CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider

https://physicsworld.com/a/cern-accepts-1bn-in-private-cash-towards-future-circular-collider/

by zeristor • 6 months ago

155 118 6 months ago

Fh_• 6 months ago

These projects are extremely expensive and the findings can alter humanity itself. That's why private donors sounds a bit sketchy

murkt• 6 months ago

How can they alter humanity? What's the difference for humanity since CERN found Higgs particle? In what ways could the potential dark matter particle detection alter humanity?

niemandhier• 6 months ago

It’s a place where extremely skilled people work highly motivated on humanities hardest problems at scale.

CERN pushed distributed computing and storage before anyone else hat problems on that scale.

CERN pushed edge computing for massive data analysis before anyone else even generated data at that rate.

CERN is currently pushing the physical boundaries of device synchronisation ( Check „ White Rabbit“ ), same for data transmission. CERNS accelerator cooling tech paves the way for industrial super cooling, magnet coils push super conduction…

Companies are always late in the game, they come once there is money to be had: No one founded a fusion startup until we were close enough to the relevant tripple product.

mr_mitm• 6 months ago

In what way would studying black body radiation alter humanity? Oh just the basis for quantum mechanics and thus transistors, lasers, MRIs, photovoltaics, and more.

The point is, you don't know in advance. I admit it's a bit more far fetched with these experiments that are so far removed from everyday life, but they're still worthwhile.

hnthrow0287345• 6 months ago

Less that and more "we built a really complex machine and we can apply those skills elsewhere".

pjmlp6• 6 months ago

Cancer treatment goes back to particle physics research at CERN, the Web was born there, cloud was previously known as Grid Computing at CERN,

Three examples of how humanity would not be as we know it today without CERN.

As Alumni, there are many other changes that trace back to CERN.

We don't sit only on the H1 beer garden and go skiing.

waihtis• 6 months ago

So complain to your government about their spending. Probably at least 30% of government spend is used on completely worthless or fraudulent things.

It's good that someone is funding this stuff.

sampo• 6 months ago

findings can alter humanity itself

Higgs boson was predicted in theory in 1964, and found in LHC in CERN in 2012-2013. With this, all elementary particles in the standard model of particle physics have been found.

From the 1970s to 2010s, physicists believed in a theory called supersymmetry, which predicted supersymmetric partner particles for the known elementary particles. But these should have been already found in the energies used in LHC.

For the first time, there is no mainstream theory that would predict any new findings. Maybe the next bigger particle collider will find no new particles at all?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlixMNBlQos

sandworm1013• 6 months ago

A collider produces far more than new particles or explanations. They produce papers and phds. In effect, thier primary goal is to produce stem careers. The new particles are just the public announcements. The collider doesnt even need to be functional. Much/most of the work occures before first light, before anyone turns it on. The design of the ring and its innumerable detectors and subsystems takes decades. So a great many people want the next collider to be funded regardless of its potential for scientific discovery.

The same discussion can happen re the ISS. Its primary purpose was not science. It existed to give shuttle a parking spot, to keep the US manned space program ticking along and to keep a thousand russian rocket people from going to work for rando countries. The ISS will soon end. Are we going to put up a new one? A place to park starliner and dragon? Or are we going to shut down low earth orbit spaceflight? The decision will not turn on the potential for new science, rather it will be about supporting and maintaining a flagship industry.

westurner• 6 months ago

Higgs boson was predicted in theory in 1964, and found in LHC in CERN in 2012-2013. With this, all elementary particles in the standard model of particle physics have been found.

Before LHC Large Hardron Collider (CERN), there were other experiments with lower raw and final recorded data rates: SppS (CERN; MB/s; 1-10 Hz), SLC (SLAC (Stanford); 50 MB/s; 2 Hz), LEP (CERN; 100 MB/s; 1-5 Hz), Tevatron (Fermilab (Chicago); 250 GB/s, 100-400 Hz), HERA (DESY; 500 MB/s; 5-20 Hz), LHC CMS/ATLAS (CERN; 40 TB/s; 1000 Hz).

HL-LHC (CERN; 10X LHC;)

FCC-ee (CERN), FCC-hh (CERN)

Non-confirmed non-elementary particles of or not of the Standard Model?

What about Superfluids and Supersolids (like spin-nematic liquid crystals)? Are those just phases? Is the phase chart for all particles complete?

T-A2• 6 months ago

can alter humanity

or at least keep some of it warm:

https://home.cern/news/news/cern/heating-homes-worlds-larges...

dharma1• 6 months ago

“Eric Schmidt, who founded Google” no he didn’t

mc322• 6 months ago

That kind of reporting is awful.

