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Elon Musk could have actually done something for humanity and build two of those instead of buying Twitter.
Dude literally owns a boring company, he could have ate the cost of digging the tunnel to specifications and still have more money than buying xitter
Yea but his boring company isn’t particularly useful for anything other than stymieing public transportation programs by acquiring contracts with cities and then doing nothing with them. Almost like he has an interest in selling more cars than expand public transit… allegedly.
Not even allegedly. I could be wrong but I thought he admitted publicly at one point that was the whole idea behind The Boring Co. It might have even been on Rogan. Anyone remember or have a clip? Jamie, pull that up.
I think was a biographer, who wrote that the “hyperloop” project existed only to sabotage California’s high speed train project.
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And he’s driven the value down below the price of one collider. He’s lost an entire super collider!
I disliked the truth of what you wrote so much, I initially downvoted you.
You may not realize this, but the twitter money still exists. The former owners of twitter have it under their mattress right now, why don’t they build a supercollider?
Upkeep might be expensive, but 22 billion is probably lower bound estimation, highly likely to 5x that at least
So, we’ll need to kill fewer brown children to pay for it?
This is Switzerland you’re talking about, they make money when people get killed
Understood, the world needs to kill more brown people, so we can afford rare particles . ***not my opinion
That would be too hard, but we can just try and save some money on useless things and if people don’t accept cutting benefits just raise the interest rates, all of them are underwater anyway
Found a future Federal Reserve banker!
Man, that’s just not in the budget. How am I supposed to scratch my need-to-kill-brown-kids itch without the taxpayer money we specifically set aside for this purpose?
What kind of absurd ideas are you gonna come up with next? No more instigating strife in the middle east? Pah! Not on my watch!
/s
Pff the UK is spending that on a 70 mile railway thats going to be slower than the one already there, already spent nearly 2x the projected FCC budget on just 6 miles of the fucking thing.
Maybe the government should spend less on avocado toast.
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The problem is a train needs to transport humans, whereas the collider just needs to transport teeny tiny particles and keep a receipt of their arrival.
The particle collider also doesn’t need to ensure the safety of the particles. Frankly, if it did it would be a rather shitty collider.
I do love the image of scientists constructing little half buckyball helmets that they lovingly wrap around a lead atom before yeeting it to .9995% the speed of light
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First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
I don’t remember where I heard that science is super cheap, but I did not belive it first. Some time later I see that it is.
I guess everything is relative.
The US has given 4 times that to Ukraine. That’s 2/3rds the budget of NASA.
That’s actually surprising that NASA only has 50% more budget than a single particle accelerator, given the huge number of cutting edge projects NASA is working on.
Only about half a penny of every federal tax dollar goes to NASA.
This is one-time vs recurring payment
That’s why I compared it to 44x the initial jwst budget
Money spent fighting a morally justifiable war with Russia that we aren’t actually having to fight is money well spent IMO.
A million people dead. Money well spent. Thanks
Versus us not getting involved, there being a million people dead, the Ukraine occupied and Russia moving on to the next eastern European country?
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Never heard of diplomacy? These US security experts had a nice idea back in May:
We advocate for a meaningful and genuine commitment to diplomacy, specifically an immediate ceasefire and negotiations without any disqualifying or prohibitive preconditions. Deliberate provocations delivered the Russia-Ukraine War. In the same manner, deliberate diplomacy can end it.
Seems the politicians are catching on to the same facts these days: NBC News, Nov 4th: Western officials broach with Kyiv issue of possible peace talks with Moscow
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They have mostly given stuff they weren’t going to use anymore worth that amount when bought new.
How many people has the moon killed? Cuz Russia has killed tens of thousands. They’ve lost on the order of 250k of their own guys, and probably inflicted roughly the same numbers on the AFU.
The moon doesn’t kill old ladies sitting in their apartment.
This initial budget estimate is 44x the 500M initial estimate of the jwst for comparison. Jwst eventually ballooned to 20B, but I’m guessing this would similarly balloon over time as well.
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Guys, the trick is to get it partially built and then cancel funding. Then scientists will never trust you to fund anything ever again, and you get to act like science is a waste of money while you’re spending ridiculous sums on fighter jets.
Yes, I am still bitter about Waxahatchie.
Having the corpse of the Supercollider Superconductor in my backyard growing up (not literally) makes me wonder what could have been if the US wasn’t so shortsighted.
