'God particle' research debate divides China's physicists
Nobel laureate in physics Yang Zhenning on Tuesday fired the latest salvo in the debate over China's current plans to build a better electron-positron collider to hunt for the Higgs boson, or "God particle," a topic that has divided the opinions of China's top physicists.
"What I object to is that China has begun to build its supersized collider instead of further developing high energy physics," Yang wrote in an article on WeChat public account "The Intellectuals" on Sunday, in response to an August 29 article in which Shing-Tung Yau - the only Chinese-American winner of the Fields Medal - expressed his confusion about Yang's opposition to the particle collider.
Yang said the construction of the facility allots hefty investment - over $20 billion - for research that is not yet urgent, pinching funding for research in other important fields like life sciences. He cited the US' cancellation of a $3 billion super collider in 1993 as an example of the same problem.
Wang Yifang, head of the Institute of High Energy Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), however, argued on Monday that building a collider now will allow China to take the lead in worldwide particle physics research for decades to come.
There is still plenty of room for China to increase funding for fundamental research, Wang said in an article published on the same WeChat public account on Monday.
"[Building the collider] will not cut funding for other fundamental sciences," he said.
The electron-positron collider aims to measure the nature of the Higgs boson and explore the regularity of fundamental physics, the Xinhua News Agency reported in 2014.
According to Wang, China's central government will cover 70 percent of the total cost of building the 40 billion yuan ($5.99 billion) Circular Electron Positron Collider and the 100 billion yuan Super Proton-Proton Collider.
Relative to China's overall GDP, the two colliders will cost less than either the Chinese collider currently operating in Beijing or the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, Wang said.
Cao Zexian, a research fellow with the CAS Institute of Physics, told the Global Times on Tuesday that he firmly objects to building the huge colliders, arguing that China has not yet reached the scientific research level or mastered the manufacturing skills necessary to build such facilities.
"The scientific apparatuses we are using now are all imported. Without a strong industrial manufacturing development as the foundation, such hefty projects will come to nothing but a total loss," he said.
"There is no shortcut for scientific progress, and China should still stick to a prudent path and enhance our scientific research ability," he added.
