Honest question could this be feasible with a few dozen satellites positioned above the Van Allen Belts to accelerate particles, and just letting the particles raw dog the solar wind and ride around Earth's gravity well between each acceleration satellite? Cause that would be badass
No, to orbit the earth at an height of let's say 1000 km you would need a speed of around 7km/s. If you go faster, you don't follow an circular orbit. Wirh around 11km/s you would be so fast to leave the gravity well of earth. The particles in those colliders are almost moving at the speed of light. To be exact, they move only 3.1m/s slower than the speed of light, so almost 300000km/s. They would fly almost straight and would be barely influenced by the gravity well.
It'll still be called the Future Circular Collider when it's shut down after forty years of service. You gotta commit to a scale in the proposal, like the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.
The last time? aaaahahahaa... no. There are several phenomenon that require energy levels that only stellar objects can throw off. They'll be asking for bigger colliders even when they're dedicated space stations firing what would be equivalent to weapons of mass destruction at each other.
Unless scientists can figure everything out just by observing space, there will always be a demand for a bigger collider. Since scientists like to control variables and don't like waiting for random events that they then almost have to reverse-engineer to explain (without most all of the sensitive detectors built in to these colliders), there will always be a demand.
More size = more speed and more particles colliding = more bang = more data = for example possibility for dark matter and/or heavier particles to be found.
When I see massive and highly technical projects like this I wonder where they find enough skilled labor to build it. Just look at the immense complexity of this and they have to build miles and miles of it underground. I'm imagining that all of the construction workers have PhDs in physics or some shit. Or am I overestimating the demands here?
Overestimating it a little, the construction workers just need to be good. But there are indeed literally thousands of PhDs working on it for decades, from all over the world.
My understanding based on watching too many science communicators videos on YouTube is that such tiny black holes would evaporate quickly before causing harm that humans could appreciate. However, this would provide experimental evidence of Hawkings theory.
Didn’t stop some fearmongering from the last one that went operational.
“The new supercollider could cause BlAcK hOLeS; ExPeRtS SaY!!!1!1!1!1!2!?3!!4!!!”
Honestly, I would love a slow-mo guys style video of a bunch of nerdsvery professional researchers smashing microsingularities into random fruit targets.
I assume it would be fairly boring without some massive magnification… but ya know….
The limiting factor is the bend. The subatomic particles want to go in a straight line. A magnetic field is used to bend the beam around into a circle. The faster the particles are moving however, the more energy is needed to bend them. A larger circle has less bend. This lets you get your particles faster.
Since E^2 = M^2 C^4 + P^2 C^2 (the full form is E=MC^2 ). If you can force the particle to stop rapidly, then you can force the energy from momentum into mass. This is done by hitting 2 beams into each other. The faster the beams, the more energy is available to convert to mass.
Most of the time, this creates a lot of mundane particles. However, ever so often it creates something interesting. They rapidly decay into mundane particles, but the shower they create tells us a lot about them. The catch is that all the energy needs to be present at once. You can't use more particles, you need to make them move faster.
As for why. The more particles we have to study, the more we can figure out about the underlying rules. We have a number of theories. They all agree at lower energy levels, but disagree at higher energy levels. By knowing which is correct, we can pry deeper into the workings of reality.
Thanks! I'm personally in favor of doing things for knowledge's sake. That said, what is the stated practical benefit when some government body is writing a check?
More size = more speed and more particles colliding = more bang = more data = for example possibility for dark matter and/or heavier particles to be found.