On: CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider

[mqus]

most of the comments are about the cost-to-deliverable tradeoff, which is pretty high. But we have to consider that the new particle accellerator is not the only thing that will be created. An enormous amount of infrastructure will have to be developed and researched, including new hardware to handle all the events, new detector hardware, magnets, etc. All of these are pretty usable outside of a particle detector or even science environments, because many of the hard parts are engineering problems. I think the "useless" part of this 23B investment is far smaller than we think.

For evidence of that look at the past, two projects that immediately come to my mind as being pushed by CERN: HTTP and KiCad. But there are surely some more.

[JumpCrisscross → mqus]

> we have to consider that the new particle accellerator is not the only thing that will be created

The problem with this argument is it works for any spending.

The cost of $23bn on a new collider is potentially not spending $23bn on other, more fruitful, physics experiments.