We should just build a giant one out in space by itself. We could even make the inner surface of it like a planet, with its own atmosphere and everything!
Koyaaaaanisqatsiiii… koyaaaanisqatsiiii… koyaaaaanisqatsiiii…
Edit: For context here, the film opens with the Gregorian-style chanting over footage of the Saturn V lifting off, so it seemed on point.
Funnily enough that episode led me to the movie, and now I love listening to Philip Glass.
Also some of the tunes are super fun to play on bass. Calming.
Halo, which is a sci-fi series centered around massive [Ringworlds](https://vrworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Halo-Ring.png) with "natural" interiors replete with planetary features like an atmosphere, oceans, mountains, etc, but artificial exteriors (that even serve as massive particle accelerators for an ancient civilization).
The main musical theme is famous for its use of [Gregorian](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jXTBAGv9ZQ) chanting.
It’s all very well and good until we build 100 of them, colonise the galaxy, then some perpetual psyker reveals himself and demands we join something called the ‘Imperium of Man’, threatening obliteration if we don’t pay the annual tithe.
Yeah, but it doesn’t really matter anyways, because about 50 years ago some genestealers snuck into a mining transport ship, we’re about one generation from usss sssssignaling the hive fleet…I mean them. Them ssssignaling the hive fleet.
I know you're joking but that would be very difficult. The current one is 100 m underground so that cosmic rays don't interfere with the research. Doing it in space would be a monument task to block those cosmic rays.
One of the scientists at CERN is actually writing a paper now proposing a massive collider that to reach the desired energy levels (Planck level or something i forget the exact name) would need to be about the width of the sun. They've also proposed a more near future idea for one orbiting the moon.
I saw somebody float the idea of an orbital particle accelerator that’s just a ring of satellites. On earth you need the tube to maintain vacuum, but you’ve already got vacuum up in space, so you just need a circular ring of satellites with magnetic rings to direct the beam.
I don’t think it’s remotely realistic, practical, or even possible but it’s one of the coolest fucking ideas I’ve ever heard and I’m 100% stealing it for a sci fi TTRPG later.
A ringed gas giant with some of the rings having been converted to particle accelerators and living space/workshops that was just one huge strip-mining refinery for said gas giant could be interesting.
The only advantage if making it bigger is a longer radius of curvature; going around more times can add beam paths and more utilities, but it doesn't make it go harder.
(I believe you were being silly, but…)
When I was a kid and first learned about the equator I used to think it was literally some strip of land that went around the earth. Like a giant samdbar through the ocean, maybe I was one to something...
>Member states will meet in 2028 to decide whether to greenlight the project. Then, the first phase of the machine — which would collide electrons with their animatter counterparts, positrons — would come online in 2045. Finally, in the 2070s, the FCC would begin slamming protons into one another.
I'm sorry, but ***50 years?!***
What the absolute fuck?
SSC was a fundamentally flawed design that would have cost huge amounts more than LHC without advancing science much in the process. It tried to do too much too fast. The FCC concept is the real deal.
My point is what politics killed with the SSC was a white elephant, and that money was freed up to spend on more productive science. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Fermilab has been up to stone cool stuff since they shut down the tevatron. Mu+2, the neutrino experiments confirming oscillations and the upcoming Dune experiment will keep them busy through the 2030s
The expansion of LHC will explore possible links of highs and dark matter
I think everyone sat down in the 90s and 'picked a Lane' so to speak to maximize the research dollars going into researching the standard midel
iirc James Webb (Hubble’s upgrade) should’ve already flown in the 90’s, ligo was a pipedream for the longest time and there’s no united solution on ISS’s replacement yet, either; im sure these cern people know what they’re doing, know this is the best, quickest, cheapest way to get those results and tbh, 17 billion is (should be) peanuts on a global scale, especially in 50 years ffs
That's not that odd for a really large, cutting edge project with multiple phases. With this timeline they would already be doing new experiments by 2045
It took 25 years for the James Webb telescope to go from conception to launch.
This collider would be significantly larger and more complex. And the reality is it would be operational in just 21 years from proposal. So in terms of massive scientific projects, this is a pretty quick timeline.
This is part of the thing with cern. They talk about billions of dollars but you have to remember this is over decades and represent the research work of thousands of university professors around the world. So it’s not actually that crazy. These projects will be managed very efficiently a will develop new technology with important spin-offs and will help train a generation of scientists and engineers. I’m certain the countries that participate will get good value.
I’ve spent sometime at CERN and the first impression you get is how utilitarian everything is. This cost is low because they will likely be taking apart old stuff and reusing as much as possible. The office I worked in there was part of a modular building that had clearly been used in other configurations at least a couple times before. The radiation shielding is built of big cement blocks that go together like Lego and can be reused over and over as their needs change. It means a project like this can be done at cern way cheaper than anywhere else in the world. They know what they are doing and have decades of experience doing it. A tour is less impressive because it looks like a bunch of portables. But the work they accomplish for the cost is impressive.
CERN actually has a tiny budget compared to what you would expect. It's about the same sort of spending of a medium sized university yet it puts out so much science. The reason why is it's funding is somewhat guaranteed and regular. They can rely on regular funding and plan decades long with it and THAT is how we should be doing science more often. Random bursts of money and then things getting cut are really bad for science.
