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Science

The Next Big Particle Accelerator 257

Posted by Hemos from the the-next-great-thing dept.
Guinnessy writes "This year more than a thousand physicists gathered for three weeks at Snowmass Village, in the Colorado Rockies near Aspen, to talk about the future of particle physics in the US. Physics Today has a report on the meeting which says that the community should build a 500-GeV electron-positron linear collider. That's powerful enough to make mini black holes."
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The Next Big Particle Accelerator More

The Next Big Particle Accelerator

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  • Power! (Score:3, Funny)

    by rf600r ( 236081 ) on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @01:24PM (#2378814) Homepage
    Cool. They can zap every remaining bit of power that California has left to make a black hole for a nanosecond.
    • And ladies and gentlemen... here we have a real live NON READER... they don't even know what country the thing will be in... but you'd have to read the article for that...
      • There are three or four sites discussed in the article- one is california (also japan, midwest, fermilab)
        • Yeah, but I think we can eliminate California. Would you build something like this in California and risk losing all your work in the next ________ (A: Earthquake B: Fire C: Power Outage D: Writer's/Actor's Guild Strike)

          Fermilab or CERN makes the most sense to me.
    • Finaly, something that pulls more power than my dual AMD motherboard. Sheesh..

  • Yeah, next thing you know... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 ) on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @01:30PM (#2378862) Homepage Journal
    So they build a 500-GeV electron-positron linear collider. The next you know Michael Jackson will buy one to sleep in because it makes him younger.

  • Probably won't get built (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kaszeta ( 322161 ) <rich@kaszeta.org> on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @01:31PM (#2378865) Homepage

    Unfortunately, I doubt that it will get built.

    Like the SCSC before it, it will end up on the cutting floor of a supposedly cost-conscious Congress.

    I doubted that the current Congress would've approved something like this to begin with. With the current state of economy, and the fact that eventually we'll have to clean up the giant mess that the recent anti-terrorism and airline support bills have made of our budget, the outlook is grim.

    Hopefully they won't waste a lot of money partially building it and then abandon it like the SCSC.

    • I doubted that the current Congress would've approved something like this to begin with. With the current state of economy, and the fact that eventually we'll have to clean up the giant mess that the recent anti-terrorism and airline support bills have made of our budget, the outlook is grim.

      Remember that the congress who killed (and then buried) SCSC was a Democratic Congress. I had the opportunity to speak to a physicist in '93 who actually attended the hearings. His take on the whole deal was that the D's were pretty openly 'punishing' Texas for voting Republican in '92 by yanking all its 'pork-barrel' projects.
      There was never a cost/benifit analysis or any mention of science. It was all politics and greed.

      The SCSC development pumped millions into both Lubbock and Amarillo economies. It took quite a while for both those economies to recover from its burial... and it was literally buried. They filled in the trenches dug for the contstruction so that it could not easily be ressurected. While I think Clinton was a fairly decent president in terms of job performance, he rubberstamped this one. This kind of behavior got the D's very firmly ejected from both Senate and House in '94.
      • . . . that killed the SCC was that it required rebuilding Fermilab first. (It's a step up system, you need the smaller one to inject particles into the bigger.) This was 25% or more of the budget. When killed it was at 40% completed. Add the two, and you get 65%, enough that few politicians will kill the project.
        • What the hell are you talking about? The SSC was supposed to be in Texas. Fermilab is in Chicago. How on earth could Fermilab be used as a step up system? Furthermore, what do you mean "rebuilding Fermilab"? Fermilab is built, was never unbuilt, and is running just fine.
    • Unfortunately, I doubt that it will get built.

      The article, though, brings up a good point: why do we need this? One speaker told the audience that they need to convince other scientists WHY the money should be spent on this machine. In other words, what are the practical uses? Why should we care about discovering new particles?

      And before someone replies with the "science isn't supposed to be concerned with uses, only with knowledge" argument, let me remind you that $5,000,000,000 has a LOT of zeroes behind it. This money could fund a LOT of other scientific endeavours that are just as important as this one (important in the sense that knowledge is important).

      So when deciding which projects should be funded by the governments of the world, it is only natural that the people paying for it should ask why they are paying for it. If there are no forseeable (or even potential) practical uses, why should that project be funded rather than another one?

