
Plans Revealed for Enormous Particle Collider in China - rlv-dan
https://gizmodo.com/plans-revealed-for-enormous-particle-collider-in-china-1830444169
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labster
Good luck to them, and to any nation that pushes the boundaries of pure
science.

I do hope that they'll be able to staff it, though; they still can't get
scientists to staff their mega radio telescope:
[https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/china-still-
having-t...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/china-still-having-
trouble-staffing-up-its-mega-telescope/)

~~~
rando444
I would say that's less about technology and more about location.

Particle colliders can go underground around major cities. Telescopes like
this are in the middle of nowhere.

You need a special type of person that is qualified to operate the worlds
largest telescope and simultaneously wants to live in a remote forest.

~~~
craftyguy
I'd say it may be less about the type of person, and more about the
conditions:

> Another concern international astronomers have about the chief scientist
> position, as well as that of the research associates, is that their
> activities will be controlled by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This seems
> likely to limit the academic freedom that Western observers generally enjoy.

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elliottlan
I am ignorant on this subject - when discoveries are made with the LHC are
they made public or are they kept 'secret' by its 'owners'?

If they are made public, will another country investing in another one (or
even a bigger one) discover anything that the European one hasn't?

~~~
T-A
> when discoveries are made with the LHC are they made public

Yes. CERN is a publicly funded, shared facility; its users are universities.
What it does has no direct commercial value.

> will another country investing in another one (or even a bigger one)
> discover anything that the European one hasn't?

Possibly. The proposed machine would allow more precise measurements of the
Higgs boson's properties than the LHC. The best case scenario is that those
measurements would turn up deviations from the Standard Model, which would
point the way to something new.

To actually "discover" that hypothetical new thing, in the sense of directly
detecting a new particle, would probably require yet another accelerator to be
built (possibly in the same tunnel).

~~~
arethuza
"What it does has no direct commercial value."

Well, apart from that "web" thing.... ;-)

I always think that was a great example of the complete unpredictability of
research - fund one thing and get benefits you'd never have been able to
predict.

~~~
castis
Derivations of their work may be commercially valuable but to my knowledge
CERN projects do not directly generate revenue.

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cletus
Not the best source for this. As in it's light on details.

For one the LHC was designed to have a maximum collision energy of 14 TeV. The
CEPC is designed for more like 70 TeV.

The goal of higher end is to make relatively infrequent products much more
common. It says in the article they want to produce more Higgs bosons and this
is how that happens.

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orbifold
If the western particle physics community goes along with that it would be
pretty disappointing.

~~~
colordrops
why?

~~~
orbifold
CERN is a international cooperation of many countries on neutral (Swiss)
territory. While maybe not emphasized in recent years one real danger of high
energy particle physics is the discovery of an effect that can be weaponized.
Right now that seems highly unlikely, but it was a motivation for setting the
CERN up in the way it is.

Then there is the obvious problem of technology transfer. A lot of detector
technology can also be used for high resolution surveillance and missile
guidance, I’ve met at least one person who did his doctorate in physics at our
institute, worked for Raytheon and now owns a company in the defense sector
that contributes parts to the successor of the Hubble telescope.

In case you didn’t know there exist 7 nearly identical copies of the Hubble
space telescope with different sensors (he worked on those),
[https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/nasa-gets-two-
unneed...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/nasa-gets-two-unneeded-
hubble-sized-spy-telescopes/). The same will be true for the next generation
version of the telescope and is also one of the reasons for the “cost
overruns”.

~~~
T-A
> one real danger of high energy particle physics is the discovery of an
> effect that can be weaponized

In Dan Brown novels, maybe. The fact that you need an LHC-sized machine to
just barely manage to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, and that it has
failed to see anything at all beyond the Standard Model, should tell you
something.

In short, the requirements for a physical phenomenon to be technologically
useful are stronger than the requirements for it to be at all observable.
Basic conditions like "needs to interact with ordinary matter and have a
decent half-life" are sufficient to rule out the existence of still
undiscovered particles with technological potential. If they existed, we would
already have found them.

~~~
orbifold
I agree that it is highly unlikely but it was deemed far more likely when CERN
was founded.

~~~
scottlocklin
People totally forget about this: if you simply look at where the accelerator
physics funding comes from in the US, that ought to tell the story. Dept of
Energy used to be the atomic energy commission, and is still in charge of bomb
research. Heck it wasn't that long ago that plain old particle accelerators
were contenders for directed energy systems.

Yeah, it looks like there is no new physics there which could make devilish
new weapons, and frankly the state of modern physics is such I don't know as
anyone would notice if there was, but nobody knew this in, say, the 1960s.
Serious people thought, for example, one might be able to build a weak field
ray gun which causes matter to decay into subatomic particles (source 'towards
the year 2018' by the Foreign Policy Association).

~~~
orbifold
Funnily enough even a lot of string theorists such as Edward Witten were
funded by the department of energy.

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deadbunny
China really seems like the America of the 50s/60s when it comes to science
these days.

~~~
tshannon
China is _funding_ like America of the 50s/60s.

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bmc7505
If their chief scientists start disappearing and their colliders suddenly
malfunction, I’m going to be pretty disappointed. Trisolarans had better watch
out, our Space Fleet is waiting for you this time.

~~~
basementcat
Yeah our combined fleets can totally take out that puny little droplet.

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ginsu
Cool, let's all protest about the inevitable cataclysm of microscopic black
holes we were so worried about with CERN.

