I’d rather have a 100km particle collider than an aircraft carrier.
What if we build it on a 100km aircraft carrier? Think of the possibilities! heh
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.
As much as I love science, and I’d much rather see billions spent on a collider than war, I gotta admit this is funny as hell.
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.”
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We have a perfectly good collider at home.
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
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.
Shit Sabine Hossenfelder would say. (She funny tho…)
Edit: I had no idea about her questionable actions so that is news to me.
She also did an interview with a holocaust denier so…
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.)
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
