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.
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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
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
What if we put an aircraft carrier into a particular accelerator and spin it up to the speed of light?
The sailors would probably get dizzy.
We can only get to 99.999998% or so (I might be off by a decimal) so I think it would just result in light bruising (though probably at the atomic level which tends to sting a bit more).
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
His foreign relations record includes a hell of a lot of ratfucking the third world, including being so paranoid about communism he ended up pushing quite a few nations into the Soviet sphere when the coups didn't work (Cuba, cough cough cough) and directly enabling some of history's greatest monsters when they did, but he is an American president so grade that on a curve I guess
Exactly. I like Ike, in comparison to other U.S. presidents. He had some good ideas, but we have a really shitty track record with the rest of the world, and he's no exception to that.
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.
If only they wouldn't use that force to invade half the planet...
The peace of Americans is paid for by the terror of dozens of nations. It ain't cool.
You are fucking beasts
The purpose of military is always dual: to deflect other country's military and to "protect national interests" (read: attack another country that now has to have military too, and may consider using it for an attack).
Wildly assuming you are American, you should have no issue understanding that defensive forces are not really always defensive.
I am from Europe, from country invaded by nazi Germany so I know well what means an oppressive use of army. But could you give an alternative to the army?
Uhm...no army?
We have to push politicians to drive UN-scale policies on demilitarization - not this playful "lemme dismantle 10 rockets and call it a day" demilitarization, but a real effort - and expanding mutual defence-type alliance (could be NATO expansion if they're gonna get their shit together, or a new bigger alliance) to as many countries as humanly possible in order to reduce their need to rely on their own armies and drastically reduce armed manpower globally.
Switzerland-like militias can help in the transitional period.
I wonder how Switzerland militia would deal with Russian tanks and rockets.
Uhm…no army?
After the Russian invasion do you really believe than all countries in the world will become peaceful and any of them will ever try to invade another?
Which is why I suggested transition into a worldwide military alliance first. One that would cover Ukraine, and even Russia at the end of the conflict if it would like to join.
Any sort of aggression, from members or non-members, should be met with united forces. With such circumstances, you really won't need that much, even if your plan is to keep forces like US or China at bay, not to mention Russia.
Militias should be there not as a force that can solely defeat an army, but as a stopping force for the initiation of the conflict, while logistics is busy moving troops. And yes - Switzerland is actually equipped to deal with Russian tanks (see demolition of roadways) and rockets (see a vast network of bunkers).
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.
You should think again about what they actually can do.
https://cerncourier.com/a/lhc-upgrade-brings-benefits-beyond-physics/
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.
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 SUPERCOLLIDERS
Would 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!
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By accident, which is just straight-up embarrassing. They voted the wrong way by accident and then never fixed it.
Haven’t heard of that but i definitely saw debate with R congressman saying basically “why should US pay for it let’s let Europe pay for it”
Na. It was a joint effort on both sides of the issue.
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...
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https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
It only took a couple decades for that whole greedy evil movement to dictate such big decisions.
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.
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.
Ah you mean unlike the many other wisely spent tax money and private investments which turned out to be something to show for? /s
22 billion is such a drop in the bucket for a pan-European, decades long project. That's enough money to fund Israel's genocide for like, 72 hours.
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.
Awesome. And with reality defined my daily existance and cost of living is. ... Exactly the same and killing me. 🙃
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.
And bigger understanding the gifts, or gravitons helps me how?
Tbh I think its cool as fuck. But playing the role of my socialist SO. Who will have this response when I show her this meme.
Experiment > Understand > Practical use
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?
https://culturico.com/2020/11/26/your-smartphone-knows-physics-the-science-inside-mobile-devices/
Or how physics discoveries can be fundamental for medicine?
https://www.news-medical.net/health/The-Role-of-Physics-in-Medicine.aspx
Physic is the "Manual of Construction" of this Universe, more pages we find, more the things we can do.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
First the equator, then orbital, then solar, then system, then GALAXY CLASS BITCHES
That's only in the movies. In reality they just completely evaporate. Usually they just evaporate. They take up a lot of volume but aren't terribly filling.
/s
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.
Bill Nye is literally just called the science guy and we got invaluable information from him.
Bold claim from a monkey puppet, jk. I’ve watched his channel it’s really good. I found the videos on the collider to be really interesting.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"Yo dawg, I heard you like colliders, so we built a collider into your collider so it can collide while it collides...."
You are asking something different, but I think it's interesting to mention that the particles that go into the LHC don't start there. The LHC gets them from the SPS, which gets them from the PS and this keeps going for a few more steps.
I mean like he's climaxing extremely hard in the top picture. Where's the professionalism? I understand he occupies a rather senior role in the organisation, why is he ejaculating in his underwear with rage?
Although he is an odd looking chap, I agree.
How else will we transmogrify enough souls to create a philosopher stone --- I mean do science stuff?
What if they added smaller loops along the main loop, like a roller coaster with loopdy-loops? 🤔
There will be.
Colliders work best at specific speeds, like gears on a car. The big collider is fed by a smaller one. That one is likely fed by an even smaller one. Eventually, you get small enough that a simple linear accelerator can get the gas up to speed.
Oh, and likely a scientist/engineer grinning manically as they "push the trigger" on the largest rail gun in existence.
Even the ones not pushing the trigger on the biggest rail gun in existence do this.
The doctors do too. It's... Concerning if you don't know why they get so excited.
22 billion is just a drop in the bucket to the Committee of 300 on their path to world domination.
First, you try to defend your country. Then, you want to have some advantage for a safety margin. Then, bigger advantage "just in case". This military play is what is really addictive.