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there's a lot of learning potential in building one or two but after that you're pretty much just making them bigger. There's a lot of engineering and construct

there's a lot of learning potential in building one or two but after that you're pretty much just making them bigger. There's a lot of engineering and construction involved but the new ones are really just very expensive and huge without netting necessarily much in terms of engineering science. In particular if you consider opportunity costs. With the 23 billion(!) it costs to build the new Large Hadron collider you could fund 230.000 100k grants to young scientists. That's enough money to fund entire disciplines. And that's important to keep in mind because money is a limited resource and what's relevant is where that money didn't go rather than just speaking idealistically about the potential benefits of a megaproject.

welterde 5y ago
The technology used in the accelerator and the detectors keeps changing though. Particle accelerators today are quite different to those in the 60ies. Also not sure where you got the 23 billions from. Total budget for LHC is less than 8 billion euros. And that's over quite a long time frame. The whole CERN budget is only 1.1 billion a year (and they run quite a few different experiments apart from the LHC). That's within a factor of a few of a major sports club!
- Barrin92 5y ago
  I'm talking about the new collider (FCC), the LHC is already finished so there's not much point talking about its costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Circular_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Circular_Collider
spekcular 5y ago
"There's a lot of engineering and construction involved but the new ones are really just very expensive and huge without netting necessarily much in terms of engineering science." This is extremely false. The new engineering science required to make the incredibly strong magnets for each collider (newer colliders requiring stronger magnets) is one obvious counterexample.
SiempreViernes 5y ago
Your comment about skill transfer is about as accurate as if you had meant going from "toy boat" to "Ever Given (the ship)".
davrosthedalek 5y ago
The world spends about 2 Trillion dollars on military per year. 23 billion over, say, 10 years as a lower bound, is a per mille of that. NASA has a yearly budget of 20 billion, ~1/3 of which goes into science. (BTW, with 100k, in experimental physics, you can't even pay for a postdoc at an US institution for a year) That shouldn't mean NASA should get less money. But 23 billion for a world-wide, multi-decade project isn't that much.

welterde 5y ago

The technology used in the accelerator and the detectors keeps changing though. Particle accelerators today are quite different to those in the 60ies. Also not sure where you got the 23 billions from. Total budget for LHC is less than 8 billion euros. And that's over quite a long time frame. The whole CERN budget is only 1.1 billion a year (and they run quite a few different experiments apart from the LHC). That's within a factor of a few of a major sports club!

Barrin92 5y ago
I'm talking about the new collider (FCC), the LHC is already finished so there's not much point talking about its costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Circular_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Circular_Collider

spekcular 5y ago

"There's a lot of engineering and construction involved but the new ones are really just very expensive and huge without netting necessarily much in terms of engineering science." This is extremely false. The new engineering science required to make the incredibly strong magnets for each collider (newer colliders requiring stronger magnets) is one obvious counterexample.

SiempreViernes 5y ago

Your comment about skill transfer is about as accurate as if you had meant going from "toy boat" to "Ever Given (the ship)".

davrosthedalek 5y ago

The world spends about 2 Trillion dollars on military per year. 23 billion over, say, 10 years as a lower bound, is a per mille of that. NASA has a yearly budget of 20 billion, ~1/3 of which goes into science. (BTW, with 100k, in experimental physics, you can't even pay for a postdoc at an US institution for a year) That shouldn't mean NASA should get less money. But 23 billion for a world-wide, multi-decade project isn't that much.