I hope we can build one that can use hydrogen fusion like the sun; such an energy source would make an excellent power source, even if small
It’s just a collider, not a fusion reactor. But there are multiple sites where they experiment with it.
Ok… What are you even talking about? Most fusion solutions use the same second stage for power generation as many other power generation solutions. Heating water to spin a turbine. That is the same thing as all coal, natural gas, petroleum, and solar thermal. In a roundabout way you could even say hydro is just generating power from heated water if you abstract it to include the rain cycle that moved the water behind the dam. There is literally 0 “weakening” that is needed to generate power from fusion under the current predominant paradigms that are being researched. Tokomaks and inertial fusion both generate fusion and bleed the excess heat off to boil water. The only method with promise that does not use this method compresses colliding superheated plasma vortex rings in a strong magnetic field to induce fusion causing the plasma’s magnetic field to ramp up and push back against the containment field. The flux is captured directly into an electrical current that is shunted into a capacitor bank so it can be slowly discharged into the grid. This last method is the only one that has the potential to overload the grid if some sort of runaway event happens, though I don’t see how it would happen as every stage of it is reasonably confined by well-known physics.
Science bad
I’m pretty bullish on science investments, but I’ve heard multiple arguments that this thing is probably not worth the money. The most prevalent argument I’ve heard to the contrary is basically “we could discover something that might be interesting.” But like very little in terms of concrete measurable returns on investment for it.
This article does a good job of arguing against it I think. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-need-a-new-gigantic-particle-collider/
My mind isn’t made up on the topic, so like can anybody explain to me why this thing is actually worth 30+ billion dollars?
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any advance that didn’t at some point depend on people just dicking around to see what they could see.
“What happens if we spin this stick really really fast against this other stick?”
“Cool! What happens if we put some dried moss around it?”
“That’s nuts, man! Hey, I wonder what happens if we toss some of our leftovers in there?”
“C’mon over here, guys. You gotta taste this!”
At worst, a project like this keeps a lot of curious people in one place where we can make sure they don’t cause harm with their explorations. At best, whole new industries are founded. Never forget that modern electronics would never have existed without Einstein and Bohr arguing over the behaviour of subatomic particles.
Say the actual construction cost is $100 billion over 10 years and operational costs are $1 billion a year. Compared to all the stupid and useless stuff we already spend money on, that’s little more than pocket lint. We could extract that much from the spending of one military alliance and it would look like a rounding error. Hell, we could add one cent to the price of each litre of soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and bottled water and have money left over.
Has the LHC resulted in any kind of tangible returns on investment so far? I know they proved the existence of the Higgs Boson, but all that did as I understand it was verify what we were already pretty sure of.
I’m just having a hard time understanding why we can’t blow 30 or 100 billion or whatever on something else like fusion research. Or just something with a more concrete "if we pull this off it solves " kinda prospect.
I understand science can walk and chew gum at the same time, but this in particular seems like a shitload to spend and a lot of land to disturb so that particle physicists can nerd out in an underground torus proving theories but maybe not moving the needle much for mankind.
I also think there are better places to put this kind of money, including on projects that we are certain have obvious potential to change the world for the better.
What I was getting at was the very idea that we absolutely have to know what the return is before we start. Just because we know the potential return doesn’t mean that it’s not research (as in your fusion example), but just because we can’t identify a return ahead of time doesn’t mean there won’t be one.
Also, I don’t know if there have been any tangible benefits from the LHC. Precision manufacturing? Improvements in large-scale, multi-jurisdiction project management? Data analytics techniques? More efficient superconducting magnets? I don’t know if those are actual side effects of the project and, if they are, I don’t know that the LHC was the only way to get them.
Edit: or, like the quantum physics underlying our electronics, maybe we won’t know for 50-100 years just how important that proof was.
The thing is, that you can’t predict, what fundamental science will lead to. In the case of the LHC the tangible returns are technologies, that can be adapted to other fields, like detectors. There are enough other arguments, why a bigger accelerator is a bad idea, where you do not need to trash fundamental research as a whole.
Yeah, but you could also fund a lot of other research with this budget. The point is, physicists just don’t know, if there are more particles existing. There is no theoretical theory there predicting particles at a certain mass with certain decay channels. They won’t know what to look for. That’s actually already a problem for the LHC. They have this huge amount of data, but when you don’t know, what kind of exotic particles you are looking for and how they behave, you can’t post-process the data accordingly. They are hidden under a massive amounts of particles, that are known already.
So why don’t they just use post processing to remove all the known particles and start looking at the particles that remain, discover a new one, remove it, continue until there’s none left?
Yes, with finite resources, we have to make choices. As long as there are some resources for people to just poke around, I’m good with whatever. If we’re actually looking for some place to drop a few billion, I actually don’t think another collider should be on the list, let alone at the top.
The problem as I see it is that “but what good is it” is used to limit pretty much all fundamental research.
If they already knew the intended results it wouldn’t make sense to do it. Science of this kind is like “here’s something we haven’t tried yet”, which itself is pretty difficult to even come up with.
Also, money spend on something like this doesn’t just disappear. It goes around the suppliers doing it and returns to the state eventually. Of course someone will pocket some money but when talking billions it’s more of an investment in the area than a cost or even an investment in the actual collider. A used collider isn’t worth that amount of money , so where’d it go? It didn’t disappear. Money goes round.
It creates a lot of jobs and when looking at the entire supply chain, it feeds a hell of a lot of people, even if the scientific result is “oh well it didn’t do anything at all.” That way, it might be cheaper than supplying social security/basic income for that amount of people.
At the end of the day, in the grand economic scale, we’re all riding on the shoulders of whoever digs out the the resources from the Earth, so we need to make these kind of very important projects to make it appear as if everyone else is actually producing anything at all. The science is just a nice side effect.
Will this do?
Sorry bro, we spent the 22 billion on the genocide budget.
I am waiting for the day when the biggest collider first run is going to explode this planet and then earth is going to become itself a particle.
Why does future circular collider, the largest collider, not eat all the other colliders?