It would be badass if it was literally
With all the development around Waxahachie, Midlothian, and Ennis, There’s a very good chance that many backyards are now built over the loop’s proposed path.
It’s really sad as a clear landmark on the map of the US’s descent into scientific irrelevancy on the world stage.
“If there was demand, the market would have built it!”
He’s a great video documentary about it by Bobby Broccoli if you want information and have two hours.
“A US-Japanese trade mission where SSC funding was supposed to be discussed ended in the George H. W. Bush vomiting incident.” LOL
TIL as well and have been to waxahatchie without knowing.
Wow, thanks to that article TIL about the George H. W. Bush vomiting incident
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I would have loved for the SSSC to have been built as well. It probably wouldn’t have found the highs boson till 2010 or maybe as early as 2009. The computer technology of the 90s would have severely limited the things ability to be understood. CERN creates GB of data per second. I can’t imagine what that thing would have done, and then we need to be able to process that much so we can filter out the noise.
I was 12 when it was announced that they weren’t gonna finish buildt it, and even though I was just a kid in IN, something shattered for me that day. That was almost as bad as watching Challenger.
I think we realized halfway through building that we couldn’t build bombs.
That project put my dad out of business. Government gave him (part of) the contract, he did a bunch of work for years and then poof, project gone, not gonna pay you for it.
I was looking for this comment lol
Budget: Military Complex > CERN
Long term value to citizens: CERN > Miltary Complex
All historical CERN expenses combined are a tiny fraction of the yearly expenses of the combined EU miltary
But particles don’t make my dick feel big
Even quarks aren’t that small.
They call me quark cause I’m always down to top and up to bottom and I’m charmingly strange. Also I’m very very small
Do you also mysteriously disappear whenever there’s anyone interested in what you’re doing?
Seems like you’re just not using them creatively enough
Hold a particle in your hand first, then your dick. The relative difference will make your dick seem at least ten times bigger!
OMG. This might be my favorite burn ever!!
That’s because you’re using them wrong!
US Congress: Audit NASA > Audit the Pentagon
EU: Audit CERN > Audit Luxemborg/Malta/
UKI’m just amazed that funding $22 billion is even an issue when the project is being backed by the EU, and partially the US, since we never built ours…
That’s a rounding error for both entities
This is cheaper than two super carriers.
The feds give the states more than $16b per year to build and run shitty, custom made IT systems for their Medicaid programs. It’s basically a subsidy to IT companies. There are thousands of examples like this, where spending money on fundamental science is clearly a better investment.
I was kind of thinking that $22 billion really doesn’t seem like that much money for a project like this.
Remember when people were worried about these killing us all by creating a black hole that swallows the Earth?
Can this one just hurry up and do that please?
I’d rather spend 22 billion on this than in Israel or more weapons of war
We have wasted way more money on way stupider projects. Would love to see this built rather than the military getting even more money.
…or another feeble scheme like the 5000th pitch for a “hyper loop”
Hyperloop was known high schooler nonsense from the start, at least this will get something back, whatever it is.
i hope someday we construct a collider that spans the entire circumference of the earth. But we’d probably have to build one that spans the circumference of the moon first, and then maybe mars, since the oceans are going to be a bit of a doozie to work around that we don’t have the technology for, whereas the interior of a collider is supposed to be evacuated, so, the moon almost kinda already handles that for us. heat might be an issue of course, but if we can figure out thermal radiator panels that can dump the heat straight into space, maybe we could pull it off…
mars would address the heat issues, but those dust storms are no joke and the dust itself is microscopic toxic/caustic razors and it’ll try to get in everywhere and ruin fine instruments it touches. Moon dust is also really bad but there’s no wind to kick it up on the moon obviously…
but damn. DAMN. imagine the fucking science we could get done with a LUNAR-SCALE PARTICLE COLLIDER!!!
Halo
Just gonna throw that out there
Master Chief, we need you for one last mission >!bro!<
Fuck it, orbital collider. Earth deserves a cool ring
Yes. Encircling the Sun
queue halo theme
Now I’m imagining placing a ring of gigantic dyson-sphere powered magnets in an intergalactic void to create the final and ultimate supercollider, the size of a galactic supercluster
that would legitimately be so fucking cool, but I think at those scales we’re actually encroaching on things that truly are physically impossible. If it takes light entire geological eras to move through such a system, any hope of maintaining physical integrity throughout its length is … exceedingly unlikely. Like, at ranges THAT vast, pretty sure the expansion of spacetime itself would rip it open…
… but i’m still enjoying imagining it :3
Does it actually have to maintain physical integrity as a single structure? If it’s not got a vacuum chamber due to relying on the ambient vacuum, then each section of magnets need not physically touch, so the individual components need only use some of the energy from their power source to actively steer themselves into formation rather than rely on material strength to hold together.
