the golden age of Physics, but indeed the golden age has cost practically nothing.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't post flamebait here. It never leads anyplace new. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - axla 6y ago
    One cannot leave smooth articles or headlines un-contradicted, for the unfortunate reason that if humans read something often enough, it tends to become the truth.
    - dang 6y ago
      Here we trust readers to make up their own minds. Of course it is good to supply relevant information, but then the emphasis should be on supplying information, not taking a swipe.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.md/tCzip https://archive.md/tCzip
yters 6y ago
Used to be breakthroughs could be made by a lens maker accidentally discovering micro biology or the president of the treasury thinking through the mathematics behind his observations and discovering the law of gravity or a patent clerk resolving contradictions between data and theory in his spare time to discover relativity or a barely employed artist describing in detail inventing concepts that would not be created until centuries after his death. Now we need billions of dollars and all the best minds to even hypothetically make progress. Maybe something is wrong in the state of scientific research.
- 0xTJ 6y ago
  What you've said makes no sense. Why shouldn't new tech be required? You're not even comparing similar science topics to modern physics. When you're pushing the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe, there's no human perception that can itself detect anything new.
  - ellofromoversea 6y ago
    Math and humans modeled the Higgs before technology “found it” IMO like with space ships this is just not a useful engineering endeavor in general We probably could iterate on engineering AI and nanotechnology so future people could programmatically build specific machines But let’s go on a whim and prematurely optimize a machine to maybe produce new insights at scale that, unlike with the Higgs, we’re still trying to find consensus mathematics to define We’re putting the cart before the horse this time and the fact the LHC hasn’t produced much else even with all the mathy theories has shown on paper we’re so off the mark a giant new machine would be built just to titillate a generation that is addicted to being titillated Maybe we could just get our own imaginations back for a bit before we keep following the imaginings of yesterday Not sure if you’ve noticed but pandemic life is making building such a thing a non-starter. How do you design, plan, and assemble such a thing when groups of people have to work on a basement?
  - yters 6y ago
    It's always our theoretical perception that pushes the boundaries, regardless of what tech we have. I would say our theoretical imagination is lacking these days. Probably because scientists aren't trained in broad rigorous thought with philosophy. Instead, the memorize some mathematical formula and the latest tech, and go off trying different permutations thereof in order to get published and get grants. In my many years in academia I see very little imaginative original thought. In the commercial world there is more innovation, but not much deep understanding or theory beyond optimizing some market. Altogether, the leading thinkers are very narrow minded and short sighted. Academia is also much less religious these days. Perhaps there is a correlation.
thysultan 6y ago
Sounds like the particle collider people are having tunnel vision. "1 after the new particle collider": Guess what? we need an even bigger particle collider. What we really need is to build one on the moon.
- Nbox9 6y ago
  Is it turtles all the way down, or is there a theoretical maximum size of a particle collider where no larger size would yield interesting results?
  - pacala 6y ago
    I've heard 'solar system size' and even 'galaxy size'. Maybe we should take a step back and realize that funding for high energy physics is rooted in the Cold War's nuclear arm's race. We already have nuclear devices more powerful than we'd ever need, not clear why we'd fund ever larger particle colliders.
- djaque 6y ago
  It is not tunnel vision when the problem they're tackling is literally stuck in a tunnel. Bigger and bigger colliders are the only direct way we have to study high energy phenomena. It's not that physicists are lazy, it's that the problems they're studying are hard. I'm also seeing a lot resentment for the price tag of colliders in this thread. My personal opinion is that we shouldn't build a new one, but I'll point out that colliders are incredibly cost efficient. The whole LHC (which has been running and providing jobs to people for 12 years) costs a similar amount as just two B-2 bombers. The US owns like 20 of those and that money went somewhere into huge defense contractors profits as opposed to knowledge and tech which is now accessible to the whole world. You might not know this, but a lot of the technology developed during the construction of the LHC is now used to improve medical imaging and power transmission to name a few applications. These all have a direct impact on the quality of our every day life. That fancy PET scan you received to diagnose your cancer was literally funded in part by the LHC.
  - thysultan 6y ago
djaque 6y ago
My personal opinion (and I might be biased since I'm not a collider guy) is that it's time to take a break from the energy frontier and put our efforts into other kinds of physics. There's a whole world out there besides "fixing" the standard model. I'm having a hard time finding it, but there's a quote from a famous physicist along the lines of "we already have a theory of everything we encounter in daily life, it's just that we can't apply it to practically anything". For instance, we still have no idea how unconventional superconductors work. Of course, they're completely described by plain old quantum mechanics without even using field theory. However, that still doesn't mean we understand them because the theory is too complex. I'm personally interested in the rising complexity frontier of physics where increased computing power and new methods of approaching problems will help uncover emergent phenomena. Plus, there's other accelerators besides colliders that are essential to this field (x-ray light sources for instance). We should come back to the energy problem experimentally when we can affordably make a revolutionary accelerator (like x100, not a factor of 2 or 3). That will come when we have mastered advanced acceleration techniques like plasma and wakefield.
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  Another one falls for the pretext. These colliders are created to attempt to create conditions that will call the simulation admins’ attention to this region of space. They believe the strange entities they see while on LSD/DMT are real and outside this universe and are the admins, hence the bizarre satanic rituals at CERN in their honor that you all pretend never took place.
- yummypaint 6y ago
