Addiction is a scary thing

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submitted by The Picard Maneuver

Addiction is a scary thing

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243 Comments

magnetosphere

As much as I love science, and I’d much rather see billions spent on a collider than war, I gotta admit this is funny as hell.

ID411

“Ok, but what does this collider do, that the one you have in the garage won’t do ?”

Mrs Cern.

nmhforlife

We have a perfectly good collider at home.

AA5B

Should have had. That was sad when we gave that up in favor of military spending

However, it also wouldn’t have been as big

ToxaKniotee

I think it was more due to the ISS, Reagan only wanted one international science project

SpaceNoodle

Meanwhile, Star Wars.

VindictiveJudge

Our collider is now two baseball pitchers aimed at each other.

Kusimulkku

After 22.5 km (14 mi) of tunnel had been bored and about US$2 billion spent, the project was canceled by the US Congress in 1993.

LMAO

PunnyName

As a former Texan, yes that's a city name. And you'll probably pronounce it correctly.

VindictiveJudge

Wax-a-hatch-y?

KISSmyOSFeddit , edited

Wax a haji

Turious

I feel like this should be required watching for anyone who wants to better understand colliders and the politics around them. BobbyBroccoli made this series on the development of some of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivVzGpznw1U

Ultraviolet

Of course it was fucking Reagan.

irreticent

Hopefully without lube.

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

I don't want to learn science from someone named BobbyBroccoli.

niktemadur

How about Robby Ravioli instead?

RealFknNito

Bill Nye is literally just called the science guy and we got invaluable information from him.

Kusimulkku

Well maybe I'll call up Broccoli Man if I need info on Broccoli

Shotgun_Alice

Bold claim from a monkey puppet, jk. I’ve watched his channel it’s really good. I found the videos on the collider to be really interesting.

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

Bold claim from a monkey puppet

Turious

How convenient; you won't be learning science! You'll be learning history!

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

Yay!

CptEnder

Also that West Wing episode where a physicist is trying to get funding for our Collider and the staffer is like "what does it do? What practical applications does it have?" and the physicist says none. It's practical application is discovery. That we discovered penicillin on accident not when we were researching practical applications of injections.

Peter_Arbeitslos

And I think it's beautiful.

Socsa

I just think it's neat

Peter_Arbeitslos

420km collider, when?

lengau

2069

ArcaneSlime

4096?

APassenger

2^12?

PriorityMotif

What would happen if we put a small collider inside of a bigger collider and spun it around while it spun around?

zout

"Yo dawg, I heard you like colliders, so we built a collider into your collider so it can collide while it collides...."

nxdefiant

SOUNDS LIKE A GOOD QUESTION 22 BILLION DOLLARS WOULD ANSWER.

silver_wings_of_morning

You are asking something different, but I think it's interesting to mention that the particles that go into the LHC don't start there. The LHC gets them from the SPS, which gets them from the PS and this keeps going for a few more steps.

lath

We recreate an atom?

ThePyroPython

You just know the letters of the FCC originally stood for Fucking Collosal Collider.

rockerface

And from there, we're one step closer to BFG

hperrin

No, it was the Large Hardon Collider, and this is the Fat Cock Collider.

ThePyroPython

Contractor, scratching head:

Hey boss, are you sure they got the dimensions right in this drawing of their new proton smasher?

Next to the scale it just says "GIRTHY".

inset

feedum_sneedson

Why does he look like that.

MenacingPerson

genetics

feedum_sneedson , edited

I mean like he's climaxing extremely hard in the top picture. Where's the professionalism? I understand he occupies a rather senior role in the organisation, why is he ejaculating in his underwear with rage?

Although he is an odd looking chap, I agree.

xenoclast

If scientists had their way they'd have built the big one first. Or at least something reasonably larger than what they have.. it's politics that is capitalism and war that is the addiction preventing us from having nice things

mohammed_alibi

I think the experience of building the previous smaller ones helped though. I think if you just go for the large one, it will probably fail or overrun the budget and we'll have nothing to show for the money spent.