      • Normally I would defend spending lots of cash on collider projects, but in this case, I think you have a very good point. As far as science research goes, that is truely an ass-load of money. I'd rather see it go to other projects and save the big-ass collider for later, perhaps the cost will come down as technology progresses and the designers get more crafty about blowing shit up.

        On the other hand, if the money doesn't go to the collider, it'll probably be sent to poverty level baby factories on welfair, in which case, I'd rather see the collider.

      • $5,000,000,000 has a LOT of zeroes behind it. This money could fund a LOT of other scientific endeavours that are just as important as this one (important in the sense that knowledge is important).

        As important as this could all be, you are very correct.

        How much money did the gov't approve for nanotechnology? I think $400 million or so, maybe less.

        If all of this money for the particle accelerator was funneled into developing nanotech, it surely could help push things much farther along. I feel the development of nanotech is much more important than the accelerator at this time - the accelerator can be built later on for cheaper if other technologoies are built up now.

        • You're comparing apples and oranges:

          Nanotech: $400e6 dollars/year x 12 years = $4.8 billion dollars

          $5e9 dollar over 12 years = $5 billion dollars

          I'm not suggesting that this changes your argument, but when you are making an argument based on comparing "dollar investments", you need to compare the right dollar amounts. I'm actually opposed to building such a machine in the US, but for other reasons.

      • Unfortunately, I doubt that it will get built

      Why unfortunately? I know that compared to the NSA or the defence budget, it's just noise, and the pursuit of knowledge is great and all. However, I'm just an ignorant taxpayer, so (accepting that I'll get modded as a troll) can anyone explain what material benefits we've got out of the accelerators that we've already built, and what we expect to get out of this one?

      • Material benefits? Bah. We, as humans, want to know how the universe works. This is the same quest that scientists and theologians have been on for millennia. I am not content to accept "I push the ball and it rolls over there, I don't know why...it just does". We want to know WHY. Where did we come from? Why are we here? How did the universe start? How will it end?

        It's also hard to relate the "Higgs boson" to the above questions in explaining it all to lay persons. Ultimately, we want to know why the universe is the way it is, and part of that question is "what is the universe made of?", which is a far more difficult question than it might appear.

        It is unfortunate that it takes billion-dollar accelerators to answer these questions, but I think they're worth answering. And I'd rather have several accelerators than the equivalent of B-2 bombers.

        Also remember that "high energy" = "expensive" but it also equals short-distance. The stuff we find at 500GeV is also the stuff going on in the atoms on your skin. Another way of phrasing that "we don't know what exists above 200GeV" is to say we don't know what happens on distance scales shorter than 10^-19 meters (10^-3 meters for gravity).

        --Bob


        • It's also hard to relate the "Higgs boson" to the above questions in explaining it all to lay persons. Ultimately, we want to know why the universe is the way it is, and part of that question is "what is the universe made of?", which is a far more difficult question than it might appear.


          Don't you mean "we, as physicists"? Why should a 5 billion dollar particle accelerator take precedence over space travel or new telescope construction? Personally I'm lukewarm on the idea of a particle accelerator being built with my tax dollars at the moment. 5 billion dollars would vaccinate a lot of children.

          It is unfortunate that it takes billion-dollar accelerators to answer these questions, but I think they're worth answering. And I'd rather have several accelerators than the equivalent of B-2 bombers.

          Agreed, but those aren't necessarily the only two options.
          • Don't you mean "we, as physicists"?
            Yes, I'm a grad student in theoretical physics...and I'm working on Higgs boson calculations for such accelerators.

            We could argue for years about how money gets allocated, and not get anywhere. It's not really the point. I'd agree with you on vaccinations, but the sad fact is that no government is dumping a lot of money into vaccinating people outside their countries. If you can convince them though, I'd be all for vaccinating the entire african continent.

            Why should a 5 billion dollar particle accelerator take precedence over space travel or new telescope construction?

            At this point (human) space travel is too expensive, even for governments. Governments should get out of it as fast as possible, loosen the suffocating regulations preventing the private sector from doing it, and see what happens. At $10,000 per pound, sure a government could put a man on mars for ~hundreds of billions, but is that really worth it for flags and footprints? I want to live on Mars, but no stupid flags and footprints are going to get me there. (I could rant at length on this subject...if your interested you can email me) More X-Prize's and fewer space shuttles will get us more for our buck and will get humanity into space sooner.

