Comment by T-A

Comment by T-A a day ago

2 replies

> 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.

dwaltrip 20 hours ago

Isn’t one of the limitations to transistor density quantum tunneling?

  • dgfl 19 hours ago

    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.