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CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

134 points by gmays 2y ago

teekert 2y ago
Sabine is skeptical [0]. Is it really true that there a no theories that are proven or dicarded with this experiment, and that the Chinese have plans to do it much faster? Her video is pretty damning. [0] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/04/why-cerns-new-collider-plans-are-dead.html?m=1 https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/04/why-cerns-new-coll...
- jameskilton 2y ago
  The utter lack of significant discoveries at the LHC after the Higgs (2012!) is a pretty telling sign. Any bigger collider is riding purely on the hope that something will make the effort worth while.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    There's been plenty of significant discoveries, many, many. (O(10)s hadrons, consistent standard model discrepancies are really big news, those weren't expected) There hasn't been a significant new particle discovery, but none was expected other than Higgs, as far back as 2006 when I was still screwing around in graduate physics. I honestly can't remember the last time a new particle was randomly discovered by experiment that wasn't already proposed and agreed to as sound-in-theory. It's much cheaper and faster to do theory, then built what you need to verify, than to crank up energy as high as you can and hope for the best (I'd hazard a guess this ran out of steam by the 50s/60s at the latest)
    - T-A 2y ago
      > There hasn't been a significant new particle discovery, but none was expected other than Higgs The word "expected" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. At least one kind of Higgs had to be found unless the mass generation mechanism of the Standard Model and all its proposed extensions (MSSM etc) was categorically wrong; the LHC was designed to cover the entire mass range where it had to be. In that sense, the Higgs was strictly expected. But if you had asked a bunch of phenomenologists "What new thing do you expect to be found first at the LHC?", most would have gone for one or more superpartners. The Higgs' hierarchy problem [1] was believed to require electroweak-scale SUSY, which in turn implied the existence of electroweak-scale supersymmetric partners to the known SM particles. Those would have been easier to find than the Higgs, so they would have shown up earlier in the data, before there was enough of it to also discern a Higgs bump. You could argue that superpartners were not expected with the same degree of certainty as some kind of Higgs, but the absence of any sign of SUSY was a big disappointment, and the beginning of the end for what had become the dominating scenario for Beyond Standard Model physics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem#Supersymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem#Supersymmetr...
      - MadnessASAP 2y ago
        I'm not much of a particles guy but isn't the lack of "expected" discoveries itself a discovery?
        refulgentis 2y ago
        You nailed it. In addition, they're absolutely correct, some subset of particle researchers were wish-casting for SUSY stuff. In addition, there's a significant substantive difference between "$X was defined and built for discovering $Y" and "some subset of $X hoped for proof of their theory $Y via $Z being discovered" -- there was also some subset that hoped for proof of string theory, or innumerable other things. In general they're right and know their stuff if they're able to have this detailed of a take, but the actual claim "The word "expected" is doing a lot of work.", is doing a lot of work. And I was there. In a graduate physics lab with multiple faculty members on the LHC before it opened, including a big SUSY fan who thought that'd be a bank shot on a bank shot outcome, maybe. Hoped for by some? Yes. Expected by a majority? Absolutely not.
        MadnessASAP 2y ago
        Neat! Thanks for sharing your insight and fancy words :)
        T-A 2y ago
        Experimenters always were more skeptical; I hypothesized asking phenomenologists for a reason. I like Adam Falkowski's description of what it was like in [1] (about the end of dedicated SUSY working groups at CERN): the existence of SUSY was almost a fact for a bulk of researchers working on the topic. This certainly was reflected in hiring practices, and you had a large group of top researchers whose entire publication list was tied to supersymmetry [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supersymmetrys-long-fall-from-grace/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supersymmetrys-lo...
        refulgentis 2y ago
        I don't disagree but you choosing contrarianism to show you're clever and know a lot here (which worked!) made it sound like CERN was expecting a SUSY particle or whatever (which it wasn't)
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    I'm not a physicist, but if I understand correctly there's likely new-ish physics to be found in Higgs-Higgs interactions.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      There is a _hope_ that there's new physics there. But so far, nothing indicates that the next collider will find something. There is definitely new physics to be discovered, but it might need a collider the size of the Solar system for the discovery.
  - 77pt77 2y ago
    Negative results are valuable results. SUSY is excluded. Like completely at these scales. Extra dimensions the same.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      Sure, but there was never any firm reason to believe SUSY should be true, and certainly no evidence that it should happen at these scales specifically. This is like saying that burning a billion dollars in cash is valuable science, because it conclusively proved that money can't spontaneously reform out of ash, at least not at the scale of a billion dollars.
  - FilosofumRex 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - ChadNauseam 2y ago
