Sabine Hossenfelder recently wrote a Scientific American article arguing against this push, which might be an interesting read. <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-need-a-new-gigantic-particle-collider/#" rel="nofollow">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-...</a>.<p>> "When physicists started building colliders in the 1940s, they did not have a complete inventory of elementary particles, and they knew it... [] The Standard Model still has some loose ends, but experimentally testing those would require energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test."<p>> "... particle physicists should focus on developing new technologies that could bring colliders back in a reasonable price range and hold off digging more tunnels."<p>> "It’s because too much science funding is handed out on the basis of inertia. In the past century, particle physics has grown into a large, very influential and well-connected community. They will keep on building bigger particle colliders as long as they can, simply because that’s what particle physicists do, whether that makes sense or not."
What's more interesting to me than HEP is how HEP became such a big deal. I asked on HN before why people find HEP interesting and the responses were enlightening to me as someone who finds HEP boring: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322857" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322857</a><p>Personally, I find turbulence much more interesting. The fact that it's orders of magnitude more important than HEP <i>and</i> also very intellectually challenging should give pause to those who have dedicated their lives to HEP. But my impression is that cultural forces have unfortunately convinced many of our best and brightest to go into HEP or other similarly impractical areas of physics. I guess that's better than working for Facebook to make people click on ads, but that's setting the bar low. If you're interested in physics, you can make a much better choice than HEP. (If you're open to areas outside of physics you may be able to make an even better choice.)<p>I can see why someone might view the "building blocks" of the universe as fundamental or how there are interesting philosophical questions that HEP can address. But turbulence is fairly ubiquitous; certainly that makes it "fundamental" in some sense. And there are philosophical implications of chaos and statistical mechanics; turbulence is part of both.
For comparison, the budget of the Department of Defen(ding US interests) is $721.5 billion, which is to say one could instead do something useful with all those billions instead of spending them killing people who made the mistake of being born near natural resources.
This is such a loss of money. The practical aspects will never be used.<p>This will move some technologies a bit ahead but so would work on biology and medical areas. I would be much more happy to see people cured or otherwise helped than to know that a partcle is this or that.<p>This is in strong opposition to what happened in these areas of physics in the previous century. Things which were directives had a conceivable practical application.<p>What can you make out of events which happen at such energies, the kind we will never reach outside of such research centers.
eh, do they expect to find anything new?<p>To me, fusion research need more $$ and a higher priority as it has extremely practical applications for all humanity, from energy independence to global warming.<p>21b Euros is a lot of money, and apart the ongoing ITER effort, fusion research can be tackled from different angles with just half of that money.
Two things:
1) The article is amazingly low on specifics besides "to uncover the Higgs Boson's secrets"
2) The only thing to agree with is what Sabine Hossenfelder says (as always): it costs way too much without any significant scientific potential. Meaning, there are not enough viable theories to prove on that thing.<p>Sure, people who will be getting paid from those $21B of public money are saying: "Another one! Even bigger and faster! That project will be definitely worthwhile!"
In the current climate of inequity making the front pages of the news and dominating the public discourse, I would think such huge expenditures would be anathema to the populist agenda?<p>Because the beneficiaries of the jobs of this project are definitely not the disadvantaged in society (research-wise, or construction-wise). And I have to say, HEP's huge experiments seem to produce one-time headline discoveries (of a few hundred authors, yes), but then quickly become obsolete pieces of equipment.<p>And the science or industrial benefits themselves, of hitting the next tier beyond 13 TeV for such a collider? What is, and where does that benefit go? Does anyone have even an inkling of what results it will produce? Or is this just HEP on autopilot, "we need the next big one"?<p>Please don't trot out the usual "science for its own sake", as if that justifies <i>any arbitrary</i> amount of $ being spent without question.<p>At least astronomy produces pretty pictures for its funding.
<i>Money printer should go brrr?</i><p>Would it really be bad to simply print the money for CERN, ITER or other scientific projects? New money without anything in return is bad but here? In these cases we would get an actual collider/reactor/rocket/whatever - built by actual companies that employ actual people, run by actual scientists, maintained by actual engineers, ...
While I've been very interested in HEP as a teen and up, even as a "fanboy" the science potential seems very dubious.<p>When they approved the LHC, they were almost entirely certain they'd find the Higgs and there was solid arguments for why they should find more.<p>Now it seems much less clear that they stand to find anything groundbreaking by simply doing more of the same.<p>Personally I'd like to see more money being put towards condensed matter physics, quantum information science and similar areas which seems to have potential for much more practical applications.
I support super-colliders for the same reason I support space research. If we aren't on earth to discover something greater than ourselves, what purpose do we have?<p>I could see the creation of a utopia or an equitable state as another purpose. I suppose some people don't support super-colliders because they want money to go to this goal instead.
I think building a assemble in space, space telescope would be the best use for a mega project in science. I admit I don't know enough about colliders to evaluate the scientific impact.<p>But I think once we figure out how to assemble gigantic telescopes in space, the options for astronomy and maybe physics are huge.<p>With the ability to launch cheaply now, and with Starship maybe even cheaper in the future. You can build something truly gigantic in space.<p>What I think is more practically pressing is a commercial competition for next generation of fission reactors, but that was pressing since the 1970s and politics has ignore it. So that's not gone happen.
In choosing the lockdown we have ruled this out.<p>Along with support of minorities, disabilities and the environment and all such things.<p>The next half a decade isn't going to be much fun.
I think they should better explain how this thing works... It accelerate an electron!? And then there is some sensitive equipment to measure the charge!? Get a curve on a oscilloscope and if the curve is different it have discovered a new particle!?
I'm very curious about the so called gravity particle aka Higgs boson, but Cern would need to explain this in layman terms in order to get funded.