  My perception is that this is closer to the direction the field has been moving for the last half decade or so. Pushing the "energy frontier" was needed to experimentally find the higs and test supersymmetric theories. The higs was measured, and literally hundreds of proposed theories and particles, including very well-liked theories, have been eliminated. This is a big success. However, it turns out that some of the same physics of extremely high energy scales is also accessible through extremely high precision/low background experiments like the many neutrinoless double beta decay searches, or the rapidly growing field of neutrino experiments. In my oppinion, there is still compelling need for an accelerator specialized in colliding electrons with ions at lower energy than at the LHC. The nuclear physics community has been after this for some time now, and it looks like it will be built at Brookhaven. Now that FRIB is almost finished, this will probably be the big budget nuclear physics project for the next 5 years or so.
mylons 6y ago
i’m skeptical because that was the promise of the LHC.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  One of the main goals[1] of the LHC was finding the Higgs, which it has done. Another goal was to look for the matter-antimatter asymmetry, where it has[2] and will likely continue to find interesting things. So as such it has had decent success I think. Another goal was to look for supersymmetry. While the LHC so far has excluded large sections of the possible parameter space for supersymmetry, I don't think it was unreasonable to think at the time LHC was designed that it had a decent chance of finding evidence for supersymmetry. However given how things are looking currently, maybe effort should be focused on the areas where we know there's something weird, such as neutrinos[3], as well as astronomical searches such as LIGO[4] which can constrain Beyond Standard Model physics. [1]: https://home.cern/resources/faqs/facts-and-figures-about-lhc https://home.cern/resources/faqs/facts-and-figures-about-lhc [2]: https://home.cern/news/press-release/physics/lhcb-sees-new-flavour-matter-antimatter-asymmetry https://home.cern/news/press-release/physics/lhcb-sees-new-f... [3]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutrino-evidence-could-explain-matter-antimatter-asymmetry-20200415/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutrino-evidence-could-expla... [4]: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-gravitational-waves-can-say-about-dark-matter https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-gravitational-...
scottlocklin 6y ago
At some point, elementary particle physics will actually die as a field and the people who persist in building particle accelerators as if there is some new electroweak theory right around the corner will have to find something else to do. Of course, they'll probably continue with their pyramid building for decades after the subject has actually died.
xvilka 6y ago
The interplanetary space is probably the best place to build a particle collider - you won't need compensation fields and giant tube[s].
- Ancalagon 6y ago
  I believe the vacuum inside particle accelerators is actually much higher than your average cubic meter of solar system space.
  - siscia 6y ago
    And the vacuum in LHC is not THAT big as a problem. The real problem are the magnets.
- erikpukinskis 6y ago
  What about solar shielding? Doesn’t the magnetosphere deflect a lot of particles?
  - xvilka 6y ago
    The good point hadn't thought about this.
traes 6y ago
> A minifigure, 3 blocks high, is repesentative of an average American adult, at 1.753 meters tall Shouldn't it be the height of an average adult from Denmark? At 1.672m (edit: closer to 1.8) it's a big enough difference to matter. The inaccuracies in this article are disgusting! This is a serious matter that has numerous implications, and is definitely not a joke. Edit: I meant to post this somewhere else. Sorry.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  I think you’ve misspelled ‘9’ as ‘6’.
  - traes 6y ago
    I accidentally grabbed the number for average female height. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
hpcjoe 6y ago
As a (non-practicing) physicist, I've always disliked the penchant of some in the HEP community to say what this article says. They (the HEP community) tends to equate physics with HEP physics. It's not. When this is pointed out to the people espousing this odd viewpoint, they usually respond with some passive aggressive comment. I've seen/experienced much of this during my time in research. New physics not requiring an accelerator would include quantum computing; the real stuff of entangled qubits, and the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits. More generally quantum mechanics interpretation and meaning. There are some unsettling things within QM, such as non-locality, and how to understand them. There are many other examples, just listing 1 for brevity. Basically, any text that begins with "the set of all physics is HEP physics" such as this article implies, is, pretty much by definition, incorrect. I recall while the SSC was being built in Texas, that when the NSF asked for more money for researchers not involved in SSC, they were told that physics folks were getting enough. I remember my thesis advisor's grant that I was funded on, getting cut to help fund other things. Equating the new physics with new HEP physics is, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, not even wrong. We don't need accelerators for most new physics.
- djaque 6y ago
  Well said. Whenever I bring up that point on physics subreddits I also get tons of passive aggressive comments. It's super toxic. The HEP people in my own department also seem to believe that anything other than beyond the standard model physics isn't fundamental or isn't pure enough to care about.
  - eigenspace 6y ago
    I think a lot of it comes from the fact that they used to be the golden child of science, but the influence and prestige of HEP has been a victim of it's own success. HEP just doesn't hold the same importance it used to, and that stings for the people who dedicated their lives to it. As they pushed to higher and higher energies and events with lower and lower cross sections, they're solving problems that matter less and less, and are increasingly less likely to be useful in any way. Of course, it's still incredibly interesting to know about the fundamental building blocks of the universe, but without a promise of practical applications, or at least a convincing argument that they'll find something interesting with this new collider, I find it really hard to justify the price tag. Would knowing what physics does at 100TeV be any more valuable to us than a great work of literature? I'm not sure.
jariel 6y ago
People have failed to mention the fact that the LHC has turned out to be kind of a failure, at least it hasn't given the populist soundbites needed to support its' success. Nothing really 'new' came out of it and it was very expensive. People seem to be ignorant that everything has a populist aspect, and very expensive things always do. The politicians who foot the bill are thinking "We just spent bazillions and what did we get? Now we have to convince the proles to spend billions more?" If LHS gave us some really fundamental new insights, the Round B would be easy. But right now it's like a startup with no 'product market fit' it's going to be hard.
- l33tman 6y ago
