The next supercollider

Last week to the Royal Institution to hear about plans for the next supercollider, which some people hope to have on stream not too long after the present supercollider, known as the large hadron collider or LHC, is retired. Possibly my fourth talk about this sort of thing - see references 4, 5 and 6.

Bad start with the trains being well off schedule, with the result that we caught a train which ran non-stop from Raynes Park to Waterloo - no stopping at stations that is - which meant that, rather than our usual Victoria Line we had to take the Jubilee Line to Green Park from where we made our way to a full Goat. Perhaps they were getting warmed up for the next day.

The format of the talk was a lady science journalist in the chair, a physics professor giving one talk and a physics bureaucrat giving another. The professor did a good job of introducing particle physics and drumming up some enthusiasm for the venture. While the bureaucrat did a good job of introducing the business of securing the large amount of money needed to make. He gave the impression that he knew all about the various corridors of power scattered around Europe. Both processor and bureaucrats were good talkers, managing without notes and without standing behind a desk or lectern. But in the end, I was not convinced. One could see the pull, but, in the jargon of the Treasury, what was the opportunity cost? What was one not doing if one was doing this? The nearest we got to an answer was the bureaucrat saying that a lot of the many scientists who were not particle physicists were not too happy about so much money being poured down this particular drain. With his defence being that the signal processing algorithms used by mobile phones were invented by radio astronomers and that the magnets used by medical scanners were invented by the people building the magnets used in big colliders.

We were given the cautionary tale of President Obama pulling the plug on a large collider in the US when it was half built. While all I can find is President Clinton pulling the plug on the Superconducting Super Collider, on instructions from Congress. According to 'Scientific American': 'Since then, the glory of particle physics has moved to Europe. Last year the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, discovered the Higgs, the biggest event in physics in a generation, and, adding insult to injury, announced it on a U.S. national holiday: the Fourth of July'.

Otherwise the story seemed to be that the LHC had indeed given us the Higgs Boson but there were still lots of gaps in our model of the particle world. We needed a much bigger machine so that we could really get to grips with the new boson, possibly moving onto to whatever it was that made dark matter and dark energy, of which there appeared to be a great deal in the universe. Not a line of argument supported by David Tong in his talk, noticed at reference 4.

Some discussion of the merits of straight colliders compared with round ones. This one was to be a round one, about 100km long, to be built next to the 25km of LHC, leveraging the investment there, in particular by repurposing the old collider as the starter motor for the new collider.

Some discussion of whether the Chinese would go it alone.

The lady journalist gave the children in the audience a good crack at question time. As is usual on these occasions, the children rising to the occasion sounded as if they had paid to go to school. No bog standard for them.

Two mobile phone items from the tube back to Vauxhall. First, many young ladies seem to be very casual about tucking their phones into back pockets of their tight trousers. Second, many young men can be a serious pain having conversations both deep and loud in public places.

Eventually, we make it back to the Marquis at Epsom for a spot of their Sancerre. An establishment which appeared to keep reasonably flexible hours and we were almost certainly the oldest customers by the time that we left.

We took a large new model of taxi from the station home. The driver not very happy with it, first on account of it needing repairs when it was nearly new. Second on account of customers avoiding him for fear of extra charges for the extra leg room. The driver seemed to think he was losing a fair amount of business on this (quite untrue) account.

PS: at some point on this expedition I learned that the Poles were pioneers in the dangerous business of winter climbing in the Himalayas. I can't now find out what this might have been about, but references 1, 2 and 3 probably give the right flavour.

[names of speakers to be supplied in due course]

Reference 1: https://abenteuer-berg.de/en/.

Reference 2: http://blogs.dw.com/adventuresports/2019/01/.

Reference 3: http://altitudepakistan.blogspot.com/2013/01/ice-warriors-poles-and-winter-altitude.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/11/fields.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/11/luvvy-spotting.html.

Reference 6: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/09/hadrons.html. A typo breaks the link to this post in reference 5 above.

Reference 7: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-large-hadron-collider-unveiled.html. Some better informed background - including the price tag of 24 billion euros. Which a quick peek at the Internet suggests might build 24 big hospitals, which seem to come in at around a million euros a bed. Which seems better than the rival device of so much a square metre. Alternatively a quarter of an independent nuclear deterrent. I assume all this is capital costs rather than running costs and I have no idea of the balance between the two.