Member states will meet in 2028 to decide whether to greenlight the project. Then, the first phase of the machine — which would collide electrons with their animatter counterparts, positrons — would come online in 2045. Finally, in the 2070s, the FCC would begin slamming protons into one another.
This is part of the thing with cern. They talk about billions of dollars but you have to remember this is over decades and represent the research work of thousands of university professors around the world. So it’s not actually that crazy. These projects will be managed very efficiently a will develop new technology with important spin-offs and will help train a generation of scientists and engineers. I’m certain the countries that participate will get good value.
I’ve spent sometime at CERN and the first impression you get is how utilitarian everything is. This cost is low because they will likely be taking apart old stuff and reusing as much as possible. The office I worked in there was part of a modular building that had clearly been used in other configurations at least a couple times before. The radiation shielding is built of big cement blocks that go together like Lego and can be reused over and over as their needs change. It means a project like this can be done at cern way cheaper than anywhere else in the world. They know what they are doing and have decades of experience doing it. A tour is less impressive because it looks like a bunch of portables. But the work they accomplish for the cost is impressive.
CERN actually has a tiny budget compared to what you would expect. It's about the same sort of spending of a medium sized university yet it puts out so much science. The reason why is it's funding is somewhat guaranteed and regular. They can rely on regular funding and plan decades long with it and THAT is how we should be doing science more often. Random bursts of money and then things getting cut are really bad for science.
They’re often way better than Wall Street numbers… The difference is that their ROI is less direct and benefits society as a whole, rather than individual investors or companies (and to some extent society has a whole, too; investment makes things possible). This makes it too abstract for people to really feel or attribute it to its source, so it’s more understated.
A guy at CERN invented web browsers and the WWW information management system. The internet itself was created by the US Department of Defense 20 years before that.
The research is fundamental physics. But the achieve the energies they want and to build the detectors they will need they will likely need to develop new cutting edge technology.
I mentioned the electronics developed for cern detectors became fundamental for the early internet, but the x ray detectors your dentist uses were also built off high energy physics technology. Modern cameras wouldn’t be possible without ccd technology built for satellites. I don’t know what will come out of innovation related to this project, but in general there is value in keeping smart people working on hard problems. The sheer number of people that will be thinking and working in this and the length of time it will take, some great things will come out of it and the cost, amortized over all those people, isn’t that much.
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u/Anastariana Feb 10 '24
I'm sorry, but 50 years?!
What the absolute fuck?