CERN aims to build €20B collider | Hacker News Reader

CERN aims to build €20B collider

theguardian.com

51 pointsgslin68 comments

We were talking about this at work yesterday and trying to add up how many new LHC each UK government foul up could have bought.

- HS2 rail : about five LHC - Liz Truss Budget: about two - Energy suppliers: only half - we stopped at this point

Honestly it’s depressing how much we want to nickel and dime Scientific research yet are hilariously incompetent elsewhere

Thank you for the perspective. My gut reaction to the headline was "Are particle colliders really the biggest bang for the buck science we can do?"

And you are kinda right, it doesn't have to be the biggest bang for the buck we can do in science. Its just nice it is not wasted on bridges to nowhere.

Agreed - and it’s one of those things that we know there is an ROI but the R rarely makes it to the original I, or even on a viable timescale.

I mean giving Einstein an education is probably the highest ROI made in the past 120 years. But how do we ascribe that?

Or more recently South Africa has made noises along the lines of “we raised you Elon, where’s the tax revenue now?”

> Or more recently South Africa has made noises along the lines of “we raised you Elon, where’s the tax revenue now?”

Source?

UK is also a massively failing economy though. Being bought by the middle east piecemeal.

It's not massively failing, just relatively stagnant, and it's not being bought by the middle east, that's just not the case.

Quatar (or "its ruling family") does own £10bn in properties?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2022/nov...

Yeah that's not that much, certainly not enough to warrant being called a "massively failing economy", otherwise so too was the US a massively failing economy in the 80s when Japan was buying everything up. Total property assets in the UK are worth £8.7 trillion. It says more about Qatar than it does about the UK, other than that the UK is a liberal capitalist democracy.

And it's quite the turnaround for Qatar in the last 50 years considering how they were once part of the British Empire. The Qataris still have a fascination with British things (e.g. Harrods).

Well, they have oil.

More like returning to a normal state, for a small ass island population with limited resources (all currently over concentrated in London). It's pure luck UK didn't end up like Madagascar.

I completely agree that it's returning to its "normal state" but disagree with the pure luck part. The UK is a declining empire, much like Spain and Portugal of past. They massively expanded their empire / Colonial holdings from the late 16th century all the way up to the WW1/2 era, at their peak holding sway over something like 25% of the world's population.

That wasn't luck, even if you consider it lucky that they are an island and were able to isolate themselves (while still being involved!) from the conflicts of continental Europe.

Now the empire is more or less gone and they've shot themselves in the foot with Brexit, they will become much like any other relatively isolated (economically) and resource poor developed nation.

My take on the Industrial Revolution is there was something valuable about the British … I am going to use the word … culture (#). That empire crumbled in the two wars (or one war with a half-time break) but the second “empire” of the USA picked up more or less the same place (Suez usually is the hand over point)

So yeah. We had a massive empire with global excess capital draining into London - now it’s mostly into NYC and SV.

(#) no that’s not supposed to be code for “white”. The Bank of England funded the monarchy’s wars so middle class capital held enough sway to hold the monarch off parliament which gave enough regional autonomy, courts supported capital investment over government, a growing middle class, widespread education, I mean it’s incredible it all held together. But I think a lot of what worked got sent by virus to the American Colony so by 1776 there were two simikar “cultures”.

not just the government...how many new LHC's for Brexit?

Brexit is more or less agreed as reduced 4% of the UK GDP - so that’s about 100bn less money sloshing around - something like 2/3 NHS or half welfare state. Or one HS2!

As an aside my take on Brexit is it was like a middle aged man thinking a divorce would “free him up” for a bright future of sexy young girlfriends. I mean it’s possible but it would mean a massive painful overhaul (whatever the nationhood equivalent of dieting, hitting the gym, doubling your salary, and giving your personality an uplift might be. And maybe plastic surgery and fixing those teeth. possible hardly covers it. )

The problem with Brexiteers is they can always say “we did not try hard enough” as if one more gym round, one more hair dye will bring the girls a’calling.

Spending billions on a collider when the healthcare system is starved of funding and doctors are striking would be massively unpopular and wrong.

Leave the particle colliders for rich countries to fund.

both could be done, they just don't want to

Not really. The amount of money available to spend is not unlimited, especially at these interest rates.

A billion pounds towards hospitals is better than a billion pounds towards a collider. People are struggling to even see a dentist. The NHS is in a deep hole and it needs a lot of money to dig it out of it.

imo nhs and uk's rail network are not failing because pure lack of money, they are failing because uk's govt decided to fail them. Uk does have a lot of money, and a lot of money are spent either unoptimally or entirely wrong. Spending money on a collider is not wrong, deliberately underfunding pub transport and promoting car use for any usecas is wrong because the final costs for maintaining this infra & developing it are much higher.

No, it is not wrong. I think your statement comes from a rather short sighted view on scientific and technological developments. We need progress as a society and as humankind to develop and further advance our (currently rather poor) state of affairs (on a global scale). Be it technological (where new tech can actually improve stuff considerably) or 'just' on the understanding of things, i.e. knowledge'.