Zacryon

Ah you mean unlike the many other wisely spent tax money and private investments which turned out to be something to show for? /s

KillingTimeItself

we almost built a really fucking big collider in the US somewhere in the middle of fuck off land texas.

It died.

troglodytis , edited

Yep, that was when the US jumped the shark. It was the exact moment, Oct 20, 1993, we went "fuck science, we're only doing short term profits now."

niktemadur , edited

This would have created a strong science hub and community in Texas, a real reason for the state to be proud of itself, looking towards the future like it did in the 1960s, and that was due to the Democrats with LBJ.
Now instead, they got assault rifle-totin', shit-kicking knuckle-draggers for life, as the whole place builds up inertia sinking into a festering swamp of its' own ignorance.

33550336

We fucked, we need 60s back (with all the mindset).

KillingTimeItself

yeah, would be interesting to see the alternate universe where it was finished and built..

niktemadur

There would have been t-shirts
EVERYTHING'S BIGGER IN TEXAS
INCLUDING SUPERCOLLIDERS

Would we have never heard the end of republicans bitching and whining about the cost and "our taxpayer dollars" and all that idiocy?

Who knows, considering Texan lawmakers carry an outsized weight in the republican party, and this project meant thousands upon thousands of skilled, high-paying jobs, including creating large new communities populated by scientists from all over the world.

Then after beating CERN to the punch to first detect the Higgs Boson, they would have draped themselves in the flag while chanting USA, USA, USA...

But ignorance and myopia are the horses pulling the republican cart.

KillingTimeItself

gotta love politics, only the most interesting of all the boring fields put together!

HootinNHollerin

As one might guess, the republicans canceled it

Liz

By accident, which is just straight-up embarrassing. They voted the wrong way by accident and then never fixed it.

brbposting

Really?!

Liz

https://youtu.be/40YIIaF1qiw

Sometime after the 30 minute mark NDT bitches about it.

HootinNHollerin , edited

Haven’t heard of that but i definitely saw debate with R congressman saying basically “why should US pay for it let’s let Europe pay for it”

Zink

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

It only took a couple decades for that whole greedy evil movement to dictate such big decisions.

MacN'Cheezus

The Apollo 14 moon landing?

mokus

Stairway to Heaven?

KillingTimeItself , edited

well i mean to be fair, it was also on a really big boon of massive military spending, and the debt was a significant problem, plus this was like a fucking *massive* collider for the time, and probably even now.

The sheer cost alone of it i think was like 20 billion dollars near the tail end of development, not to mention they had basically redesigned the entire fucking thing by that point since they had dropped an entire team. It was a fucking mess.

troglodytis , edited

Right! Think of those quarters' balance sheets!

Scientific progress? Peoples bonuses were on the line

Edit: it's good that our government protected America and left innovation to Europe

KillingTimeItself

yeah unfortunately the public and government just weren't very perceptive to a massive scientific project which would almost certainly many times overrun the budget outlined for it. Socioeconomics are hard...

nexguy

There was an auto-body shop in that town all ready to go...Super Collider Collison Repair

Rip small aoto-body business sign.

AlexWIWA

I bet the US public would vote to fund it if we actually called it Fucking Big Collider and it was the largest in the world.

KillingTimeItself

oh for sure.

AlexWIWA

That'd be the easiest vote of my life tbh

KillingTimeItself

you're telling me i can shitpost with 20 billion dollars? Don't mind if i yes!

AlexWIWA

Yes absolutely.

just_change_it

I'm waiting on the equatorial supercollider myself. 40,075km let's go!

zaphod

Too small, we need to go bigger.

Land_Strider

Ringworld collider, you say?

DragonTypeWyvern

First the equator, then orbital, then solar, then system, then GALAXY CLASS BITCHES

phoneymouse

You need to find another planet

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In

Why bother digging. We just need a loop of magnetic lenses in deep space.

supercriticalcheese

Just after the transcontinental maglev train

daniyeg

for context 22 billion is a few billions less than what elon musk overpaid for twitter. i don't think a bigger collider will do anything but I'd like for humanity to have this rather than whatever the fuck the rich are doing now.

