Posted by gmays 4/9/2025
Personally I'm interested in their proposal about how they are going to approach software (Section 8). They plan to provide experiment agnostic and unified framework that is actually unified and user accessible. The field really need something like that, it is usually the pain point of most junior graduate student. The field suck at documentation and keep coherent software and write code in a bad way most of the time. I think they can have much better framework than Fermilab's art [2].
I don't think that I've ever heard of an area of software where folks say "it's got great documentation and the code's really good". In fact many programmers react allergically to any code that they review (including code that they wrote themselves but have forgotten about).
BUT.. some of the code that LLMs have spit out at me is absolutely wild in how well it is constructed, and it gives me real imposter syndrome when I see the occasions when the code is so much tighter and better than I would have personally crafted.
CERN is wonderful but the physics studied there are eons away from applications. This is not solid state physics where you can suddenly discover a great material. This is physics at such energies that we will not have anyone soon. Kinda like quasar astrophysics, about objects that are really far away.
The usual response is that this is core science. Yes it is, but not the core science we need today. We have a limited budget for science and a mammoth like CERN cannot swallow it all.
The other argument is that technology will get better. True. It can get better without the accelerator, though, if we really need it.
I loved my time there, truly fantastic but the costs are not sustainable with current budgets for science
Now the world is fundamentally different and it is much more difficult. Not to mention that people move from academia to industry, sometimes fro financial reasons.
When you put 16 B€ in front of that to study stuff that may be useful in 1000 years if we do a breakdown before (otherwise it won't) and you look at the site of budgets in universities, there is another relativity to be taken into account
Maybe a bigger collider is exactly what we need, and if it fails that's also useful as a confirmation to go in other directions. To build it right now instead of other things is the difficult question because that's politics.
The LHC had a clear objective: to experimentally validate the Higgs boson, which it did. There have been a ton of experiments since but AFAIK all those have really done is invalidated various theories. That has value, for sure.
But it really seems like we need to play catch up and work out a theoretical model in what we'd actually search for with a bigger collider, rather than hoping higher energies will break something significant in the Stnardard Model in such a way that it'll give us a clue to a theory beyond the Standard Model.
Think of it like looking for a treasure ship. As a salvager you may know from historical records that a given Spanish ship, carrying gold and silver from the New World, sunk on its way back to Spain. You may have developed a model to really narrow down where on the ocean floor you want to search. That's what the LHC was. But this seems like throwing a dart at a map and searching the ocean floor to see if anything interesting shows up.
That however is not how modern particle physics operates. A particle accelerator of the scale of CERN runs many experiments at once as with higher energies more becomes measurable. The idea here isn't that we have a hypothesis of a small thing existing and therefore we build a giant microscope, the idea is that we know we do not have a complete understanding of what happens in thst domain, so we build a giant mkcroscope to look at it. I am pretty damn sure there is a line of theoretical physicists who already know what to try once a bigger accelerator is around. And we have other benefitial developments coming out of that.
The fact that you write this on the internet, a thing which was in no small part created by CERN should probably also tell us something.
The answer for particle physics can’t be to build larger and larger circular machines. Rather that money would be better spent on accelerator research to enable smaller more practical machines at high energies. Such machines may have some practical spinoff uses such as how FNAL offers neutron therapy.
[0] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/04/why-cerns-new-coll...
I'm sure that if you asked a range of physicists if _their_ area of research should receive more funding instead of the FCC, you would see less support for the FCC.
So we, as outsiders, are stuck not knowing what to believe - and ultimately an outsider, a politician, must make the decision for funding.
And it doesn't have to be physics, it could be cancer research, or not even research: each country involved could upgrade their sewage system instead.
But Sabine doesn't have to have all the answers to be right to point out that there's an enormous conflict of interest if you ask particle physicists whether they'd like $40B. Of course they'll say yes.
That's not a conflict of interest, like at all. What are you talking about?