            As to space telescopes, these are also very important, and there are many projects to build space (and terresterial) telescopes. But in the long run, telescopes can only tell us so much about the universe. A critical unanswered question right now is that of "dark matter". The universe is composed of roughly 95% stuff we can't see (not stars, planets, nebula, etc). We don't know what it is. It could be fundamental particles that don't interact or only interacts weakly with normal matter (something that could be discovered by a particle accelerator, but not a telescope). Or it could be large, dark jupiter-sized objects (MACHOS), something that can be seen by telescopes but not particle accelerators. So it's not an either/or choice. We need both.

            I guess a more pertinent question is: why oppose an accelerator? Science is cheap by most government standards, and has possibly the largest long-term benefit. It's not like taxes will go up because we decided to build an accelerator.

            --Bob

          • Material benefits? Bah. We, as humans, want to know how the universe works [... and on and on and on...]

          What a long way to go to say "No material benefits.". ;)


      • can anyone explain what material benefits

        Not all benefits are material.
  • can I use this thing to catch ghosts?

    Or will BAD THINGS happen?

  • mini black holes (Score:3, Funny)

    by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @01:32PM (#2378874) Journal
    I bet a beowulf cluster of those would really suck.
  • Homer Simpson gets sucked into a black hole and ends up in our world, so if we get sucked in, do we end up in Springfield?
  • I may not be a expert in particle physics but opening a mini Black hole. Maby they can do it, but, what if there theories about controling it are dead wrong. I know enought about physics to know that somthing is not true untill tests prove it to be true. And since this is not tested, you can't prove it to be true. But testing and proving that the ideas of a black hole are true but how to control it / what might happen may not be true coud be rather bad.

    Be honest, it is rather interesting to me, but I am a little afraid at the same time tht this might be a step to far right now.

    my 2 cents plus 2 more

    • Re:Bad Things (Score:4, Insightful)

      by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportland AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @01:43PM (#2378938) Homepage Journal
      this is like saying:

      "I'm not an expert in cars, but what if they explode randomly?"

      • Re:Bad Things (Score:1, Offtopic)

        by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 )
        > my email name is latin, look it up

        No it isn't. It just means you are breastless.

        Rick Gutleber
        hooterfree@zycha.com
      • my Ford Exploder^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Explorer? Or my Pinto?

    • Re:Bad Things (Score:2, Informative)

      by Chocky2 ( 99588 )
      There wouldn't be a problem, black holes that small would evaporate so quickly as to never be any risk. Plus it would be virtually impossible to accidently create one in the process of doing other things. And besides, cosmic rays of several hundred GeV smack into our atmosphere every day.
      • The black holes would evaporate if Hawking radiation is for real. The first physical test of whether or not Hawking radiation really takes place would be observing mini black holes made in an accelerator...

    • Re:Bad Things (Score:4, Informative)

      by dragons_flight ( 515217 ) on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @01:58PM (#2379013) Homepage
      See this story [slashdot.org].

      The main reassurance we have is that cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere do get to highly energies than we've ever created. Hence if those energies can create mini black holes, then it must happen naturally in the upper atmosphere. Mini black holes from the upper atmosphere have yet to the destroy the Earth, so there is good reason to believe that nothing created in the accelerator will either.
    • "I may not be a expert in particle physics"

      Heavens! I find this statement absolutely shocking from someone named after a Dragon Ball Z character... I never would have guessed.

      ;-p
    • If it's a theory, it has already been tested, and the result supports it. You would actually have to prove it wrong - you cannot just dismiss and say "What if it's wrong?"

      I keep telling people, "If you don't like a theory, tough. IF you think it is wrong, the burden is on you to disprove the theory."
  • This could actually be kinda cool. I mean, money aside, they'll actually be able to start peeking into things that we can't go to yet. We can barely get off our own planet, let alone go check out the local scenery. This thing would let the smart-folks exmaine lots of local stellar stuff, after a fashion. Could be a great boon to scientific research.
  • I wonder if the billions proposed to be spent on esoteric particle research would better be spent on applied materials science. Just a thought....
    • I wonder if the billions proposed to be spent on esoteric particle research would better be spent on applied materials science.

      Well, the fields are closer than you think. "Esoteric particle research" boils down to a better understanding of quantum phenomena, which includes nailing down the band theory of solids (among other things)--very important in understanding how to make stuff adhere and cohere.

      No, this doesn't have immediate application in the sense of "does material A or material B work better?" but it can help us answer the question "How do I design a material C to work the best?"

