The well-publicized fight between the scientists over the construction of the future accelerator

In recent days, we have seen a number of opinion articles in Forbes, the New York Times and on social media discussing the scientific need and the financial investment in the construction of the future accelerator (the FCC). Is it a scientific promise or a waste of public money? About the media struggle, about theoretical and applied justice, about the exchange of accusations, punishments and heartfelt wishes - in the next article

Let's put some facts on the table - the existing accelerator is already starting to lose its scientific relevance, the economic cost of operating it (a billion dollars a year) does not necessarily justify more years of data collection. In order for science to progress, quality experimental evidence must be collected. The trivial jump is building an even bigger, more powerful booster, one that also promises results. The question is at what price? Will 20 billion dollars advance humanity? Maybe it's worth transferring the funds to cancer research and terminal illnesses? At the end of the day, public funds finance the replication studies, and for that, you should spend time thinking, raising doubts and perhaps offering less trivial alternatives that are just as useful.

These are the questions facing the scientific teams entrusted with the promotion of the future accelerator, but in the last few days, just before the decisions take effect, the scientists leave nothing in their stomachs and go to the media.

One of the more well-known speakers against the accelerator is Prof. Sabina Hosenfelder, herself a theoretical researcher in high energies. There are those who may be surprised because a researcher who comes from the field decides to express an opposing position, but she has some interesting and logical claims. In an article she published almost a month ago in the New York Times, she claims that the scientific community is guilty of misrepresentation because it perpetuates scientific illusions. Every year the theorists come up with thousands of mathematical ideas without physical motivation because mathematics simply allows it. She gave the example of 2015 when a wave of rumors ignited the scientific community about a new discovery of a particle at the LHC. In that period, about 500 articles were published that explained the discovery, when at the end the "discovery" was revealed as a mistake in the measurement. Apart from that, Sabina points out that dark matter, dark energy and supersymmetry, which "seem" to be waiting for us around the corner, do not justify the construction of an accelerator because there is not yet a sufficiently well-founded argument that a future accelerator might discover them. In conclusion, Sabina asks not to build the new accelerator as a punishment for those theorists who did not listen to nature and published articles lacking a physical point.

Sabina's publication ignited a wave of reactions on social networks as well. Prominent among them was the physicist from MIT Prof. Daniel Herlow, who also deals with the theory of physics at high energies. Harlow claims that the scientific community is aware of the problem and therefore many researchers and theorists are changing their research direction in order to be contemporary and attentive. According to him, scientific research is done by experimenters and their importance to the scientific community is great, the preservation of experimental knowledge is just as important. Harlow adds that even if the new accelerator shows that the Standard Model is still valid in its scaling of energies, this is of great scientific importance. The USA, for example, spent 17.5 billion dollars on the construction of its aircraft carrier, so why not invest the money for the benefit of science? Daniel's post was published about two weeks ago, gained about 100 responses from scientists around the world and still continue to respond.

In Forbes, Prof. Chad Orzel from Union College presented both sides and sharpened Sabina's demand that the community rationally consider whether it is worth investing a lot of money on accelerators. All in all, he claimed that at the global level the money is considered relatively little especially that it is spread over a large number of countries and over decades. In another article published in Forbes about a week after Sabina's article, the physicist Dr. Ethan Seigel writes why it is important to promote a new accelerator. His argument, as simple as it is considered, is the basis of scientific curiosity - we won't know if it was necessary for science until one is built. We will not know what is hidden behind the vast desert spread beyond the accelerator in Geneva if we do not build an accelerator stronger than it.

In conclusion the scientific community has several ends of a thread, many ideas and hopes that cost billions of dollars. Dark matter, new particles, supersymmetry and corrections to the standard model may not appear in the new accelerator. No one really knows what the energy scale is at which we will see new physics, but one thing we are pretty sure of, we don't know everything and we are missing many pieces of the picture we call nature. The accelerator may even discover new ideas that we have not put forward in any scientific article. Maybe evidence for string theory, for example, will come from gravitational waves, maybe from small laboratories, but about that in the following articles. It is important to note that beyond the science that the accelerator is aimed at, very useful accompanying technologies have been developed for the purpose of the accelerator - from the WWW, to powerful magnets, to algorithms and smart media whose importance cannot be underestimated. This is usually how it happens in huge scientific projects. For now, let the scientists and leaders decide how and who (the Japanese or the Europeans) will invest the money for the accelerator, if at all, and we hope that the scientists will continue to express their opinion openly in the public as well.

To the article in the New York Times:

For an article in Forbes

Another article in Forbes

To Daniel Harlow's post: 20