If you asked me if my friend Bob should get a free $100 or if I should get a free $100; of course I'm going to choose myself, as that's in my best interest. There is no conflict though.
I believe the core point being "of course particle physicists want more funding of particle physics"
Her argument is that very particular niches of science receive extreme funding leading to advanced results in particular areas, which other areas can not meaningfully engage with. This funding imbalance is not "decided by the scientists", in any meaningful way.
Nowhere does she imply that she should decide who gets funding, in fact she wants an end to publicly funded research. I really dislike it if people criticize other based on made up arguments about them, like you did.
I have found that academics invite criticism--- indeed, peer review is founded on it--- but well-done scientific debate rarely generates the same click-through rate. It's hard, technical material rather than something to idly watch while you're eating, which is the caliber of the content here. Just compare it to, say, literature reviews from the field or comparisons with prior work in publications. It's not remotely as rigorous or well-founded.
Unless someone has proven to you that they are not trustworthy, you choosing not to listen is a... personal choice at best. So don't try to chalk it up like if it's not presented in a certain way that's to your taste it's not real science and/or it's fake news.
Choosing to engage with the attention economy and optimizing for engagement/rage as Sabine does undermines the validity of what she says because the incentive structures in the media environment she’s chosen to embrace.
I think it’s more like Sabine joined a gang, and while it’s possible that she has useful things to say, it’s also difficult to know where her allegiances lie, and which things she says are to keep the gang leaders happy.
Audience capture is real, and she’s been on that path for awhile now I think.
Yes. The content mirrors the thumbnail style.
It's not like she's Kaku or something.
Alas...
There hasn't been a significant new particle discovery, but none was expected other than Higgs, as far back as 2006 when I was still screwing around in graduate physics.
I honestly can't remember the last time a new particle was randomly discovered by experiment that wasn't already proposed and agreed to as sound-in-theory. It's much cheaper and faster to do theory, then built what you need to verify, than to crank up energy as high as you can and hope for the best (I'd hazard a guess this ran out of steam by the 50s/60s at the latest)
The word "expected" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
At least one kind of Higgs had to be found unless the mass generation mechanism of the Standard Model and all its proposed extensions (MSSM etc) was categorically wrong; the LHC was designed to cover the entire mass range where it had to be. In that sense, the Higgs was strictly expected.
But if you had asked a bunch of phenomenologists "What new thing do you expect to be found first at the LHC?", most would have gone for one or more superpartners. The Higgs' hierarchy problem [1] was believed to require electroweak-scale SUSY, which in turn implied the existence of electroweak-scale supersymmetric partners to the known SM particles. Those would have been easier to find than the Higgs, so they would have shown up earlier in the data, before there was enough of it to also discern a Higgs bump.
You could argue that superpartners were not expected with the same degree of certainty as some kind of Higgs, but the absence of any sign of SUSY was a big disappointment, and the beginning of the end for what had become the dominating scenario for Beyond Standard Model physics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem#Supersymmetr...
One of the problems we have is that we are generally inculcated by our educational system to just think "science is good", without asking how good. But when we're talking about things like massive supercolliders, which cost things that start looking less like "a grant from the National Science Foundation" and more like "the entire economic output of a small country for a couple of decades", we need to ask whether we're getting enough science bang for our science buck, because not even science is actually immune to that question.
The LHC is honestly pretty questionable on that front. One can debate what was expected, but what is perhaps easier to wrap your mind around is certainly the LHC would have been immensely more valuable if it had found all sorts of supersymmetric particles, right?
Personally I think the most potent criticism of building yet another, even larger collider is just that such a collider requires essentially strangling the entire rest of the field for decades on end, and indeed, at this level of expense, strangling neighboring fields for decades on end, to fund something that doesn't have a terribly clear through-line on its value, on any dimension, practical or purely scientific. It's almost like "let's build a larger collider" is just a reflex at this point. There's a lot of interesting things bubbling on the fringe right now, and I don't mean the crazy fringe, I mean the scientific fringe. Maybe we should take a bit of a break from particle colliders for a bit and put some money into those things for a while.
