Actually the $12 billion figure underestimates the cost. That is the construction cost for phase 1. It does not include the costs for phase 2, and it also does not include the ongoing costs of running the device, which is estimated at $500 million per year.
How much would phase 2 cost? I'm not sure I believe the figures for phase 1. Also, what's the net present value of a stream of payments of $500 million per year, that lasts in perpetuity?
Sabine Hossenfelder has become unpopular among physicists, because she keeps raining on their parade. The next stop in the parade - or the stop CERN‡ would like to build - is massive particle collider, like the Large Hadron Collider, only on a much more massive scale. The Future Circular Collider, or FCC, would be 90 kilometers in circumference, 300 meters under the Swiss countryside. The problem is, it wouldn't really accomplish anything.
It's really not a good investment, because there is no reason to expect anything new in the energy range that it could reach. The most likely thing to happen is that it will measure some constants in the Standard Model to higher precision, and that's it. That sounds good if you're a particle physicist, because it will keep you employed, but it's got next to no societal impact. It's a high-risk, low-payoff project, basically insanity. I don't even know why we're even seriously discussing this.
There is an interesting part, in which a chemist, not a physicist, was telling the UK government that of course this collider would discover new particles, even though it won't. So the UK government would have spent billions of British pounds funding an experiment based on misinformation. Isn't that the thing that the EU keeps trying outlaw?
Sabine Hossenfelder pointed this out the UK government. Another reason she went from writing for the New York Times, to ranting on YouTube - an "anti-career."
Folks in the US can take solace in the fact that we won't be asked to fund this, but will be asked, or not asked, to fund other stuff that may or may not be of any value.
This is Sabine Hossenfelder's video Chances for CERN’s Mega-Collider are Sinking
‡ CERN stands for Conseil européen pour la Recherche nucléaire or the European Organization for Nuclear Research
The issue with such research projects is that is impossible to predict what will be learned and what benefits that knowledge may have in the future. Much "research funding" is wasted. Much is beneficial. But it's simply not possible to be certain at the beginning which project belongs in which category.
ReplyDeleteThat is really not true though. LIGO started in the 1960s with the express purpose of detecting gravitational waves. It finally did, sort of, when a much larger version was built. Those were detected in the 21st Century. Now maybe we learned a little bit about lasers along the way, though I don't think we learned anything we wouldn't have learned from the work the military has been doing on laser weapons, or that was done for developing DVDs, Bluerays, etc.
DeleteThe Large Hadron Collider was built specifically to find the Higgs Boson. It did, after an upgrade. It has measured some constants to more detail than was possible with the FermiLab accelerator in the 1980s and 90s, but it basically did what it was designed to do.
The FCC is just not big enough to produce any particles that are predicted by the standard model of the universe not already found by the LHC. It is possible that they could find something outside of the standard model, but I guarantee, that if they did, that would be written off as a data anomaly. Too many people have their careers tied up in the standard model - even with all of its problems - for it to be any other way. Politics does exist in science.
My memory is not what it was, I had to look it up... The Fermi accelerator was the Tevatron. It was basically a smaller version of the LHC. The Tevatron was decommissioned after the LHC came on line.
DeleteAnd the LHC discovered the Higgs BEFORE the upgrade.