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.
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
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).
Always a relevant Onion
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
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.
“Ok, but what does this collider do, that the one you have in the garage won’t do ?”
Mrs Cern.
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
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
Our collider is now two baseball pitchers aimed at each other.
I think it was more due to the ISS, Reagan only wanted one international science project
Meanwhile, Star Wars.
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
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.
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.”
I’m waiting on the equatorial supercollider myself. 40,075km let’s go!
Too small, we need to go bigger.
Ringworld collider, you say?
This is starting to turn into some Full Metal Alchemist shit. If you know, you know.
Probably have a ton of tunnel builders unemployed over there
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.
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
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.
Awesome. And with reality defined my daily existance and cost of living is. … Exactly the same and killing me. 🙃
Hopefully they can finally manufacture black holes. Because that would be totally safe for everyone 😉.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
