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> It could be a hard sell, especially as the new collider wouldn’t have as clear a goal as the LHC did. However, particle physics and the Standard Model are at

> It could be a hard sell, especially as the new collider wouldn’t have as clear a goal as the LHC did. However, particle physics and the Standard Model are at a place where the application of science is needed to validate theories. I mean I understand the need to keep pushing the boundaries of fundamental physics, but how long do you justify such spending on a single project? That same money could possibly be pumped into more immediately useful "hard" applied problems like fusion reactors, clean energy, propulsion systems or pretty much any problem on the technology horizon that won't be funded by private capital.

The_rationalist 6y ago
Or 23 Billions for building the first serious AGI project!
dgellow 6y ago
> That same money could possibly be pumped into more immediately useful "hard" applied problems like fusion reactors Interesting, I just checked the number for ITER (i.e: Europe's main fusion project), the project has been estimated at around €20-30 billion (with some pessimistic estimates from the US at around €60 billion for the completion of the reactor). And that's considered a VERY HIGH cost and has been the main concern from participating countries. But somehow $23 billion for a new collider have been approved? Edit: correction, $23 billion haven't been approved, the plans for a potential collider, estimated at $23 billion, have been approved.
- usrusr 6y ago
  Think of CERN more as a cultural endeavor. It's the big, permanent, multigenerational physicists jamboree. The big colliders are not the goal, they are merely the foundation. The meat is in the detectors and experiments that are attached and that would not be possible elsewhere. Sure, the flagship experiments are also important in their own right, but their function as a rallying point, as a halo product for everything else that is happening there is a big reason why they should be funded. A reactor project is a much less colorful affair, focused on a single deliverable. More contractors, less postgrads. There should be money for both.
- simonh 6y ago
  ITER is just a demonstration system, it will hopefully produce a modest energy surplus. As just one step towards an actual useful fusion energy source, Its a proof of concept and it's cost need to be considered in the context of the whole endeavour. The new collider will be a fully functional 'production' system that we fully expect to probe new physics, and test specific scenarios that will require it's particular capabilities. It's an end product and the latest in a highly successful, proven series of systems. By itself that doesn't make it worthwhile, but I think a high cost for a final system is a different beast from a high cost from a test project.
- vidarh 6y ago
  ITER's successor, DEMO is in planning, with a similar planned timeframe as this new collider... If we wanted to assign them to "generations", ITER should be compared against LHC. ITER is considered very expensive exactly because nobody wants to spend all their money on one type of project, but in fact are concerned about ensuring their science funding is well rounded.
boudin 6y ago
In an ideal world, both happens at the same time. Applied physics require fundamental research. It's impossible to say what will come out of it, but most of today's technologies comes from research that allowed us to understand our environment. Fundamental research takes time, maybe this project will allow future generations to solve problems they are facing.
orbifold 6y ago
While it is one project it also is an umbrella to fund a large number of smaller projects. Whole institutes were funded and build in part to develop detector components for the LHC. A project like this gives everyone a common goal and pushes technology development in sectors that are critical to Europe's high tech economy. It also has consequences for the IT sector in Europe. Before cloud companies had to deal with PetaBytes of data, scientists at CERN and elsewhere developed techniques for filtering, storing and analysing this data with sophisticated statistical tools (and machine learning). You can easily scale your analysis run to thousands of machines all over the world and transparently get access to the huge experiment datastore. There is no other scientific field in Europe that has developed a similar level of sophistication and scale. The initial idea behind the Human Brain Project was to build a similar infrastructure for Neuroscience research. But instead of the cooperation in Particle Physics it resulted in fierce opposition, out of fear that funding would be shifted away from national funding agencies and independent researchers and doubts over the ambitious goals of the project. If you think about it a project like CERN, that successfully contributed to understanding of the fundamental forces of nature is in some ways much more ambitious than a centralised program to understand the Human brain. But the latter got badly derailed multiple times simply because the participants did not have the single minded will, focus and consensus that the Particle Physics community has been able to maintain for almost 70 years now.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > it also is an umbrella to fund a large number of smaller projects Then justify the spending on those merits. Spending for the sake of spending isn’t a great argument. Why is a new supercollider a better use of resources than, say, a new telescope? Or a suite of gravitational wave or neutrino detectors? A host of fusion research reactors? The opportunity cost of spending shouldn’t be ignored just because it isn’t entirely useless.
