71–80 of 316 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less than it cost to research, develop and manufacture all of the components in the device you typed this on.
I'd put that amortised cost at about $1000 upfront in 2022 dollars for my high quality internet comment and many others like it. If you need high energy, pure vacuums and ultra low temps, surely space is where such experiments should be conducted on bigger scales in future to push it further?
I only have an amateur interest in physics, so I'm sorry if this sounds dumb, but I often think about what if we've reached as far as we can go within the current framework of physics? This is more meta-science than actual science, but what if we made some decisions very early in the development of physics and mathematics and we need to revisit those?
Consider the following:
For all terrestrial phenomena that we have observe so far we have a theory of everything.
In order to put matter into a state where it behaves in such a way that you can tell the difference between two competing theories that describe the world, you have to build the LHC. Anything less than that and the theories all are perfectly good at describing what we see.
I think there is a tendency to misunderstand LHC and it's high energies as somehow being "brute force". High energy really just means small structures. It's better to think of it as the worlds best microscope. LIGO is the worlds best ruler. So we're measuring the world and it's matter to an unfathomable precision and we do not see meaningful divergence between theory and experiment.
We know there is more out there, but it's not stuff we can study on earth. That's the single biggest problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less than it cost to research, develop and manufacture all of the components in the device you typed this on.
I'd put that amortised cost at about $1000 upfront in 2022 dollars for my high quality internet comment and many others like it. If you need high energy, pure vacuums and ultra low temps, surely space is where such experiments should be conducted on bigger scales in future to push it further?
The fundamental problem is that collider physics relies on being able to create collisions of exactly known quantity as your input (eg in the LHC's case, proton-proton collisions at a 14TeV centre of mass energy). If you don't control the input, you can't extract any information about the output you detect, in the same way that you can't create a simulation of snooker by looking at the balls on the table, without knowing how they were set up before being hit.
The other problem is that to probe the frontier of particle physics, you need truly immense statistics to get enough of the incredibly rare collisions. Think bunches of hundreds of billions of protons colliding tens of millions of times per second. The upshot is that you'd not only need to build the detectors in space (which are thousands of tonnes with extremely precise electronics that need whole server farms plugged directly into them to process the terabits of data coming out each second), but you'd also need to build the entire collider in space too.
Even then it's a rather pointless endeavour, since the colliders require a colder temperature and higher vacuum than even interstellar space, nevermind within the solar system.
Oh jesus christ, the constant whining! This is science. This is how it works. Maybe there's nothing else to discover, maybe it will take us 100 years, we don't know, that's why it's called research.
At least they are finding nothing and confirming they are finding nothing. Less scrupulous operators might be always finding something even if its not there. So that's a sign of good science. Maybe there's something they haven't found because there's so much data? Mix things up and look again? Change assumptions? Or as someone I know likes to say to various smaller humans: have you looked around the couch? Really? Ar…
They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is nothing. They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what they might find, and have established some evidence against others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.
This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the only "success" is a new discovery.
This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded.
What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and public support for additional funding. That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western governments can find the public support for trillions in military expenditures, I am confident that it can be found for the comparably meager budgets of the scientific establishment.
Also, perhaps it'd be a tad bit more accurate to rephrase it `particle physicists`, not `physicists` -- even though it's totally exaggerated anyways.
But like the age of discovering new continents is passed, now it's subtler things. Like the time when the center of Africa was unknown, but the Americas and Australia and Antartica were known.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd put that amortised cost at about $1000 upfront in 2022 dollars for my high quality internet comment and many others like it. If you need high energy, pure vacuums and ultra low temps, surely space is where such experiments should be conducted on bigger scales in future to push it further?
I can't speak to whether it would cost less to do these experiments in space, I'm no expert on the colliding of particles and the implications thereof. In any case - how much of that $1000 is attributed to the research and development of the wheel in Ancient Mesopotamia? How much is attributed to the discovery of electricity, and to General Relativity? If we weren't attempting to get answers to fundamental questions…
I'm a nonexpert who has some vague idea of how these things work.
There's two kinds of accelerator: circular and linear. In either case, you have a tube, often underground, a bunch of accelerator components along the tube, and a detector component. I believe but I am not sure that a key advantage of the circular one is that you can accelerate the particles in the beam as they take multiple loops around the tube. The disadvantage is that when charged particles turn they lose energy by emitting electromagnetic radiation, and the whole point of the accelerator is to stuff these particles full of energy to make interesting collisions. This is mitigated by having higher-radius accelerators, which is the key reason we build things like the Large Hadron Collider and make it so very large in the first place, instead of just trying to add stronger stuff at existing accelerators.
So what do you intend to do in space?
The quasi-achievable near term might see a linear accelerator that consists of two components orbiting and firing particle beams into a third (the detector) because we are obviously not orbiting the mass of the LHC in the near term, and we're not orbiting anything that's rigid and also substantially larger than a rocket payload. It will no doubt be tricky to align the beams, as the orbits are ellipses and the beams need to be approximately straight lines (or close enough, blah blah spacetime). But the fundamental problem is that you're going to need to do all your acceleration all at once, at the accelerators, which immediately negates any possible advantages you could possibly have from space.
Perhaps you could do something very clever with an orbit-sized circular accelerator with accelerators spaced at intervals around the planet. You'd need a lot of launches of some intense equipment (I believe the Earth-based accelerator components are giant supercooled magnets). You'd also need an energy source, lots of engineering prowess to get everything in good working order (LHC bringup was very hands-on) except any adjustments will have to be done in orbit, and then when it's running you'd face the problem of LOLmaintenance.
I'm going to be honest, I'm more skeptical about this than about the Mars colony.
Oh jesus christ, the constant whining! This is science. This is how it works. Maybe there's nothing else to discover, maybe it will take us 100 years, we don't know, that's why it's called research.
I think the argument is not whether we invest in research or not, but are we putting our limited resources into viable research or not. Sabine Hossenfelder argues that many researchers are more interested in testing their pet theory based on mathematical beauty than actually working on more boring forms of fundamental research. This imbalance leads to poor returns on research investments.