Flying Squid

22 billion is *half* of what Elon paid for Twitter. He paid 44 billion.

So this seems like a pretty good bargain for unlocking the secrets of the universe.

daniyeg

if i remember correctly twitter was evaluated as 20 billion before musk bought it, so he overpaid by 24 billion dollars which is a couple billion dollars more than the price tag quoted here.

LifeInMultipleChoice

To be fair I think he only paid $14 billion. The rest came from other investors like Saudia Arabia

MashedTech

For your money you can have "A social media platform that's on fire or the secrets of the universe and money for another project. What do you choose?" "The dumpster fire social media platform"

XTornado

Yeah.... And at least this will generate jobs... And not reduce them like it did on Xitter.

Zarcher

Cern has produced quite some interesting systems for software and data management. I am sure the added value of the work is beyond just understanding particles.

Aux

LHC and previous colliders did a lot of science. You don't need to think, there are facts.

ekZepp , edited

You should think again about what they actually can do.

https://cerncourier.com/a/lhc-upgrade-brings-benefits-beyond-physics/

Jimmyeatsausage , edited

I'd rather have a 100km particle collider than an aircraft carrier.

tiredofsametab

What if we build it on a 100km aircraft carrier? Think of the possibilities! heh

Agent641

What if we put an aircraft carrier into a particular accelerator and spin it up to the speed of light?

The sailors would probably get dizzy.

tiredofsametab

We can only get to 99.999998% or so (I might be off by a decimal) so I think it would just result in light bruising (though probably at the atomic level which tends to sting a bit more).

Allero

Always a relevant Onion

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA

It better have a particle collider on it

TonyTonyChopper

that would just be the Halo from Halo

AlexWIWA

That'd be kinda cool. Ace Combat ass aircraft carrier

LifeInMultipleChoice

Throw in Jurassic Park and some jet engines and we've got Ark

A7thStone , edited

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

lateraltwo

Last good Republican change my mind

DragonTypeWyvern , edited

His foreign relations record includes a hell of a lot of ratfucking the third world, including being so paranoid about communism he ended up pushing quite a few nations into the Soviet sphere when the coups didn't work (Cuba, cough cough cough) and directly enabling some of history's greatest monsters when they did, but he is an American president so grade that on a curve I guess

lateraltwo

Yep, it went downhill from there, just so ya know

A7thStone

Exactly. I like Ike, in comparison to other U.S. presidents. He had some good ideas, but we have a really shitty track record with the rest of the world, and he's no exception to that.

33550336

In a ideal word, sure, I'd too. But we live among fucking beasts.

JasSmith

Yeah, if history has taught as nothing else, it's that the guy with the biggest stick usually wins. There are many criticisms of the U.S. military, but no one could accuse it of being weak. That kind of deterrence is invaluable.

Allero

If only they wouldn't use that force to invade half the planet...

The peace of Americans is paid for by the terror of dozens of nations. It ain't cool.

JasSmith

I can't say I disagree. There is much to criticise.

Allero

My fear is, this approach is unsustainable in general, and cannot be effectively applied for global security.

It's not just US military being poorly led.

Allero

You *are* fucking beasts

The purpose of military is always dual: to deflect other country's military and to "protect national interests" (read: attack another country that now has to have military too, and may consider using it for an attack).

Wildly assuming you are American, you should have no issue understanding that defensive forces are not really always defensive.

33550336

I am from Europe, from country invaded by nazi Germany so I know well what means an oppressive use of army. But could you give an alternative to the army?

Allero , edited

Uhm...no army?

We have to push politicians to drive UN-scale policies on demilitarization - not this playful "lemme dismantle 10 rockets and call it a day" demilitarization, but a real effort - and expanding mutual defence-type alliance (could be NATO expansion if they're gonna get their shit together, or a new bigger alliance) to as many countries as humanly possible in order to reduce their need to rely on their own armies and drastically reduce armed manpower globally.

