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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 bump

by 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.

by jmyeet 2y ago

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.