  - orbifold 6y ago
    Because sometimes it is better to keep a large number of people occupied with one specific goal instead of trying to convince them to do something else. This ultimately boils down to people, most of them are very smart and capable and could do any number of other things, but basically want to work on fundamental particle physics. You couldn't easily convince them to build a telescope instead (a totally different set of people finds that fascinating) or any of the other things you listed. Besides there are (smaller) collaborations that work on all of these other things you mentioned as well. Furthermore there is good motivation to keep nuclear / particle physics research as centrally organised as possible because the people working on it would be equally capable of producing nuclear weapons. For example a good number of the people working with CERN in France sit right across the Institute that developed their nuclear weapons.
brnt 6y ago
Protontherapy alone is enough justification in my opinion. Add the many kinds of detector offshoots that find their way to industry. The web itself, if you wanna go back a bit further. Aren't those worth it you think?
- pfdietz 6y ago
  How is proton therapy a justification? The protons in PT have energies six orders of magnitude below that of this proposed FCC. Are you saying that the historical precedent of PT means FCC will also have that sort of spinoff? That's not a legitimate argument.
  - brnt 6y ago
    Accelerator physics would have been unlikely to have progressed as far as it has without HEP. Beam line components for cyclo-/synchrotrons up to proton therapeutic energies are not seen in non HEP facilities (material physics). FCC of course will not produce spinoffs that have already spun off, but what exactly will spin off we obviously can't predict very precisely.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      I think you're engaging in a bit of cargo cult thinking here. FCC is analogous to early HEP, but it's an error to think that analogy implies similar outcomes. The sheer scale of FCC argues against similar sorts of direct spinoff. And indirect spinoffs are a poor justification for anything -- they can come from anything, after all, so provide no justification for a specific approach.
  - techphys_91 6y ago
    The top energy of the accelerator might not be a good judge of how practical its technology will turn out to be. The maximum center-of-mass energy of CLIC is 3 TeV [1], far in excess of what would currently be considered practical. Nevertheless the technology developed for CLIC is now being looked at for providing very high-energy electron beams for cancer therapy [2]. Making something like the FCC isn't just a matter of making a bigger copy of the LHC, it has its own specific challenges [3,4]. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Linear_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Linear_Collider 2 - Slide 7, https://indico.cern.ch/event/578818/contributions/2487012/attachments/1435583/2207629/strathclydeVHEE2.pdf https://indico.cern.ch/event/578818/contributions/2487012/at... 3 - http://fcc-ee.web.cern.ch/content/accelerator-challenges http://fcc-ee.web.cern.ch/content/accelerator-challenges 4 - https://indico.fnal.gov/event/16753/contributions/39405/attachments/24513/30556/FCC_HELHC_AccelPhys_VS_v1.pdf https://indico.fnal.gov/event/16753/contributions/39405/atta...
Faaak 6y ago
Meanwhile, US's DOD budget in 2020 is 718 billion dollars.. So yeah..
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  The fact that a huge amount of money is wasted in one area doesn't justify wasting a smaller amount somewhere else.
  - cygx 6y ago
    But it puts things into perspective. Humanity blows crazy amounts of money on war, entertainment, advertising and the financial industry, within a system where something like two dozen individuals can (collectively) amass trillions of dollars of personal wealth. But $20 billion for fundamental science, spread out among 23 comparatively wealthy nations is too much?
    - vidarh 6y ago
      To expand on your point to illustrate how relatively little this is: Norway alone spends about $6bn on research and development a year for a population of ~5m people... This project will take ~30 years to complete. Norway alone could fund it. But there's as you say 23 members (and more associate members), and as a CERN member, Norway contributes ~$30m/year to CERN. That's 0.5% of the R&D budget, or about $6/year per person. This is the highest per capita amount of any CERN member, since funding is determined based on GDP. E.g. the UK pays less than half as much per capita as Norway. As such, it's reasonable to assume that for most members of CERN, funding to CERN takes up less than a percent of their R&D budgets. It is likely member states would have to pay more for this, but amortized over the project period, we're talking at most double even without an international (beyond the member states) consortium. And of course it's not only the 23 member states that benefits from this. Overall in terms of worldwide science funding, CERN is a rounding error.
- 9OzUIvDwF4LvfUM 6y ago
  That isn't relevant. CERN isn't a US government project and the US doesn't provide funding. The cumulative budgets of the EDA member states €223 billion in 2018[1]. [1] https://www.eda.europa.eu/docs/default-source/brochures/eda-defence-data-2017-2018 https://www.eda.europa.eu/docs/default-source/brochures/eda-...

