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Physicists Plan to Build a Bigger LHC
ananyo writes "When Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started up in 2008, particle physicists would not have dreamt of asking for something bigger until they got their US$5-billion machine to work. But with the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the LHC has fulfilled its original promise — and physicists are beginning to get excited about designing a machine that might one day succeed it: the Very Large Hadron Collider. The giant machine would dwarf all of its predecessors (see 'Lord of the rings'). It would collide protons at energies around 100 TeV, compared with the planned 14TeV of the LHC at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland. And it would require a tunnel 80-100 kilometres around, compared with the LHC's 27-km circumference. For the past decade or so, there has been little research money available worldwide to develop the concept. But this summer, at the Snowmass meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota — where hundreds of particle physicists assembled to dream up machines for their field's long-term future — the VLHC concept stood out as a favorite."
Sadly its not that simple. Imagine lab "A" says they have a design they can build for 10B and lab "B" says it will cost $11B - and assume both labs have similar good reputations for building large projects. "A" gets the project and that means they get funded for the next ~15 years. Lab B gets downsized or even shut down because the high energy physics money is going to lab A. If the project works -great. But if not, and Lab A has put in an unreasonably low estimate at least they still exist, and after 15 years many of the managers responsible have retired.
Now say 15 years later the $10B has been spent, but its not quite done, another $2B would let you finish the project. Do you really throw away $10B to save 2B? There is no fraud, just a mis-estimation of the costs of building a beyond state-of-the-art machine and slightly larger technical problems than were expected.
What happens is that you create a very strong motivation for under-estimates because that at least keeps the lab alive. Combine that with the difficulty of estimating the cost of something that hasn't been done yet, and a long enough project timescale that changing economic conditions can substantially change labor and construction costs. This is why many projects like this go over budget.
I don't think this is unique to government. I suspect that Boeing doesn't do a good job of estimating the development cost of a new airliner either - and that is much less of a technological extrapolation than the high energy physics machines.
We don't yet know. Isn't that terribly exciting? That is basic research at its finest.