CERN Large Hadron Collider big bang experiment

[zhao]

The troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future

that shit is totally nuts!!! i approve.

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

i remember that. my dad had to find a new job. but he said it was shut down because oil companies didn't want alternative energy sources to be found.

this is great:

Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

oh and this:

a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours.

 

[nomadthethird]

I laffed at this when I read it on another website:

There ought to be something akin to "Poe's Law" for physicists. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to tell whether or not a physicist is joking.

It would probably fit better as a corollary to Clark's third law, which states: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Law 3a: Any sufficiently complex/recent physics concept is indistinguishable from one that's been made up.

The problem with physicists sometimes (hehe, correct me if I'm wrong Mr. Tea), is that because math is all kinds of useful in figuring out how the omniverse (or whatever you want to call it) coheres, they want to rely on it all the time for everything. So then you get all of these crazy theories based on mathematically-based possibilities. But what's mathematically possible is not always mathematically probable, especially not in this particular world, given certain constraints.

When the atom bomb was being developed some cranks, I mean, physicists thought it was going to set off a chain reaction that would explode the whole world, too. Only it didn't.

 

[nomadthethird]

This one's also pretty good:

So is this the latest explanation for that breakdown last year?

This one ftw:

As to the whole Higgs' boson being abhorrent to nature, surely if we can make it "nature" already has, in the Big Bang and in later high-energy phenomena like black holes and gamma ray bursts. This seems to be the old "we'll make black holes and destroy the earth" objection, which is as easily answered with "if we can do it with the LHC, nature's done it thousands of times before."

 

[Mr. Tea]

Well yeah, I was gonna say: Higgses would have existed in great profusion in the very early universe, just after the Big Bang, and particles with energies many orders of magnitude higher than the energy that will (hopefully, maybe, perhaps) be achieved at the LHC smash into the Earth's upper atmosphere all the time. And for those particles to have those energies, still more energetic events must have created them in the first place. So really, the universe (and even our small corner of it) is and always has been full of Higgs bosons, along with whatever other exotic particles and phenomena some people have predicted could spell doom for us.

Secondly, collisions between elementary particles are explicitly quantum-mechanical by nature, which is to say probabilistic, so if there was some ghostly hand of chance trying to prevent Higgs bosons from being made, it could just wait until the LHC was up and running and then simply ensure that no Higgses were made, even though millions of them 'should' be made in a year of running at the nominal energy.

So the whole idea only makes any sense, to the extent that it makes any sense at all, if the universe had some particular prejudice agains Higgs bosons being created by human beings - which strikes me as just a teeensy bit anthropocentric, to say nothing of ludicrous.

(Nomad, AFAIK the possibility of igniting the Earth's atmosphere with a nuclear explosion was put forward by people who knew their stuff as a real possibility; it was certainly more plausible than the idea of particle physics experiments bringing about doomsday as it would certainly have been the first time in the Earth's history that a macroscopic plasma of that temperature and density was achieved. The individual particles involved in experiments or cosmic ray collisions have much higher energy that those produced in a nuclear blast, but it's only a few particles, as opposed to several kg of matter being suddenly raised to millions of degrees in a nanosecond.)

Edit:

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

Never underestimate the antipathy of the American Christian Right towards witchcra- I mean science!

 

[nomadthethird]

(Nomad, AFAIK the possibility of igniting the Earth's atmosphere with a nuclear explosion was put forward by people who knew their stuff as a real possibility; it was certainly more plausible than the idea of particle physics experiments bringing about doomsday as it would certainly have been the first time in the Earth's history that a macroscopic plasma of that temperature and density was achieved. The individual particles involved in experiments or cosmic ray collisions have much higher energy that those produced in a nuclear blast, but it's only a few particles, as opposed to several kg of matter being suddenly raised to millions of degrees in a nanosecond.)

I'm not surprised to hear this, and it does seem slightly more intuitive than the LHC business. It's just that lately I've been reading about all these cases of things (IVF being just one of many) where even prominent scientists claimed something would be an ethical disaster that would destroy humankind, and the apocalypse never came, while the technology thrives on today. James Watson spoke out against IVF originally...not like Billy Graham or some religious right wack job but James Watson!