Switzerland-like militias can help in the transitional period.

33550336

I wonder how Switzerland militia would deal with Russian tanks and rockets.

Uhm…no army?

After the Russian invasion do you really believe than all countries in the world will become peaceful and any of them will ever try to invade another?

dream_weasel

Idk, I'm not sure I could get much use out of a particular accelerator even if I got it running. An aircraft carrier though might be joyride-able, and that I can understand. Might still be moot since both need a team, but if I get to have either one I'd have to at least think on it.

ekZepp , edited

Is not only about physics research. The complexity of those projects fund hundreds of sectors and push forward new technologies who will have many commercial use.

...Also they've confirmed the existence of this little thing called Higgs Boson which field define pretty much reality, soo... not exactly wasted time.

GlenRambo

Awesome. And with reality defined my daily existance and cost of living is. ... Exactly the same and killing me. 🙃

ekZepp

Blame your govern, not the science. Science give you medicine, electricity, internet, and all the device you use daily. Your govern put unfair taxes on everything and allow the corporation to exploit your work.

GlenRambo

And bigger understanding the gifts, or gravitons helps me how?

Tbh I think its cool as fuck. But playing the role of my socialist SO. Who will have this response when I show her this meme.

ekZepp , edited

Experiment > Understand > Practical use

For example, did you know that the super-small processor that allow us to have a smartphone so small to be pocket-size is only possible thanks to knowledge we have of quantum physic?

https://culturico.com/2020/11/26/your-smartphone-knows-physics-the-science-inside-mobile-devices/

Or how physics discoveries can be fundamental for medicine?

https://www.news-medical.net/health/The-Role-of-Physics-in-Medicine.aspx

Physic is the "Manual of Construction" of this Universe, more pages we find, more the things we can do.

werefreeatlast

Hopefully they can finally manufacture black holes. Because that would be totally safe for everyone 😉.

Corno

Don't worry! Though black holes may sound scary, microscopic black holes, the type that could hypothetically be produced by high-energy particle collisions such as this, would pretty much instantaneously (in approximately 10-27 seconds) evaporate due to the emission of Hawking radiation, before they could "suck up" anything. Cosmic rays of far higher intensities than what we could produce routinely collide with atoms in Earth's atmosphere, so microscopic black holes could be happening daily in our atmosphere, we just never see them because they're far too small and evaporate instantly.

Skates , edited

Hey you seem pretty knowledgeable so I'm gonna just ask - if these types of events happen regularly in earth's atmosphere, why build particle colliders at all? Is it just to have control over when they're triggered and to be able to observe the results? If so, wouldn't it help to just launch more satellites that can observe when these things happen in the atmosphere? Sorry for the dumb questions, I'm very much a layman.

Corno , edited

Yup! It's so they can view what happens when these particles collide as the collisions happen, using specialized detectors. The ATLAS detector at CERN weighs 7,000 tons and is huge.

These reactions in the atmosphere happen very fast and are a bit chaotic. When a primary cosmic ray hits an atom in our atmosphere, it then sets off a chain reaction similar to billiard balls, resulting in "air showers", which are cascades of subatomic particles, such as hadrons, photons, muons, electrons, as well as ionized nuclei. The colliders allow physicists to view these kinds of reactions under controlled conditions right as the reactions happen, and can adjust things such as the energies. There's an array of detectors in Argentina which can detect the particles released by an air shower

RizzRustbolt

Maybe that's what is happening to the ozone layer.

Olhonestjim

Well no danger of that. We certainly cannot do it on terrestrial scales. No way, no how. Not even with fusion and a collider ring wrapped around the equator. It still requires vastly higher energies.

Even if we could make a kugelblitz black hole right here, it would instantly fall out of reach through the Earth while barely interacting at all with any other particles. On the Planck scale, particles are mostly empty space. We wouldn't even get to study it.