We don't have infinite money, and we don't have guaranteed money; pouring vast, vast quantities of money into a new collider could well inhibit future research monies. It is still important to think about not whether we "should" spend the money in this or that way, because that always produces more "yes" answers than we actually have money for. The question is, is this the best way to spend money? And given the staggering amount we're talking, it's a high bar for this to be "best". Personally I'd really rather see at least a decade or so of just spreading things around a bit more, rather than pouring all of that into what is essentially a single project.
There are other scientific fields that produce much more tangible results that the finite funding could go to. Even something like materials science which could not only produce more useful discoveries but could also make the next collider cheaper.
In addition, they're absolutely correct, some subset of particle researchers were wish-casting for SUSY stuff.
In addition, there's a significant substantive difference between "$X was defined and built for discovering $Y" and "some subset of $X hoped for proof of their theory $Y via $Z being discovered" -- there was also some subset that hoped for proof of string theory, or innumerable other things.
In general they're right and know their stuff if they're able to have this detailed of a take, but the actual claim "The word "expected" is doing a lot of work.", is doing a lot of work. And I was there. In a graduate physics lab with multiple faculty members on the LHC before it opened, including a big SUSY fan who thought that'd be a bank shot on a bank shot outcome, maybe. Hoped for by some? Yes. Expected by a majority? Absolutely not.
the existence of SUSY was almost a fact for a bulk of researchers working on the topic. This certainly was reflected in hiring practices, and you had a large group of top researchers whose entire publication list was tied to supersymmetry
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supersymmetrys-lo...
?
> to show you're clever and know a lot
?!?
I contribute to discussions when I have the time and think I have something relevant to say. HN is hardly the right place to show off about physics, and trying to do so anonymously would be particularly pointless.
> made it sound like CERN was expecting a SUSY particle
That's not what I wrote. My point was explicitly about expectations on the theory side.
Perplexed.
Thanks for sharing your insight and fancy words :)
In other words super symmetry wasn't excluded, just excluded for XeV where X is what LHC is able to produce.
SUSY is excluded. Like completely at these scales.
Extra dimensions the same.
There is definitely new physics to be discovered, but it might need a collider the size of the Solar system for the discovery.
Personally, I'm skeptical too, but the new ideas have been piling up since the time she started talking about this. Things have changed a lot since then.
It's not true at all.
I'll come back and write some up over the next 20 minutes.
Your claim, IIUC, please correct me: Not all who conclude $D make false claims.
I can agree with that for sure
These days she's clearly rage baiting with titles, which is typical algorithm submission behaviour.
I hope there was _any other criteria_ at play here? Why would I not be surprised that the answer is "NO" for 99.9% of the population? The world is really doomed...
Sadly, it absolutely 100% is. She's an amazing case of this. I'll spend the next 2 years gently walking people down from her clickbait, and I'll end up with net-negative karma for it.
I honestly had given up entirely until I saw a subthread about a month ago where people who knew the area were exchanging info of lesser-known youtubers who come and clean up her messes after.
The sad news is, they are getting more and more attention (I saw one over 400K+ views), but a lot of that just comes from being loud, proud, and aggressive, as well as having 30 minutes of video to justify the up front "hey, she's at best a not even wrong contrarian, and honestly, lets be clear at this point, shes a liar for views!!!!"
Thankfully I'm old enough to see this stuff happens in waves, within 2 years it'll become common wisdom that she's X, Y, and Z, and even if I disagree and just think she's misguided, that'll be enough for the tide to ebb.
They linked out to this Professor Dave @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70vYj1KPyT4 IIRC. (1M views!) He's got a couple more on it.
Note I'd never say she was a fraud but I also don't know what to do with someone who has grown into being Not Even Wrong regularly. This might be the only way, fire with fire, but it makes me squeamish.
