This is in preparation for starting construction work on the Electron-Ion-Collider (EIC) which will use the same tunnel and experiment locations.
gnufx•Feb 7, 2026
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.
phongn•Feb 8, 2026
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.
webdevver•Feb 7, 2026
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.
pfdietz•Feb 7, 2026
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.
tehnub•Feb 7, 2026
I don't think that argument holds up. See quantum mechanics.
pfdietz•Feb 7, 2026
Quantum mechanics is demonstrable on a lab bench (or smaller), so your counterargument is completely wrong.
Any useful consequence of a physical effect is, in effect, an experiment that could test that effect. So if the smallest test is with a machine the size of a small country, no device using the effect can be smaller.
tehnub•Feb 8, 2026
They’re using big things to do experiments. Maybe they discover some new physical effect. How do you know that that effect couldn’t be demonstrated in some smaller scale experiment after it’s understood better?
pfdietz•Feb 8, 2026
Can you tell me of an example where that has happened? I can't think of any.
demonstrably works up to the electroweak scale, which requires an LHC-sized machine to probe.
lefra•Feb 8, 2026
The first working transistor was centimeter-scale, now billions of them fit in that space.
The first useful internal combustion engines were room-sized, now they fit on a moped.
The truck-sized hole in your argument is talking about "the smallest test". First discoveries/demonstrations of interesting phenomenons don't typically happen at the smallest scale (why would they?).
T-A•Feb 8, 2026
The first working transistors and engines were of the size which happened to be most convenient to work with. They could then be shrunk because fundamental physical limits to their size were far below human scale. Their inventors were neither constrained by nor interested in those fundamental physical limits. They were inventors, not scientists.
In contrast, a particle accelerator like the LHC is designed from the outset to explore physics at a given energy scale at the lowest possible cost. Shrink it any further and it will no longer work. Despite decades of attempts to come up with alternative designs, when time comes to draw up plans for a successor capable of pushing to even higher energy, it's just more of the same:
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.
pfdietz•Feb 8, 2026
You are mistating my argument. An honest reading, where you try to read what I wrote in the way that makes the most sense, would have concluded I was talking about large scale, not small scale.
AIorNot•Feb 7, 2026
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
pfdietz•Feb 7, 2026
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.
micromacrofoot•Feb 7, 2026
We absolutely can, and I reckon we will... this is like a fraction of a percent of science funding which is a fraction of a percent of GDP, we spend more on maintaining warheads we can't use
10% of the US military budget for one year could build a 100km collider, RHIC is 4km
pfdietz•Feb 7, 2026
What a nonsense argument. Spending like this has to be justified on its own merits, not because there is some other bad spending. The argument you are trying to make would justify spending on almost anything.
micromacrofoot•Feb 7, 2026
The point is that there's so much bad spending that by comparison this is practically nothing to shake a stick at, and it produces actual science.
pfdietz•Feb 7, 2026
Repeating a bad argument doesn't transmute it into a good argument. I already explained why your argument is invalid. Please reconsider your dogmatic and irrational support for this kind of spending.
SiempreViernes•Feb 7, 2026
No, you just asserted that you think existing arguments are invalid, then accused a person who disregarded your assertion of being "dogmatic".
Izikiel43•Feb 7, 2026
It's not a question of "can", it's a question of "should".
No one knows what discoveries can happen and what the spillover from them could be in the future.
In essence, it's a bet, a moonshot.
mmooss•Feb 7, 2026
How can you look at current and recent US science and call it 'entitlement'? Have there been larger cuts anywhere in modern history?
pfdietz•Feb 7, 2026
If you think you are entitled to any amount larger than zero, you are showing entitlement.
MSFT_Edging•Feb 7, 2026
It's not an entitlement if you're paying into the tax base.
I'm somehow entitled to others receiving corporate bailouts, entitled to massive military waste spending, and entitled to seeing the "victims" of Havana Syndrome receiving free healthcare for life.
Yet I am not entitled to this money going towards research for the greater good of humanity?
