21–30 of 146 posts
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-coll...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blissfully, I found an IEEE article that collects the stuff I'm aware of in one neat package. 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…
As far as I know, there isn't much theory behind the "important work" being done here, just "let's smash stuff at higher energy and see what shakes out." Science is supposed to go the other way. You are supposed to have a theory or a set of theories and then use experiments to test them. If this experiment can falsify the standard model in a meaningful way, that's cool, but it's a lot better if it can actually prove…
That's one of the effects of the pitch framing by Sabine: the design intent is not about smashing stuff at higher energy, despite the basis of the critique requiring that it is.
My comment above is really long, but tl;dr the impetus for both facilities is smashing electrons and positrons and specific features of those collisions that let physicists hone in on the discoveries made at the LHC, not moar energy leading to new particle observations that theory never predicted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blissfully, I found an IEEE article that collects the stuff I'm aware of in one neat package. 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…
Why is this work important? To me it just feels so distant from my reality. At the core of this, is there an answer to the "who cares?" attitude? Because if the answer is that we might incidentally create new useful technology in the build up of a new collider, why not just diversify the investment and put that money into a bunch of smaller projects? Hedge your bets sort of thing. Why support this and not allocate mo…
People got so excited about the Higgs boson, despite having no idea what it really means. They kept asking if it had an application, but seemed to accept that the answer is "no".
I'll admit, I too would rather put the money into an array of different sciences. But the money goes where you can get interest, and a lot of other science happens in the margins.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I listened to her a lot recently because YouTube decided ever “next video” bump while I drove should be her. I hope there was _any other criteria_ at play here? Why would I not be surprised that the answer is "NO" for 99.9% of the population? The world is really doomed...
Sadly, it absolutely 100% is. She's an amazing case of this. I'll spend the next 2 years gently walking people down from her clickbait, and I'll end up with net-negative karma for it.
I honestly had given up entirely until I saw a subthread about a month ago where people who knew the area were exchanging info of lesser-known youtubers who come and clean up her messes after.
The sad news is, they are getting more and more attention (I saw one over 400K+ views), but a lot of that just comes from being loud, proud, and aggressive, as well as having 30 minutes of video to justify the up front "hey, she's at best a not even wrong contrarian, and honestly, lets be clear at this point, shes a liar for views!!!!"
Thankfully I'm old enough to see this stuff happens in waves, within 2 years it'll become common wisdom that she's X, Y, and Z, and even if I disagree and just think she's misguided, that'll be enough for the tide to ebb.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 exper…
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#Supersymmetr...
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.
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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-coll...