this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 93 points 5 months ago (7 children)

Just get it over with and start building an equatorial particle collider already.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Can we get a collider between moon an earth? I know, a lot of particles out there, but if we isolate it?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

We currently can't block enough radiation to make space travel safe for humans in long term situations unless we are blessed with the calmest of space weather based on some recent news about the long term effects on the kidneys in the conditions of space travel (source, I believe the research still needs to be corroborated https://phys.org/news/2024-06-astronauts-kidneys-survive-roundtrip-mars.pdf )

We're still not at the Star Trek radiation screen level, unfortunately. So I'm not confident we can isolate this well enough. Earths magnetic field and atmosphere do a lot of work for us, and we still cannot replicate their function well enough to make it safe for humans long term. And this is a project that was put underground because it was more sensitive than humans.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Put one of them magnet floating trains on top please.

The equator express.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Free power as well. I see no downside to this.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Accidentally accelerates the whole mass of the sun in a fragile ring of superheated plasma at ridiculous speeds.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

A gaggle of particle physicists standing in a circle chanting "RING! WORLD! RING! WORLD!"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Surely the collective noun for a group of particle physicists has to be A Theory.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Orbital particle collider or bust

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

That's what the asteroid belt is for!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Just put it in orbit! Let's commit and put a ring on this planet!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Honest question could this be feasible with a few dozen satellites positioned above the Van Allen Belts to accelerate particles, and just letting the particles raw dog the solar wind and ride around Earth's gravity well between each acceleration satellite? Cause that would be badass

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No, to orbit the earth at an height of let's say 1000 km you would need a speed of around 7km/s. If you go faster, you don't follow an circular orbit. Wirh around 11km/s you would be so fast to leave the gravity well of earth. The particles in those colliders are almost moving at the speed of light. To be exact, they move only 3.1m/s slower than the speed of light, so almost 300000km/s. They would fly almost straight and would be barely influenced by the gravity well.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 50 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Saturn is one step ahead of us

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The two first are the same?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Ops, I meant the Proton Syncrotron.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Decades of colliding hardons and what do we have to show for it

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Just the Higgs boson, which is exactly what the LHC was originally built for. But other than the intended results, it’s been basically useless!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

But other than the intended results, it’s been basically useless!

Tbf, there are quite a few big experiments that have been done and will be done with the LHC, not just the Higgs boson search.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

The hardons haven't been colliding fast enough. Sorry boys, I don't make the rules

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Confirmation of the principles they built the thing to demonstrate.

Every time so far.

This isn't far off from some dipshit saying the place program was a waste of resources.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think they were making a hardon joke more than questioning scientific research

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I need to remind myself people here aren't as dumb (or dumber depending on how much you like the hardon joke) as you average internet user and maybe lower my defense a couple notches.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

it was about the hardons we collided along the way

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (3 children)

It'll still be called the Future Circular Collider when it's shut down after forty years of service. You gotta commit to a scale in the proposal, like the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Maybe that's the real Kardashev scale...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

Just one more collider bro I swear just this one and we'll fix the standard model bro just one more I swear

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (3 children)

The last time? aaaahahahaa... no. There are several phenomenon that require energy levels that only stellar objects can throw off. They'll be asking for bigger colliders even when they're dedicated space stations firing what would be equivalent to weapons of mass destruction at each other.

Unless scientists can figure everything out just by observing space, there will always be a demand for a bigger collider. Since scientists like to control variables and don't like waiting for random events that they then almost have to reverse-engineer to explain (without most all of the sensitive detectors built in to these colliders), there will always be a demand.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

I said 10y, but yes it will need a lot more colliders.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Larger Hadron Collider

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Is we even sure Geneva hasn’t already been overrun by the Combine?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why does a larger loop mean better results?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

More size = more speed and more particles colliding = more bang = more data = for example possibility for dark matter and/or heavier particles to be found.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

More particles. MOOOOOREEEE!

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

I like how it went from second to third picture. Borders? Who needs borders?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

When I see massive and highly technical projects like this I wonder where they find enough skilled labor to build it. Just look at the immense complexity of this and they have to build miles and miles of it underground. I'm imagining that all of the construction workers have PhDs in physics or some shit. Or am I overestimating the demands here?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I can probably look this up but how does size effect the result in these things?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (3 children)

The limiting factor is the bend. The subatomic particles want to go in a straight line. A magnetic field is used to bend the beam around into a circle. The faster the particles are moving however, the more energy is needed to bend them. A larger circle has less bend. This lets you get your particles faster.

Since E^2 = M^2 C^4 + P^2 C^2 (the full form is E=MC^2 ). If you can force the particle to stop rapidly, then you can force the energy from momentum into mass. This is done by hitting 2 beams into each other. The faster the beams, the more energy is available to convert to mass.

Most of the time, this creates a lot of mundane particles. However, ever so often it creates something interesting. They rapidly decay into mundane particles, but the shower they create tells us a lot about them. The catch is that all the energy needs to be present at once. You can't use more particles, you need to make them move faster.

As for why. The more particles we have to study, the more we can figure out about the underlying rules. We have a number of theories. They all agree at lower energy levels, but disagree at higher energy levels. By knowing which is correct, we can pry deeper into the workings of reality.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

More size = more speed and more particles colliding = more bang = more data = for example possibility for dark matter and/or heavier particles to be found.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Of course they need a bigger one. They haven’t spontaneously created a world-ending black hole yet.

(Actually? They should build one looping around the meridians. Maybe build a turret at each pole. You know. In case aliens show up. )

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