Insanity•Feb 7, 2026
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.
davrosthedalek•Feb 8, 2026
Why past tense? BNL will host the EIC, and SBU is going full steam.
DetroitThrow•Feb 8, 2026
FYI the lab isn't shutting down. Glad you appreciate it's achievements though!
mindslight•Feb 8, 2026
You were not nearly harsh enough.
Keyframe•Feb 7, 2026
this particular collider or particle accelerators in general? Cyclotrons are rather useful, for example.
GreyZephyr•Feb 7, 2026
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.
gnufx•Feb 7, 2026
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.
atoav•Feb 7, 2026
Yeah, one of them is used by you right now. The Internet.
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?
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.
slashdave•Feb 8, 2026
SLAC had a collider
mgibbs63•Feb 7, 2026
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)
gnufx•Feb 7, 2026
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].
> 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.
Colliders have been the source of almost everything we know about the fundamental nature of reality. That makes them a fruitful scientific direction.
mmooss•Feb 7, 2026
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.
thesmtsolver2•Feb 8, 2026
This is not a capitalism issue. During the communist revolution, scientists were persecuted if their work was too "intellectual" and didn't have immediate use.
The Church of Capitalism (as opposed to small-c capitalism) is the ideology of here and now; that's what I was talking about. The capitalist-communist dichotomy - a favorite of ideologues in both groups - is not something I was referring to.
phongn•Feb 8, 2026
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.
slashdave•Feb 8, 2026
> 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
tahoeskibum•Feb 7, 2026
How time passes! I remember touring the RHIC tunnels back in 1999 when it was being made.
syntaxing•Feb 7, 2026
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.
ephimetheus•Feb 7, 2026
sPHENIX uses software that we’ve worked on at CERN to do some of their reconstruction!
frob•Feb 8, 2026
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.
divbzero•Feb 8, 2026
Thanks for contributing to research.
What was the “experimental season”? Why was there an experimental season vs. running RHIC all year?
awjlogan•Feb 8, 2026
Maintainance and upgrades. These big shared facilities they are shutdown regularly and researchers work flat out while they're up.
scheme271•Feb 8, 2026
Doesn't power costs also affect shutdown periods? I know that CERN would shutdown in winter due to increased power costs and power demands around then. I suppose something similar may affect accelerators in the US.
fyredge•Feb 8, 2026
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.
vvpan•Feb 8, 2026
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.
7 Comments
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.
The problem is that fundamental physics has moved too far beyond the scales where we operate.
Any useful consequence of a physical effect is, in effect, an experiment that could test that effect. So if the smallest test is with a machine the size of a small country, no device using the effect can be smaller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_field_theory
demonstrably works up to the electroweak scale, which requires an LHC-sized machine to probe.
The first useful internal combustion engines were room-sized, now they fit on a moped.
The truck-sized hole in your argument is talking about "the smallest test". First discoveries/demonstrations of interesting phenomenons don't typically happen at the smallest scale (why would they?).
In contrast, a particle accelerator like the LHC is designed from the outset to explore physics at a given energy scale at the lowest possible cost. Shrink it any further and it will no longer work. Despite decades of attempts to come up with alternative designs, when time comes to draw up plans for a successor capable of pushing to even higher energy, it's just more of the same:
https://home.cern/science/accelerators/future-circular-colli...
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.
(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
10% of the US military budget for one year could build a 100km collider, RHIC is 4km
I'm somehow entitled to others receiving corporate bailouts, entitled to massive military waste spending, and entitled to seeing the "victims" of Havana Syndrome receiving free healthcare for life.
Yet I am not entitled to this money going towards research for the greater good of humanity?
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.
[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
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...
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)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_Radiation_Source
2. https://www.ukri.org/publications/new-light-on-science-socio...
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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinking_Old_Ninth
https://www.culturalrevolutionceramics.com/object-details/do...
The DOE hoped to repeat that success in the 1990s with the much larger SSC, but it was cancelled.
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
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.
What was the “experimental season”? Why was there an experimental season vs. running RHIC all year?