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CERN is a international cooperation of many countries on neutral (Swiss) territory. While maybe not emphasized in recent years one real danger of high energy pa

CERN is a international cooperation of many countries on neutral (Swiss) territory. While maybe not emphasized in recent years one real danger of high energy particle physics is the discovery of an effect that can be weaponized. Right now that seems highly unlikely, but it was a motivation for setting the CERN up in the way it is. Then there is the obvious problem of technology transfer. A lot of detector technology can also be used for high resolution surveillance and missile guidance, I’ve met at least one person who did his doctorate in physics at our institute, worked for Raytheon and now owns a company in the defense sector that contributes parts to the successor of the Hubble telescope. In case you didn’t know there exist 7 nearly identical copies of the Hubble space telescope with different sensors (he worked on those), https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/nasa-gets-two-unneeded-hubble-sized-spy-telescopes/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/nasa-gets-two-unneed.... The same will be true for the next generation version of the telescope and is also one of the reasons for the “cost overruns”.

T-A 8y ago
> one real danger of high energy particle physics is the discovery of an effect that can be weaponized In Dan Brown novels, maybe. The fact that you need an LHC-sized machine to just barely manage to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, and that it has failed to see anything at all beyond the Standard Model, should tell you something. In short, the requirements for a physical phenomenon to be technologically useful are stronger than the requirements for it to be at all observable. Basic conditions like "needs to interact with ordinary matter and have a decent half-life" are sufficient to rule out the existence of still undiscovered particles with technological potential. If they existed, we would already have found them.
- orbifold 8y ago
  I agree that it is highly unlikely but it was deemed far more likely when CERN was founded.
  - scottlocklin 8y ago
    People totally forget about this: if you simply look at where the accelerator physics funding comes from in the US, that ought to tell the story. Dept of Energy used to be the atomic energy commission, and is still in charge of bomb research. Heck it wasn't that long ago that plain old particle accelerators were contenders for directed energy systems. Yeah, it looks like there is no new physics there which could make devilish new weapons, and frankly the state of modern physics is such I don't know as anyone would notice if there was, but nobody knew this in, say, the 1960s. Serious people thought, for example, one might be able to build a weak field ray gun which causes matter to decay into subatomic particles (source 'towards the year 2018' by the Foreign Policy Association).
    - orbifold 8y ago
      Funnily enough even a lot of string theorists such as Edward Witten were funded by the department of energy.
adrianN 8y ago
Things can't be a "real danger" and "highly unlikely". What would be, even theoretically, a discovery in a particle accelerator that can be weaponized? Imho improvements in weapons technology won't be coming out of basic physics anytime soon. The real dangers are currently the development of cheap weapons that can be deployed without putting your own soldiers in danger as well as electronic warfare.
- vkou 8y ago
  Actually, the real danger is two countries pointing three thousand nuclear weapons at eachother, on hair-trigger alert, while the rest of the world watches, and shakes its head. I'd worry about that, long before I'll worry about some magical unicorn particle gun being discovered.
dogma1138 8y ago
Hubble was built on an existing EOS bus, JWST on the other hand wasn’t. Kepler was a dedicated design also while Swift was built on top of a generic LEO sattlite bus.
Loic 8y ago
CERN is at the border between France and Switzerland. As such it has two official addresses, one in France and one in Switzerland. Most of the loops are in France. This is important for the European part of the funding. Practically, scientists do not care.

T-A 8y ago

> one real danger of high energy particle physics is the discovery of an effect that can be weaponized In Dan Brown novels, maybe. The fact that you need an LHC-sized machine to just barely manage to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, and that it has failed to see anything at all beyond the Standard Model, should tell you something. In short, the requirements for a physical phenomenon to be technologically useful are stronger than the requirements for it to be at all observable. Basic conditions like "needs to interact with ordinary matter and have a decent half-life" are sufficient to rule out the existence of still undiscovered particles with technological potential. If they existed, we would already have found them.

orbifold 8y ago
I agree that it is highly unlikely but it was deemed far more likely when CERN was founded.
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  People totally forget about this: if you simply look at where the accelerator physics funding comes from in the US, that ought to tell the story. Dept of Energy used to be the atomic energy commission, and is still in charge of bomb research. Heck it wasn't that long ago that plain old particle accelerators were contenders for directed energy systems. Yeah, it looks like there is no new physics there which could make devilish new weapons, and frankly the state of modern physics is such I don't know as anyone would notice if there was, but nobody knew this in, say, the 1960s. Serious people thought, for example, one might be able to build a weak field ray gun which causes matter to decay into subatomic particles (source 'towards the year 2018' by the Foreign Policy Association).
  - orbifold 8y ago
    Funnily enough even a lot of string theorists such as Edward Witten were funded by the department of energy.

adrianN 8y ago

Things can't be a "real danger" and "highly unlikely". What would be, even theoretically, a discovery in a particle accelerator that can be weaponized? Imho improvements in weapons technology won't be coming out of basic physics anytime soon. The real dangers are currently the development of cheap weapons that can be deployed without putting your own soldiers in danger as well as electronic warfare.

vkou 8y ago
Actually, the real danger is two countries pointing three thousand nuclear weapons at eachother, on hair-trigger alert, while the rest of the world watches, and shakes its head. I'd worry about that, long before I'll worry about some magical unicorn particle gun being discovered.

dogma1138 8y ago

Hubble was built on an existing EOS bus, JWST on the other hand wasn’t. Kepler was a dedicated design also while Swift was built on top of a generic LEO sattlite bus.

Loic 8y ago

CERN is at the border between France and Switzerland. As such it has two official addresses, one in France and one in Switzerland. Most of the loops are in France. This is important for the European part of the funding. Practically, scientists do not care.