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We have a perfectly good collider at home.
Should have had. That was sad when we gave that up in favor of military spending
However, it also wouldn’t have been as big
I think it was more due to the ISS, Reagan only wanted one international science project
Meanwhile, Star Wars.
Our collider is now two baseball pitchers aimed at each other.
After 22.5 km (14 mi) of tunnel had been bored and about US$2 billion spent, the project was canceled by the US Congress in 1993.
LMAO
As a former Texan, yes that’s a city name. And you’ll probably pronounce it correctly.
Wax-a-hatch-y?
Wax a haji
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.
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.
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.
22 billion is half of what Elon paid for Twitter. He paid 44 billion.
So this seems like a pretty good bargain for unlocking the secrets of the universe.
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.
To be fair I think he only paid $14 billion. The rest came from other investors like Saudia Arabia
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”
Yeah… And at least this will generate jobs… And not reduce them like it did on Xitter.
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.
LHC and previous colliders did a lot of science. You don’t need to think, there are facts.
You should think again about what they actually can do.
https://cerncourier.com/a/lhc-upgrade-brings-benefits-beyond-physics/
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.
we almost built a really fucking big collider in the US somewhere in the middle of fuck off land texas.
It died.
Yep, that was when the US jumped the shark. It was the exact moment, Oct 20, 1993, we went “fuck science, we’re only doing short term profits now.”
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.We fucked, we need 60s back (with all the mindset).
yeah, would be interesting to see the alternate universe where it was finished and built…
There would have been t-shirts
EVERYTHING’S BIGGER IN TEXAS
INCLUDING SUPERCOLLIDERSWould we have never heard the end of republicans bitching and whining about the cost and “our taxpayer dollars” and all that idiocy?
Who knows, considering Texan lawmakers carry an outsized weight in the republican party, and this project meant thousands upon thousands of skilled, high-paying jobs, including creating large new communities populated by scientists from all over the world.
Then after beating CERN to the punch to first detect the Higgs Boson, they would have draped themselves in the flag while chanting USA, USA, USA…
But ignorance and myopia are the horses pulling the republican cart.
gotta love politics, only the most interesting of all the boring fields put together!
As one might guess, the republicans canceled it
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.
Right! Think of those quarters’ balance sheets!
Scientific progress? Peoples bonuses were on the line
Edit: it’s good that our government protected America and left innovation to Europe
yeah unfortunately the public and government just weren’t very perceptive to a massive scientific project which would almost certainly many times overrun the budget outlined for it. Socioeconomics are hard…
There was an auto-body shop in that town all ready to go…Super Collider Collison Repair
Rip small aoto-body business sign.
I bet the US public would vote to fund it if we actually called it Fucking Big Collider and it was the largest in the world.
oh for sure.
That’d be the easiest vote of my life tbh
you’re telling me i can shitpost with 20 billion dollars? Don’t mind if i yes!
Yes absolutely.
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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 😉.
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
Maybe that’s what is happening to the ozone layer.
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.
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.
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.
I’m waiting on the equatorial supercollider myself. 40,075km let’s go!
Just after the transcontinental maglev train
You know what WOULD solve physics?
TRAINS
Yes, trains!
Maybe in a very, very large circular track. A huge circle.
And fast. Super fast. Make them faster by making them lighter. Smaller. Super tiny. So light and fast.
A teeny, tiny, light train going super duper fast in a very large circle.
Sure hope it doesn’t smack into anything while going top speed. Or maybe it does, so long as we measure it.
I like trains.
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.
We already have plenty of trains in Switzerland, they’re just expensive to ride
You just know the letters of the FCC originally stood for Fucking Collosal Collider.
And from there, we’re one step closer to BFG
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?
SOUNDS LIKE A GOOD QUESTION 22 BILLION DOLLARS WOULD ANSWER.
Tap for spoiler
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.
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.