      • Agreed. Quantum mech has real-world applications for computing that we may see in the next 5-10 years. Something that was not imagined 80 or so years ago by Einstein, Dirac, Heisenberg, et al.
    • Well seeing as applied material science gets big bucks from companies and corporations this "esoteric" particle research (as well as most anything without a direct link to joe consumer)needs to get money from someplace. It might not have direct applications to everyday life, but it's stuff like this that makes life interesting.

  • Ummmm... what? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @01:41PM (#2378924)
    Okay, particle physics are not my cup of tea, but I am going to assume that if people are even beginning to think about building a five billion dollar particle accelerator, there must be some really good reason.

    So would someone who does have a clue enlighten the rest of us as to just WTF this thing would actually be good for? I mean, is this going to provide us with new ideas, knowledge, and technology that can greatly benefit mankind, or does it just let some really badass physicists find out what happens when they slam particles together really fast?

    • Re:Ummmm... what? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rebelcool ( 247749 )
      It helps form the basis of physics, of which one needs to know before that is then applied to technology and what not to benefit mankind.

      Kind of like before computers could be built, logic theory needed to be worked out. Back in the 1920s, logic theory was fairly useless and relegated to logicians in academia. Then the computer came along and logic theory found its place.

    • You're confusing corporate research with science.

      Science exists to find out what is, simply for the sake of it being.

      Corporate research exists to find out things to make money on (or minimize costs, same deal).

      I'm sure they didn't know for certain what they were going to get when they started playing around with most discoveries that led to the technologies that make our modern world what it is....

    • Re:Ummmm... what? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )
      It will let scientists understand a little more, IF it allows them to understand the right things, it could allow scientest to build power plants with unlimited power, and clean.
      In the more immediate sense, it would create Jobs, and stimilate the local economy.

    • Because... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BillyGoatThree ( 324006 )
      ...nobody really knows how gravity works, at a fundamental level. Gravitons, gravity waves, a quantum mechanical theory of gravity--all these things are related and outstanding (as in "not done yet").

      Those of us with even a passing familiarity with science can surely think of applications for a fundamental theory of gravity, but for the others of you here's a hint: anti-gravity, time travel, faster than light drives.

      • Re:Because... (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It's not very likely that this accelerator will help us test quantum gravity. Quantum gravity scales are many orders of magnitude beyond our largest accelerators, which are themselves more powerful than the one being proposed. Accelerator physics isn't likely to do anything for quantum gravity, unless particular hypothetical large-extra-dimension proposals happen to be right.
        • From the Slashdot headline: That's powerful enough to make mini black holes. As pointed out by AC, this is only if some very speculative theories turn out to be correct.

          Here's a good NY Times article [nytimes.com] about the black hole idea.

        • You're only partially right. Quantum gravity may be at a much higher energy scale, but we can still begin looking for signs of things like large extra dimensions. Or, for that matter, supersymmetry, which is of course fairly important for deciding whether or not string theorists are correct about things.

    • From the Civilization CTP manual:


      Physics: Allows research of Magnetism, Steam Engine and Atomic Theory.

      Atomic Theory: Allows research of Nuclear Fission.

      Nuclear Fission: Uranium becomes a comodity and allows research of Nuclear Power.

      Nuclear Power: Increases ship movement and allows research of Fusion Power.

      Fusion Power: Eliminates the threat of nuclear plant meltdown and allows for the research of Future Technology.

      Future Technology: Adds to overall game score.


      So in a nutshell, we're trying to add to our game score.

  • What about 1.21 gigawatts?

    (btw, the submitter meant energetic enough to make a mini-black hole. considering the very short time span that's not all that much power)
    • ...GeV = giga-electron volt = 10^6 eV, and that is a buttload of energy. That is the kinetic energy the particles will have when they collide, which is all they care about.

    • Re:500 GeV is nothin' (Score:4, Informative)

      by dragons_flight ( 515217 ) on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @02:09PM (#2379063) Homepage
      Incidently, I was told that if Fermilab loses confinement on their Tevatron beam, it hits the ring with the force of a big rig hitting a wall. Hopefully the lost beam is distributed over a large enough section not to cause serious damage, but even then you get to hear an audible "WWHHuuuummmpp". The idea that a bunch of particles can get themselves heard is a little frightening when you think about it.

      • a problem for circulating hadrons (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Yes, this is a problem with hadron colliders.

