From the BBC:
Researchers at the world's biggest particle accelerator in Switzerland have submitted proposals for a new, much larger, supercollider.
Its aim is to discover new particles that would revolutionise physics and lead to a more complete understanding of how the Universe works. If approved, it will be three times larger than the current giant machine. But its £17bn price tag has raised some eyebrows, with one critic describing the expenditure as "reckless".
Now obviously I have no knowledge on what this is, what it does, or how it does it. But from what I can gather, the original Hadron Collider hasn’t done what it was designed to do, so let’s build a bigger one.
Prof Fabiola Gianotti, told BBC News that, if approved, it will be a "beautiful machine".
She added “We are missing something big,''
Personally I think they are missing something a bit more basic. Something between the ears…..
Researchers want a new, much bigger supercollider but is it worth us paying the £12bn price tag?
www.bbc.co.uk
Physicist here. It's not stupid. Here's the explanation:
Colliders can be thought of as a complicated, indirect kind of eye. Our eyes work by visible light (which have wavelength 450-700 nanometers, about 1/100x the size of a bacteria) bouncing off objects and entering our eyes. Our retina (i.e. sensor) can then detect the intensity, spectrum, etc. of said light, and reconstruct a picture of what the object the light bounced off of looks like. This is a basic example of a scattering process, which is to some extent what all physics experiments are. You bounce things off other things, measure the things that bounced off at some distance, and hence indirectly measure the things said things bounced off of.
Because of diffraction processes and other complicated reasons, this kind of scattering only works if the size of the object being measured is greater than the wavelength of the light being used to measure it. (One may think of it as, if the wavelength is greater than the object in the scattering process, the light or wave will kind of "miss" the object, similar to how a thin metal rod in the water will not noticeably perturb the waves going the other way.) And because of quantum mechanics, it turns out it's not only light that has a wavelength; massive particles also have a wavelength, called the de Broglie wavelength, which is inversely proportional to how big it is, and how fast it's going. For human-sized objects, this wavelength is so miniscule as to basically not exist, but for light and fast atomic or subatomic particles, the wavelength starts to reach the scale at which these particles exist (in the 0.1nm and smaller range, mostly.) So, hitting small and fast particles onto other small and fast particles help us understand what is going on inside said small and fast particles.
The problem, of course, with small and fast particles is that it takes quite a lot of energy to generate them. That is where the cyclotron and collider come in. The larger a collider is, the higher energy it can get up to, both because there is more space for the particle to accelerate, and because the energy loss associated in accelerating them is smaller (via a process called cyclotron radiation), and because the magnetic fields required to keep the particle in place will be smaller. And the larger energy we can get the thing up to, the smaller the wavelength will be, and the better we will be able to probe the smaller scales at which these particles live.
In short: the LHC did not fail at its job; it managed to find the particles and structures at the energy and wavelength it was designed at, and now research has moved on to higher energy scales and smaller wavelengths. That's why we need a bigger accelerator.
As an aside, particle physics is generally not very concerned about finding new particles, but much more concerned with probing the properties of existing ones. There are a limited combination of particles that can exist (and we know this because some math from group theory, which lets you derive some basic structures of particle models just by assuming that the universe is symmetric in different ways. Basically black magic.) and while a new particle or force makes the news, there are a lot of things we still don't understand about existing ones (such as, for example, things as simple as the mass of the particle), how they interact, etc. and these results can help prove or disprove various theories about things happening at far smaller scales than we can ever hope to probe by a reactor. A larger LHC won't solve physics; to directly experiment at the smallest scales physics allows, we would need a collider with a radius larger than the galaxy. But it certainly is not a white elephant, and has plenty of utility.
I think you're onto something. Scientists have already discovered the
boson, neuron, electron and positron.
A quick look at some people, would rapidly detect the
moron....
And of course to be pedantic, the boson is not a particle, it is a type of particle which represent fundamental forces. The electron and positron are antiparticles ("two sides of the same coin") and the neutron is a composite particle, made out of two down quarks and one up quark. (The quarks were named by the Americans. Don't question it.)