I would expect so on the basis of precision. At scales that large, space itself becomes an unreliable medium…
Gotta build it as an orbital ring.
Also, maybe add some biomes, oceans and wildlife. And absolutely no parasitic life forms trapped in there.
Hear me out okay. hits blunt Dyson ring. Maybe we start building it out between earth and Mars. We dig a big ass hole into Mars core and use some kind of laser technology to focus radiation into it perhaps “jump starting” the core. Or maybe we use some kind of cable and gymbal system to run a hard wire into it. hits blunt Then meanwhile we’re crashing comets and shit into it to get us some oceans and atmosphere, badabing badaboom we got earth 2.0
You should put that blunt down, buddy.
never.
Well check this out: if it’s big enough and can collect enough solar energy, it can be a self-powered gargantuan electromagnet and CREATE a magnetosphere for Mars itself. And the moon has a higher silver content than earth, which a) won’t tarnish in the vacuum of space and b) is more conductive than copper or gold!
Aluminum alloy structures, silver circuitry, we could build this thing without sending ANY of it’s raw materials from earth. It’s all already up there waiting for us… … Some assembly required :p
I’m sorry I’m just now seeing this reply because that is fascinating
The Moon’s daytime is half a month long and can reach 120 C so we’d need some pretty powerful heat shielding. And there’s no ozone layer to protect the electronics from radiation, and I’m pretty sure the Moon orbits outside of Earth’s magnetosphere. And the shielding used for such a project could also be used to fix climate change here (and terraform Venus later) with orbital parasols. And whatever unimaginable technology we’d need for such an ambitious project may as well be used to run a grid of electromagnets and power lines across Mars to give it a magnetic field
Most proposals for moon colonies are either built underground or covered up with a thick layer of regolith for both of the reasons you mentioned. It’s very likely a collider would also be built underground for the same reasons. Digging a many-miles-long tunnel on the moon with the awful properties of moon regolith to deal with would have its own set of challenges though.
Yeah. I hear NASA and India are planning to send 3d-printer robots to lava caves to seal them off, cover/get rid of all moon dust and build permanent bases there (but as of now the priority seems to be researching the polar water-ice and using moon rocks to study what the early solar system’s geology was like)
There’s probably opportunity to do some really large colliders in space, for much cheaper than on any celestial body.
But then, people are having a really hard time imagining the fucking science we could get done with a lunar-scale particle collider. That’s why the merely 100km one isn’t getting any money.
If gravatons are a real particle, we’d need one on on the order of earths orbit around the sun to see it. Maybe someday lol.
Or a different mechanism of detection,
Why do we need to do it around a planet? Origin of Halo confirmed
Linear collider to Proxima Centauri
I think on earth is preferential, and you’d have to build it underground anyways in order to shield it from interference.
I think on earth is preferential
Something something “resonance cascade.”
Even underground there is tons of issues. One for example is that the ground is having tides.
As the moon passes above is the ground is moving by several cm so it has to be compensated by the collider.
At the energies involved, it’s akin to a bacteria interfering with a supersonic goods train. The only bit that needs shielding is the detector systems, and that’s not THAT hard to do in space. At least if you’re at the point of building a space based accelerator.
Fun fact, they were going to build one in the US crossing the borders of LA, TX, AR. They even dug out the damn hole, but they shit canned the whole project so now we’re just left with a random giant circular hole underground.
Edited AK to AR. That would have been a bit excessive.
I think I saw this in an anime once. Something to do with a big Philosopher Stone or something.
edo… wado…
Not quite circular, they only got 26% of the tunnel dug. Still, 23 km is quite a long tunnel to leave sitting empty
Fill it with cheese. Make another cheese vault. We require the cheese. Government cheese. Cheese.
Or it could an extension for the millions of chickens that the US government keep I’m the a secret location.
Thanks for clearing that up, I thought I was finished or near completion. Glad they decided to stop production when they did but sucks that we didn’t get it.
There’s an excellent documentation by BobbyBroccoli about that.
This is awesome thanks for sharing.
