Before discussions go into some generic direction about the field. This is a huge feasibility study contain different aspects done by hundreds of people. People who are mostly interested about the physics case of FCC should read/skim at least through the first volume [1], second chapter (Specificities of the FCC physics case) the first four sections. This is about 35 pages with somehow accessible language to people with some physics knowledge.
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].
>hey 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).
I'd echo this somewhat. Wading into other people's projects I'm often like "wtf is this mess.. why are your variables named a, b and c?"
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.
Also before the discussion goes off in a random direction such as software frameworks, I want to point everyone to volume 37, book 5, chapter 72, pages 8843-9023 (2022 incremental update) of their feasibility report. In it, they introduce a new cryptocoin known as "HIGGSCOIN" which will help fund the reactor. It has some interesting innovations for realtime payment systems, something that can be a pain point for bitcoin
This is unreasonable spending. And I am saying this as someone who did his PhD at CERN, so I am shitting my old bed.
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
All is relative. 16 billions of EUR looks like a lot. But are spent in 12 years, so 1.3 Billions of Eur year. To compare Italy alone has spent 1 billion to have empty immigrant centers in Albania in less than two years.
Of course, everything is relative. When I finished my PhD, getting a postdoc was easy and money was not really a concern. I did a "double PhD" (in two schools) and there were no problems for me to travel between the two (and associated costs).
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
This makes me think of The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), I remember a scientist working there in an interview right after the first discovery telling the reporter how back in the day he was dissuaded by his teacher to go into the field because "there's nothing there, it's not a serious field of research" or something along those lines.
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.
So I'm normally a fan of science but I'm torn on this one because, as far as I can tell, there's no clear objective with this collider. It just seems to be bumping up collision energy (to ~100TeV) and hoping something interesting pops out.
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.
What you're actually saying is that there is no single and symbolic issue it is tackling, you know landing on the moon type stuff.
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.
Sabine is skeptical [0]. Is it really true that there a no theories that are proven or dicarded with this experiment, and that the Chinese have plans to do it much faster? Her video is pretty damning.
I have repeatedly heard from people who work in physics research that she's optimized her content for maximum rage/anger/emotional response rather than accuracy, particularly as of late. The tidbits of truth and warranted skepticism lend the rest of it undue credibility. Sadly, good science reporting doesn't get the advertising revenue that manufactured-scandal tabloid-style reporting does. I think her critical perspective can be useful, but it's important to keep in mind while considering it that you're being presented a warped telling of reality.
You can read her book from ~2014 where she describes the same arguments that she also does on her channel, but in much more depth. She didn't make videos back then.
She also has great talks at universities and discussion panels.
The utter lack of significant discoveries at the LHC after the Higgs (2012!) is a pretty telling sign. Any bigger collider is riding purely on the hope that something will make the effort worth while.
There's been plenty of significant discoveries, many, many. (O(10)s hadrons, consistent standard model discrepancies are really big news, those weren't expected)
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 report has about 100 pages with summaries of experiments they want to test there, if you want to see for yourself.
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.
I was just about to post this. Good to see another Sabine listener here. Her criticism of particle physics, the LHC, and academia is absolutely savage.
I was a physics student back when the SSC was cancelled. At the time it seemed like a terrible decision but years on I’m not sure the expense was worth it. In the end I think it worked out and was a good call to let the Europeans fund CERN and find the Higgs. I’m very pro science but I’ve come to a point where I’m asking is the juice worth the squeeze? I think beyond Higgs the juice is becoming harder to justify.
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.
It doesn't feel ambitious enough to me. Spend 10s of billions to get a less than 10x energy about 40 years after LHC reached its peak. Also planning of the next one should have happened while the last one was being commissioned to avoid the huge gap between them.
The link mentions 100 meters depth. Without being an expert that sounds deep enough to withstand hurricanes and such.
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?
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.
They did start planning around then. I don’t remember the exact date of when the FCC working group officially convened but they’ve been working on it at least since I was a grad student in the early 2010s.
I remember seeing a thread from a guy from ASML about this, he clearly said that any academic use is a lucky by-effect; China is building this to obsolete ASML for chip manufacturing.
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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].
[1] https://cds.cern.ch/record/2928193
[2] https://art.fnal.gov/
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.
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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.
[0] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/04/why-cerns-new-coll...
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)
SUSY is excluded. Like completely at these scales.
Extra dimensions the same.
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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.
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It's not true at all.
I'll come back and write some up over the next 20 minutes.
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.
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/
[2]: https://pirsa.org/20100056
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?
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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.
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I know FCC is firmly science, but curious: does it help in this area of tech also?