Guys, the trick is to get it partially built and then cancel funding. Then scientists will never trust you to fund anything ever again, and you get to act like science is a waste of money while you’re spending ridiculous sums on fighter jets.
Yes, I am still bitter about Waxahatchie.
He’s a great video documentary about it by Bobby Broccoli if you want information and have two hours.
I think we realized halfway through building that we couldn’t build bombs.
Budget: Military Complex > CERN
Long term value to citizens: CERN > Miltary Complex
All historical CERN expenses combined are a tiny fraction of the yearly expenses of the combined EU miltary
But particles don’t make my dick feel big
Even quarks aren’t that small.
They call me quark cause I’m always down to top and up to bottom and I’m charmingly strange. Also I’m very very small
US Congress: Audit NASA > Audit the Pentagon
EU: Audit CERN > Audit Luxemborg/Malta/
UKI’m just amazed that funding $22 billion is even an issue when the project is being backed by the EU, and partially the US, since we never built ours…
That’s a rounding error for both entities
This is cheaper than two super carriers.
Yeah, but how many brown children can it kill?
If you ask the scientists in my local Facebook group, it could kill all of them. That is, the ones not already killed by vaccines and 5G.
STOP ACCELERATING PARTICLES! Years of research and no use found for particles any smaller than SAND!
But look how fast we can make those little fuckers go!
It’s just like slot car racing, round and round, but… you know… faster. And yeah, it’s more expensive than a regular slot car track, I guess. But still, those particles will beat any slot car you care to pick! So there’s that. Welllll not those fancy slot cars with them high performance motors, I mean, that’s a completely different ballgame there, we can’t compete with that.
But still, those particles whizzing around, it’s gonna be pretty cool. I reckon we should do it.
So anyway, thank you for reading my financial proposal for the SuperLHC.
They’ve played us for absolute fools.
Mfw this pipe dream costs 22 billion and we just gave Israel 105 billion to keep genociding
I’d rather spend 22 billion on this than in Israel or more weapons of war
This meme got Sabine hossenfelder bricked up
See here from physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on the subject:
Fun fact, they were going to build one in the US crossing the borders of LA, TX, AR. They even dug out the damn hole, but they shit canned the whole project so now we’re just left with a random giant circular hole underground.
Edited AK to AR. That would have been a bit excessive.
Not quite circular, they only got 26% of the tunnel dug. Still, 23 km is quite a long tunnel to leave sitting empty
Fill it with cheese. Make another cheese vault. We require the cheese. Government cheese. Cheese.
Any actual creepy stories about the LHC?
something very creep happened to me recently and idk what to make of it
Only if someone sticks their head in this one too
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Then I saw I already liked it. 15 years sounds short but it’s actually a decent amount of time.
We need this one to undo the timeline shift the last one caused
Yeah everything’s been kinda fucked ever since, hasn’t it… i mean… it was 2008 right before obama being elected and i really don’t think the “correct” path of the future would have involved r-money or mccain winning so at least SOME shit would be the same, but still…
LHC didn’t start seriously smashing shit (beyond previous energies done by other colliders) until after 2010 though. I think everything went tits up about 2012, tbh - the year they found the Higgs Boson. I kind-of jokingly subscribe to the idea that the world ended. I mean, it just checks so many boxes to me, it truly seems that the universe as it stands right now is fundamentally different than it should be after the passing of one single decade.
okay i can DEFINITELY agree with you about 2012, shit’s been super fucking weird since SPECIFICALLY that year.
the worst day of my life was December 22nd 2012 and I remember it very clearly because I couldn’t figure out WHY.
I just felt awful to a degree i have NEVER felt before or ever again since. Not even once. Not even a little.
It was a distinct watershed moment that divided my entire life into “before” and “after”.
I figured it was just some freak hormonal imbalance that walloped me out of nowhere but it’s weird that that was the only time and that it coincided with such a distinct … difference in how the world was between ‘before that’ and ‘after that’.now, the higgs boson event was on a different date, certainly, but that day… i will never be able to forget it.
i hope someday we construct a collider that spans the entire circumference of the earth. But we’d probably have to build one that spans the circumference of the moon first, and then maybe mars, since the oceans are going to be a bit of a doozie to work around that we don’t have the technology for, whereas the interior of a collider is supposed to be evacuated, so, the moon almost kinda already handles that for us. heat might be an issue of course, but if we can figure out thermal radiator panels that can dump the heat straight into space, maybe we could pull it off…
mars would address the heat issues, but those dust storms are no joke and the dust itself is microscopic toxic/caustic razors and it’ll try to get in everywhere and ruin fine instruments it touches. Moon dust is also really bad but there’s no wind to kick it up on the moon obviously…
but damn. DAMN. imagine the fucking science we could get done with a LUNAR-SCALE PARTICLE COLLIDER!!!
The Moon’s daytime is half a month long and can reach 120 C so we’d need some pretty powerful heat shielding. And there’s no ozone layer to protect the electronics from radiation, and I’m pretty sure the Moon orbits outside of Earth’s magnetosphere. And the shielding used for such a project could also be used to fix climate change here (and terraform Venus later) with orbital parasols. And whatever unimaginable technology we’d need for such an ambitious project may as well be used to run a grid of electromagnets and power lines across Mars to give it a magnetic field
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.
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.
