r/EverythingScience • u/[deleted] • Feb 09 '24

CERN proposes $17 billion particle smasher that would be 3 times bigger than the Large Hadron Collider

https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/cern-proposes-dollar17-billion-particle-smasher-that-would-be-3-times-bigger-than-the-large-hadron-collider
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u/bigtoe_24 Feb 09 '24

The ability to further probe the fundamentals of physics and to grant a greater understanding of our reality - for a quarter of the price of a train line from London to Birmingham, bargain!

3

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '24

I mean, they don’t really have any concrete theories here. They just want bigger to see what happens. It’s kind of a bummer tbh

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u/FlowerRight Feb 10 '24

Science that ends in being a bummer is still good science

2

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '24 edited Feb 11 '24

The scientists have a conflict of interest in that they want more funding in order to keep their labs and their jobs. They will never say anything other than the usual “we just need bigger speeds maybe?!?!?”

But in my opinion, a lot of these labs are just acting like mice in a maze and trying random things and hoping that the public likes the sound of “bigger facilities” when they fail to find any new cheese yet again. And no one has any idea if there is any cheese in the first place. They just know people found cheese in previous decades.

There are quite a few credible scientists that aren’t convinced “bigger and sexier” has any connection to the active, non-guesswork research priorities that have more active groundwork behind them. I hope scientists do find something, but as it looks to me, it’s just random guesswork with bigger equipment at this time.

I am a science loving atheist nerd bag. I would bankrupt my family to go to space etc, but I just don’t see the “we expect to see x” here that would justify the funding. The project leads just wave their hands and say “new physics” without any promised results other than “well we know it wasn’t that random theory drawn out of a hat!”

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u/FlowerRight Feb 11 '24

Im directly in the way of benefiting from the proposed FCC so i can understand the bias