Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions(hpcwire.com)
26 points by gnufx 3 hours ago | 19 comments
- davrosthedalek 2 hours agoThis is in preparation for starting construction work on the Electron-Ion-Collider (EIC) which will use the same tunnel and experiment locations.[-]
- gnufx 60 minutes agoAs I recall, RHIC itself replaced some cancelled project. I remember the tunnel being at least partly there in the mid-80s, with a plan to trundle ions from the tandem lab through a crazy long beamline across the site and stop nuclear structure research there as a result.
- tahoeskibum 29 minutes agoHow time passes! I remember touring the RHIC tunnels back in 1999 when it was being made.
- webdevver 1 hour agoas a layperson, it seems the whole collider stuff has not been a very fruitful scientific direction so far (has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?)
maybe we are trying to 'jump' the tech tree too much - perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data.
[-]- JumpCrisscross 13 minutes ago> has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?
Yes. SLAC has an excellent public-lecture series that touches on industrial uses of particle colliders [1].
If you want a concrete example, "four basic technologies have been developed to generate EUV light sources:" (1) synchrotron radiation, (2) discharge-produced plasma, (3) free-elecron lasers (FELs) and (4) laser-produced plasma [2]. Synchrotrons are circular colliders. FELs came out of linear colliders [3]. (China has them too [4].)
We have modern semiconductors because we built colliders.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M6sjEYCE2I&list=PLFDBBAE492...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S270947232...
[3] https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation...
- juanjmanfredi 14 minutes agoParticle physicists working on collider experiments were among the first people that needed to deal with large quantities of digitally stored data. As a result, advances in the particle and nuclear physics have fed advances in computing, and vice versa [0]. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, the largest particle physics and accelerator laboratory in the world [1]. Another example more relevant to this post is when a few physicists developed a CouchDB-based solution to handle the large amounts of data generated by their RHIC and CERN experiments. They spun that out into Cloudant, which was one of the pioneers for DBaaS [2].
[0] https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-coevolution-of-...
[1] https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-...
- GreyZephyr 55 minutes agoThe web would be one of the more well known technologies to come out of running collider experiments. More directly a whole lot of medical imaging including PET is only possible because of either isotopes manufactured through colliders or sensors developed in colliders.
- gnufx 53 minutes agoSince when were industrial products the purpose? Why do you think my colleagues can't analyse LHC data and discover the Higgs particle? The article says RHIC was a considerable scientific success.
- Keyframe 58 minutes agothis particular collider or particle accelerators in general? Cyclotrons are rather useful, for example.
- pfdietz 59 minutes agoLook at it this way: they are investigating phenomena that require a collider-sized object to see. So unless your application involves a collider sized object, it won't use any effect they discover.
The problem is that fundamental physics has moved too far beyond the scales where we operate.
- atoav 46 minutes agoYeah, one of them is used by you right now. The Internet.
- AIorNot 58 minutes agoI hate to be harsh but this mentality is part of the decline of this country
(that is so evident with loss of manufacturing, open and free science and tech robber barons oligarchs that have taken over our national discourse)
Brookhaven was instrumental to Nobel winning discoveries and Stony Brook was a great science minded university
I’m not opposed to investing in AI but its not a zero sum game and we are not a country of data centers alone
[-]- Insanity 40 minutes agoNit: saying “this country” without context on where the parent poster is from or where you are from is kinda useless.
From context, you probably mean USA. And I’d agree, however the US was always more technology minded than scientifically minded, and the parent poster lines up with that centuries old ideology. So I don’t think this is per se a new thing.
- pfdietz 56 minutes agoAt some point physics entitlement has to end -- why not here? We can't just keep scaling up the size and cost of fundamental physics experiments. Eventually the cost becomes so large that platitudinous arguments for them don't work.[-]
- micromacrofoot 29 minutes agoWe absolutely can, and I reckon we will... this is like a fraction of a percent of science funding which is a fraction of a percent of GDP, we spend more on maintaining warheads we can't use
10% of the US military budget for one year could build a 100km collider, RHIC is 4km
[-]- pfdietz 23 minutes agoWhat a nonsense argument. Spending like this has to be justified on its own merits, not because there is some other bad spending. The argument you are trying to make would justify spending on almost anything.[-]
- micromacrofoot 22 minutes agoThe point is that there's so much bad spending that by comparison this is practically nothing to shake a stick at, and it produces actual science.[-]
- pfdietz 20 minutes agoRepeating a bad argument doesn't transmute it into a good argument. I already explained why your argument is invalid. Please reconsider your dogmatic and irrational support for this kind of spending.