CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider • Hacker News Board

Re: CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider

#121

Post by colechristensen » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 3:35 AM UTC

mike-the-mikado wrote: post #104

colechristensen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a weasel question because you can keep saying whatever was new was "just technology" not pure discoveries. No, there hasn't been any big "new physics" since the standard model in the 70s, everything has been refinement and specifics. You can't go to Walmart and buy something that couldn't exist unless we knew the precise mass of the top quark or the Higgs boson. There have been a tremendous amount of dev…

I was hoping that someone would be able to point me to some practical technical advance enabled by discoveries or measurements at CERN (or similar establishments). It seems plausible to me that better understanding of the properties the subatomic particles might enable some previously unexploited technology (e.g. in quantum computing or sensing).

Very very close to 100% of your entire lifetime experience of the world has only to do with the effects of gravity and the behavior of electrons both of which are extremely well understood and will be until (or if) a MAJOR paradigm shift in science that might not ever happen. Until theres commercial fusion or some extremely exotic high energy physics consumer products in hundreds of years the behavior of the strong force or discoveries about such just won't have impacts in daily life. Lots of technology has been developed and filtered down to everyone as a result of particle physics in the last 50 years but the actual end result discoveries not so much. We're waiting for revolution at ever higher energies and those might not be realized until daily life for humans looks extremely different. We're just sticking our toes in the ocean of knowledge and for daily life, we're stuck with electrodynamics.

Re: CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider

#122

Post by thrance » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #118

thrance wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So many more science experiments with better expected ROI could be funded for the money needed for the FCC Ok, like what? Let the scientists at CERN decide what to spend their funding on.

CERN shouldn't get that funding if they're going to push for the FCC. Funding is often contingent. Even sticking only to particle physics, there's lots of other research that could use that funding better, like wakefield accelerators and muon colliders.

I mean, CERN is already funding many other projects? It's a huge organization. Why should the FCC specifically be forbidden to them? Who else than the actual CERN scientists has the competence to decide what to allocate funds to? I used to subscribe to this anti-collider contrarianism too, but then I realized that it is not that common among actual researchers.

Re: CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider

#123

Post by trueno » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 11:12 AM UTC

potamic wrote: post #112

notepad0x90 wrote: post #111

I try to keep up with this stuff, but I wish to a layperson like me, the benefits of this was communicated more clearly. Even something like the JWT, I'm still not seeing the benefit. It's really awesome, don't deny that at all! But I'd rather see more investment put into developing space-faring capabilities. Being able to transport lots of goods and people into space, and start manufacturing in space. I've heard it…

I suppose the question of how to prioritize scientific funding is itself a scientific problem, so we would first need to decide how much to allocate to the scientific funding sub-discipline so that all of scientific funding is as efficient as possible! In all seriousness, I don't know how science policy works but I expect it is more goal-oriented than objective-oriented. Science rarely starts with, "What are the bigg…

the itch of curiosity can take someone to great heights... and glorious useless rabbit holes. us nerd programmers should be intimately familiar with this. i sort of do get a little irked at how a lot of the things discovered at the furthest reaches of our universe are just simply just trying to figure out that for the sake of figuring that out. don't get me wrong i'm a huge proponent of sciences in general im mostly just bewildered at the widespread collective belief that science can only be beneficial if you let it move at a glacial pace with lots of time and resources spent answering questions that should potentially be deprioritized. even writing software im constantly compelled to shake off the wild goose chases that are just me trying to find an answer to that and get back to doing something else, and i'm constantly hungry for ways to add my capacities to something that is beneficial for at least a handful of people.

we tend to give sciences a huge sort of "let them cook" pass about many things even though sometimes it's just resources spent on some giga niche corner of science to get to an answer that settles a 25 year old argument or theory no one knows or cares about. i don't think it hurts to get back occasionally to "ok guys let's try to focus on something of importance" and acknowledging even a little bit that some of the goose chases have been utterly pointless. is there some kind of unspoken rule that scientific discovery should only come from one giant leaky bucket exercise but the bucket is never ending? aligned research goals with some outcomes that aren't some super autistic itch-scratch only one or two people on earth understand are.. not a bad thing.

scientists of some levels sometimes terrify me. human, sure, but the relentless pursuit of finding that has throughout history caused many scientists and researchers to cross moral boundaries. sometimes i wonder if people looking the traces of hundred billion year old invisible invisible gamma stinky fart rays at the edge of our universe give any shits about the world and the people in it at all. its just harder now than ever to care about their laundry list of meaningless discoveries when we're in desperate need of here and now discoveries to solve problems we face today. in some respects staring at a scope into the edge of the universe is sometimes not any different than the kid who's just trying to escape the noise of life by throwing a video game on. i get it, i do. but i don't always wrap it in nobility because the sciences are filled with humans who are as imperfect as you and i, and sometimes they straight up aren't cooking much and seem a little directionless.

