alt Hacker News> It is hard to gauge this is in advance though. If you were sure what you were gonna find, it wouldn't be much of a discovery.
Virtually all previous particle discoveries were predicted, and then we built devices to find them, eg. the Higgs was predicted in the 1960s. There is no such motivation here. There is no theoretical or significant practical benefit for the FCC, it's basically a jobs program.
There is better frontier research that could use those funds for much better payoffs. For instance, just sticking with particle physics, Wakefield accelerators would be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper than the LHC while achieving the same energies. We've also never built a muon collider, and so that's largely unexplored territory.
We just don't need another radio frequency particle collider, we've reached the limits of what they can do within a reasonable research budget.
> Virtually all previous particle discoveries were predicted
That's not true at all. To give just few examples.
Electron was not predicted but Thomson found it during first fundamental particle discovered came from cathode‐ray experiments, not from a prior microscopic theory of matte. Remember this was during thr 19th century.
Another one is the muon discovered in 1936 which was detected as "heavy electron" in cosmic rays. it did not fit any clear theoretical need in nuclear physics at the time, leading Rabi to quip “Who ordered that?”
Heck there are many more examples that I will bypass the comment limits if I tried to list them (resonances in particular will be very numerous).
You can of course move the goal target by narrowing what you mean by particle but this is exactly why physicists try to define what they talk about before making an argument.
> There is no such motivation here. There is no theoretical or significant practical benefit for the FCC, it's basically a jobs program.
Really? There is a huge volume of the feasibility study about the physics program of FCC. Are you claiming that it is false. Have you even read it?