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CERN aims to build €20B collider
- habibur 3y ago$20 billion might have sounded huge 20 years back. But we are living in an age where someone paid $40bl for Twitter.
- jstummbillig 3y agoI would argue nobody paid 40b for Twitter. They paid that for the humans attached to it and the potential buying power they represent. The non-existent buying power of a collider makes it a very different kind of deal.
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- Xcelerate 3y agoFor real... “mankind debates whether pocket change worth spending to advance limits of human knowledge on science”
- fh973 3y agoThis seems to imply that the LHC has done it's job? Would it be switched off in the foreseeable future? Does the CERN run other instruments or is its existence tied to the LHC?
- elseweather 3y agothey have a whole complex of particle accelerators; many of the old ones are feeders into LHC https://home.web.cern.ch/science/accelerators/accelerator-complex/panoramas https://home.web.cern.ch/science/accelerators/accelerator-co...
- dghlsakjg 3y agoCERN has been around since 1954. Among other incredible nuclear science earning several Nobel prizes it also employed Tim Berners Lee when he created what would become the www. The LHC is but one of CERN’s world changing contributions.
- whatwhaaaaat 3y agoThis is the wrong place to get something like this wrong.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y agoThis is the wrong place to make an unhelpful comment like this one; Consider reading the HN guidelines on comment quality again, and then maybe share the part of GP's comment you think needs clarifying.
- whatwhaaaaat 3y agoNaw id rather laugh at you and oc.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoWhat am I wrong about? Everything factual I said is backed up here[1]. You can disagree with my opinion that the science is great, but it’s arguably impossible to be wrong on a purely subjective opinion. As you said: this is the wrong place to get something like this wrong. 1. https://public-archive.web.cern.ch/en/About/History-en.html https://public-archive.web.cern.ch/en/About/History-en.html
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- wolverine876 3y ago> This seems to imply that the LHC has done it's job? If you mean, 'LHC has nothing more to do', where do you see that in the article?
- ephimetheus 3y agoNot quite. We’re currently preparing for phase 2 of the LHC with increased beam intensities and therefore increased collected date. From a computing point of view, this poses lots of fun challenges! The current plan I believe is to run LHC and the experiments until the end of the 30s, to maximize return on investment in terms of “data per CHF”. Aside from that, CERN has other experiments and projects, some are benefitting from LHC and the big experiments, some are connected to the chain of preaccellerators, and some are completely independent.
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- bluish29 3y agoThis is the long term schedule for LHC [1] where you can get an idea about the plans for runs, maintainace and upgrades. The current plan is to run with HL-LHC (High Luminosity LHC) starting from Run 4 (2030) until Run 6 (2041). These plans will probably be extended because of different factors, but this gives the overall plan for LHC. And also why we start thinking about the next collider because it will take decades to be designed, build, commissioned and tested. This will require huge amount of efforts, community built and collaboration on a global scale. [1] https://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/schedule/LHC-long-term.htm https://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/schedule/LHC-long-term...
- magicalhippo 3y agoIndeed. A working group suggested the specs for what would become LHC back in 1987, and R&D for the magnets had started the year before. So 21 years before they first fired up the LHC in 2008. Keep in mind that the LHC would the existing tunnels from LEP, this new one will require a lot of drilling, so planning would have to start earlier relative to startup I imagine. [1]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsta.2014.0037 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsta.2014...
- tobinfricke 3y agoCERN has evolved over the decades, building generation after generation of more powerful accelerators. The predecessor to LHC was called LEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Electron%E2%80%93Positron_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Electron%E2%80%93Positro... Yes, the LHC has done its job, more or less. Of course there is more utility to be squeezed out of it. But it is also time to consider the next generation.
- hiddencost 3y ago[flagged]
- lostemptations5 3y ago20B dollars /euros seems like nothing these days...
- dragonelite 3y agolol 20 billions is nothing just say the Russians and the Chinese are invading the nano scale and see the west throw tens of billions around as if its nothing..
- dilivion 3y agoThere is nothing to imply that there is something to be discovered at that energy scale (100 TeV), and likely any potential breakthrough is far from the reach of the FCC. At least the LHC was aiming for the Higss (which could also be discovered at the Tevatron, but this was not certain at the time) and there was a great hope for supersymmetry. Perhaps the funding would best be used in other endeavors…
- tobias2014 3y agoIs knowing the presence of something more valuable than knowing the precise absence of something? In my opinion both drive our knowledge forward and challenge our current understanding and development of models.
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- saiya-jin 3y agoSure we can build more weapons, do social experiments that mostly fail and burn tens if not hundreds of billions with 0 or almost 0 returns, plenty of examples around. Heck, things like biofuels in EU have clearly negative overall impact yet we burned cash on it like there is no tomorrow. This is not taking budget from other scientists who will have to play with rocks for next few decades, the whole article sounds like an envy of rather weird folks ("Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy" is really not the best places to ask such questions). Overall, one of better uses of public money I've seen in past decade. > Because of the extra radiation generated by the machine, it would need to sit twice as far underground as the Large Hadron Collider. Since I live nearby, happy to see the proposed circle is mostly in France, relatively far from our place. Of course if some small black hole is created by accident it may not matter much.
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoWe were talking about this at work yesterday and trying to add up how many new LHC each UK government foul up could have bought. - HS2 rail : about five LHC - Liz Truss Budget: about two - Energy suppliers: only half - we stopped at this point Honestly it’s depressing how much we want to nickel and dime Scientific research yet are hilariously incompetent elsewhere
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoUK is also a massively failing economy though. Being bought by the middle east piecemeal.