The best way to build one is to surround a star with millions of orbital mirrors, then focus all the light onto a single point in space, with an accuracy of nanometers, if not picometers. Focusing enough energy on a single point will cause a tiny black hole to form. It's probably impossible to do by accident.

Cyclist

I'll show you my kugelblitz black hole.

ComradeKhoumrag , edited

There are plenty of natural particles colliders, such as black holes or very dense stars, that are way more powerful than our engineered particle colliders, which (observationally) don't create black holes around them

Rin , edited

Similar reactions produced by particle accelerators are constantly happening all around us, and isn't just limited to extreme conditions like around black holes. This is just the same thing but at a much smaller and more controlled scale, and last I checked the sun hasn't produced any world ending black holes despite the *far* more extreme reactions constantly happening within it. A man even survived a high energy proton beam from one of those accelerators passing through his brain and was able to continue his career in quantum physics, so at that point I doubt they're capable of anything world ending.

werefreeatlast

There's 1 in a trillion trillion chance! So we should be glad we're not all beautiful beach body people married to the most wonderful and irresistibly sexy megalonymphomaniac people that just want to hump us every single second of the rest of our lives in all possible ways, all of us 8 billion people together. Because if that ever happened, it could only mean one thing, the end of the world as we know it would be coming in the form of a tiny black hole.

RememberTheApollo_

They posit that yes, black holes could be formed, but they’re so small they evaporate pretty much instantly. They don’t have the mass to survive.

What if they added smaller loops along the main loop, like a roller coaster with loopdy-loops? 🤔

cynar

There will be.

Colliders work best at specific speeds, like gears on a car. The big collider is fed by a smaller one. That one is likely fed by an even smaller one. Eventually, you get small enough that a simple linear accelerator can get the gas up to speed.

Oh, and likely a scientist/engineer grinning manically as they "push the trigger" on the largest rail gun in existence.

peopleproblems

Even the ones *not* pushing the trigger on the biggest rail gun in existence do this.

The doctors do too. It's... Concerning if you don't know why they get so excited.

cynar

The difference between science, and blowing shit up, is in the recording.

Hobbes_Dent

You find a whee! little boson.

TachyonTele

Ahh yes, the infamous Dadjoke particle

x4740N

Now that you've said this I want to know if other shapes without corners are possible

But also why do they need a bigger collider

Now that you've said this I want to know if other shapes without corners are possible

The squircle :)

Summzashi

More speed probably

jol

Starting to be suspicious like an alchemy circle around multiple cities...

octopus_ink

Alexstarfire

Just waiting for the right solar eclipse.

tetris11 , edited

Nah, it's just the sloppy creation of The One Ring, without elven craftmanship to keep things down to wearable size.

That, or they're building a stone giant's cock ring.

Kiosade

This is starting to turn into some Full Metal Alchemist shit. If you know, you know.

The Picard Maneuver [OP]

They say Sloth has already started on the largest tunnel in secret.

PresidentCamacho

.....what a drag....

thirteene

I'll be concerned when it's the same size as the eclipse's shadow

Rob Bos

NGL though, how great would it be if we could get a neutrino detector big enough to image the moon with the sun as a neutrino source?

thirteene

Well it was about that time i realized this user was a homunculus in a flask. Get of here homunculus, you ain't taking my soul.

huquad

Naa, more like steins gate.

Melatonin

Maybe we could convince the military that they are rail guns. Yeah, it's rail gun research, and it will finally result in the defeat of those...other guys.

Of course, it will never work because they only trust a few companies like Lockheed to do their dirty stuff.

cadekat

I mean, if you're making a railgun, maybe superconducting magnets would be useful tech to have 🤔

OldWoodFrame

You know what WOULD solve physics?

TRAINS

BambiDiego

Yes, trains!

Maybe in a very, very large circular track. A huge circle.

And fast. Super fast. Make them faster by making them lighter. Smaller. Super tiny. So light and fast.

A teeny, tiny, light train going super duper fast in a very large circle.

