CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

Thanks for the clarification. I was wondering what’s supposed to be in place of the "Gulf of Mexico".

> A deluded clown pretends otherwise

Was just trying to be funny, but point taken. Will refrain from that one going forwards.

As mentioned in the linked presentation, they envision using interconnected 300m (1000ft) long segments that can be changed using ROVs, using technology that's already available for underwater pipelines.

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-...

Presumably the plan would be you're actually building a the collider tunnel much like CERN under water, so effectively a very long pressure structure. This...probably isn't super-unreasonable for a static structure where you avoid the cost of excavation - i.e. it depends on how different in diameter from something like the Nordstream pipelines you'd be going.

But one of her points is that many of the jobs of current physicists depend on the status quo. That seems almost tautological. She then alleges that that clouds their judgement on the best use of research funding.

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.

I just won't give my eyeballs to science content like that. I don't care if she has anything useful to say.

> her content for maximum rage/anger/emotional response rather than accuracy

Yes. The content mirrors the thumbnail style.

These days she's independent of the field financially, and has been pretty forthright about condemning bad behavior within it. It's inevitable that insiders will turn on her, because she turned on them. They being angry about it doesn't mean anything by itself, you'd need to decide if her points are legitimate or not without reference to those she's criticising.

> There hasn't been a significant new particle discovery, but none was expected other than Higgs

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...

There is a _hope_ that there's new physics there. But so far, nothing indicates that the next collider will find something.

There is definitely new physics to be discovered, but it might need a collider the size of the Solar system for the discovery.

I don't know anything about high energy physics, but functional programming is carried on the shoulders of LGBT people, and it wouldn't surprise me if other extra-nerdy fields are similar. So I don't see anything wrong with CERN writing a blog post commemorating LGBT people.

It's already here by the time you wrote - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43668292.

Claim: $A made false claims $B and $C to support conclusion $D.

Your claim, IIUC, please correct me: Not all who conclude $D make false claims.

I can agree with that for sure

My view- she, like many, has been conditioned by social media to optimize for clicks by having contrarian and anti-establishment views. She's not positioned to have a particularly well-researched opinion on 95%+ of the topics she covers (which is understandable considering how many hundreds of videos she has made). I watched her for a bit, but stopped when I researched a topic deeper and found her analysis very superficial. Physics is a huge field. Think it is always better to find experts in a particular subfield and hear their views, rather than follow the feed of someone who repeatedly expresses the "everyone else is wrong" schtick

> I listened to her a lot recently because YouTube decided ever “next video” bump while I drove should be her.

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...

Blissfully, I found an IEEE article that collects the stuff I'm aware of in one neat package. https://spectrum.ieee.org/supercolliders

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.

Resource allocation is political

there was a scene in SG-1 where O'Neill locks up a bunch of aliens in a room and said they would not be released until they came to some agreement.

I always thought there should be a religious army with the entire world's military might, who's central tenet is that they do and decide nothing except enforce what the nations decide - and the nations get to decide in any way they want except violence - but they may choose a champion on each side of a divide, and the champions may hold a knife fight to the death. the army would then enforce the deal of the winner's side.