I’d rather have a 100km particle collider than an aircraft carrier.
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.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
Last good Republican change my mind
In a ideal word, sure, I’d too. But we live among fucking beasts.
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.
Hopefully they can finally manufacture black holes. Because that would be totally safe for everyone 😉.
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.
I’ll show you my kugelblitz black hole.
They posit that yes, black holes could be formed, but they’re so small they evaporate pretty much instantly. They don’t have the mass to survive.
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.
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.
Hey you seem pretty knowledgeable so I’m gonna just ask - if these types of events happen regularly in earth’s atmosphere, why build particle colliders at all? Is it just to have control over when they’re triggered and to be able to observe the results? If so, wouldn’t it help to just launch more satellites that can observe when these things happen in the atmosphere? Sorry for the dumb questions, I’m very much a layman.
Yup! It’s so they can view what happens when these particles collide as the collisions happen, using specialized detectors. The ATLAS detector at CERN weighs 7,000 tons and is huge.
These reactions in the atmosphere happen very fast and are a bit chaotic. When a primary cosmic ray hits an atom in our atmosphere, it then sets off a chain reaction similar to billiard balls, resulting in “air showers”, which are cascades of subatomic particles, such as hadrons, photons, muons, electrons, as well as ionized nuclei. The colliders allow physicists to view these kinds of reactions under controlled conditions right as the reactions happen, and can adjust things such as the energies. There’s an array of detectors in Argentina which can detect the particles released by an air shower
I’m waiting on the equatorial supercollider myself. 40,075km let’s go!
Just after the transcontinental maglev train
You just know the letters of the FCC originally stood for Fucking Collosal Collider.
No, it was the Large Hardon Collider, and this is the Fat Cock Collider.
Contractor, scratching head:
Hey boss, are you sure they got the dimensions right in this drawing of their new proton smasher?
Next to the scale it just says “GIRTHY”.
What would happen if we put a small collider inside of a bigger collider and spun it around while it spun around?
We recreate an atom?
How else will we transmogrify enough souls to create a philosopher stone — I mean do science stuff?
Just wait, if civilization and/or human life still exists in a thousand years or so, they’ll build one into an orbital ring.
Eh who am I kidding, well be lucky to survive the 21st century.
Unless asteroid … we will survive, how is another matter.
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.
Come on anti-photons!
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.
Probably have a ton of tunnel builders unemployed over there
Not for long!
They should make it square because squares are cool
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.
The way it’s typed out makes it sound like a Vince Russo quote lol
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.
Yes I’ve pointed this out about the internet for years.
We’ll make sophons one of these days.
