8 ms·
Richard Milner on a new U.S. particle accelerator
- tlb 8y agoMuch more detail about the EIC: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.1701.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.1701.pdf
- solotronics 8y agowhy not finish the one in Texas? yes the facility probably needs repairs but a lot of initial work is done I would think?
- SkyMarshal 8y agoI wish that would happen, the SSC design is even more powerful than LHC. But not sure Texas is culturally the optimal place for such high science these days. Part of the opposition to SSC back in the day was religious. CA or NV might be better.
- imglorp 8y agoThey might give physicists a hard time, yeah. http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html It seems like the SSC was located there as more of a congressional boondogle than serious science?
- specializeded 8y agoIt's impossible to copy and paste that link on mobile Safari fwiw, fixed width scroll area.
- imglorp 8y agoSorry... http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html
- chiph 8y agoAs long as you buy your project's land outright and don't try and take it via eminent domain, you're good. https://www.texastribune.org/2017/02/23/come-and-take-it-eminent-domain-dispute-heart-train-battles/ https://www.texastribune.org/2017/02/23/come-and-take-it-emi...
- SkyMarshal 8y agoPS - part of the opposition to the LHC also was religious. Remember people objecting to humanity deliberately searching for the “God Particle”, aka Higgs Boson, which the LHC was specifically designed to find? Probably not the best word choice on the part of the scientific community, unless they were deliberately trying to troll the 20-30% of the population that treats religion literally. There were similar undercurrents reaching all the way up to Congress during the SSC’s life.
- dandelany 8y agoAFAICT, it's an entirely different design - it would probably cost more to retrofit the existing SSC facilities than it would to start from scratch. More importantly, the SSC site was sold to private industry more than a decade ago.
- hardtke 8y agoThis will be hosted at either Brookhaven National Lab (NY) or Jefferson Lab (Virginia). Unfortunately, National Labs need to find new large construction projects to justify their continued existence, and there aren't enough big science projects to go around. The European model of sharing a single facility (CERN) is much more sensible in that it decouples scientific prioritization and the issue of local jobs.
- coward83847 8y agoIt's worth mentioning that the national labs are also considered a wartime resource. Having geographic separation is an asset in that sense.
- jessriedel 8y agoThe EIC and the SSC study radically different physical regimes, differing by 3 orders of magnitude in energy.
- duxup 8y agoPolitically considering how that went down... I don't know if any politician wants to touch that again. Except of course some in Texas.
- davrosthedalek 8y agoIt's a collider of electron on proton/ion beams. There are two candidate sites: Jefferson Lab (Newport News, Virginia), which already has a electron beam (CEBAF). And Brookhaven National Lab (Brookhaven, Long Island, New York), which already has an ion beam.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoThis suggestion is for an electron beam, and they radiate sybchrotron radiation like crazy when you make them turn at high energies. So building it in a circular tunnel is a good idea if you want to make a x-ray source or a lot of radioactive rock.
- adventured 8y agoThe top 20 universities in the US are sitting on over a quarter of a trillion dollars in endowment money (including MIT at $15b), which continues to perpetually increase. I'd like to see them step up and almost entirely fund the creation of the EIC (the US Government could still kick in billions of dollars with little hassle). Far better to be directing their wealthy donors toward important projects like this, than another building on campus.
- bytematic 8y agoGotta love million dollar charity donations to schools which are unable to go bankrupt they generate so much money passively.
- tanderson92 8y agoThis is an argument against public investment in science and a reliance on private donor-based science. Is that really the direction we want for our country and the entities in which we want to entrust the future R&D decisions of our country?
- oh_sigh 8y agoIt sounds more like just an argument for private donor-based science than an argument against public investment.
- tanderson92 8y agoIt is an argument for private donor-based science instead of public investment.
- oh_sigh 8y agoBut OP said that the government could also pony up billions of dollars for the project. The main point seemed to be that universities are wasting their endowment with fancy buildings instead of doing science.
- madengr 8y agoSigh, the only thing guaranteed is political fighting over the pork.
