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Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

23 points by gnufx ago | 15 comments

davrosthedalek |next [-]

This is in preparation for starting construction work on the Electron-Ion-Collider (EIC) which will use the same tunnel and experiment locations.

gnufx |root |parent [-]

As I recall, RHIC itself replaced some cancelled project. I remember the tunnel being at least partly there in the mid-80s, with a plan to trundle ions from the tandem lab through a crazy long beamline across the site and stop nuclear structure research there as a result.

tahoeskibum |next |previous [-]

How time passes! I remember touring the RHIC tunnels back in 1999 when it was being made.

webdevver |previous [-]

as a layperson, it seems the whole collider stuff has not been a very fruitful scientific direction so far (has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?)

maybe we are trying to 'jump' the tech tree too much - perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data.

GreyZephyr |root |parent |next [-]

The web would be one of the more well known technologies to come out of running collider experiments. More directly a whole lot of medical imaging including PET is only possible because of either isotopes manufactured through colliders or sensors developed in colliders.

gnufx |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Since when were industrial products the purpose? Why do you think my colleagues can't analyse LHC data and discover the Higgs particle? The article says RHIC was a considerable scientific success.

Keyframe |root |parent |next |previous [-]

this particular collider or particle accelerators in general? Cyclotrons are rather useful, for example.

pfdietz |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Look at it this way: they are investigating phenomena that require a collider-sized object to see. So unless your application involves a collider sized object, it won't use any effect they discover.

The problem is that fundamental physics has moved too far beyond the scales where we operate.

atoav |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Yeah, one of them is used by you right now. The Internet.

AIorNot |root |parent |previous [-]

I hate to be harsh but this mentality is part of the decline of this country

(that is so evident with loss of manufacturing, open and free science and tech robber barons oligarchs that have taken over our national discourse)

Brookhaven was instrumental to Nobel winning discoveries and Stony Brook was a great science minded university

I’m not opposed to investing in AI but its not a zero sum game and we are not a country of data centers alone

Insanity |root |parent |next [-]

Nit: saying “this country” without context on where the parent poster is from or where you are from is kinda useless.

From context, you probably mean USA. And I’d agree, however the US was always more technology minded than scientifically minded, and the parent poster lines up with that centuries old ideology. So I don’t think this is per se a new thing.

pfdietz |root |parent |previous [-]

At some point physics entitlement has to end -- why not here? We can't just keep scaling up the size and cost of fundamental physics experiments. Eventually the cost becomes so large that platitudinous arguments for them don't work.

micromacrofoot |root |parent [-]

We absolutely can, and I reckon we will... this is like a fraction of a percent of science funding which is a fraction of a percent of GDP, we spend more on maintaining warheads we can't use

10% of the US military budget for one year could build a 100km collider, RHIC is 4km

pfdietz |root |parent [-]

What a nonsense argument. Spending like this has to be justified on its own merits, not because there is some other bad spending. The argument you are trying to make would justify spending on almost anything.