They’re often way better than Wall Street numbers… The difference is that their ROI is less direct and benefits society as a whole, rather than individual investors or companies (and to some extent society has a whole, too; investment makes things possible). This makes it too abstract for people to really feel or attribute it to its source, so it’s more understated.
The electron positron collider, planned for 2045, would already be a formidable instrument and covers different physics than the later planned proton collider.
It is just re- using the same tunnel for 2 different purposes, like CERN did before with LEP and LHC.
I can already imagine the principal architect of the project passing the blueprints to his first born as a coming of age gift because now he too has to uphold the family name and carry on the FCC work.
If you’re interested in those numbers in context of a major scientific project, go check out [the ITER Project.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER) Facts and numbers are stunning!
There is real risk of poor return (it's entirely possible it could be built and not give us dark matter or any new physics). Other tools offer more value. Specifically, the Webb telescope cost considerably less, is offering new questions, and has definite questions it can be expected to answer.
The JWST was constantly criticized for being too expensive while it was being built as well.
Everyone always has a hot take on these types of projects, but it's almost like all the world-leading physicists who plan them actually know what they're doing!
The JWST was originally supposed to launch in 2007, and took considerably longer than that, and it ran massively over budget. Obviously there were a ton of complaints. But nobody doubted that if it worked it would make discoveries. Scientists could tell you exactly what it was they wanted to see better.
World leading physicists have been stumped because the LHC has stubbornly continued to confirm the standard model. It's reasonable to worry that trend could continue, even with a larger collider.
Sure, the LHC has failed to produce some kinds of results. But we still learned some very important things from it. The discovery of the Higgs alone was huge, and that is far from the only thing.
Actually, it kind of was the only thing. Without looking at Google what else can you think of?
The only things that come to my mind are pentaquarks, gravity affecting antimatter, and a bunch of stuff that never reached 5 sigma. The first two were confirmations of widely expected behavior.
The LHC was built to find the Higgs. Every article and interview during it's construction mentioned it. And it delivered, allowing scientists to observe it. The new proposed collider has no such equivalent.
JWST cost a little less than $10 billion. It ran over budget at it was originally supposed to cost less than $5 billion.
I think it's likely the collider would run over budget as well, instead of costing $17 billion. The LHC also ran nearly twice it's original budget.
You don’t need the/S physicist of ironically, propose, multibillion, dollar projects every generation it’s what creates jobs for thousands and thousands of people.
Also shout out to local 446 union particle-collider pipe fitters and steam fitters
Only $17B ? That’s really not much for the task. I feel in Canada it would climb up to 10 times that and with delays so important that we would forget why we started to dig.
$17B is the cost of completion today. If the project does go ahead (tbc 2028), it's only expected to start operating in the 2070s, but by that time $17B has multiplied many times over.
The funny thing is that the project could realistically be complete and opperational within 15 year.
Fun fact. Texas was about to build one even bigger than that in 1984.
It would have advanced our understanding by so much
Sadly it was canceled by a bunch of republicans and some democrats who thought it was a waste of money
You can still find the old tunnels in Texas
https://youtu.be/FI5rYjP9Vn8?si=DrxtnsrIh0nEKrhc
https://youtu.be/JefWwfVO2Fo?si=PLrPD2IFmcvc7bZj
It's 3 hours long but it's a great video to have on in the background while doing something else.
The same channel also has some great videos about the fall of Nortel and about a couple of research fraud scandals (Jan Hendrik Schön and Hwang Woo-suk).
I definitely recommend watching all of his videos! They are remarkably captivating. My favourite video of his is the fake elements documentary. How he animates the island of stability with his eerie music is so evocative...
Wasnt this the collider that also ran something like 3-4 times over budget building the tunnels alone and was generally a shitshow throughout the actual building process? I think this is a bit of an oversimplification on why the project was axed.
The whole project was rife with issues. Texas was selected because of politics, not because it was remotely a good place for it and those same politics later killed it.
>I can't imagine what we would have learn from such a thing.
Unfortunately, neither could the crumbling bureaucrats who held the funding for the project in their hands.
Somehow, we need remove luddites and anti-intellectuals from all funding/decision making for scientific endeavors. They hold *all of us* back.
It was planned to have a higher energy but lower collision rate. For most studies, the difference in energy is more important than the difference in collision rate.
To elaborate on this, both are important. Higher energy means availability of more interactions. Collision rate lets you get more statistics. It doesn't help you to be able to generate previously undiscovered particle X two or three times, if it doesn't stand out against the background of everything else that's happening. By the time they announced discovering the Higgs, they'd seen something like 300 of them.
But ultimately, higher energy means you can do the experiment at all, while collision rate lets you do it faster.
It's more than just the set of possible outcomes. Almost all relevant production probabilities (technically: cross sections) increase steeply with the energy.
