[HN Gopher] CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possibl...
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CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future
Circular Collider
Author : gmays
Score : 47 points
Date : 2025-04-09 14:52 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (home.cern)
(TXT) w3m dump (home.cern)
| teekert wrote:
| Sabine is skeptical [0]. Is it really true that there a no
| theories that are proven or dicarded with this experiment, and
| that the Chinese have plans to do it much faster? Her video is
| pretty damning.
|
| [0] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/04/why-cerns-new-
| coll...
| jameskilton wrote:
| The utter lack of significant discoveries at the LHC after the
| Higgs (2012!) is a pretty telling sign. Any bigger collider is
| riding purely on the hope that something will make the effort
| worth while.
| refulgentis wrote:
| There's been plenty of significant discoveries, many, many.
| (O(10)s hadrons, consistent standard model discrepancies are
| really big news, those weren't expected)
|
| There hasn't been a significant new _particle discovery_ ,
| but none was expected other than Higgs, as far back as 2006
| when I was still screwing around in graduate physics.
|
| I honestly can't remember the last time a new particle was
| randomly discovered by experiment that wasn't already
| proposed and agreed to as sound-in-theory. It's much cheaper
| and faster to do theory, then built what you need to verify,
| than to crank up energy as high as you can and hope for the
| best (I'd hazard a guess this ran out of steam by the 50s/60s
| at the latest)
| pfdietz wrote:
| I'm not a physicist, but if I understand correctly there's
| likely new-ish physics to be found in Higgs-Higgs
| interactions.
| cyberax wrote:
| There is a _hope_ that there's new physics there. But so
| far, nothing indicates that the next collider will find
| something.
|
| There is definitely new physics to be discovered, but it
| might need a collider the size of the Solar system for the
| discovery.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Sabine is something other-than a good source on how physicists
| actually think about things at this point, unfortunately.
|
| It's not true at all.
|
| I'll come back and write some up over the next 20 minutes.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| I look forward to it. I listened to her a lot recently
| because YouTube decided ever "next video" bump while I drove
| should be her.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Blissfully, I found an IEEE article that collects the stuff
| I'm aware of in one neat package.
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/supercolliders
|
| The shell games are:
|
| 1. claiming it is a proton collider[^1 source] designed to
| look for new particles [^2 comment].
|
| 2. false equivalence between China putting in their latest
| 5 year plan to make a plan to make something that will
| transition to being a proton collider. And it's worse than
| that:
|
| If they immediately started after the plan was complete and
| on schedule, they'd be done in 2048 and transition from e/p
| to protons in 2066.
|
| CERNs plan is to be done with e/p in 2042 and transition to
| protons in 2070. That's 4 years later, but it's comically
| irrelevant. That's not getting done sooner, that's just
| transitioning to doing stuff we already can do faster, the
| cool thing and why _both_ are interested in building one is
| the _electron /positron_ collider stuff, not scaled up
| proton collider stuff.
|
| Content: - The project would transition to a _proton
| collider_ at the end of its lifespan as a novel tool, in
| 2070.
|
| - It is proposed to operate by 2042, assuming funds
| dispersed over 12 years, starting in 2030.
|
| - It will operate as a _electron-positron collider_ for the
| intervening ~3 decades before transitioning to essentially
| LHC with 4x power.
|
| - Electron / positron is a unique collision form, chosen to
| allow for _more precise measurement_ , such as the LHC
| discoveries of discrepancies in the Standard Model.
|
| - This is very important work. The more precise you nail
| down these uncertainties, the more theorists can do to
| verify their work, allowing the experimentalists to know
| where to look for new stuff, if any.
|
| [^1 source] Via Sabine link: "CERN wants to build a new
| particle collider which will smash protons together at
| roughly 6 times the energies seen at the Large Hadron
| Collider."
|
| [^2 comment] This is the undercurrent of the whole
| criticism, I cannot explicitly source it to one sentence.
| It's also bizarre: I can't remember the last time
| experimentalists got to discover something without the
| theorists telling them where to look. It's cheaper that
| way! LHC was a failure too by that standard. There simply
| aren't any candidates in the theory that are accessible at
| humanities near-term energy levels, the Standard Model's
| worked beautifully, _modulo these tantalizing discoveries
| at LHC of small discrepancies_ that electron /positron
| collisions let you explore.
| raziel2701 wrote:
| Why is this work important? To me it just feels so
| distant from my reality. At the core of this, is there an
| answer to the "who cares?" attitude?
|
| Because if the answer is that we might incidentally
| create new useful technology in the build up of a new
| collider, why not just diversify the investment and put
| that money into a bunch of smaller projects? Hedge your
| bets sort of thing.
|
| Why support this and not allocate more into high
| temperature superconductivity for example? I don't
| understand what is the justification that entitles such a
| large amount of money to a singular project.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Sabine also have wasn't the only physicist that thinks FCC
| would be dead on arrival.
| elashri wrote:
| I would be very interested in the list of physicists who
| thinks FCC would be dead on arrival. Can you provide
| source/s of this list?
| dr_kretyn wrote:
| Not sure who you are and why would your opinion matter here
| but I'll take you on your comment. Looking forward to your
| write up.
| msm_ wrote:
| It's already here by the time you wrote -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43668292.
| elashri wrote:
| > wouldn't be operational until the 2070s That's for the pp/hh
| stage not when it will take data. Sabine is misleading here.
| The plan is to start in 2042
|
| This will depend on level of funding and when are we actually
| going to start construction and have the investment. This is
| huge project that will involve state of art technologies that
| need a lot of R&D. Also The HL-LHC upgrade will push LHC to
| 2040s. Having expectation that in 2040s to get the next inline
| project is normal. LHC started before two decades from Tevatron
| shutting down. Most of the people who contributed to this
| feasibility study will not be working (or alive) when this
| project start collecting data. This is not something new as she
| is trying to imply.
| elashri wrote:
| Before discussions go into some generic direction about the
| field. This is a huge feasibility study contain different aspects
| done by hundreds of people. People who are mostly interested
| about the physics case of FCC should read/skim at least through
| the first volume [1], second chapter (Specificities of the FCC
| physics case) the first four sections. This is about 35 pages
| with somehow accessible language to people with some physics
| knowledge.
|
| Personally I'm interested in their proposal about how they are
| going to approach software (Section 8). They plan to provide
| experiment agnostic and unified framework that is actually
| unified and user accessible. The field really need something like
| that, it is usually the pain point of most junior graduate
| student. The field suck at documentation and keep coherent
| software and write code in a bad way most of the time. I think
| they can have much better framework than Fermilab's art [2].
|
| [1] https://cds.cern.ch/record/2928193
|
| [2] https://art.fnal.gov/
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