• magnetosphere@fedia.io
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    6 months ago

    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.

    • A7thStone@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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

      • JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        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.

    • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      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.

  • daniyeg@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    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.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.

      • daniyeg@lemmy.ml
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        6 months ago

        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.

      • MashedTech@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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”

    • XTornado@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      Yeah… And at least this will generate jobs… And not reduce them like it did on Xitter.

      • Zarcher@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

    • Aux@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      LHC and previous colliders did a lot of science. You don’t need to think, there are facts.

  • xenoclast@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    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

    • mohammed_alibi@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.

  • ekZepp@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    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.

    • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Hopefully they can finally manufacture black holes. Because that would be totally safe for everyone 😉.

      • 🐋 Color 🔱 ♀@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        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.

        • Skates@feddit.nl
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          6 months ago

          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.

          • 🐋 Color 🔱 ♀@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            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

      • Olhonestjim@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

      • ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub
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        6 months ago

        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

      • Rin@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        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.

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

      • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

    • BambiDiego@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.

    • loics2@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      We already have plenty of trains in Switzerland, they’re just expensive to ride

    • nicoweio@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.

  • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    What would happen if we put a small collider inside of a bigger collider and spun it around while it spun around?

  • Kiosade@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    This is starting to turn into some Full Metal Alchemist shit. If you know, you know.