13 ms·
CERN makes push to build €21B super-collider
- RedShift1 6y agoMachines like this really show off the best we humans can do. I'm happy my tax money goes to the LHC and hopefully to this project too.
- holoduke 6y agoI agree. my only concern is that certain companies try to entangle themselfs in these public funded projects and gain large benefits in essence from tax money. I think it would be good (in Europe at least) that bigger tech companies donate much more to these projects.
- tengbretson 6y agoMaybe they could sell their old one to help finance the new one. I'd go in for a few shares of a particle collider.
- csomar 6y agoCollider as a Service. You pay per collision.
- dekhn 6y agoI think they should just sell their antimatter. I bet you could sell it for billions per microgram.
- leephillips 6y agoJust imagine the unboxing videos.
- ralusek 6y agoHey guys, it's xxStreamer420Xx, and today we're going to be unboxing dark matter from t̵̨̢͈͔̘̣̪͖̾̓̋͒̿̈́͘ḧ̷͙͈͕͉͙́̽̀̍́̚̕ȇ̸̻͎͇̥͚̪̬͛̒͑̕͝͠ ̴̢̖̞͓̬̩̭̦̰̠͔͎͔̟͙̋͆̄̅̎́͌̇͘͘͝͝͠a̴̧͉͎̹̅̃̓͋̅͛͗͠͠b̵̨͕͎͖͙̠̣̭̉̽̓͛͜y̴̡̡̛̹͖͇̙̝͜ş̶̝̮̻̙͉̤͚͍̪̩͓̞̓̔͛̇͑̓̎̀̑͌̊͜s̵̬̰͖̅̒̉̄̓͒̋͋̈̓̆͊͋͘͝.
- z3t4 6y agoI think they should better explain how this thing works... It accelerate an electron!? And then there is some sensitive equipment to measure the charge!? Get a curve on a oscilloscope and if the curve is different it have discovered a new particle!? I'm very curious about the so called gravity particle aka Higgs boson, but Cern would need to explain this in layman terms in order to get funded.
- delfinom 6y agohttps://www.iop.org/resources/topic/archive/cern/index.html https://www.iop.org/resources/topic/archive/cern/index.html https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/lhc-data-how-its-made https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/lhc-data-how-its-ma... There are tons of resources written by them and others that explains how it all works. None of it is secret.
- chmod775 6y agoFor comparison, the budget of the Department of Defen(ding US interests) is $721.5 billion, which is to say one could instead do something useful with all those billions instead of spending them killing people who made the mistake of being born near natural resources.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago$721.5 billion per year, to be more specific. While the collider cost is one-time.
- dekhn 6y agoThe operating budget for LHC is $1B/year.
- ssully 6y agoWhile I still agree on wanting to direct money from military to science, it isn't a one time cost. In 2012, the yearly budget for the LHC was 1 billion [1]. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-does-it-cost-to-find-a-higgs-boson/#3d629aac3948 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d...
- lgl 6y agoThat's still pocket change and pretty irrelevant in context since merely half of 1 year's budget of the US military would still be able to power the LHC for over 350 years.
- UweSchmidt 6y agoThe military budget is practically not available for redistribution without a complete political overhaul. Many people could be fed and many nice projects could be financed with that money. As it is, the supercollider money comes from the limited science budget, and buying the one thing means we can't have the other.
- 6y ago
- babbledabbler 6y agoIf they make a bigger super collider they should call it the super duper collider.
- ceejayoz 6y agoThat's pretty much how telescopes are named. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope
- ardit33 6y agoeh, do they expect to find anything new? To me, fusion research need more $$ and a higher priority as it has extremely practical applications for all humanity, from energy independence to global warming. 21b Euros is a lot of money, and apart the ongoing ITER effort, fusion research can be tackled from different angles with just half of that money.
- andrepd 6y agoThe difference is that particle research doesn't stand to displace a multi trillion dollar industry with the world's biggest militaries to back it...
- leephillips 6y agoI don’t think the energy companies are exactly quaking in terror: http://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-energy-180313/ http://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-e...
