I spent days and days inside the STAR control room in grad school, often during the 12:30am-7:30am graveyard shift. We needed to run 24/7 for efficiency reasons during the experimental season. Getting superconductors down to temp is costly, so once you get it there, it is go time all the time.
You had to stay on top of all the detectors and triggers, since every minute of beam time cost around $1k. You often sat around doing little, probably working on other research, and then would need to drop everything to reboot a detector so we could get back to collecting data.
Cost of electricity. Accelerators consume huge amounts of power and require the appropriate infrastructure. For example in RIKEN, Japan, agreement is made beforehand with electric companies to provide power to the accelerator during specific spring and fall months, where demand for air conditioner and heaters are at the lowest.
NSRL is like $7k/hr and required over a dozen physicists when running the beam. The point is to get the most amount of experiments performed while everyone is available to do so. We would work like a 12 hour day when running tests at NSRL without any days off until we were done.
As I recall, RHIC itself replaced some cancelled project. I remember the tunnel being at least partly there in the mid-80s, with a plan to trundle ions from the tandem lab through a crazy long beamline across the site and stop nuclear structure research there as a result.
ISABELLE, which was a cancelled proton-proton collider. Major delays with its magnet design meant that it was overtaken by existing programs at CERN and Fermilab. RHIC reused its hall.
My father worked on PHOENIX for over a decade and I got to watch all the equipment being assembled as a teen, unforgettable to have spent time so close to "big science". During budget cuts Jim Simons paid to keep the accelerator running.
I worked at BNL during college days through the SULI program! Some of my peers from college is working there full time now too. I got to work on some really cool stuff but unfortunately a lot of the tenured researcher I knew have seem to left. I heard a lot of researchers left during Trump’s first term.
Probably a third hand story at this point but what I was told from someone that worked there for a long time is that at one point, the winch that raised the cesium source got jammed in the up position. Obviously this was a problem because no one could approach it. They brought in a marksman who somehow shot the winch or rope or whatever which dropped the source back into it's pig.
I will say that this experiment only exposed the plot of land to radiation, not contaminated it. Unless the source was broken or eroded, there would be no detectable radiation on that land once the source is sealed up.
That's not to say BNL hasn't contaminated the land, it is a Superfund site. They do a lot of medical experiments there (they invented the PET scan) but medical waste hasn't always been disposed of properly like now. They had "glass holes", a hole in the ground where you'd chuck in your contaminated labware.
> the supergeniuses at Brookhaven National Labs decided it would be a good thing
Doing this next to an aquifer was reckless. But doing it at all is just science.
> I grew up on Long Island and I expect that it will eventually kill me
Wouldn't we expect to have solid data on this by now?
Also, "Caesium-137 has a half-life of about 30.04 years" [1]. Less than a quarter of the original sample is still Cs-137. (The rest is mostly naturally-occuring barium.)
Not OP but I doubt it. I’m in my mid 30s and when I grew up there in the 90s, Suffolk county was bumble. Some people had horses on their land. After 9/11, a ton of people moved in from the city and the population absolutely ballooned. Over two decades, the population grew so much that just Nassau county and Suffolk county combined has more people than a handful of states. People come and go too (including myself) so unless some organization is tracking us, it’ll be hard to pinpoint.
You imply that experiment contaminated drinking, and other, water. How? Are you saying the Cs¹³⁷ leaked, and at concentration above that from fallout, say? Its γ-rays don't activate materials — I've used enough of them.
Aha likewise, I swear, between the ticks and the polluted water, a good amount of us are screwed. Grumman has put some nasty stuff into the ground too. I remember growing up how they mentioned it was slowly seeping into the aquifer. Took me ages to convince my parents to get a RO machine
It may help alleviate your concerns somewhat to know that these scientists weren’t completely irresponsible: Cesium 137 is a gamma emitter, which means that it doesn’t make things around it radioactive (unlike most fissionable elements such as Uranium or Plutonium).
This was mentioned in one of the articles you linked!
And you are proposing that none of the Cesium 137 escaped into the ambient environment during the 19 year exposure period? That is statistically impossible. The source had ha mechanical shutter that allowed it to be directly exposed to the environment for almost 20 years, with no human to maintain it. Corrosion, spalling, and release of radioactive material though freeze-thaw cycles are all ways that bits of the source can become liberated.
