It does make you wonder whether the physicists obsession [1] of turning base metals into gold - is the real reason for the LHC :-)
[1] Newton famously spent around 30 years of his life on alchemy ( the other stuff were really side projects )
[1] Newton famously spent around 30 years of his life on alchemy ( the other stuff were really side projects )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
The program was famously badly run, with talented physicists utterly refusing to work with the administrators to keep a ballooning budget under control, and was an example of utterly failed project management. It used a magnet design that had numerous problems, including really severe project management oversights, like deciding to update the magnet design, and accidentally forgetting to update a significant portion of the magnets.
Killing the SSC was the correct call. It was going to cost over $12 billion just to build. The LHC eventually cost about $5 billion, and had much more success in the world of project management.
It's a lot easier to get science funding when you can demonstrate that you can manage a several billion dollar project, and don't fuck up basic things like accounting.
It was long known it can be achieved, but it's prohibitively expensive :)
Though rather than lead into gold, it's known stuff into unknown or previously unseen but predicted stuff.
So it is, in fact, a giant Alchemy machine. Newton would have been proud.
Really? I thought, it was one of the Newton's doom which couldn't be achieved.
When did humanity know alchemy is a real science?
It is somehow radically simpler in terms of fundamental underlying rules, and radically more complex in terms of… I dunno, emergent complexity or something.
Edit: imagine,
Alchemist, “But then we were right, it is made up of a small number of tiny discrete elements at the lowest level?!?”
Modern physicist: “Oh man… ah, yeah, but here’s the thing about ‘discrete’…”