Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Sabine Hossenfelder thinks a bigger collider would be a poor investment

CERN is dreaming of a new and larger particle collider, called Future Circular Collider (FCC). The cost would be in the low 10s of billions (dollars or Euros, makes little difference). Hossenfelder concludes:
... investment-wise, it would make more sense to put particle physics on a pause and reconsider it in, say, 20 years to see whether the situation has changed, either because new technologies have become available or because more concrete predictions for new physics have been made.

At current, other large-scale experiments would more reliably offer new insights into the foundations of physics. Anything that peers back into the early universe, such as big radio telescopes, for example, or anything that probes the properties of dark matter. There are also medium and small-scale experiments that tend to fall off the table if big collaborations eat up the bulk of money and attention. And that’s leaving aside that maybe we might be better off investing in other areas of science entirely.

Of course a blog post cannot replace a detailed cost-benefit assessment, so I cannot tell you what’s the best thing to invest in. I can, however, tell you that a bigger particle collider is one of the most expensive experiments you can think of, and we do not currently have a reason to think it would discover anything new. Ie, large cost, little benefit. That much is pretty clear.

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