How is it they can’t either go to Wikipedia or one of the LLMs (despite hallucinations, tend to get simple things right) and get some corroborating evidence before making such basic mistakes on an article?

Forgeties79• 6 months ago

Man I can’t even trust simple things these days from LLM’s. Hardly scientific but I just decided to do my own little test one time when I was on discord talking to some friends about The Game Awards back in December or so. ChatGPT would simply omit winners and/or categories - got it wrong (twice the same way, one unique way) 3 times. We tried Gemini, it gave 1 wrong answer and omitted 2 categories. It was impressive how much worse than a basic search they were at a simple “what were the results of the 2025 Game Awards?”

simianwords• 6 months ago

You are right. ChatGPT doesn’t catch this, instead catches things like CERN having 25 member states instead of 24.

I would have expected it to catch it but it did not. I’m sure pro version would have though.

giancarlostoro• 6 months ago

I can understand the confusion since he was CEO for the companies most critical years.

user3939382• 6 months ago

This should have a $1T budget not a B. We waste so much money on low efficiency computing infrastructure and energy that should be going to this.

SecretDreams3• 6 months ago

Maybe we can just have the AI hardware make the discoveries for us!

sandworm1013• 6 months ago

A thousand gpus running a thousand LLMs will one day soon give us the next shakespeare. It will all be worth it in the end. Maybe we can try putting in on a blockchain.

tgv• 6 months ago

I have low expectations that physics can dig itself out of the hole it dug by building an even larger collider. It's not worth €1T to find out.

mike-the-mikado2• 6 months ago

As someone who supports pure science research, I would be interested to understand if any of the discoveries of CERN (and related projects) in the last 50 years (say) have proved to have practical application.

(Specifically, "discoveries", not technology developed in support of the research)

bryant• 6 months ago

Before your edit:

The world wide web: https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

certain medical imaging: https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/medipix-partic...

grid computing advances: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00104...

PIMMS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4724719/

Medicis: https://home.cern/news/news/accelerators/cern-accelerates-me...

FLASH radiotherapy: https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/cern-chuv-and-...

---

After your edit:

No, not yet, but those are long tail efforts. The technologies are the short term yield.

daveguy• 6 months ago

I don't know why you were getting down voted for this. Discovery during technological development of scientific instrumentation is one of the greatest returns on investment of funding pure science research. And like your sibling comment says, the pure science helps direct applied science, eg cutting edge materials science. Long tail, if for no other reason, because its a whole other development process that happens after the pure science.

hammock• 6 months ago

It’s an interesting question. After all we were using electricity, batteries, electric motors, radios and telegraphs long before we ever discovered electrons and photons.

But discovering the electron was necessary for us to develop vacuum tubes. And developing quantum mechanics was necessary for developing transistors.

Think about the relative impact of the telegraph vs the vacuum tube.

When we do eventually find something to do with the W and Z bosons, it’s likely to look more like a transistor-level tech than an immediately practical tool like a lightbulb. But the second-order effects from whatever that new tech turns out to be, have the potential to be world-shattering.

mrtksn• 6 months ago

With that kind of fundamental science I would expect no practical applications but guidance for researchers that work on practical applications.

There are many ideas on how the universe works, right? Knowing which ideas are closer to the truth must be helpful to people who work on nano scale stuff, like chips so fine that quantum effect are considerable.

It must be somewhere between knowing if there's alien life or not AND knowing that atoms can be split at sub particles at will.

jocaal2• 6 months ago

What actually happens is, smart people are isolated from the problems of the general population and work towards meaningless goals at the cost of the everyday tax payer doing unglamorous work to earn a living. Decoupling science from the state will also reduce the meaningless competition of academia that leads to the publish-or-perish and replication crises, because the people who will be doing it, will do it for the love of the game, regardless of social status and money.

If you want to live in this world, you have to trade your time and provide value to others. You shouldn't get a free pass because, just because you convinced yourself and the government that you're smarter than everyone else.

T-A2• 6 months ago

Knowing which ideas are closer to the truth must be helpful to people who work on nano scale stuff, like chips so fine that quantum effect are considerable.

