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/
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
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
Yep, it went downhill from there, just so ya know
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.
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.
Always a relevant Onion
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).
that would just be the Halo from Halo
That’d be kinda cool. Ace Combat ass aircraft carrier
It better have a particle collider on it
Throw in Jurassic Park and some jet engines and we’ve got Ark
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.
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.
I can’t say I disagree. There is much to criticise.
My fear is, this approach is unsustainable in general, and cannot be effectively applied for global security.
It’s not just US military being poorly led.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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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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
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.
As a former Texan, yes that’s a city name. And you’ll probably pronounce it correctly.
Wax-a-hatch-y?
Wax a haji
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
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 SUPERCOLLIDERSWould we have never heard the end of republicans removeding 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!
We fucked, we need 60s back (with all the mindset).
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
It only took a couple decades for that whole greedy evil movement to dictate such big decisions.
The Apollo 14 moon landing?
Stairway to Heaven?
As one might guess, the republicans canceled it
By accident, which is just straight-up embarrassing. They voted the wrong way by accident and then never fixed it.
Really?!
Sometime after the 30 minute mark NDT removedes about 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”
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…
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.
Starting to be suspicious like an alchemy circle around multiple cities…
Just waiting for the right solar eclipse.
Nah, it’s just the sloppy creation of The One Ring, without elven craftmanship to keep things down to wearable size.
That, or they’re building a stone giant’s removed ring.
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.
I mean, if you’re making a railgun, maybe superconducting magnets would be useful tech to have 🤔
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Dual purpose Dyson Ring?
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’m waiting on the equatorial supercollider myself. 40,075km let’s go!
Too small, we need to go bigger.
First the equator, then orbital, then solar, then system, then GALAXY CLASS removedES
Ringworld collider, you say?
You need to find another planet
Why bother digging. We just need a loop of magnetic lenses in deep space.
Just after the transcontinental maglev train
Probably have a ton of tunnel builders unemployed over there
Not for long!
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.
