| > 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 |