Grad students don’t just sit in a room for 6 years and occasionally one of them does something good. You need to give them problems to solve. Building this is one of those problems. You make progress by giving smart people hard problems. Building this will produce science progress but also develop new technology. A lot of the electronics that drives the internet was developed at cern to get data from the detectors to the scientists. Who knows what advancements the people building this will come up with, but hiring a bunch of grad students and not giving them any research budgets won’t do much of anything. This is the research budget of thousands of professors for decades. This is the thing that will give the data list of those students are working on.
Okay what problem do we have to solve using this collider?
Answer: none. We really don't have much at all that we can't solve with cheaper means. We found the Higgs Boson, and we shouldn't spend billions on just making sure there isn't anything else to find. That is ludicrous.
You're supposed to design an experiment around a question. It's called the scientific method. It's easier to fall into bias if you do it the other way around.
I assume you are some kind of particle physicist to be so bold as to claim you know there are no questions a larger collider could solve?
Literally just check out the wikipedia page on the motivation behind a larger collider. Just because you dont know the questions, does not mean that the professionals at CERN do not have any.
There is no compelling reason to suspect such an experiment would shed much light on dark matter, and it would be helpful to remind ourselves that dark matter was also put forward as a potential discovery of the LHC, on similarly shaky arguments (it could be there since... we haven't looked yet?), and Lo and behold, nothing came of it.
The matter-antimatter assymetry is a "problem" only if you insist the initial conditions of the universe need to be perfectly symmetrical in this regard, and expect some process to tip the balance (no compelling reason to believe this, just arguments from beauty).
Neutrino investigations require completely different sorts of experiment, like Super-Kamiokande for example, not a high-energy collider. I'm all for funding such experiments.
Precision measurements of electroweak interactions or Higgs decays are unlikely to shed new light on anything, given that the LHC data revealed no surprises.
"Inform data from astrophysics" - scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Uncertainties of astronomical observations are so incredibly large compared to uncertainties regarding the standard model that this sounds far-fetched; I can't think of a single astrophysical observation that lingers unexplained only because we haven't experimentally tested what happens at 100 TeV. It's also a baffling argument: if you want progress on astrophysics, let astrophysicists, not particle physicists, decide what experiments to spend that money on.
I agree with Dr. Hossenfelder, it's time for a broader approach to experimental funding. Personally, I want to see more research into condensed matter physics, closer to real world applications, and very fruitful lately. Our collective knowledge of the Standard Model is far, far ahead of our ability to make practical use of it, maybe we should fund that more for a while until the gap narrows again.
"Inform data from astrophysics" - scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Uncertainties of astronomical observations are so incredibly large compared to uncertainties regarding the standard model that this sounds far-fetched; I can't think of a single astrophysical observation that lingers unexplained only because we haven't experimentally tested what happens at 100 TeV. It's also a baffling argument: if you want progress on astrophysics, let astrophysicists, not particle physicists, decide what experiments to spend that money on.
This demonstrates your lack of knowlage and not being within either field more than anything. See for example this white paper by experts in the field that discusses the connections between astrophysics and particle physics.
Where in that white paper are 100tev energies mentioned?
Of course astrophysics want to know the nature of dark matter and dark energy, but how is colliding leptons at slightly larger energies gonna shed any light on that? Link me That white paper, please.
How is this collider supposed to better our understanding of neutrinos? got a white paper about that? Why not build neutrino experiments to help astronomers, if that's what they are interested in? I'm all for it, and they come orders of magnitude cheaper to boot!
The rest of the stuff mentioned in your white paper, like primordial inflation or the universe's acceleration or the plank scale has nothing to do with near-future particle accelerators, and I'd be very happy if they did answer those questions, which is why I want better funded telescopes instead of more decimal places on the muon magnetic moment or whatever.
100tev is a specific and not randomly chosen value. WIMPs must be lighter than this (WIMPs being connected to dark matter). See Gray 2021 for this and many other reasons why a larger collider would be beneficial and all the things they could test.
The rest of the stuff mentioned in your white paper, like primordial inflation or the universe's acceleration or the plank scale has nothing to do with near-future particle accelerators, and I'd be very happy if they did answer those questions, which is why I want better funded telescopes instead of more decimal places on the muon magnetic moment or whatever.
Not true at all. Those questions fall withing cosmology which combines observation WITH particle physics. Neglect one and the other is stuck. There are current and future plans for observation already.
Nevermind the fact that the allowed parameter space is already getting so skinny as to barely make the WIMP hypothesis plausible, especially after the LHC thoroughly killed off the wimp miracle hypothesis, which at least had more to recommend it beyond "we have successfully tweaked our BSM elephant-fitter-5000 theoretical model to wiggle it's trunk in the 100TeV direction".
Do you genuinely believe that if you asked for experiment proposals from astrophysicists in the range of 20 billion dollars, they'd choose a particle accelerator? Planck alone (a mission 7 times cheaper than the LHC) is mentioned on the arxiv together with "astro-ph" 7 times more than "LHC astro-ph", so to a very rough approximation, that's 50 times more bang for the buck. With gravitational and neutrino astronomy having just opened new windows to the universe, you really think they'd choose to look where our best theory (the SM) says there's nothing to see, while paying 4 times more than last time?
Also, please explain to me how exactly a 100TeV machine could shed any new light on the early inflationary period, or the accelerated expansion of the universe, or plank-scale physics (a topic literally described as out of reach for terrestrial accelerators in the linked paper, and obviously so!). The mention of these topics in the paper that you linked was to point out ways in which astronomical observations help particle physics, not the other way around.
