From sponsors: “We don’t have an equivalent, rock-solid prediction now — and that makes knowing where and how to look for answers more challenging and higher risk.”
At Nature: Bold push for a supercollider. But has the age for this sort of thing passed?
It’s at least worth asking:
The costly plan has detractors — even in the physics community. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, has emerged as a critic of pursuing ever higher energies when the scientific payback — apart from measuring the properties of known particles — is far from guaranteed. “I still think it’s not a good idea,” Hossenfelder says. “We’re talking about tens of billions. I just think there is not enough scientific potential in doing that kind of study right now.”
The new collider will be in uncharted territory, says Tara Shears, a physicist at the University of Liverpool, UK. While the LHC had a clear target to look for the Higgs boson as well as theorists’ well-motivated reasons to believe that there could be new particles in the range of masses it could explore, the situation now is different. “We don’t have an equivalent, rock-solid prediction now — and that makes knowing where and how to look for answers more challenging and higher risk.”
Davide Castelvecchi & Elizabeth Gibney, “CERN makes bold push to build €21-billion super-collider” at Nature
They write as though the age has passed but don’t know how to put it into words. No?