  When you fund a huge project using state money, not just physics projects but anything, it's as much about all the side-effects. A 10 year $10B project.. I mean, those $10B will not go into a bank account, they will be used to funnel work (both in related physics and engineering) down the years. It's amazing how they pushed some manufacturing methods to build LHC and I'm sure those methods will be used for some other good, for example.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    You're literally talking about the benefits of employing people to dig holes in the ground. That could be a larger program; it doesn't have to be limited to particle accelerators.
deleted 6y ago
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knzhou 6y ago
Nima-Arkani Hamed likes to point out that particle colliders aren't getting more expensive at all, in relative terms. The price tags are going up for just the same reason that you can't buy a loaf of bread for a nickel anymore, but as a fraction of GDP, the next big collider has always been about 0.01%. In fact, if there's any identifiable trend at all, it's that this fraction has been falling. The LHC, for instance, was slapped together after the last would-be supercollider was defunded, and reuses the LEP tunnel (built in the 1980s). If you're wondering why we took so long to find the Higgs boson, it's because the field has already been shrinking under the pressure of declining funding for 40 years.
jcims 6y ago
Complete physics moron here, is there no way to use particle/anti-particle annihilation to drive collision energy up? Also, i think if we invested the money for a new collider into an effort to develop what we've learned so far into a useful technology that inspires the general public, the funding for the next collider would take care of itself.
- ganzuul 6y ago
  That's what the LEP did. It was replaced with the LHC. Strange as it might sound, I think technology being developed for the next generation of mobile networks could be what opens up a new regime (with likely candidate theories) of high energy physics. - Terahertz beamforming for wakefield accelerators, to throw some lingo at you.
- knzhou 6y ago
  Perhaps counterintuitively, it makes little difference. At the energies we're considering, the mass-energy of the particles being collided is completely negligible. Switching to colliding protons and antiprotons does change the details of what you get out, but not the energy scales.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  I'll drastically oversimplify here, but in a collider, the particles being collided are highly regimented. First, you have a very specific type of particle you want to move around, like a proton (and you had best hope you picked a charged particle so you and move it easily with an EM field). Second, you have a very specific direction for that particle so you can smash it against something else. Third, the energy the particle is at at the time of smashing is well-known and very high. It's all very specific. Annihilation is too uncontrolled to help, often in terms of direction. Accelerators are all about trying to add just a tiny bit more velocity to something already moving at 99.99% of the speed of light, in the exact direction that particle is already going in. So it is both precision and vanishing results. It's a tricky situation.
- magv 6y ago
  LEP was annihilating electrons with positrons; LHC does not, as it only accelerates protons. FCC will have the option to do both: the plan includes two separate pipes in the same tunnel, one for protons, one for electrons. This however does not increase the collision energy significantly: a single electron-positron pair has the (rest) energy of ~1MeV -- this is what is released during the annihilation, but the energies we want to go to at the next collider go up to 10TeV, so 10^7 times larger.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Finding some physics
thrower123 6y ago
Of course it does. They finished the LHC, it's time for another white elephant to keep the gravy train rolling.
K0SM0S 6y ago
Finding new physics will require removing a lot of dust on the politics of that field, and a vast re-evaluation of why and how people get funded. How important the is science versus everything else in the matter. It's not going to happen overnight, but it's good that people are opening their eyes. Let's reevaluate in 2040 and see if we've moved the needle in fundamental physics even just a little compared to what was achieved in the first half of the 20th century.
graycat 6y ago
Here is some reasoning for funding -- i.e., US Congress funding -- high energy physics (HEP), e.g., the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), I didn't see mentioned here: (1) The Russians, EU, China, Japan might pursue HEP so the US does not want to appear to fall behind. So in part, the funding is "a matter of national pride". (2) The funding has a constituency and keeps it and the university physics departments going. The US does want healthy university physics departments if only to teach physics for all the roles all of physics can play in national security, NASA, the economy, other sciences, e.g., medicine, engineering, e.g., computing, etc. For the power of constituencies, notice that a lot of physics laboratories were started during WWII and are still operating. One way and another, somehow they keep getting funding. (3) In the Manhattan Project the world, the power elite, all of civilization were surprised, shocked, felt blind-sided, afraid. The lesson they took was: It's a big, complicated universe out there; a good guess is that not nearly all of it is well understood (true or not); so we must pursue physics, at least keep up as insurance against another shocking discovery. (4) The US likes to claim to have the best country, economy, culture, human rights, standard of living, roads, bridges, public health, Internet, ..., cars, hamburgers, milk, pizza, etc., basketball, Olympic athletes, pop music, etc., nearly the best of everything, in particular the best universities. So, can't have a great university without at least a good physics department, and very much want a great physics department. Short version: The US wants to be the best, e.g., be the first to put a human with a flag on Mars, the Stars and Stripes.
- knzhou 6y ago
  These arguments were indeed used 30 years ago, but shortly after the USSR fell apart, the American Superconducting Supercollider was defunded midway through construction. The US was satisfied to become 2nd to Europe in this field then, I don't see why the US wouldn't be equally satisfied to be 4th to Europe, Japan, and China a little while later.
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mensetmanusman 6y ago
Quantum computers, fusion, free electron lasers, or particle accelerators, where would you put $100 000 000 000?
mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y ago
Wait, so fusion, solar panels, semiconductors, and anything practically important is not considered physics anymore? Well, people in HEP will necessarily use the definition "Physics=HEP" to get more funding. You can't have a meaningfull argument if your well being depends on its outcome.
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103 points by seagullz 6y ago