Love me a Bobby video. Can’t wait for nortel part 2
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Every time we get close to a science victory our military advisor finds another war to divert production to…
Yea sometimes I’m pretty dumb. Gona edit the correct abbreviations now lol
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Moms for Liberty would be calling the police on it regularly.
Sounds very much like how I build my homes in Minecraft
They should have built it crossing the border of TX and MX, that would have been really popular ;)
Ps I’m not a Trumpian, just making a joke :)
Imagine if only 1/10 of all countries
GDPgouvernement spending went to scientists and the patent bullshit didn’t exist ? We’d be mining asteroids and sipping coffee on Mars.This comment doesn’t even make sense. For example, the USA government spent 37% compared to the GDP.
If you mean 10% of government spending towards science then that question makes sense.
The USA spends about $75billion of the $800billion defense budget on R&D. It spends another $120billion on non-defense R&D.
Which is about 1/31 of federal spending for the US.
Thanks for the correction. I never knew what word to use and used GDP because that’s the closest thing to what I mean. Thanks again !
Honestly I thought your original comment was refering to basic science so the 10% would be huge.
Would be neat if they found a way to only spend like 200 billion a year (the GDP of Hungary and as much as the second biggest military spender) on the people grinder.
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I don’t think even a purely defensive military could be that small for the US. We have a lot of coastline on two oceans, plus distant holdings in Alaska and Hawaii. Even discharging Guam and the like would still be a lot of ground and ocean to cover.
My googling says the US spent/185b on the DHS for this year and has 100b for FY2024, which includes the stupid mexico wall. I’m sure there would be more things to deal with not included in that number and it would take time to transition, but any reduction is a positive gain if you ask me.
But we spend nearly $200 billion just paying salaries. We spend the most because we are also an expensive country to live in and that means paying the folks who volunteer a decent wage.
We would have to significantly downsize the military personnel and pretty much operate as homeland defense only.
That sounds great
Venus would take longer, but would be vastly easier to terraform to a habitable world. The atmosphere should be able to be transformed into an earth like atmosphere by dumping a few comets and some bacteria in. Might take the bacteria a few thousand years, but they did it here in Earth caused the first mass extinction.
We might wanna check to see if any bacteria exist on Venus first, but honestly if there are, they haven’t made the evolutionary jump in the last 4 billion years, so I doubt it will happen just cause we add the necessary water.
While we are at it, we may as well solve the dark forest problem, turn the solar system into a massive spaceship, and extend the life of our sun, by turning Mercury into a solar thruster/ star lifter.
I’m partial to the idea of converting Mercury into a star lifter / thruster / planetary shade. Blocking sunlight to Venus would cause the atmosphere to cool, then freeze and fall as snow. Then you can disassemble Venus too for more raw material. That’s a massive store of carbon, oxygen, and sulfur. Solar powered mass drivers operating out of a planetary vacuum cut costs of launching material into space.
People often object to the idea because we can’t afford it, it’s too difficult, or out of concern for preserving those planets. Yeah, we won’t be doing all that. It will be our descendants in the far future. A task for new civilizations, over eons. Discovering life on Mercury and Venus is a long shot. But if it is there, it’s doomed without human intervention. Convert those two planets to Dyson swarm, and they’ll have matter for countless orbital habitats, not just for whoever humans evolve into, but for nature preserves too.
I’ve watched a bunch of Isaac Arthur.
Don’t disassemble Venus. That planet is far too easy to terraform. Disassemble Mars, asteroids, and the various otherwise useless moons, comets, asteroids, and proto-planets in the heliosphere
Take a look at my other comment in this thread.
Dont worry dude, I won’t. I promise. 😆
Well, I understand the argument for terraforming, and I’d bet good money we will terraform it long before disassembly, but I’m more of an O’Neil Cylinder / Dyson Swarm kind of guy. I prefer the idea of overwhelming surface area via orbital habitats rather than colonizing gravity wells. I also don’t trust Venus not to catastrophically resurface itself and refill the atmosphere with CO2 and sulphuric acid in a mass volcanic event.
Long term, but far too soon the Sun will expand into a red giant and devour Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth as well. If it’s possible to employ a Dyson Swarm to lift material from a star to reduce its mass, then it may be feasible to prevent or mitigate the red giant phase to preserve Earth and extend its habitability, perhaps indefinitely. If preserving the birthplace of known life seems more important than building a copy in a more precarious orbit, then we ought to sacrifice that copy to expand the Dyson Swarm and mine the Sun faster. Mercury first though. We’ve got time. Mars can probably go too.