      I don't know anything about high energy physics, but functional programming is carried on the shoulders of LGBT people, and it wouldn't surprise me if other extra-nerdy fields are similar. So I don't see anything wrong with CERN writing a blog post commemorating LGBT people.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Sabine is something other-than a good source on how physicists actually think about things at this point, unfortunately. It's not true at all. I'll come back and write some up over the next 20 minutes.
  - gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
    I look forward to it. I listened to her a lot recently because YouTube decided ever “next video” bump while I drove should be her.
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      Blissfully, I found an IEEE article that collects the stuff I'm aware of in one neat package. https://spectrum.ieee.org/supercolliders https://spectrum.ieee.org/supercolliders The shell games are: 1. claiming it is a proton collider[^1 source] designed to look for new particles [^2 comment]. 2. false equivalence between China putting in their latest 5 year plan to make a plan to make something that will transition to being a proton collider. And it's worse than that: If they immediately started after the plan was complete and on schedule, they'd be done in 2048 and transition from e/p to protons in 2066. CERNs plan is to be done with e/p in 2042 and transition to protons in 2070. That's 4 years later, but it's comically irrelevant. That's not getting done sooner, that's just transitioning to doing stuff we already can do faster, the cool thing and why both are interested in building one is the electron/positron collider stuff, not scaled up proton collider stuff. Content: - The project would transition to a proton collider at the end of its lifespan as a novel tool, in 2070. - It is proposed to operate by 2042, assuming funds dispersed over 12 years, starting in 2030. - It will operate as a electron-positron collider for the intervening ~3 decades before transitioning to essentially LHC with 4x power. - Electron / positron is a unique collision form, chosen to allow for more precise measurement, such as the LHC discoveries of discrepancies in the Standard Model. - This is very important work. The more precise you nail down these uncertainties, the more theorists can do to verify their work, allowing the experimentalists to know where to look for new stuff, if any. [^1 source] Via Sabine link: "CERN wants to build a new particle collider which will smash protons together at roughly 6 times the energies seen at the Large Hadron Collider." [^2 comment] This is the undercurrent of the whole criticism, I cannot explicitly source it to one sentence. It's also bizarre: I can't remember the last time experimentalists got to discover something without the theorists telling them where to look. It's cheaper that way! LHC was a failure too by that standard. There simply aren't any candidates in the theory that are accessible at humanities near-term energy levels, the Standard Model's worked beautifully, modulo these tantalizing discoveries at LHC of small discrepancies that electron/positron collisions let you explore.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ks2048 2y ago
  She seems to base her content on how good of a Mr-beast-style thumbnail she can make to get clicks.
  - gr_norm 2y ago
    I have repeatedly heard from people who work in physics research that she's optimized her content for maximum rage/anger/emotional response rather than accuracy, particularly as of late. The tidbits of truth and warranted skepticism lend the rest of it undue credibility. Sadly, good science reporting doesn't get the advertising revenue that manufactured-scandal tabloid-style reporting does. I think her critical perspective can be useful, but it's important to keep in mind while considering it that you're being presented a warped telling of reality.
    - 77pt77 2y ago
      > her content for maximum rage/anger/emotional response rather than accuracy Yes. The content mirrors the thumbnail style.
      - exe34 2y ago
        I've started to watch one or two videos of hers, but I don't respond very well to emotional rants. So I stopped.
        77pt77 2y ago
        It's a shame because some of her content is actually good. It's not like she's Kaku or something. Alas...
        exe34 2y ago
        to be honest, I already have several lifetimes of projects and books lined up, so I'm okay missing out on some things.
    - johnny22 2y ago
- Uptrenda 2y ago
  I was just about to post this. Good to see another Sabine listener here. Her criticism of particle physics, the LHC, and academia is absolutely savage.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  The report has about 100 pages with summaries of experiments they want to test there, if you want to see for yourself. Personally, I'm skeptical too, but the new ideas have been piling up since the time she started talking about this. Things have changed a lot since then.
elashri 2y ago
Before discussions go into some generic direction about the field. This is a huge feasibility study contain different aspects done by hundreds of people. People who are mostly interested about the physics case of FCC should read/skim at least through the first volume [1], second chapter (Specificities of the FCC physics case) the first four sections. This is about 35 pages with somehow accessible language to people with some physics knowledge. Personally I'm interested in their proposal about how they are going to approach software (Section 8). They plan to provide experiment agnostic and unified framework that is actually unified and user accessible. The field really need something like that, it is usually the pain point of most junior graduate student. The field suck at documentation and keep coherent software and write code in a bad way most of the time. I think they can have much better framework than Fermilab's art [2]. [1] https://cds.cern.ch/record/2928193 https://cds.cern.ch/record/2928193 [2] https://art.fnal.gov/ https://art.fnal.gov/
- aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
- sgt101 2y ago