Time to resurrect the SSC? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

raverbashing 6y ago
What physics needs is a revolutionary (not evolutionary like the SSC or the LHC) particle accelerator. There are promising works with high-powered lasers, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcGgaa2mFc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcGgaa2mFc4 But it seems the "spin particles really fast in a very long circular tube" is reaching the end of its life.
Random_ernest 6y ago
A senior scientist told me they grow mushrooms now in that tunnel ;-)

quchen 6y ago

Is there a non-paywalled link?

kristianp 6y ago
https://outline.com/aVuwpX https://outline.com/aVuwpX

ajflores1604 6y ago

Article is paywalled for me so I don't know if it's mentioned, but it's a shame the one in Texas was never finished. Was supposed to be 3x more powerful than the LHC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

orbifold 6y ago

More likely than not the next collider will be build in China, quite a few particle physicist luminaries have already made their case there. I for one am glad that I stayed clear of the siren call to join the 3000+ grad student workforce at CERN. Sifting through the heap of data that was assigned to you is about as fun as it sounds I think. You get to look for the J/Psi, Pomeron, Dark Matter how exciting! In reality most of the detectors are barely functional, Alice for example doesn’t produce useful data for most of the runs.

xondono 6y ago
I’m with you. Not only the job didn’t seem to match the prospect, the “large organization politics” drove me away pretty quickly.
willis936 6y ago
That’s just the nature of the machines. You spend so much effort to get to the nuggets, but you still get the nuggets. Does China have experience making particle colliders? I’ve seen their magnetic confinement fusion research devices. Even in the design stage, there are lessons yet to be learned that are well documented in other machines. That doesn’t mean the people working on them are dumb, or that all fields of large-magnetic-confinement-machine-building physicists are in the same position, but I think we should be pretty sure whoever builds the next big particle collider is actually up to the task.
- rubidium 6y ago
  These don’t get built by countries. They get built in countries. The home country matters and they’ll need to put up funding, but it’s an international workforce.
  - culturestate 6y ago
    > The home country matters...but it’s an international workforce. Given the current state of the world and the trajectory of the West's relationship with the Chinese government, it may have to be built by China if it's going to be built in China.

blargmaster33 6y ago

Let's step back an perfect the physics we know. Perfect fission and fusion first! The short and long term benefits of that is more important the verifying for example the next Higgs boson. While verifying the Higgs is nice there are no practical applications for the knowledge.

peteradio 6y ago
Yes, let's "just" do that. But I guess we should make some restrictions: 1) Can't use the any of the theorists or experiementalists who had anything to do with the useless research of the LHC. 2) Can't use any of the hardware research required to make that discovery (all apparently useless): 2a) superconducting magnets 2b) high performance fpga computing 2c) particle detectors 3) Understanding of background physics (i.e. perfecting understanding of physics we know)
- jkelleyrtp 6y ago
  In a way, the demand created for tech for the new age of particle accelerators like detectors and magnets will be the thing that eventually cracks fusion. The entire value prop of CFS is predicted on the fact that magnetics have advanced faster than ITER could be built. The LHC is a big driver of that advancement.
- hpcjoe 6y ago
  Superconducting magnets were in use well before their use in HEP colliders. FPGA computing was in use in industry well before it was in use in HEP colliders. Particle detectors have existed for more than 100 years. When was the first collider built? Seriously, this is one of the issues I take with HEP advocates claiming that their field yielded all of these advances. Works well with politicians they have to lobby for funding their stuff. Doesn't work so well with other physicists. HEP has utility, as all science does. Investment in it generally turns out useful items, even if the science is esoteric, and not applicable to problems in the world now. However, and this is the crux of the problem, we have many items of significant priority. Which means we have to triage our expenditures. Is HEP and collider physics one of these high priorities right now? In short, no. It shouldn't be.