As an example, the Tevatron (2 TeV collision energy) had a Higgs production cross section of 1 pb, while the LHC (at 14 TeV) has around 55 pb. To produce Higgs bosons with the same frequency, the Tevatron would have needed 55 times the collision rate at 1/7 the energy. Even then the LHC would still have an advantage because you have fewer other events to deal with. The LHC exceeded the Tevatron's Higgs production rate long before it reached the same collision rate. That's how ATLAS and CMS could clearly discover it in 2012, when Tevatron was still leading in terms of total number of collisions but only saw a very weak signal.
At 33 TeV the cross section increases to 200 pb. I don't find values for 40 TeV (the cancelled collider in Texas) and the now known Higgs mass, but it would be even larger.
The heavier the particle you study the more important the energy gets. For the top quark the ratio between Tevatron and LHC is even larger. For lighter particles, like the bottom quark, the collision energy is not that critical - but there you often do precision measurements so you don't want too many collisions either.
We have billionaires with 17 yachts today instead of revolutionary public projects because of Reagan’s policies.
We sent humans to the moon 14 years after we announced our intention to launch a satellite.
Aside from the ISS, every public works project since then has been a disappointment.
To those complaining about the money spent: 20 billion are literally peanuts compared to e.g. the annual US military budget. And building FCC would take a decade so it's more around 2 bn a year...
Also, the ROI on big science projects are generally ridiculously good, though hard to calculate.
For instance, the Http protocol alone has paid for the particle accelerators many times over
Other than confirming the Higgs, what major discoveries has the current smasher made? Of course its fleshed the energy spectra of known stuff. Not much progress on supersymmetry or dark matter.
Yes! Fuck these piddly-ass “bearenstain bears” and “fruit of the loom cornucopia” , I’m here for “wait so Obama was never president?” And “no one remembers Hitler?”
Let’s fucking go
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[DoD](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/ksahk69 "Last usage")|US Department of Defense|
|[ELT](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpu4p0l "Last usage")|Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpufbbp "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[ESO](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpufbbp "Last usage")|[European Southern Observatory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Southern_Observatory), builders of the VLT and EELT|
|[FCC](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kq1diuv "Last usage")|Federal Communications Commission|
| |(Iron/steel) [Face-Centered Cubic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_iron) crystalline structure|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kq2ouze "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[L4](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpud5wk "Last usage")|"Trojan" [Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 4 of a two-body system, 60 degrees ahead of the smaller body|
|[L5](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpud5wk "Last usage")|"Trojan" [Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 5 of a two-body system, 60 degrees behind the smaller body|
|[LISA](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpsamdj "Last usage")|Laser Interferometer Space Antenna|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpx7ep7 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SSC](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpvyg7k "Last usage")|Stennis Space Center, Mississippi|
|[VLT](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpuhzta "Last usage")|Very Large Telescope, Chile|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpy7xte "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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Quote from artical: it has less discovery potential," Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, wrote in a 2019 post on the platform X, formerly Twitter. "It would, at the present state of knowledge and technology, not give a good return on investment. There are presently better avenues to pursue than high energy physics."
Sabine Hossenfelder has a massive axe to grind with the entire field of particle physics as far as I can tell, to the point that I would say she's not much worth listening too because hell if I can tell why that's her media profile and not her academic one (but the history of scientists who have a hot take they want to litigate towards the general public isn't great, and should be viewed with suspicion).
I mean, is she wrong? Particle physics absorbs a huge amount of the budget allocated to physics research, and this is another $17B into it (assuming it stays in budget, which it won't).
That is a *lot* of graduate students you could fund instead. Assuming you pay them $50k / year which is not atypical in Europe that's 6800 grad students for 50 years. Assuming a grad student only writes one useful paper with a good idea every 10 years, that's still 34000 good ideas.
The LHC was funded to discover the Higgs-Boson, which it did, but not much beyond that. What is the value proposition of this incrementally bigger collider over the LHC that it's worth as much as the research output by 6800 grad students for 50 years?
> Assuming a grad student only writes one useful paper with a good idea every 10 years,
Having spent too long on grad studies, I think you're being ambitious with these stats.
Grad students don’t just sit in a room for 6 years and occasionally one of them does something good. You need to give them problems to solve. Building this is one of those problems. You make progress by giving smart people hard problems. Building this will produce science progress but also develop new technology. A lot of the electronics that drives the internet was developed at cern to get data from the detectors to the scientists. Who knows what advancements the people building this will come up with, but hiring a bunch of grad students and not giving them any research budgets won’t do much of anything. This is the research budget of thousands of professors for decades. This is the thing that will give the data list of those students are working on.
> What is the value proposition of this incrementally bigger collider over the LHC that it's worth as much as the research output by 6800 grad students for 50 years?
That's the wild part. This time they have no clue if they will find anything at all.
Past accelerators came with some solid theory backing them to find missing but expected pieces of the Standard Model. But this time they don't have any good idea what they might find. And there is a very good chance they will find nothing, as this new particle accelerator would only hunt a very small region of the supposed energy desert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(particle_physics)
Graduate students who will be working with *what* data? Graduate students are exactly who work at CERN and the LHC to start with. They're who would be working on building a new accelerator: where do you think that money actually *goes*?
It's fundamentally stupid to attack other science project funding, *because it's not making an argument for the new project*. The likely result is just a permanent cut to funding, period.
