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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

#131

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.

You're assuming two things here.

The first unfounded assumption is that, regardless of what the LHC found, there was always going to be a need for a larger collider of the same design. This is clearly false - the design of the FCC (for better and worse) is specifically geared to confirming or probing various discrepancies that the LHC found, and to finding things that the LHC was hoped to find that didn't pan out. If the LHC had found SUSY partners or WIMPs, or if it found no conflict with theory whatsoever, the next accelerator might have had a radically different design.

Secondly, you're assuming that it's possible to build a collider that has (significantly) higher power than that with foreseeable technologies. The reality is that we are very close to the limits of what seems achievable in terms of particle accelerators, and per the people at CERN, even this 6x increase in collision energy will require ~40 years of research to be achieved. And the collider we need to probe regimes where we really have good scientific reasons to believe will reveal new physics (i.e. the regimes where we know the standard model breaks down) is not 15x or even 100x higher: even a collider buried around the entire equator wouldn't get anywhere close, we'd need a collider the size of the solar system to actually probe these regimes. So going 6x or 10x or 50x is irrelevant, unless you're looking for some very specific technicalities, like they are at the FCC.

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

#132
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…

For scale: The LHC has more than 11km diameter and the deepest mine we have built is 4km. Adding vertical distance is much harder than making the diameter of the circular tunnel larger.

I worded that poorly, I didn't mean to say that the entire distance should be covered vertically, but rather that a second loop could be wound on top of the first.

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

#133
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Only if you have a finite set of theories. If you have infinitely many theories that could explain a phenomenon, eliminating some swath of them brings you 0 new information, in information theoretical terms. The problem with SUSY and String theory and other similar physical theories is that they have many free parameters that can have any value that hasn't yet been ruled out by experiment. So if you build a collider twice as large and find nothing, you'll find that your parameter that today has possible range [n, +Inf) will now be known to have range [2n, +Inf). That doesn't actually mean anything at all, though. That doesn't actually tell you anything: you'll need infinitely more experiments to know what's the value of that parameter.

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

#134
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.

Interesting, thanks fot clearing that up. I was under the impression that the length was where it's at.

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

#135
post #126
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've started to watch one or two videos of hers, but I don't respond very well to emotional rants. So I stopped.

It's a shame because some of her content is actually good. It's not like she's Kaku or something. Alas...

to be honest, I already have several lifetimes of projects and books lined up, so I'm okay missing out on some things.

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

#136

This is unreasonable spending. And I am saying this as someone who did his PhD at CERN, so I am shitting my old bed. CERN is wonderful but the physics studied there are eons away from applications. This is not solid state physics where you can suddenly discover a great material. This is physics at such energies that we will not have anyone soon. Kinda like quasar astrophysics, about objects that are really far away.…

All is relative. 16 billions of EUR looks like a lot. But are spent in 12 years, so 1.3 Billions of Eur year. To compare Italy alone has spent 1 billion to have empty immigrant centers in Albania in less than two years.

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is the scientific method of course (what you're talking about), but I think it isn't entirely insane to sometimes just do a ton of experimenting and see where you end up. Edison did a lot of the latter.

Yes, noted non-scientist Edison who stole pretty much everything he claimed to have invented.

I think that view is a bit over the top. He built his own research lab and was responsible for something like 2000 patents. We're all aware of the Tesla story, but being a shrewd businessman and collosal jerk doesn't prevent important contributions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison

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

#138
post #125
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one saw neutrinos coming for example. Other than Pauli, you mean? It was hypothesized around 1930. Discovered in 1934. The basis of scientific method is following: 1. You notice something. 2. You ask a question. 3. Form a hypothesis. 4. Experiment. 5. Analyze. 6. Draw conclusions.

> Other than Pauli, you mean? After linear momentum was missing in collisions! Pauli speculated that neutrinos would exist after an experimental anomaly. No one really saw it coming. No one saw 3 generations coming either, for example. In fact, people were baffled.

> In fact, people were baffled.

Yes, but what is FCC supposed to look for?

If it's just Dark Matter, and Matter/Anti-matter asymmetry, what theoretical framework is it going to explain it? Will it explain it, or will it just do "Your asymmetric partners are in another Order of Magnitude collider"? Or maybe there are actually 34 dimensions and not like four.

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

#139
post #136

This is unreasonable spending. And I am saying this as someone who did his PhD at CERN, so I am shitting my old bed. CERN is wonderful but the physics studied there are eons away from applications. This is not solid state physics where you can suddenly discover a great material. This is physics at such energies that we will not have anyone soon. Kinda like quasar astrophysics, about objects that are really far away.…

All is relative. 16 billions of EUR looks like a lot. But are spent in 12 years, so 1.3 Billions of Eur year. To compare Italy alone has spent 1 billion to have empty immigrant centers in Albania in less than two years.

Of course, everything is relative. When I finished my PhD, getting a postdoc was easy and money was not really a concern. I did a "double PhD" (in two schools) and there were no problems for me to travel between the two (and associated costs).

Now the world is fundamentally different and it is much more difficult. Not to mention that people move from academia to industry, sometimes fro financial reasons.

When you put 16 B€ in front of that to study stuff that may be useful in 1000 years if we do a breakdown before (otherwise it won't) and you look at the site of budgets in universities, there is another relativity to be taken into account

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

#140
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>hey plan to provide experiment agnostic and unified framework that is actually unified and user accessible. The field really need something like that, it is usually the pain point of most junior graduate student. The field suck at documentation and keep coherent software and write code in a bad way most of the time. I think they can have much better framework than Fermilab's art [2]. I don't think that I've ever hea…

I'd echo this somewhat. Wading into other people's projects I'm often like "wtf is this mess.. why are your variables named a, b and c?" BUT.. some of the code that LLMs have spit out at me is absolutely wild in how well it is constructed, and it gives me real imposter syndrome when I see the occasions when the code is so much tighter and better than I would have personally crafted.

A large part of that is just following style guides. It's crazy how few people actually read things like PEP8 despite writing tons of code in python. It's not even that much to learn and most is quite logical - all while making your code not just appear professional but also be more readable by others.
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