Is we even sure Geneva hasn’t already been overrun by the Combine?
What’s the new one for?
More particles. MOOOOOREEEE!
AI particles & AI physics 🤡
For smashing things
When I see massive and highly technical projects like this I wonder where they find enough skilled labor to build it. Just look at the immense complexity of this and they have build miles and miles of it underground. I’m imagining that all of the construction workers have PhDs in physics or some shit. Or am I overestimating the demands here?
Overestimating it a little, the construction workers just need to be good. But there are indeed literally thousands of PhDs working on it for decades, from all over the world.
Of course they need a bigger one. They haven’t spontaneously created a world-ending black hole yet.
(Actually? They should build one looping around the meridians. Maybe build a turret at each pole. You know. In case aliens show up. )
My understanding based on watching too many science communicators videos on YouTube is that such tiny black holes would evaporate quickly before causing harm that humans could appreciate. However, this would provide experimental evidence of Hawkings theory.
Unironically, getting to watch short-lived black holes explode could be really, really useful.
But no, the larger one on the picture isn’t anything near big enough for that.
Didn’t stop some fearmongering from the last one that went operational.
“The new supercollider could cause BlAcK hOLeS; ExPeRtS SaY!!!1!1!1!1!2!?3!!4!!!”
Honestly, I would love a slow-mo guys style video of a bunch of
nerdsvery professional researchers smashing microsingularities into randomfruittargets.I assume it would be fairly boring without some massive magnification… but ya know….
Just wait until the day somebody makes one that’s a full 1 AU in radius.
I can probably look this up but how does size effect the result in these things?
More size = more speed and more particles colliding = more bang = more data = for example possibility for dark matter and/or heavier particles to be found.
The limiting factor is the bend. The subatomic particles want to go in a straight line. A magnetic field is used to bend the beam around into a circle. The faster the particles are moving however, the more energy is needed to bend them. A larger circle has less bend. This lets you get your particles faster.
Since E^2 = M^2 C^4 + P^2 C^2 (the full form is E=MC^2 ). If you can force the particle to stop rapidly, then you can force the energy from momentum into mass. This is done by hitting 2 beams into each other. The faster the beams, the more energy is available to convert to mass.
Most of the time, this creates a lot of mundane particles. However, ever so often it creates something interesting. They rapidly decay into mundane particles, but the shower they create tells us a lot about them. The catch is that all the energy needs to be present at once. You can’t use more particles, you need to make them move faster.
As for why. The more particles we have to study, the more we can figure out about the underlying rules. We have a number of theories. They all agree at lower energy levels, but disagree at higher energy levels. By knowing which is correct, we can pry deeper into the workings of reality.
Thanks! I’m personally in favor of doing things for knowledge’s sake. That said, what is the stated practical benefit when some government body is writing a check?
There’s a story, though I’m not 100% sure on how true it was. Queen victoria did a royal visit to the new lab overseen by Michael Faraday. She asked him what use this new “electricity” was? His response was along the lines of "mam, we’re not completely sure, that’s why we are researching it.
As for actual uses. It could give us the theoretical key to room temperature super conductors. It could give us a foundation for exotic space drives. It could help crack new forms of fusion reaction.
Ultimately, it’s a foundational block. What gets built on there is hard to predict. By comparison, GPS is not an obvious extension of relativity. However, without an understanding of relativity, GPS would basically be useless. It would drift km/day
Thanks!
Larger Hadron Collider
It’ll still be called the Future Circular Collider when it’s shut down after forty years of service. You gotta commit to a scale in the proposal, like the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.
Chucky McParticleface
Lead engineer, Dr. Slab Bulkhead.
Decades of colliding hardons and what do we have to show for it
Just the Higgs boson, which is exactly what the LHC was originally built for. But other than the intended results, it’s been basically useless!
But other than the intended results, it’s been basically useless!
Tbf, there are quite a few big experiments that have been done and will be done with the LHC, not just the Higgs boson search.
it was about the hardons we collided along the way
The hardons haven’t been colliding fast enough. Sorry boys, I don’t make the rules
Confirmation of the principles they built the thing to demonstrate.
Every time so far.
This isn’t far off from some dipshit saying the place program was a waste of resources.
I think they were making a hardon joke more than questioning scientific research
I need to remind myself people here aren’t as dumb (or dumber depending on how much you like the hardon joke) as you average internet user and maybe lower my defense a couple notches.
Orbital collider when?
Maybe that’s the real Kardashev scale…
The two first are the same?
Ops, I meant the Proton Syncrotron.
Just get it over with and start building an equatorial particle collider already.
Skip that. Put it in orbit and make it double as a solar collector array and beam the extra energy back down.
A gaggle of particle physicists standing in a circle chanting “RING! WORLD! RING! WORLD!”
Surely the collective noun for a group of particle physicists has to be A Theory.
Just put it in orbit! Let’s commit and put a ring on this planet!
Orbital particle collider or bust
That’s what the asteroid belt is for!
Unironical support
Can we get a collider between moon an earth? I know, a lot of particles out there, but if we isolate it?
We currently can’t block enough radiation to make space travel safe for humans in long term situations unless we are blessed with the calmest of space weather based on some recent news about the long term effects on the kidneys in the conditions of space travel (source, I believe the research still needs to be corroborated https://phys.org/news/2024-06-astronauts-kidneys-survive-roundtrip-mars.pdf )
We’re still not at the Star Trek radiation screen level, unfortunately. So I’m not confident we can isolate this well enough. Earths magnetic field and atmosphere do a lot of work for us, and we still cannot replicate their function well enough to make it safe for humans long term. And this is a project that was put underground because it was more sensitive than humans.
Put one of them magnet floating trains on top please.
The equator express.
Honest question could this be feasible with a few dozen satellites positioned above the Van Allen Belts to accelerate particles, and just letting the particles raw dog the solar wind and ride around Earth’s gravity well between each acceleration satellite? Cause that would be badass
No, to orbit the earth at an height of let’s say 1000 km you would need a speed of around 7km/s. If you go faster, you don’t follow an circular orbit. Wirh around 11km/s you would be so fast to leave the gravity well of earth. The particles in those colliders are almost moving at the speed of light. To be exact, they move only 3.1m/s slower than the speed of light, so almost 300000km/s. They would fly almost straight and would be barely influenced by the gravity well.
Ok, so a huge circular tube it is then
… around the sun.
Free power as well. I see no downside to this.
Accidentally accelerates the whole mass of the sun in a fragile ring of superheated plasma at ridiculous speeds.
