A Particle Collider on the Moon!? (w Dr James Beacham)

Should we consider building a particle collider on the Moon?

#moon #collider #physics

Guest:

[AdamMeaney-zszw]

Whats the diameter of the arctic circle? Solar power?

[Omnifarious]

8:20 - Do you have any reason whatsoever to believe that those particles with higher energies/masses exist? If you don't, there is also no 'scientific' justification for building a bigger collider, just like there is no scientific justification for not doing so.

It really rubs me the wrong way when someone uses that word in this way. It's disingenuous, and an attempt to poison the well and not have to have an actual discussion.

And around at 13:34 he finishes explaining that we have no current indications that we'll find anything until we get to an energies we really have no hope of getting to anytime soon.

I don't support any of these ideas except the moon collider. And the moon collider I support because it will have the huge side-benefit of learning much better how to do construction off planet. And if we're going to be spending such an insane amount of time and effort on something, we should have at least some guarantee massive return on investment besides the nebulous possibility of a new discovery we have no good current reason to believe exists.

23:50 - Synchotron radiation.... does acceleration due to gravity also cause synchotron radiation? If so, where does this cause things to spiral into deep gravity wells screaming out x-rays all the way down?

It strikes me that around the circumference of Titan might be ideal, aside from how far away Titan is. It's consistently around the temperature of liquid methane. :-)

[Muonium]

You can just _feeeel_ the sanctimony and 'pronouns in the bio' with some people. Anywho, an interesting subject to think about the engineering problems it would involve, but he seems to assume acceleration gradients will remain the same for these hypothetical world-encircling accelerators. That's absurd given the fact we've increased particle energies by a factor of roughly a hundred million in under a century since just discovering how to do this stuff at all. Money's still on similar massive increases in acceleration gradients from eg. laser wakefield techniques over the next hundred years that could be done in a few Km instead of ever more ridiculously grandiose schemes.