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.
> 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).
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.
The WWW was not a CERN research project, it was a hypertext system (far from the first one) developed by a couple of technicians working at CERN's office of documentation to facilitate the sharing of documents across its multi-OS, multi-protocol computing environment (at the time IBM VMS, DEC VAX, Apple Macs, PCs, and the NeXTstations used to develop the first WWW client).
It took off because it was free, open source and easily portable by design, but frankly, pretty much the same thing could have, and doubtless would have, emerged from many other large organizations with similar requirements (quite possibly an intelligence service like the CIA - let's not forget where Tor came from), even without a dime being spent on particle physics.
As for direct commercial value, CERN made it freely available to all, as it must. The closest it got to making some money off it was an Apple program to donate computers to the office of documentation.
And don't forget all the engineering work that goes into the magnets and data analysis tools. The internet falls into this broad category of components necessary for the pursuit of science that aren't the direct objects of research.
Science by it's nature isn't kept secret, results are shared and verified.
What a second LHC does is allow you to verify results independently. With one LHC you have to be extra careful about assumptions you made and what data might be being thrown off by local peculiarities.
Being at the forefront of particle/energy research is it's own reward. The results are only part of the prize. Learning how to build a LHC is probably just as valuable.
They just happen to feed off the same particle beams.
The proposed Chinese collider would not be a second LHC; it would be a Higgs factory for precision studies rather than a discovery machine like the LHC.
Everything about CERN is in the public domain.
By the way, while CERN is a European institution, research conducted at CERN isn't anymore that European: dozens of different nationalities work together in harmony with the common goal of sharing humanity's knowledge.
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.
> But Cheng asked that scientists worldwide don’t just allow the machine to be built and use it without exercising their political power to help address the country’s issues. “International scientists have leverage and power,” that they can wield without being complicit. She also said that Chinese scientists should be more aware about their potential complicity.
I do not see why scientists should be expected to play politics if they do not want to. It is great if China is willing to fund and host such a project. Yes, perhaps there are some issues in China but there are issues in every country.
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.... The same will be true for the next generation version of the telescope and is also one of the reasons for the “cost overruns”.
> 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.
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).
CERN is at the border between France and Switzerland. As such it has two official addresses, one in France and one in Switzerland. Most of the loops are in France. This is important for the European part of the funding. Practically, scientists do not care.
Things can't be a "real danger" and "highly unlikely". What would be, even theoretically, a discovery in a particle accelerator that can be weaponized? Imho improvements in weapons technology won't be coming out of basic physics anytime soon. The real dangers are currently the development of cheap weapons that can be deployed without putting your own soldiers in danger as well as electronic warfare.
Actually, the real danger is two countries pointing three thousand nuclear weapons at eachother, on hair-trigger alert, while the rest of the world watches, and shakes its head.
I'd worry about that, long before I'll worry about some magical unicorn particle gun being discovered.
CERN is run by 22 member states. Is it not likely that the Chinese center would be run and major decisions entirely made, by the Chinese. Many might suspect that is the case. No problems with that?
Not really. If they want to build something in their own country and run it how they choose then that's up to them. Why is it a problem? Even if they refuse the share any science with the rest of the world we're no worse off than we were before.
Hopefully they do share though, we might be slightly worse off if they lure away scientists that otherwise would have working in a more open system. But it seems unlikely to be an issue, I'm sure the people working on the cutting edge would like to publish and get the results known everywhere.
Who knows what it could lead to. But no I'm not implying that there is any great danger from this project, but I'm objecting to the idea that one party gaining exclusive information somehow leaves the other parties in an unchanged situation.
Probably not. We're doing a lot better than we were 100 years ago, and nuclear weapons have been a great deterrent to stop many countries from engaging in wars that they might have been more tempted to if at least one of the parties didn't have nuclear weapons.
Yes no problems with that. Each country can choose to invest in science as much as they want and no one has authority to stop them. If member states of cern (I’m a citizen of one) are concerned they should also make those investments.
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.
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...