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CERN's New Collider Design Is Four Times Larger Than the LHC (vice.com)
If built, the Future Circular Collider will be 10 times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider, and could discover new types of particles. From a report: The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is widely considered to be one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in history. It validated a half-century of research about the basic building blocks of matter, and remains the crowning achievement of modern particle physics. Now, CERN wants to follow up on the LHC's smashing success with a super-sized structure called the Future Circular Collider (FCC).
This next-generation particle accelerator would boast 10 times the observational power of the LHC and would stretch across 100 kilometers (62 miles), encircling the Swiss city of Geneva and much of the surrounding area. CERN published its first conceptual design report for the FCC on Tuesday. The four-volume roadmap was developed over five years by 1,300 contributors based at 150 universities, according to a statement.
This next-generation particle accelerator would boast 10 times the observational power of the LHC and would stretch across 100 kilometers (62 miles), encircling the Swiss city of Geneva and much of the surrounding area. CERN published its first conceptual design report for the FCC on Tuesday. The four-volume roadmap was developed over five years by 1,300 contributors based at 150 universities, according to a statement.
Well, for the cost of this monstrosity, what else could we do? Where I like dreams like this, are we SURE that we need the collision energies this new collider will give us? What burning questions will this tool help answer that the old one didn't? Are we sure there isn't any way to improve the current collider without drilling more than 180 miles of tunnels?
Yea, I know that much of what we *could* find out with this thing is nothing more than educated guessing, but I wonder about the cost and schedule needed to build something this size. Is there something else which holds more promise than driving sub-atomic particle physics to higher energies? Are there benefits here? I mean other than providing answers to settle the various bets made by proponents of the various competing theories now?
Maybe the money would be better spent on bio-medical research, genetic manipulation of food crops, Fusion energy commercialization or space exploration? Just a thought guys.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I strongly suspect you could presently invest $50 billion into biology (with perhaps a side order of machine learning) before your incremental ROI declined anywhere close to this $17 b facility.
Which is not to say that this facility is worthless, but that the time is ripe for investment elsewhere.
The two main arguments for this facility are: 1) keeping the existing expertise alive; and 2) feeding the beast of existing appropriations directed to this technology sector.
I read Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex (2015) within the last year and I know that the achievements in this line of research have historically been immense, and I still don't think we should continue with yet another colossal expenditure, because the point of diminishing returns is exactly the facility we just built: worth it to confirm the Higgs, but no new physics.
People were dying inside when the LHC discovered no new physics for precisely this reason.
Furthermore, even if you discover new physics at this energy scale, it surely won't trickle into practical applications—not outside of cosmological theory, in any case.
The only way this gets built is on the velocity of established funding tributaries.
Meanwhile proteomics / machine learning are poised to deliver to the 21st century what particle physics delivered to the 20th century, if we're smart enough to look forwards, rather than perseverate on former glories.