Are you also proposing that this was the only experiment that released radionuclides into the environment at BNL? I certainly remember the furor of them getting caught pissing tritium into the groundwater. I am sure there are many, many things they did which were not detected.
It is well know and well documented that the defense industry has taken a cavalier approach to public nuclear safety from it’s very inception. And make no mistake, BNL exists primarily as a national defense asset.
as a layperson, it seems the whole collider stuff has not been a very fruitful scientific direction so far (has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?)
maybe we are trying to 'jump' the tech tree too much - perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data.
> has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?
Yes. SLAC has an excellent public-lecture series that touches on industrial uses of particle colliders [1].
If you want a concrete example, "four basic technologies have been developed to generate EUV light sources:" (1) synchrotron radiation, (2) discharge-produced plasma, (3) free-elecron lasers (FELs) and (4) laser-produced plasma [2]. Synchrotrons are circular colliders. FELs came out of linear colliders [3]. (China has them too [4].)
We have modern semiconductors because we built colliders.
In the context of the article "collider" means intersecting particle beams, like in RHIC and LHC, which obviously involves rather low probability interactions, as opposed to accelerators which slam a beam into a dense target (like the SLAC accelerator). In a synchrotron light source you want the beam to circulate and specifically not collide with anything; they were developed from particle physics accelerators, of course.
I think there's a strong argument that the most useful product from collider science is the synchrotron light source. Researchers using collider rings realized that the x-ray synchrotron light these rings emit (an inconvenience to collider physics people) was a fantastic tool for structural biology and materials science. Eventually, they built dedicated electron storage rings that don't do collisions at all - the main goal is producing bright X-ray beams.
Synchrotron light sources have had wide-ranging, concrete impacts on "industrial products" that you probably use every day via studies in:
- Drug discovery (Tamiflu and Paxlovid are good examples)
- Battery technology (X-ray studies of how/why batteries degrade over time has lead to better designs)
- EUV photolithography techniques
- Giant Magetoresistance (Important for high capacity spinning-disk hard drives)
Indeed. The first dedicated light -- for various values of "light" -- source[1] repurposed the tunnel and various bits and techniques from the particle physics accelerator it replaced, and on which parasitic "light" measurements were made previously. See also [2].
Particle physicists working on collider experiments were among the first people that needed to deal with large quantities of digitally stored data. As a result, advances in the particle and nuclear physics have fed advances in computing, and vice versa [0]. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, the largest particle physics and accelerator laboratory in the world [1]. Another example more relevant to this post is when a few physicists developed a CouchDB-based solution to handle the large amounts of data generated by their RHIC and CERN experiments. They spun that out into Cloudant, which was one of the pioneers for DBaaS [2].
> has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?
Accelerators and colliders have had a profound impact on medical sciences. Nuclear isotopes used for nuclear medicine[1] is often produced by cyclotrons[2], the accelerator component of circular colliders. The detectors[3] used in things like PET scanners are based on detectors used in collision experiments[4]. Using protons to treat cancer was an idea that came directly from work on cyclotrons[5]. Using the tools developed to simulate how the collision fallout interact with the detectors at LHC[6] has been incorporated into radiotherapy to more accurately compute required doses[7][8].
> perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data
We are actually data starved, we have lots of good ideas but no way to test them.
The web would be one of the more well known technologies to come out of running collider experiments. More directly a whole lot of medical imaging including PET is only possible because of either isotopes manufactured through colliders or sensors developed in colliders.
Tevatron’s construction program built up a lot of industrial capacity for superconducting magnets. This was by design, in the hopes that it would drive induced demand for them. One of the first beneficiaries were MRI machines, which became a lot more affordable to produce.
The DOE hoped to repeat that success in the 1990s with the much larger SSC, but it was cancelled.
Since when were industrial products the purpose? Why do you think my colleagues can't analyse LHC data and discover the Higgs particle? The article says RHIC was a considerable scientific success.
Look at it this way: they are investigating phenomena that require a collider-sized object to see. So unless your application involves a collider sized object, it won't use any effect they discover.
The problem is that fundamental physics has moved too far beyond the scales where we operate.
You're in an IT forum and can't imagine implementations of both the smallest and largest scales? ICs are built at nanoscale and have to deal with quantum effects. PNT systems are so large that they have to deal with the speed of light and relativistic effects.
Many things humanity builds are on the scale of colliders.