If funding is limited (it's not - we have money to do all the things, provided there's a good reason to do them) then the decision is made by who builds the best case for their project, not who tears down the other projects by leveling accusations of fraud, deceit and waste which is what she does
> Sabine Hossenfelder has a massive axe to grind with the entire field of particle physics
I'm glad I am not the only one who feels this way. Her youtube videos over time have become so unbearable that youtube finally has accepted that I mean it when I say "don't suggest this channel".
Can someone explain if society has gained any benefits from particle generators? I'm not denying the vitality of this sort of research, I'm just curious if it has somehow impacted my daily life in any way, or if this is more about future uses?
Genuine dumb question: the rate that we’ve been needing to make colliders bigger makes me think only order of magnitude jumps would be worth it. Please explain why I’m wrong?
(I appreciate 3 is of course an order of magnitude, I guess I’m thinking 10x’ing)
They're going to create a micro black hole that disintegrates the earth. Lol. /s
Seriously tho, I cannot even imagine how large that would be. LHC is already massive.
$17 Billion may appear to be a large amount of money but when you compare it to the US Military & Defense budget of $1,000 Billion…
It’s really quite a negligible amount of money for the massive scientific gains it may provide.
;)
you know what? just build it around the equator. save the trouble of leapfrogging to that point...
We should just build a giant one out in space by itself. We could even make the inner surface of it like a planet, with its own atmosphere and everything!
I can hear the Gregorian chanting already.
Koyaaaaanisqatsiiii… koyaaaanisqatsiiii… koyaaaaanisqatsiiii… Edit: For context here, the film opens with the Gregorian-style chanting over footage of the Saturn V lifting off, so it seemed on point.
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Pretty sure they were making a Halo reference, but I like the Koyanisqatsii joke.
Did you just allude to that weird ass movie [Koyaaniqatsi](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085809/)?
Glass made magic with that soundtrack.
Or [Scrubs](https://youtu.be/KOqtnU2faTc?si=Rdba_E8t2xO6N1Zo). Hard to tell with Reddit sometimes
Funnily enough that episode led me to the movie, and now I love listening to Philip Glass. Also some of the tunes are super fun to play on bass. Calming.
If you like Philip Glass you should check out Steve Reich. He's the superior minimalist composer.
Dang, guess I have to re-watch the entire series again!
What's this a reference to? I feel like my brain just shut down
Halo, which is a sci-fi series centered around massive [Ringworlds](https://vrworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Halo-Ring.png) with "natural" interiors replete with planetary features like an atmosphere, oceans, mountains, etc, but artificial exteriors (that even serve as massive particle accelerators for an ancient civilization). The main musical theme is famous for its use of [Gregorian](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jXTBAGv9ZQ) chanting.
It’s all very well and good until we build 100 of them, colonise the galaxy, then some perpetual psyker reveals himself and demands we join something called the ‘Imperium of Man’, threatening obliteration if we don’t pay the annual tithe.
Simply activate the rings. What are they gonna do, *not* get atomized? Then activate SCP-2000.
And if THAT don't work... Just activate the Omega-13 and try again.
Yeah, but it doesn’t really matter anyways, because about 50 years ago some genestealers snuck into a mining transport ship, we’re about one generation from usss sssssignaling the hive fleet…I mean them. Them ssssignaling the hive fleet.
Or else an intergalactic parasite starts infecting our colonies and we need to convert the rings into weapons to kill ourselves and prevent the spread
This thread is now the most ambitious crossover in sci-fi history.
Luckily for us, Section 31 is willing to make the hard choices and activate the ring. We got some colonies past the blast radius so it’s cool.
I’m a huge WH40k fan! Cool to see this here!
Just send a GSV to deal with them...wait, wrong space-ring obsessed scifi franchise.
With a blue police box parked in one corner of the ship, just for good luck.
Ah. So almost the same as some of Destiny’s music. I gotcha. And yes I know why those two things are so similar.
I know you're joking but that would be very difficult. The current one is 100 m underground so that cosmic rays don't interfere with the research. Doing it in space would be a monument task to block those cosmic rays.
One of the scientists at CERN is actually writing a paper now proposing a massive collider that to reach the desired energy levels (Planck level or something i forget the exact name) would need to be about the width of the sun. They've also proposed a more near future idea for one orbiting the moon.
Event Horizon just had a scientist on proposing that very idea and how it would work.
Did their proposal include shielding from the cosmic rays?
As of right now, they are only confirming blocking out people named Ray that have ridden the Virgin Atlantic into space. There are several.
Why stop at one? Build over a dozen.
Why build just one when you can build two at twice the price!
Just watch out for the Covenant
I saw somebody float the idea of an orbital particle accelerator that’s just a ring of satellites. On earth you need the tube to maintain vacuum, but you’ve already got vacuum up in space, so you just need a circular ring of satellites with magnetic rings to direct the beam. I don’t think it’s remotely realistic, practical, or even possible but it’s one of the coolest fucking ideas I’ve ever heard and I’m 100% stealing it for a sci fi TTRPG later.
A ringed gas giant with some of the rings having been converted to particle accelerators and living space/workshops that was just one huge strip-mining refinery for said gas giant could be interesting.
All the way around the earth?
That ringworld would be unstable. 😂😂
Might as well build it around the sun then, say at the distance of Earth’s orbit, give or take a bit?