QuesnayJr 6y ago

I was surprised by the possibility (raised by the article) that the Higgs could turn out to not actually be the Higgs, but just another particle with the right mass. Is that a real possibility?

sp332 6y ago
Sure, it's not like the particle stuck around long enough for us to test any of its other properties. We just know that its decay products add up to a plausible energy level. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/12/rolling-the-dice-understanding-how-physicists-hunt-for-the-higgs/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/12/rolling-the-dice-und...

_fizz_buzz_ 6y ago

A counter point by Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/particle-physics-large-hadron-collider.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/particle-physics-...

Deukhoofd 6y ago
> I still believe that slamming particles into one another is the most promising route to understanding what matter is made of and how it holds together. But $10 billion is a hefty price tag. And I’m not sure it’s worth it. When is it worth it? They tested many theories, and many of them were proven wrong, and some were proven right. What price can you attach to having this knowledge? Is there a maximum price tag for potentially knowing more about the universe?
- adrianN 6y ago
  The question is, what kind of other interesting knowledge might we acquire with ten billion?
- kd5bjo 6y ago
  > Is there a maximum price tag for potentially knowing more about the universe? Yes. On the extreme end, there’s a finite amount of useful work that can be done before the heat death of the universe. An energy budget the size of the combined output of all power stations on the planet is much smaller than that, but also too much. At a more realistic scale, human knowledge is only valuable in so far as it improves the human condition in some way, now or in the future. Other research areas could be more important to progress right now and we only have so many scientists available to do the work. Allocating those scientists to research areas is an incredibly hard task, but it’s a necessary one. Even if we accept that pure physics knowledge is a worthy goal in itself, diving straight into another megaproject isn’t necessarily the best way forward. Maybe it’s more valuable right now to find uses for the great theoretical leaps we’ve already made, for instance. Or maybe we should be focussing on training theorists so that we can have a better idea of what the next piece of giant scientific equipment needs to be. Or maybe we need to raise the global literacy rate so that we have more scientists available.

mlag10 6y ago

Finding a new apartment in any major European city will require 40-50% of a person's income. But let's go for new particle colliders with pretty multicultural pictures.

Deukhoofd 6y ago
So you propose we just stop trying to discover new things until all issues with government policies are resolved?
- axla 6y ago
  "So, what you are saying ..." is rarely correct. Prioritizing issues that benefit humans does not mean that research ceases. By the way, Edward Teller is on record saying that throwing money at technology produces results, whereas throwing money at science does not. He was obviously biased by living in the golden age of Physics, but indeed the golden age has cost practically nothing.
dang 6y ago
Please don't post flamebait here. It never leads anyplace new. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- axla 6y ago
  One cannot leave smooth articles or headlines un-contradicted, for the unfortunate reason that if humans read something often enough, it tends to become the truth.
  - dang 6y ago
    Here we trust readers to make up their own minds. Of course it is good to supply relevant information, but then the emphasis should be on supplying information, not taking a swipe.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.md/tCzip https://archive.md/tCzip

yters 6y ago

Used to be breakthroughs could be made by a lens maker accidentally discovering micro biology or the president of the treasury thinking through the mathematics behind his observations and discovering the law of gravity or a patent clerk resolving contradictions between data and theory in his spare time to discover relativity or a barely employed artist describing in detail inventing concepts that would not be created until centuries after his death. Now we need billions of dollars and all the best minds to even hypothetically make progress. Maybe something is wrong in the state of scientific research.

0xTJ 6y ago
What you've said makes no sense. Why shouldn't new tech be required? You're not even comparing similar science topics to modern physics. When you're pushing the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe, there's no human perception that can itself detect anything new.
- ellofromoversea 6y ago
  Math and humans modeled the Higgs before technology “found it” IMO like with space ships this is just not a useful engineering endeavor in general We probably could iterate on engineering AI and nanotechnology so future people could programmatically build specific machines But let’s go on a whim and prematurely optimize a machine to maybe produce new insights at scale that, unlike with the Higgs, we’re still trying to find consensus mathematics to define We’re putting the cart before the horse this time and the fact the LHC hasn’t produced much else even with all the mathy theories has shown on paper we’re so off the mark a giant new machine would be built just to titillate a generation that is addicted to being titillated Maybe we could just get our own imaginations back for a bit before we keep following the imaginings of yesterday Not sure if you’ve noticed but pandemic life is making building such a thing a non-starter. How do you design, plan, and assemble such a thing when groups of people have to work on a basement?
- yters 6y ago
  It's always our theoretical perception that pushes the boundaries, regardless of what tech we have. I would say our theoretical imagination is lacking these days. Probably because scientists aren't trained in broad rigorous thought with philosophy. Instead, the memorize some mathematical formula and the latest tech, and go off trying different permutations thereof in order to get published and get grants. In my many years in academia I see very little imaginative original thought. In the commercial world there is more innovation, but not much deep understanding or theory beyond optimizing some market. Altogether, the leading thinkers are very narrow minded and short sighted. Academia is also much less religious these days. Perhaps there is a correlation.

