• CliffordBigRedDog [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    lol i gurantee half this thread would reverse their position entirely if it was China building particle colliders

    • SteelSun [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I would for sure, but I’m also assuming China has adequate health care.

      • CliffordBigRedDog [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        i mean the reason why the US doesnt have healthcare is not because there isnt enough money or whatever

        its because the government is beholden to whatever special interests who benefits from the current situation

        • SteelSun [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          but I’m not talking about the money. I mean personally, in an imaginary prioritized list, healthy people comes before big fancy rings. But I don’t know enough about particle accelerators to know what comes in between, if that makes sense?

          • CliffordBigRedDog [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            I mean for the US

            Its probly like:

            #1 imperialism ...

            ...

            #5000 fancy ring

            #5001 healthcare

            Anyways death to america

            Also this thing probably wont get funding

            They've wanted to build one for years now and its still not happening

          • Runcible [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Unless you're saying that particle physicists only get to do this after they form the vanguard the "but I’m not talking about the money" doesn't clarify things if you accept that there is no conflict between universal health care and this project.

            • SteelSun [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              What. WHAT. All I’m saying is, if you’re going allocate funding to anything it should be to peoples health and happiness first and foremost. The idea of putting cost of the two projects head to head is unfair due to the years and years of healthcare negligence.

      • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        democrats campaigned against shit by saying we needed to spend money on poverty and then didn't spend money on poverty.

      • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        We can walk and chew gum.

        Or rather, whether or not we’re chewing gum has no impact on if we’ll walk. We won’t be walking regardless, but that has nothing to do with the gum chewing.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        China has adequate health care.

        Sorta? It has cheap healthcare but their system is really different from any of the western European systems.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    There's a patch of rural territory just outside of city limits, loaded with those overcompensating pickups that get roughly single-digit MPG and are quite possibly designed to do as much damage to the other party in collisions as possible. That area, especially at intersections without traffic signals (or ignored traffic signals) is a moron collider. :kelly:

  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    There's reasons to be skeptical of particle accelerators as a frontier of physics, Sabine Hossenfelder has expressed this quite well, it's unlikely to help us learn anything CERN hasn't already and it seems increasingly that when theoretical physics doesn't agree with experimental reality, they aren't revising theories or looking elsewhere but assuming the theory was right we just need higher TeV to do it this time - like SuSY. This new potential accelerator sounds basically like they just want to do more collisions with higher TeV, but at least they state they can study the Higgs a bit better with it besides trying to search for more particles...

    It's frustrating because basic research is so underfunded and it can feel very zero-sum that yet another particle accelerator is gonna get built and it almost certainly will NOT discover anything new. When they proposed CERN, they talked about how they may never need a higher energy accelerator again. There's no off button for this particular flow of experiments when, at this point, we really have to be discarding some entire avenues of questioning because they just aren't matching up with reality.

    • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      fair, my problems come from my landlord and the fact my country is shitting itself to death to give Ukraine every penny it can to kill Russians

  • betelgeuse [comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Sorry physicists, no amount of fundamental particles will bring fulfillment. You found the higgs. Now you need to find another. And there will only be another after that one. So on and so forth. When you run out of particles you'll look for that of what makes particles. It'll never stop because there's always another question. Knowing the secrets of the universe's mechanics will not make you happy. What will make you happy is applying physics for the material benefit of your society. Using it to throw off the chains of capitalism.

    • CliffordBigRedDog [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      the only way to overthrow capitalism with a physics degree is to join the Chinese/DPRK nuclear programme

      :posadist-nuke:

      • betelgeuse [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        A lot of physics is done privately in the US. If physicists of all stripes were to unite and withdraw their labor then capitalism would have no ability to do R&D. The astrophysics and particle physics are a very small part of the "physics industry." They could brain-drain capitalism but they won't because they're only materialists when it comes to nature. As far as society goes, they might as well believe in magic.

        • comi [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          The scientists strike is completely impossible, because they don’t have leverage. If the whole science (studying fundamentals, but applied probably as well) were to strike, you would see downstream effects maybe 5 years later, and effects would be only comparative ones -we didn’t make new thingy which somebody else discovered. You don’t need scientist to make something you know how to make

    • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Sorry physicists, no amount of fundamental particles will bring fulfillment. You found the higgs. Now you need to find another. And there will only be another after that one. So on and so forth. When you run out of particles you’ll look for that of what makes particles.

      thank you! Someone needs to teach these physicists the four noble truths

      • betelgeuse [comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Even when two statements have the same structure, their meanings aren't interchangeable. When a capitalist says a job should only exist because it's profitable, they're asking that only the jobs they can exploit exist while others of little value don't. That's clearly not what I'm saying.

        I explain further in another post

        A lot of physics is done privately in the US. If physicists of all stripes were to unite and withdraw their labor then capitalism would have no ability to do R&D. The astrophysics and particle physics are a very small part of the “physics industry.” They could brain-drain capitalism but they won’t because they’re only materialists when it comes to nature. As far as society goes, they might as well believe in magic.

        Asking physicists to strike and leverage their labor for the benefit of a socialist movement is not the same as asking them to develop iphones and drones so your billion-dollar company can turn a buck.

    • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      At this point they're looking for particles that almost certainly don't exist, like theoretical super-symmeteic partners of the current particle zoo. They've been searching for decades and nature keeps saying "nope, that's not how I work" and scientists keep looking anyway.

