Reply to post: It’s a hard choice...

The Large Hadron Collider is small beer. Give us billions more for bigger kit, say boffins

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

It’s a hard choice...

Yes it is a lot of money but as someone pointed above, compared to defence spending it’s a drop in the ocean.

I am certainly not a HEP Physicist. However, I do have a passion for all things science. A good point above was that we don’t know what will happen with a new larger collider especially if using Protons. Isn’t it in our nature to push the boundaries?

However, there are fundamental issues that need to be discussed. The hope scientists had about the LHC was yes to prove the Higgs Boson predicted more than 50 years ago existed. This as we know turned out to be true, it also completed the Standard Model nicely. But we also know via observations there is still plenty of unknowns left to discover. The problem is that getting funding for stuff like this is hard. So the people pushing for a collider need to be able to stand by their reasoning for a larger collider.

Within theoretical physics there is a big divide (read Sabine’s blog and then compare it to someone’s blog like Lubos Motl). We have String theorists who struggle to give us anything falsifiable and mostly rely upon SUSY being valid. On the other side of the coin we have people like Sabine who are adamant these theorists are lost in math and the money and the brain power should go elsewhere like Condense Matter Physics.

This isn’t an easy situation to resolve. Everyone hoped the LHC would open up Beyond the Standard Model physics. It just hasn’t happened and there is no guarantee a new collider will gives us the ability to validate this. It is by nature high risk.

A documentary on Netflix called Particle Fever describes this beautifully. In short the measurement of the Higgs Boson was slap bang in the middle of most models (be it SUSY or the multiverse). So for the last few decades theorists assume a low energy for the Higgs and a high one, and nature being what it is threw us a curve and in one go invalidated a whole bunch of models (more worrryingly decades of wasted work on those assumptions). Give these people some flexibility though, as the reality is this particle was predicted decades ago and we only proved it existed in the last 6 years. They have to make assumptions and take things forward as the technology catches up and let’s us test and falsify these things.

I’m on the fence, there should be some detailed consultation involved in all facets of HEP to work out whether the money should be spent. I suspect if we throw money at these things and the results don’t pan out, any remaining credibility will be gone and will won’t get major funding for anything big. HEP physicists also need to respect that if explained well we can understand the difficulties and they have to tackle. Assuming we are all too stupid and that we will just keep handing over money will not work.

What they don’t tell you is that they are all just as dumbfounded as to how the universe works as we are, they just have the ability to articulate that in math and models.

To say they are disappointed is an understatement. There is also a risk that we might be at the ceiling of what we can physically observe, this could just be it (especially if we do exist in a multi verse).

I say get all the risks and problems on the table and work together to spend what limited money and credibility is left to try and push the boundaries further. Otherwise we risk seeing the end of big HEP projects and the LHC while successful in detecting and measuring the Higgs Boson will be seen as an expensive failure.

A final point is I would like to see more global collaboration. The Chinese also plan to build a huge collider. Why build two expensive machines because we can’t work together rather than one that all physicists can get behind? Just seems crazy but that’s Geo-Politics I guess *smh

I respect all the people that work in this field but Joe public will not fund these things indefinitely.

A closing analogy... a collider is like smashing two cars together at near light speed and trying to work out how they were constructed by seeing which bits broke off in the resulting collision. Highly technical, but very crude.

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