4 ms·

I don't know if it matters that much, if there are direct results from the research itself. I mean, the World Wide Web worked out pretty well. I don't know if t

by jfoutz 10y ago

I don't know if it matters that much, if there are direct results from the research itself. I mean, the World Wide Web worked out pretty well. I don't know if that would be a thing without CERN. There's lots of cool engineering that has to happen to build stuff at that scale. Maybe the age of cool side effects is over, but it seems like time and time again, we get great stuff. NASA with smoke detectors and aluminum cnc machining. Cracking the enigma gave general purpose computers. Just trying to do something no one has done before forces discovery of other cool stuff, independent of the actual research goal.

stephengillie 10y ago
What new technologies have been developed at CERN, for the LHC?
- lloeki 10y ago
  New alloys, supraconductors for the magnetic rings, the devices, architecture and software to collect, transmit, store and analyse a volume of data whose size and throughput is unheard of... But it would be more exact to say "developed at CERN for the LHC"
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    Thank you for the correction.
- captainmuon 10y ago
  I'm more involved in the analysis / software side of research, and somebody who is working on hardware can probably tell you more about technology spin-offs. In fact, I'd like to hear about them, too. One thing that has been pioneered at the LHC is grid computing. Basically we were doing cloud computing before it was cool. Of course, the requirements of science and industry are different, and we were quickly overtaken in scale by Amazon, Google, etc.. But still, particle physicists were among the first to connect different data centers across the world to a unified resource. You just say "do this computation on this dataset" and the system finds the optimal place to perform the calculation without copying too much data around, and delivers the packaged up datasets back when it's done. Many spin-offs are small improvements of existing technology, giant leaps are rare. An example of an incremental step are improved solar panels [1] using LHC vacuum technology. There is also a lot of work done on superconductors and magnets that is cutting-edge, but I don't know if it has found application yet. We have a lot of hardware development that is really interesting, but too far away from consumer electronics to be used as a spin-off, like radiation hard electronics, or high precision particle detectors. Maybe some of this will go into medical devices. We used to be early adopters of machine learning (e.g. neural networks) and pattern recognition techniques, but have been utterly surpassed in these fields by industry recently, and are only starting to import modern techniques, like deep neural networks. [1]: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2012/03/16/cern-spin-off-more-efficient-solar-panels http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2012/03/16/cern-spi...
  - dnautics 10y ago
    The superconductor stuff is persistent physics myth; commercial superconductors were largely developed for NMR spectrometers used by the petrochemical industry about a decade before superconducting supercolliders.
    - jakub_h 10y ago
      Interesting, any references?
      - dnautics 10y ago
        http://www.nmr2.buffalo.edu/resources/edu/matr/40yearsofPNMRS.pdf http://www.nmr2.buffalo.edu/resources/edu/matr/40yearsofPNMR... first superconducting NMR magnet was built in 1962, by a commercial NMR company (bruker). 1970 was the first commercial superconducting FT-NMR. The first superconducting synchrotron was planned around 1974 (ESCAR) and wasn't completed. the SSC was first discussed in 1976. CEBAF is the first accelerator to actually deploy superconducting technology in any form... But its use is in the RF chambers (the walls of the rf chambers are superconducting which allows them to transfer energy by charge oscillation more efficiently to the electron beam), not in the bend magnets.
      - dnautics 10y ago
        also I believe the food industry was very interested in NMR. There's stuff like "nmr analysis to estimate fat content in cream cheese" sort of stuff in the very old (60s) literature. This shouldn't be surprising, as the way arnold Beckman got really wealthy (and got his name on pretty much every science building) was by inventing the pH meter, which was snapped up by the florida citrus industry.
  - exergy 10y ago
    I work at CERN. We work on a cooling system that has found uses on satellites and also the International Space Station. Now, it would be wrong to say that CERN invented this. More that there was sufficient need at both CERN and in satellites for such a cooling system. Does it have a use beyond High Energy Physics? I'd like to think yes. It is impressively stable, thermally speaking. Another example is a colleague working on lasers with crazy narrow beams.
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
The touchscreen was also invented at CERN, way back in 1973 for the SPS, as a solution to avoid having thousands of dedicated hardware buttons. https://cds.cern.ch/record/1248908?ln=en https://cds.cern.ch/record/1248908?ln=en
- Natanael_L 10y ago
  Which touchscreen tech? Because there were touchscreens in the 1960:s using a pressure sensor on each corner of the screen.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    This was capacitive touch (i.e. like on your smartphone).
rubidium 10y ago
Yang's point wasn't that there should be no large scale projects, just that they shouldn't do accelerators. "Yang argues that high-energy physicists should eschew big accelerator projects for now and start blazing trails in new experimental and theoretical approaches." Things like the IceCube project (https://icecube.wisc.edu/ https://icecube.wisc.edu/) come to mind as better (and cheaper) projects to pursue. They approach the particle physics questions from a different experimental viewpoint.
- mattheww 10y ago
  Experiments like IceCube answer different questions than accelerator based experiments. You couldn't, for example, measure the Higgs branching ratio to bottom quarks at IceCube. On the other hand, you can't measure high-energy neutrinos at the LHC. Both types of experiments have their place.
  - rubidium 10y ago
    Totally hear you. But Yang's whole point was accelerator measurements are not what we should be focusing on for the next "x" new big experiments. I tend to agree.

