Hot Debate Raging on The Proposed Super Particle Collider in China

hackingbear writes: Chinese high-energy physicists proposed four years ago to build a particle collider four times the size of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. On Sunday, Dr Yang Chen-ning, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1957 and now living on campus at Tsinghua University in Beijing, released an article on WeChat opposing the construction of the collider. He said the project would become an investment “black hole” with little scientific value or benefit to society, sucking resources away from other research sectors such as life sciences and quantum physics. Yang’s article hit nearly all social media platforms and internet news portals, drawing tens of thousands of positive comments over the last couple of days. The first stage of the project was estimated to cost 40 billion yuan (US$6 billion) by 2030, and the total cost would exceed 140 billion yuan (US$21 billion) when construction is completed in 2050, making it the most expensive research facility built in China. Yang’s main argument was that China would not succeed where the United States had failed. A similar project had been proposed in the US but was eventually cancelled in 2012 as the construction far exceeded the initial budget. Yang said existing facilities including the Large Hadron Collider contributed little to the increase of human knowledge and was irrelevant to most people’s daily lives. But Dr Wang Yifang, lead scientist of the project with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of High Energy Physics, argued research in high energy physics lead to the world wide web, mobile phone touch screens and magnetic resonance imaging in hospitals, among other technological breakthroughs.