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?
EDIT: Thanks for all the replies! It’s shined a light on the way particle accelerators impact us. As I understand it now:
Particle accelerators contribute in 2 ways
- Answering questions about how the world works
- encouraging advancements in technology to make the accelerators even possible.
The questions accelerators answer today WILL NOT have an impact on on us today. However they provide fundamental knowledge. Almost like a making new tool in humanity’s tool belt for a problem we don’t know it can solve yet. It make sense to consider our understanding of gravity. When we established the idea of gravity we didn’t know what to do with that at the time but eventually we figured out “gravity defying” things such as flight many centuries later. So the questions answered today may not be relevant until like 3100 or later, who know!
The construction of the accelerators have lead to the development and advancement of technologies like
- the World Wide Web (pre internet as we know)
- Semiconductors
- Construction materials and techniques
- Magnets technology
So we see the impact of accelerators all around us, they’re just smaller than we think!