‘Factory of discoveries’: China thinks big for massive science projects to explain the universe
- How large-scale research facilities helped China transform from making shoes and shirts to discovering cosmic ray and pulsars
- Not all Chinese scientists believe the huge projects are worth the mammoth expense
Never have there been so many of these costly, shiny, futuristic-seeming gadgets in one place – 1,188 muon detectors, 4,901 electromagnetic particle detectors, 78,000 square metres of water Cherenkov detector array and 18 wide-angle gamma-ray telescopes.
On Monday, researchers from Lhaaso announced the detection of the brightest cosmic light that, by the law of physics, should not exist. More importantly, Lhaaso helped Chinese astronomers discover in less than a year over a dozen mysterious sources in our galaxy that were constantly producing impossibly energetic cosmic rays known as “Oh-My-God” particles.
“It opens a window to a brand new world,” said Cao Zhen, lead scientist of the Lhaaso project.
Not long ago, to most people outside, China was a world factory for making cheap products. Even within the country, there remains a popular saying: “We make 800 million shirts to buy a Boeing jet plane”.
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Many of these facilities were built on a massive scale to become, as one Beijing-based physicist described, a “factory of discoveries”.
With a 500-metre-wide radio dish, Fast has discovered more than 400 pulsars, more than the amount discovered in the same period by all American and European telescopes combined.
This month, researchers with China’s National Astronomical Observatories reported that some pulsars, or dying stars beaming like a beacon, had a spinning behaviour that, again, could not be explained by known physical equations.
Wu Xuebing, a professor of astronomy at Peking University, said China had long followed the West in discovering the universe. Astronomy, which rarely yielded an economic return, was close to a luxury for Chinese researchers, Wu said, adding that astronomers could previously only follow the footsteps of others and, with lesser telescopes in hand, hardly glimpsed what their colleagues in rich countries saw.
“There is a wind of change,” Wu said.
“Thanks to Fast, Lhaaso and other large research platforms recently built or soon to come, the landscape of Chinese astronomical research is changing rapidly. The cosmic ray and pulsar discoveries are just the beginning. There will be many more exciting works in the future,” Wu said.
“Great hardware leads to great discoveries.”
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The United States is the first country in the world to conduct research on hypersonics, or the physics of speed five times faster than sound. Travelling in the air at such high speed defies many known physical laws of aerodynamics.
Because of these gaps in knowledge, many experiments by the US and its allies ended up in failure, leaving hypersonic weapons largely a concept on paper for decades.
JF22, a much bigger and more powerful hypersonic tunnel, is under construction in Huairou district in northern Beijing for the development of space planes that could one day take off from an ordinary airport and dock on a space station, among other things.
Most Chinese scientists agree that big research facilities will lead to new discoveries. But not all of them support a large-scale project because of the cost.
“The party is over,” Yang said on numerous occasions, insisting that the golden age of high-energy physics had gone, and the money for building the Higgs factory could better be used in other areas.
Although the super collider remained in debate, most big science projects proposed by Chinese researchers have been approved by the Chinese government. One of the best known example is the world’s first quantum satellite and longest communications network on Earth.
Quantum science studies the strange physics of subatomic particles, but the construction of large-scale facilities allowed Chinese scientists the opportunity to discover phenomena that could never be observed in a laboratory, such as the interaction of two entangled particles between the Earth and moon.
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According to the National Development and Reform Commission, the central government agency overseeing infrastructure projects, more than 50 large-scale research facilities have been built in recent years or are under construction across the country.
To Li Ran, an astronomer in Beijing, the biggest excitement to come is the China Space Station Optical Survey, a massive space telescope that can take a picture 300 times bigger than the legendary Hubble space telescope.
Using these images, astronomers would better understand dark energy and dark matter, among other puzzles of the universe.
“If the Hubble telescope has opened a corner of the universe for us with high-definition images, the Chinese telescope will bring the high-definition images of the entire universe to mankind,” he said.