Sure hope it doesn't smack into anything while going top speed. Or maybe it does, so long as we measure it.

DragonTypeWyvern

Yessss run the trains through the collider

Zink

Who is brave enough to ride the LCC centrifuge?! It’s EXTREEEEEEEeeeeee__ 💥

chatokun

I like trains.

loics2

We already have plenty of trains in Switzerland, they're just expensive to ride

nicoweio

There's this (true) anecdote that precision measurements at CERN/LHC need to take into account the schedule of high-speed trains in the area because they cause tiny, yet measurable disturbances in the power grid.

Sam_Bass

Probably have a ton of tunnel builders unemployed over there

The Picard Maneuver [OP]

Not for long!

Daft_ish , edited

How else will we transmogrify enough souls to create a philosopher stone --- I mean do science stuff?

whotookkarl

Interferometers are moving to space launches, maybe colliders need to do the same if they keep growing bigger

crapwittyname

Would be a fucking nightmare to keep that in any kind of stable orbit.

efstajas , edited

Just build it as a big ring all the way around the earth

whotookkarl

Let's show Saturn who can do rings better

Entropywins

Just tie some string to it...

brain_in_a_box

22 billion is such a drop in the bucket for a pan-European, decades long project. That's enough money to fund Israel's genocide for like, 72 hours.

supersquirrel

Just make one big enough that you can use billionaires instead of atomic particles

milicent_bystandr

Do billionaires split apart into multiple millionaires, and anti-tax neutrinos?

mechoman444

There's only one way to find out.

GloriousGouda

That's only in the movies. In reality they just completely evaporate. Usually they just evaporate. They take up a lot of volume but aren't terribly filling.

/s

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA

You just aren't cooking yours right

Agent641

No its like when sonic dies and all his rings spilled out

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In

I may be an anti billionaire

milicent_bystandr

Were you created when a billionaire formed in a high energy event?

iAvicenna

I really like where this is going, keep talking

EdibleFriend

or invent a board with a nail in it for that iono

Plap plap 𓁑𓂸

22 billion is just a drop in the bucket to the Committee of 300 on their path to world domination.

33550336

First, you try to defend your country. Then, you want to have some advantage for a safety margin. Then, bigger advantage "just in case". This military play is what is really addictive.

LEONHART

The microwave at the Future Gadgets Lab is about to experience one hell of an upgrade.

MrJameGumb

The way it's typed out makes it sound like a Vince Russo quote lol

Cargon

The Wheel of Osheim stops for no one

Etterra

Just wait, if civilization and/or human life still exists in a thousand years or so, they'll build one into an orbital ring.

Eh who am I kidding, well be lucky to survive the 21st century.

lazylion_ca

Dual purpose Dyson Ring?

supercriticalcheese

Unless asteroid ... we will survive, how is another matter.

TypicalHog

It's true tho. We need them bigger bois!

RizzRustbolt

We'll make sophons one of these days.

pythonoob

I'd settle for the astroid belt circumference collider from the second or third book

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In

If we get space elevators then that may be cheaper.

Corno

Perhaps with a big collider we'll finally be able to get confirmation on the cause of sinking soufflés - the bigon!

nicoweio

Daily reminder that the World Wide Web was invented at CERN, so somewhere around the LHC highlighted in the picture. Who knows what the next big random innovation will be.

RizzRustbolt

Come on anti-photons!

nicoweio

Not sure if this is just playing with the fact that a photon could be considered its own antiparticle in quantum field theory or if I missed the joke. Please, enlighten me.

The_Tired_Horizon

I dont remember ever reading they were trying to find dark matter with particle colliders. Read New Scientist for years too. They have deep mountain detectors for dark matter that are nothing like particle accelerators. Memes are great and funny and all, but not always based upon reality. And why shouldnt science be used to figure out how things are constructed, even the fundamentals of the universe..?

