Adam Brown

else, any of these more fanciful scenarios, or anything basically unexpected, but people had speculated we'd see supersymmetry there, or we'd see extra dimensions, and basically that was a null result.

We didn't see anything like that.

I would say we should definitely build another one if it was cheap to do so.

And we should build another one once AGI has made us all so rich that it's cheap to do so.

But it's not the obvious place to spend $50 billion if you had $50 billion to spend on science.

Often it's these smaller experiments that can look for things in unexpected places.

A decade ago, there was BICEP, which is a reasonably cheap, tens of millions of dollars experiment at the South Pole that thought it had seen some hints in the cosmic microwave background of gravitational waves.

That would have been revolutionary, if true.

Not worth doing BICEP if it costs $10 billion.

Definitely worth doing BICEP if it costs $10 million.

So there's all sorts of experiments like that, often observational.

Oh, it gives you hints.

You're just examining the night sky very closely and seeing hints of what happened at the Big Bang.

So yeah, this is a sort of different approach to doing high energy physics, which is...

Why do you want to build a big collider?

You want to build a big collider because the bigger the collider, the more high energy you can smash this together with.

And Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that high energy means short resolution.

You can see things on very small scales.

That's great, except the cost to build them is... There's some scaling laws, and those scaling laws are not particularly friendly.

There is another...