Sorry, no. That's solid state physics on inter-atomic scales: tenths of nanometers, a handful of electronvolts. The LHC probes physics at the electroweak scale: hundreds of billions of electronvolts, billionths of nanometers. It has zero relevance to anything of practical use.

port11• 6 months ago

Fundamental research is entwined with practical applications, you can’t have the later without the former. Europe is known for FR, while everyone else seems to be better at commercialising. It’s alright, progress for us is progress for everyone.

naasking8• 6 months ago

That's not an answer to the specific question asked. Not all types of fundamental research have the same potential for material benefits, or the same cost.

biophysboy• 6 months ago

No. It is purely a model tester.

colechristensen2• 6 months ago

This is such a weasel question because you can keep saying whatever was new was "just technology" not pure discoveries.

No, there hasn't been any big "new physics" since the standard model in the 70s, everything has been refinement and specifics. You can't go to Walmart and buy something that couldn't exist unless we knew the precise mass of the top quark or the Higgs boson.

There have been a tremendous amount of developments and technologies that have come out of CERN with varying degrees of closeness to particle physics, but depending on who you're talking to, most of them don't count.

(Specifically, "discoveries", not technology developed in support of the research)

Ok, but Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN when he created HTTP, HTML, etc.

The Internet through web browsers as you know it was created at CERN in order to enable scientific communication and collaboration.

mike-the-mikado2• 6 months ago

I was hoping that someone would be able to point me to some practical technical advance enabled by discoveries or measurements at CERN (or similar establishments).

It seems plausible to me that better understanding of the properties the subatomic particles might enable some previously unexploited technology (e.g. in quantum computing or sensing).

dwaltrip2• 6 months ago

Why do you not count the technology developments needed to do the research?

jiggawatts• 6 months ago

This kind of thing always reminds me G. H. Hardy, a mathematician that famously took pride in working on pure number theory, which he described as having "no practical use" and therefore being morally superior to applied mathematics connected to war or industry.

This ended up as the theoretical bedrock upon which modern encryption algorithms are built, enabling trillions of dollars of economic activity (as well as spying and other nefarious or ethically questionable activities).

I noticed (as have others) that even the purest of pure fundamental research has this oddly persistent pattern of becoming applied to everyday problems sooner or later.

The x-ray telescope mirror design used for Chandra -- motived only by pure intellectual curiosity -- ended up being a key development stepping stone towards ASML's TWINSCAN tools that use focused x-rays for chip lithography. Arguably this is more important to the global economy now that even oil is!

Similarly, particle accelerators like CERN might be the next chip lithography beam sources. The technologies being developed for research physicists such as laser-driven "desktop" accelerators might be just the ticket to replace tin droplet x-ray light sources.

Who knows?

We certainly won't if we don't built these things for pure research first to find out!

sva_• 6 months ago

Maybe this one will finally make a black hole that ends it all

https://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

kachapopopow• 6 months ago

https://hasthelargehadroncollidercreatedablackholeyet.com/ (Yep, of money)

lelandfe• 6 months ago

source code has us at 89%

dawnerd• 6 months ago

Or maybe just undo this weird timeline the last one put us in.

arthurfirst2• 6 months ago

it's already a black hole for funding

chrystalkey4• 6 months ago

Said the grumpy grandpa, shaking his hand at the cloudy sky. I dont know what value that comment contributed, funding research is always a long shot. And often times it fails, but that is kinda its purpose, we dont know what we dont know.

mc322• 6 months ago

There’s an abandoned one around Dallas, the SSC. Lots of sunken cost in that one.

arthurfirst2• 6 months ago

your comment made me smile like a grandpa :)

Also lighten up! oh... damn black hole...

crote2• 6 months ago

You could use the same argument to justify spending $1B on searching for the Loch Ness Monster. The problem is, you can only spend money once. If you're spending $1B on the FCC you aren't spending that same $1B on all kinds of other research.

With the LHC there was a very clear goal: verify the Standard Model and prove (or disprove) the existence of the Higgs boson - and hopefully discover some unexpected stuff along the way. On the other hand, the FCC is mainly a shot in the dark: they aren't validating a widely-accepted theory, they are just hoping that if you spend enough money on a bigger collider something interesting will fall out.

Most research gives you at least some insight. With the FCC there is a very real possibility that the insight will be "our $20B collider found absolutely nothing, now give us $1T to build an even bigger one". Sure, funding research is a long shot, but at a certain point you're just setting money on fire.

jasonwatkinspdx2• 6 months ago

It's largely fans of Sabine Hossenfelder youtube channel, where some years ago sadly she shifted into just being a grifter selling conspiracy theories about the funding of particle physics.