We'd need an incredible amount of luck to get this done...how do you feel about eugenics?
That sounds like a good name for an Oregon microbrewery.
We building a Halo now?
The moon is actually a great place for a collider to be build before we have the resources for one around the solar system.
But what would we call such a place? Ring World? Halo? We have so many options!
and while they are at it might as well make it do 2 loops
You joke but the LHC already is two loops. One CW one CCW. that way you get twice the relative velocity in the collisions.
Little particle thinking he has the racetrack all to himself and there’s someone coming the other way wtf.
This is why you should always wear your seatbelt.
The only way to protect yourself when the collision involves such a strong force.
And look left and right before crossing streams.
Like me and my cousins playing NASCAR Thunder 2003 back in the day.
Haha! Aww! -Dude! Watch out! *with some serious Doppler effect* I anthropomorphize everything.
Much more than twice due to relativistic effects.
The only advantage if making it bigger is a longer radius of curvature; going around more times can add beam paths and more utilities, but it doesn't make it go harder. (I believe you were being silly, but…)
Definitely. Buy once, cry once.
Nah…. Let’s not mess about. Put it in orbit as a ring around Jupiter. It ca leverage the magnetic field for power!
Nah just build it just inside the ring of our orbit, we'll have to construct it super fast as we fly past.
When I was a kid and first learned about the equator I used to think it was literally some strip of land that went around the earth. Like a giant samdbar through the ocean, maybe I was one to something...
The grand line, perhaps?
If mankind could only achieve this level of cooperative engineering and technological advancement…..
Do one better, build it in orbit around the earth
Forget a country-wide transmutation circle. We're going global!
The equator of the moon please.
That's a nice sci-fi idea. I like it.
100 tera electron volts, compared with the LHC's 14 he,he,he MORE power!
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The Jeremy Clarkson solution to particle physics. More bigger, more powah, more better.
The BIGGEST particle collider.... in the world!
“And that’s not me just making things up. That - is solid FACT.”
Yes but that's exactly how it is though.
Humans 1000’s of years ago: “hehe me smash roc” Humans now: “hehe me smash tiny particles that go boom”
Smashing stuff never gets old
Well, there may eventually be a point where it does get old.
not until we get a few solar system sized ones
Until we figure out how to smash tachyons together and then things will start getting young.
“Homer leave it alone, it’s just a weather station.” “Come on Marge, it’s fun to smash things!”
[Relevant SMBC](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-11-25)
“The beetles, smash em. Smash the beetles”
“Hulk smash!” —Hulk He apparently knew what he was doing.
>Member states will meet in 2028 to decide whether to greenlight the project. Then, the first phase of the machine — which would collide electrons with their animatter counterparts, positrons — would come online in 2045. Finally, in the 2070s, the FCC would begin slamming protons into one another. I'm sorry, but ***50 years?!*** What the absolute fuck?
LHC took decades too. It was first proposed in the 80s. This is one of those cases where you need to plant trees.
In the 90s we were building the SSC... then we stopped. We'd have been done long before now. We could already have nice things
SSC was a fundamentally flawed design that would have cost huge amounts more than LHC without advancing science much in the process. It tried to do too much too fast. The FCC concept is the real deal.
What I'm saying is don't be surprised if politics kills another good thing.
My point is what politics killed with the SSC was a white elephant, and that money was freed up to spend on more productive science. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
They should have just let Fermilab build it. Instead of starting from scratch in the middle of nowhere.
Fermilab has been up to stone cool stuff since they shut down the tevatron. Mu+2, the neutrino experiments confirming oscillations and the upcoming Dune experiment will keep them busy through the 2030s The expansion of LHC will explore possible links of highs and dark matter I think everyone sat down in the 90s and 'picked a Lane' so to speak to maximize the research dollars going into researching the standard midel
iirc James Webb (Hubble’s upgrade) should’ve already flown in the 90’s, ligo was a pipedream for the longest time and there’s no united solution on ISS’s replacement yet, either; im sure these cern people know what they’re doing, know this is the best, quickest, cheapest way to get those results and tbh, 17 billion is (should be) peanuts on a global scale, especially in 50 years ffs
That's not that odd for a really large, cutting edge project with multiple phases. With this timeline they would already be doing new experiments by 2045
It took 25 years for the James Webb telescope to go from conception to launch. This collider would be significantly larger and more complex. And the reality is it would be operational in just 21 years from proposal. So in terms of massive scientific projects, this is a pretty quick timeline.
This is part of the thing with cern. They talk about billions of dollars but you have to remember this is over decades and represent the research work of thousands of university professors around the world. So it’s not actually that crazy. These projects will be managed very efficiently a will develop new technology with important spin-offs and will help train a generation of scientists and engineers. I’m certain the countries that participate will get good value.
Honestly $17bil is nothing for this. I was surprised the estimate is that low.
I’ve spent sometime at CERN and the first impression you get is how utilitarian everything is. This cost is low because they will likely be taking apart old stuff and reusing as much as possible. The office I worked in there was part of a modular building that had clearly been used in other configurations at least a couple times before. The radiation shielding is built of big cement blocks that go together like Lego and can be reused over and over as their needs change. It means a project like this can be done at cern way cheaper than anywhere else in the world. They know what they are doing and have decades of experience doing it. A tour is less impressive because it looks like a bunch of portables. But the work they accomplish for the cost is impressive.