  >hey plan to provide experiment agnostic and unified framework that is actually unified and user accessible. The field really need something like that, it is usually the pain point of most junior graduate student. The field suck at documentation and keep coherent software and write code in a bad way most of the time. I think they can have much better framework than Fermilab's art [2]. I don't think that I've ever heard of an area of software where folks say "it's got great documentation and the code's really good". In fact many programmers react allergically to any code that they review (including code that they wrote themselves but have forgotten about).
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    I'd echo this somewhat. Wading into other people's projects I'm often like "wtf is this mess.. why are your variables named a, b and c?" BUT.. some of the code that LLMs have spit out at me is absolutely wild in how well it is constructed, and it gives me real imposter syndrome when I see the occasions when the code is so much tighter and better than I would have personally crafted.
nullbio 2y ago
[flagged]
- dieortin 2y ago
  Surely what the world needs is to redirect more funding to AI
kristianp 2y ago
It doesn't feel ambitious enough to me. Spend 10s of billions to get a less than 10x energy about 40 years after LHC reached its peak. Also planning of the next one should have happened while the last one was being commissioned to avoid the huge gap between them.
- cshimmin 2y ago
  They did start planning around then. I don’t remember the exact date of when the FCC working group officially convened but they’ve been working on it at least since I was a grad student in the early 2010s.
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  There are those who wants to go larger, by building a submerged collider[1] in the area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico which could do 500 TeV. Using established technology from offshore industry it's supposedly not as crazy nor costly as one might first imagine. There was a nice and fairly accessible talk[2] given at Perimeter Institute, which gave some background and went into this and the FCC. [1]: https://arl.physics.tamu.edu/research/collider-in-the-sea/ https://arl.physics.tamu.edu/research/collider-in-the-sea/ [2]: https://pirsa.org/20100056 https://pirsa.org/20100056
  - mjevans 2y ago
    The link mentions 100 meters depth. Without being an expert that sounds deep enough to withstand hurricanes and such. However 100m depth? For a structure _that_ size, which I think might contain high vacuum, let alone systems that might need humans to service when they break? What is the feasibility of that problem?
    - XorNot 2y ago
      Presumably the plan would be you're actually building a the collider tunnel much like CERN under water, so effectively a very long pressure structure. This...probably isn't super-unreasonable for a static structure where you avoid the cost of excavation - i.e. it depends on how different in diameter from something like the Nordstream pipelines you'd be going.
jmyeet 2y ago
So I'm normally a fan of science but I'm torn on this one because, as far as I can tell, there's no clear objective with this collider. It just seems to be bumping up collision energy (to ~100TeV) and hoping something interesting pops out. The LHC had a clear objective: to experimentally validate the Higgs boson, which it did. There have been a ton of experiments since but AFAIK all those have really done is invalidated various theories. That has value, for sure. But it really seems like we need to play catch up and work out a theoretical model in what we'd actually search for with a bigger collider, rather than hoping higher energies will break something significant in the Stnardard Model in such a way that it'll give us a clue to a theory beyond the Standard Model. Think of it like looking for a treasure ship. As a salvager you may know from historical records that a given Spanish ship, carrying gold and silver from the New World, sunk on its way back to Spain. You may have developed a model to really narrow down where on the ocean floor you want to search. That's what the LHC was. But this seems like throwing a dart at a map and searching the ocean floor to see if anything interesting shows up.
- atoav 2y ago
  What you're actually saying is that there is no single and symbolic issue it is tackling, you know landing on the moon type stuff. That however is not how modern particle physics operates. A particle accelerator of the scale of CERN runs many experiments at once as with higher energies more becomes measurable. The idea here isn't that we have a hypothesis of a small thing existing and therefore we build a giant microscope, the idea is that we know we do not have a complete understanding of what happens in thst domain, so we build a giant mkcroscope to look at it. I am pretty damn sure there is a line of theoretical physicists who already know what to try once a bigger accelerator is around. And we have other benefitial developments coming out of that. The fact that you write this on the internet, a thing which was in no small part created by CERN should probably also tell us something.
nntwozz 2y ago
This makes me think of The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), I remember a scientist working there in an interview right after the first discovery telling the reporter how back in the day he was dissuaded by his teacher to go into the field because "there's nothing there, it's not a serious field of research" or something along those lines. Maybe a bigger collider is exactly what we need, and if it fails that's also useful as a confirmation to go in other directions. To build it right now instead of other things is the difficult question because that's politics.
neals 2y ago
I feel like with all the silly things humans do, every remotely feasible physics experiment should be top priority on getting funding and attention. Isn't finding out how the universe works, by far, the only thing that matters?
- daseiner1 2y ago
  i’d imagine food shelter and dignified employment rank just a little higher. in terms of higher-order needs, meaningful connection and love are quite a bit more important to me.
  - NitpickLawyer 2y ago
    > food shelter and dignified employment None of those are technological or even theoretical problems, tho. We (humanity as a whole) thoroughly understand all of them. Whatever your post meant with listing them is stemming from politics more than scientific understanding. I don't think there's a politician's head collider out there, but maybe we should build one.
