[herdcall]

The problem isn't that there isn't money, but that there isn't enough money for scientific research. The view that building bigger and bigger LHCs is coming at the expense of more deserving research is IMO worth consideration and is something folks like Sabine Hossenfelder aggressively share. I don't think it's fair to just shout down and down-vote people just for raising the concern.

[bastawhiz]

> The problem isn't that there isn't money, but that there isn't enough money for scientific research

My whole point is that if you believe this, you've accepted defeat: you're saying the politics is unwinnable and there's no convincing the people with the purse strings to give out any extra money for science, while the defense contractors suckle at the government's teat unimpeded doing exactly what you said isn't possible for the scientists to do.

The whole argument is literally that we shouldn't explore areas of science because cheaper science should be prioritized. And in fact, I think that attitude is actively harmful for the reasons Adam Mastroianni writes about when he talks about the NIG giving money to "safe" projects labeled as innovative[1]. If all you ever fund are projects that you think are safe, affordable uses of money, you don't end up with MRNA vaccines or a cure for goiter, you end up with a pile of papers that didn't do a whole lot to further anything at all.

[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/experimentalhistory/p/whos-got...

[JumpCrisscross]

> that we shouldn't explore areas of science because cheaper science should be prioritized

I’d put it slightly differently: if the best thing a group of scientists can come up with for $17bn is something like the FCC, there are probably better things to be done with those resources.

It might be science. It might be humanitarian. It might be military. (It might be fundamental collider research. As in how do we do orders of magnitude higher energy physics without building solar-system sized synchrotrons. Or, alternatively, a series of proving experiments that aim to better understand what a collider with a substantial chance of uncovering new physics might look like, e.g. in characterising the neutrino fog.)

The FCC is a copy-paste make it bigger LHC. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the LHC was built to detect the Higgs. We had a goal going in and reason beyond “it isn’t elsewhere” for the particle being in the energy domains the LHC could probe. We have nothing analogous for FCC energies.

I want to end on a positive note: I’m excited about the muon collider [1]. In part because it’s a new type of collider, which increases the chances of learning something new, whether that be science or engineering. In part because it gets one step closer to possible electronuclear physics [2].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00105-9

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.04469