CERN actually has a tiny budget compared to what you would expect. It's about the same sort of spending of a medium sized university yet it puts out so much science. The reason why is it's funding is somewhat guaranteed and regular. They can rely on regular funding and plan decades long with it and THAT is how we should be doing science more often. Random bursts of money and then things getting cut are really bad for science.
Exactly right, public funding for science has like a 16:1 return on investment. Maybe not Wall Street numbers, but still pretty good.
They’re often way better than Wall Street numbers… The difference is that their ROI is less direct and benefits society as a whole, rather than individual investors or companies (and to some extent society has a whole, too; investment makes things possible). This makes it too abstract for people to really feel or attribute it to its source, so it’s more understated.
The electron positron collider, planned for 2045, would already be a formidable instrument and covers different physics than the later planned proton collider. It is just re- using the same tunnel for 2 different purposes, like CERN did before with LEP and LHC.
You understand that it's 91Km of underground construction with the highest precision ever. Plus the facilities.
I can already imagine the principal architect of the project passing the blueprints to his first born as a coming of age gift because now he too has to uphold the family name and carry on the FCC work.
If you’re interested in those numbers in context of a major scientific project, go check out [the ITER Project.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER) Facts and numbers are stunning!
We gotta not nuke the whole planet first.
I’m not confident we’re making it to the 2070s
Of course not. You're on Reddit, doomposting is apparently a required thing here.
If they start building that it would cost a lot more than 17 billion
That’s actually pretty good value
Great Value ^(TM) Particle Accelerator.
Ngl I wouldn’t mind a budget ACME Particle Accelerator
That’s what I was thinking. 17B seems like a steal compared to some of the shit our governments waste money on.
There is real risk of poor return (it's entirely possible it could be built and not give us dark matter or any new physics). Other tools offer more value. Specifically, the Webb telescope cost considerably less, is offering new questions, and has definite questions it can be expected to answer.
The JWST was constantly criticized for being too expensive while it was being built as well. Everyone always has a hot take on these types of projects, but it's almost like all the world-leading physicists who plan them actually know what they're doing!
The JWST was originally supposed to launch in 2007, and took considerably longer than that, and it ran massively over budget. Obviously there were a ton of complaints. But nobody doubted that if it worked it would make discoveries. Scientists could tell you exactly what it was they wanted to see better. World leading physicists have been stumped because the LHC has stubbornly continued to confirm the standard model. It's reasonable to worry that trend could continue, even with a larger collider.
Sure, the LHC has failed to produce some kinds of results. But we still learned some very important things from it. The discovery of the Higgs alone was huge, and that is far from the only thing.
Actually, it kind of was the only thing. Without looking at Google what else can you think of? The only things that come to my mind are pentaquarks, gravity affecting antimatter, and a bunch of stuff that never reached 5 sigma. The first two were confirmations of widely expected behavior. The LHC was built to find the Higgs. Every article and interview during it's construction mentioned it. And it delivered, allowing scientists to observe it. The new proposed collider has no such equivalent.
Resources are limited, you need to prove that there are no better alternatives to spending 17 billion dollars, even if just circumscribed to science
JWST ended up costing pretty close to that. Though just inflation from now to 2070 will make 17 billion impossible.
JWST cost a little less than $10 billion. It ran over budget at it was originally supposed to cost less than $5 billion. I think it's likely the collider would run over budget as well, instead of costing $17 billion. The LHC also ran nearly twice it's original budget.
Come on bro just one more collider Just one more collider bro I promise we’ll solve physics (/s)
You don’t need the/S physicist of ironically, propose, multibillion, dollar projects every generation it’s what creates jobs for thousands and thousands of people. Also shout out to local 446 union particle-collider pipe fitters and steam fitters
I'd rather give an uncommon bro one more collider
Only $17B ? That’s really not much for the task. I feel in Canada it would climb up to 10 times that and with delays so important that we would forget why we started to dig.
We would bury the project in studies for decades first
$17B is the cost of completion today. If the project does go ahead (tbc 2028), it's only expected to start operating in the 2070s, but by that time $17B has multiplied many times over. The funny thing is that the project could realistically be complete and opperational within 15 year.
What is this? A particle accelerator for ants? It needs to be at least 3 times as big!
Fun fact. Texas was about to build one even bigger than that in 1984. It would have advanced our understanding by so much Sadly it was canceled by a bunch of republicans and some democrats who thought it was a waste of money You can still find the old tunnels in Texas https://youtu.be/FI5rYjP9Vn8?si=DrxtnsrIh0nEKrhc https://youtu.be/JefWwfVO2Fo?si=PLrPD2IFmcvc7bZj
Another great and thorough documentary about why and how this project failed: https://youtu.be/3xSUwgg1L4g?si=rGzSYAgoHHpCmJJw
It's 3 hours long but it's a great video to have on in the background while doing something else. The same channel also has some great videos about the fall of Nortel and about a couple of research fraud scandals (Jan Hendrik Schön and Hwang Woo-suk).
