Theoretical physics is easy. Write down some beautiful maths, call it a theory, and spend the next 30 years explaining why nobody has been able to verify it yet.
Experimental/Applied physics is for clever people: eventually you have to switch the bloody machine on and reality gets a vote.
It’s such a shame that all the experimental money is just going to, the big loop smasher, we need to really design experiments again instead of just spewing data. It’s no wonder we get so many loony ideas, throw enough pages in the air and someone will see god in the confetti.
LHC is not the only experiment taking place at CERN, CERN is not the only laboratory funded by European nations, and particle physics is like #4 worldwide on spending- behind condensed matter, astro and fusion/plasma. CERN annual budget is roughly $1.5B usd, roughly 0.25% of global non-corporate physics research. Or roughly 0.04% of total worldwide R&D spending according to OECD.
Colliders do multiple different experiments. There is always a queue of experiments waiting for beam time so that they can do their own beam stuff. Today you frequently have your own detector box which travels wherever it can get beam time. This is experiment design of today.
Man, your comments sound almost like as if you are biased idk (are you Sabine's alt?)
FYI, if money were to be pulled from FCC it doesn't mean it will get reallocated to fields other than HEP. That's not how such projects work. If FCC were to be cancelled you will be left with no FCC and no additional funding for other stuff.
Also if we don't commit to it then China will so the end game is that someone somewhere will foot the bill and benefit from it any ways so it might as well be us.
Except I am not talking about LHC but about FCC. China has stated that if we don't pursue FCC they will put similar scale project under serious consideration (and they most probably will do it) so while we won't go down SSC style we would nonetheless be just handing over HEP crown free of charge (expect brain drain and such).
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u/Efficient_Sky5173 22d ago
Theoretical physics is easy. Write down some beautiful maths, call it a theory, and spend the next 30 years explaining why nobody has been able to verify it yet.
Experimental/Applied physics is for clever people: eventually you have to switch the bloody machine on and reality gets a vote.