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:
Effective field theory is a general approach to integrate out degrees of freedom which are not relevant to the problem at hand. Trivial example: if you are trying to build an aqueduct (characteristic scale: meters and up), you can safely ignore the inner workings of individual water molecules (characteristic scale: tenths of nanometers), or even the fact that molecules exist at all.
In terms of interaction energies, once you have an effective field theory which demonstrably works well up to some scale E, you know that whatever new physics you may find by colliding things at energies larger than E will not significantly affect physics at energies lower than E.
Thanks to the LHC and its predecessors, E is now upwards of 1 TeV, or equivalently a spatial resolution of 1 attometer; a billionth of a nanometer, less than a thousandth of a proton's diameter. Anyone arguing that this still is not enough, and that a larger accelerator may reveal new physics with wonderful technological properties, must be planning to go live inside a proton.
> Knowing which ideas are closer to the truth must be helpful to people who work on nano scale stuff, like chips so fine that quantum effect are considerable.
Sorry, no. That's solid state physics on inter-atomic scales: tenths of nanometers, a handful of electronvolts. The LHC probes physics at the electroweak scale: hundreds of billions of electronvolts, billionths of nanometers. It has zero relevance to anything of practical use.
In a few cases and in a simplistic sense, yes. But the point of the comment you’re replying to still stands completely. Quantum tunneling is nothing exotic and we have plenty of devices exploiting the principle (e.g. tunnel diodes). It was basically fully understood the moment the Schrödinger equation appeared.
These accelerators are as large as they are to try and find mismatches between theory and experiment. And even then, we can explain virtually every experiment that the LHC has conducted. If we did find something unexpected with one of these colliders, it would only really apply to experiments made in the collider. Particle physics is irrelevant for everyday stuff since we already fully understand everything involved.
> Greenland can declare independence on its own at any time
And wants to keep it that way. Considering what happened the last time secession was attempted in the US, and the legal aftermath which ruled it unconstitutional,
> there is always an uncertainty from having to depend on a foreign government
So "uncertainty" is now a valid reason to invade allies? Because maybe some day they might no longer want to be allied? Put it that way and it seems more like a "psychological need". Oh, wait...
> Annexation would also simplify US access to Greenland's natural resources
Implied in that statement is that it would allow mining companies to ignore what the natives want. We've seen that movie before (and so have the Greenlanders):
Personnel: 150. That is the measure of how important the US actually thinks Greenland is for its security. Needless to say, those 150 Americans are not there to defend Greenland; they are there to operate a US Space Force remote tracking station which provides early warning if something bad heads toward the continental US over the North Pole. You want the Greenlanders to pay for that?
> Greenland a) is inevitably going to gain independence—every single poll for decades has shown this
What the polls show is that the Greenlanders would like to become independent. They've had the option to do so since 2009, and they have not, because they know that Greenland
> b) is completely unable to function on its own as a bona fide independent country
Exactly. Now explain how you reconcile your (a) with your (b). Don't forget to explain why they would want to do so if they have "the best of all worlds now", which you claimed just before enunciating (a).
> I don't believe that the US would invade Greenland militarily; it will likely buy it
> But let's say that the US does, and NATO dissolves.
Thus ending the security architecture which has kept Europe from blowing up the world a third time for nearly eight decades. In place of which you propose to put what?
> It comes down to net benefits. Would owning Greenland be more valuable for American national security, than the current NATO status quo of the US being willing to to accept its own cities being nuked if Russia invades Western Europe?
Quite obviously not. Let's say the US takes Greenland by force. First, this will happen:
Second, Russia would immediately follow the example and seize Svalbard while the West is busy tearing itself apart. And of course create a security zone around
Murmansk; as you surely know, the Russian Northern Fleet's main base is less than 30 miles from the (current) Norwegian border:
Another little thing which would be taken care of quickly would be that corridor to Kaliningrad which they've been wanting since their latest imperial collapse:
At this point you have Denmark in a shooting war with the US; and Norway, Poland, the three Baltic states and most likely Finland + Sweden in a shooting war with Russia; the perfect moment for China to make its move on Taiwan, and for North Korea to "help" by attacking South Korea (incidentally seizing or destroying 90% of the world's compute production capacity).
Congratulations, you just started WW III.
And all because of a "psychological need" which could only be satisfied by turning half a billion friends into enemies who will never forget, let alone forgive, your betrayal.
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...
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