Oh yes, and if the notion of slowly altering Earth’s orbit by tossing asteroids past us ever needs to happen, then surely rapid firing 2 or 3 planets worth of material across our bow ought to get the job done much faster.
Considering the eons involved with stripping both inward planets down to the last bucketful though, I’m certainly in favor of a few millennia to fully explore and research them both beforehand.
A properly configured solar thruster doubles as a starlifting platform. Kurzgesagt has a video on is as well as PBS Spacetime
I’m not seeing why the same couldn’t be said for Mars, drop some mold spores and water bears down there, maybe some photosynthetic bacteria, slowly build a blanket of CO2 to warm the planet, melt/release the water from the surface, a thousand years gives a habitable planet, no asteroid steering required.
Mars is roughly a single order of magnitude larger than The Moon, in mass. The Earth is roughly 81 times the mass of The Moon. Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field protecting it, and can’t unless we add a significant amount of metals, and mass to the planet. It also doesn’t have an atmosphere due to the two previous facts.
Meanwhile, Venus is roughly the size of The Earth at a scale of 4.8673 : 5.97222. It doesn’t have enough water though. It also doesn’t have a large iron core to create a magnetic field to protect the inhabitants. However, we could re-route several comets fairly easily to impact Venus giving it a small amount of mass, but also all the water that is needed to start the bacteria creating a Nitrogen rich atmosphere that has a large percentage of Oxygen, turning Venus into a tropical planet that will lose its atmosphere in a few billion years. To counteract this, as we throw 20-30 comets at Venus, we should also throw 100-200 Iron rich asteroids at Venus so that they will be absorbed into the molten core and form a magnetic field for Venus.
Now we have 2 Earth-like planets in a few hundred to thousand years.
To create such a gravitational well on Mars, so that we aren’t constantly losing both our normal skeletural muscles, but also more importantly, our organ muscles, you would have to create a stable black hole in the core of Mars, or you would have to bombard Mars, and its pathetic moons, with millions of asteroids.
To create a long term naturally stable, new earth, Venus is just closer to the masses that we actually need. By dropping just the comets onto Venus you just added a lot of mass, and that gets Venus even closer to being “Earth-like.” We will have to give Venus a comparative moon, but with asteroid mining, and starlifting, that shouldn’t be an issue.
By using Mercury to create a solar thruster, we gain access to unlimited space dust, that will form unlimited asteroids for us, in the Kuiper Belt.
It’s all fine calling patents bullshit until you start getting large corporations stealing technology from small and medium enterprises.
The way to ensure that large corporations and no small businesses can thrive have an even bigger monopoly is to get rid of the patent system.
Tired of this shit on Lemmy. Do your homework.
It’s currently used to monopolize important discoveries and technologies. The Huawei debacle is the biggest proof. No country should be able to control another’s technological advance based on weither they’re friends with them at the moment or not. Also, it’s not like big tech stealing from small/medium enterprise never happens. Either they just buy the company or strangle it one way or another to bankrupt it and then buy it for cheap.
You make the patents too easy to get and it fucks the little guy over as the big corps hoover up all the ideas. You make them difficult or impossible to get then that also benefits the big guys over the little guys as they will just steal people’s ideas and produce them for cheaper with their existing infrastructure which creates an even bigger monopoly.
There is a sweet spot that society is trying to reach. It’s imperfect like any system but it’s far far better than having no system.
You’ve not even considered that in order to get a patent granted you have to disclose your invention to the public which stops big corporations hoarding too many trade secrets.
All in all, the idea that patents shouldn’t exist benefits nobody except the large corporations. Say goodbye to start ups growing in size if that is the case.
Just because big tech does these things doesn’t mean we should remove any pretense of rules against it. If they want something a little guy has, they should buy it, not take it for free.
I’d rather spend money on science than killing innocent people.
When I look at the inability to fund big science projects like this, I’m reminded of the most fictional thing to ever happen in a science fiction movie.
The film? Contact.
They build a giant portal machine thing.
Gets blowed up by terrorists.
But that’s okay, because they’ve got another one!
What?
Yep!
“Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?”
FALSE. SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF FAILURE. ABORT.
Wasn’t the second one built by an eccentric billionaire or something? Like a Howard Hughes type.
It was actually the us government that built a second one in secret, which actually sounds about right.