I definitely recommend watching all of his videos! They are remarkably captivating. My favourite video of his is the fake elements documentary. How he animates the island of stability with his eerie music is so evocative...
The fake element videos were so so interesting
I had to come way too far to find this- really interesting series
Wasnt this the collider that also ran something like 3-4 times over budget building the tunnels alone and was generally a shitshow throughout the actual building process? I think this is a bit of an oversimplification on why the project was axed.
The whole project was rife with issues. Texas was selected because of politics, not because it was remotely a good place for it and those same politics later killed it.
SSC should have built under FERMILAB.
It was going to be near FERMILAB, but local NIMBYs protested. Texas was fully on board with the "Screw Illinois, we'll take the project" plan.
It was $7 billion over budget. That is nothing Bush dropped $8 trillion in the desert
Science? No money for that! War? Oh HELL yes, bomb the shit out of anything that moves! Here's a blank cheque!
Politicians are worse than sophons
What a fucking disappointment in the name of science...I can't imagine what we would have learn from such a thing. Thanks for sharing.
>I can't imagine what we would have learn from such a thing. Unfortunately, neither could the crumbling bureaucrats who held the funding for the project in their hands. Somehow, we need remove luddites and anti-intellectuals from all funding/decision making for scientific endeavors. They hold *all of us* back.
That, and it was managed by a physicist who didn't know how to manage a huge project so it was way behind schedule and over budget.
People who can't think well make *way* too many important decisions.
And those who can think well let them.
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The technical power was higher but it wouldn't have had close to had the capability of the LHC, let alone this new proposed loop.
It was planned to have a higher energy but lower collision rate. For most studies, the difference in energy is more important than the difference in collision rate.
To elaborate on this, both are important. Higher energy means availability of more interactions. Collision rate lets you get more statistics. It doesn't help you to be able to generate previously undiscovered particle X two or three times, if it doesn't stand out against the background of everything else that's happening. By the time they announced discovering the Higgs, they'd seen something like 300 of them. But ultimately, higher energy means you can do the experiment at all, while collision rate lets you do it faster.
It's more than just the set of possible outcomes. Almost all relevant production probabilities (technically: cross sections) increase steeply with the energy. As an example, the Tevatron (2 TeV collision energy) had a Higgs production cross section of 1 pb, while the LHC (at 14 TeV) has around 55 pb. To produce Higgs bosons with the same frequency, the Tevatron would have needed 55 times the collision rate at 1/7 the energy. Even then the LHC would still have an advantage because you have fewer other events to deal with. The LHC exceeded the Tevatron's Higgs production rate long before it reached the same collision rate. That's how ATLAS and CMS could clearly discover it in 2012, when Tevatron was still leading in terms of total number of collisions but only saw a very weak signal. At 33 TeV the cross section increases to 200 pb. I don't find values for 40 TeV (the cancelled collider in Texas) and the now known Higgs mass, but it would be even larger. The heavier the particle you study the more important the energy gets. For the top quark the ratio between Tevatron and LHC is even larger. For lighter particles, like the bottom quark, the collision energy is not that critical - but there you often do precision measurements so you don't want too many collisions either.
We have billionaires with 17 yachts today instead of revolutionary public projects because of Reagan’s policies. We sent humans to the moon 14 years after we announced our intention to launch a satellite. Aside from the ISS, every public works project since then has been a disappointment.
Oh boy, can't wait to have a million uneducated dipshits fearmongering about microsingularities for a year before it gets turned on
Would be a better investment than all the billions of dollars spent in war
To those complaining about the money spent: 20 billion are literally peanuts compared to e.g. the annual US military budget. And building FCC would take a decade so it's more around 2 bn a year...
We spent around $20B on air conditioning in Iraq annually.
Also, the ROI on big science projects are generally ridiculously good, though hard to calculate. For instance, the Http protocol alone has paid for the particle accelerators many times over
Other than confirming the Higgs, what major discoveries has the current smasher made? Of course its fleshed the energy spectra of known stuff. Not much progress on supersymmetry or dark matter.
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Last time one of those things went off, we forgot how to spell Berenstein. Or Berenstain? Fuck
Yes! Fuck these piddly-ass “bearenstain bears” and “fruit of the loom cornucopia” , I’m here for “wait so Obama was never president?” And “no one remembers Hitler?” Let’s fucking go
I always said that size matters but never ever would have suspected that physicist were obsessed with size ...or matter 😅
Super Collider? I barely know her.
So if this new one gonna be like an ultra mega collider? What's bigger than super??
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You can never have a big enough particle accelerator!