InternetCitizen2

The thing is that the general public never sees the line between toy lab experiment to factory production line. To be fair that path is nebulous and doesn't follow a schedule, so it is hard to sell. On the topic of selling this is often funded by the government too, so people want to jump in and say "free market.... " when corporations don't show up until the last mile.

The_Tired_Horizon

Yes I've pointed this out about the internet for years.

leavemealone

Gotta do it before trisolarians come for us.

Defectus

Those goddam sophons keeps jacking up our shit

splonglo

They should make it square because squares are cool

tetris11

One square to rule them all, one square to find them,
one square had roast beef, and one square stayed at home.

Ransack

Lol two 90s and they'll turn everything right around

ThunderclapSasquatch

Imagine the g-forces that kind of turn would create.....

JATth

Put that 20 billions first into fusion research. Like yesterday. How on earth would we power and cool that 100 km of superconductors otherwise? Unless the 100 km FCC is required by the fusion research, then we have a *pickle*.

bastion

Third and fourth-gen nuclear would be helpful.

Fontasia

I feel like their marketing needs a rewrite, everyone vaguely knew the LHC was to identify the Higgs Boson, what's this one for, gravitons?

remotelove , edited

Shit Sabine Hossenfelder would say. (She funny tho..)

Edit: I had no idea about her questionable actions so that is news to me.

teft

She also did an interview with a holocaust denier so…

Dojan

Oh ew, really? I'm not overly surprised to be honest, her video on trans people was awful.

niktemadur

The titles on some of her videos manage to be too fishy for my taste, they appear a lot on my feed due to watching a lot of videos from channels like PBS Spacetime and The History Of The Universe, stuff like that.

You can tell that she knows her stuff, but clickbait titles somewhat like, I paraphrase here: "A year ago I lost my faith in science, here's why", raise my suspicions and I move on without clicking. Right on the blurry edge between science and something else beyond that line, something that's not quite legit and not good for you.

teft

Same for me. I had watched one video of hers because I watch those same channels and afterwards i looked her up and saw the controversial shit. The clickbait doesn’t help her image either. Hard pass for me.

niktemadur

This is the conversation I needed to finally block (or "not recommend", or whatever YouTube calls it) her videos on my feed.

Astrum also sometimes gives me an uneasy feeling, but so far the content appears to be solid, although I don't watch all his videos.

Hey, let me recommend one of the best channels out there in the vast sea of science/history YouTube content, the name is ParallaxNick.
He's been doing incredibly well-research videos on the history of astronomy, recently he's been doing a series that went into detail on Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Galileo, I suspect (fingers crossed tight) he's gonna follow with Newton, then Huygens, Halley and the Herschels.

Prunebutt

That means you missed her video on how capitalism is good actually. It's about as horrid as you'd expect.

Dojan

Oh is this the one where she claims that without capitalism there'd be no innovation?

Prunebutt

Yeah, and she doesn't properly explain what it is, reproduces the barter myth, etc.

SrTobi

But I feel after that, she has mostly stuck to physics stuff right?

PunnyName

Is she the reincarnation of Ayn Rand?

Prunebutt

Not *that* bad. She's still dapable of logical conclusions. Just ignorant, really...

b000rg

Absolutely horrendous. I stopped watching her after that. I don't care if it was good intentioned or not, she obviously should have expanded her understanding of the topic before presenting herself as an expert on it, and that makes me wonder how many other topics she covers in this way.

partial_accumen

I didn't see that one on her view of trans people, but her recent one on nuclear power was nearly biased and selective enough to be called "disinformation".

Dojan

Honestly the intro of it was enough for me to click out of it initially. She says

On the one side you have people claiming that it's a socially contagious fad among the brainwashed woke who want to mutilate your innocent children. On the other side there are those saying that it's saving the lives of minorities who've been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people, like you and I, who think both sides are crazy and could someone please summarise the facts in simple words, which is what I'm here for.

As a cis-man, I detest the notion that wanting trans people to have access to healthcare and *equal* human rights to the rest of us is in any way "crazy."