The shell games are:
1. claiming it is a proton collider[^1 source] designed to look for new particles [^2 comment].
2. false equivalence between China putting in their latest 5 year plan to make a plan to make something that will transition to being a proton collider. And it's worse than that:
If they immediately started after the plan was complete and on schedule, they'd be done in 2048 and transition from e/p to protons in 2066.
CERNs plan is to be done with e/p in 2042 and transition to protons in 2070. That's 4 years later, but it's comically irrelevant. That's not getting done sooner, that's just transitioning to doing stuff we already can do faster, the cool thing and why both are interested in building one is the electron/positron collider stuff, not scaled up proton collider stuff.
Content: - The project would transition to a proton collider at the end of its lifespan as a novel tool, in 2070.
- It is proposed to operate by 2042, assuming funds dispersed over 12 years, starting in 2030.
- It will operate as a electron-positron collider for the intervening ~3 decades before transitioning to essentially LHC with 4x power.
- Electron / positron is a unique collision form, chosen to allow for more precise measurement, such as the LHC discoveries of discrepancies in the Standard Model.
- This is very important work. The more precise you nail down these uncertainties, the more theorists can do to verify their work, allowing the experimentalists to know where to look for new stuff, if any.
[^1 source] Via Sabine link: "CERN wants to build a new particle collider which will smash protons together at roughly 6 times the energies seen at the Large Hadron Collider."
[^2 comment] This is the undercurrent of the whole criticism, I cannot explicitly source it to one sentence. It's also bizarre: I can't remember the last time experimentalists got to discover something without the theorists telling them where to look. It's cheaper that way! LHC was a failure too by that standard. There simply aren't any candidates in the theory that are accessible at humanities near-term energy levels, the Standard Model's worked beautifully, modulo these tantalizing discoveries at LHC of small discrepancies that electron/positron collisions let you explore.
It's unfair to merely critique the headline. If you do not wish to watch the video, here is a transcript: https://www.youtube-transcript.io/videos/elvEcWc7U7c
"This is very important work." is just an opinion.
"The more precise you nail down these uncertainties, the more theorists can do to verify their work, allowing the experimentalists to know where to look for new stuff, if any." Sabine's point is that there are countless theories and parameters that can be changed to fit any measurement. New results will eliminate some, but it will not reduce the total number of possible theories, as others will be constructed to fit the results without having any reason to think one is more true than another.
Concretely:
If you don't think OP got the right understanding from the video, so their questions were fundamentally Wrong and Shouldn't Be Asked and Impugned Sabine by their very nature of being asked, that's fine. Own that.
If you think it's unfair of me to quote Sabine without quoting the entirety of a 30 minute transcript, well, more power to you.
But that doesn't mean I didn't watch it or whatever other crock is being imagined.
Just ask! :) Curiosity and discussion are why we're here. :)
When you say:
"The shell games are:
1. claiming it is a proton collider"
it seems to me that you're implying that Sabine is not disclosing the fact that it's a two stage project. And I'm pointing out that it's one of the first things she says in her video.
Because if the answer is that we might incidentally create new useful technology in the build up of a new collider, why not just diversify the investment and put that money into a bunch of smaller projects? Hedge your bets sort of thing.
Why support this and not allocate more into high temperature superconductivity for example? I don't understand what is the justification that entitles such a large amount of money to a singular project.
People got so excited about the Higgs boson, despite having no idea what it really means. They kept asking if it had an application, but seemed to accept that the answer is "no".
I'll admit, I too would rather put the money into an array of different sciences. But the money goes where you can get interest, and a lot of other science happens in the margins.
Next thought that come to my head is, how do I boundary-test this. ex. work my way backwards, what was the last collider worth building?
It's perfectly rational and intellectually honest to say "whichever one gave us something that got commercialized / helped people / etc."
As far as high-temperature superconductivity, I'm virtually certain if there was consensus a $XXB facility would concretely advance that, I assume it'd get funded.