> The problem is that fundamental physics
I didn't know there was a problem. It seems like one of humanity's greatest successes.
Very much yes: Knowledge is valuable itself. We're discovering the secrets of the universe.
The owners of capital have created an amazing, self-serving ideology in the US (and elsehwere): If something doesn't help them make money, it's worthless. People seem to think that's part of the US - in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Even more amazing is that I hear scholars in non-profitable fields parrot those ideas. I think capitalism - and especially free markets - work well in many ways, but it's a means to an end, not a religion. Capitalism serves us, not vice-versa.
Nit: saying “this country” without context on where the parent poster is from or where you are from is kinda useless.
From context, you probably mean USA. And I’d agree, however the US was always more technology minded than scientifically minded, and the parent poster lines up with that centuries old ideology. So I don’t think this is per se a new thing.
At some point physics entitlement has to end -- why not here? We can't just keep scaling up the size and cost of fundamental physics experiments. Eventually the cost becomes so large that platitudinous arguments for them don't work.
I spent days and days inside the STAR control room in grad school, often during the 12:30am-7:30am graveyard shift. We needed to run 24/7 for efficiency reasons during the experimental season. Getting superconductors down to temp is costly, so once you get it there, it is go time all the time.
You had to stay on top of all the detectors and triggers, since every minute of beam time cost around $1k. You often sat around doing little, probably working on other research, and then would need to drop everything to reboot a detector so we could get back to collecting data.
RHIC is dead. Long live eRHIC.
Thanks for contributing to research.
What was the “experimental season”? Why was there an experimental season vs. running RHIC all year?
Cost of electricity. Accelerators consume huge amounts of power and require the appropriate infrastructure. For example in RIKEN, Japan, agreement is made beforehand with electric companies to provide power to the accelerator during specific spring and fall months, where demand for air conditioner and heaters are at the lowest.
NSRL is like $7k/hr and required over a dozen physicists when running the beam. The point is to get the most amount of experiments performed while everyone is available to do so. We would work like a 12 hour day when running tests at NSRL without any days off until we were done.
Maintainance and upgrades. These big shared facilities they are shutdown regularly and researchers work flat out while they're up.
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This is in preparation for starting construction work on the Electron-Ion-Collider (EIC) which will use the same tunnel and experiment locations.
As I recall, RHIC itself replaced some cancelled project. I remember the tunnel being at least partly there in the mid-80s, with a plan to trundle ions from the tandem lab through a crazy long beamline across the site and stop nuclear structure research there as a result.
ISABELLE, which was a cancelled proton-proton collider. Major delays with its magnet design meant that it was overtaken by existing programs at CERN and Fermilab. RHIC reused its hall.
My father worked on PHOENIX for over a decade and I got to watch all the equipment being assembled as a teen, unforgettable to have spent time so close to "big science". During budget cuts Jim Simons paid to keep the accelerator running.
How time passes! I remember touring the RHIC tunnels back in 1999 when it was being made.
sPHENIX uses software that we’ve worked on at CERN to do some of their reconstruction!
I worked at BNL during college days through the SULI program! Some of my peers from college is working there full time now too. I got to work on some really cool stuff but unfortunately a lot of the tenured researcher I knew have seem to left. I heard a lot of researchers left during Trump’s first term.
[flagged]
Probably a third hand story at this point but what I was told from someone that worked there for a long time is that at one point, the winch that raised the cesium source got jammed in the up position. Obviously this was a problem because no one could approach it. They brought in a marksman who somehow shot the winch or rope or whatever which dropped the source back into it's pig.
I will say that this experiment only exposed the plot of land to radiation, not contaminated it. Unless the source was broken or eroded, there would be no detectable radiation on that land once the source is sealed up.
That's not to say BNL hasn't contaminated the land, it is a Superfund site. They do a lot of medical experiments there (they invented the PET scan) but medical waste hasn't always been disposed of properly like now. They had "glass holes", a hole in the ground where you'd chuck in your contaminated labware.
> the supergeniuses at Brookhaven National Labs decided it would be a good thing
Doing this next to an aquifer was reckless. But doing it at all is just science.
> I grew up on Long Island and I expect that it will eventually kill me
Wouldn't we expect to have solid data on this by now?
