111–120 of 223 posts
Made this comment below but spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible. A few years ago, a bunch of physical philosophers tried to justify this turn of particle physics in general away from experiment, particularly suggesting the search of symmetries and mathematical beauty (I guess) was enough of a justification for the work even though it essentially is contrar…
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If you want to store the beam, you need a ring. And the size of the ring is given by the minimum bending radius, which is given by maximum field strength you can achieve, and energy loss from bremsstrahlung in the bends, which you have to put back. So space doesn't really help: You'll still need a circle of magnets. Approximating the circle with a polygon means you split up a smaller circle with straight segments. Bu…
That’s sad. I really thought space could open up some new physics.
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The goal of every top-tier collider is new physics, that greater understanding that progresses mankind. What did the previous collider discover? It certainly validated current theories, but did it create anything new? If it did, why do we yet need a new one? If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two. If there is no new physics from the last experimen…
> If there is new physics to study let us keep the experiment going as is to study that for a generation or two. They are doing that, are are doing upgrades to get more use of out of the LHC. The new planned collider is for about a generation from now. If this goes ahead, it will be starting construction in nearly 20 years from now. > If there is no new physics from the last experiment, why do we think that building…
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You are contradicting yourself here: "spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible. A few years ago, a bunch of physical philosophers tried to justify this turn of particle physics in general away from experiment" The proposed collider is an experiment. It might incidentally find support for SUSY (unlikely) but its purpose would be to produce precision data about h…
Not quite. The experiment has already been done, it was called the LHC. It found no evidence for SUSY, but instead of re-evaluating SUSY since it's needed for all modern particle phenomology as well as many unification theories, the argument is to "keep looking." Fine, keep looking, if you want, but it certainly won't be with a larger collider, especially since the last search failed. That failure demands a re-assess…
Just out of interest, why do you believe this to be true? There existed particle colliders before the LHC, none were able to experimentally verify the Higgs.
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I tend to think of this xkcd [1] comic when people talk about 'solving the big problems we face' instead of doing blue-sky research. [1] https://xkcd.com/1232/
> [...] instead of doing blue-sky research. In 1921 the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein won a Nobel, was blue-sky research with no practical applications. Fast forward a few decades and it was used as the basis for making laser: you know, those things that all modern communication uses to transfer information over long distances. While it is up to debate how much to spend on "blue-sky research", cutting off…
Made this comment below but spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible. A few years ago, a bunch of physical philosophers tried to justify this turn of particle physics in general away from experiment, particularly suggesting the search of symmetries and mathematical beauty (I guess) was enough of a justification for the work even though it essentially is contrar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it is one project it also is an umbrella to fund a large number of smaller projects. Whole institutes were funded and build in part to develop detector components for the LHC. A project like this gives everyone a common goal and pushes technology development in sectors that are critical to Europe's high tech economy. It also has consequences for the IT sector in Europe. Before cloud companies had to deal with P…
> it also is an umbrella to fund a large number of smaller projects Then justify the spending on those merits. Spending for the sake of spending isn’t a great argument. Why is a new supercollider a better use of resources than, say, a new telescope? Or a suite of gravitational wave or neutrino detectors? A host of fusion research reactors? The opportunity cost of spending shouldn’t be ignored just because it isn’t en…
$23bn is a lot of money, but it also is a pittance when you're planning a project that will take ~30 years to be operational. E.g. for comparison the EU is planning ~$100bn for its science programs for the next 7 years; on top of that all the member states have their own projects, and non-EU European states have their own science funding.
As such, we're talking low single digits percent of overall European science funding, but even so CERN may not be able to fund $23bn from their own funding alone, and may seek out international sources of funding for this project.
I'd guess Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder (herself a physicist, and a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) must be pretty annoyed, to put it politely. She posits that a lot of current physicists are working with outdated notions of "beauty": (quote) But if it’s clear that putting forward new hypotheses just because they are beautiful doesn’t mean they’re likely to be right, then why do theorists…
I am a Prof. for Nuclear Physics, so maybe HEP-adjacent and biased. I don't think I will ever get much use of LHC/FCC myself (EIC will do that for the stuff I'm doing), but I'm happy if they will build it. It's a fallacy to believe that this money takes away from other research. There would be enough money to do all possible research if one really wants to. Just a point to consider: A lot of money for the military is essential to prop up the economy. The same, maybe more effectively, is true for research, with the added benefit that you educate people, and maybe find some cool new stuff.
I'd guess Prof. Sabine Hossenfelder (herself a physicist, and a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) must be pretty annoyed, to put it politely. She posits that a lot of current physicists are working with outdated notions of "beauty": (quote) But if it’s clear that putting forward new hypotheses just because they are beautiful doesn’t mean they’re likely to be right, then why do theorists…
>has demonstrably not worked for 40 years The beauty of Standard Model was affirmed with finding Higgs Boson mere 8 years ago, what is she getting at?