I'm not certain, but I believe someone with more wherewithal / had skin in the game would argue that there's no reason to think this isn't that facility. (in that, advancing the boundary of physics tends to bring breakthroughs down the pipeline)
It seems like the LHC wouldn't pass this test? In which case, continuing down the path wouldn't make sense under this criteria.
(the thing is, "continuing down the path" is a Not Even Wrong (in the Pauli sense) description of what's going on. It's a hopelessly confused. At least, I have given up hope: I wrote a quite detailed post, with both a TL;DR and longer, linking out to an approachable article, explaining this.)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00793-x
It seems accurate that this is an expensive proposed experiment with less expensive alternatives, with very real debate about costs and benefits.
I'm in the "spend more money on theory first" camp. You keep saying that theorists should guide experimenters, but you seem to mean that in the limited sense of poking a little harder at the Standard Model and hoping it breaks.
Meanwhile there are all kinds of open questions where fundamental theory around and parallel to the Standard Model is underdeveloped.
It might well be better to spend a few billion on doing something about that first, then designing experiments to test whatever falls out.
However, you know that both of these claims asked about are blatantly false, and were distracted by the idea that saying those claims is false also implies all alternatives proposed are based on lies.
To wit, the ask was "Is it really true that there a no theories that are proven or discarded with this experiment, and that the Chinese have plans to do it much faster? Her video is pretty damning."
Both of those things are clearly false.
The Chinese part is blatantly false, to the point it can be worked out by a laymen who knows years ascend.
The Standard Model itself is in question, modulo semantics about proven/disproven and the philosophy of certainty, by any reasonable definition, theory is at stake.
Do we have $X00 billion worth of theories to test here?
That's one of the effects of the pitch framing by Sabine: the design intent is not about smashing stuff at higher energy, despite the basis of the critique requiring that it is.
My comment above is really long, but tl;dr the impetus for both facilities is smashing electrons and positrons and specific features of those collisions that let physicists hone in on the discoveries made at the LHC, not moar energy leading to new particle observations that theory never predicted.
The scientific goals of that experiment are somewhat more unclear, though. The LHC had a landmark scientific purpose, finding the last particle in the standard model. There is, as far as I can tell, no specific experiment that can be the headline for this new machine because the LHC pretty much did its job (modulo some error) and string theory et al need higher energy. There are a bunch of guesses about the higgs field and about dark matter that failed to materialize at the LHC, so now we want moar energy to see if that fixes our problems.
As to the theory they will be proving, maybe there are a few minor ones about the higgs field, but that's pretty much it at this point.
Then, when the tech for it is ready, the FCC-ee will be replaced by the FCC-hh, which is the successor of the LHC and can probe energy levels that are completely unaccessible at the moment - at about 5-6 times the energy level of the LHC. This is the true goal of the FCC project, and the biggest reason for building such a huge tunnel in the first place. But this requires significant advancements in magnets and other components which won't be available for several decades. So, they're filling in that time with the FCC-ee.
When we get new theory, then we go hunting new particles, presuming its physically possible (as you point out with the incorrect idea that this might be being built to look for confirmation of string theory)
I understand the idea this won't find new particles, is it worth it?, but the idea this is unclear, confusing, misguided, or hoping for an outcome are trivially verifiable as false.
Things like:
- "The scientific goals...are unclear" (they are very clear!)
- "(modulo some error)" (reducing the error in the glimpses of deviation from the standard model is the interesting part, 5 sigma or bust, because that lets the theorists know how to progress. This isn't just "oh we'd like to reduce error bars, a less-entitled discipline would just get some grad students on SPSS", this is "holy shit...looks like we found something is fucky in our fundamentals here, but all we know is its off. we need to figure out by how much to give the theorists more data")
- "string theory et al" (I worry very much about the effectiveness of my communication if this is coming up, to be clear, no one is attempting to verify string theory, and it doesn't come up at all even in Sabine's arguments, no? )
The IEEE article lays out this is not about discovering particles.
