Live data from Hacker News

CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

home.cern

51–60 of 146 posts

Re: CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

#51
post #2

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...

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.

Negative results are valuable results.

SUSY is excluded. Like completely at these scales.

Extra dimensions the same.

Re: CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lay out above, the IEEE article linked lays out, and you come across to me as having domain knowledge to understand that having electron-positron collisions at the same energy level of LHC lets us nail down the hints of what we saw at LHC -- persistent deviations in the standard model that require new theory. When we get new theory, then we go hunting new particles, presuming its physically possible (as you point o…

I don't care about Sabine and I'm not defending her. There are lots of other people who think this is a bad idea, and Nature has quoted "dozens" of them. The error they saw isn't interesting unless it leads to something. There aren't even good theories about what it might lead to, other than some extra significant figures on some constants that nobody uses. Surely you can see there is a problem with doing science thi…

> Theory precedes experiment. It always has

This is laughably false, even in fundamental physics.

No one saw neutrinos coming for example.

Re: CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

#54
post #47

I feel like with all the silly things humans do, every remotely feasible physics experiment should be top priority on getting funding and attention. Isn't finding out how the universe works, by far, the only thing that matters?

This is such a privileged "I dont have real problems" take its hilarious.

Re: CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

#55
post #42
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She seems to base her content on how good of a Mr-beast-style thumbnail she can make to get clicks.

I have repeatedly heard from people who work in physics research that she's optimized her content for maximum rage/anger/emotional response rather than accuracy, particularly as of late. The tidbits of truth and warranted skepticism lend the rest of it undue credibility. Sadly, good science reporting doesn't get the advertising revenue that manufactured-scandal tabloid-style reporting does. I think her critical persp…

I just won't give my eyeballs to science content like that. I don't care if she has anything useful to say.

Re: CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First thought: I'm not the greatest at coming up with a stirring polemic justifying pushing out boundary science. Next thought that come to my head is, how do I boundary-test this. ex. work my way backwards, what was the last collider worth building? It's perfectly rational and intellectually honest to say "whichever one gave us something that got commercialized / helped people / etc." As far as high-temperature supe…

> what was the last collider worth building?...It's perfectly rational and intellectually honest to say "whichever one gave us something that got commercialized / helped people / etc." It seems like the LHC wouldn't pass this test? In which case, continuing down the path wouldn't make sense under this criteria.

Right! :)

(the thing is, "continuing down the path" is a Not Even Wrong (in the Pauli sense) description of what's going on. It's a hopelessly confused. At least, I have given up hope: I wrote a quite detailed post, with both a TL;DR and longer, linking out to an approachable article, explaining this.)

Re: CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

#57

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.

There are those who wants to go larger, by building a submerged collider[1] in the area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico which could do 500 TeV.

Using established technology from offshore industry it's supposedly not as crazy nor costly as one might first imagine.

There was a nice and fairly accessible talk[2] given at Perimeter Institute, which gave some background and went into this and the FCC.

[1]: https://arl.physics.tamu.edu/research/collider-in-the-sea/

[2]: https://pirsa.org/20100056

Re: CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

#58
post #47

I feel like with all the silly things humans do, every remotely feasible physics experiment should be top priority on getting funding and attention. Isn't finding out how the universe works, by far, the only thing that matters?

One can plausibly argue that finding out how the universe works is one of the things that matters least.

Re: CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not much of a particles guy but isn't the lack of "expected" discoveries itself a discovery?

You nailed it. In addition, they're absolutely correct, some subset of particle researchers were wish-casting for SUSY stuff. In addition, there's a significant substantive difference between "$X was defined and built for discovering $Y" and "some subset of $X hoped for proof of their theory $Y via $Z being discovered" -- there was also some subset that hoped for proof of string theory , or innumerable other things.…

Neat!

Thanks for sharing your insight and fancy words :)

Re: CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

#60
post #2

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...

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.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN