$950 Million Large Hadron Collider Upgrade 'Could Upend Particle Physics' (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A massive project to supercharge the world's largest particle collider launched on Friday in the hope that the beefed-up machine will reveal fresh insights into the nature of the universe. The approximately $950 million Swiss franc mission will see heavy equipment, new buildings, access shafts and service tunnels installed, constructed and excavated at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, the particle physics laboratory on the edge of Geneva.

The upgrade will make the collider far more sensitive to subtle quirks in the laws of physics, and physicists hope these anomalies will pry open the door to entirely new theories of the universe. If the upgrade goes to plan, the proton beams in the souped-up accelerator, known as the high-luminosity LHC, or HL-LHC, will be so intense that the number of collisions in the machine will be five to 10 times greater than today. The upgrade is expected to take eight years. While new magnets and beam instruments will be installed when the LHC is switched off for two years in 2019, most of the required equipment will be fitted in a longer shutdown from 2024 to 2026, when the revamped machine will switch back on again.

Comments

CERN

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's make that "CERN," not "Cern."

can't have both.

[Anonymous Coward]

The approximately $950 million Swiss franc

What is it?

dollars or swiss franc?

you can not have both.

This really hurts ...

[CaptainDork]

... because it should have been Texas.

They would have detected the Higgs boson first, and would have attracted the best scientific minds on the planet.

The infrastructure and support system including housing, lodging, eateries, fuel ...

The list is enormous and the impact great.

Democrats controlled the House, Senate, White Hous

[raymorris]

Actually Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, and the presidency at the time it was cancelled. They had total control. The effort to shut it down was led by Democrat Jim Slattery of Kansas.

upgrading the hardware isn't the problem

[lkcl]

i've been studying alternative theories to the Standard Model for years. by amateurs, semi-amateurs, "professionals" operating outside of the peer-reviewed process for "some reason" (see below), as well as academics operating within the peer-reviewed community: piotr zenczykowski, sundance osland bilson-thompson (yes a real person!), and many more.

the amateurs... dang. there's a lot of crap out there.

the semi-amateurs... yyeah they actually get somewhere, generally, but they tend to want to contribute to the Standard Model because that's what everyone else is doing.

professionals operating outside of the peer-reviewed process: i'll describe these below. they're extremely rare (as in: there's only really one group, led by one person)

academics: these tend to focus on the Standard Model. the two that i mentioned - piotr and sundance - actually based their work on Haim Harari's "Rishon Model": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - it was extremely popular in the 1980s but unfortunately did not go anywhere.

there's also "String Theory" which has taken literally decades of extremely talented mathematicians (reducing - or wasting - the world-wide available pool of mathematical talent in the process, was one complaint i saw made by other academics, a few years ago).

all this means we basically have a lot of effort being spent on a theory with at least TWENTY SIX completely unexplained "magic constants"! https://spinor.info/weblog/?p=...

the one exception to this is work by someone called dr randall mills, whose work started somewhere in the 1990s, and, after 30 consistent self-referencing papers (because no peer-reviewed journal would accept them) he and his team published a whopping 1750-page book containing the material. it's *dynamite*. it's the *only* one of the theories that i cannot dismiss "out of hand". it makes sense, it's consistent, it's self-consistent, there *are* mistakes, there *are* "missing pieces"... but the core makes perfect sense even to me with A-Level maths.

now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model, where funding is ONLY available if you are working on the STANDARD MODEL, and where deviations from the STANDARD MODEL result in you never receiving funding again... you see where this is going?

basically i am trying to point out that upgrading the hardware really isn't going to help. the academic peer-reviewed system is so broken that i have really not a lot of hope that things will change. if you are not familiar with this concept, you can google it for yourself: https://www.google.co.uk/searc...

this article - which i had never seen until now - is particularly fascinating: https://www.nature.com/news/pe... which points out that peer-review is "a response to political demands for public accountability". whilst we may claim that, in concert with internet searches and connectivity arxiv (and vixra) are helping to bypass that and allow "public comments" over time to help spot mistakes, it doesn't help with the top journals, which is what most academics read and take seriously. and if those journals are biased....

Re:upgrading the hardware isn't the problem

[Plus1Entropy]

it's *dynamite*. it's the *only* one of the theories that i cannot dismiss "out of hand". it makes sense, it's consistent, it's self-consistent, there *are* mistakes, there *are* "missing pieces"... but the core makes perfect sense even to me with A-Level maths.

Genuinely not trying to troll you here, but this sounds like classic Dunning-Kruger effect. It's entirely possible that someone with the expertise you don't have (i.e. a particle physicist) could point out glaring inconsistencies that you are overlooking.

Re:upgrading the hardware isn't the problem

[lkcl]

basically there's something really, really wrong with society, that people with the willingness to study and further science are basically quite literally in some cases expected to starve themselves.

I don't think it's wrong that society is not expected to fund people's hobbies. If people want to try to lead into gold or whatever 'non-standard science' on their own time, that's fine. Don't expect me to pay for it though.

patronage, particularly during victorian times, was basically how scientific enquiry got funded. and the arts, and much more. it was a "golden age". many industrialists became extremely wealthy, and it was "de rigueur" amongst your wealthy peers to either (a) fund some scientific research in the hope that the people you funded would make something that you could make MORE money out of (b) you were so rich you just did it anyway.

now, would some of those people so funded have been fraudsters? quite probably. would such people have been disovered pretty quickly? almost certainly. would they have been people who initially had "hobbies" that, thanks to their patron, *became* a genuine line of scientific advancement? yes absolutely.

fast-forward a few centuries, and the money that the "wealthy" has is far, far greater than that which the wealthy people of the victorian age had. so what the hell's gone wrong? why is there no such thing as "patronage" any more? that's down to society. you said it yourself: "don't expect me to fund your quotes hobby quotes". yes we have crowd-funding as a way to get round that, as it takes more than one person (of our level of financial capacity) to fund an idea, but as for the really *really* truly wealthy? there's not a single incentive for them to do anything other than "get richer". walk away from society, effectively sucking the monetary system (and the ability to fund new scientific lines of enquiry) dry as a result.

it's quite sad, really.

Re:upgrading the hardware isn't the problem

[lkcl]

That is not how I read GP's comment at all. As I see it they are making clear, strong claims about particle physics and string theory.

that's why i provided references, plus1entropy. i missed the ones about string theory, here are some:

https://www.neogaf.com/threads...
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~...

which leads to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Physi...

and that last one is particularly poignant, as it's by someone for whom the work that they set out to do just.. wasn't fun. they had a goal, but they'd forgotten the journey.

the other one quotes the observer.

here's another one: https://backreaction.blogspot.... which points out that the "bang-per-buck" is firmly on the "please for god's sake pull the plug" side.

i'm struggling to find the original article, but i believe this last post comes fairly close. basically i'm pointing out that it's not *my* idea(s). i didn't reference *any* of *my* work. these are *other people's* opinions - ones that are becoming increasingly common, that's all.

Re:upgrading the hardware isn't the problem

[Dorianny]

Einstein did some of his most insightful work while making a living as a patent specialist. Don't blame "**FUNDING**" for the inability of all the alternative theories to come up with testable predictions. If the theory doesn't have obvious flaws and has a testable prediction, it will eventually gain enough respect from the theorist and enough curiosity from experimental scientists. Even Einstein's groundbreaking "special relativity" was mostly ignored at first

Re:upgrading the hardware isn't the problem

[DerekLyons]

it makes sense, it's consistent, it's self-consistent, there *are* mistakes, there *are* "missing pieces"... but the core makes perfect sense even to me with A-Level maths.

You're OK with a theory with mistakes visible and missing pieces... but you're bothered by theories with "magic constants"? Interesting double standard you have going there.
 

now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model, where funding is ONLY available if you are working on the STANDARD MODEL, and where deviations from the STANDARD MODEL result in you never receiving funding again... you see where this is going?

Deviations from the Standard Model never receiving funding again? Hardly. And if proven, they lead straight to Stockholm. Where this is going is straight to cloud cuckoo land.

Re:cue the black holers

[Waffle Iron]

maybe this one will be the one? can we really take that chance?

Your survivorship bias is showing. You're only here to make jokes about it because you happen to inhabit one of the one in 1e1000 universes where CERN hasn't already created a planet-devouring black hole.

Re:I need to know

[Hognoxious]

I can't even work out whether it's the collider that's large or the hadron!

More detail. Both parties stopped the spending.

[Futurepower(R)]

More detail in this story: Why the Higgs boson wasnâ(TM)t discovered in America.

Quotes:

"One thing that killed the TexasSSC was an undeserved reputation for over-spending." I don't agree with "undeserved". The project leaders did not explain their spending sufficiently that people with little technical knowledge could understand it. That was my impression.

"People have been asking which party killed the Superconducting Super Collider. The answer is... both of them. The key Senate vote came in 1993, when Democrats controlled Congress. All told, 26 Democrats voted to kill the project and 29 voted to keep it; 31 Republicans voted to kill and 13 voted to maintain funding."