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Ask Slashdot: Should Scientists Build a New Particle Collider In Japan?
gbrumfiel writes "The world's most powerful particle collider ended an epic proton run yesterday morning, and researchers are already looking to the future. They want to build a 31-kilometer, multi-billion-dollar International Linear Collider (ILC) to study the recently-discovered Higgs boson in more detail and to look for new things as well. Japan has recently emerged as the front-runner to host the new collider. The Liberal Democratic Party, which won this weekend's elections, actually support the ILC in its party platform. But it's not yet clear whether real money will be forthcoming, or whether European and American physicists will back a Japanese bid. What do Slashdotters think? Does particle physics need a new collider? Should it go to Japan?"
World class universities and scientists, a willing government and easy access to the country for foreign nationals. What's not to like?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Does a multi-billion 31 km long particle collider that must remain aligned belong in one of the seismically most active areas of the world?
(Of course they wouldn't actually be rescued, the money would go to lobby organisations, military spendings etc. instead, but since that was always the case that does not have to be questioned.)
Trolling is a art!
These devices require a pretty solid footing to provide accurate measurements, after all you're mashing together *really small* particles, some of which are subatomic. An earthquake nudging something half a millimeter out of alignment could prove a setback much more expensive than the liquid helium leak they had at LHC earlier....
This would make a perfectly reasonable news item; there's no need to solicit Slashdotters' opinions. People comment anyway.
99% of comments will be ill-informed. You won't be able to identify the 1% which are well informed, unless you're already knowledgeable on the subject. So why bother?
Queue Bernard's law. No, and No. There's a lot more data to be gathered at CERN for a decade, and it just doesn't matter where it's built. However, when we've run the existing coliders to the extent of their ability to generate data, then it may be time to build a new collider and why not Japan.
Because if there is a disaster it is sure to happen in Japan.
Just my 2 cents, but shouldn't the ILC be built on an area with a reduced earthquake risk?
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
As someone who spends a lot of time in multinational scientific facilities (e.g. the Swiss Light Source) ... I don't understand the "Should it go to Japan?" question. It's infrastructure for the greater scientific community, so it doesn't matter where it's built.
If the money for building the new collider would be invested in researchers and scientists to think for a cheaper and better way to examine the very same things they do in colliders, I guess we would start having results in some time. After figuring out how the next generation colliders would be, go and put the money building that to a new project to think about a yet better solution.
I think this should be applied to the current space exploration too. Give money to scientists and have them thinking 8 hours a day, nothing more.
Why build one, when you can build two at twice the price?
Wouldn't the Tevatron have found the Higgs particle had it been run a few months longer? Actually didn't it, and then the LHC confirmed it with higher confidence?
Let the intelligent physicists figure out how to extend their science without so many billions of dollars. (hint: look up, there are collisions in the atmosphere at much higher energy than the LHC is capable of). Let the physicists outsmart Nature rather than funding agencies. Maybe they could concentrate better if they weren't so worried about construction, budgets, reports, etc.
Verbum caro factum est
As someone who spends a lot of time in multinational scientific facilities (e.g. the Swiss Light Source) ... I don't understand the "Should it go to Japan?" question. It's infrastructure for the greater scientific community, so it doesn't matter where it's built.
Sure it does! Political, geological and socioeconomic stability are prime factors in building one of these things. Why the SSC showed us that politics and economics will ruin your particle collider. So if Japan is better with their money than the US and has a geologically stable site and doesn't go to war with China in the near future, it's a good site.
Selecting a good site will increase your chances of it actually becoming infrastructure for the greater scientific community. Just ask Weinberg.
My work here is dung.
Quality Control issues will have to looked at carefully though.
I was under the impression that Japan is very crowded and that most rural, open space is limited when it comes to construction or is protected park land. 31km is HUGE and if they have the room, well than go for it.
I'm curious about the scientific justification of another particle collider. The data from the LHC, ATLAS, and so forth has been amazing and it's possible to collide almost any subatomic particle in them so why do we need another? I'm not making a point, I'm asking a question.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
When will people stop publishing news articles saying "the Higgs has been confirmed to exist"? This is driving me bat-shit insane. No, the Higgs has NOT necessarily been discovered. Particles have been observed in the LHC at energy levels that match the expected characteristics of the Higgs, but we DO NOT KNOW if it is the standard model Higgs or just something else that looks like it. Goddamn.
Read more: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/342408/description/Higgs_hysteria
The ILC would be able to measure properties of the Higgs more accurately than the LHC, but before the LHC has ran at 13 or 14 TeV for a while we don't know if there's other interesting stuff to see.
