CERN Visit

[Sesselmann]

Hi Guys,

I just got back from a relaxing 5 week holiday in Europe, fortunately I managed to convince my wife and son that a trip to CERN was not a waste of time. We did the 90 minute tour of the facilities which was free and way too short for me, but interesting anyway. The tour guide was a PHD student and she took us through the old decommissioned cyclotron facility which was located inside a concrete bunker with 5 meter thick walls. This was probably a good place to start the tour because participants get to see the whole accelerator at once, whereas the LHC which is 27 km long can not really be appreciated by the relative novice.

Whilst inside the decommissioned cyclotron bunker my Atom-Swift pocket dosimeter with threshold set to 500 nSv was constantly in alarm, so there was obviously some long lived isotopes from past activation in there ☢

I was surprised by how much my 9 year old son actually understood, but I guess growing up with vacuum systems, fusors and radiation detectors has had some effect on him 😂

Steven

Steven and Albert at CERN

[Marco75]

great experience for your son (and you).
well done!
Marco

[Chase]

That is really cool. Too bad you couldn't collect a gamma spectrum in that old cyclotron to see what sorts of radionuclides are contributing! I'd be curious to know what sorts of shielding considerations they have to take for something like the LHC. Do you happen to know what sorts of particles they were accelerating in the cyclotron?

[Sesselmann]

Chase,

The shielding problem at the LHC was solved by putting it 50 to 175 meters underground. The tour guide told us that the LHC was running experiments as we were there, but did not specifically call out what was being accelerated, although my understanding was protons ionised from Hydrogen. Frankly all we could see of the current LHC experiment was half a dozen guys watching computer monitors, somewhat of an anticlimax.

To be honest I am not sure if humanity gets a return on the billions spent on these projects, but I guess you don't know until you do it.

Steven

[NuclearPhoenix]

To be honest I am not sure if humanity gets a return on the billions spent on these projects, but I guess you don't know until you do it.

Yes, of course, as it always is with basic research :)

[Chase]

To be honest I am not sure if humanity gets a return on the billions spent on these projects, but I guess you don't know until you do it.

Steven

I'm of the same opinion as you for sure. It doesn't seem very intelligent to throw billions more at an experiment that only has the vaguest of mathematical basis. Seems more of a hail mary to me. Given I'm not the one making the decisions of where all that money goes, I might as well enjoy the crazy accelerator since we've already got it, haha!

[Rob Tayloe]

Accelerators give one the opportunity to perform experiments on earth that would otherwise require stars to explode. Fun science such as the discovery of new elements can come from accelerators. I can recall a visit to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories in California and a question arising about the champagne kept in a nearby 'fridge - the answer was for the next time a new element was discovered.

One might worry about some terrorist stealing an amount of accelerator created anti-matter and doing something evil like blowing up the Vatican. [Not really - just a fanciful imagination of a movie and book.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_%26_Demons_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_%26_Demons
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808151/?ref_=nv_sr_2
https://edu.rsc.org/feature/hot-particl ... 66.article

[Sesselmann]

My concern with mega science projects is that they inevitably become so large that they start attracting money for no other purpose than attracting money. Works a bit like gravity, i.e. gather enough mass in one place and it starts attracting more mass.... you guys get the idea.

The most significant discoveries in the last 300 years were made by creative thinkers on very small budgets.

Isaac Newton did his work with paper and pen, no billion dollar budget required.
James Clerk Maxwell probably used paper and pen as well, maybe some chalk.
Albert Einstein, yea he probably used quite a bit of chalk, more than a carton I imagine.
Niels Bohr, well he had a small lab and an assistant ....
Max Plank, well he probably used quite a bit of chalk...
Richard Feynman needed bongo drums to think...
Werner Heisenberg..., some uncertainty around how much money he spent...
Erwin Schroedinger, chalk, pen paper and milk for the cat
Michael Faraday, some magnets, bobbins, batteries and copper wire..
Peter Higgs, one 27 km long accelerator initially costing $3.6 Billion
Kip Thorne, Needed a large interferometer initially costing $365 million but sadly needed expensive upgrades

I think I made my point...

So many scientists work at these institutions that it becomes almost unthinkable to shut them down. There is always an argument to keep feeding them and politicians who don't understand the science will reluctantly keep funding them.

Steven

[NuclearPhoenix]

I see your point and I'm definitely agreeing with the fact that money attracts more money. You could discuss how bad (or good?) it is for today's science community if only people and projects get more money that have shown results in the past or have gathered some credibility. It's an interesting point to think about CERN as becoming too big to fail, sort of? Sunk cost fallacy surely rings a bell.

But of course some of the people you mentioned didn't need big budgets because they were (for the most part) theoretical physicists. For about half the people you mentioned yourself that they used pen and paper or chalk. I'm sure you're going to agree with me that theory needs to be tested and experimental physics costs money. Quantum phyiscs has been verified with so many different experiments over the decades, I'm sure if you'd add up the amount of money that all of these cost, there would be people that think it's a gigantic waste of money too. And I'm not sure how you'd plan on doing actual quantum physics in your backroom on a tight budget. And a particle accelerator with this kind of performance of CERN is not gonna build itself either.

Obviously, there is a bit of a difference between describing basic gravity and forces and doing experimental high-energy physics. Not that any of these discoveries are of a lesser value or something, but they are a product of their time and as time goes on, things get more complex. It's the same reason you need huge telescopes and crazy expensive satellites in astronomy -- you're not gonna find anything fundamentally new if you work with the same simple lens telescopes as Galileo Galilei did. And even theoretical physics is getting much more complex today, I mean look at simulations for example. They're needed almost everywhere and for the most part you need super computers or some similar cluster computing today. Those aren't cheap either.

I hope I made my point, let me know what you think.

[Sesselmann]

Matthias,

I totally agree, the cost of experimentation increases exponentially the deeper we want to probe into nature.

The problem I see with mega science projects like LHC, ITER, LIGO etc is that they become so big that a significant fraction of the money is spent on administration, committees, overheads etc.. Hundreds and in some cases thousands of staff becoming reliant on income from the project, comfortably settling down having families, kids at local schools etc..., few of these people are going to say, we are all done here let's move on.

My question is not weather or not arts and sciences should be funded, I absolutely agree they should, but rather if the open ended mega-projects deliver value for money?

Should experiments instead be designed to end when they reach their objective or spend their budget ?

I don't know the answer to these questions, and I also don't know what scientists are gaining by continuing the experiments, I'm just calling it as I see it.

Take ITER as an example, would 65 Billion distributed across 1000 promising fusion experiments yield a better outcome ?

Don't know....

Steven