    - exe34 2y ago
      there was a scene in SG-1 where O'Neill locks up a bunch of aliens in a room and said they would not be released until they came to some agreement. I always thought there should be a religious army with the entire world's military might, who's central tenet is that they do and decide nothing except enforce what the nations decide - and the nations get to decide in any way they want except violence - but they may choose a champion on each side of a divide, and the champions may hold a knife fight to the death. the army would then enforce the deal of the winner's side.
    - dgellow 2y ago
      Resource allocation is political
- voidfunc 2y ago
  This is such a privileged "I dont have real problems" take its hilarious.
neom 2y ago
How much of this kinda stuff is also about lithography etc? re: https://medium.com/@thechinaacademy/china-may-be-constructing-euv-lithography-machines-on-a-massive-scale-da796ea1af73 https://medium.com/@thechinaacademy/china-may-be-constructin... I know FCC is firmly science, but curious: does it help in this area of tech also?
- tomaskafka 2y ago
  I remember seeing a thread from a guy from ASML about this, he clearly said that any academic use is a lucky by-effect; China is building this to obsolete ASML for chip manufacturing.
deleted 2y ago
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throw8494949 2y ago
[flagged]
elric 2y ago
Is there any particular reason why they keep building colliders with ever increasing diamaters, instead of going vertical? If we can create magnetic fields strong & precise enough to force particles into a very large loop, surely we can bend the loop upwards ever so slightly and gain additional distance by coiling the collider like a spring? Seems like an insane amount of tunnels is always needed for these things, which is obviously expensive and labour intensive.
- petschge 2y ago
  For scale: The LHC has more than 11km diameter and the deepest mine we have built is 4km. Adding vertical distance is much harder than making the diameter of the circular tunnel larger.
  - elric 2y ago
    I worded that poorly, I didn't mean to say that the entire distance should be covered vertically, but rather that a second loop could be wound on top of the first.
- igiveup 2y ago
  The point is minimizing curvature, not maximizing length. Curved path makes the accelerated particles lose energy through radiation.
  - elric 2y ago
    Interesting, thanks fot clearing that up. I was under the impression that the length was where it's at.
derelicta 2y ago
Being a project manager for such an endeavour must be both thrilling and traumatic. I've only worked in small projects with a handful of stakeholders, I just can't imagine how all of this works when scaled 1000x.
BrandoElFollito 2y ago
This is unreasonable spending. And I am saying this as someone who did his PhD at CERN, so I am shitting my old bed. CERN is wonderful but the physics studied there are eons away from applications. This is not solid state physics where you can suddenly discover a great material. This is physics at such energies that we will not have anyone soon. Kinda like quasar astrophysics, about objects that are really far away. The usual response is that this is core science. Yes it is, but not the core science we need today. We have a limited budget for science and a mammoth like CERN cannot swallow it all. The other argument is that technology will get better. True. It can get better without the accelerator, though, if we really need it. I loved my time there, truly fantastic but the costs are not sustainable with current budgets for science
- fbn79 2y ago
  All is relative. 16 billions of EUR looks like a lot. But are spent in 12 years, so 1.3 Billions of Eur year. To compare Italy alone has spent 1 billion to have empty immigrant centers in Albania in less than two years.
  - BrandoElFollito 2y ago
    Of course, everything is relative. When I finished my PhD, getting a postdoc was easy and money was not really a concern. I did a "double PhD" (in two schools) and there were no problems for me to travel between the two (and associated costs). Now the world is fundamentally different and it is much more difficult. Not to mention that people move from academia to industry, sometimes fro financial reasons. When you put 16 B€ in front of that to study stuff that may be useful in 1000 years if we do a breakdown before (otherwise it won't) and you look at the site of budgets in universities, there is another relativity to be taken into account
  - _giorgio_ 2y ago
    Ecco il comunista
mmmBacon 2y ago
I was a physics student back when the SSC was cancelled. At the time it seemed like a terrible decision but years on I’m not sure the expense was worth it. In the end I think it worked out and was a good call to let the Europeans fund CERN and find the Higgs. I’m very pro science but I’ve come to a point where I’m asking is the juice worth the squeeze? I think beyond Higgs the juice is becoming harder to justify. The answer for particle physics can’t be to build larger and larger circular machines. Rather that money would be better spent on accelerator research to enable smaller more practical machines at high energies. Such machines may have some practical spinoff uses such as how FNAL offers neutron therapy.
esaiohotpvld 2y ago
What surprises me the most is the cost. This is considered to be one of the most expensive endeavors in science… but the first stage costs just about a billion a year? Jeff Bezos (or any other billionaire) could pay for the whole of it, and it would be like me going for a coffee. The yearly cost is 1% of what DOGE allegedly saved, three Marvel movies, and less than the GDP of San Marino. If one of the costliest ever scientific enterprises is this cheap, how many scientific advances are we leaving on the table? It makes me extremely sad. *Disclaimer: I enjoy Marvel movies and don't particularly believe DOGE claims about saved money. But I wanted to give some scale of what a billion francs (now about 1.2 billion USD) are.
jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago
It always blows my mind to see the anti-intelectualism of HN.