If the LHC finds something new and the ILC has too low energy to produce it, it's wasted. Obviously those results would come long before the ILC is even close to finished, but it's important to keep options open until we know better. In addition there are other proposals for Higgs factories that would be cheaper to implement. Without new discoveries at the LHC the ILC may be pointless.
If the populace of Japan has the foresight to back the project with their tax dollars, then they deserve it. If you want another particle collider in the US or Europe then you need to get the populations priorities in order and spend more on STEM and less on war mongering, pointless drug wars, and other pork.
Have they restored electricity to normal levels yet in Japan?
Last I heard industry in Japan was suffering from electricity shortage in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster.
Also i think a large scientific installation might be better off in a more seismicly stable region as
they would just would cost a lot more if factoring in earthquake damage risks.
Why do particle accelerators seem to have such a short shelf life?
Is this it for the LHC? Im surprised that they are already looking for something larger, to study something that the LHC was aiming at doing.
I am not a scientist, but I do find this stuff incredibly cool.
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
As a computer scientist my opinion is irrelevant and thus, shall be withheld.
A question of "do you want beer or not" is not meaningful. This is why you get reasonable but useless responses like the first one here which had a subject line of "why not?"
For the article to have some legitimacy here, it should post the question in terms of altenatives:
- should a new accelerator be built in japan OR should the money go towards a new orbiting telescope?
- should a new accelerator be built in japan OR should a new accelerator be built in india?
and so forth.
while some such questions are a bit forced (I mean, we'd all like to have BOTH the accelerator and the telescope) if the question is framed in terms of decision making given scarcity, then we can discuss the merits and tradeoffs in a realistic way rather than the fantastic way that the headline suggests we should
Japan would be a poor location, as particle accelerators are EXTREMELY sensitive to seismic activity. I took a tour of Fermilab (the site of the Tevatron before it was shut down) recently and one of the operators there mentioned that Japan's big earthquake last year disrupted the beam (the Tevatron was still operational at the time). And Fermilab is in Illinois, about as far away as you can get from Japan. So putting it IN Japan seems like a very bad idea.
How about Alberta? Very stable geologically, lots of open space and excellent transport links with Europe, North America and Asia. Plus mountains nearby so those moving from Geneva should be able to cope.
They should build it right on top of Fukushima! If that doesn't produce giant lizards or superheroes, nothing will.
Why don't we let them play with their current toy for a few more years and "branch out" a bit? I say we all get together and figure out this fusion thing once and for all. Put the big science spending into something that might be directly useful to the world.
Other ideas include: 1. Fund "X-prize" like competitions for development of a self sustaining fusion reactor. 2. Start a materials engineering accomplishment of the year prize. 3. A Most important applied science (engineering) prize. 4. A prize for the development of the commercially sold device that saves the most energy over the life of the device.
It seems to me that the toy they have now is only a few years old and has a LOT of useful science left to do. We should not put the funding of this tool at risk by trying to build a bigger one. We would likely be much better off spending money to improve this one over the next decade and not try to start another big multinational science project right now.
Not that I don't see the value in particle physics - but shouldn't we be spending the big bucks on research that might prevent our extinction?
Isn't anybody bothered by the fact that its already quite easy for small nations and medium sized cooperation to develop potentially lethal bacterial and viral strains? Or that we don't have comprehensive and globally coordinated defenses for Meteorite impacts, Rogue AIs, Nano-tech catastrophe and so forth?
But yes - all of this is speculative. What is not is the ongoing Climate Change, and far more importantly what is likely the Biggest Mass Extinction Event this Planet EVER experienced. While prevention of both these disasters is IMO futile, the mitigation of their damage to humanity is not. Come on Homo Sapiens, earn your name for once.....
At what point do we taxpayers say enough is enough? The LHC was crazy expensive to build and to run. They still havent definitively found a Higgs particle which is pretty much what it was built for, yet now after just 3 years its aparently already declared useless?
At the end of the day, so freaking what if they do or don't definitively find a Higgs particle. How will that knowledge improve normal people's lives in any practical way that justifies the massive cost?
The WP article says the physics case is the following:
"1. Measure the mass, spin, and interaction strengths of the Higgs boson
"2. If existing, measure the number, size, and shape of any TeV-scale extra dimensions
"3. Investigate the lightest supersymmetric particles, possible candidates for dark matter"
This is very weak.
#2 is pretty much dead, since the LHC's observations don't look very compatible with large extra dimensions -- http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.3375 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.5830 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4683
#3 is also pretty weak, since the LHC has disappointed the many people who were sure it would find supersymmetry. The strongest physical motivation for supersymmetry is at the electroweak unification energy scale, so it's looking less and less likely that it exists, based on LHC data at that scale. If the LHC can't even see it, then it's unlikely that the ILC, operating at an energy an order of magnitude lower, would be able to see it.