Also, "Caesium-137 has a half-life of about 30.04 years" [1]. Less than a quarter of the original sample is still Cs-137. (The rest is mostly naturally-occuring barium.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137
Not OP but I doubt it. I’m in my mid 30s and when I grew up there in the 90s, Suffolk county was bumble. Some people had horses on their land. After 9/11, a ton of people moved in from the city and the population absolutely ballooned. Over two decades, the population grew so much that just Nassau county and Suffolk county combined has more people than a handful of states. People come and go too (including myself) so unless some organization is tracking us, it’ll be hard to pinpoint.
You imply that experiment contaminated drinking, and other, water. How? Are you saying the Cs¹³⁷ leaked, and at concentration above that from fallout, say? Its γ-rays don't activate materials — I've used enough of them.
Aha likewise, I swear, between the ticks and the polluted water, a good amount of us are screwed. Grumman has put some nasty stuff into the ground too. I remember growing up how they mentioned it was slowly seeping into the aquifer. Took me ages to convince my parents to get a RO machine
It may help alleviate your concerns somewhat to know that these scientists weren’t completely irresponsible: Cesium 137 is a gamma emitter, which means that it doesn’t make things around it radioactive (unlike most fissionable elements such as Uranium or Plutonium).
This was mentioned in one of the articles you linked!
And you are proposing that none of the Cesium 137 escaped into the ambient environment during the 19 year exposure period? That is statistically impossible. The source had ha mechanical shutter that allowed it to be directly exposed to the environment for almost 20 years, with no human to maintain it. Corrosion, spalling, and release of radioactive material though freeze-thaw cycles are all ways that bits of the source can become liberated.
Are you also proposing that this was the only experiment that released radionuclides into the environment at BNL? I certainly remember the furor of them getting caught pissing tritium into the groundwater. I am sure there are many, many things they did which were not detected.
https://www.gao.gov/products/rced-98-26
It is well know and well documented that the defense industry has taken a cavalier approach to public nuclear safety from it’s very inception. And make no mistake, BNL exists primarily as a national defense asset.
1 reply →
Oh yes, the Gamma Forest is shown in Brookhaven Spectrum!
Here's what it looked like back in 1967... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsuiLxcDuHY&t=925s
as a layperson, it seems the whole collider stuff has not been a very fruitful scientific direction so far (has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?)
maybe we are trying to 'jump' the tech tree too much - perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data.
> has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?
Yes. SLAC has an excellent public-lecture series that touches on industrial uses of particle colliders [1].
If you want a concrete example, "four basic technologies have been developed to generate EUV light sources:" (1) synchrotron radiation, (2) discharge-produced plasma, (3) free-elecron lasers (FELs) and (4) laser-produced plasma [2]. Synchrotrons are circular colliders. FELs came out of linear colliders [3]. (China has them too [4].)
We have modern semiconductors because we built colliders.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M6sjEYCE2I&list=PLFDBBAE492...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S270947232...
[3] https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation...
In the context of the article "collider" means intersecting particle beams, like in RHIC and LHC, which obviously involves rather low probability interactions, as opposed to accelerators which slam a beam into a dense target (like the SLAC accelerator). In a synchrotron light source you want the beam to circulate and specifically not collide with anything; they were developed from particle physics accelerators, of course.
1 reply →
I think there's a strong argument that the most useful product from collider science is the synchrotron light source. Researchers using collider rings realized that the x-ray synchrotron light these rings emit (an inconvenience to collider physics people) was a fantastic tool for structural biology and materials science. Eventually, they built dedicated electron storage rings that don't do collisions at all - the main goal is producing bright X-ray beams.
Synchrotron light sources have had wide-ranging, concrete impacts on "industrial products" that you probably use every day via studies in: - Drug discovery (Tamiflu and Paxlovid are good examples) - Battery technology (X-ray studies of how/why batteries degrade over time has lead to better designs) - EUV photolithography techniques - Giant Magetoresistance (Important for high capacity spinning-disk hard drives)
Indeed. The first dedicated light -- for various values of "light" -- source[1] repurposed the tunnel and various bits and techniques from the particle physics accelerator it replaced, and on which parasitic "light" measurements were made previously. See also [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_Radiation_Source
2. https://www.ukri.org/publications/new-light-on-science-socio...
