China Plans Particle Colliders That Would Dwarf CERN's LHC 219
ananyo (2519492) writes Scientists at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, working with international collaborators, are planning to build a "Higgs factory" by 2028 — a 52-kilometer underground ring that would smash together electrons and positrons. Collisions of these fundamental particles would allow the Higgs boson to be studied with greater precision than at the much smaller (27 km) Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Physicists say that the proposed US$3-billion machine is within technological grasp and is considered conservative in scope and cost. But China hopes that it would also be a stepping stone to a next-generation collider — a super proton-proton collider — in the same tunnel. The machine would be a big leap for China. The country's biggest current collider is just 240 meters in circumference.
How many broken parts trying to spin up? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cern had how many set backs while trying to power the thing up in the early stages of testing? With all the corruption China has I wonder how this will compare.
The flavour of sour grapes (Score:5, Insightful)
Cern had how many set backs while trying to power the thing up in the early stages of testing? With all the corruption China has I wonder how this will compare.
Of course CERN had problems - this is not engineering, but science. The big difference between the two being that you call it engineering, when you know in advance how to do, and science when you don't. No doubt, the first time a simple van-der-Graf accellerator was built, they had to overcome a number of problems; now, it is something you'd let a student do, because all the technical problems have been ironed out. And when/if China builds this new cyclotron, they will run into a large number of technical problems; of course they will. No need to start constructing fables about "all the corruption"; all that says is that you are suffering from petty envy.
The flavour of sour grapes (Score:2, Insightful)
DEAD WRONG! When you have to figure out how to do it, it is engineering. When you can read a manual and know how to do it, it's IKEA. Engineering is building things to solve problems, science is about knowledge NOT building things. Of course, engineering uses science to engineer its solutions, and science uses engineering to acquire more knowledge. In any case, the LHC is a product of engineering, the conclusions after analyzing the data it gathers are science. I know because I'm an engineer with a Ph.D.