The_rationalist 6y ago

Or 23 Billions for building the first serious AGI project!

dgellow 6y ago

> That same money could possibly be pumped into more immediately useful "hard" applied problems like fusion reactors Interesting, I just checked the number for ITER (i.e: Europe's main fusion project), the project has been estimated at around €20-30 billion (with some pessimistic estimates from the US at around €60 billion for the completion of the reactor). And that's considered a VERY HIGH cost and has been the main concern from participating countries. But somehow $23 billion for a new collider have been approved? Edit: correction, $23 billion haven't been approved, the plans for a potential collider, estimated at $23 billion, have been approved.

usrusr 6y ago
Think of CERN more as a cultural endeavor. It's the big, permanent, multigenerational physicists jamboree. The big colliders are not the goal, they are merely the foundation. The meat is in the detectors and experiments that are attached and that would not be possible elsewhere. Sure, the flagship experiments are also important in their own right, but their function as a rallying point, as a halo product for everything else that is happening there is a big reason why they should be funded. A reactor project is a much less colorful affair, focused on a single deliverable. More contractors, less postgrads. There should be money for both.
simonh 6y ago
ITER is just a demonstration system, it will hopefully produce a modest energy surplus. As just one step towards an actual useful fusion energy source, Its a proof of concept and it's cost need to be considered in the context of the whole endeavour. The new collider will be a fully functional 'production' system that we fully expect to probe new physics, and test specific scenarios that will require it's particular capabilities. It's an end product and the latest in a highly successful, proven series of systems. By itself that doesn't make it worthwhile, but I think a high cost for a final system is a different beast from a high cost from a test project.
vidarh 6y ago
ITER's successor, DEMO is in planning, with a similar planned timeframe as this new collider... If we wanted to assign them to "generations", ITER should be compared against LHC. ITER is considered very expensive exactly because nobody wants to spend all their money on one type of project, but in fact are concerned about ensuring their science funding is well rounded.

boudin 6y ago

In an ideal world, both happens at the same time. Applied physics require fundamental research. It's impossible to say what will come out of it, but most of today's technologies comes from research that allowed us to understand our environment. Fundamental research takes time, maybe this project will allow future generations to solve problems they are facing.

orbifold 6y ago

While it is one project it also is an umbrella to fund a large number of smaller projects. Whole institutes were funded and build in part to develop detector components for the LHC. A project like this gives everyone a common goal and pushes technology development in sectors that are critical to Europe's high tech economy. It also has consequences for the IT sector in Europe. Before cloud companies had to deal with PetaBytes of data, scientists at CERN and elsewhere developed techniques for filtering, storing and analysing this data with sophisticated statistical tools (and machine learning). You can easily scale your analysis run to thousands of machines all over the world and transparently get access to the huge experiment datastore. There is no other scientific field in Europe that has developed a similar level of sophistication and scale. The initial idea behind the Human Brain Project was to build a similar infrastructure for Neuroscience research. But instead of the cooperation in Particle Physics it resulted in fierce opposition, out of fear that funding would be shifted away from national funding agencies and independent researchers and doubts over the ambitious goals of the project. If you think about it a project like CERN, that successfully contributed to understanding of the fundamental forces of nature is in some ways much more ambitious than a centralised program to understand the Human brain. But the latter got badly derailed multiple times simply because the participants did not have the single minded will, focus and consensus that the Particle Physics community has been able to maintain for almost 70 years now.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> it also is an umbrella to fund a large number of smaller projects Then justify the spending on those merits. Spending for the sake of spending isn’t a great argument. Why is a new supercollider a better use of resources than, say, a new telescope? Or a suite of gravitational wave or neutrino detectors? A host of fusion research reactors? The opportunity cost of spending shouldn’t be ignored just because it isn’t entirely useless.
- orbifold 6y ago
  Because sometimes it is better to keep a large number of people occupied with one specific goal instead of trying to convince them to do something else. This ultimately boils down to people, most of them are very smart and capable and could do any number of other things, but basically want to work on fundamental particle physics. You couldn't easily convince them to build a telescope instead (a totally different set of people finds that fascinating) or any of the other things you listed. Besides there are (smaller) collaborations that work on all of these other things you mentioned as well. Furthermore there is good motivation to keep nuclear / particle physics research as centrally organised as possible because the people working on it would be equally capable of producing nuclear weapons. For example a good number of the people working with CERN in France sit right across the Institute that developed their nuclear weapons.

