Proposal for bigger supercollider at CERN

[Steveam]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68172162

The required funding is, it seems to me, a very big ask given competing priorities such as climate change.

Best wishes, Steve

[88V8]

The required funding is, it seems to me, a very big ask given competing priorities such as climate change.

And that's just the estimate.
Then there's the electricity it will use.
Easy to be negative about theoretical science, but considering the overall budgets of CERN's 23 members, we should be able to afford this stuff.

V8

[9873210]

The required funding is, it seems to me, a very big ask given competing priorities such as climate change.

And that's just the estimate.
Then there's the electricity it will use.
Easy to be negative about theoretical science, but considering the overall budgets of CERN's 23 members, we should be able to afford this stuff.

V8

Pretty sure this is experimental science. Theoretical science only needs a white board and markers.

But beware the scientific-industrial complex. We should always ask if the money is best spent doing the same thing, only bigger. It seems pretty clear at this point that the unification of quantum theory and gravity needs more than a superer collider. AIUI a collider would need to improve by orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude get anywhere near grand unification.

Perhaps we should fund a related field (e.g. astronomy of black holes or cosmic rays), thousands of smaller but more imaginative experiments, or hundreds of thousands of theorists hoping for the next Einstein.

[scrumpyjack]

I can’t really see how this is worth it. OK it is great for France and Switzerland to have many many billions of other countries money spent in their countries but the lack of agreement among academics about this proposal suggests there are better things to do with 17 billion (and I guess it would be many times that over the decades).

Perhaps Elon Musk can spend some of his next bonus on it, after Tesla has moved to Texas. Better than splurging it on Twitter/X!

[odysseus2000]

There are several issues here:

Foremost is that folk have begun to equate science with the measures taken against Covid that in popular perception were not very good. Trying to sell a big science spend to people who equate science with incompetence & stupidity is challenging and as politicians need to get re-elected, funding what many voters see as rubbish is not going to be done lightly.

Next is that the phase space for detecting dark matter although not exhausted is heavily constrained. Dark matter may be as real as the ether & there are serious folk postulating alternatives that explain galactic rotation curves via other sources: mass that we can not see because of the limit vision constrained by the speed of light, other ideas suggest similar ideas but due to the bending of space time via known gravitational mass. Some of these ideas would cancel the Big Bang hypothesis. There are already James Webb observations of structures that are extremely unlikely to have been formed by the Big Bang.

After that comes concerns that the whole Standard model is no longer appropriate. It was never right, getting the baryon to photon ratio wrong by huge factors & anyhow all the various fixes have not worked.

String theory has not provided any practical tests & the energies where folk think it would apply will not be approached by the big ring collider, so that it may need to be parked & other approaches considered, suggesting wait & see for funding big experimental projects.

Also we now have AI looking at many of these problems, giving individual researchers access to knowledge that previously could not be acquired in a human life time. This could easily change everything.

Then there are the various scientific factions all wanting funding, climate scientists being one of the noisiest & one of the weakest given very regular changes to predictions and today a new satellite (Pace):

https://www.space.com/nasa-pace-spacex- ... ion-launch

to measure particulates & that may change the climate models drastically.

The big ring looks like a hard sell just now.

Regards,

[servodude]

"what have CERN ever done for us?" would be the Pythonesque question to post on an internet forum

[XFool]

There are several issues here:

Foremost is that folk have begun to equate science with the measures taken against Covid that in popular perception were not very good. Trying to sell a big science spend to people who equate science with incompetence & stupidity is challenging and as politicians need to get re-elected, funding what many voters see as rubbish is not going to be done lightly.

An interesting take on the matter. Though I wonder if the sort of people who rubbished all the COVID science are really much interested in things like CERN and if the public who are interested in CERN are the sort to be bothered by all the online nonsense about COVID! Or am I being naïve?

Next is that the phase space for detecting dark matter although not exhausted is heavily constrained. Dark matter may be as real as the ether & there are serious folk postulating alternatives that explain galactic rotation curves via other sources: mass that we can not see because of the limit vision constrained by the speed of light

Could you please explain this further. TIA.

