Nobel laureate Chen-Ning Yang was openly opposed to the idea of China building the next generation supe particle collider. On 7 September, he released an article on WeChat expressing his views that China should not build the world’s largest particle collider. His main reason, other than being very costly, is that such a machine would not gain us much scientific knowledge or benefit to society. We may even read into his reason as a hint that particle physics - strictly the Standard Model of particle physics - may lead us to nowhere. We will examine if particle physics is indeed useful.
International Press of Boston, http://intlpress.sinaapp.com/blog/essay.php?id=5
David Gross, a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Science, responded to Dr.Yang’s comment on:
High-energy physics produced any “tangible benefits” to society?
David Gross, being a physicists, seems to not know much about economics. You can hypothetically create a “billion dollar industries” from a huge unused mountain and you spend billions moving it back and forth between two locations - repeatedly ad infinitum. Surely, billion dollar secondary industries may arise around new technologies for moving mountains around “better and faster” giving larger revenues - they somehow would still end up to be of some use somewhere.
It is a myth that particle physics from CERN (operator of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which discovered the Higgs Boson) has given society any new physics that resulted in any new technology - not one item, directly. The Standard Model involves so far only in fanciful concepts like quark, color charge, etc and none has anything to do with what engineers could use in their work. The very great technological advances of the past decades have nothing at all to do with the experiments carried out at CERN; they were nothing other than the result of empirical experimentation based on physics that have been around for decades since the breakthrough in quantum mechanics of the 1930’s.
…
Should anyone build super particle collider machines where the supposed 6.5 x 10¹² eV protons have only real energy of 470 x 10⁶ eV - out by a factor of 15,000!
@ChanRasjid, CERN was never about ‘solving the fundamental of fusion of hydrogen’, get your fact right!
The theory is already known, but there is simply no way pressure and temperature level found at the core of stellar masses can be artificially recreated in such a tiny space in a laboratory on earth.
Even the entire mass of Jupiter is not enough to ignite a sustained fusion reaction.
It is obvious that you lack basic understanding on the science of nucleosynthesis.
As for megaprojects, it is only the natural path for all nascent superpower to invest in all major research fields.
Right after WWI, the U.S.A. has completed several world’s first before it could be recognized as the undisputed number one superpower, superseding in this role the British Empire, by 1945.
The 100-inch (2.5 m) Hooker telescope located at Mount Wilson Observatory, California, was completed in 1917, and was the world’s largest telescope from 1917 to 1949. It is one of the most famous telescopes in observational astronomy of the 20th century. It was used by Edwin Hubble to make observations with which he produced two fundamental results which changed the scientific view of the Universe.
In the field of high energy physics, the first working U.S. cyclotron became operational in January 1931. This machine had a radius of 4.5 inches (11 cm), and accelerated protons to an energy up to 80 keV.
Ernest O. Lawrence and his collaborators went on to construct a series of cyclotrons which were the most powerful accelerators in the world at the time; a 27 in (69 cm) 4.8 MeV machine (1932), a 37 in (94 cm) 8 MeV machine (1937), and a 60 in (152 cm) 16 MeV machine (1939). Lawrence received the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it.
In a similar patern, after the end of the Cold War, China that is intended to supersede the U.S. as the next superpower has completed or is in the procecess of completing a series of research megaprojects.
• Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope
Nicknamed Tianyan (天眼), FAST is a radio telescope located in the Dawodang depression (大窝凼洼地), a natural basin in Pingtang County, Guizhou, southwest China. FAST has a 500 m diameter dish constructed in a natural depression in the landscape. It is the world’s largest filled-aperture radio telescope.
Construction of FAST began in 2011. It observed first light in September 2016. After three years of testing and commissioning, it was declared fully operational on 11 January 2020.
• LHAASO gamma-ray and cosmic-ray observatory
The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) is a gamma-ray and cosmic-ray observatory in Daocheng, in the Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan, China. It is designed to observe air showers triggered by gamma rays and cosmic rays. The observatory is at an altitude of 4,410 metres (14,470 ft) above sea level. Observations started in April 2019.
Making it the highest in the world.
• Xinjiang Qitai Radio Telescope
China-developed world’s largest steerable telescope in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, QTT will become the world’s most powerful steerable radio telescope spanning 110 meters by 2028, capable of observing radio waves from meter-level to millimeter with a high degree of precision, and can also observe 75 percent of the stars in the sky at any given time.
• TRIDENT undersea neutrino telescope
The next-generation neutrino telescope (TRIDENT) to be built in the South China Sea is designed to have a roughly 30-cubic-kilometer volume, will be submerged to a depth of more than 1 km, said Chen Mingjun, lead researcher of the project at the Institute of High Energy Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The planned Chinese detector will be the world’s largest. It will be a 30-cubic-kilometer detector comprising over 55,000 optical modules suspended along 2,300 strings.
• Sanya High-powered Incoherent Scatter Radar
The device, known as a High-powered Incoherent Scatter Radar, would be capable of influencing the ebb and flow of subatomic particles as far away as Singapore, a distance of over 2,000km (1,200 miles).
This facility would be the most powerful radar in the South China Sea and – regardless of whether it can be used to generate extreme climate events – would have multiple military uses, including improving China’s submarine warfare capabilities and disrupting other countries’ communications networks by creating an atmospheric “black hole”. |1||2|
The U.S. HAARP facility could generate a maximum 1 gigawatt of power, nearly four times that of Soviet’s Sura.
Sanya High-powered Incoherent Scatter Radar is even more powerful than HAARP. |1||2|
• Chinese Large Hadron Collider
Physicists at Beijing’s Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) are designing the world’s biggest 100-kilometre circumference particle collider.
