Live data from Hacker News

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

physicsworld.com

31–40 of 126 posts

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

#31

it's already a black hole for funding

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.

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

#32

This should have a $1T budget not a B. We waste so much money on low efficiency computing infrastructure and energy that should be going to this.

Maybe we can just have the AI hardware make the discoveries for us!

A thousand gpus running a thousand LLMs will one day soon give us the next shakespeare. It will all be worth it in the end. Maybe we can try putting in on a blockchain.

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

#33
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cancer treatment goes back to particle physics research at CERN, the Web was born there, cloud was previously known as Grid Computing at CERN, Three examples of how humanity would not be as we know it today without CERN. As Alumni, there are many other changes that trace back to CERN. We don't sit only on the H1 beer garden and go skiing.

I understand how linacs and even small compact syncrotrons can have practical medical and industrial applications, and I understand that in the past CERN has developed technology and produced research which is relevant to hardon therapy. What I don't understand, and maybe you can clarify, is how the very largest gargantuan accelerators can ever have practical relevance. How can effects and products which can only be…

Because of the engineering effort required to build such systems, that no one has built before, means there is a gigantic amount of R&D discoveries that can be eventually applied in other fields outside particle physics.

Mechanical, electronic, informatics, chemistry, physics,...

Hence why CERN eventually created an industry collaboration office, responsible for finding business partners that would like to make a business out of such discoveries.

https://knowledgetransfer.web.cern.ch/activities-services/co...

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

#34

This should have a $1T budget not a B. We waste so much money on low efficiency computing infrastructure and energy that should be going to this.

I have low expectations that physics can dig itself out of the hole it dug by building an even larger collider. It's not worth €1T to find out.

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

#35

it's already a black hole for funding

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.

There’s an abandoned one around Dallas, the SSC. Lots of sunken cost in that one.

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

#36
post #5

“Eric Schmidt, who founded Google” no he didn’t

That kind of reporting is awful.

How is it they can’t either go to Wikipedia or one of the LLMs (despite hallucinations, tend to get simple things right) and get some corroborating evidence before making such basic mistakes on an article?

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

#37
post #36
post #5

“Eric Schmidt, who founded Google” no he didn’t

That kind of reporting is awful. How is it they can’t either go to Wikipedia or one of the LLMs (despite hallucinations, tend to get simple things right) and get some corroborating evidence before making such basic mistakes on an article?

Man I can’t even trust simple things these days from LLM’s. Hardly scientific but I just decided to do my own little test one time when I was on discord talking to some friends about The Game Awards back in December or so. ChatGPT would simply omit winners and/or categories - got it wrong (twice the same way, one unique way) 3 times. We tried Gemini, it gave 1 wrong answer and omitted 2 categories. It was impressive how much worse than a basic search they were at a simple “what were the results of the 2025 Game Awards?”

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

#38
As a non physicist I like the idea of a moun collider more - more compact (thus should be cheaper) as well as something which haven't done in similar energy scales and therefore more likely to need new technology in building it and finding something new.

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

#39
post #5

“Eric Schmidt, who founded Google” no he didn’t

[flagged]

Do you have a source on that?

I can't find anything besides he went to a Gala where he was in a photo with Maxwell and made an investment in a company her brother ran.

Post reply on HN