This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
Yeah, if history has taught as nothing else, it's that the guy with the biggest stick usually wins. There are many criticisms of the U.S. military, but no one could accuse it of being weak. That kind of deterrence is invaluable.
The purpose of military is always dual: to deflect other country's military and to "protect national interests" (read: attack another country that now has to have military too, and may consider using it for an attack).
Wildly assuming you are American, you should have no issue understanding that defensive forces are not really always defensive.
Idk, I'm not sure I could get much use out of a particular accelerator even if I got it running. An aircraft carrier though might be joyride-able, and that I can understand. Might still be moot since both need a team, but if I get to have either one I'd have to at least think on it.
for context 22 billion is a few billions less than what elon musk overpaid for twitter. i don't think a bigger collider will do anything but I'd like for humanity to have this rather than whatever the fuck the rich are doing now.
if i remember correctly twitter was evaluated as 20 billion before musk bought it, so he overpaid by 24 billion dollars which is a couple billion dollars more than the price tag quoted here.
For your money you can have "A social media platform that's on fire or the secrets of the universe and money for another project. What do you choose?"
"The dumpster fire social media platform"
Cern has produced quite some interesting systems for software and data management. I am sure the added value of the work is beyond just understanding particles.
This would have created a strong science hub and community in Texas, a real reason for the state to be proud of itself, looking towards the future like it did in the 1960s, and that was due to the Democrats with LBJ.
Now instead, they got assault rifle-totin', shit-kicking knuckle-draggers for life, as the whole place builds up inertia sinking into a festering swamp of its' own ignorance.
well i mean to be fair, it was also on a really big boon of massive military spending, and the debt was a significant problem, plus this was like a fucking massive collider for the time, and probably even now.
The sheer cost alone of it i think was like 20 billion dollars near the tail end of development, not to mention they had basically redesigned the entire fucking thing by that point since they had dropped an entire team. It was a fucking mess.
If scientists had their way they'd have built the big one first. Or at least something reasonably larger than what they have.. it's politics that is capitalism and war that is the addiction preventing us from having nice things
I think the experience of building the previous smaller ones helped though. I think if you just go for the large one, it will probably fail or overrun the budget and we'll have nothing to show for the money spent.
Is not only about physics research. The complexity of those projects fund hundreds of sectors and push forward new technologies who will have many commercial use.
...Also they've confirmed the existence of this little thing called Higgs Boson which field define pretty much reality, soo... not exactly wasted time.
Blame your govern, not the science. Science give you medicine, electricity, internet, and all the device you use daily. Your govern put unfair taxes on everything and allow the corporation to exploit your work.
Don't worry! Though black holes may sound scary, microscopic black holes, the type that could hypothetically be produced by high-energy particle collisions such as this, would pretty much instantaneously (in approximately 10-27 seconds) evaporate due to the emission of Hawking radiation, before they could "suck up" anything. Cosmic rays of far higher intensities than what we could produce routinely collide with atoms in Earth's atmosphere, so microscopic black holes could be happening daily in our atmosphere, we just never see them because they're far too small and evaporate instantly.
Well no danger of that. We certainly cannot do it on terrestrial scales. No way, no how. Not even with fusion and a collider ring wrapped around the equator. It still requires vastly higher energies.
Even if we could make a kugelblitz black hole right here, it would instantly fall out of reach through the Earth while barely interacting at all with any other particles. On the Planck scale, particles are mostly empty space. We wouldn't even get to study it.
The best way to build one is to surround a star with millions of orbital mirrors, then focus all the light onto a single point in space, with an accuracy of nanometers, if not picometers. Focusing enough energy on a single point will cause a tiny black hole to form. It's probably impossible to do by accident.
There are plenty of natural particles colliders, such as black holes or very dense stars, that are way more powerful than our engineered particle colliders, which (observationally) don't create black holes around them
Similar reactions produced by particle accelerators are constantly happening all around us, and isn't just limited to extreme conditions like around black holes. This is just the same thing but at a much smaller and more controlled scale, and last I checked the sun hasn't produced any world ending black holes despite the far more extreme reactions constantly happening within it. A man even survived a high energy proton beam from one of those accelerators passing through his brain and was able to continue his career in quantum physics, so at that point I doubt they're capable of anything world ending.
There's 1 in a trillion trillion chance! So we should be glad we're not all beautiful beach body people married to the most wonderful and irresistibly sexy megalonymphomaniac people that just want to hump us every single second of the rest of our lives in all possible ways, all of us 8 billion people together. Because if that ever happened, it could only mean one thing, the end of the world as we know it would be coming in the form of a tiny black hole.
That's only in the movies. In reality they just completely evaporate. Usually they just evaporate. They take up a lot of volume but aren't terribly filling.
I feel like this should be required watching for anyone who wants to better understand colliders and the politics around them. BobbyBroccoli made this series on the development of some of them.
Also that West Wing episode where a physicist is trying to get funding for our Collider and the staffer is like "what does it do? What practical applications does it have?" and the physicist says none. It's practical application is discovery. That we discovered penicillin on accident not when we were researching practical applications of injections.
There's this (true) anecdote that precision measurements at CERN/LHC need to take into account the schedule of high-speed trains in the area because they cause tiny, yet measurable disturbances in the power grid.
You are asking something different, but I think it's interesting to mention that the particles that go into the LHC don't start there. The LHC gets them from the SPS, which gets them from the PS and this keeps going for a few more steps.
First, you try to defend your country. Then, you want to have some advantage for a safety margin. Then, bigger advantage "just in case". This military play is what is really addictive.
Colliders work best at specific speeds, like gears on a car. The big collider is fed by a smaller one. That one is likely fed by an even smaller one. Eventually, you get small enough that a simple linear accelerator can get the gas up to speed.
Oh, and likely a scientist/engineer grinning manically as they "push the trigger" on the largest rail gun in existence.
Daily reminder that the World Wide Web was invented at CERN, so somewhere around the LHC highlighted in the picture. Who knows what the next big random innovation will be.
Not sure if this is just playing with the fact that a photon could be considered its own antiparticle in quantum field theory or if I missed the joke. Please, enlighten me.
Maybe we could convince the military that they are rail guns. Yeah, it's rail gun research, and it will finally result in the defeat of those...other guys.
Of course, it will never work because they only trust a few companies like Lockheed to do their dirty stuff.
I dont remember ever reading they were trying to find dark matter with particle colliders. Read New Scientist for years too. They have deep mountain detectors for dark matter that are nothing like particle accelerators. Memes are great and funny and all, but not always based upon reality. And why shouldnt science be used to figure out how things are constructed, even the fundamentals of the universe..?
The thing is that the general public never sees the line between toy lab experiment to factory production line. To be fair that path is nebulous and doesn't follow a schedule, so it is hard to sell. On the topic of selling this is often funded by the government too, so people want to jump in and say "free market.... " when corporations don't show up until the last mile.
Put that 20 billions first into fusion research. Like yesterday. How on earth would we power and cool that 100 km of superconductors otherwise? Unless the 100 km FCC is required by the fusion research, then we have a pickle.
Ok, that I didn't know. Off to find some references.
(I have fairly strong opinions about people like that. Hell, I refuse to watch any Tom Cruise movies because of his association with scientology, just as an example.)
Other than the fact that it/some of it was probably detected in 2023 and all the models do mostly work. Plus the LHC proved the existence of the Higgs Boson.
Neutrinos are an unknown science that we still know so very little about. There are hypotheses that say neutrinos could be the missing dark matter, but they are fringe. Once we have a reliable way of detecting them it would unlock all sorts of secrets of the very early universe - think microwave background radiation except with neutrinos.