Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Should Scientists Build a New Particle Collider In Japan?
gbrumfiel writes "The world's most powerful particle collider ended an epic proton run yesterday morning, and researchers are already looking to the future. They want to build a 31-kilometer, multi-billion-dollar International Linear Collider (ILC) to study the recently-discovered Higgs boson in more detail and to look for new things as well. Japan has recently emerged as the front-runner to host the new collider. The Liberal Democratic Party, which won this weekend's elections, actually support the ILC in its party platform. But it's not yet clear whether real money will be forthcoming, or whether European and American physicists will back a Japanese bid. What do Slashdotters think? Does particle physics need a new collider? Should it go to Japan?"
World class universities and scientists, a willing government and easy access to the country for foreign nationals. What's not to like?
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Does a multi-billion 31 km long particle collider that must remain aligned belong in one of the seismically most active areas of the world?
(Of course they wouldn't actually be rescued, the money would go to lobby organisations, military spendings etc. instead, but since that was always the case that does not have to be questioned.)
Trolling is a art!
This would make a perfectly reasonable news item; there's no need to solicit Slashdotters' opinions. People comment anyway.
99% of comments will be ill-informed. You won't be able to identify the 1% which are well informed, unless you're already knowledgeable on the subject. So why bother?
Queue Bernard's law. No, and No. There's a lot more data to be gathered at CERN for a decade, and it just doesn't matter where it's built. However, when we've run the existing coliders to the extent of their ability to generate data, then it may be time to build a new collider and why not Japan.
Just my 2 cents, but shouldn't the ILC be built on an area with a reduced earthquake risk?
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As someone who spends a lot of time in multinational scientific facilities (e.g. the Swiss Light Source) ... I don't understand the "Should it go to Japan?" question. It's infrastructure for the greater scientific community, so it doesn't matter where it's built.
Why build one, when you can build two at twice the price?
Wouldn't the Tevatron have found the Higgs particle had it been run a few months longer? Actually didn't it, and then the LHC confirmed it with higher confidence?
Let the intelligent physicists figure out how to extend their science without so many billions of dollars. (hint: look up, there are collisions in the atmosphere at much higher energy than the LHC is capable of). Let the physicists outsmart Nature rather than funding agencies. Maybe they could concentrate better if they weren't so worried about construction, budgets, reports, etc.
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The 'cheaper' bit will come in time, as these experiments tend to push the state-of-the-art in so many areas.
BUT, the ILC will be expensive, and that's unavoidable. In high-energy physics, higher and higher energies, and better, more sensitive detectors, are required to explore new physics. The accelerator and detectors required to do this are custom built, need to be basically developed from scratch -- and do not come cheap.
As someone who spends a lot of time in multinational scientific facilities (e.g. the Swiss Light Source) ... I don't understand the "Should it go to Japan?" question. It's infrastructure for the greater scientific community, so it doesn't matter where it's built.
Sure it does! Political, geological and socioeconomic stability are prime factors in building one of these things. Why the SSC showed us that politics and economics will ruin your particle collider. So if Japan is better with their money than the US and has a geologically stable site and doesn't go to war with China in the near future, it's a good site.
Selecting a good site will increase your chances of it actually becoming infrastructure for the greater scientific community. Just ask Weinberg.
My work here is dung.
Quality Control issues will have to looked at carefully though.
I was under the impression that Japan is very crowded and that most rural, open space is limited when it comes to construction or is protected park land. 31km is HUGE and if they have the room, well than go for it.
I'm curious about the scientific justification of another particle collider. The data from the LHC, ATLAS, and so forth has been amazing and it's possible to collide almost any subatomic particle in them so why do we need another? I'm not making a point, I'm asking a question.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
When will people stop publishing news articles saying "the Higgs has been confirmed to exist"? This is driving me bat-shit insane. No, the Higgs has NOT necessarily been discovered. Particles have been observed in the LHC at energy levels that match the expected characteristics of the Higgs, but we DO NOT KNOW if it is the standard model Higgs or just something else that looks like it. Goddamn.
Read more: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/342408/description/Higgs_hysteria
The ILC would be able to measure properties of the Higgs more accurately than the LHC, but before the LHC has ran at 13 or 14 TeV for a while we don't know if there's other interesting stuff to see.
If the LHC finds something new and the ILC has too low energy to produce it, it's wasted. Obviously those results would come long before the ILC is even close to finished, but it's important to keep options open until we know better. In addition there are other proposals for Higgs factories that would be cheaper to implement. Without new discoveries at the LHC the ILC may be pointless.
If the populace of Japan has the foresight to back the project with their tax dollars, then they deserve it. If you want another particle collider in the US or Europe then you need to get the populations priorities in order and spend more on STEM and less on war mongering, pointless drug wars, and other pork.