134 points by gmays 2y ago

Sabine is skeptical [0]. Is it really true that there a no theories that are proven or dicarded with this experiment, and that the Chinese have plans to do it much faster? Her video is pretty damning. [0] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/04/why-cerns-new-collider-plans-are-dead.html?m=1 https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/04/why-cerns-new-coll...

jameskilton 2y ago
The utter lack of significant discoveries at the LHC after the Higgs (2012!) is a pretty telling sign. Any bigger collider is riding purely on the hope that something will make the effort worth while.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  There's been plenty of significant discoveries, many, many. (O(10)s hadrons, consistent standard model discrepancies are really big news, those weren't expected) There hasn't been a significant new particle discovery, but none was expected other than Higgs, as far back as 2006 when I was still screwing around in graduate physics. I honestly can't remember the last time a new particle was randomly discovered by experiment that wasn't already proposed and agreed to as sound-in-theory. It's much cheaper and faster to do theory, then built what you need to verify, than to crank up energy as high as you can and hope for the best (I'd hazard a guess this ran out of steam by the 50s/60s at the latest)
  - T-A 2y ago
    > There hasn't been a significant new particle discovery, but none was expected other than Higgs The word "expected" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. At least one kind of Higgs had to be found unless the mass generation mechanism of the Standard Model and all its proposed extensions (MSSM etc) was categorically wrong; the LHC was designed to cover the entire mass range where it had to be. In that sense, the Higgs was strictly expected. But if you had asked a bunch of phenomenologists "What new thing do you expect to be found first at the LHC?", most would have gone for one or more superpartners. The Higgs' hierarchy problem [1] was believed to require electroweak-scale SUSY, which in turn implied the existence of electroweak-scale supersymmetric partners to the known SM particles. Those would have been easier to find than the Higgs, so they would have shown up earlier in the data, before there was enough of it to also discern a Higgs bump. You could argue that superpartners were not expected with the same degree of certainty as some kind of Higgs, but the absence of any sign of SUSY was a big disappointment, and the beginning of the end for what had become the dominating scenario for Beyond Standard Model physics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem#Supersymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem#Supersymmetr...
    - MadnessASAP 2y ago
      I'm not much of a particles guy but isn't the lack of "expected" discoveries itself a discovery?
      - refulgentis 2y ago
        You nailed it. In addition, they're absolutely correct, some subset of particle researchers were wish-casting for SUSY stuff. In addition, there's a significant substantive difference between "$X was defined and built for discovering $Y" and "some subset of $X hoped for proof of their theory $Y via $Z being discovered" -- there was also some subset that hoped for proof of string theory, or innumerable other things. In general they're right and know their stuff if they're able to have this detailed of a take, but the actual claim "The word "expected" is doing a lot of work.", is doing a lot of work. And I was there. In a graduate physics lab with multiple faculty members on the LHC before it opened, including a big SUSY fan who thought that'd be a bank shot on a bank shot outcome, maybe. Hoped for by some? Yes. Expected by a majority? Absolutely not.
        MadnessASAP 2y ago
        Neat! Thanks for sharing your insight and fancy words :)
        T-A 2y ago
        Experimenters always were more skeptical; I hypothesized asking phenomenologists for a reason. I like Adam Falkowski's description of what it was like in [1] (about the end of dedicated SUSY working groups at CERN): the existence of SUSY was almost a fact for a bulk of researchers working on the topic. This certainly was reflected in hiring practices, and you had a large group of top researchers whose entire publication list was tied to supersymmetry [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supersymmetrys-long-fall-from-grace/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supersymmetrys-lo...
        refulgentis 2y ago
        I don't disagree but you choosing contrarianism to show you're clever and know a lot here (which worked!) made it sound like CERN was expecting a SUSY particle or whatever (which it wasn't)
- pfdietz 2y ago
  I'm not a physicist, but if I understand correctly there's likely new-ish physics to be found in Higgs-Higgs interactions.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    There is a _hope_ that there's new physics there. But so far, nothing indicates that the next collider will find something. There is definitely new physics to be discovered, but it might need a collider the size of the Solar system for the discovery.
- 77pt77 2y ago
  Negative results are valuable results. SUSY is excluded. Like completely at these scales. Extra dimensions the same.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Sure, but there was never any firm reason to believe SUSY should be true, and certainly no evidence that it should happen at these scales specifically. This is like saying that burning a billion dollars in cash is valuable science, because it conclusively proved that money can't spontaneously reform out of ash, at least not at the scale of a billion dollars.
- FilosofumRex 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ChadNauseam 2y ago
    I don't know anything about high energy physics, but functional programming is carried on the shoulders of LGBT people, and it wouldn't surprise me if other extra-nerdy fields are similar. So I don't see anything wrong with CERN writing a blog post commemorating LGBT people.
refulgentis 2y ago
Sabine is something other-than a good source on how physicists actually think about things at this point, unfortunately. It's not true at all. I'll come back and write some up over the next 20 minutes.
- gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
  I look forward to it. I listened to her a lot recently because YouTube decided ever “next video” bump while I drove should be her.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Blissfully, I found an IEEE article that collects the stuff I'm aware of in one neat package. https://spectrum.ieee.org/supercolliders https://spectrum.ieee.org/supercolliders The shell games are: 1. claiming it is a proton collider[^1 source] designed to look for new particles [^2 comment]. 2. false equivalence between China putting in their latest 5 year plan to make a plan to make something that will transition to being a proton collider. And it's worse than that: If they immediately started after the plan was complete and on schedule, they'd be done in 2048 and transition from e/p to protons in 2066. CERNs plan is to be done with e/p in 2042 and transition to protons in 2070. That's 4 years later, but it's comically irrelevant. That's not getting done sooner, that's just transitioning to doing stuff we already can do faster, the cool thing and why both are interested in building one is the electron/positron collider stuff, not scaled up proton collider stuff. Content: - The project would transition to a proton collider at the end of its lifespan as a novel tool, in 2070. - It is proposed to operate by 2042, assuming funds dispersed over 12 years, starting in 2030. - It will operate as a electron-positron collider for the intervening ~3 decades before transitioning to essentially LHC with 4x power. - Electron / positron is a unique collision form, chosen to allow for more precise measurement, such as the LHC discoveries of discrepancies in the Standard Model. - This is very important work. The more precise you nail down these uncertainties, the more theorists can do to verify their work, allowing the experimentalists to know where to look for new stuff, if any. [^1 source] Via Sabine link: "CERN wants to build a new particle collider which will smash protons together at roughly 6 times the energies seen at the Large Hadron Collider." [^2 comment] This is the undercurrent of the whole criticism, I cannot explicitly source it to one sentence. It's also bizarre: I can't remember the last time experimentalists got to discover something without the theorists telling them where to look. It's cheaper that way! LHC was a failure too by that standard. There simply aren't any candidates in the theory that are accessible at humanities near-term energy levels, the Standard Model's worked beautifully, modulo these tantalizing discoveries at LHC of small discrepancies that electron/positron collisions let you explore.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ks2048 2y ago
She seems to base her content on how good of a Mr-beast-style thumbnail she can make to get clicks.
- gr_norm 2y ago
  I have repeatedly heard from people who work in physics research that she's optimized her content for maximum rage/anger/emotional response rather than accuracy, particularly as of late. The tidbits of truth and warranted skepticism lend the rest of it undue credibility. Sadly, good science reporting doesn't get the advertising revenue that manufactured-scandal tabloid-style reporting does. I think her critical perspective can be useful, but it's important to keep in mind while considering it that you're being presented a warped telling of reality.
  - 77pt77 2y ago
    > her content for maximum rage/anger/emotional response rather than accuracy Yes. The content mirrors the thumbnail style.
    - exe34 2y ago
      I've started to watch one or two videos of hers, but I don't respond very well to emotional rants. So I stopped.
      - 77pt77 2y ago
        It's a shame because some of her content is actually good. It's not like she's Kaku or something. Alas...
        exe34 2y ago
        to be honest, I already have several lifetimes of projects and books lined up, so I'm okay missing out on some things.
  - johnny22 2y ago
Uptrenda 2y ago
I was just about to post this. Good to see another Sabine listener here. Her criticism of particle physics, the LHC, and academia is absolutely savage.
marcosdumay 2y ago
The report has about 100 pages with summaries of experiments they want to test there, if you want to see for yourself. Personally, I'm skeptical too, but the new ideas have been piling up since the time she started talking about this. Things have changed a lot since then.

