CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider

Private funding and influence

• Some see private money as necessary given government waste and underfunding of basic research.
• Others are uneasy that work “which can alter humanity” might be steered by wealthy donors, though no concrete capture mechanisms are detailed.

Scientific value vs cost of the FCC

• Supporters argue a bigger collider is the only realistic way to probe the next energy scale; you design experiments for what you can reach technologically.
• Skeptics say the Standard Model is complete, supersymmetry didn’t show up, and there’s no strong mainstream prediction the FCC would test; risk of spending tens of billions for no “new physics.”
• One view holds colliders primarily produce careers (papers, PhDs, engineering work) and function partly as “flagship industry” projects, comparable to the ISS.

Technological spinoffs and broader impact

• Pro-FCC commenters stress CERN’s history of enabling other fields: grid/distributed computing, precision timing (“White Rabbit”), superconducting magnets and cooling, the web, medical imaging, accelerator tech for medicine and industry.
• Critics counter that these are engineering byproducts, not discoveries, and could be pursued more cheaply without giant machines.

Medical applications and proton therapy

• CERN-related work underpins proton therapy and other medical technologies.
• There’s a detailed subthread on whether proton therapy is clinically superior and cost-effective versus conventional radiotherapy; evidence is mixed and indication-specific, with some promising but not definitive trials.
• Even if outcomes are only non-inferior, reduced collateral damage and long-term side effects might justify higher upfront costs, especially in children—though this is presented as an actuarial tradeoff, not settled science.

Fundamental vs applied research and public funding

• Some argue fundamental research rarely has immediate applications but eventually guides transformative technologies; others respond that high-energy collider physics is too remote from practical scales to repeat the “quantum mechanics → transistor” story.
• A minority argues taxpayers shouldn’t fund such projects at all and that science should be decoupled from the state; multiple replies defend public funding as essential for long-horizon, non-profit-driven knowledge.

Alternatives and opportunity cost

• Several suggest that, if spending at this scale, higher-payoff or more novel directions exist: wakefield accelerators, muon colliders, or many smaller experiments across disciplines.
• Others reply that you only learn by doing large, risky experiments; a null result is still valuable constraint on theories.

Miscellaneous

• Commenters note a basic factual error in the article (crediting Eric Schmidt with founding Google), using it to criticize science journalism and, tangentially, LLM reliability.
• There is some dark humor about colliders as “black holes” for money and apocalyptic black-hole creation, mostly treated as jokes rather than real risk.