  • save_vs_death [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    America was supposed to have a super-collider (the Superconducting Super Collider) rivaling whatever CERN had at that point, but they completely botched it. Congress will put the kibosh on your fancy tech toy and call it a "boondoggle" unless their state gets something out of it, so out of the gate, everyone needs to get a piece of pie, ultimately they put it somewhere in Texas because that would wheel the grease of a lot of contractors. That put the actual tech nerds off and the management of the thing was a shitshow. At some point they tried to sell it as an international scientific effort but they couldn't stop going "America First" for one goddamn minute so nobody joined in. Congress eventually nixed it, then CERN started working on their own super-collider (the Large Hadron Collider) which was an international project (and actually got international backing) and basically ate the USs lunch.

    This feels like a compensatory reaction, and unless they build it between the US-Canada border my money's on it floundering like the SSC before it.

    • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The Texas idea was horrible because the insulation required to make it was instantly eaten by ants. It was a few billion just wasted on nothing.

      • save_vs_death [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        there were a lot of technological problems that i completely glossed over because it's nerd shit (and a lot of what worked and what didn't informed the construction of the LHC greatly), anyway at least the ants liked it; and at least a couple of contractors got a really nice couch out of it so who's to say, etc., etc.

        • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Would you like to share any of it? I have an interest in nerd stuff and am somewhat deficient in physics nerd crap.

          • save_vs_death [they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            So the SSC was planned to have a 40 terra electron (TeV) volt power rating. The more TeV the gun has the bigger hadrons you can smash the more power you can unleash the higher energy subparticles you can potentially find. This was way over what the LHC was planned to ever reach (14 TeV) and this was way before the LHC would even start construction, so in order to keep the LHC project afloat the eggheads there put a lot of their eggs in their luminosity basket. As it turns out, smashing bigger particles is good, but if you can't detect what the smash resulted in, you have to re-run the collision over and over again until you can catch one of them "on film", you're still generating a lot more of the buggers since you have 4x the TeV, but you can't see any. The plan of the LHC was that it would have higher luminosity so even though it would have a much harder time generating the higher energy subparticles, if they were to generate any, they would be have a much easier time getting actual readings on them.

            With hindsight, even if the SSC would have went through, it would have had a garbage luminosity so actually trying to find those particles would have been a challenge (which they actually tried to do with the collider at fermilabs that got a new injection before being closed down, no dice). LHC also benefited tremendously from the exponential improvement in computing from the age of Reagan to that of Obama, in reality if the SCC would have gone through the amount of computing power alone required to make heads or tails of the sensor readings would have been staggering so when all was said and done they would have had a lead of only a couple of years to find the Higgs boson.

  • gaycomputeruser [she/her]M
    ·
    2 years ago

    Fucking hell could we stop giving particle physists money and direct it towards something actually fucking useful like perennial cereals or antibiotics or phage therapy or something that might help with the looming existential crisis of climate change? A new telescope or two would probably do more for fundemental physics research than the lhc will do beyond finding the higgs-boson. Higgs boson? More like higgs-bozo.

    To be clear, particle research has had value, but the amount of money that particle research costs in comparison to other fundemental physics fields is rediculous.

    • comi [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Particle research doesn’t cost that much money cmon. Plus it’s about creating new detectors/fast data transfer/analysis, the problems of accelerators became trivial some time ago. Maybe they won’t discover jack shit, maybe they will, fundamental science is funny that way.

      Antibiotics receive a lot of funding actually, cereals research is completely owned by agrotech/monsanto patents i suspect, phage therapy is actively being worked on.

    • SlashThat [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      "It's of no use whatsoever[...] this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right." - Heinrich Hertz about the discovery of radio waves.

      They are still building new telescopes. ESO is currently building the largest one in history. It's very easy to complain that funding should go to something more immediately applicable but in the long term there is nothing that comes close to the potential to revolutionise technology than fundamental physics research.

      • CliffordBigRedDog [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        its either gonna be completely useless or absolutely mindblowing in terms of both applications and scientific knowledge

        no in between

      • TankieTanuki [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Years of research and no use found for particles smaller than your FINGERS!

  • CommunistBear [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    How about we take all of the money the military gets and throw it all at scientists? I'd rather they build 1000 colliders that do absolutely nothing over more fucking tanks and missiles.

  • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    People throwing up because an anthropologist got 20$ to study the affect of anything on society then just hand a couple billion so these folks can figure out another half a particle that doesn't do anything except be part of other particles.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      If Anthropology had Particle Physics money we could build an atlatl big enough to kill cities and hold the world ransom until they read one goddamn ethnography about the effect of capitalism on literally anyone.

      • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        if anthropologists had been paying attention to the trends they would realise that the world would take death rather than stopping killing themselves

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          There's an article floating around demanding an end to anthropology conventions on climate grounds. The reasoning is that flying everyone to one place is expensive, causes pollution, and is often inaccessible and we could do better using modern technology like video comms.

            • Frank [he/him, he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              It's America. People can't afford to take four to five days just for travelling to and from the event.

              If we had high-speed cross country rail you'd be spot on.

    • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      particle accelerator money isn't coming out of the healthcare budget ffs.

      it's all MMT anyway, but if you insist on the balance sheet fantasy then complain about the military industrial complex.