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How much of this kinda stuff is also about lithography etc? re: https://medium.com/@thechinaacademy/china-may-be-constructin... I know FCC is firmly science, but curious: does it help in this area of tech also?
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...
She seems to base her content on how good of a Mr-beast-style thumbnail she can make to get clicks.
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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.
Before discussions go into some generic direction about the field. This is a huge feasibility study contain different aspects done by hundreds of people. People who are mostly interested about the physics case of FCC should read/skim at least through the first volume [1], second chapter (Specificities of the FCC physics case) the first four sections. This is about 35 pages with somehow accessible language to people w…
I don't think that I've ever heard of an area of software where folks say "it's got great documentation and the code's really good". In fact many programmers react allergically to any code that they review (including code that they wrote themselves but have forgotten about).
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> A deluded clown pretends otherwise Was just trying to be funny, but point taken. Will refrain from that one going forwards.
You can get down or up voted either direction for any politically adjacent puns.
But karma points have no cash value, so whatev.
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> There hasn't been a significant new particle discovery, but none was expected other than Higgs 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 H…
I'm not much of a particles guy but isn't the lack of "expected" discoveries itself a discovery?
One of the problems we have is that we are generally inculcated by our educational system to just think "science is good", without asking how good. But when we're talking about things like massive supercolliders, which cost things that start looking less like "a grant from the National Science Foundation" and more like "the entire economic output of a small country for a couple of decades", we need to ask whether we're getting enough science bang for our science buck, because not even science is actually immune to that question.
The LHC is honestly pretty questionable on that front. One can debate what was expected, but what is perhaps easier to wrap your mind around is certainly the LHC would have been immensely more valuable if it had found all sorts of supersymmetric particles, right?
Personally I think the most potent criticism of building yet another, even larger collider is just that such a collider requires essentially strangling the entire rest of the field for decades on end, and indeed, at this level of expense, strangling neighboring fields for decades on end, to fund something that doesn't have a terribly clear through-line on its value, on any dimension, practical or purely scientific. It's almost like "let's build a larger collider" is just a reflex at this point. There's a lot of interesting things bubbling on the fringe right now, and I don't mean the crazy fringe, I mean the scientific fringe. Maybe we should take a bit of a break from particle colliders for a bit and put some money into those things for a while.
We don't have infinite money, and we don't have guaranteed money; pouring vast, vast quantities of money into a new collider could well inhibit future research monies. It is still important to think about not whether we "should" spend the money in this or that way, because that always produces more "yes" answers than we actually have money for. The question is, is this the best way to spend money? And given the staggering amount we're talking, it's a high bar for this to be "best". Personally I'd really rather see at least a decade or so of just spreading things around a bit more, rather than pouring all of that into what is essentially a single project.
Seems like an insane amount of tunnels is always needed for these things, which is obviously expensive and labour intensive.
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> A deluded clown pretends otherwise Was just trying to be funny, but point taken. Will refrain from that one going forwards.
No, don't refrain. I got the joke and think we could use more. You can get down or up voted either direction for any politically adjacent puns. But karma points have no cash value, so whatev.
So like Prince back in the nineties, perhaps it should have a symbol. Maybe ⌂ ?
Is there any particular reason why they keep building colliders with ever increasing diamaters, instead of going vertical? If we can create magnetic fields strong & precise enough to force particles into a very large loop, surely we can bend the loop upwards ever so slightly and gain additional distance by coiling the collider like a spring? Seems like an insane amount of tunnels is always needed for these things, wh…