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.

Probably a third hand story at this point but what I was told from someone that worked there for a long time is that at one point, the winch that raised the cesium source got jammed in the up position. Obviously this was a problem because no one could approach it. They brought in a marksman who somehow shot the winch or rope or whatever which dropped the source back into it's pig.

I will say that this experiment only exposed the plot of land to radiation, not contaminated it. Unless the source was broken or eroded, there would be no detectable radiation on that land once the source is sealed up.

That's not to say BNL hasn't contaminated the land, it is a Superfund site. They do a lot of medical experiments there (they invented the PET scan) but medical waste hasn't always been disposed of properly like now. They had "glass holes", a hole in the ground where you'd chuck in your contaminated labware.

You imply that experiment contaminated drinking, and other, water. How? Are you saying the Cs¹³⁷ leaked, and at concentration above that from fallout, say? Its γ-rays don't activate materials — I've used enough of them.

Oh yes, the Gamma Forest is shown in Brookhaven Spectrum!

Here's what it looked like back in 1967... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsuiLxcDuHY&t=925s

It may help alleviate your concerns somewhat to know that these scientists weren’t completely irresponsible: Cesium 137 is a gamma emitter, which means that it doesn’t make things around it radioactive (unlike most fissionable elements such as Uranium or Plutonium).

This was mentioned in one of the articles you linked!

> 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.

[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...

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)

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.

> 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.

[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...

Colliders have been the source of almost everything we know about the fundamental nature of reality. That makes them a fruitful scientific direction.

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.

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].

[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

this particular collider or particle accelerators in general? Cyclotrons are rather useful, for example.

Yeah, one of them is used by you right now. The Internet.

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

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.