Re: CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider

#124

Post by Revolution1120 » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 6:45 PM UTC

jocaal wrote: post #55

mrtksn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that kind of fundamental science I would expect no practical applications but guidance for researchers that work on practical applications. There are many ideas on how the universe works, right? Knowing which ideas are closer to the truth must be helpful to people who work on nano scale stuff, like chips so fine that quantum effect are considerable. It must be somewhere between knowing if there's alien life or n…

What actually happens is, smart people are isolated from the problems of the general population and work towards meaningless goals at the cost of the everyday tax payer doing unglamorous work to earn a living. Decoupling science from the state will also reduce the meaningless competition of academia that leads to the publish-or-perish and replication crises, because the people who will be doing it, will do it for the…

"Being linked to the state" doesn't always mean being bound by social status and money, but rather receiving support in terms of social status and money. For example, artist support, even if government support is contingent on "the work conforming to LGBT trends," is better than nothing. How can a scientist's passion for science remain connected to the 99% of the public who have no interest in and know nothing about science? As for whether it's a low-quality paper or genuine research, that depends entirely on the conscience and ethics of the practitioners; no policy direction, left or right, can solve this. Left-wing fabrication is plagiarism, right-wing fabrication becomes illegal fundraising and financial fraud. Right-wing fabrication is far more destructive and harmful.

Re: CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider

#125

Post by Revolution1120 » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 7:13 PM UTC

crote wrote: post #51

chrystalkey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said the grumpy grandpa, shaking his hand at the cloudy sky. I dont know what value that comment contributed, funding research is always a long shot. And often times it fails, but that is kinda its purpose, we dont know what we dont know.

You could use the same argument to justify spending $1B on searching for the Loch Ness Monster. The problem is, you can only spend money once. If you're spending $1B on the FCC you aren't spending that same $1B on all kinds of other research. With the LHC there was a very clear goal: verify the Standard Model and prove (or disprove) the existence of the Higgs boson - and hopefully discover some unexpected stuff along…

It's not necessarily a "waste of money," but it's certainly highly deceptive. For example, China has built a large number of unprofitable infrastructure projects and abandoned projects over the past two decades. Even though they lost money, the waste during construction still made China the world's second-largest economy and aroused envy among some ignorant right-wingers. However, this cost has overdrawn the resources for the next few decades. It has caused China's fertility rate to fall below 1, meaning there won't be enough population to repay this debt in the future, let alone enough money for maintenance (even though many of these facilities were never economically viable to begin with). China's bankruptcy is only a matter of time. Moreover, China owes not only economic debt, but also significant "cultural debt" and "civilizational debt." The Chinese government and society's attempt to raise money through illegal means and extortion by issuing "cultural debt" and "civilizational debt" will undoubtedly result in another collapse.

Re: CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider

#126

Post by potamic » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 9:01 AM UTC

trueno wrote: post #123

potamic wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the question of how to prioritize scientific funding is itself a scientific problem, so we would first need to decide how much to allocate to the scientific funding sub-discipline so that all of scientific funding is as efficient as possible! In all seriousness, I don't know how science policy works but I expect it is more goal-oriented than objective-oriented. Science rarely starts with, "What are the bigg…

the itch of curiosity can take someone to great heights... and glorious useless rabbit holes. us nerd programmers should be intimately familiar with this. i sort of do get a little irked at how a lot of the things discovered at the furthest reaches of our universe are just simply just trying to figure out that for the sake of figuring that out. don't get me wrong i'm a huge proponent of sciences in general im mostly…

The people looking at invisible gamma farts at the edge of our universe is what led to understanding of supernovas, and the research on supernovas is what enabled ASML to build an EUV light source for their machines. EUV machines are arguably the most important machines on earth right now, responsible for modern GPUs and the recent growth of AI. If somebody told all those researchers in the 20th century to "focus on something of importance" instead, we may easily be a couple of decades behind with the state of semi-conductor technology today.