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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
For example, did you know that the super-small processor that allow us to have a smartphone so small to be pocket-size is only possible thanks to knowledge we have of quantum physic?
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.