No one thinks new particles will be discovered.
The investment is not based on speculating new particles will be discovered.
The investment is not based on bad theory that new particles will be discovered.
The investment is not to find a sneaky way to hopefully accidentally find new particles.
Investments in colliders in general haven't been spectulatively looking for new particles in decades.
As both the IEEE, open source information, and my comment lay out above, they are specifically for nailing down these previously-assumed-settled values in the standard model. Because getting more data on the things theory can't explain leads to informed revisions in the theory. The next pendulum swing after that data would be theory to tell us a narrow band of energies to look at for any new particles theory needed to fix the standard model.
The error they saw isn't interesting unless it leads to something. There aren't even good theories about what it might lead to, other than some extra significant figures on some constants that nobody uses. Surely you can see there is a problem with doing science this way.
Theory precedes experiment. It always has, and you can't call what you're doing "science" unless that is true.
This is laughably false, even in fundamental physics.
No one saw neutrinos coming for example.
Other than Pauli, you mean? It was hypothesized around 1930. Discovered in 1934.
The basis of scientific method is following:
1. You notice something.
2. You ask a question.
3. Form a hypothesis.
4. Experiment.
5. Analyze.
6. Draw conclusions.
After linear momentum was missing in collisions!
Pauli speculated that neutrinos would exist after an experimental anomaly.
No one really saw it coming.
No one saw 3 generations coming either, for example.
In fact, people were baffled.
Yes, but what is FCC supposed to look for?
If it's just Dark Matter, and Matter/Anti-matter asymmetry, what theoretical framework is it going to explain it? Will it explain it, or will it just do "Your asymmetric partners are in another Order of Magnitude collider"? Or maybe there are actually 34 dimensions and not like four.
Blatantly false. Plenty of FCC docs from CERN itself mention the possibility that new particles could be discovered, from dark matter to axions. They even think they could help gather data to guide searches for supersymmetric partners.
[edited to add links and quotes]
https://fcc-cdr.web.cern.ch/reports/EPPSU18_FCCint.pdf
> In addition to the dark matter examples given before, Volume 1 documents the extraordinary sensitivity to less-than-weakly coupled particles, ranging from heavy sterile neutrinos (see Fig. 5, right) down to the see-saw limit in a part of parameter space favourable for generating the baryon asymmetry of the Universe, to axions and dark photons.
https://fcc.web.cern.ch/physics
> Future searches at lepton and proton colliders would further constrain any viable scenarios and put progressively tighter bounds to SUSY candidate particles. Searches could profit from data collected at the FCCs as they will allow better discrimination of the Standard Model backgrounds but also deliver more information for event reconstruction.
There's lots of "could" in your own post and your sources. Very little "will" - as in "will test X theory."
I was merely showing that there is nothing unfair about it, as all materials about the FCC, at least from CERN, come with beliefs about the chance that new particles could be found. Sure, they don't make hard claims that they will be found. But even these claims that they could be found are unfounded. It's just as likely that I'll spot a WIMP in my oven if I look carefully while it's pretty hot as WIMPs being found at the FCC. This speculation has no place in serious discussions about this level of spending and human effort.
If this were an abstract discussion at a panel and someone was asking "what are some speculations about what we could see at the FCC", it would be perfectly fine to go on about SUSY and dark matter detection and axions and whatever else. But this has no place whatsoever in official documents about the scientific purpose of allocating billions of euros to this project. It is blatant speculation to pad out an otherwise pretty thin motivation. It's like writing a proposal for a new build system at your company and including speculation that it might detect security vulnerabilities automatically, or it might reduce build times a hundred fold.
What's more, much of CERN's own literature on the FCC references fanciful ideas like finding WIMPs, "ruling out many classes of dark matter particles", finding/limiting the search space for axions, or in general, putting boundaries on theories that have no specific basis and no fundamental bounds on their parameters beyond "we havent found them yet, so they can't be this large/small/strongly interacting/etc". Here you'll find at least some claims currently up on CERN's FCC site about probing dark matter [1].