- delfinom 6y agoYou kidding me? Energy companies would fucking love fusion energy as it'll still require power plants they get to control and power lines and all the infrastructure to transmit. They absolutely fear solar energy though.
- mckirk 6y agoFusion technology is very dangerous though. Just think what would happen to my Bitcoin portfolio if energy was suddenly almost-free :/
- karlicoss 6y agoNot sure how ironic are you, but don't you think you'd massively win overall if the energy suddenly became free? Think how many problems it would solve :)
- 6y ago
- geraltofrivia 6y agoSabine Hossenfelder recently wrote a Scientific American article arguing against this push, which might be an interesting read. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-need-a-new-gigantic-particle-collider/# https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-.... > "When physicists started building colliders in the 1940s, they did not have a complete inventory of elementary particles, and they knew it... [] The Standard Model still has some loose ends, but experimentally testing those would require energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test." > "... particle physicists should focus on developing new technologies that could bring colliders back in a reasonable price range and hold off digging more tunnels." > "It’s because too much science funding is handed out on the basis of inertia. In the past century, particle physics has grown into a large, very influential and well-connected community. They will keep on building bigger particle colliders as long as they can, simply because that’s what particle physicists do, whether that makes sense or not."
- dekhn 6y agoshe is also the person who accused the people running LIGO of major scientific misconduct. After reading a bunch of what she's written I really don't think her opinions in these areas contribute a lot to the long-term scientific discussion.
- brutt 6y agoHer arguments looks valid for me. Can you explain your concern?
- sdwa 6y agoShe does seem to have made something of a side hustle out of arguing against large scientific experiments. From my point of view, just build it. Sure money could be better spent elsewhere in principle, but it could also be spent reasonably well on the FCC. And I never understood her degree of concern, the sums at play here aren't that big. She'd be better off just campaigning against tax avoidance if she's so concerned about the state coffers rather than arguing for cutting research spending which may or may not actually be redirected towards other research.
- jmount 6y agoJust imagine that €21B spent on biological/medical programs.
- andrepd 6y agoYou should be more angry about 700B on defense spending in the US, or >2000B in bank/corporate bailouts. Rather than being upset that money is being spent on a good thing instead of an (in your eyes) better thing.
- epistasis 6y agoI'm biased, but that's exactly what I would like to see, and I think would have huge scientific returns. That's on the order of magnitude of the NIH budget in the US. But it's spread across a huge number of researchers rather than just a few huge projects. The Human Genome Project was only a $1B project which led to huge technology development in sequencers. Other efforts at developing large canonical datasets have been less effective at spinning out clear tech wins, but they have had huge science wins. I think biology has been really good at balancing having tons of churn from small independent labs pushing on new ideas, and coming together for big asks when it makes sense.
- ape4 6y agoThere are medical spinoffs. eg Positron emission tomography = PET scan.
- pfdietz 6y ago
- dschuetz 6y agoTwo things: 1) The article is amazingly low on specifics besides "to uncover the Higgs Boson's secrets" 2) The only thing to agree with is what Sabine Hossenfelder says (as always): it costs way too much without any significant scientific potential. Meaning, there are not enough viable theories to prove on that thing. Sure, people who will be getting paid from those $21B of public money are saying: "Another one! Even bigger and faster! That project will be definitely worthwhile!"
- BrandoElFollito 6y agoThis is such a loss of money. The practical aspects will never be used. This will move some technologies a bit ahead but so would work on biology and medical areas. I would be much more happy to see people cured or otherwise helped than to know that a partcle is this or that. This is in strong opposition to what happened in these areas of physics in the previous century. Things which were directives had a conceivable practical application. What can you make out of events which happen at such energies, the kind we will never reach outside of such research centers.
- orf 6y agoJust wait until you see your countries military budget!
- calcifer 6y agoScience for its own sake is a noble pursuit. Not everything has to have commercial applications or to be "practical".
