Il Guardian riporta le discussioni tra vari gruppi di fisici sulla proposta del CERN di costruire un nuovo acceleratore di particelle che andrebbe a sostituire il Large Hadron Collider (LHC) di Ginevra, destinato a cessare l’attività tra qualche decennio.

La discussione nasce dalla constatazione che la costruzione del nuovo acceleratore richiede fondi talmente grandi, che non ci sarebbero altri fondi disponibili per altri progetti di ricerca di pari importanza.

“What worries me most is that, by investing all this money, we will ​be stopping the development of other technologies because there will be no money for them. The FCC could soak up funds for years and years,” said Abramowicz, who dismissed the idea of the mega-collider as “a toy” that could certainly not be guaranteed to fix the holes that exist in current theories…

…

However, if the FCC were given the go-ahead, it could lock up funds for decades and end up dictating the direction that particle physics will have to take for much of the century, List added.

“We will be telling future generations exactly what to do scientifically, and so we need to ask ourselves today: who are we to decide what our grandchildren should research and not research?”