building another collider is very silly imo. super cern would make sense if the ship hadn’t so thoroughly sailed on supersymmetry, but it sort of has, so it’s hard to see why such an undertaking would be worthwhile. The LHC has done a lot for less fundamental physics, but in terms of the Higgs, that’s kind of the only huge thing that the LHC has discovered. and the higgs is important, but not nearly as important as people make it out to be. the higgs field gives rise to the bare masses of particles, but most of the mass in the universe is actually held in the binding energy of quarks and gluons.
I worked on some SUSY models last decade and the LHC limits were a pretty big blow to everyone’s motivation, mine included. Maybe we find something at the next energy frontier, but there’s not a compelling reason to go there yet. One could say that it would be good to measure Higgs parameters, but we could also do that with an electron collider at the Higgs resonance for likely a lower cost. It’s a mess
but in terms of the Higgs, that’s kind of the only huge thing that the LHC has discovered
Oh no the only huge thing the scientific project discovered is the thing it was built with the explicit intention of discovering, what a waste.
and the higgs is important, but not nearly as important as people make it out to be
well and exiting science brain for a second there’s the like human question of the cognitive dissonance of burning so much surplus on investigating mass generation models while so many people are hungry or unhoused or suffering from lack of access to basic medicines or clean water 😵💫
If you think money being diverted from scientific research would go to any of those things I have a bridge to sell you and all the profits will go to access to basic medicine and clean water.
describing it as putting some stolen-anyway surplus to better use sounds great but when that better use is just first-world phds getting their field coupling research funded there isn’t exactly a compelling case to frame it that way. does the research benefit the people paying for it or not? if I were a hungry peasant farmer and louis xiv strolled out into the fields and tried to persuade us that master sculptors chiseling marble for the enjoyment of his court would be a better use for the money than more campaigns in spain or whatever because advancing the arts is fundamentally good for all of humanity, I’d be crouched behind an oxcart with my phone frantically searching youtube for pitchfork sharpening tutorials
no i completely agree, i just didn’t want to kill the vibe. that’s the real main issue with building a big new collider. shit’s insanely, obscenely, mindbogglingly expensive. even just in terms of similar science, the cost to science ratio is absolute dogshit. even if it were worthwhile to continue spending large large amounts of money on fundamental physics research, colliders are objectively not a promising path to explore right now.
