CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider • Hacker News Board

Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

#201

Post by rowanG077 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

newsclues wrote: post #197

rowanG077 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any metric you can imagine is nothing more then a guess. That's why it's research. The researchers guess and tests. Some guesses can be observably better but that's not quantifiable. At least that's what I think.

Surely you see the hazard in funding expensive wildly speculative projects? If you fail once, fail again but bigger... who cares it’s not our money and the bigger our project the more we pay ourselves...

That's why scientific projects are still judged by panels. It's not like money is thrown at any random project. It must have merit and be judged to actually be able to test a hypothesis.

Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

#202

Post by T-A » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:44 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #105

T-A wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are fixating on SUSY, not CERN. A new collider is needed to find out what's beyond the Standard Model, whether it's SUSY or something else entirely.

Your statement that "it certainly won't be with a larger collider, especially since the last search failed" frankly makes no sense, and the claim that "the higgs was already found before" is incorrect.

This is mostly true though: "the main thing behind the LHC was to see SUSY or general new physics beyond the SM" (I say "mostly" because the energy range was chosen to ensure that either the Higgs or something else would be found; if it existed, it had to be in that range, and if not, something else had to do its job).

And that statement remains true about the next collider. It will look for "SUSY or general new physics beyond the SM".

Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

#203

Post by f00zz » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:54 PM UTC

tobinfricke wrote: post #200

f00zz wrote: post #17

Honest question, what are some engineering spin-offs that could come out of this? I'm asking because I'm reminded of a Peter Thiel interview where it's mentioned that, despite changing our view of the universe, no "real world" applications came out of the quark model discovered in the 1960s. This is different from a project like ITER, which is also hugely expensive but could be a game changer.

I generally believe that looking for "spin-offs" is a poor way to justify experimental physics, the space program, etc. However, it does seem apropos to mention that the web itself was a spin-off of work at CERN.

Right, others have mentioned the WWW. But it doesn't look obvious to me how the existence of a high energy physics research facility was a necessary precondition for the development of the web. The idea of hypertext had already been floating around for some time (SGML, Xanadu, etc).

I was curious about things more directly related to the actual research done at CERN.

Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

#204

Post by nix23 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:54 PM UTC

Gibbon1 wrote: post #198

simonh wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a strange comparison. Why would you compare it to a space telescope when you could compare it to another supercollider, operated by the same organisation? The Large Hadron Collider went over budget by about double, which is bad but frankly for these sorts of cutting edge systems hardly unprecedented. Some of that was ironically due to budget cuts causing delays which in the long term increased costs.

> Some of that was ironically due to budget cuts causing delays which in the long term increased costs. If you want a prime reason things go over budget this is the prime one, not fully funding a project in order to save money. If you look at well executed projects they spend years setting up and then execute as fast as possible.

Yeah please show me one single project of that complexity that didn't went over budget, just a single one...good luck.

Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

#205

Post by take_a_breath » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 8:54 PM UTC

erulabs wrote: post #189

take_a_breath wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's a crowd of people like I mentioned.

Well, crowds don't have opinions. People do. There in no hypocrisy when a group disagrees with itself - it is just people disagreeing with other people.

Crowds, of people, absolutely have opinions. It's the entire foundation of politics, business, and entertainment. What is a political party platform other than a series of opinions?

Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

#206

Post by l0b0 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

Aside from the gamble that any fundamental research represents, consider the immense amount of training CERN generates every year, with several thousand physicists and engineers continuously involved. That sort of a mix generates more learning than the sum of its parts, because everyone has opportunities to learn from many related fields. If the money was instead split into many smaller projects it wouldn't generate the same kind of learning, because each project would be a tiny silo compared to CERN.

Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

#207

Post by T-A » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

LatteLazy wrote: post #41

Can anyone comment on the claim that making large numbers of Higgs' bosons will explain dark matter?

It's a plausible idea, but there are no guarantees. The reasoning goes like this:

So far, the Standard Model is holding up quite well (too well in fact; it would be nice to have some glaring discrepancies pointing to new physics). According to the Standard Model, all fundamental particles with mass get that mass by interacting with the Higgs field. Now, assuming that dark matter also consists of particles with mass (plausible), it's a fair guess that those particles also get their mass by interacting with the Higgs field. And if they do, we should be able to produce them by making Higgs particles (excitations of the Higgs field); when those decay, they will produce pairs of any particle species which they interact with (provided that those particle pairs are less massive than the Higgs particle; and even if they are not, their existence should indirectly affect Higgs decay to other particle species in ways which may be possible to study).

An obvious way this idea could fail is that dark matter gets its mass from a different Higgs field than the Standard Model one (SUSY generally requires more than one Higgs field, and GUTs can have lots). Another is that dark matter is not just another particle but something more weird.

Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

#208

Post by techphys_91 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #53

brnt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protontherapy alone is enough justification in my opinion. Add the many kinds of detector offshoots that find their way to industry. The web itself, if you wanna go back a bit further. Aren't those worth it you think?

How is proton therapy a justification? The protons in PT have energies six orders of magnitude below that of this proposed FCC. Are you saying that the historical precedent of PT means FCC will also have that sort of spinoff? That's not a legitimate argument.

The top energy of the accelerator might not be a good judge of how practical its technology will turn out to be. The maximum center-of-mass energy of CLIC is 3 TeV [1], far in excess of what would currently be considered practical. Nevertheless the technology developed for CLIC is now being looked at for providing very high-energy electron beams for cancer therapy [2]. Making something like the FCC isn't just a matter of making a bigger copy of the LHC, it has its own specific challenges [3,4].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Linear_Collider

2 - Slide 7, https://indico.cern.ch/event/578818/contributions/2487012/at...

3 - http://fcc-ee.web.cern.ch/content/accelerator-challenges

4 - https://indico.fnal.gov/event/16753/contributions/39405/atta...

Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

#209

Post by pfdietz » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

brnt wrote: post #104

pfdietz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is proton therapy a justification? The protons in PT have energies six orders of magnitude below that of this proposed FCC. Are you saying that the historical precedent of PT means FCC will also have that sort of spinoff? That's not a legitimate argument.

Accelerator physics would have been unlikely to have progressed as far as it has without HEP. Beam line components for cyclo-/synchrotrons up to proton therapeutic energies are not seen in non HEP facilities (material physics). FCC of course will not produce spinoffs that have already spun off, but what exactly will spin off we obviously can't predict very precisely.

I think you're engaging in a bit of cargo cult thinking here. FCC is analogous to early HEP, but it's an error to think that analogy implies similar outcomes. The sheer scale of FCC argues against similar sorts of direct spinoff. And indirect spinoffs are a poor justification for anything -- they can come from anything, after all, so provide no justification for a specific approach.

Re: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

#210

Post by mhh__ » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #96

[flagged]

If you give 50k to half a million engineers they aren't going to beat the track record at the Nürburgring by magic.

Some science experiments are expensive - not only financially, they require intense cooperation between large groups of multi-discipline people. Theoretical Work takes a toll on the mind, experimental work does the same while draining the wallet at the same time.