raptop changed the topic of #kspacademia to: https://gist.github.com/pdn4kd/164b9b85435d87afbec0c3a7e69d3e6d | Dogs are cats. Spiders are cat interferometers. | Космизм сегодня! | Document well, for tomorrow you may get mauled by a ネコバス. | <UmbralRaptor> egg|nomz|egg: generally if your eyes are dewing over, that's not the weather. | <ferram4> I shall beat my problems to death with an engineer. | We can haz pdf
<mofh>
"Separation is easy: Switzerland is good at digging tunnels,"
<mofh>
Huh, TIL Phobos is about 1/10th of the mass of the continental crust encompassing the area of Switzerland.
<SnoopJeDi>
not as good as Texas >:)
<SnoopJeDi>
(the SSC tunnel is AFAIK still the world record advance rate for a bore of that size)
<SnoopJeDi>
mofh, so uh, I dunno if you listen to NPR, but today's Morning Edition features the pianist Lang Lang playing "Chopsticks" to show off how trite music still has lots of room for expression.
<egg|work|egg>
mofh: flyswat
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<UmbralRaptor>
Would tidal forces cause problems if we constructed a circular collider around Phobos?
<SnoopJeDi>
They cause "problems" in terrestrial accelerators
<SnoopJeDi>
But the biggest problem with such an accelerator would probably be much higher backgrounds?
<SnoopJeDi>
and uh, by tidal forces I mean diurnal stuff. It's not a huge problem, but it's definitely something we're aware of as a noise channel
<whitequark>
do you work at an accelerator?
<whitequark>
("we")
<SnoopJeDi>
whitequark, not at a facility, but I study accelerator physics yea
<whitequark>
ah
<SnoopJeDi>
my lab is magnet building by pedigree but we've pivoted a lot in the time I've been here because DOE has more or less completely shut down magnet R&D in the US
<SnoopJeDi>
whitequark, you might get a kick out of this, though...we have the only SSC dipoles that were manufactured: https://i.imgur.com/YEYRlaA.jpg
<SnoopJeDi>
they are thankfully no longer at the front of the building as in that picture. it was wholly depressing to walk past them every morning
<SnoopJeDi>
they're rotting on concrete now but uhhh because nobody except my advisor has cared about them for ~30 years
<SnoopJeDi>
it's a shame they weren't sealed up or something, I've been told they used to have George H.W. Bush's signature and a few others from first assembly.
<SnoopJeDi>
but those are long gone if they were even there to begin with
<whitequark>
wow, they're old
<SnoopJeDi>
we have a bunch of crap that was scattered to the wind from when the project was killed
<whitequark>
"the end of the need to prove the supremacy of American science with the collapse of the Soviet Union"
<SnoopJeDi>
mmhmm
<SnoopJeDi>
The US and USSR competed pretty aggressively over accelerator accomplishments, and Novosibirsk is still one of the major attractors in the accelerator world
<SnoopJeDi>
and while the two of them duked it out, CERN created the first beam-beam collisions with the ISR, the first use of stochastic cooling, and by the time the US realized they'd slipped way behind it was almost too late. The SSC was basically the last change to stay relevant in the hadron collider world, and they blew it
<SnoopJeDi>
but tl;dr lab politics happened, they decided to change dipole magnet designs mid-stream, failed to design something, and by that time had wasted enough money and time that Congress had really no choice but to kill the project.
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<whitequark>
oh.
<SnoopJeDi>
IIRC that article quotes Michio Kaku and this is like weirdly one of the only matters where I see eye-to-eye with him
<egg>
!seen mofh
<galois>
egg: I last saw mofh at 2019-04-02 - 15:17:09 in here, saying Huh, TIL Phobos is about 1/10th of the mass of the continental crust encompassing the area of Switzerland.