Why do particle accelerators seem to have such a short shelf life?
Is this it for the LHC? Im surprised that they are already looking for something larger, to study something that the LHC was aiming at doing.
I am not a scientist, but I do find this stuff incredibly cool.
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A question of "do you want beer or not" is not meaningful. This is why you get reasonable but useless responses like the first one here which had a subject line of "why not?"
For the article to have some legitimacy here, it should post the question in terms of altenatives:
- should a new accelerator be built in japan OR should the money go towards a new orbiting telescope?
- should a new accelerator be built in japan OR should a new accelerator be built in india?
and so forth.
while some such questions are a bit forced (I mean, we'd all like to have BOTH the accelerator and the telescope) if the question is framed in terms of decision making given scarcity, then we can discuss the merits and tradeoffs in a realistic way rather than the fantastic way that the headline suggests we should
They should build it right on top of Fukushima! If that doesn't produce giant lizards or superheroes, nothing will.
Not that I don't see the value in particle physics - but shouldn't we be spending the big bucks on research that might prevent our extinction?
Isn't anybody bothered by the fact that its already quite easy for small nations and medium sized cooperation to develop potentially lethal bacterial and viral strains? Or that we don't have comprehensive and globally coordinated defenses for Meteorite impacts, Rogue AIs, Nano-tech catastrophe and so forth?
But yes - all of this is speculative. What is not is the ongoing Climate Change, and far more importantly what is likely the Biggest Mass Extinction Event this Planet EVER experienced. While prevention of both these disasters is IMO futile, the mitigation of their damage to humanity is not. Come on Homo Sapiens, earn your name for once.....
At what point do we taxpayers say enough is enough? The LHC was crazy expensive to build and to run. They still havent definitively found a Higgs particle which is pretty much what it was built for, yet now after just 3 years its aparently already declared useless?
At the end of the day, so freaking what if they do or don't definitively find a Higgs particle. How will that knowledge improve normal people's lives in any practical way that justifies the massive cost?
The WP article says the physics case is the following:
"1. Measure the mass, spin, and interaction strengths of the Higgs boson
"2. If existing, measure the number, size, and shape of any TeV-scale extra dimensions
"3. Investigate the lightest supersymmetric particles, possible candidates for dark matter"
This is very weak.
#2 is pretty much dead, since the LHC's observations don't look very compatible with large extra dimensions -- http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.3375 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.5830 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4683
#3 is also pretty weak, since the LHC has disappointed the many people who were sure it would find supersymmetry. The strongest physical motivation for supersymmetry is at the electroweak unification energy scale, so it's looking less and less likely that it exists, based on LHC data at that scale. If the LHC can't even see it, then it's unlikely that the ILC, operating at an energy an order of magnitude lower, would be able to see it.
So the only justification would seem to be to thoroughly characterize the Higgs. Is the LHC really incapable of doing this?
In general, the LHC results are turning out to be every particle physicist's worst nightmare. So far, it's confirmed the standard model and failed to turn up any new physics.
I suspect the reason Japan is such a good candidate is that the Japanese government's main vehicle for pork-barrel politics is construction projects.
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As a scientist I have to say that we are the last people who should build something this large. For starters, our efforts are better spent doing science. Many of us are also old and out of shape. I suggest that, instead, we find some contractors to build it--they probably need the work more anyway. However, if it is decided that scientists should indeed build a collider, I want to be in charge of the hollering: "Shake it madam! Capital knockers!"
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
I thought about it, and I've come to a definite conclusion. . .
I don't know bupkus about linear accelerators, so I'll let the scientists and engineers who DO KNOW figure it out.
Is there no way to profit from the existing investment?
The LHC isn't that great for precision measurements of Higgs properties (mass, production cross section, branching ratios for decays). If there's a small deviation from the SM, the ILC could find what the LHC can't.
For supersymmetry, I'm not sure if the ILC could see anything at all given how high the masses have been pushed by the LHC already, but upping the energy from the current 8 TeV to 13 or 14 and adding 10-100 times the data can still give the LHC a chance to find SUSY.
Large extra dimensions was always a long shot. There's really no good case from theory for that showing up at current energies.
Is there really a demonstrated need for another large collider? If so build it but I'm not so sure this isn't a case of tool envy.
It all starts at 0
Do you expect giant robots to just appear?
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we going to finally say no to these out-of-control children? Is it when they demand a collider that encircles the Earth for chasing the gimmeallyourcash-on? Just because it is science doesn't mean it has to be done and has to be done now. I suggest that finding out things about the Higgs boson and other exotics is a goal of such mindbending uselessness that it can very well be left for another century.
E Proelio Veritas.