        If the SPS confinement is lost, the beam will drill a hole through the machine. This has happened, when a lightning strike tripped the power.

        The LHC requires a special beam dump, because if the beam is lost it will deposit enough energy that it will literally blow up the machine where it hits. It won't rupture the tunnel or anything, but it will cause quite a mess.

        I saw some of the early work on the SSC emergency beam dump. The problem is that you have to turn on the deflection magnet very rapidly (and properly sync'd with the particle bunches), so that one bunch goes entirely down the "normal" beamline, and the next gets entirely deflected down the dump. You do not want any particles to be in the way when the magnet is partially on: they'd bend only partway, and slam into the throat of the "wye" between the lines.

        You also have to tie the trigger into the safety systems, so if anything trips -- RF, loss of power, magnet quench, whatever -- the beam is automatically dumped before it's lost.

        Leptons are less of a problem. If the LEP beam was lost, it would just harmlessly slam into the beampipe wall. Well, mostly harmless: it'd create a shower of "noise" particles, which if it happened in the wrong spot, might go into one of the experiments. This might damage some of the more sensitive electronics, crystals, or whatnot. I think Aleph claimed this happened once.

        But note that what they were talking about at Snowmass is a linear collider: no circulating beams. So just stop injection, and you're set. I suppose there might be some benefit to a last-minute dump to protect the detector, but it'll have to be triggered from the detector site itself.. remember the beam is essentially travelling at the speed of light! No upstream alarm signal will get there in time.

  • Gee thats odd, I don't remember the article mentioning black holes. I did read the same article as the rest of you guys right?

    • There is the (remote) possibility that the submitter actually knows somthing about particle physics and what it takes to create miniature black holes.

  • This machine will cost a lot of money, but how much will determine if it will get built. While Japan might be a great place to do it to keep symmetry, we need to learn from the SSC failure. It was (partially) built in Texas in spite of the fact that it would have been much cheaper at Fermilab. If this machine will be built cost considerations must be foremost. That probably means Fermilab again is the only realistic place.

  • Ooh. (Score:1, Funny)

    by b0r0din ( 304712 )
    Building a high-luminosity linear electron- positron collider with a collision energy of 500 GeV--upgradable to 800 or 1000 GeV--was, for most participants, the obvious next big undertaking of the world particle-physics community.

    After all, there's nothing cooler than overclocking a black hole.

  • No black holes here. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @01:54PM (#2378991)
    Nowhere in the article does it mention creating mini-black-holes. The purpose is to try to create Higgs bosons and to precisely measure their characteristics to get a better handle on how electroweak symmetry breaking works.

    To create mini-black-holes, you'd need a Planck-energy accelerator. This is beyond our current ability to build, and will remain so for quite a while. Scientific American had an article many years ago about what you'd have to do to build a conventional linac that powerful; it ended up having to be constructed in space and taking 2% of the sun's power output to run.

    On a more mundane scale, we have experimental evidence (from cosmic rays of the same energy) that nothing catastrophically bad happens in collisions at energies of up to about 1.0e30 eV. We're not going to produce energies this high for a very long time either (current accellerators get in the 1.0e13 range at most; that's 100,000,000,000,000,000 times too low to be a concern).
    • Nowhere in the article does it mention creating mini-black-holes. The purpose is to try to create Higgs bosons and to precisely measure their characteristics to get a better handle on how electroweak symmetry breaking works.

      Oh, sure, and then the whole world gets shrunk down to the size of a pea, and Stanley never gets to finish having sex with Bunny.

    • Re:No black holes here. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SL2C ( 82809 ) on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @02:50PM (#2379410)
      Actually, there is a fashionable idea in particle physics these days which goes by the name of "large extra dimensions" (large compared to the ordinary Planck length), which would bring the Planck scale, where you could expect to create mini black holes, down a lot (depending on the number of extra dimensions, geometry of spacetime in these additional dimensions, etc.) Lots of free parameters, by which you can get anything you like, much like in string theory ;-)
      Anyway, in these scenarios you do expect black hole creation a the next linear collider, or in fact even at the LHC, currently under construction at CERN.

      Also, very briefly the way experimental particle physics has worked over the last decades is to build proton and electron (possibly muon in the future) colliders alternatingly.

