Even Nuclear Detectors Need a Day Job!
Particle accelerators (like the famous Large Hadron Collider that found the even more famous Higgs particle a couple of years back) are ridiculously expensive. The Large Hadron Collider cost a jaw-dropping $9 billion (no, that’s not a typo)! How does anyone justify spending such huge amounts to learn more and more about even more obscure topics of physics that (let’s face it) most people neither understand nor care about? After all, what are the odds of ever discovering a new principle due to these detectors that would have any commercial application that would recover the money spent? Kate Scholberg, a scientist, has a partial answer. Talking of detectors built to check out particles emitted by a supernova (that’s when a star blows up, literally): “Your detector has to have a day job while it awaits a supernova.” In other words, do something besides what it was built for. Far removed from aims like understanding the universe, we have detectors to check far more earthly c...