elashri 2y ago

Before discussions go into some generic direction about the field. This is a huge feasibility study contain different aspects done by hundreds of people. People who are mostly interested about the physics case of FCC should read/skim at least through the first volume [1], second chapter (Specificities of the FCC physics case) the first four sections. This is about 35 pages with somehow accessible language to people with some physics knowledge. Personally I'm interested in their proposal about how they are going to approach software (Section 8). They plan to provide experiment agnostic and unified framework that is actually unified and user accessible. The field really need something like that, it is usually the pain point of most junior graduate student. The field suck at documentation and keep coherent software and write code in a bad way most of the time. I think they can have much better framework than Fermilab's art [2]. [1] https://cds.cern.ch/record/2928193 https://cds.cern.ch/record/2928193 [2] https://art.fnal.gov/ https://art.fnal.gov/

aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
sgt101 2y ago
>hey plan to provide experiment agnostic and unified framework that is actually unified and user accessible. The field really need something like that, it is usually the pain point of most junior graduate student. The field suck at documentation and keep coherent software and write code in a bad way most of the time. I think they can have much better framework than Fermilab's art [2]. I don't think that I've ever heard of an area of software where folks say "it's got great documentation and the code's really good". In fact many programmers react allergically to any code that they review (including code that they wrote themselves but have forgotten about).
- qingcharles 2y ago
  I'd echo this somewhat. Wading into other people's projects I'm often like "wtf is this mess.. why are your variables named a, b and c?" BUT.. some of the code that LLMs have spit out at me is absolutely wild in how well it is constructed, and it gives me real imposter syndrome when I see the occasions when the code is so much tighter and better than I would have personally crafted.

