Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
1–10 of 467 posts
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#2Couldn't agree more.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#3Ah... the yearly bigthink article that we should stop funding other experiments and put everything into fusion.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#4tl;dr.
Because Supersymmetry is stupid theory that can be fit to any set of facts, there is no point in building LHC++. Besides it is so expensive you could give a 100.000 physicist a million bucks and that would be more productive.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#5> What it could discover is entirely speculative.
Thats the point of discovery and arguably a point in favour of doing this
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#6I wouldn't mind them building it if they just used their own money. Spinoff cern companies have earned a $trillion or more revenue and probably a hundred billions profit from things like medical imaging gear. They could well afford to fund themselves and a new collider without begging the public for money.
Cern really should be investigated and audited publicly, but it would take Delloites and PWC to follow that paper trail and audit hundreds of companies going back 25-30 years. I've always said it, cern is a scam, they take public money to fund product research, and then spin off separate companies to cream off the profits. Then they act broke and beg us for more money.
Edit: There is very little public information on this. The company accounts may be public, but like I said, there are hundreds of them going back 30 years, and no-one is motivated to do that kind of research. There is a recent study here[0] which looks at the economic benefit to companies that help build the research equipment. Obviously a lot of tech has to be invented just to build systems like this. But I haven't seen a similar study of the cern spin-off companies, or KT (Knowledge Transfer) partners in cern nomenclature, and that is where the real meat is.
I don't see why it would be so controversial for cern to retain some share in those KT companies and use that money to be self sufficient. That seems like a win for science.
[0] https://cds.cern.ch/record/2632083/files/CERN-ACC-2018-0022....
Further reading:
https://kt.cern/success-stories/fostering-culture-entreprene...
https://kt.cern/success-stories/managing-cern-intellectual-p...
One example company (out of hundreds):
UK firm buys cancer-zapping spin-off from CERN collider
"The spin-off, known as Adam, was established in 2007 by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to build low-cost innovative accelerators for proton beam therapy (PBT) and conventional radiotherapy. Advanced Oncotherapy will pay for Adam in shares, giving CERN scientist Alberto Colussi, who founded the CERN business, a continuing stake in the technology." https://www.avoplc.com/en-gb/Investors/Share-Price-Informati...
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#7Yeah, no. Only LHC can generate particle events in a highly controllable environment with enough energy. In physics there are energy thresholds. Below a certain level of energy a certain event just never happens.
The low hanging fruit of discovering new physics looks like this. Build a bigger machine to collide particles with even more energy. Observe what comes out. It's a clear direction. Just throw money at the problem and get a result.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#8> What it could discover is entirely speculative. Thats the point of discovery and arguably a point in favour of doing this
For the cost though, you should probably fund a lot of other science. Climate change mitigation perhaps?
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#9Driven by this post, out of curiosity I started looking at the price tag of some mega-projects around the world.
Interestingly, the most expensive ones are almost always highway systems. Can someone briefly explain why? I'm my naive view it's mostly asphalt and terrain work.
Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider
#10Yeah, no. Only LHC can generate particle events in a highly controllable environment with enough energy. In physics there are energy thresholds. Below a certain level of energy a certain event just never happens. The low hanging fruit of discovering new physics looks like this. Build a bigger machine to collide particles with even more energy. Observe what comes out. It's a clear direction. Just throw money at the pr…
Does this sort of thing give us tangible benefits? Is it worth the investment? I get things like materials science, supercomputers, AI research, etc. But these colliders are so expensive, all for the sake of discovering a tiny subatomic particle that we have no way of using, AFAIK. But I know nothing, am I wrong here?