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Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

bigthink.com

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Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#221

Post by namaria »

musha68k wrote: post #118
japanuspus wrote: post #73

As a low-energy quantum physicist, I completely agree: Experimental high-energy physics has become primarily an industrial subsidy scheme[1], and if we want the highest chance of reaching a grand unified theory, it seems the money would be much better spent elsewhere (cosmology, space-based observatories, research positions for young physicists without publish-or-perish incentives to run for the latest fad). The shor…

How about thinking about this on a grander scale / in the open - and just have more and even larger “industrial subsidy schemes”? Wouldn’t you like to work on another BIG SCIENCE project that tries to find answers to something that seems more worthwhile (to you)?

I'd much rather live on a planet with too many giant science projects than have top engineers and scientists with obscene budgets for blowing up whole countries into the middle ages for political gain.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#222

Post by unsupp0rted »

l33tman wrote: post #56
moonchrome wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy is fundamentally flawed. More realistically : we can only build one car in the entire world, where a tiny minority of people can even understand the potential benefit, and anything they see will be completely useless for everyone else in day to day life because we need a civilisation level effort to even detect the implications of their theory. If their theory had some real world implications - you would…

And yet 15M people yearly are still visiting those "useless" pyramids 4600 years after they were built.

If the Egyptians had built a literal money pit 4600 years ago, tourists would now be visiting that.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#224

Post by rimunroe »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #191
fnands wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The detectors on the LHC get upgraded regularly, between every run some part gets updated. Computing-wise as well, better computing resources are there. The fundamental limitations isn't the detectors or computers, it's the energies you can reach with a collider of that size. Yes you can completely retool the LHC, which will probably allow you to do slightly better precision measurements, but won't strongly affect th…

> to get to really high energies you need to build bigger Superconducting magnets enable much higher energies in smaller (granted, theoretical) fusion reactor designs than previously possible. Does the same not apply to colliders?

Colliders already use superconducting magnets

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#225

Post by ncmncm »

waqf wrote: post #179
ncmncm wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It would cost far, far more to extract useful energy from fusion than using well-understood renewables. And, we control plenty of energy. The project is to concentrate it in one spot.

What is meant by "solving fusion" if not making fusion an economically viable source of power? And I didn't mean to suggest that available energy was the limitation on building LHC++, but rather that available economic surplus was.

In that case, fusion will never be solved, and any money spent toward that goal is money wasted.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#226

Post by esarbe »

Georgelemental wrote: post #211
concordDance wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's it currently doing with that money? I guess we could get rid of funding healthcare and trying to help people out of poverty so that a small number of people get to use a very expensive toy... You know what would be an awesome big science project that would immeasurably improve future people's lives? Sequencing all genes and using that data provide free embryo selection services to everyone who wants to be a pa…

"Embryo selection"—is that a euphemism for "murdering any unborn child that doesn't have all the "right" genes? Because if so I think your definition of "people's lives" must be very different from mine.

No, it's just that; embryo selection. It's not an euphemism for what you wrote because an embryo is not a child and you cannot murder an embryo.

From Wikipedia: "A child (plural children) is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty [...]"

You are also conflating the abortion of an embryo with murder; only human persons can be murdered, embryos are not persons, therefore no murder.

I sincerely ask you to cut down the polemics here on HN. It does not lead to fruitful (no pun intended) discussions.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#227

Post by _heimdall »

mehrdada wrote: post #11

Cannot disagree more. "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's just have 1000 people walk one mile and explore." Simply ridiculous comparison. But sure, let's find a way to build/experiment LHC++ less expensively. What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.

Curiousity can have many shapes. Being curious about 100,000 smaller questions is no better or worse than being curious about one big one. A lack of curiousity here would have been to sinply say all this money shouldnt be spent on research at all.

My read of the article was more a call for considering the practical uses of tge research. If we don't know what $100B worth of LHC will discover, why wouldnt we instead fund tens of thousands of smaller projects that often have very practical real world goals?

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#228

Post by _ph_ »

I think the question whether to build a new collider deserves more than a simple "yes" and "no". Indeed, it looks as if particle physics right now is a bit in a dead end, there are no obvious and imminent discoveries to be expected from such an instrument. And with the enormous amount of money it would require, a lot of other experiments could be financed, which short term are much more likely to advance science. On the other side, I unless there is evidence that we cannot discover any more by building a new collider, we shouldn't just stop research into that direction. We don't know what lies there and might be missing the true discoveries to be made. Also, these colliders do finance a lot of science around them. Just designing and building them fills plenty of thesises and papers. A lot of adjacent science is involved. Detector design, data processing just to name a few. The web we are using has been invented at CERN :)

Consequently, the cost trade-off isn't as clear-cut as the article might make it sound. Which for me leads to the obvious answer: yes, we should build another, larger collider. But probably not right now. There should be plenty of funding for the current one and also quite a bit of theoretical preparation before it is getting planned/built. In this time, other projects should get priority funding. But eventually, we should build another collider. We should never stop researching.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#229

Post by ephimetheus »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #114
japanuspus wrote: post #73

As a low-energy quantum physicist, I completely agree: Experimental high-energy physics has become primarily an industrial subsidy scheme[1], and if we want the highest chance of reaching a grand unified theory, it seems the money would be much better spent elsewhere (cosmology, space-based observatories, research positions for young physicists without publish-or-perish incentives to run for the latest fad). The shor…

> Today we have detectors and computing power that let us observe the natural experiment of the universe with a precision and diligence that would be impossible when LHC was commissioned. Couldn't the LHC be upgraded then to take advantage of this? Sounds like a much cheaper option. But I'm not a physicist at all so I'm sure I'm oversimplifying.

Like the sibling comment says: we’re currently doing this. Higher energies are not really feasible without a bigger ring though so we’re increasing the beam intensity (sort of) to produce more physics per time unit. This very likely won’t reveal any new physics processes, but it will allow us to increase the precision in many measurements we do and could allow us to find discrepancies or otherwise increase our understanding of the existing model.

This is effectively a measure to maximize the output we can get from the machine, so to maximize the return in investment.

There’s a lot of debate in the field what should happen next. FCC is one possibility, but I’m personally sceptical (even though I work at CERN myself).

It seems to me there’s a clear need for a Higgs-factory as a follow up to LHC, but that doesn’t have to be a ring collider, a electron positron linear collider could fulfill this purpose as well.

Re: Please, don't build another Large Hadron Collider

#230

Post by nix23 »

_heimdall wrote: post #214
nix23 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So finding Black-holes is not significant because it was already predicted? And btw there is so much money around...we should not fight against different project but the spending that goes into science itself. LHC and NASA is really just a small drop compared to military spending (in the US). https://twitter.com/WillPVGreen/status/1363179862706503681/p...

Why hello again, tragedy of the commons! Modern monetary theory is its own can of worms, but justifying massive spending in one area because of even more massive spending elsewhere isn't solving anything.

But:

https://interestingengineering.com/these-7-cern-spinoffs-sho...

And i think the ISS was still much more expensive (especially over the years) then LHC/Atlas etc.

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