So the only justification would seem to be to thoroughly characterize the Higgs. Is the LHC really incapable of doing this?
In general, the LHC results are turning out to be every particle physicist's worst nightmare. So far, it's confirmed the standard model and failed to turn up any new physics.
I suspect the reason Japan is such a good candidate is that the Japanese government's main vehicle for pork-barrel politics is construction projects.
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As a scientist I have to say that we are the last people who should build something this large. For starters, our efforts are better spent doing science. Many of us are also old and out of shape. I suggest that, instead, we find some contractors to build it--they probably need the work more anyway. However, if it is decided that scientists should indeed build a collider, I want to be in charge of the hollering: "Shake it madam! Capital knockers!"
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
building the next collider in japan should yield soem interesting physics.
afterall the fukushima nuclear incident has charged the "aether" in japan with some
interesting particles ^_^
I thought about it, and I've come to a definite conclusion. . .
I don't know bupkus about linear accelerators, so I'll let the scientists and engineers who DO KNOW figure it out.
Is there no way to profit from the existing investment?
Japan, they need to stop printing money and let their currency appreciate
Except that the Yen is still a fiat currency. You have argued before that all fiat currencies are garbage; now you are contradicting yourself by offering advice on how to improve on a fiat currency. If you were trying to honestly stay on message you would instead go back to your old argument of scrapping the yen and going to a gold standard.
People do not live forever.
Correct. So why should some people be sold into slavery - which is a pillar of your ideals - when they have finite time to live? Or do you see then death as being the reprieve from slavery? Does your church claim that those who were made into slaves on earth will receive a just reward after their passing?
The LHC isn't that great for precision measurements of Higgs properties (mass, production cross section, branching ratios for decays). If there's a small deviation from the SM, the ILC could find what the LHC can't.
For supersymmetry, I'm not sure if the ILC could see anything at all given how high the masses have been pushed by the LHC already, but upping the energy from the current 8 TeV to 13 or 14 and adding 10-100 times the data can still give the LHC a chance to find SUSY.
Large extra dimensions was always a long shot. There's really no good case from theory for that showing up at current energies.
Is there really a demonstrated need for another large collider? If so build it but I'm not so sure this isn't a case of tool envy.
It all starts at 0
Do you expect giant robots to just appear?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
we going to finally say no to these out-of-control children? Is it when they demand a collider that encircles the Earth for chasing the gimmeallyourcash-on? Just because it is science doesn't mean it has to be done and has to be done now. I suggest that finding out things about the Higgs boson and other exotics is a goal of such mindbending uselessness that it can very well be left for another century.
E Proelio Veritas.
My mental image of Japan is of a place which trembles a lot. For such an investment I wonder if the geology of Japan is adequate to maintain the shape and alignment of such a large device.
Could a linear collider share a tunnel with an undersea rail network like the Seikan Tunnel that already exists in Japan? Or would the railway interfere with its operation? There are other long tunnels in the world too, like the Channel Tunnel, but the undersea portion of the Seikan Tunnel does looks very straight.
From looking at images of various parts of the LHC, it seems the majority of the collider's apparatus does not require that much space around it, although the actual detectors, etc, obviously will need quite a bit of room.
If a rail network and linear collider could share a tunnel(s), I'm guessing it would save a significant wedge of cash and time.
Correct. So why should some people be sold into slavery - which is a pillar of your ideals - when they have finite time to live?
Please explain how wanting a monetary system that does not steal the wages and savings of the people via inflation is "selling people into slavery". Such a statement is a blatant non sequitor. You don't even attempt to answer the point he is making, you instead build a rickety strawman to poke at by ripping a sentence out of context. Which is kind of stupid because people can see the statement in context right above your post.
China might be better in many respects: Fewer earthquakes, money's definitely no problem, science shouldn't be a problem, and it will encourage even more cooperation with the West.
a hunter with a kazoo and decoy
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Build a particle accelerator in an country that has turned it's back on physics like atomic power. Right ... Where's the daily power going to come from?
If only cause we can get another one of these.
He's not contradicting himself.
No, he is. Read through some of his older posts - he loves to cite himself which makes that a very easy thing to do. Roman_mir (and his sock puppet udachny) states repeatedly that fiat currencies are not real currencies and are inherently worthless, or "not real money". Hence any action to assign value to a fiat currency is a contradiction of his core belief of fiat currencies being worthless, and therefore a blatant contradiction.
