Plans Revealed for Enormous Particle Collider in China
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
I do hope that they'll be able to staff it, though; they still can't get scientists to staff their mega radio telescope: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/china-still-having-t...
Particle colliders can go underground around major cities. Telescopes like this are in the middle of nowhere.
You need a special type of person that is qualified to operate the worlds largest telescope and simultaneously wants to live in a remote forest.
> Another concern international astronomers have about the chief scientist position, as well as that of the research associates, is that their activities will be controlled by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This seems likely to limit the academic freedom that Western observers generally enjoy.
If they are made public, will another country investing in another one (or even a bigger one) discover anything that the European one hasn't?
What a second LHC does is allow you to verify results independently. With one LHC you have to be extra careful about assumptions you made and what data might be being thrown off by local peculiarities.
Being at the forefront of particle/energy research is it's own reward. The results are only part of the prize. Learning how to build a LHC is probably just as valuable.
https://home.cern/science/experiments
They just happen to feed off the same particle beams.
The proposed Chinese collider would not be a second LHC; it would be a Higgs factory for precision studies rather than a discovery machine like the LHC.
Yes. CERN is a publicly funded, shared facility; its users are universities. What it does has no direct commercial value.
> will another country investing in another one (or even a bigger one) discover anything that the European one hasn't?
Possibly. The proposed machine would allow more precise measurements of the Higgs boson's properties than the LHC. The best case scenario is that those measurements would turn up deviations from the Standard Model, which would point the way to something new.
To actually "discover" that hypothetical new thing, in the sense of directly detecting a new particle, would probably require yet another accelerator to be built (possibly in the same tunnel).
Well, apart from that "web" thing.... ;-)
I always think that was a great example of the complete unpredictability of research - fund one thing and get benefits you'd never have been able to predict.
It took off because it was free, open source and easily portable by design, but frankly, pretty much the same thing could have, and doubtless would have, emerged from many other large organizations with similar requirements (quite possibly an intelligence service like the CIA - let's not forget where Tor came from), even without a dime being spent on particle physics.
As for direct commercial value, CERN made it freely available to all, as it must. The closest it got to making some money off it was an Apple program to donate computers to the office of documentation.
For one the LHC was designed to have a maximum collision energy of 14 TeV. The CEPC is designed for more like 70 TeV.
The goal of higher end is to make relatively infrequent products much more common. It says in the article they want to produce more Higgs bosons and this is how that happens.
> But Cheng asked that scientists worldwide don’t just allow the machine to be built and use it without exercising their political power to help address the country’s issues. “International scientists have leverage and power,” that they can wield without being complicit. She also said that Chinese scientists should be more aware about their potential complicity.
More realistically, we got lucky and barely dodged the armageddon bullet on a number of occasions.
Then there is the obvious problem of technology transfer. A lot of detector technology can also be used for high resolution surveillance and missile guidance, I’ve met at least one person who did his doctorate in physics at our institute, worked for Raytheon and now owns a company in the defense sector that contributes parts to the successor of the Hubble telescope.
In case you didn’t know there exist 7 nearly identical copies of the Hubble space telescope with different sensors (he worked on those), https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/nasa-gets-two-unneed.... The same will be true for the next generation version of the telescope and is also one of the reasons for the “cost overruns”.
In Dan Brown novels, maybe. The fact that you need an LHC-sized machine to just barely manage to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, and that it has failed to see anything at all beyond the Standard Model, should tell you something.
In short, the requirements for a physical phenomenon to be technologically useful are stronger than the requirements for it to be at all observable. Basic conditions like "needs to interact with ordinary matter and have a decent half-life" are sufficient to rule out the existence of still undiscovered particles with technological potential. If they existed, we would already have found them.
Yeah, it looks like there is no new physics there which could make devilish new weapons, and frankly the state of modern physics is such I don't know as anyone would notice if there was, but nobody knew this in, say, the 1960s. Serious people thought, for example, one might be able to build a weak field ray gun which causes matter to decay into subatomic particles (source 'towards the year 2018' by the Foreign Policy Association).
I'd worry about that, long before I'll worry about some magical unicorn particle gun being discovered.
Kepler was a dedicated design also while Swift was built on top of a generic LEO sattlite bus.