- twixfel 3y agoIt's not massively failing, just relatively stagnant, and it's not being bought by the middle east, that's just not the case.
- tomalbrc 3y agoQuatar (or "its ruling family") does own £10bn in properties? https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2022/nov/05/how-qatar-bought-up-britain https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2022/nov...
- twixfel 3y agoYeah that's not that much, certainly not enough to warrant being called a "massively failing economy", otherwise so too was the US a massively failing economy in the 80s when Japan was buying everything up. Total property assets in the UK are worth £8.7 trillion. It says more about Qatar than it does about the UK, other than that the UK is a liberal capitalist democracy.
- qingcharles 3y agoAnd it's quite the turnaround for Qatar in the last 50 years considering how they were once part of the British Empire. The Qataris still have a fascination with British things (e.g. Harrods).
- tobinfricke 3y agoThe Superconducting Supercollider was to have a circumference of 87.1 km. The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is similar at a planned 91 km circumference. We could have had this in Texas.
- mad_tortoise 3y ago[flagged]
- Takennickname 3y ago$20B as a one time payment is nothing when compared to a defense budget of $750B a year for a country that is neighbored by Canada and Mexico.
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago> $20B as a one time payment is nothing when compared to a defense budget of $750B a year for a country that is neighbored by Canada and Mexico. It may be a smallish percentage of the defence budget - but it would be a massive amount to get approved.
- nindalf 3y agoA country that borders Canada and Mexico and also underwrites security for selected countries around the world. That’s Pax Americana isn’t it? You may correctly point out that they only did this because peace encouraged trade, which made them rich. You may also say that they did to increase their global influence and that would be right as well. But that means that the $750B a year is a rational expense that has economic and geopolitical benefits. That doesn’t mean any expense on any unrelated thing can be justified with “it’s only a few billion. What’s a few billion when you’re spending 750 on an unrelated thing”. Each expense needs its own cost benefit analysis. It may well be that $20B for a collider is cheap compared to the benefits, but you have to make that argument. Comparing expenses isn’t a compelling argument.
- derelicta 3y agoPax Americana only applies to close allies of the US Empire. Republics that do not bow to its Might get erased from the surface of the Earth.
- nindalf 3y agoYes, I can certainly see how such an argument can be made. I can think of counter-examples like India, which had been antagonistic towards the US for decades. This was especially apparent when the US provided naval support to Pakistan during the 1971 Indo-Pak war. And yet last I checked, India hadn't been erased from the surface of the Earth. But my original point stands - Pax Americana was very much worth it for America and her allies. The cost of the military budget used to maintain Pax Americana paid for itself.
- andsoitis 3y agoSince the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, CERN’s large hadron collider has not revealed any new significant physics that explains some of the deeper mysteries of the universe. It would be amazing if this new collider will let us peek beyond the decade long stasis.
- magicalhippo 3y agoHiggs was the main science objective of the LHC, though many, if not most, particle physicists expected the LHC to see something more. Keep in mind LHC has yet to collect most of its data as colliders tend to collect the most data near the end of their life, after all the upgrades and operational tweaks etc have been applied. As such there's still a chance of a discovery one way or another. That said, from what I've gathered, while particle physicists are less enthusiastic about these next-gen collider projects given what we've learned from LHC so far, there's also an acknowledgement that the expertise to build these colliders might be lost if we take a break from building colliders. The alternative could be very, very costly, as many lessons would have to be relearned the hard way.
- dschuetz 3y agoCern makes physicists look bad.
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- Mainan_Tagonist 3y agoa little Off-Topic but if you ever get to visit Geneva, there is a permanent exhibition at CERN to show how the LHC work and what is the organization around it to collect information, keep it running... etc... it is rather kid friendly too.
- bluish29 3y agoIf you happen to be there during a shutdown for maintenance or long shutdown, there is a great chance that you can get an on-site tour that will show you the machines itself. There are other tours too.
- Eavolution 3y agoMy old secondary school took the A level physics students to Geneva while it was shutdown, honestly the tour of the place is great. The Antimatter Factory (yep its a building full of horrifically complicated machines with ANTIMATTER FACTORY on the front) is really interesting too.
- saiya-jin 3y agoSaw this, they do massive maintenance every 5 years and do tours in various underground parts. First of all, I never saw any place better organized, not a smidge of dust, thousands of cables arranged perfectly. And then you get to collider/detector part which is this massive maybe 15m wide long cylinder, opened completely, and it looks like from sci-fi novels. Just the scale and evident competence of building such a hyper complex unique thing... I live in Switzerland, pretty used to well organized stuff but this was next level.
- mg 3y agoMaybe there are no secrets, but every time a new experiment is conducted, the universe randomly decides the outcome and then sticks to it? I think this is what we assume about small things already, like the position of a previously unmeasured photon or the spin of a previously unmeasured electron, right? Neither the photon has a position, nor the electron has a spin, but we measure one. And from then on, the the universe acts according to the measured values.
- bratbag 3y agoMaybe, but from a practical perspective even if this crazy hypothesis were true, the distinction is irrelevant.
- mg 3y agoWhy is it irrelevant for the universe, but not for electrons?
- guerrilla 3y agoIf that were true, what difference would it make? We would do everything exactly the same as how we would otherwise. There's also no way of testing your hypothesis becauase of that. It might fit well in a good hard sci-fi novel though. "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object."
- wkat4242 3y agoHere's to another wave of black hole doomsdayers :P I'll just buy another crowbar and I'm good.