brnt 6y ago

Protontherapy alone is enough justification in my opinion. Add the many kinds of detector offshoots that find their way to industry. The web itself, if you wanna go back a bit further. Aren't those worth it you think?

pfdietz 6y ago
How is proton therapy a justification? The protons in PT have energies six orders of magnitude below that of this proposed FCC. Are you saying that the historical precedent of PT means FCC will also have that sort of spinoff? That's not a legitimate argument.
- brnt 6y ago
  Accelerator physics would have been unlikely to have progressed as far as it has without HEP. Beam line components for cyclo-/synchrotrons up to proton therapeutic energies are not seen in non HEP facilities (material physics). FCC of course will not produce spinoffs that have already spun off, but what exactly will spin off we obviously can't predict very precisely.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    I think you're engaging in a bit of cargo cult thinking here. FCC is analogous to early HEP, but it's an error to think that analogy implies similar outcomes. The sheer scale of FCC argues against similar sorts of direct spinoff. And indirect spinoffs are a poor justification for anything -- they can come from anything, after all, so provide no justification for a specific approach.
- techphys_91 6y ago
  The top energy of the accelerator might not be a good judge of how practical its technology will turn out to be. The maximum center-of-mass energy of CLIC is 3 TeV [1], far in excess of what would currently be considered practical. Nevertheless the technology developed for CLIC is now being looked at for providing very high-energy electron beams for cancer therapy [2]. Making something like the FCC isn't just a matter of making a bigger copy of the LHC, it has its own specific challenges [3,4]. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Linear_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Linear_Collider 2 - Slide 7, https://indico.cern.ch/event/578818/contributions/2487012/attachments/1435583/2207629/strathclydeVHEE2.pdf https://indico.cern.ch/event/578818/contributions/2487012/at... 3 - http://fcc-ee.web.cern.ch/content/accelerator-challenges http://fcc-ee.web.cern.ch/content/accelerator-challenges 4 - https://indico.fnal.gov/event/16753/contributions/39405/attachments/24513/30556/FCC_HELHC_AccelPhys_VS_v1.pdf https://indico.fnal.gov/event/16753/contributions/39405/atta...

Faaak 6y ago

Meanwhile, US's DOD budget in 2020 is 718 billion dollars.. So yeah..

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
The fact that a huge amount of money is wasted in one area doesn't justify wasting a smaller amount somewhere else.
- cygx 6y ago
  But it puts things into perspective. Humanity blows crazy amounts of money on war, entertainment, advertising and the financial industry, within a system where something like two dozen individuals can (collectively) amass trillions of dollars of personal wealth. But $20 billion for fundamental science, spread out among 23 comparatively wealthy nations is too much?
  - vidarh 6y ago
    To expand on your point to illustrate how relatively little this is: Norway alone spends about $6bn on research and development a year for a population of ~5m people... This project will take ~30 years to complete. Norway alone could fund it. But there's as you say 23 members (and more associate members), and as a CERN member, Norway contributes ~$30m/year to CERN. That's 0.5% of the R&D budget, or about $6/year per person. This is the highest per capita amount of any CERN member, since funding is determined based on GDP. E.g. the UK pays less than half as much per capita as Norway. As such, it's reasonable to assume that for most members of CERN, funding to CERN takes up less than a percent of their R&D budgets. It is likely member states would have to pay more for this, but amortized over the project period, we're talking at most double even without an international (beyond the member states) consortium. And of course it's not only the 23 member states that benefits from this. Overall in terms of worldwide science funding, CERN is a rounding error.
9OzUIvDwF4LvfUM 6y ago
That isn't relevant. CERN isn't a US government project and the US doesn't provide funding. The cumulative budgets of the EDA member states €223 billion in 2018[1]. [1] https://www.eda.europa.eu/docs/default-source/brochures/eda-defence-data-2017-2018 https://www.eda.europa.eu/docs/default-source/brochures/eda-...