nullbio 2y ago

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dieortin 2y ago
Surely what the world needs is to redirect more funding to AI

kristianp 2y ago

It doesn't feel ambitious enough to me. Spend 10s of billions to get a less than 10x energy about 40 years after LHC reached its peak. Also planning of the next one should have happened while the last one was being commissioned to avoid the huge gap between them.

cshimmin 2y ago
They did start planning around then. I don’t remember the exact date of when the FCC working group officially convened but they’ve been working on it at least since I was a grad student in the early 2010s.
magicalhippo 2y ago
There are those who wants to go larger, by building a submerged collider[1] in the area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico which could do 500 TeV. Using established technology from offshore industry it's supposedly not as crazy nor costly as one might first imagine. There was a nice and fairly accessible talk[2] given at Perimeter Institute, which gave some background and went into this and the FCC. [1]: https://arl.physics.tamu.edu/research/collider-in-the-sea/ https://arl.physics.tamu.edu/research/collider-in-the-sea/ [2]: https://pirsa.org/20100056 https://pirsa.org/20100056
- mjevans 2y ago
  The link mentions 100 meters depth. Without being an expert that sounds deep enough to withstand hurricanes and such. However 100m depth? For a structure _that_ size, which I think might contain high vacuum, let alone systems that might need humans to service when they break? What is the feasibility of that problem?
  - XorNot 2y ago
    Presumably the plan would be you're actually building a the collider tunnel much like CERN under water, so effectively a very long pressure structure. This...probably isn't super-unreasonable for a static structure where you avoid the cost of excavation - i.e. it depends on how different in diameter from something like the Nordstream pipelines you'd be going.

jmyeet 2y ago

So I'm normally a fan of science but I'm torn on this one because, as far as I can tell, there's no clear objective with this collider. It just seems to be bumping up collision energy (to ~100TeV) and hoping something interesting pops out. The LHC had a clear objective: to experimentally validate the Higgs boson, which it did. There have been a ton of experiments since but AFAIK all those have really done is invalidated various theories. That has value, for sure. But it really seems like we need to play catch up and work out a theoretical model in what we'd actually search for with a bigger collider, rather than hoping higher energies will break something significant in the Stnardard Model in such a way that it'll give us a clue to a theory beyond the Standard Model. Think of it like looking for a treasure ship. As a salvager you may know from historical records that a given Spanish ship, carrying gold and silver from the New World, sunk on its way back to Spain. You may have developed a model to really narrow down where on the ocean floor you want to search. That's what the LHC was. But this seems like throwing a dart at a map and searching the ocean floor to see if anything interesting shows up.

atoav 2y ago
What you're actually saying is that there is no single and symbolic issue it is tackling, you know landing on the moon type stuff. That however is not how modern particle physics operates. A particle accelerator of the scale of CERN runs many experiments at once as with higher energies more becomes measurable. The idea here isn't that we have a hypothesis of a small thing existing and therefore we build a giant microscope, the idea is that we know we do not have a complete understanding of what happens in thst domain, so we build a giant mkcroscope to look at it. I am pretty damn sure there is a line of theoretical physicists who already know what to try once a bigger accelerator is around. And we have other benefitial developments coming out of that. The fact that you write this on the internet, a thing which was in no small part created by CERN should probably also tell us something.

nntwozz 2y ago

This makes me think of The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), I remember a scientist working there in an interview right after the first discovery telling the reporter how back in the day he was dissuaded by his teacher to go into the field because "there's nothing there, it's not a serious field of research" or something along those lines. Maybe a bigger collider is exactly what we need, and if it fails that's also useful as a confirmation to go in other directions. To build it right now instead of other things is the difficult question because that's politics.

neals 2y ago

I feel like with all the silly things humans do, every remotely feasible physics experiment should be top priority on getting funding and attention. Isn't finding out how the universe works, by far, the only thing that matters?

daseiner1 2y ago
i’d imagine food shelter and dignified employment rank just a little higher. in terms of higher-order needs, meaningful connection and love are quite a bit more important to me.
- NitpickLawyer 2y ago
  > food shelter and dignified employment None of those are technological or even theoretical problems, tho. We (humanity as a whole) thoroughly understand all of them. Whatever your post meant with listing them is stemming from politics more than scientific understanding. I don't think there's a politician's head collider out there, but maybe we should build one.
  - exe34 2y ago
    there was a scene in SG-1 where O'Neill locks up a bunch of aliens in a room and said they would not be released until they came to some agreement. I always thought there should be a religious army with the entire world's military might, who's central tenet is that they do and decide nothing except enforce what the nations decide - and the nations get to decide in any way they want except violence - but they may choose a champion on each side of a divide, and the champions may hold a knife fight to the death. the army would then enforce the deal of the winner's side.
  - dgellow 2y ago
    Resource allocation is political
voidfunc 2y ago
This is such a privileged "I dont have real problems" take its hilarious.

