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

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

#101

Post by matusp »

sigmar wrote: post #35
gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #5

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.

My view- she, like many, has been conditioned by social media to optimize for clicks by having contrarian and anti-establishment views. She's not positioned to have a particularly well-researched opinion on 95%+ of the topics she covers (which is understandable considering how many hundreds of videos she has made). I watched her for a bit, but stopped when I researched a topic deeper and found her analysis very super…

I agree. I enjoyed her physics content. Then she made a few videos about AI, a field where I have more expertise than her, and I found her opinions very shallow and without much nuance. Ever since, my trust in her other videos went down as well. She is just trying to be overly sceptical and everything that is done in science is some sort of conspiracy.

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

#102

Post by amy214 »

elashri wrote: post #7

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…

Also before the discussion goes off in a random direction such as software frameworks, I want to point everyone to volume 37, book 5, chapter 72, pages 8843-9023 (2022 incremental update) of their feasibility report. In it, they introduce a new cryptocoin known as "HIGGSCOIN" which will help fund the reactor. It has some interesting innovations for realtime payment systems, something that can be a pain point for bitcoin

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

#103

Post by igiveup »

elric wrote: post #98

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…

The point is minimizing curvature, not maximizing length. Curved path makes the accelerated particles lose energy through radiation.

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

#104

Post by marcosdumay »

teekert wrote: 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 report has about 100 pages with summaries of experiments they want to test there, if you want to see for yourself.

Personally, I'm skeptical too, but the new ideas have been piling up since the time she started talking about this. Things have changed a lot since then.

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

#105

Post by tsimionescu »

refulgentis wrote: post #22
pclmulqdq wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I hope this doesn't seem abrupt, and when/if it does, that it comes across as coming from a place inviting further discussion and appreciating your curiosity. 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 sma…

You are being extremely disingenuous. The aim of the FCC is very explicitly to be a bigger hadron-hadron collider than the LHC. The FCC-ee that you mention is presented in all of CERNs papers as an intermediate goal, a use for the gigantic tunnel they'll need for the FCC-hh (the FCC), while the technology for actually doing the most important work is being developed [0].

What's more, much of CERN's own literature on the FCC references fanciful ideas like finding WIMPs, "ruling out many classes of dark matter particles", finding/limiting the search space for axions, or in general, putting boundaries on theories that have no specific basis and no fundamental bounds on their parameters beyond "we havent found them yet, so they can't be this large/small/strongly interacting/etc". Here you'll find at least some claims currently up on CERN's FCC site about probing dark matter [1].

[0] https://fcc.web.cern.ch/overview

> A key recommendation of the 2020 update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics is that Europe, in collaboration with the worldwide particle physics community, should undertake a feasibility study for a next-generation hadron collider. (emp. mine)

> The goal of the FCC is to push the energy and intensity frontiers of particle colliders, with the aim of reaching collision energies of 100 TeV in the search for new physics.

[1] https://fcc.web.cern.ch/physics

> However there is a very broad class of models for which theory motivates dark matter candidates with masses in the range of GeV to few tens of TeV. The FCC would break new ground in the search for dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles, by covering a wide array of potential signals predicted by either production of dark matter, or production of the particles mediating its interactions with ordinary matter. FCC-ee and FCC-hh offer complementary ways to search for dark matter that could consist of lighter particles (i.e. sterile neutrinos) or could be produced in the decays of the Higgs boson.

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

#106

Post by SiempreViernes »

Jabbles wrote: post #87
SiempreViernes wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you don't trust the budget priorities that the scientist themselves create, why would you trust Sabine's opinion on those priorities?

I don't know what Sabine would spend $40B on instead, but intuitively that seems like it could buy a lot of research in a lot of areas, rather than picking particle physics. And it doesn't have to be physics, it could be cancer research, or not even research: each country involved could upgrade their sewage system instead. But Sabine doesn't have to have all the answers to be right to point out that there's an enormo…

> there's an enormous conflict of interest if you ask particle physicists whether they'd like $40B

That's not a conflict of interest, like at all. What are you talking about?

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

#107

Post by parineum »

jerf wrote: post #97
MadnessASAP wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, but it's a weak one. 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",…

Additionally, while you're talking about budget in a practical manner, spending money on science to discover science isn't something that people outside of science generally love spending money on. I am nearly certain that part of the hope for people spending that kind of money on the LHC is not only might they discover something amazing but that it might also be practically useful to someone else.

There are other scientific fields that produce much more tangible results that the finite funding could go to. Even something like materials science which could not only produce more useful discoveries but could also make the next collider cheaper.

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

#108

Post by tsimionescu »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #45
pclmulqdq wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electrons and positrons have been smashed together before. It has been done at CERN before, too. The premise of this experiment is to do it at higher energy than has been done before. The scientific goals of that experiment are somewhat more unclear, though. The LHC had a landmark scientific purpose, finding the last particle in the standard model. There is, as far as I can tell, no specific experiment that can be th…

No, not quite. The electron-positron collision will allow more precise measurements. The goal is precision, not higher energy range, where a proton-proton machine would be much better. The goal is not to go beyond LHC in energy to see if something new shows up because of moar energy. The goal is to go to high energy with electron/positrons to measure stuff more precisely.

The FCC-ee is an intermediate goal, which will probe similar collisions as the LHC but at higher precisions. It is also a direct successor as the LEP which was housed in the LHC tunnel, so in this sense it is very much about "moar energy" than the previous electron-positron collider that CERN had. They're also hoping against hope that maybe they'll identify some rare collisions and even dark matter at the energy ranges that they couldn't probe before (at the LEP) with such high precision (at the LHC).

Then, when the tech for it is ready, the FCC-ee will be replaced by the FCC-hh, which is the successor of the LHC and can probe energy levels that are completely unaccessible at the moment - at about 5-6 times the energy level of the LHC. This is the true goal of the FCC project, and the biggest reason for building such a huge tunnel in the first place. But this requires significant advancements in magnets and other components which won't be available for several decades. So, they're filling in that time with the FCC-ee.

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

#110

Post by tsimionescu »

anoncareer0212 wrote: post #37
pclmulqdq wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electrons and positrons have been smashed together before. It has been done at CERN before, too. The premise of this experiment is to do it at higher energy than has been done before. The scientific goals of that experiment are somewhat more unclear, though. The LHC had a landmark scientific purpose, finding the last particle in the standard model. There is, as far as I can tell, no specific experiment that can be th…

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…

> No one thinks new particles will be discovered.

Blatantly false. Plenty of FCC docs from CERN itself mention the possibility that new particles could be discovered, from dark matter to axions. They even think they could help gather data to guide searches for supersymmetric partners.

[edited to add links and quotes]

https://fcc-cdr.web.cern.ch/reports/EPPSU18_FCCint.pdf

> In addition to the dark matter examples given before, Volume 1 documents the extraordinary sensitivity to less-than-weakly coupled particles, ranging from heavy sterile neutrinos (see Fig. 5, right) down to the see-saw limit in a part of parameter space favourable for generating the baryon asymmetry of the Universe, to axions and dark photons.

https://fcc.web.cern.ch/physics

> Future searches at lepton and proton colliders would further constrain any viable scenarios and put progressively tighter bounds to SUSY candidate particles. Searches could profit from data collected at the FCCs as they will allow better discrimination of the Standard Model backgrounds but also deliver more information for event reconstruction.

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