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

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 the headline for this new machine because the LHC pretty much did its job (modulo some error) and string theory et al need higher energy. There are a bunch of guesses about the higgs field and about dark matter that failed to materialize at the LHC, so now we want moar energy to see if that fixes our problems.

As to the theory they will be proving, maybe there are a few minor ones about the higgs field, but that's pretty much it at this point.

So I'm normally a fan of science but I'm torn on this one because, as far as I can tell, there's no clear objective with this collider. It just seems to be bumping up collision energy (to ~100TeV) and hoping something interesting pops out.

The LHC had a clear objective: to experimentally validate the Higgs boson, which it did. There have been a ton of experiments since but AFAIK all those have really done is invalidated various theories. That has value, for sure.

But it really seems like we need to play catch up and work out a theoretical model in what we'd actually search for with a bigger collider, rather than hoping higher energies will break something significant in the Stnardard Model in such a way that it'll give us a clue to a theory beyond the Standard Model.

Think of it like looking for a treasure ship. As a salvager you may know from historical records that a given Spanish ship, carrying gold and silver from the New World, sunk on its way back to Spain. You may have developed a model to really narrow down where on the ocean floor you want to search. That's what the LHC was. But this seems like throwing a dart at a map and searching the ocean floor to see if anything interesting shows up.

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 superficial. Physics is a huge field. Think it is always better to find experts in a particular subfield and hear their views, rather than follow the feed of someone who repeatedly expresses the "everyone else is wrong" schtick

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 out with the incorrect idea that this might be being built to look for confirmation of string theory)

I understand the idea this won't find new particles, is it worth it?, but the idea this is unclear, confusing, misguided, or hoping for an outcome are trivially verifiable as false.

Things like:

- "The scientific goals...are unclear" (they are very clear!)

- "(modulo some error)" (reducing the error in the glimpses of deviation from the standard model is the interesting part, 5 sigma or bust, because that lets the theorists know how to progress. This isn't just "oh we'd like to reduce error bars, a less-entitled discipline would just get some grad students on SPSS", this is "holy shit...looks like we found something is fucky in our fundamentals here, but all we know is its off. we need to figure out by how much to give the theorists more data")

- "string theory et al" (I worry very much about the effectiveness of my communication if this is coming up, to be clear, no one is attempting to verify string theory, and it doesn't come up at all even in Sabine's arguments, no? )

The IEEE article lays out this is not about discovering particles.

No one thinks new particles will be discovered.

The investment is not based on speculating new particles will be discovered.

The investment is not based on bad theory that new particles will be discovered.

The investment is not to find a sneaky way to hopefully accidentally find new particles.

Investments in colliders in general haven't been spectulatively looking for new particles in decades.

As both the IEEE, open source information, and my comment lay out above, they are specifically for nailing down these previously-assumed-settled values in the standard model. Because getting more data on the things theory can't explain leads to informed revisions in the theory. The next pendulum swing after that data would be theory to tell us a narrow band of energies to look at for any new particles theory needed to fix the standard model.

Be careful when rushing. Your viewpoint as expressed is perfectly rational.

However, you know that both of these claims asked about are blatantly false, and were distracted by the idea that saying those claims is false also implies all alternatives proposed are based on lies.

To wit, the ask was "Is it really true that there a no theories that are proven or discarded with this experiment, and that the Chinese have plans to do it much faster? Her video is pretty damning."

Both of those things are clearly false.

The Chinese part is blatantly false, to the point it can be worked out by a laymen who knows years ascend.

The Standard Model itself is in question, modulo semantics about proven/disproven and the philosophy of certainty, by any reasonable definition, theory is at stake.