neom 2y ago

How much of this kinda stuff is also about lithography etc? re: https://medium.com/@thechinaacademy/china-may-be-constructing-euv-lithography-machines-on-a-massive-scale-da796ea1af73 https://medium.com/@thechinaacademy/china-may-be-constructin... I know FCC is firmly science, but curious: does it help in this area of tech also?

tomaskafka 2y ago
I remember seeing a thread from a guy from ASML about this, he clearly said that any academic use is a lucky by-effect; China is building this to obsolete ASML for chip manufacturing.

deleted 2y ago

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throw8494949 2y ago

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elric 2y ago

Is there any particular reason why they keep building colliders with ever increasing diamaters, instead of going vertical? If we can create magnetic fields strong & precise enough to force particles into a very large loop, surely we can bend the loop upwards ever so slightly and gain additional distance by coiling the collider like a spring? Seems like an insane amount of tunnels is always needed for these things, which is obviously expensive and labour intensive.

petschge 2y ago
For scale: The LHC has more than 11km diameter and the deepest mine we have built is 4km. Adding vertical distance is much harder than making the diameter of the circular tunnel larger.
- elric 2y ago
  I worded that poorly, I didn't mean to say that the entire distance should be covered vertically, but rather that a second loop could be wound on top of the first.
igiveup 2y ago
The point is minimizing curvature, not maximizing length. Curved path makes the accelerated particles lose energy through radiation.
- elric 2y ago
  Interesting, thanks fot clearing that up. I was under the impression that the length was where it's at.

derelicta 2y ago

Being a project manager for such an endeavour must be both thrilling and traumatic. I've only worked in small projects with a handful of stakeholders, I just can't imagine how all of this works when scaled 1000x.

BrandoElFollito 2y ago

This is unreasonable spending. And I am saying this as someone who did his PhD at CERN, so I am shitting my old bed. CERN is wonderful but the physics studied there are eons away from applications. This is not solid state physics where you can suddenly discover a great material. This is physics at such energies that we will not have anyone soon. Kinda like quasar astrophysics, about objects that are really far away. The usual response is that this is core science. Yes it is, but not the core science we need today. We have a limited budget for science and a mammoth like CERN cannot swallow it all. The other argument is that technology will get better. True. It can get better without the accelerator, though, if we really need it. I loved my time there, truly fantastic but the costs are not sustainable with current budgets for science

fbn79 2y ago
All is relative. 16 billions of EUR looks like a lot. But are spent in 12 years, so 1.3 Billions of Eur year. To compare Italy alone has spent 1 billion to have empty immigrant centers in Albania in less than two years.
- BrandoElFollito 2y ago
  Of course, everything is relative. When I finished my PhD, getting a postdoc was easy and money was not really a concern. I did a "double PhD" (in two schools) and there were no problems for me to travel between the two (and associated costs). Now the world is fundamentally different and it is much more difficult. Not to mention that people move from academia to industry, sometimes fro financial reasons. When you put 16 B€ in front of that to study stuff that may be useful in 1000 years if we do a breakdown before (otherwise it won't) and you look at the site of budgets in universities, there is another relativity to be taken into account
- _giorgio_ 2y ago
  Ecco il comunista

mmmBacon 2y ago

I was a physics student back when the SSC was cancelled. At the time it seemed like a terrible decision but years on I’m not sure the expense was worth it. In the end I think it worked out and was a good call to let the Europeans fund CERN and find the Higgs. I’m very pro science but I’ve come to a point where I’m asking is the juice worth the squeeze? I think beyond Higgs the juice is becoming harder to justify. The answer for particle physics can’t be to build larger and larger circular machines. Rather that money would be better spent on accelerator research to enable smaller more practical machines at high energies. Such machines may have some practical spinoff uses such as how FNAL offers neutron therapy.

esaiohotpvld 2y ago

What surprises me the most is the cost. This is considered to be one of the most expensive endeavors in science… but the first stage costs just about a billion a year? Jeff Bezos (or any other billionaire) could pay for the whole of it, and it would be like me going for a coffee. The yearly cost is 1% of what DOGE allegedly saved, three Marvel movies, and less than the GDP of San Marino. If one of the costliest ever scientific enterprises is this cheap, how many scientific advances are we leaving on the table? It makes me extremely sad. *Disclaimer: I enjoy Marvel movies and don't particularly believe DOGE claims about saved money. But I wanted to give some scale of what a billion francs (now about 1.2 billion USD) are.

jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago

It always blows my mind to see the anti-intelectualism of HN.