thysultan 6y ago

Sounds like the particle collider people are having tunnel vision. "1 after the new particle collider": Guess what? we need an even bigger particle collider. What we really need is to build one on the moon.

Nbox9 6y ago
Is it turtles all the way down, or is there a theoretical maximum size of a particle collider where no larger size would yield interesting results?
- pacala 6y ago
  I've heard 'solar system size' and even 'galaxy size'. Maybe we should take a step back and realize that funding for high energy physics is rooted in the Cold War's nuclear arm's race. We already have nuclear devices more powerful than we'd ever need, not clear why we'd fund ever larger particle colliders.
djaque 6y ago
It is not tunnel vision when the problem they're tackling is literally stuck in a tunnel. Bigger and bigger colliders are the only direct way we have to study high energy phenomena. It's not that physicists are lazy, it's that the problems they're studying are hard. I'm also seeing a lot resentment for the price tag of colliders in this thread. My personal opinion is that we shouldn't build a new one, but I'll point out that colliders are incredibly cost efficient. The whole LHC (which has been running and providing jobs to people for 12 years) costs a similar amount as just two B-2 bombers. The US owns like 20 of those and that money went somewhere into huge defense contractors profits as opposed to knowledge and tech which is now accessible to the whole world. You might not know this, but a lot of the technology developed during the construction of the LHC is now used to improve medical imaging and power transmission to name a few applications. These all have a direct impact on the quality of our every day life. That fancy PET scan you received to diagnose your cancer was literally funded in part by the LHC.
- thysultan 6y ago

djaque 6y ago

My personal opinion (and I might be biased since I'm not a collider guy) is that it's time to take a break from the energy frontier and put our efforts into other kinds of physics. There's a whole world out there besides "fixing" the standard model. I'm having a hard time finding it, but there's a quote from a famous physicist along the lines of "we already have a theory of everything we encounter in daily life, it's just that we can't apply it to practically anything". For instance, we still have no idea how unconventional superconductors work. Of course, they're completely described by plain old quantum mechanics without even using field theory. However, that still doesn't mean we understand them because the theory is too complex. I'm personally interested in the rising complexity frontier of physics where increased computing power and new methods of approaching problems will help uncover emergent phenomena. Plus, there's other accelerators besides colliders that are essential to this field (x-ray light sources for instance). We should come back to the energy problem experimentally when we can affordably make a revolutionary accelerator (like x100, not a factor of 2 or 3). That will come when we have mastered advanced acceleration techniques like plasma and wakefield.

FriendlyNormie 6y ago
Another one falls for the pretext. These colliders are created to attempt to create conditions that will call the simulation admins’ attention to this region of space. They believe the strange entities they see while on LSD/DMT are real and outside this universe and are the admins, hence the bizarre satanic rituals at CERN in their honor that you all pretend never took place.
yummypaint 6y ago
My perception is that this is closer to the direction the field has been moving for the last half decade or so. Pushing the "energy frontier" was needed to experimentally find the higs and test supersymmetric theories. The higs was measured, and literally hundreds of proposed theories and particles, including very well-liked theories, have been eliminated. This is a big success. However, it turns out that some of the same physics of extremely high energy scales is also accessible through extremely high precision/low background experiments like the many neutrinoless double beta decay searches, or the rapidly growing field of neutrino experiments. In my oppinion, there is still compelling need for an accelerator specialized in colliding electrons with ions at lower energy than at the LHC. The nuclear physics community has been after this for some time now, and it looks like it will be built at Brookhaven. Now that FRIB is almost finished, this will probably be the big budget nuclear physics project for the next 5 years or so.

mylons 6y ago

i’m skeptical because that was the promise of the LHC.