- qwobit 6y agoAgree. But another thing I must point out is that pure mathematics is an example of ‘doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff’ and it has had an incredibly long lasting influence, with physicists turning to pure mathematics research to aid with their own problems. The solution just has to be a perfect fit with the problem to become practical in industry. We often do not see the practicality of such abstract ideas until they are abundant in use.
- BrandoElFollito 6y agoWith mathematics you have at least hope to use it someday. Indeed, research on elliptic equations may not have been seen as important until widespread crypto hit. Moreover, the cost is small. This is also the rational by which we can agree that philosophy is worth spending money on (because "general culture"). Here we have 20B€ so that some people discover the structure of a particle, knowing that it is exactly impossible to have a real life use because of the required energies.
- _Microft 6y agoMoney printer should go brrr? Would it really be bad to simply print the money for CERN, ITER or other scientific projects? New money without anything in return is bad but here? In these cases we would get an actual collider/reactor/rocket/whatever - built by actual companies that employ actual people, run by actual scientists, maintained by actual engineers, ...
- ImprobableTruth 6y agoWhat is the actual return of the project itself though? You could also print money to build a tower of babel and it seems like the same general benefits would apply.
- ceejayoz 6y ago> What is the actual return of the project itself though? A better understanding of the universe we live in?
- Barrin92 6y agothat's true for almost all human scientific or inventive activity, so the case for this has to be made in the face of opportunity costs. 21 billion could be spent on two hundred thousand(!) 100k grants to scientists. Building a giant machine to perform experiments that will likely merely confirm the existing models of particle physics while revealing very little of interest to society at large is pretty much indefensible.
- Gibbon1 6y ago> 21 billion could be spent on two hundred thousand The $1T F35 program has entered the chat.
- Barrin92 6y agoI agree with you. But then again the corruption/waste in military procurement/development is a well-known issue. I think paying strong attention to return per bucks is a mindset we need to reintroduce in every sector.
- btrettel 6y agoWhat's more interesting to me than HEP is how HEP became such a big deal. I asked on HN before why people find HEP interesting and the responses were enlightening to me as someone who finds HEP boring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322857 Personally, I find turbulence much more interesting. The fact that it's orders of magnitude more important than HEP and also very intellectually challenging should give pause to those who have dedicated their lives to HEP. But my impression is that cultural forces have unfortunately convinced many of our best and brightest to go into HEP or other similarly impractical areas of physics. I guess that's better than working for Facebook to make people click on ads, but that's setting the bar low. If you're interested in physics, you can make a much better choice than HEP. (If you're open to areas outside of physics you may be able to make an even better choice.) I can see why someone might view the "building blocks" of the universe as fundamental or how there are interesting philosophical questions that HEP can address. But turbulence is fairly ubiquitous; certainly that makes it "fundamental" in some sense. And there are philosophical implications of chaos and statistical mechanics; turbulence is part of both.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoI too have waved my hand in the smoke from a snuffed candle, and sure it's fun for a while but pretty soon it just becomes a big mundane mush and I go out to look at the stars instead.
- leephillips 6y agoScientists are trained to accept a philosophical stance that regards particle physics are more fundamental than turbulence. Most have never critically questioned the meaning of “fundamental” in physics: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/turbulence-the-oldest-unsolved-problem-in-physics/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/turbulence-the-oldes...
- whatshisface 6y agoYou can explain how turbulence arises from particles, but you can't explain how particles arise from turbulence, because they don't...
- zests 6y agoI support super-colliders for the same reason I support space research. If we aren't on earth to discover something greater than ourselves, what purpose do we have? I could see the creation of a utopia or an equitable state as another purpose. I suppose some people don't support super-colliders because they want money to go to this goal instead.
- leephillips 6y agoSome people don’t support supercolliders because they want us to “discover something greater than ourselves”, but they think there are better ways to do that, and money spent on huge HEP projects takes funding away from what could be more fruitful and interesting projects.
- Barrin92 6y ago>If we aren't on earth to discover something greater than ourselves, what purpose do we have? This almost sounds like the secular version of the tower of babel. The point of building scientific instruments ought not to be the worship of science as some sort of ritualistic activity. We (ideally) engage in science to maximize human knowledge and insight, not to just build a utopia or the 2001 monolith.