Close. The US controlled it but it was built by Japanese subcontractors who just happen to be…
…recently acquired… …wholly-owned subsidiaries… …of Hadden Industries.
Want to take a ride?
*I love that film despite all its flaws.
We need this one to undo the timeline shift the last one caused
Yeah everything’s been kinda fucked ever since, hasn’t it… i mean… it was 2008 right before obama being elected and i really don’t think the “correct” path of the future would have involved r-money or mccain winning so at least SOME shit would be the same, but still…
LHC didn’t start seriously smashing shit (beyond previous energies done by other colliders) until after 2010 though. I think everything went tits up about 2012, tbh - the year they found the Higgs Boson. I kind-of jokingly subscribe to the idea that the world ended. I mean, it just checks so many boxes to me, it truly seems that the universe as it stands right now is fundamentally different than it should be after the passing of one single decade.
okay i can DEFINITELY agree with you about 2012, shit’s been super fucking weird since SPECIFICALLY that year.
the worst day of my life was December 22nd 2012 and I remember it very clearly because I couldn’t figure out WHY.
I just felt awful to a degree i have NEVER felt before or ever again since. Not even once. Not even a little.
It was a distinct watershed moment that divided my entire life into “before” and “after”.
I figured it was just some freak hormonal imbalance that walloped me out of nowhere but it’s weird that that was the only time and that it coincided with such a distinct … difference in how the world was between ‘before that’ and ‘after that’.now, the higgs boson event was on a different date, certainly, but that day… i will never be able to forget it.
We accidentally changed the fabric of the Universe by observing it.
We need to get the divergence number above 1.
But how will it be called? “Even larger Hadron Collider”?
QUARK
Quantum
Universe
Advanced
Research
Komplex!!
Collidy Mc Collideface
It literally says “Future Circular Collider” smh…
If it works like telescopes, the Very Large Hadron Collider, then the Extremely Large Hadron Collider, and then the Overwhelmingly Large Hadron Collider.
Do not forget the BFHC and the GHCOAT
“Largest Hadron Collider… so far”
“LHC 2: Electric Boogaloo”
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Maybe they should do a Kickstarter.
I’m pretty bullish on science investments, but I’ve heard multiple arguments that this thing is probably not worth the money. The most prevalent argument I’ve heard to the contrary is basically “we could discover something that might be interesting.” But like very little in terms of concrete measurable returns on investment for it.
This article does a good job of arguing against it I think. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-need-a-new-gigantic-particle-collider/
My mind isn’t made up on the topic, so like can anybody explain to me why this thing is actually worth 30+ billion dollars?
If they already knew the intended results it wouldn’t make sense to do it. Science of this kind is like “here’s something we haven’t tried yet”, which itself is pretty difficult to even come up with.
Also, money spend on something like this doesn’t just disappear. It goes around the suppliers doing it and returns to the state eventually. Of course someone will pocket some money but when talking billions it’s more of an investment in the area than a cost or even an investment in the actual collider. A used collider isn’t worth that amount of money , so where’d it go? It didn’t disappear. Money goes round.
It creates a lot of jobs and when looking at the entire supply chain, it feeds a hell of a lot of people, even if the scientific result is “oh well it didn’t do anything at all.” That way, it might be cheaper than supplying social security/basic income for that amount of people.
At the end of the day, in the grand economic scale, we’re all riding on the shoulders of whoever digs out the the resources from the Earth, so we need to make these kind of very important projects to make it appear as if everyone else is actually producing anything at all. The science is just a nice side effect.
Will this do?
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any advance that didn’t at some point depend on people just dicking around to see what they could see.
“What happens if we spin this stick really really fast against this other stick?”
“Cool! What happens if we put some dried moss around it?”
“That’s nuts, man! Hey, I wonder what happens if we toss some of our leftovers in there?”
“C’mon over here, guys. You gotta taste this!”
At worst, a project like this keeps a lot of curious people in one place where we can make sure they don’t cause harm with their explorations. At best, whole new industries are founded. Never forget that modern electronics would never have existed without Einstein and Bohr arguing over the behaviour of subatomic particles.
Say the actual construction cost is $100 billion over 10 years and operational costs are $1 billion a year. Compared to all the stupid and useless stuff we already spend money on, that’s little more than pocket lint. We could extract that much from the spending of one military alliance and it would look like a rounding error. Hell, we could add one cent to the price of each litre of soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and bottled water and have money left over.
