I recently saw a Cleo Abrams video about particle accelerators and the lead scientist said that they use particle accelerators to create the building blocks for future innovations.
I’m sure advancements have been made only because particle accelerators exist but I don’t know any. Can someone highlight a direct influence particle accelerators have on our daily lives?
In: Physics
I don’t know about advancements but not super powers because the guy who took a shot to the head survived but lost hearing in one ear, paralyzed nerves, and occasional seizures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski?wprov=sfti1
Like the super collider outside Waxahachie, Texas, that cost $2 billion dollars and has been abandoned for two decades? I imagine the daily lives of the contractors that pocketed the $2 billion were enhanced greatly. As were the Texas taxpayers who fronted $400 million…down the drain.
So to get to the point of accelerating particles and analyzing them, we had to do a lot of research and development on the infrastructure supporting the operation of the accelerator.
The detectors they used required innovation in semiconductor technologies. That gets passed down to consumers.
They needed a robust and powerful computer system to analyze a lot of data. That needed R&D. That R&D can then be applied to other industries to build a similar computer system that can then be used for consumer services.
Construction of the particle accelerators required R&D for better construction techniques and materials. That development can then be used for building bridges, roads, and buildings.
So yeah, identifying particles from a particle accelerators or even looking back on stars with the JWST may not directly provide benefits to humanity, but the technologies required to get there is beneficial to humanity.
Small particle accelerators are used all the time for making PET tracers (radioactive chemicals for tracking biological structures).
FDG is a common one for imaging tumors and many major hospitals have cyclotrons on site
A particle accelerator is just a very useful scientific instrument to interrogate nature and discover its laws. Out of all the weird and specialized tools scientists use, I think the only reason people single it out is its cost.
The earliest accelerator is a cyclotron built in Berkeley sometime in the early 30s. They only got bigger and more powerful from there. So basically it contributed to the development of all particle and high energy physics since then, and I can’t think of any world-shaking inventions since then that didn’t involve those two fields of physics. That list of inventions is too long to write down but includes stuff like semiconductors, GPS, MRI machines, PET scanners, nuclear power plants and the Internet.
Particle physics at that level isn’t currently in itself the basis for any technology that directly benefits humanity.
But neither was Electromagnetism, Radioactivity, General Relativity or Quantum Theory when they were first discovered and probed.
And without those you wouldn’t have nuclear power plants supplying electricity to semiconductor-driven phones with LCD or OLED screens, capable of recieving GPS signals from solar panel powered satellites which atomic clocks need to account for difference in gravity in orbit.
That’s the point of fundamental science, understanding how the world works has to come first, before we can do anything useful with it.
That aside, particle acceletors themselves are useful beyond particle smashing. They produce radioactive elements used in medicine and other devices, while others are used as radiation sources for powerful non-invasive scanning and analysis.
I can’t say definitively that particle accelerators are DIRECTLY responsible for this. But one thing that particle accelerators have been used for is observing Quantum Tunneling, and Quantum Tunneling has wound up being really important in electronics. For example, modern Solid State Drives / Flash Drives leverage Quantum Tunneling to work. It’s probably fair to say that you wouldn’t be able to have a working Solid State Drive as your main OS Drive in your PC without understanding Quantum Tunneling.
There is a video “Physics experiments that changed the world” on the Royal Institution’s YouTube channel. It discusses the background leading up to each experiment and then presents examples of technologies that came out of the knowledge learned due to the experiment. If you look at the timestamps in the description, you’ll see that the speaker (who is herself a particle physicist) gets to particle accelerators at around 45 minutes. Here is a link to the talk, which is quite nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXg3edeUrtc
Science is broken up into 2 categories:
1. Applied science which seeks to solve problems. For example, one might spend time making a more efficient jet engine or breed crops to be more drought resistant
2. Basic science which is more focused on asking questions instead of answering them. Think particle accelerators, space telescopes and the gravitational wave detectors. None of the discoveries made from them will likely lead to technology that ends up in your hands in the next decade.
Governments and universities fund these ventures because corporations won’t since they are bottomless money pits. When Madame Curie and her husband discovered radiation from uranium it had no practical purpose, people were using it to make crystal dinnerware that glowed in the dark. It wasn’t until decades later that we were able to safely harness it’s power. When Sir Walter Rayleigh went to answer the question the why the sky is blue, he wasn’t doing it because there was a practical purpose to answering that question but answering that question will also answer the question of how do I detect large thunderstorms or manage air traffic? When Albert Einstein proposed the Theory of Relativity, he answered questions no one had even thought about not because they had a practical application, it was just a thought experiment. But without answering those questions GPS would not work.
These are the building blocks that she’s talking about. I will not be alive when we come up with a practical purpose for understanding the Higs Boson, but I’m glad we have scientists who dedicate their lives to it.
There are two simple particle accelerators, which were the first known.
The first are cathode ray tubes which led to the discovery of the electron, and later, major advances in a large number of fields, including radiography and medicine, and led to the first electronic computers, television, and later, transistors.
The second are certain radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium, and radium. I describe them as particle accelerators since they tend to randomly fling bits of nuclear shrapnel, usually alpha particles and electrons off into space at a significant fraction of the speed of light.. These led to the discovery of the nucleus and of subatomic particles.
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