The Circular Electron Positron Collider
johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com
johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com
There is some discussion in the community about whether it truly is going to advance the field to build such a machine. It's not super clear whether the various proposed 250 GeV machines will improve on what will be done by HL-LHC. From the Chinese point of view, though, it absolutely is the right decision to build this machine on the way to a 100 TeV hadron collider, since they desperately need to build up some local expertise in constructing/operating a large collider.
NASA with smoke detectors and aluminum cnc machining. Cracking the enigma gave general purpose computers. Just trying to do something no one has done before forces discovery of other cool stuff, independent of the actual research goal.
But it would be more exact to say "developed at CERN for the LHC"
One thing that has been pioneered at the LHC is grid computing. Basically we were doing cloud computing before it was cool. Of course, the requirements of science and industry are different, and we were quickly overtaken in scale by Amazon, Google, etc.. But still, particle physicists were among the first to connect different data centers across the world to a unified resource. You just say "do this computation on this dataset" and the system finds the optimal place to perform the calculation without copying too much data around, and delivers the packaged up datasets back when it's done.
Many spin-offs are small improvements of existing technology, giant leaps are rare. An example of an incremental step are improved solar panels [1] using LHC vacuum technology. There is also a lot of work done on superconductors and magnets that is cutting-edge, but I don't know if it has found application yet.
We have a lot of hardware development that is really interesting, but too far away from consumer electronics to be used as a spin-off, like radiation hard electronics, or high precision particle detectors. Maybe some of this will go into medical devices.
We used to be early adopters of machine learning (e.g. neural networks) and pattern recognition techniques, but have been utterly surpassed in these fields by industry recently, and are only starting to import modern techniques, like deep neural networks.
[1]: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2012/03/16/cern-spi...
first superconducting NMR magnet was built in 1962, by a commercial NMR company (bruker). 1970 was the first commercial superconducting FT-NMR.
The first superconducting synchrotron was planned around 1974 (ESCAR) and wasn't completed. the SSC was first discussed in 1976. CEBAF is the first accelerator to actually deploy superconducting technology in any form... But its use is in the RF chambers (the walls of the rf chambers are superconducting which allows them to transfer energy by charge oscillation more efficiently to the electron beam), not in the bend magnets.
Another example is a colleague working on lasers with crazy narrow beams.
"Yang argues that high-energy physicists should eschew big accelerator projects for now and start blazing trails in new experimental and theoretical approaches."
Things like the IceCube project (https://icecube.wisc.edu/) come to mind as better (and cheaper) projects to pursue. They approach the particle physics questions from a different experimental viewpoint.
Eh? Speak up, it's hard to hear anything up here on the Moon.
I used to work at Fermilab, the largest US particle physics laboratory. There was this ridiculous thing that mid-year, our funding would run dry (because congress decided after the fact to cut our funding, or because there was no budget to begin with) and we would be sent on furlough (mandatory unpaid leave). Thank god I was paid by an external institute.
Now I work for IHEP, the institute which is behind the CEPC (though I'm not working on that project). I share the opinion that it is currently much more likely for such a large project to succeed in China than in the US (which surprized me a bit in the beginning). It's the difference between being able to plan a few years in advance, vs. not having a budget for more than the next six months.