Yeah, but you could also fund a lot of other research with this budget. The point is, physicists just don’t know, if there are more particles existing. There is no theoretical theory there predicting particles at a certain mass with certain decay channels. They won’t know what to look for. That’s actually already a problem for the LHC. They have this huge amount of data, but when you don’t know, what kind of exotic particles you are looking for and how they behave, you can’t post-process the data accordingly. They are hidden under a massive amounts of particles, that are known already.
Yes, with finite resources, we have to make choices. As long as there are some resources for people to just poke around, I’m good with whatever. If we’re actually looking for some place to drop a few billion, I actually don’t think another collider should be on the list, let alone at the top.
The problem as I see it is that “but what good is it” is used to limit pretty much all fundamental research.
So why don’t they just use post processing to remove all the known particles and start looking at the particles that remain, discover a new one, remove it, continue until there’s none left?
There are multiple reasons for that. We don’t know the decay channels of already discovered particles precisely. So there might be very rare processes, that contribute to already known particles. It is all a statistical process. While you can give statements on a large number of events, it is nearly impossible to do it for one event. Most of the particles are very short-lived and won’t be visible themselves in a detector (especially neutral particles). Some will not interact with anything at all (neutrinos). Then your detectors are not 100% efficient, so you can’t detect all the energy, that was released in the interaction or the decay of a particle. The calorimeters, that are designed to completely stop any hadrons (particles consisting of quarks) have a layer of a very dense material, to force interactions, followed by a detector material. All the energy lost in the dense material is lost for the analysis. In the end you still know, how much energy was not detected, because you know the initial energy, but everything else gets calculated by models, that are based on known physics. A neutral weakly interacting particle would just be attributed as a neutrino.
Something something capitalism innovation
Has the LHC resulted in any kind of tangible returns on investment so far? I know they proved the existence of the Higgs Boson, but all that did as I understand it was verify what we were already pretty sure of.
I’m just having a hard time understanding why we can’t blow 30 or 100 billion or whatever on something else like fusion research. Or just something with a more concrete "if we pull this off it solves " kinda prospect.
I understand science can walk and chew gum at the same time, but this in particular seems like a shitload to spend and a lot of land to disturb so that particle physicists can nerd out in an underground torus proving theories but maybe not moving the needle much for mankind.
The thing is, that you can’t predict, what fundamental science will lead to. In the case of the LHC the tangible returns are technologies, that can be adapted to other fields, like detectors. There are enough other arguments, why a bigger accelerator is a bad idea, where you do not need to trash fundamental research as a whole.
You have any links to info on these technologies? I’ve done some googling today and in the past and come up with little specifics on the LHC gave us X or helped lead to the development of X that is now being used for Y.
And I’m not saying we need to trash research. Just that research could be done on things that more directly answer some of the very real problems we have right now before this planet goes up in flames. Building another even bigger more expensive collider seems really indulgent from where I’m sitting.
And we can agree to disagree. I’m not big mad they’re proposing this. I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense based on the information I have available.
These things are really special interest. They developed small scale particle detectors, that are nowadays used in medical physics for example (PET scanners and so on). Then their electronics need to be very insensitive to radiation damage, that is also important for everything space related. There is probably some R&D on superconducting magnets as well, that can be adapted to other purposes, but I am not too up to date in this field and I am not sure, if Cern is a major player there.
Thanks I appreciate some specifics. It’s pretty cloudy when I’ve looked into this myself.
The world wide web, for one.
The LHC specifically (or any other particle accelerator for that matter) and not CERN developed the world wide web?
Imagine thinking that the literal, fundamental fabric of reality isn’t important research…
I also think there are better places to put this kind of money, including on projects that we are certain have obvious potential to change the world for the better.
What I was getting at was the very idea that we absolutely have to know what the return is before we start. Just because we know the potential return doesn’t mean that it’s not research (as in your fusion example), but just because we can’t identify a return ahead of time doesn’t mean there won’t be one.
Also, I don’t know if there have been any tangible benefits from the LHC. Precision manufacturing? Improvements in large-scale, multi-jurisdiction project management? Data analytics techniques? More efficient superconducting magnets? I don’t know if those are actual side effects of the project and, if they are, I don’t know that the LHC was the only way to get them.
Edit: or, like the quantum physics underlying our electronics, maybe we won’t know for 50-100 years just how important that proof was.
This is fundamental research, we never know what we are going to find.