magicalhippo 6y ago
One of the main goals[1] of the LHC was finding the Higgs, which it has done. Another goal was to look for the matter-antimatter asymmetry, where it has[2] and will likely continue to find interesting things. So as such it has had decent success I think. Another goal was to look for supersymmetry. While the LHC so far has excluded large sections of the possible parameter space for supersymmetry, I don't think it was unreasonable to think at the time LHC was designed that it had a decent chance of finding evidence for supersymmetry. However given how things are looking currently, maybe effort should be focused on the areas where we know there's something weird, such as neutrinos[3], as well as astronomical searches such as LIGO[4] which can constrain Beyond Standard Model physics. [1]: https://home.cern/resources/faqs/facts-and-figures-about-lhc https://home.cern/resources/faqs/facts-and-figures-about-lhc [2]: https://home.cern/news/press-release/physics/lhcb-sees-new-flavour-matter-antimatter-asymmetry https://home.cern/news/press-release/physics/lhcb-sees-new-f... [3]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutrino-evidence-could-explain-matter-antimatter-asymmetry-20200415/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutrino-evidence-could-expla... [4]: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-gravitational-waves-can-say-about-dark-matter https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-gravitational-...

scottlocklin 6y ago

At some point, elementary particle physics will actually die as a field and the people who persist in building particle accelerators as if there is some new electroweak theory right around the corner will have to find something else to do. Of course, they'll probably continue with their pyramid building for decades after the subject has actually died.

xvilka 6y ago

The interplanetary space is probably the best place to build a particle collider - you won't need compensation fields and giant tube[s].

Ancalagon 6y ago
I believe the vacuum inside particle accelerators is actually much higher than your average cubic meter of solar system space.
- siscia 6y ago
  And the vacuum in LHC is not THAT big as a problem. The real problem are the magnets.
erikpukinskis 6y ago
What about solar shielding? Doesn’t the magnetosphere deflect a lot of particles?
- xvilka 6y ago
  The good point hadn't thought about this.

traes 6y ago

> A minifigure, 3 blocks high, is repesentative of an average American adult, at 1.753 meters tall Shouldn't it be the height of an average adult from Denmark? At 1.672m (edit: closer to 1.8) it's a big enough difference to matter. The inaccuracies in this article are disgusting! This is a serious matter that has numerous implications, and is definitely not a joke. Edit: I meant to post this somewhere else. Sorry.

Koshkin 6y ago
I think you’ve misspelled ‘9’ as ‘6’.
- traes 6y ago
  I accidentally grabbed the number for average female height. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hpcjoe 6y ago

As a (non-practicing) physicist, I've always disliked the penchant of some in the HEP community to say what this article says. They (the HEP community) tends to equate physics with HEP physics. It's not. When this is pointed out to the people espousing this odd viewpoint, they usually respond with some passive aggressive comment. I've seen/experienced much of this during my time in research. New physics not requiring an accelerator would include quantum computing; the real stuff of entangled qubits, and the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits. More generally quantum mechanics interpretation and meaning. There are some unsettling things within QM, such as non-locality, and how to understand them. There are many other examples, just listing 1 for brevity. Basically, any text that begins with "the set of all physics is HEP physics" such as this article implies, is, pretty much by definition, incorrect. I recall while the SSC was being built in Texas, that when the NSF asked for more money for researchers not involved in SSC, they were told that physics folks were getting enough. I remember my thesis advisor's grant that I was funded on, getting cut to help fund other things. Equating the new physics with new HEP physics is, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, not even wrong. We don't need accelerators for most new physics.

djaque 6y ago
Well said. Whenever I bring up that point on physics subreddits I also get tons of passive aggressive comments. It's super toxic. The HEP people in my own department also seem to believe that anything other than beyond the standard model physics isn't fundamental or isn't pure enough to care about.
- eigenspace 6y ago
  I think a lot of it comes from the fact that they used to be the golden child of science, but the influence and prestige of HEP has been a victim of it's own success. HEP just doesn't hold the same importance it used to, and that stings for the people who dedicated their lives to it. As they pushed to higher and higher energies and events with lower and lower cross sections, they're solving problems that matter less and less, and are increasingly less likely to be useful in any way. Of course, it's still incredibly interesting to know about the fundamental building blocks of the universe, but without a promise of practical applications, or at least a convincing argument that they'll find something interesting with this new collider, I find it really hard to justify the price tag. Would knowing what physics does at 100TeV be any more valuable to us than a great work of literature? I'm not sure.

jariel 6y ago

People have failed to mention the fact that the LHC has turned out to be kind of a failure, at least it hasn't given the populist soundbites needed to support its' success. Nothing really 'new' came out of it and it was very expensive. People seem to be ignorant that everything has a populist aspect, and very expensive things always do. The politicians who foot the bill are thinking "We just spent bazillions and what did we get? Now we have to convince the proles to spend billions more?" If LHS gave us some really fundamental new insights, the Round B would be easy. But right now it's like a startup with no 'product market fit' it's going to be hard.

l33tman 6y ago
When you fund a huge project using state money, not just physics projects but anything, it's as much about all the side-effects. A 10 year $10B project.. I mean, those $10B will not go into a bank account, they will be used to funnel work (both in related physics and engineering) down the years. It's amazing how they pushed some manufacturing methods to build LHC and I'm sure those methods will be used for some other good, for example.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  You're literally talking about the benefits of employing people to dig holes in the ground. That could be a larger program; it doesn't have to be limited to particle accelerators.

