
The Theory of American Decline - IAmWorried
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_decline
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djaque
I research particle accelerators. Even over just the past five years that I
have been attending international conferences, there has been a broad feeling
that the US is no longer the best place in the world for what I study.

In particular, China's budget for accelerator R&D literally has another zero
at the end of it compared to the US. They are building their own competing
facilities to the ones in the US such as x-ray free electron lasers,
synchrotron light sources, and ion colliders. In my own speciality, china has
probably one of the top three groups in the world for ultrafast electron
diffraction.

I have also seen researchers who came to the US from china return to their
home country to take advantage of the better funding situation. Interestingly,
we in the US are prohibited from collaborating with them because accelerators
are considered advanced technology related to national defense. With how fast
they are growing, I absolutely believe that they could become the center of
scientific research for the next few decades.

Plus, outside of China, the US is competing with top groups across Europe.
Speaking with some of those researchers, people just are not incentivized to
make the trip to the US and set up their research here anymore.

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rajlego
What kind of long term applications do particle accelerators bring?

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djaque
Most of the public is only familiar with colliders like the large hadron
collider at CERN. However, most accelerators are much more common/practical
than what is going on there.

In terms of research impact, accelerators are our most powerful probes of
matter. If you're a chemist, a materials scientist, a biologist, a medical
researcher, or any other number of specialists, then you probably want to use
an accelerator for your work. Think of them as kind of the foundation of all
modern research going on in these fields. It's to the point that one in three
Nobel prizes in medicine, chemistry, and physics in the past ~fifty years
benefited from an accelerator in some way.

If you want to know what a protein looks like, it's done at an accelerator. If
you want to get time resolved structural information about a chemical
reaction, accelerators are how it's done. If you're a company or the military
and want to optimize a new super-alloy, you do that at a particle accelerator.
Most modern research where you want to know what matter looks like on an
atomic scale is done at particle accelerators. Not just for pure science, but
for industry.

I work at a synchrotron light source and our facility is over-subscribed to
the point where we only accept something like 10% of users. Part of that is
also industry users who travel from across the world to our facility. During
the Covid-19 shutdown, my facility was still operating and being used to study
candidate treatments and vaccines.

Besides R&D, accelerators are used in industry, medicine, and
security/defense. Food sterilization is done with accelerators. Future
semiconductor fabs are expected to rely on accelerators to produce the XUV
light needed for advanced photolithography. Most modern ICs use ion
implantation at particle accelerators. Accelerators are being studied for
fusion/fission power generation. They're used to treat cancer and are also a
predominant source of some medical radio-isotopes.

The reason accelerators are important and every major region in the world has
one or is building one(including unexpected places like Africa and South
America) is because a surprising amount of research and development across
many fields can not be done without them.

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tomekf
Very interesting info. Never thought it has so much use outside science at
CERN.

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ralusek
America needs to start investing seriously in infrastructure and research.
Infrastructure and research are both essentially social safety nets that also
happen to make the country better.

Look what infrastructure spending has done for Asia.

