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
It depends what you mean by “advancement”. A lot of the answers have focused on practical technological applications but I think that somewhat misses the point. The main thing that big expensive particle accelerators like Large Hadron Collider, which I think is more what you were asking about, get us, is knowledge. It can take decades more for us to figure out what we can do with the knowledge, but the knowledge is the point.
The electron was discovered in the late 1800s using a very early kind of particle accelerator. Think of all the things that we have done in the last 150 years and will continue to do in the future, because we know about electrons.
We just used particle colliders to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson. This is another elementary particle that has improved our knowledge of the world. 150 years from now there could well be lots of technology that derives it’s existence from those experiments that confirmed the Higgs Boson.
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