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Cern aims to build €20bn atom-smasher to unlock secrets of universe (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Research lab submits plans for next-generation model at least three times size of Large Hadron Collider

Officials at Cern, home to the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, are pressing ahead with plans for a new machine that would be at least three times bigger than the existing particle accelerator.

The Large Hadron Collider, built inside a 27km circular tunnel beneath the Swiss-French countryside, smashes together protons and other subatomic particles at close to the speed of light to recreate the conditions that existed fractions of a second after the big bang.

The machine, the world’s largest collider, was used in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, nearly 50 years after the particle was proposed by Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh, and several other researchers. The feat was honoured with the Nobel prize in physics the following year.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Which are sometimes as or more important than answers, but it does tend to reveal that it's "turtles all the way down"

[–] [email protected] -3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

While true, it may be time to realize that we will never have all the answers. And the amount of questions that need answering will trend towards infinity.

Imagine how many people can be fed with €20,000,000,000. Or homeless housed. Or children educated.

Instead, a few elite scientists (likely from a well connected family) will be conducting research that is basically unsolvable and is incomprehensible to human minds.

There is also a high likelihood that the technological discoveries will be used for military purposes. Such as displacing and/or killing those homeless, starving, uneducated children.

The cherry on top is the impact on the environment. The amount of precious metals required for such a project requires heavy mineral extraction. A particle collider uses massive amounts of power as well.

But yes, we will create groundbreaking (literally) new schools of mathematics that will disprove earlier theories. Until of course it is disproven itself by yet another future theory. Unless we all kill ourselves before then, that is...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Instead, a few elite scientists (likely from a well connected family) will be conducting research

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how research at CERN works. Tens of thousands of physicists from all over the world work either on the information gathered by CERN or to design experiments to get further data from the colliders under CERN's purview. Many of the people contributing to the research are students from different stages of academia. They are not rich or connected people but just smart people motivated to contribute and better our understanding of the universe

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

"we used to think that this was what we didn't know, but thanks to exhaustive and expensive research, it is now this that we don't know."