Scientists build mega tube under Geneva to succeed CERN

As parents, we often worry about what our children are getting excited about. We hope we can guide them to healthy and creative habits like a lifelong love of learning and outdoors, and reduce their dependence on Tech and screens. Dependence on Tech and Technology not to be confused with Science.

The first is an addiction and the latter can lead you to inner peace or eye brow loss.

Having said that, we are making new innovations perilously fast, making increasingly difficult to even follow, leave alone actually going out and exploring one for yourself.

In a sense this a very good thing, as Science is the engine that drives our economy and the more you produce the better your output would be.

Recently Reuters: Science News covered a news story titled Mega tube under Geneva enters the race to succeed CERN collider.

A proposed 100-km particle accelerator under Geneva has joined an international quest to develop the successor to the Large Hadron Collider to help unlock humankind’s knowledge of matter.

The existing collider (LHC), which started up in 2008, smashes protons together in a 27-km circuit beneath the Swiss-French border. It helped scientists discover the long-sought Higgs boson — a particle that supplied the missing piece of the standard model of physics by explaining why objects have mass.

Long before CERN became operational, Texas was in a bid to set up a competitive institute, however unfortunately this endeavor was abandoned due to political wrangling over budget and what good will it provide.

Unfortunately, value is a very difficult question to answer for cutting edge technology or new innovations. Imagine the financiers of Christopher Columbus’ voyage calculating a value proposition that included $1.2 Trillion of e-commerce trade.

Now the Future Circular Collider (FCC), proposed by more than 150 universities and science institutes, would be a huge tubular circuit almost four times as long, with 10 times more power than the LHC at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Physics.

The proposal came out of the European strategy for particle physics, which recommended that design and feasibility studies be conducted in order for Europe “to be in a position to propose an ambitious post-LHC accelerator project at CERN by the time of the next strategy update”.

But the decision on whether to go ahead with the FCC – incurring an initial 9 billion euro ($10.25 billion) bill for participating governments plus a later 15 billion euro upgrade – is effectively part of an international race to host the LHC’s successor, with China, Japan, the United States and Europe all interested.

The LHC is expected to keep running until around 2036-2040, by which time it will have done its job collecting data, but it might also be possible to upgrade it by increasing the energy of collisions, which would require major investment.

China has floated plans for its own 100-km collider, but has not yet confirmed it will go ahead.

Japan is expected to take a decision on a linear collider in March, which could play into a potential choice by European countries in 2020 about whether to back the FCC or another proposal for CERN, the Compact Linear Collider.

For physicists, the location may be less important than the science opportunities on offered by a new collider, allowing them to peer into the debris left when subatomic particles smash together and shatter into even smaller pieces, some of which may answer fundamental questions about the universe.

But science mega-projects attract talent and can generate unforeseen spin-offs – including the invention of the World Wide Web at CERN, which has become a global center for physicists, despite the high cost of living around Geneva.

This could have very easily been Texas, had the plans gone through back in the 1990s.

Strong foundation in Science and Technology is key for economic advancement of the whole country and as a matter of fact the whole planet.

The more technology stories like these are reported, it will fuel the imagination of the next generation.

I try to comment on stories like [post_keyword] on my website, one for referencing back when you are writing something, and two to share with everyone.

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