The audience here tends to vastly overweight contrarian near conspiracy theory style stuff, so this sort of comment shows up on literally every damn post about physics research.

throwaway198846• 6 months ago

As a non physicist I like the idea of a moun collider more - more compact (thus should be cheaper) as well as something which haven't done in similar energy scales and therefore more likely to need new technology in building it and finding something new.

mikhailfranco• 6 months ago

Typo?

I like the idea of a noun collider. Then we could smash apples and oranges.

assaddayinh• 6 months ago

What changeable vectors are there except to scale up the energy levels? Can particles be altered prior to collission with the existing system to observe interesting effects?

naasking8• 6 months ago

Wakefield accelerators would be orders of magnitude smaller and higher energy than radio frequency colliders like the FCC. If it has to go to particle physics, this money would be better spent on that research.

naasking8• 6 months ago

What a waste. So many more science experiments with better expected ROI could be funded for the money needed for the FCC, and we're not even expecting any significant new insights from it.

astrobe_2• 6 months ago

Sometimes you get huge value from things you didn't expect ;-)

naasking8• 6 months ago

1. That's not an argument unless the evidence for these payoffs is so huge as to dwarf the payoffs of 1000 smaller experiments. There is no evidence of this.

2. There is no world in which this applies to particle physics at this point, especially using radio frequency particle collider tech. This is known physics and there are no mysteries in the regime the FCC would reach.

z3ratul1630712• 6 months ago

amen

thrance2• 6 months ago

So many more science experiments with better expected ROI could be funded for the money needed for the FCC

Ok, like what? Let the scientists at CERN decide what to spend their funding on.

naasking8• 6 months ago

CERN shouldn't get that funding if they're going to push for the FCC. Funding is often contingent. Even sticking only to particle physics, there's lots of other research that could use that funding better, like wakefield accelerators and muon colliders.

z3ratul1630712• 6 months ago

FCC is "physics" equivalent of easter island statues. Useless resource sink with no perspective productive outcome whatsoever.

notepad0x902• 6 months ago

I try to keep up with this stuff, but I wish to a layperson like me, the benefits of this was communicated more clearly. Even something like the JWT, I'm still not seeing the benefit. It's really awesome, don't deny that at all!

But I'd rather see more investment put into developing space-faring capabilities. Being able to transport lots of goods and people into space, and start manufacturing in space.

I've heard it said that research into this stuff will inevitably benefit all manners of other sciences, but hoping for a byproduct isn't the same as direct investment.

I'm just asking in earnest if priorities are aligned properly. I'm sure many of these experiments and projects would be more useful if they were actually built in space! Even for space agencies, it's all sorely disappointing. Their focus is on research and experimentation, which wouldn't be a problem if there were plans that were getting executed with some vision or goal of actual progress in capabilities. Their planning is also too long-term.

Why did artemis take 3 years? is it just to boast about being able to go back to the moon? By now this should have taken 3 months after over half a century. My point is not to be dismissive of the complexities, but to say that the state of things is being accepted as-is from what I'm seeing. Is there any actual solid plan to reduce at least launch times that factor?

It would be amazing if humans launched enough infrastructure into space, that there were would be foundries and factories entirely in space, reducing the dependence on transporting heavy things from earth into space.Spacecraft and space station components could largely be manufactured by mining raw materials and manufacturing with them without depending on earth's resources directly. That's probably not realistic, but what I'm decrying is not so much lack of action, but lack of vision (outside of scifi), planning, and focus.

That said, I'm just hijacking this to bring up that point of discuss. This is private cash, and I'm glad someone is donating to CERN for this research. I wish all the stuff I said could be funded with tax dollars. lay people need to see a vision, a plan, even if it can't be achieved in our lifetime, political will comes afterwards.

potamic2• 6 months ago

I suppose the question of how to prioritize scientific funding is itself a scientific problem, so we would first need to decide how much to allocate to the scientific funding sub-discipline so that all of scientific funding is as efficient as possible!

In all seriousness, I don't know how science policy works but I expect it is more goal-oriented than objective-oriented. Science rarely starts with, "What are the biggest problems faced by humanity", and then tries to take them up. Rather what it's saying is, "I know this and this about something. Given this, I think I can figure out what is that", and then tries to figure out "that". There is no greater objective to figuring out "that", other than it is there to be found. You could perhaps say the ultimate objective of science is simply to know, and so you take whatever steps are in front of you that will help you know more.

