The World Doesn't Need a New Gigantic Particle Collider - Scientific American

The World Doesn't Need a New Gigantic Particle Collider - Scientific American

Do we need another accelerator?

CERN wants to build a collider four times larger than its Large Hadron Collider, currently the world’s biggest. A plan the CERN Council approved last week aims to build a ‘Higgs factory’ by mid-century, to study those particles’ properties in more detail. This would have undoubted scientific value, but it is not worth the tens of billions it would cost, argues theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. And the second stage in CERN’s plan — to later replace that collider with one that would reach record energies — is not guaranteed to discover any new particles. “Building larger particle colliders has run its course,” Hossenfelder writes. “It has today little scientific return on investment, and at the same time almost no societal relevance.” Better ways to invest money could be an international centre for climate predictions, or one for modelling epidemics.

Scientific American | 6 min read
Read more: CERN makes bold push to build €21-billion super-collider (Nature | 5 min read)