by jfoutz 10y ago

stephengillie 10y ago

What new technologies have been developed at CERN, for the LHC?

lloeki 10y ago
New alloys, supraconductors for the magnetic rings, the devices, architecture and software to collect, transmit, store and analyse a volume of data whose size and throughput is unheard of... But it would be more exact to say "developed at CERN for the LHC"
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Thank you for the correction.
captainmuon 10y ago
I'm more involved in the analysis / software side of research, and somebody who is working on hardware can probably tell you more about technology spin-offs. In fact, I'd like to hear about them, too. One thing that has been pioneered at the LHC is grid computing. Basically we were doing cloud computing before it was cool. Of course, the requirements of science and industry are different, and we were quickly overtaken in scale by Amazon, Google, etc.. But still, particle physicists were among the first to connect different data centers across the world to a unified resource. You just say "do this computation on this dataset" and the system finds the optimal place to perform the calculation without copying too much data around, and delivers the packaged up datasets back when it's done. Many spin-offs are small improvements of existing technology, giant leaps are rare. An example of an incremental step are improved solar panels [1] using LHC vacuum technology. There is also a lot of work done on superconductors and magnets that is cutting-edge, but I don't know if it has found application yet. We have a lot of hardware development that is really interesting, but too far away from consumer electronics to be used as a spin-off, like radiation hard electronics, or high precision particle detectors. Maybe some of this will go into medical devices. We used to be early adopters of machine learning (e.g. neural networks) and pattern recognition techniques, but have been utterly surpassed in these fields by industry recently, and are only starting to import modern techniques, like deep neural networks. [1]: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2012/03/16/cern-spin-off-more-efficient-solar-panels http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2012/03/16/cern-spi...
- dnautics 10y ago
  The superconductor stuff is persistent physics myth; commercial superconductors were largely developed for NMR spectrometers used by the petrochemical industry about a decade before superconducting supercolliders.
  - jakub_h 10y ago
    Interesting, any references?
    - dnautics 10y ago
      http://www.nmr2.buffalo.edu/resources/edu/matr/40yearsofPNMRS.pdf http://www.nmr2.buffalo.edu/resources/edu/matr/40yearsofPNMR... first superconducting NMR magnet was built in 1962, by a commercial NMR company (bruker). 1970 was the first commercial superconducting FT-NMR. The first superconducting synchrotron was planned around 1974 (ESCAR) and wasn't completed. the SSC was first discussed in 1976. CEBAF is the first accelerator to actually deploy superconducting technology in any form... But its use is in the RF chambers (the walls of the rf chambers are superconducting which allows them to transfer energy by charge oscillation more efficiently to the electron beam), not in the bend magnets.
    - dnautics 10y ago
      also I believe the food industry was very interested in NMR. There's stuff like "nmr analysis to estimate fat content in cream cheese" sort of stuff in the very old (60s) literature. This shouldn't be surprising, as the way arnold Beckman got really wealthy (and got his name on pretty much every science building) was by inventing the pH meter, which was snapped up by the florida citrus industry.
- exergy 10y ago
  I work at CERN. We work on a cooling system that has found uses on satellites and also the International Space Station. Now, it would be wrong to say that CERN invented this. More that there was sufficient need at both CERN and in satellites for such a cooling system. Does it have a use beyond High Energy Physics? I'd like to think yes. It is impressively stable, thermally speaking. Another example is a colleague working on lasers with crazy narrow beams.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

The touchscreen was also invented at CERN, way back in 1973 for the SPS, as a solution to avoid having thousands of dedicated hardware buttons. https://cds.cern.ch/record/1248908?ln=en https://cds.cern.ch/record/1248908?ln=en

Natanael_L 10y ago
Which touchscreen tech? Because there were touchscreens in the 1960:s using a pressure sensor on each corner of the screen.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  This was capacitive touch (i.e. like on your smartphone).

rubidium 10y ago

Yang's point wasn't that there should be no large scale projects, just that they shouldn't do accelerators. "Yang argues that high-energy physicists should eschew big accelerator projects for now and start blazing trails in new experimental and theoretical approaches." Things like the IceCube project (https://icecube.wisc.edu/ https://icecube.wisc.edu/) come to mind as better (and cheaper) projects to pursue. They approach the particle physics questions from a different experimental viewpoint.

mattheww 10y ago
Experiments like IceCube answer different questions than accelerator based experiments. You couldn't, for example, measure the Higgs branching ratio to bottom quarks at IceCube. On the other hand, you can't measure high-energy neutrinos at the LHC. Both types of experiments have their place.
- rubidium 10y ago
  Totally hear you. But Yang's whole point was accelerator measurements are not what we should be focusing on for the next "x" new big experiments. I tend to agree.