Particle physicists working on collider experiments were among the first people that needed to deal with large quantities of digitally stored data. As a result, advances in the particle and nuclear physics have fed advances in computing, and vice versa [0]. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, the largest particle physics and accelerator laboratory in the world [1]. Another example more relevant to this post is when a few physicists developed a CouchDB-based solution to handle the large amounts of data generated by their RHIC and CERN experiments. They spun that out into Cloudant, which was one of the pioneers for DBaaS [2].
[0] https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-coevolution-of-...
[1] https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudant
> has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?
Accelerators and colliders have had a profound impact on medical sciences. Nuclear isotopes used for nuclear medicine[1] is often produced by cyclotrons[2], the accelerator component of circular colliders. The detectors[3] used in things like PET scanners are based on detectors used in collision experiments[4]. Using protons to treat cancer was an idea that came directly from work on cyclotrons[5]. Using the tools developed to simulate how the collision fallout interact with the detectors at LHC[6] has been incorporated into radiotherapy to more accurately compute required doses[7][8].
> perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data
We are actually data starved, we have lots of good ideas but no way to test them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_medicine#Sources_of_ra...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclotron
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_camera
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintigraphy#Process
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_therapy#History
[6]: https://kt.cern/technologies/geant4
[7]: https://aapm.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mp.17678
[8]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240542832...
The web would be one of the more well known technologies to come out of running collider experiments. More directly a whole lot of medical imaging including PET is only possible because of either isotopes manufactured through colliders or sensors developed in colliders.
Tevatron’s construction program built up a lot of industrial capacity for superconducting magnets. This was by design, in the hopes that it would drive induced demand for them. One of the first beneficiaries were MRI machines, which became a lot more affordable to produce.
The DOE hoped to repeat that success in the 1990s with the much larger SSC, but it was cancelled.
Since when were industrial products the purpose? Why do you think my colleagues can't analyse LHC data and discover the Higgs particle? The article says RHIC was a considerable scientific success.
Look at it this way: they are investigating phenomena that require a collider-sized object to see. So unless your application involves a collider sized object, it won't use any effect they discover.
The problem is that fundamental physics has moved too far beyond the scales where we operate.
I don't think that argument holds up. See quantum mechanics.
7 replies →
You're in an IT forum and can't imagine implementations of both the smallest and largest scales? ICs are built at nanoscale and have to deal with quantum effects. PNT systems are so large that they have to deal with the speed of light and relativistic effects.
Many things humanity builds are on the scale of colliders.
> The problem is that fundamental physics
I didn't know there was a problem. It seems like one of humanity's greatest successes.
2 replies →
https://physicsworld.com/a/what-have-particle-accelerators-e...
Colliders have been the source of almost everything we know about the fundamental nature of reality. That makes them a fruitful scientific direction.
Very much yes: Knowledge is valuable itself. We're discovering the secrets of the universe.
The owners of capital have created an amazing, self-serving ideology in the US (and elsehwere): If something doesn't help them make money, it's worthless. People seem to think that's part of the US - in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Even more amazing is that I hear scholars in non-profitable fields parrot those ideas. I think capitalism - and especially free markets - work well in many ways, but it's a means to an end, not a religion. Capitalism serves us, not vice-versa.
3 replies →
this particular collider or particle accelerators in general? Cyclotrons are rather useful, for example.
What would that entity do exactly?
Yeah, one of them is used by you right now. The Internet.
> has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?
That's not why they were built
> then letting it have a look at the collider data.
I don't think you understand how collider data is analyzed
I hate to be harsh but this mentality is part of the decline of this country
(that is so evident with loss of manufacturing, open and free science and tech robber barons oligarchs that have taken over our national discourse)
Brookhaven was instrumental to Nobel winning discoveries and Stony Brook was a great science minded university
I’m not opposed to investing in AI but its not a zero sum game and we are not a country of data centers alone
Nit: saying “this country” without context on where the parent poster is from or where you are from is kinda useless.
From context, you probably mean USA. And I’d agree, however the US was always more technology minded than scientifically minded, and the parent poster lines up with that centuries old ideology. So I don’t think this is per se a new thing.
Why past tense? BNL will host the EIC, and SBU is going full steam.
You were not nearly harsh enough.
FYI the lab isn't shutting down. Glad you appreciate it's achievements though!
At some point physics entitlement has to end -- why not here? We can't just keep scaling up the size and cost of fundamental physics experiments. Eventually the cost becomes so large that platitudinous arguments for them don't work.
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