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knzhou 6y ago

Nima-Arkani Hamed likes to point out that particle colliders aren't getting more expensive at all, in relative terms. The price tags are going up for just the same reason that you can't buy a loaf of bread for a nickel anymore, but as a fraction of GDP, the next big collider has always been about 0.01%. In fact, if there's any identifiable trend at all, it's that this fraction has been falling. The LHC, for instance, was slapped together after the last would-be supercollider was defunded, and reuses the LEP tunnel (built in the 1980s). If you're wondering why we took so long to find the Higgs boson, it's because the field has already been shrinking under the pressure of declining funding for 40 years.

jcims 6y ago

Complete physics moron here, is there no way to use particle/anti-particle annihilation to drive collision energy up? Also, i think if we invested the money for a new collider into an effort to develop what we've learned so far into a useful technology that inspires the general public, the funding for the next collider would take care of itself.

ganzuul 6y ago
That's what the LEP did. It was replaced with the LHC. Strange as it might sound, I think technology being developed for the next generation of mobile networks could be what opens up a new regime (with likely candidate theories) of high energy physics. - Terahertz beamforming for wakefield accelerators, to throw some lingo at you.
knzhou 6y ago
Perhaps counterintuitively, it makes little difference. At the energies we're considering, the mass-energy of the particles being collided is completely negligible. Switching to colliding protons and antiprotons does change the details of what you get out, but not the energy scales.
at_a_remove 6y ago
I'll drastically oversimplify here, but in a collider, the particles being collided are highly regimented. First, you have a very specific type of particle you want to move around, like a proton (and you had best hope you picked a charged particle so you and move it easily with an EM field). Second, you have a very specific direction for that particle so you can smash it against something else. Third, the energy the particle is at at the time of smashing is well-known and very high. It's all very specific. Annihilation is too uncontrolled to help, often in terms of direction. Accelerators are all about trying to add just a tiny bit more velocity to something already moving at 99.99% of the speed of light, in the exact direction that particle is already going in. So it is both precision and vanishing results. It's a tricky situation.
magv 6y ago
LEP was annihilating electrons with positrons; LHC does not, as it only accelerates protons. FCC will have the option to do both: the plan includes two separate pipes in the same tunnel, one for protons, one for electrons. This however does not increase the collision energy significantly: a single electron-positron pair has the (rest) energy of ~1MeV -- this is what is released during the annihilation, but the energies we want to go to at the next collider go up to 10TeV, so 10^7 times larger.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Finding some physics

thrower123 6y ago

Of course it does. They finished the LHC, it's time for another white elephant to keep the gravy train rolling.

K0SM0S 6y ago

Finding new physics will require removing a lot of dust on the politics of that field, and a vast re-evaluation of why and how people get funded. How important the is science versus everything else in the matter. It's not going to happen overnight, but it's good that people are opening their eyes. Let's reevaluate in 2040 and see if we've moved the needle in fundamental physics even just a little compared to what was achieved in the first half of the 20th century.

graycat 6y ago

Here is some reasoning for funding -- i.e., US Congress funding -- high energy physics (HEP), e.g., the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), I didn't see mentioned here: (1) The Russians, EU, China, Japan might pursue HEP so the US does not want to appear to fall behind. So in part, the funding is "a matter of national pride". (2) The funding has a constituency and keeps it and the university physics departments going. The US does want healthy university physics departments if only to teach physics for all the roles all of physics can play in national security, NASA, the economy, other sciences, e.g., medicine, engineering, e.g., computing, etc. For the power of constituencies, notice that a lot of physics laboratories were started during WWII and are still operating. One way and another, somehow they keep getting funding. (3) In the Manhattan Project the world, the power elite, all of civilization were surprised, shocked, felt blind-sided, afraid. The lesson they took was: It's a big, complicated universe out there; a good guess is that not nearly all of it is well understood (true or not); so we must pursue physics, at least keep up as insurance against another shocking discovery. (4) The US likes to claim to have the best country, economy, culture, human rights, standard of living, roads, bridges, public health, Internet, ..., cars, hamburgers, milk, pizza, etc., basketball, Olympic athletes, pop music, etc., nearly the best of everything, in particular the best universities. So, can't have a great university without at least a good physics department, and very much want a great physics department. Short version: The US wants to be the best, e.g., be the first to put a human with a flag on Mars, the Stars and Stripes.

knzhou 6y ago
These arguments were indeed used 30 years ago, but shortly after the USSR fell apart, the American Superconducting Supercollider was defunded midway through construction. The US was satisfied to become 2nd to Europe in this field then, I don't see why the US wouldn't be equally satisfied to be 4th to Europe, Japan, and China a little while later.

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mensetmanusman 6y ago

Quantum computers, fusion, free electron lasers, or particle accelerators, where would you put $100 000 000 000?

mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y ago

Wait, so fusion, solar panels, semiconductors, and anything practically important is not considered physics anymore? Well, people in HEP will necessarily use the definition "Physics=HEP" to get more funding. You can't have a meaningfull argument if your well being depends on its outcome.

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