Science

sort of shit they throw in the Fallout intro video with zero context

This kinda nails something that I feel like a lot of speculative media get wrong. I remember watching terminator salvation (random anecdote) and being sort of annoyed that the terminator factory still had regular doors, control panels, all of the stuff needed for human workers. It should have been more like a “dark factory”, I guess I could hand wave it that they were reusing an older space or whatever, but basically the insistence on this alien/powerful thing that was still oriented around purely human scale design.

This object kinda breaks that, and suggests a vaster, non-human oriented purpose (even though, in this case it’s exactly the opposite). Basically just dig the aesthetic/scale. If you weren’t already terrified of your cancer diagnosis, this thing would certainly finish the job of asking you feel small and insignificant…

Very cool photo!

~~I'm not certain, but I think this is actually a port out of the synchrotron and not the accelerator itself, which I think is a much larger building behind that wall~~ (wrong, it really was very small and fit inside that thing). Synchrotrons accelerate the electrons in a loop, where every time they go around a corner they emit x-rays, which are what comes out of that structure in the photograph. Today they run at about 40-80x higher energy than that one (2.5 to 7 giga electron volts) and are a few hundred metres to a kilometer or two in circumference. ~~I imagine that one could be much smaller, but I'm sure it was still much bigger than that room.~~

Today the actual accelerator part of it looks something more like this (this picture is of the one in Spain):

And the x-rays come out of the other side of the wall from that big purple thing.

This photo makes me feel very strange, like I'm looking at the elephant foot from Chernobyl, or some cosmic horror, idk. But I like it, very cool. I want to find this thing wherever they mothballed it in person.