- supernova87a 6y agoIn the current climate of inequity making the front pages of the news and dominating the public discourse, I would think such huge expenditures would be anathema to the populist agenda? Because the beneficiaries of the jobs of this project are definitely not the disadvantaged in society (research-wise, or construction-wise). And I have to say, HEP's huge experiments seem to produce one-time headline discoveries (of a few hundred authors, yes), but then quickly become obsolete pieces of equipment. And the science or industrial benefits themselves, of hitting the next tier beyond 13 TeV for such a collider? What is, and where does that benefit go? Does anyone have even an inkling of what results it will produce? Or is this just HEP on autopilot, "we need the next big one"? Please don't trot out the usual "science for its own sake", as if that justifies any arbitrary amount of $ being spent without question. At least astronomy produces pretty pictures for its funding.
- svara 6y agoPhysics has almost single-handledy enabled the last 100 years or so of economic growth. You could make a decent case that increase in inequity has something to do with a slowdown in the progress of physics: A lack of fundamental advancement means people are not making new stuff, but rather fighting over its distribution. Now, I don't know if this collider is going to make any difference about that. Quite likely it won't. But given physics' track record, I don't think it's clear at all that there are very many things that the money would be better spent on.
- pfdietz 6y agoIt's unlikely that physical phenomena that require machines the size of small countries to detect are going to lead to any practical use.
- ephimetheus 6y agoThe LHC and HL-LHC after it will run until the thirties. We’re squeezing the absolute maximum out of the investment in the 27km ring we can here. LHC physics has produced tons and tons of results over the last 10+ years, it’s just that not all of them are exciting enough to the general public that you read about them. Still worthwhile though.
- magicalhippo 6y agoWhile I've been very interested in HEP as a teen and up, even as a "fanboy" the science potential seems very dubious. When they approved the LHC, they were almost entirely certain they'd find the Higgs and there was solid arguments for why they should find more. Now it seems much less clear that they stand to find anything groundbreaking by simply doing more of the same. Personally I'd like to see more money being put towards condensed matter physics, quantum information science and similar areas which seems to have potential for much more practical applications.
- ephimetheus 6y agoContrary to the headline it’s also not a done deal yet. They recommend further R&D to keep the possibility of FCC available.
- spekcular 6y agoFinding new particles isn't even the primary reason to build a new collider. Don't be fooled into thinking it's a new particle or bust.
- magicalhippo 6y agoI'm not. Considering the vast amounts of money needed for these huge colliders, for me it's about diminishing returns. I just don't think anything we learn "down there" will have as much impact compared to other areas. Instead I think now is a good time to slow down a bit, fund other interesting areas more, until we have a better handle on where to look. Then we can come back, if possible.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- beezle 6y agoNew is old....SSC was about the same size though only 40TeV but by now would have had a magnet upgrade to surely push close to 100TeV
- bricss 6y agoWhat if I'll tell you Higgs boson’s doesn't exist? ╰(°▽°)╯
- ClearZ 6y agoThis is madness. I heard all the "Loads of tech spinoffs" argument while the LHC was being built and have yet to see or hear of anything. This cash would be far better spent getting a manned EU space program up and running. The EU is badly in need of something that everybody can get behind and see as a united vision for the future, not some machine that only an elite few can enjoy. Some other nation(s) should build the next colider.
- aaron695 6y agoIn choosing the lockdown we have ruled this out. Along with support of minorities, disabilities and the environment and all such things. The next half a decade isn't going to be much fun.
- nickik 6y agoI think building a assemble in space, space telescope would be the best use for a mega project in science. I admit I don't know enough about colliders to evaluate the scientific impact. But I think once we figure out how to assemble gigantic telescopes in space, the options for astronomy and maybe physics are huge. With the ability to launch cheaply now, and with Starship maybe even cheaper in the future. You can build something truly gigantic in space. What I think is more practically pressing is a commercial competition for next generation of fission reactors, but that was pressing since the 1970s and politics has ignore it. So that's not gone happen.