The comparatively small research budgets would not have any noteworthy impact on dysfunctional systems such as healthcare anyway.

EDIT: Actually, I am not pro this new CERN machine. I think, there are other scientific things where it would make more sense to fund them.

There is nothing to imply that there is something to be discovered at that energy scale (100 TeV), and likely any potential breakthrough is far from the reach of the FCC. At least the LHC was aiming for the Higss (which could also be discovered at the Tevatron, but this was not certain at the time) and there was a great hope for supersymmetry. Perhaps the funding would best be used in other endeavors…

Sure we can build more weapons, do social experiments that mostly fail and burn tens if not hundreds of billions with 0 or almost 0 returns, plenty of examples around. Heck, things like biofuels in EU have clearly negative overall impact yet we burned cash on it like there is no tomorrow.

This is not taking budget from other scientists who will have to play with rocks for next few decades, the whole article sounds like an envy of rather weird folks ("Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy" is really not the best places to ask such questions).

Overall, one of better uses of public money I've seen in past decade.

> Because of the extra radiation generated by the machine, it would need to sit twice as far underground as the Large Hadron Collider.

Since I live nearby, happy to see the proposed circle is mostly in France, relatively far from our place. Of course if some small black hole is created by accident it may not matter much.

Is knowing the presence of something more valuable than knowing the precise absence of something? In my opinion both drive our knowledge forward and challenge our current understanding and development of models.

$20 billion might have sounded huge 20 years back. But we are living in an age where someone paid $40bl for Twitter.

I would argue nobody paid 40b for Twitter. They paid that for the humans attached to it and the potential buying power they represent. The non-existent buying power of a collider makes it a very different kind of deal.

For real... “mankind debates whether pocket change worth spending to advance limits of human knowledge on science”

$20B as a one time payment is nothing when compared to a defense budget of $750B a year for a country that is neighbored by Canada and Mexico.

A country that borders Canada and Mexico and also underwrites security for selected countries around the world. That’s Pax Americana isn’t it?

You may correctly point out that they only did this because peace encouraged trade, which made them rich. You may also say that they did to increase their global influence and that would be right as well.

But that means that the $750B a year is a rational expense that has economic and geopolitical benefits. That doesn’t mean any expense on any unrelated thing can be justified with “it’s only a few billion. What’s a few billion when you’re spending 750 on an unrelated thing”. Each expense needs its own cost benefit analysis.

It may well be that $20B for a collider is cheap compared to the benefits, but you have to make that argument. Comparing expenses isn’t a compelling argument.

Pax Americana only applies to close allies of the US Empire. Republics that do not bow to its Might get erased from the surface of the Earth.

Yes, I can certainly see how such an argument can be made.

I can think of counter-examples like India, which had been antagonistic towards the US for decades. This was especially apparent when the US provided naval support to Pakistan during the 1971 Indo-Pak war. And yet last I checked, India hadn't been erased from the surface of the Earth.

But my original point stands - Pax Americana was very much worth it for America and her allies. The cost of the military budget used to maintain Pax Americana paid for itself.

> $20B as a one time payment is nothing when compared to a defense budget of $750B a year for a country that is neighbored by Canada and Mexico.

It may be a smallish percentage of the defence budget - but it would be a massive amount to get approved.

It's only half a Twitter. Elon could have bought two...

That defense budget is also saying "I am powerful and dangerous" which keeps the dollar strong in a way. Imagine spending $1B per year instead. China and Russia would be on top of America within days.

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, CERN’s large hadron collider has not revealed any new significant physics that explains some of the deeper mysteries of the universe.

It would be amazing if this new collider will let us peek beyond the decade long stasis.

Higgs was the main science objective of the LHC, though many, if not most, particle physicists expected the LHC to see something more.

Keep in mind LHC has yet to collect most of its data as colliders tend to collect the most data near the end of their life, after all the upgrades and operational tweaks etc have been applied. As such there's still a chance of a discovery one way or another.

That said, from what I've gathered, while particle physicists are less enthusiastic about these next-gen collider projects given what we've learned from LHC so far, there's also an acknowledgement that the expertise to build these colliders might be lost if we take a break from building colliders.

The alternative could be very, very costly, as many lessons would have to be relearned the hard way.

The Superconducting Supercollider was to have a circumference of 87.1 km. The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is similar at a planned 91 km circumference. We could have had this in Texas.

a little Off-Topic but if you ever get to visit Geneva, there is a permanent exhibition at CERN to show how the LHC work and what is the organization around it to collect information, keep it running... etc... it is rather kid friendly too.

If you happen to be there during a shutdown for maintenance or long shutdown, there is a great chance that you can get an on-site tour that will show you the machines itself. There are other tours too.

Saw this, they do massive maintenance every 5 years and do tours in various underground parts.

First of all, I never saw any place better organized, not a smidge of dust, thousands of cables arranged perfectly. And then you get to collider/detector part which is this massive maybe 15m wide long cylinder, opened completely, and it looks like from sci-fi novels.