She further goes on to cite a disputed article in an open-access journal regarding rapid-onset gender dysphoria from a known biased source as though it carries actual weight.

The article in question basically claims that rapid-onset gender dysphoria is an actual phenomenon because the author polled *parents* of children on a transphobic forum, about whether or not the child "becoming trans" was a sudden event. There are multiple problems with this - The parents are the source of supposed truth - The parents likely have an inherent bias (being that they are on a transphobic forum)

It is possible - and in my opinion - plausible that the parents experience it as having a "rapid onset" because the children spent a lot of time *hiding* this aspect of themselves from the parents because the parents express LGBT+ phobic views. I concealed many parts of my personality from my abusive mother, and I know several trans people who didn't come out to their parents until such a time they felt it safe to do so.

From the parents perspective their kid moved out (e.g. to uni) and spontaneously changed gender from one day to the next, but at that stage their friends had been referring to them by their chosen names and pronouns for years.

Dojan , edited

This is what I took away from it as well. The fact that she so readily quoted really biased and disputed articles and presented them as though they carried as much weight as the actual science sat really wrong with me. She clearly didn't spend very long looking into the articles she presented.

It makes me think of LLMs, really. She talks with authority about a *lot* of subjects, but ultimately she's a physicist. Sure, she's scientifically literate and that can be used to make sense of articles and studies in other disciplines, at least to an extent. However, it doesn't make her an authority in any of those disciplines. Then there's the time constraint to keep in mind as well; she might be able to analyse the literature and give a sensible take on the matter, but not when her schedule involves making one ~5 minute video on any given topic per day.

remotelove

Ok, that I didn't know. Off to find some references.

(I have fairly strong opinions about people like that. Hell, I refuse to watch any Tom Cruise movies because of his association with scientology, just as an example.)

Queen HawlSera

Maybe it's time to admit that maybe Dark Matter doesn't exist, and we need a different hypothesis to explain the universe?

DragonTypeWyvern

Other than the fact that it/some of it was probably detected in 2023 and all the models *do* mostly work. Plus the LHC proved the existence of the Higgs Boson.

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In

This? https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a46807202/dark-matter-cosmic-web/

Is this really dark matter, or just more evidence of where the current physics modelling is incorrect?

DragonTypeWyvern

Either way, the solution is more science.

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In

Yes. Of course.

I was just taking issue with the phrase "probably detected" and would instead say "effects were better observed".

Queen HawlSera

"Probably" don't cut it chief

Ixsh , edited

Neutrinos are an unknown science that we still know so very little about. There are hypotheses that say neutrinos could be the missing dark matter, but they are fringe. Once we have a reliable way of detecting them it would unlock all sorts of secrets of the very early universe - think microwave background radiation except with neutrinos.

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In

Dark matter must travel slowly compared to light. Neutrinos are fast.

But could neutrinos be dark energy?

erin

That seems a bit silly considering how much evidence we have for it. That's an awful lot of work to throw away for no great reason.

Queen HawlSera

Evidence such as?

erin

It's not my job to educate you on what could be a brief Google search. Stop being such a cynic. The gravitational lens distortion of distant galaxies is basically impossible without dark matter. Not to parrot the mantra of conspiracy theorists and cultists, but do your own research.

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In

The gravitational lens distortion of distant galaxies is basically impossible without dark matter.

... using our current model of the Universe.

Dark matter, and dark energy in particular, were introduced to make existing models fit the data.

SkyeStarfall , edited

And we will keep using it until we have a better model

Which we don't, for that matter

You're speaking as if scientists aren't constantly trying to create new, better models that fit the data better.

Allero

Seriously though.

I'm no great physicist, but dark matter and dark energy sound like the ether of our times.

Hypothetical constructs to pluck the holes of misunderstanding the Universe.

Queen HawlSera

Honestly same

RecallMadness

Israel better start to follow the Geneva convention and start building particle accelerators under their cities.

Acinonyx

mindbroken

THCDenton

The really wanna blow up the earth huh

irreticent

No.