- wpasc 8y agoFind a way to call it "The largest/most powerful/biggest ever accelerator" otherwise you won't get Trump to do it
- sandworm101 8y agoPersonal politics is a larger dynamic than scientists like to admit. When you are planning something big, something international, you have to think about access. In 2030, will this facility be accessible to the international community? Will Chinese involvement become a security issue? Will data be shared openly? Those decisions are made by the executive branch, subject to the whims of whoever is in charge at the time. Planners think about this stuff.
- NegativeLatency 8y agoTo continue your line of questioning: Will scientists be granted visas?
- whyever 8y agoIt's fundamental research. What security issues are you talking about?
- sandworm101 8y agoSome of the sensor tech is subject to export controls. The stuff that could be used for nuke research/development.
- martin1975 8y agoyou can just call it the largest/most powerful/biggest ever HARDON.. pardon, HADRON accelerator. He'll go for it for sure.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yoklov 8y ago
- sovande 8y agoI thought particle physics were coming to an end? After CERN found the Higgs boson then nothing. The ROI of a more powerful accelerator is abysmal. It is impossible to know how large a new collider needs to be and if anything interesting will be found. Use the money on a moon-base instead and then mars.
- danharaj 8y agoThere's still a lot to learn about QCD even if new physics seems to be in a rut.
- mng2 8y agoYes, the EIC is much more about nuclear structure than traditional particle physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_inelastic_scattering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_inelastic_scattering
- ddavis 8y ago"the rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated" There are tens of thousands of us still driving the field (with many open questions) forward.
- lovich 8y agoIf all the experimentation at the LHC brought up nothing that physicists expect, that would imply that our model of physics is wrong. Now the model can be updated with new theories and tested with new experiments I wouldn't imagine that particle physics would be coming to an end until we had an experimentally proven model that explained all phenomena we can observe
- nikofeyn 8y agothere are other accelerator architectures and approaches that are not just scaled versions of the LHC. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration
- rurban 8y agoThey still cannot explained gravity, and the standard model is unsatisfactory. They know exactly what they are searching for, read the paper. Esp. in QCD there's a lot still missing. Sea quarks, gluons.
- jjt-yn_t 8y agoI'd like to see cost-benefit 2nd opinions from persons not on campuses...
- giardini 8y agoShouldn't we consider other possible ways of spending the moneys required, such as an AI endeavor perhaps? Wouldn't most alternatives be significantly cheaper and more likely to provide new scientific information? Finally, after seeing the politics of the Superconducting Super Collider, I don't envision any hope of a significantly larger accelerator within the next 100 years unless some incredible theoretical breakthrough makes it irresistable.
- iamgopal 8y agoIs there any important theory yet to be proved ? Is fusion reactor/any such advance tech required this ? i.e. do we have a vague idea of end goal here ? Is current theory predicts successful fusion reactor ? Can this help uncover any ?
- davrosthedalek 8y agoWe would really like to understand how the proton works, for that matter.
- _Codemonkeyism 8y agoRequired reading "Lost in Math" about the possibility that those scientists search for something that doesn't exist.
- wyattpeak 8y agoWhile Hossenfelder is well within her wheelhouse criticising the search as wrongheaded, members of the public reading and forming an opinion on the proper course of physical research is less than useless. It's exactly the same thinking that leads people to conclude that global warming isn't a problem, because they found a climate scientist who also disagrees. Unless we all, en masse, want to go get physics degrees to properly critique the arguments, the only responsible thing for a member of the public to do is trust majority opinion. It can be wrong, certainly, but it's vastly less likely to be than any of the dozens or hundreds of minority opinions which oppose it.
- _Codemonkeyism 8y agoIf the public pays billions and billions of EUR, it should form an opinion. "trust majority opinion" Trust those who get those billions of EUR, you mean.
- krastanov 8y agoGiven that science has a pretty good (but not perfect) track record of improving the human condition, yes, trust them or spend the effort to become a recognized expert.
- _Codemonkeyism 8y agoI do not argue about science. But I would be interested in the track record of particle science in the last 50 years on improving the human condition.
- davrosthedalek 8y ago