...other ideas suggest similar ideas but due to the bending of space time via known gravitational mass. Some of these ideas would cancel the Big Bang hypothesis. There are already James Webb observations of structures that are extremely unlikely to have been formed by the Big Bang.

Again, would appreciate more detail wrt James Webb observations.

Then there are the various scientific factions all wanting funding, climate scientists being one of the noisiest & one of the weakest given very regular changes to predictions

I of course heard climate research mentioned during discussions about this on the radio, but somebody pointed out there are already more people working in climate research worldwide than at CERN.

The big ring looks like a hard sell just now.

As presumably was the LHC originally. BTW, one negative line might be "The LHC didn't produce any really new science (to date) so why would the FCC?"

[odysseus2000]

There are several issues here:

Foremost is that folk have begun to equate science with the measures taken against Covid that in popular perception were not very good. Trying to sell a big science spend to people who equate science with incompetence & stupidity is challenging and as politicians need to get re-elected, funding what many voters see as rubbish is not going to be done lightly.

An interesting take on the matter. Though I wonder if the sort of people who rubbished all the COVID science are really much interested in things like CERN and if the public who are interested in CERN are the sort to be bothered by all the online nonsense about COVID! Or am I being naïve?

Next is that the phase space for detecting dark matter although not exhausted is heavily constrained. Dark matter may be as real as the ether & there are serious folk postulating alternatives that explain galactic rotation curves via other sources: mass that we can not see because of the limit vision constrained by the speed of light

Could you please explain this further. TIA.

...other ideas suggest similar ideas but due to the bending of space time via known gravitational mass. Some of these ideas would cancel the Big Bang hypothesis. There are already James Webb observations of structures that are extremely unlikely to have been formed by the Big Bang.

Again, would appreciate more detail wrt James Webb observations.

Then there are the various scientific factions all wanting funding, climate scientists being one of the noisiest & one of the weakest given very regular changes to predictions

I of course heard climate research mentioned during discussions about this on the radio, but somebody pointed out there are already more people working in climate research worldwide than at CERN.

The big ring looks like a hard sell just now.

As presumably was the LHC originally. BTW, one negative line might be "The LHC didn't produce any really new science (to date) so why would the FCC?"

It is the politicians who have to feel that investing in science will increase their chance of re-election. At the moment many voters have been so screwed around by politics dressed as science that they blame science & think it worthless.

There have been numerous dark matter candidates, such as wimps (weakly interacting massive particles) & a whole host of others with properties that have not been found in complicated experiments. There are still candidates to search for but the ones that can possibly exist are now heavily constrained although not yet certainly excluded.

One explanation for galactic rotation curves being not as expected is the potential effect from mass outside of the universe that we can not see, as limited by the velocity of light there is a lot of potential unobservable mass. If this mass exists does it pull on space time enough to both change galactic rotation curves & change the wavelength of light to give an apparent red shift that is not recessional velocity but space time distortion? It is potentially a similar effect as that which gives rise to inertia. Is the resistance of a body to move due to the effects of all distant mass acting on the body creating a tiny symmetric well in space time that keeps the body fixed unless it is subject to some directional force & then it will keep moving unless acted upon by local forces. So in space once some thing moves it keeps going as there is almost no friction, but local masses either accelerate or decelerate it due to their curving of space time.

It is unclear whether these non consensus views (there are lots of other ideas) will break the original views & entirely change our understanding of the universe or be destroyed by observations that do confirm dark matter.

Whether the new big ring accelerator would be able to answer these questions is unknowable. The general rule is that new mouse traps catch new mice, but we are already seeing new mice from the Webb telescope that are unlike what we expected to exist.

Regards,

[ursaminortaur]

"what have CERN ever done for us?" would be the Pythonesque question to post on an internet forum

If nothing else given us the World Wide Web.

https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

[servodude]

"what have CERN ever done for us?" would be the Pythonesque question to post on an internet forum

If nothing else given us the World Wide Web.

https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

Precisely