There's a dis-ease with counter-intuitive "unnatural" scientific research that seems to run pretty deep, even deeper than some of us would want to admit, probably. (Including me.)

 

[massrock]

an ethical disaster that would destroy humankind

Chuckle. Unethical perhaps, but a disaster?

 

[nomadthethird]

I don't get it...

 

[massrock]

Don't worry, I'm not having a go. Just thought it (could be read as, for the purposes of humour) funny to describe destroying humanity as an ethical disaster. Shades of comedic understatement and/or pointed comment on the relative value of humanity, you see.

How we laughed.

 

[nomadthethird]

Oh right humanism...

Some people think we have an inalienable right to be here!

 

[massrock]

No just humour.

Some people recognise that casually and indirectly contradicting what is the default position in many contexts (whether you agree with it or not) can be read as deadpan funny.

 

[nomadthethird]

Sorry, I still don't get it.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Don't worry, I'm not having a go. Just thought it (could be read as, for the purposes of humour) funny to describe destroying humanity as an ethical disaster. Shades of comedic understatement and/or pointed comment on the relative value of humanity, you see.

How we laughed.

Never mind that, the PR would be a fucking nightmare.

You'd never live it down.

 

[nomadthethird]

This doesn't really have anything to do with the LHC but there was a cool physics-related article in the Times this week.

7.3 Billion Years Later, Einstein's Theory Prevails

 

[unpardag73]

My wife asked me..

"If they make the GOD particle, How will they know that it is HIS?"

I said...
"It will have HIS name written on it"

She asked "Which name?"

I said, "Maybe the one that no one knows about yet"

 

[nomadthethird]

Obviously it will say FSM on it and have a picture of a pirate.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Well it's been running for a couple of months now and the world hasn't ended yet.

Boooooring.......

 

[Mr. Tea]

Experiment at CERN's US rival Fermilab turns up tentative hint that there may be five Higgs bosons, rather than just one.

If this is confirmed, it'd be pretty strong evidence in favour not only of the Higgs mechanism (responsible for particle masses) but also of supersymmetry theory, which is the leading candidate for explaining most of the universe's dark matter.

LHC has some catching up to do...come on you lot, pull yer fingers out!

 

[grizzleb]

Experiment at CERN's US rival Fermilab turns up tentative hint that there may be five Higgs bosons, rather than just one.

If this is confirmed, it'd be pretty strong evidence in favour not only of the Higgs mechanism (responsible for particle masses) but also of supersymmetry theory, which is the leading candidate for explaining most of the universe's dark matter.

LHC has some catching up to do...come on you lot, pull yer fingers out!

Bear in mind the reasonable number of false alarms on this type of thing afaik. Is the LHC even at full capacity yet?

What happens if they do find the Higgs is what I want to know...

 

[Mr. Tea]

Bear in mind the reasonable number of false alarms on this type of thing afaik. Is the LHC even at full capacity yet?

Well yeah, sure, but by the looks of it this is being touted very much as a cautious "we may have found some evidence that...", rather than anything as concrete as a 'discovery'. I may have a read of the paper later (good of the beeb to include a link to it on the article page, I think).

The LHC is operating at half its design energy at the moment AFAIK, which is still several times the energy of the machine at Fermilab where this new evidence comes from. But a lot of the early work on any experiment like this consists mainly of calibrating the detectors.

What happens if they do find the Higgs is what I want to know...

The tiny minority of people in the world who understand or care what the Higgs mechanism is get very excited and open champagne, and an old Scottish fella gets a Nobel prize (perhaps posthumously, depending on how long it takes). To be honest I'm not sure I can give a good argument to justify the amount of money spent on stuff like this, though it's worth remembering that the LHC and all its experiments come to a total price tag of about £6b shared between many contries, vs. the estimated £100b for the UK's new Trident missiles, planes and warships...

 

[zhao]

all i gotta say is if i don't get trans-dimensional travel passes i want my money back.