Just the scale and evident competence of building such a hyper complex unique thing... I live in Switzerland, pretty used to well organized stuff but this was next level.

My old secondary school took the A level physics students to Geneva while it was shutdown, honestly the tour of the place is great. The Antimatter Factory (yep its a building full of horrifically complicated machines with ANTIMATTER FACTORY on the front) is really interesting too.

This seems to imply that the LHC has done it's job? Would it be switched off in the foreseeable future? Does the CERN run other instruments or is its existence tied to the LHC?

CERN has been around since 1954. Among other incredible nuclear science earning several Nobel prizes it also employed Tim Berners Lee when he created what would become the www.

The LHC is but one of CERN’s world changing contributions.

This is the wrong place to get something like this wrong.

This is the wrong place to make an unhelpful comment like this one; Consider reading the HN guidelines on comment quality again, and then maybe share the part of GP's comment you think needs clarifying.

Naw id rather laugh at you and oc.

What am I wrong about? Everything factual I said is backed up here[1]. You can disagree with my opinion that the science is great, but it’s arguably impossible to be wrong on a purely subjective opinion.

As you said: this is the wrong place to get something like this wrong.

1. https://public-archive.web.cern.ch/en/About/History-en.html

This is the long term schedule for LHC [1] where you can get an idea about the plans for runs, maintainace and upgrades. The current plan is to run with HL-LHC (High Luminosity LHC) starting from Run 4 (2030) until Run 6 (2041). These plans will probably be extended because of different factors, but this gives the overall plan for LHC. And also why we start thinking about the next collider because it will take decades to be designed, build, commissioned and tested. This will require huge amount of efforts, community built and collaboration on a global scale.

[1] https://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/schedule/LHC-long-term...

Indeed. A working group suggested the specs for what would become LHC back in 1987, and R&D for the magnets had started the year before. So 21 years before they first fired up the LHC in 2008.

Keep in mind that the LHC would the existing tunnels from LEP, this new one will require a lot of drilling, so planning would have to start earlier relative to startup I imagine.

[1]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsta.2014...

Not quite. We’re currently preparing for phase 2 of the LHC with increased beam intensities and therefore increased collected date.

From a computing point of view, this poses lots of fun challenges!

The current plan I believe is to run LHC and the experiments until the end of the 30s, to maximize return on investment in terms of “data per CHF”.

Aside from that, CERN has other experiments and projects, some are benefitting from LHC and the big experiments, some are connected to the chain of preaccellerators, and some are completely independent.

> This seems to imply that the LHC has done it's job?

If you mean, 'LHC has nothing more to do', where do you see that in the article?

CERN has evolved over the decades, building generation after generation of more powerful accelerators.

The predecessor to LHC was called LEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Electron%E2%80%93Positro...

Yes, the LHC has done its job, more or less. Of course there is more utility to be squeezed out of it. But it is also time to consider the next generation.

they have a whole complex of particle accelerators; many of the old ones are feeders into LHC

https://home.web.cern.ch/science/accelerators/accelerator-co...

Here's to another wave of black hole doomsdayers :P

I'll just buy another crowbar and I'm good.

Cern makes physicists look bad.

Maybe there are no secrets, but every time a new experiment is conducted, the universe randomly decides the outcome and then sticks to it?

I think this is what we assume about small things already, like the position of a previously unmeasured photon or the spin of a previously unmeasured electron, right? Neither the photon has a position, nor the electron has a spin, but we measure one. And from then on, the the universe acts according to the measured values.

If that were true, what difference would it make? We would do everything exactly the same as how we would otherwise. There's also no way of testing your hypothesis becauase of that. It might fit well in a good hard sci-fi novel though.

"Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object."

In quantum theory, it surprisingly was possible to test the hypothesis that things don't have a state before we measure them and then they stick to that state.

So I wouldn't rule out the possibility that we can test it for other "secrets of the universe".

This isn't true. This is exactly why we have multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics.

There are always infinite interpretations of everything.

But the "no hidden variables" theory is the most popular and well tested theory about whether things have a state before we measure it. And it postulates that they don't.

It's not tested at all. No local hidden variables is just a priori true though. It's not part of any interpretation. All of them are subject to it. This is irrelevant though because there are alternatives to local hidden variables like pilot wave theory, the so-called many words interpretation, relationalism (i.e. inherent nondeterminism) and there's no way to test between any of them.

    It's not tested at all

This is what Wikipedia says about hidden variables:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

    Many Bell tests have been performed and
    they have shown results incompatible
    with the constraints imposed by local
    hidden variables.

In any case, your point is moot.

Maybe, but from a practical perspective even if this crazy hypothesis were true, the distinction is irrelevant.

Why is it irrelevant for the universe, but not for electrons?

Well it all continues as per laws of physics just as we expect. No surprising effect on macro world.

We see more surprising effects than expected effects.

95% of our explanation for how the universe behaves is "dark matter" or "dark energy".

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