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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.
Future Circular Collider will be 10 times more powerful
FUCC!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Note, I'm not against scientific discovery, but....
1. How much is this going to cost?
2. Who is going to pay for this?
They failed in their quest to cause a black hole formation or an unknown particle/quark reaction similar to a nuclear detonation so it's time to scale it up, boys! If Britain is trying to blow up all of Europe, they might as well too.
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
At last: a solution to the Fermi paradox.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
It isn't in civilized areas like the EU.
Finding God in a Dog
This won't ever be built. The era of big physics is over.
Ya, but, contrary to their name, Large Hadrons are actually really, really tiny. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"civilized"
If it's civilized to sound and act like you then by all means you can keep it.
Well, for the cost of this monstrosity, what else could we do?
Although you alternate ideas are good, I think the very fact we don't know what we can get from this makes it a good idea. It's a good idea to invest in at least a few projects that are wild gambles that could lead to truly something new. And I say that as someone who thinks we seriously need to get humans on Mars...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This might be just about the only real job that Musk's Boring Company ever gets to do.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Misread that. Where the hell does my mind go anyway?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
And not operational until 2050. For that price, there's an awful lot of other science that could be done. It might be more useful to invest in, for example, carbon sequestration tech in the short term instead. Those tiny tiny particles will still be there after we've solved climate change. ;-)
The era of big physics is most definitely not over but I find it hard to believe that there is sufficient justification for this kind of expenditure. We don't have any good sense of the scale of the physics required to explain Dark Matter or why the Higgs boson is so light (something called the fine-tuning or hierarchy problem).
Without knowing the energy scale we need to reach to discover new physics building the machine is dangerous because, if it doesn't find anything, then it will be almost impossible to get the even bigger machine we need to make those discoveries. We need the ILC first to do precision physics on the Higgs and use that to guide the design of the FCC. I know that's slower and more boring but I woudl rather we make any discoveries later than not at all.
Build a fembot for Bezos which is programmed to divorce him. There's about 30 G$ right there.
Gordon Freeman is going to need the giant anime sword of crowbars for this one!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The National Ignition facility is also dangerous as it means they will likely lose containment
Uh.....they ran it at full power starting in 2012. We're still here, and there were no containment failures nor underground ignition.
Ya might wanna cut back on the physics theories from video games.
I remember a lot of articles around the time they confirmed the Higgs Boson that the practical limits for physics by smashing things had been achieved, that future discoveries required so many orders of magnitude more energy that building a collider that is 10x or even 100x the size of the LHC wouldn't produce any new meaningful results. That same article (which I can't find now) said that explore the next stage of particle physics would effectively need a collider spanning around the equator and would never be buildable.
Can someone with more knowledge on this say what they intend to actually use this thing for?
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.
What new particle are the looking to observe with a 10-time larger collider?
How will they call the next one?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
This can reasonably be justified if evidence can be presented that new physics will be found by such an accelerator. LHC found the Higgs, and that alone already justifies its existence. However, it has found no evidence whatsoever of supersymmetric particles, or anything, at that. It might be the case that one needs to go to even higher energies - but the truth is that supersymmetry theories lose much of their appeal with every new TeV that is explored, without finding anything. If this accelerator is built, and it finds nothing, that would be the death knell for experimental high-energy particle physics.
the next particle's name ....
It's in a mountainous region. Surely it would be so much easier to build in in a desert. Shovelling sand vs. Blasting tunnels.
Can't help seeing this as a European vanity project.
>A border wall will make it take longer to cross the border, and make the trespasser more vulnerable to detection by border patrol.
And so harm the economy by inhibiting the free movement of goods and labor.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.