Going back to a gold standard would indeed be the best thing, but stopping the money printing would be the next best thing and would bring many benefits to the Japanese economy
Except that his argument is that fiat currencies are worthless. If stopping the printing of money will place value on a fiat currency, then his argument of fiat currencies being worthless falls apart.
Please explain how wanting a monetary system that does not steal the wages and savings of the people via inflation is "selling people into slavery"
Again, this comment was made in regards to roman_mir's repeated arguments. He argues for the elimination of minimum wage so that people can be paid as close to nothing as the market will allow. He sees the workers as being indebted to their employers and the employers as inherently having the right to treat them like cattle.
you instead build a rickety strawman to poke at by ripping a sentence out of context
No, it is not at all out of context. You just are viewing the context far too narrowly. Roman_mir comes here only to argue for his extreme conservative economic positions - even when he can't discuss them without contradicting himself.
Does Slashdot have any Particle Collider Money? Hmmmm?
Yes, Uruguay, a small country in south america, pretty stable both politically and seismically. Great middle class and educated population. Just needing
a little push to first world standards...
How about starting with something that's already been dug out. Pride might get past some of hype.
Definitely needed! However, don't deceive yourselves, the bad news is sources of funding have disappeared into the gaping holes caused by the could care less about science entitlement societies of the 21st century. Science as we know it barely made it out of the 20th century and will completely disappear in the looming neo-Dark Ages.
Could someone tell me why the Cern machine can't be upgraded to smash muons rather than protons? Are they too short lived (2.2us?) I just wonder if it's possible to use the existing infrastructure and not spend another 20+ billion dollars. In an era of shrinking research budgets, It's worthy to be smart about how we allocate our money. What are the underlying problems?
We haven't tried that on them, yet.
you won't even get the tunnels built for a BIG project (like the ILC). lawls.
Why build one when you can have two at twice the price? - S R Hadden
What does Sheldon Cooper think?
What was once true, is no longer so
. . . they can pull it out of the ground, and mount it spinally on the carcass of the battle cruiser Yamato, and it will be a great weapon to defeat the Gammalons.
Well, strictly speaking, it's also not confirmed that the protons in the beams are standard model protons, and the same for every other particle. Once the Higgs diverges from the standard model, all other particles will diverge from the SM as well due to quantum corrections. Of course the corrections may be small, but if your threshold of calling it Higgs is "exactly like the SM", then no particle is confirmed to be an SM particle.
I work on the KEKB accelerator at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation[1] in Tsukuba, Japan. I also hold an ID card from CERN.
KEKB powered the billion-dollar Belle experiment[2], which ran successfully gathering data for 10 years that led to the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics[3].
There are two things you should know:
1) Japan is a world leader in accelerator physics, design and construction
These machines are comprised of highly sensitive electronics that weight tonnes. There are few countries in the world that have the ability to make their parts (and pretty much no country that can do it alone). It is interesting to walk around the LHC tunnel spotting little Japanese flags painted on various things.
2) Japan is a world leader in earthquake-proofing facilities
Even in the recent earthquake caused "No fatal damages to the buildings" at KEK. That is, a magnitude *9* earthquake still left everything in a repairable state. If you want to see what such an earthquake does to facilities in a real particle collider - check out [4], in its full "An X-ray diffractometer fell down and was broken" glory :)
As for those who mentioned 'alignment'. Recalibration is a part of every particle facility of this scale, and re-alignment is a standard part of operations, even in areas of more geological stability.
[1] http://www.kek.jp
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_experiment
[3] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2008/
[4] http://www.kek.jp/intra-e/Introduction/column/quake110311_e.pdf
I humbly suggest mauritius or any indian ocean rim islands.
Far from the quaky region, easy access by plane but yet isolated and nice all year round weather..
http://www.investmauritius.com/
Powering by wind or better solar energy the collider and cooling by seawater..
and it wont be the first (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array)
What am i, but stardust
I want a muon collider, because muons are much cooler and cutting-edge than mere electrons and positrons
Wow, didn't anyone think of the anime Darker than Black. It had a similar setting, and some "incident" happened with the experimentation there. The similarity is eerie!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darker_than_Black
No universities or scientists in or near Alberta, and it's too close to the anti-science craziness of the USA.
That's news to me - last I checked there were universities in Edmonton (University of Alberta), Calgary and Lethbridge. Of the top 10 Canadian Universities the UofA is also the furthest from the US and as a scientist working there I can definitely confirm that there are lots of scientists in the faculty there. Finally I can even see that you got your nickname wrong: Grishnakh was an orc, not a troll.