Could a linear collider share a tunnel with an undersea rail network like the Seikan Tunnel that already exists in Japan? Or would the railway interfere with its operation? There are other long tunnels in the world too, like the Channel Tunnel, but the undersea portion of the Seikan Tunnel does looks very straight.
From looking at images of various parts of the LHC, it seems the majority of the collider's apparatus does not require that much space around it, although the actual detectors, etc, obviously will need quite a bit of room.
If a rail network and linear collider could share a tunnel(s), I'm guessing it would save a significant wedge of cash and time.
We did. The result of the thinking and design process was the ILC. Now we have thought for a bit and come to the conclusion that to examine our thinking we need an accelerator. The ILC has been on the drawing board for a long time now, we have known we would need it since before the LHC even began construction. Now don't get me wrong, I would love it if your idea was put into practice, I'm a theoretician. But basic research needs experiments, I cant do everything on my own and funding me to the exclusion of my experimental peers would be a waste of the taxpayers money I'm sorry to say.
Correct. So why should some people be sold into slavery - which is a pillar of your ideals - when they have finite time to live?
Please explain how wanting a monetary system that does not steal the wages and savings of the people via inflation is "selling people into slavery". Such a statement is a blatant non sequitor. You don't even attempt to answer the point he is making, you instead build a rickety strawman to poke at by ripping a sentence out of context. Which is kind of stupid because people can see the statement in context right above your post.
China might be better in many respects: Fewer earthquakes, money's definitely no problem, science shouldn't be a problem, and it will encourage even more cooperation with the West.
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Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
No universities or scientists in or near Alberta, and it's too close to the anti-science craziness of the USA.
If only cause we can get another one of these.
Looks at my CompSci degree from the University of Calgary on the wall. Wonder what non-existant university in Alberta I recived it from? I'll admit it's not a hotbed of particle physics research, but it is on track to becoming one of the top-5 research Universities in Canada in the next few years.
There is a lot of work on alternate ways to build accelerators, some of it well funded like BELLA at LBNL, FACET at SLAC, and the muon-collider from Fermilab . While some of these ideas are very promising in the long run, they are decades away from being usable for a high energy high luminosity machine like ILC. Right now the only practical alternatives are room temperature accelerators (like SLAC), and superconducting machines like DESY/FLASH or CEBAF. Several years ago a comparison was done, an it was decided that superconducting was better for this application.
Could someone tell me why the Cern machine can't be upgraded to smash muons rather than protons? Are they too short lived (2.2us?) I just wonder if it's possible to use the existing infrastructure and not spend another 20+ billion dollars. In an era of shrinking research budgets, It's worthy to be smart about how we allocate our money. What are the underlying problems?
We haven't tried that on them, yet.
you won't even get the tunnels built for a BIG project (like the ILC). lawls.
Why build one when you can have two at twice the price? - S R Hadden
Interesting, I didn't know that. But again, one decent University (which probably doesn't do much in particle physics) in driveable distance doesn't seem sufficient.
Don't be an idiot. Every major city in Canada has at least 1 university, and several colleges/technical institutes. It's not the frikkin 3rd world out here.
Eastern Canada would work as well, but there is a somewhat higher risk of earthquakes there, whereas the prairies are very stable from geologic and weather perspective.
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Well, strictly speaking, it's also not confirmed that the protons in the beams are standard model protons, and the same for every other particle. Once the Higgs diverges from the standard model, all other particles will diverge from the SM as well due to quantum corrections. Of course the corrections may be small, but if your threshold of calling it Higgs is "exactly like the SM", then no particle is confirmed to be an SM particle.
Alberta isn't exactly the most populated part of Canada; the Toronto and Montreal areas in the east are much more populated. The other provinces are pretty small by comparison. There's only about 1.2M people in the metro areas of Edmonton and Calgary (each). So no, it's not the 3rd world by any means, but it's much smaller in population than either Ontario or Quebec, and it isn't exactly known for a lot of leading universities. And unlike Switzerland, it may not be that easy to get appropriately skilled people (esp. scientists) to want to move there, as the area has a lot of things going against it (bitter cold, lack of proximity to major world-class cities (no, Calgary doesn't count, Vancouver does but that's a long drive), reputation as a very socially conservative area, etc.).
Actually there are 6 universities in Alberta, but seeing as we just got running water in our Igloo's last year, it's would be easy to make that kind of mistake.
No universities or scientists in or near Alberta, and it's too close to the anti-science craziness of the USA.
That's news to me - last I checked there were universities in Edmonton (University of Alberta), Calgary and Lethbridge. Of the top 10 Canadian Universities the UofA is also the furthest from the US and as a scientist working there I can definitely confirm that there are lots of scientists in the faculty there. Finally I can even see that you got your nickname wrong: Grishnakh was an orc, not a troll.