      With hadron (proton) colliders such as the LHC you get high energies more easily because of less synchroton radiation (charges being accelerated, including going around a curve, radiate away a lot of their energy, increasing the power you need to operate the machine. This radiation is less if the particles are heavier, as is the case for hadrons). This way you create expected (and unexpected ;-) ) particles but identification and precision measurements are hard because hadron colliders are very messy (lots of unwanted particles created along the way, giving huge background to whatever you want to look at). This is because of the more complicated laws of physics of hadrons compared to leptons (electrons or muons).
      People hope to find "the" (i.e. standard model) Higgs boson or something more unexpected (supersymmetry, mini black holes, ...) at the LHC in fact.

      Then after some time when engineering has made enough progress to bring leptons up to comparable energies, you can do precision tests on whatever you have found already. Here it can be useful to have some data available from the hadron machine.
      Anyway, you need both if you want to be sure about the laws of physics.

      The question for the US IMO is if it wants to have world class particle physics in the future. Currently the strongest hadron collider in the world is at Fermilab in Chicago. This will be made obsolete (for direct fundamental particle searches) by the LHC, which is in Europe.

      If the US fails again to build a world class machine, it will be built somewhere else in the world (Europe or Japan) and US experimental particle physics will be between in-trouble and non-existent for decades.

      (I say this as a particle physicist in Europe.)

      On the question why it fundamental physics should be done - as far as technology is concerned, there are sometimes spin-offs in the short run (such as the WWW, developed at CERN), and revolutions in the long or very long run (e.g. all semiconductor technology would be unthinkable without basic research in quantum mechanics in the first decades of the 20th century). Maybe it will happen again. Nobody can tell. Also, it's culture and it's fun. Taxpayer decides if this is interesting enough.

  • Higgs Boson (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by szero ( 244816 )
    Anyone a fan of Lexx? They get stuck on Earth, which they classify as a "Type 13" planet, a planet on the verge of self-destruction in their search for the Higgs-Boson particle (the particle theorized to be the basic building block of all mass in the universe.

    Type 13 planets usually get compressed to the size of a pea due to their discovery.

    If they didn't find it last year in Geneva... they may find it with something else.

    http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/07/11/science/p hy sical/11PART.html
  • Between this and the fusion story, anybody else really itching to boot up Alpha Centauri? "Five more turns to the Singularity Inducer!"

  • Why would they want to make another one after Disney's Black Hole? That was the worst movie ever!

    just in case you never saw the movie:

    http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue52/classic.htm

  • No mini black holes! (Score:2, Informative)

    by rimdo ( 160461 )
    From The Pierre Auger Project: [auger.org]
    In the 1960's, a ground array of 19 detectors spread over 8 square kilometers was built at Volcano Ranch, New Mexico, by a team led by John Linsley. In 1963, his team reported an observation of a cosmic ray with an energy greater than 10^20 eV. Since then, several large detector arrays have been built to search for very high energy csomic rays. One such detector, called the Fly's Eye, and built in the Utah desert, observed a cosmic ray shower in 1991 that at its maximum contained 200 billion particles in the shower. The energy of the primary particle was 3 x 10^20 eV, the highest energy cosmic ray ever observed. While the composition of the primary particle isn't known with certain, the best guess is that it was a moderate mass nucleus (something like oxygen).
    If mini black holes can be created with collisions on the order of 5*10^11eV(=500GeV), then these cosmic rays should have produced mini black holes. There is no evidence that these much more energetic cosmic ray showers created a black hole, so I think we can safely say that mini black holes either are not produced by subatomic particles or that they have no noticable effect on normal matter.
    • More than likely these mini black holes are indeed created during heavy cosmic particle bombardment. The fact that cosmic ray detectors haven't spotted them doesn't mean a thing, these detectors (fly's eye et al) do a good job of collecting info on the junk that these heavy cosmic visitors blow into when the cruise into our neighborhood. If and when a mini-black would be created it would have no chance of making it to the detector, let alone being detected by it. detectors generally only pick up one thing, you can throw non-charged partcles at an elctron grid all day long and not see anything, doesn't mean they aren't there.

  • Hmm.. (Score:2)

    by jmccay ( 70985 )
    Hemos, I think you might be able to Patent the Playing a buffered live stream. Then you can charge them (and everyone else) fees. Wait, maybe I shouldn't have said that because that would give somebody ideas...
  • What's the difference between a mini-black hole and a regular, run-of-the-mill, black hole? I mean, they are both singularlities, right? You don't get much more "mini" than that.
    • All black holes emit Hawking radiation, eventually evaporating completely. I guess one line could be drawn at black holes that (depending of the environment) have equal rates of evaporation and sucking in matter.

