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
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.
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