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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.

> 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...

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

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.

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.

https://physicsworld.com/a/what-have-particle-accelerators-e...

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

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.

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