[0] https://fcc.web.cern.ch/overview
> A key recommendation of the 2020 update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics is that Europe, in collaboration with the worldwide particle physics community, should undertake a feasibility study for a next-generation hadron collider. (emp. mine)
> The goal of the FCC is to push the energy and intensity frontiers of particle colliders, with the aim of reaching collision energies of 100 TeV in the search for new physics.
[1] https://fcc.web.cern.ch/physics
> However there is a very broad class of models for which theory motivates dark matter candidates with masses in the range of GeV to few tens of TeV. The FCC would break new ground in the search for dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles, by covering a wide array of potential signals predicted by either production of dark matter, or production of the particles mediating its interactions with ordinary matter. FCC-ee and FCC-hh offer complementary ways to search for dark matter that could consist of lighter particles (i.e. sterile neutrinos) or could be produced in the decays of the Higgs boson.
The first unfounded assumption is that, regardless of what the LHC found, there was always going to be a need for a larger collider of the same design. This is clearly false - the design of the FCC (for better and worse) is specifically geared to confirming or probing various discrepancies that the LHC found, and to finding things that the LHC was hoped to find that didn't pan out. If the LHC had found SUSY partners or WIMPs, or if it found no conflict with theory whatsoever, the next accelerator might have had a radically different design.
Secondly, you're assuming that it's possible to build a collider that has (significantly) higher power than that with foreseeable technologies. The reality is that we are very close to the limits of what seems achievable in terms of particle accelerators, and per the people at CERN, even this 6x increase in collision energy will require ~40 years of research to be achieved. And the collider we need to probe regimes where we really have good scientific reasons to believe will reveal new physics (i.e. the regimes where we know the standard model breaks down) is not 15x or even 100x higher: even a collider buried around the entire equator wouldn't get anywhere close, we'd need a collider the size of the solar system to actually probe these regimes. So going 6x or 10x or 50x is irrelevant, unless you're looking for some very specific technicalities, like they are at the FCC.
Using established technology from offshore industry it's supposedly not as crazy nor costly as one might first imagine.
There was a nice and fairly accessible talk[2] given at Perimeter Institute, which gave some background and went into this and the FCC.
[1]: https://arl.physics.tamu.edu/research/collider-in-the-sea/
However 100m depth? For a structure _that_ size, which I think might contain high vacuum, let alone systems that might need humans to service when they break? What is the feasibility of that problem?
Also mentioned is that the LHC cryostats, some nice illustrations here[1], are very nearly neutrally buoyant. Given these would be built similarly, they wouldn't need significant infrastructure to keep them in place.
So no humans would need to go down there, if something breaks they could just replace the broken segment(s) and fix the broken one(s) on the surface.
[1]: https://cas.web.cern.ch/sites/default/files/lectures/bilbao-...
This frankly is not possible. Colliders need constant maintenance. The "Collider in the Sea" is not a real proposal.
Was just trying to be funny, but point taken. Will refrain from that one going forwards.
You can get down or up voted either direction for any politically adjacent puns.
But karma points have no cash value, so whatev.
So like Prince back in the nineties, perhaps it should have a symbol. Maybe ⌂ ?
I know FCC is firmly science, but curious: does it help in this area of tech also?
Jeff Bezos (or any other billionaire) could pay for the whole of it, and it would be like me going for a coffee. The yearly cost is 1% of what DOGE allegedly saved, three Marvel movies, and less than the GDP of San Marino.
If one of the costliest ever scientific enterprises is this cheap, how many scientific advances are we leaving on the table? It makes me extremely sad.
*Disclaimer: I enjoy Marvel movies and don't particularly believe DOGE claims about saved money. But I wanted to give some scale of what a billion francs (now about 1.2 billion USD) are.