It might seem kinda wasteful on the outset, but 400 years back nobody would have dreamed that studying why these dots in the night sky move will help understand tides on earth, which in turn leads to understanding tidal currents, which in turn leads to understanding climate at a given place. 200 years back no one would have imagined that the key to health and diseases lie in finding invisible things moving around in the air. A mere 100 years back it would've been impossible to conceive studying why tiny flecks of dust jiggle about when floating on a drop of water, would lead to unlocking immense reserves of energy for civilization. Everything we are today, everything we can do, all the scientific and technological progress we have achieved is a result of this very process. It happened simply because many thousands of curious minds tried to take the next step in front of them. If some of them didn't because they were told it wasn't a worthwhile investment of resources, where would we be today?

trueno• 6 months ago

the itch of curiosity can take someone to great heights... and glorious useless rabbit holes. us nerd programmers should be intimately familiar with this. i sort of do get a little irked at how a lot of the things discovered at the furthest reaches of our universe are just simply just trying to figure out that for the sake of figuring that out. don't get me wrong i'm a huge proponent of sciences in general im mostly just bewildered at the widespread collective belief that science can only be beneficial if you let it move at a glacial pace with lots of time and resources spent answering questions that should potentially be deprioritized. even writing software im constantly compelled to shake off the wild goose chases that are just me trying to find an answer to that and get back to doing something else, and i'm constantly hungry for ways to add my capacities to something that is beneficial for at least a handful of people.

we tend to give sciences a huge sort of "let them cook" pass about many things even though sometimes it's just resources spent on some giga niche corner of science to get to an answer that settles a 25 year old argument or theory no one knows or cares about. i don't think it hurts to get back occasionally to "ok guys let's try to focus on something of importance" and acknowledging even a little bit that some of the goose chases have been utterly pointless. is there some kind of unspoken rule that scientific discovery should only come from one giant leaky bucket exercise but the bucket is never ending? aligned research goals with some outcomes that aren't some super autistic itch-scratch only one or two people on earth understand are.. not a bad thing.

scientists of some levels sometimes terrify me. human, sure, but the relentless pursuit of finding that has throughout history caused many scientists and researchers to cross moral boundaries. sometimes i wonder if people looking the traces of hundred billion year old invisible invisible gamma stinky fart rays at the edge of our universe give any shits about the world and the people in it at all. its just harder now than ever to care about their laundry list of meaningless discoveries when we're in desperate need of here and now discoveries to solve problems we face today. in some respects staring at a scope into the edge of the universe is sometimes not any different than the kid who's just trying to escape the noise of life by throwing a video game on. i get it, i do. but i don't always wrap it in nobility because the sciences are filled with humans who are as imperfect as you and i, and sometimes they straight up aren't cooking much and seem a little directionless.

Certhas2• 6 months ago

This is science for science sake. To advance knowledge. You argue for direct investment for building space faring capabilities, rather than for advancing knowledge, but then you should state why you want these space faring capabilities.

Because they are cool? I think that's essentially the reasoning behind putting people on the Moon. If you believe there are valifld economic reasons for space, why do we need tax dollars? And also: I don't see it. Space is so hostile an environment to humans, that it's hard to understand why we should invest in capability to be there personally. People aren't even investing to harvest Greenland's resources, and they are infinitely more accessible.

notepad0x902• 6 months ago

For starts for science itself. If transporting things to space wasn't so costly, so much more experimentation would better be done in space.

Yes it's cool, but that isn't why. It's because of resources and human progress.

I want mirrors in space that direct/magnify sun light to destinations on earth for example.

So many of human problems today have to do with resource scarcity. The "old" world had this, and the discovery of the "new" world in the west solved lots of problems.

Every tech we have to day, every advancement in medicine, industry,etc.. from steam engines to the internet and AI is a result of the discovery of the americas. the center of trade and commerce shifted to western europe, and western europeans used lots of means including conquest of the americas by force , enslaving africans,etc.. to get gold and riches from the americas back to europe. The improvement in the quality of life for western europeans meant they could focus less on subsistence and survival, and focus on science, industry and reformations.

Space is extremely hostile to humans. You're not wrong about that, but it isn't beyond humans' capability to conquer it. Solving the obstacles in the way of space expansion requires solving things that have the ability to improve humans' lives greatly. It means we could also conquer the polar zones and tundras much more easily, and be more resilient to climate change. Like how western europe benefited from the Americas, and how they pillaged gold from the americans, so is there gold and riches in space to be pillaged and improve the lives of the world on earth. Back in the 1800s, the west was a hostile (no comparison to space of course) place people with no options went to, space could be that for a while.

Humanity can't survive in a stagnant way. We will always need more space and more energy.

CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider

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