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posted by mrpg on Friday March 17 2017, @02:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the X-ray:origins dept.

Set high on a mountain plain in China, an ambitious observatory will offer a unique perspective on the origins of cosmic rays, high-energy particles that rain down on Earth. Construction has started on the project, which will probe, for the first time, ultra-high-energy γ-rays — bursts of radiation thought to be produced alongside cosmic rays in our Galaxy, but whose origins are easier to track.

The 1.3-square-kilometre site near Daocheng in Sichuan, close to Tibet, received the go-ahead in January, after an environmental report convinced the government that construction would not harm the threatened white-lipped deer (Cervus albirostris) and other animals in a nearby nature reserve. Now, contractors are installing infrastructure for the 1.2-billion-yuan (US$174-million) Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO).

"This will be the leading project to clarify questions of cosmic-ray physics," says Giuseppe Di Sciascio, a particle physicist at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Rome. Di Sciascio, along with researchers from a number of countries, including Switzerland, Russia and Thailand, hopes to collaborate on the project. Chief among the physics questions that LHAASO will investigate is what accelerates cosmic rays — charged particles such as protons or atomic nuclei — to such high energies. Some cosmic rays that hit Earth have energies millions of times greater than the energies produced by the most powerful human-made particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists have proposed certain celestial phenomena, such as black holes or supernovae, as origins, but no one has confirmed this conclusively.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18 2017, @05:20AM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 18 2017, @05:20AM (#480767) Journal

    The evidence is all around you, in things we all use that were originally based on pure & applied math and/or theoretical & experimental physics. Hell, George Boole had no idea that playing with 0's and 1's would eventually let khallow post on SN.

    All of which had near future application. While Boole's specific work never was implemented in a practical situation, mechanical calculators, analogue computers, etc were developed from that sort of research and widely used.

    If there is a gap in physics and it can possibly be filled by this observatory, I'm all for it, whoever puts in the effort to get it funded and whoever winds up paying for it. I'm happy that a tiny fraction of my USA taxes funds other similarly "short term useless" physics in USA.

    Notice what is missing here. Any consideration of the cost of the experiment. If we have this hole in our knowledge, then the solution is to plug it up with money without regard either to the cost of the experiment or the opportunity costs of the other things that could have been done with that money. Even if we outright ignore the non-science needs, there is an unlimited variety of science that could be done. And there's a limited amount of resources in a society. That means that one always has to pick and choose what science to do - even when science is the most important priority.

    Both bob_super and yourself have made the mistake of ignoring the economics here. We can't plug every gap in our knowledge. We simply don't have the resources to do so. So when bob_super goes on about how important it is to conduct useless experiments (under the straw man of not immediately profitable), I have to wonder just how committed he really is to science.

    Another matter here is the cost of the project. $174 million is not much by developed world standards, but it is more than an order of magnitude more expensive than a similar project [nature.com] a quarter the size completed in Mexico in 2014. At this point, I wonder where the kickbacks will be going. That excess money will be going somewhere, but not into scientific research.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @12:12PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @12:12PM (#481455)

    Resources aren't infinite, but somehow the self-proclaimed defenders of fiscal responsibility are not batting an eye to dump many tens of billions on a "great wall" that won't work, but it does appease the ego of the toddler-in-chief (these grand economic geniuses will also tell you that you're going to balance the budget and reduce the deficit by cutting paltry amounts out of discretionary spending). You can take the money that this one, very stupid and ineffective solution will cost, and it would pay the R&D budgets of all the agencies for the better part of a decade. A few million dollars is HUGE to ordinary people, but is a paltry drop in the bucket when compared to things that can make a real fiscal difference. For instance, it is costing about $60M a MONTH to keep the First Lady in New York (not to mention how much of that goes DIRECTLY in to the President's pocket), and it is costing almost that much for the President to go to his grand resort EVERY WEEKEND. If you want to cut millions of dollars out of a welfare program, at least be a man and live by example; President Carter said "turn down your thermostat and put on a sweater", and you know what, that's exactly what he did at the White House.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 20 2017, @02:36PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 20 2017, @02:36PM (#481506) Journal

      but somehow the self-proclaimed defenders of fiscal responsibility are not batting an eye to dump many tens of billions on a "great wall" that won't work

      Because you aren't supporting that project. I oppose that as well. You miss the point of the funding game. The purpose is to create sacred cows to protect spending like on the "great wall". Because anyone who will cut the funding of the big wasteful projects will also cut the funding of the wasteful research projects you happen to support or benefit from.

      This is particularly the case with stuff like Social Security/public employee pension funds, and public health care programs. Roughly half the US budget (including "off budget") is in that sort of program. Any serious budget cutter has to deal with those as well. Either risk pissing off a huge number of voters, or fail to make a dent in the US budget. These programs are an ongoing ugly bribe to the voter to look the other way while tens of billions of dollars go poof.