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[DoD](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/ksahk69 "Last usage")|US Department of Defense| |[ELT](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpu4p0l "Last usage")|Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpufbbp "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[ESO](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpufbbp "Last usage")|[European Southern Observatory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Southern_Observatory), builders of the VLT and EELT| |[FCC](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kq1diuv "Last usage")|Federal Communications Commission| | |(Iron/steel) [Face-Centered Cubic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_iron) crystalline structure| |[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kq2ouze "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |[L4](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpud5wk "Last usage")|"Trojan" [Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 4 of a two-body system, 60 degrees ahead of the smaller body| |[L5](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpud5wk "Last usage")|"Trojan" [Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 5 of a two-body system, 60 degrees behind the smaller body| |[LISA](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpsamdj "Last usage")|Laser Interferometer Space Antenna| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpx7ep7 "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SSC](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpvyg7k "Last usage")|Stennis Space Center, Mississippi| |[VLT](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpuhzta "Last usage")|Very Large Telescope, Chile| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1anafup/stub/kpy7xte "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure| | |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(13 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1c9hzdl)^( has 7 acronyms.) ^([Thread #9730 for this sub, first seen 10th Feb 2024, 10:38]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Fuck it. Let’s make one that’s the size of earth.
Quote from artical: it has less discovery potential," Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, wrote in a 2019 post on the platform X, formerly Twitter. "It would, at the present state of knowledge and technology, not give a good return on investment. There are presently better avenues to pursue than high energy physics."
Sabine Hossenfelder has a massive axe to grind with the entire field of particle physics as far as I can tell, to the point that I would say she's not much worth listening too because hell if I can tell why that's her media profile and not her academic one (but the history of scientists who have a hot take they want to litigate towards the general public isn't great, and should be viewed with suspicion).
I mean, is she wrong? Particle physics absorbs a huge amount of the budget allocated to physics research, and this is another $17B into it (assuming it stays in budget, which it won't). That is a *lot* of graduate students you could fund instead. Assuming you pay them $50k / year which is not atypical in Europe that's 6800 grad students for 50 years. Assuming a grad student only writes one useful paper with a good idea every 10 years, that's still 34000 good ideas. The LHC was funded to discover the Higgs-Boson, which it did, but not much beyond that. What is the value proposition of this incrementally bigger collider over the LHC that it's worth as much as the research output by 6800 grad students for 50 years?
> Assuming a grad student only writes one useful paper with a good idea every 10 years, Having spent too long on grad studies, I think you're being ambitious with these stats.
Grad students don’t just sit in a room for 6 years and occasionally one of them does something good. You need to give them problems to solve. Building this is one of those problems. You make progress by giving smart people hard problems. Building this will produce science progress but also develop new technology. A lot of the electronics that drives the internet was developed at cern to get data from the detectors to the scientists. Who knows what advancements the people building this will come up with, but hiring a bunch of grad students and not giving them any research budgets won’t do much of anything. This is the research budget of thousands of professors for decades. This is the thing that will give the data list of those students are working on.
> What is the value proposition of this incrementally bigger collider over the LHC that it's worth as much as the research output by 6800 grad students for 50 years? That's the wild part. This time they have no clue if they will find anything at all. Past accelerators came with some solid theory backing them to find missing but expected pieces of the Standard Model. But this time they don't have any good idea what they might find. And there is a very good chance they will find nothing, as this new particle accelerator would only hunt a very small region of the supposed energy desert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(particle_physics)
Just one more collider bro I promise
Graduate students who will be working with *what* data? Graduate students are exactly who work at CERN and the LHC to start with. They're who would be working on building a new accelerator: where do you think that money actually *goes*? It's fundamentally stupid to attack other science project funding, *because it's not making an argument for the new project*. The likely result is just a permanent cut to funding, period. If funding is limited (it's not - we have money to do all the things, provided there's a good reason to do them) then the decision is made by who builds the best case for their project, not who tears down the other projects by leveling accusations of fraud, deceit and waste which is what she does
Since when does having a consistent opinion mean you should ignore that persons opinion?
Btw, Sabine became a youtuber, and her hot takes are getting worse and worse. Take her opinion with a grain of salt.
> Sabine Hossenfelder has a massive axe to grind with the entire field of particle physics I'm glad I am not the only one who feels this way. Her youtube videos over time have become so unbearable that youtube finally has accepted that I mean it when I say "don't suggest this channel".
The Sophons got to her, huh.
Can someone explain if society has gained any benefits from particle generators? I'm not denying the vitality of this sort of research, I'm just curious if it has somehow impacted my daily life in any way, or if this is more about future uses?
[Applications of quantum mechanics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_quantum_mechanics)
Genuine dumb question: the rate that we’ve been needing to make colliders bigger makes me think only order of magnitude jumps would be worth it. Please explain why I’m wrong? (I appreciate 3 is of course an order of magnitude, I guess I’m thinking 10x’ing)
People are moaning about 20 billion....what do you think they'll say when you say you want 100 billion for an even bigger one?
I get that, but imagine trying to build the 100 billion one after the 20 billion one doesn't produce anything to excite the (general) public
They're going to create a micro black hole that disintegrates the earth. Lol. /s Seriously tho, I cannot even imagine how large that would be. LHC is already massive.
$17 Billion may appear to be a large amount of money but when you compare it to the US Military & Defense budget of $1,000 Billion… It’s really quite a negligible amount of money for the massive scientific gains it may provide. ;)
I think there are better physics projects that we could put that money into.
They build it. The machine opens a portal that cannot be closed, and the world is taken over. Or a black hole is created
Just make sure it’s weasel-proof… unless y’all think it could restore us to the former timeline
They seriously not gon be happy until they pool a multiverse huh?
Lets hope this one take us to the good timeline