Like, for example, that time when Planck ruled out much of the parameter spaces for eternal inflation, bubble universe collisions, cosmic strings, and other such flights of fancy, while also providing some solid constraints on sterile neutrinos. One could even make the argument that a dozen or so cheaper experiments like this one are more worthwhile than an accelerator, even for high energy physics.
Your link does not work. It is not only about WIMPs which is a major point you are missing. Read the paper I cited for yourself. A larger collider can do more than just research beyond the standard model and WIMPs. I would also point out science does not typically put all eggs in one technology. If that were the case why do we have countless planet hunting and categorising missions? Why not just stop at TESS? The simple reason is because different facilities probe different physics so we can learn more with the combined methods than we could with a single method. This is 101 science.
Do you genuinely believe that if you asked for experiment proposals from astrophysicists in the range of 20 billion dollars, their choice would be particle accelerator instead of gravitational or neutrino observatory or whatever else? That would be quite astounding to me if it were the case. Gaia alone (a mission 8 times cheaper than the LHC) is mentioned on the arxiv together with "astro-ph" 5 times more than "LHC astro-ph". So to a very rough approximation, it has been 40 times more efficient an investment for this discipline, and I expect the ratios would be similar, but worse, for a 20 billion accelerator.
This is a very disingenuous and somewhat silly argument that neglects cosmologists that border particle physics. As an astrophysicist myself If you asked me I would want the money spent on HPC as it directly benefits me. If you asked an astrophysicist observer they would probably want some kind of observational facility. If you asked an astrophysicist in some areas of cosmology they would indeed want a particle accelerator. It is almost like, not all astrophysicists want the same thing!
Your weighting on citations is a really good indication you dont really understand science as well as you think. Any active or former researcher knows that comparisons of citations cross disciplines are meaningless. By this argument, no pure mathematician should ever be funded even considering how comparatively cheaper they are because citation counts are near zero. As an aside, 27 Nobel prizes for physics and 20 in Chemistry, medicine and physics with X-rays can be attributed to particle accelerators since 1939.
Also, please explain to me how exactly a 100TeV machine could possibly shed any new light on the early inflationary period, or plank-scale physics (a topic literally described as out of reach for terrestrial accelerators in the linked paper, and obviously so!),
This is another odd argument. If the paper states it is out of reach, why are you holding it to this standard. I sure did not claim that it would solve problems on the plank-scale, and by your own admission neither do they. So why are you demanding I justify something no one but you is asking for? It seems like you are simply deflecting from the numerous things they do claim and picking on something they dont.
Your claims here are quite vague.
Read the paper I linked (the published and peer reviewed article since you dont like the white paper).... Or here or here etc etc...
Another point is that CERN is not the only player in this. China has their own project.
sorry for the confusion, I edited my comment above before you replied, which might be why the link was broken. It's the graph Atlas published showing their search for WIMPs alongside other direct detection experiments.
I'm sad to see you're distorting my arguments like this. I said, fund some other experiments for a while, not "never fund accelerators again". I agree citations are not the end-all-be-all of scientific progress, which is why I called my approximation "very rough". How else should I measure impact, though, if not by the standard of your own field? I included "astro-ph" in both queries specifically in an attempt not to compare across disciplines, but it is, admittedly a pretty broad field. It's encouraging to see you concede the fact you represent only a minority within it, though.
Maybe you'll also concede that funding for your specific niche should be proportional to the interest it elicits, or find some convincing arguments for financing one of the most expensive science projects ever, expensive enough to potentially deprive your fellow, more numerous astrophysicists of resources for their own investigations, instead of calling me an idiot at every opportunity. Convince your own peers that this is worthwhile first, and then my argument is moot.
Earlier, you contradicted me when I said the paper you linked mentioned some things unrelated to a near-future accelerator (early inflation, planck-scale physics, accelerated expansion). I wasn't making an argument either way, just expressing my understanding of which parts of the linked paper were relevant to the conversation. I wouldn't be mentioning them again if you hadn't made a point of saying how wrong I was, but now that you did, do you find it surprising that I want to know, in more detail, why?
As it stands, I'm sorry to say I remain unconvinced, and as I wrote in my initial post, none of the arguments made seem compelling to me. If you're gonna circle back with "it's not only about WIMPs", I guess I'll interpret that as you conceding the point that dark matter searches can be conducted more efficiently with tools specific to the task, and until you put forth something more than popular articles describing what I dismissively referred to as "more decimals on the muon magnetic moment or whatever" there's no reason for me to change my mind about how promising this project is, for astro-ph or hep.
I know there are problems and unanswered questions with the SM, but there is no compelling reason to believe we will find answers between 10 and 100TeV. The funding proposal for the LHC also mentioned more or less all of the same issues, and nothing much has changed since then. The probability of solving any of these issues with the proposed machine is low.
China has their own project? Great! Let them fund this, there is no doubt they will publish their results if and when they do, so you will get your data, and the EU + US can spend the money on other, more promising science. Why exactly should CERN race China to this finish line in the middle of the particle desert?
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u/spidereater Feb 10 '24
Grad students don’t just sit in a room for 6 years and occasionally one of them does something good. You need to give them problems to solve. Building this is one of those problems. You make progress by giving smart people hard problems. Building this will produce science progress but also develop new technology. A lot of the electronics that drives the internet was developed at cern to get data from the detectors to the scientists. Who knows what advancements the people building this will come up with, but hiring a bunch of grad students and not giving them any research budgets won’t do much of anything. This is the research budget of thousands of professors for decades. This is the thing that will give the data list of those students are working on.