      Smaller black holes have a lower rate of sucking (M$ jokes welcome), but a higher rate of evaporation. Therefore large ones will continue to grow, and small ones will not last very long. The mini black holes created in particle accelerators have very short lifetimes, comparable to that of other exotic particles.

      (Disclaimer: IAAP)

  • Worthwile research (Score:2, Interesting)

    by madbovine9 ( 525984 )
    The question about this being worthwile research is a valid one. Yes, it is. Will 10 years of research on a $5billion accelerator create a do-hicky to add to your computer/car to make it go twice as fast? No, it will not. But the study of the fundamental forces and high energy will bring better understanding of the universe and THIS will lead to the nifty gadgets that allow us to go WARP speed or whatever.

    It is much like the study of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, this study lead to nothing but a better understanding of quantum phenomenon. BUT, examing this came many applications: Lasers(espicially the diode laser, the pen laser) solid-state electronics (computers), fission (power reactors) and numerous others. Yes, some super-weapon was developed from this that could/can destroy the world, but more good was done for society (industrial western) than harm.

    On the subject of costs, $5billion is a lot of money for an individual, but this much divided amoung participating countries over 5-10 years construction time is a drop in the bucket of any countries budget. Hell, one stealth bomber costs on the order of $5 billion.

  • Not Fair! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Picass0 ( 147474 ) on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @02:50PM (#2379406) Homepage Journal
    They want to build a machine that creates silly black holes but they cut funding to the Superconducting Monkey Collider. [theonion.com]

    We could have a much greater understanding of our universe by accelerating monkeys to near-light speeds and smashing them together. But congress cut funding the facility after some animal rights wackos said it wasn't nice. The expensive collider facility had allready been under construction since 1983 and taxpayer were spending 7.5 billion a year to finish construction.

    To keep the 45 mile underground facility from going to waste, it has become a federally fundered drag-racing track. But great science could have come from the Monkey collider. But now we'll never know.
  • You know, I'm a big fan of scientific experimentation, but when it comes to technologies that have even the slight possibility of being destructive - as in "goodbye planet earth and the human race" kind of destructive - perhaps it would be best to conduct this sort of research off-world. I think the technology is there to try permanent bases on the moon at least. Maybe on the moon, or on a space station, or an asteroid somewhere. Just not here.
    • You've been watching too much poorly-researched scifi. (Yeah, I saw that Lexx...made me barf)

      Particles with MILLIONS of times the energy we are proposing hit our upper atmosphere every day. And we're still here. This speculation about the universe disappearing is completely bunk.

      Do an order-of-magnatude estimation of the cost to put one of these in orbit or on the moon. And remember it costs about $10,000 per pound to put stuff up there.

      --Bob

    • For the record I wasn't referring exclusively to high-energy physics. Some of the more risky biological and nuclear experimentation would be better if not conducted on earth, so that radiation/invasive species/deadly diseases wouldn't spread so easily.

      As for high energy physics, it would best be pursued on a space station, maybe at a lagrangian point or farther, or on an asteroid.

      As for the cost, I never said you had to ship all the components from earth. Naturally space-based manufacturing should be in place before hand. There is plenty of money and products to be made up there, if only you're willing to take the initial costs and risks.
  • Three points of information.

    1. The Super-Conducting Super Collider that was supposed to be built in Texas was, get this, already paid for! when it was canceled. The cost to clean it up would have paid running the facility for 5 years. (please correct me if I'm wrong)
    2. If the Large Hadron Collider, or this new collider, produces black holes (which is easily identifiable from other possibilities), then it will support several theories requiring more than four dimensions. Which is way cool! This is also quite safe, since cosmic rays energetic enough to produce black holes (of the possible 10 dimensional kind) have been observed hitting out atmosphere, and such small temporary black holes would evaporate before they can do anything.
    3. The benefits? Well considering that if we decide to build it now, it won't be ready to collect real data until about 2010 and that the data won't be able to be really analyzed for at least another 5 years means: it will not benefit the current administration at all, regardless of whether or not Bush Jr. gets re-elected.
    4. The real benefits? The thing is, we won't see any real benefits (except for odd offshoots like the WWW) for probably 20 years. Too long for most impatient Americans (myself included). However, that is where a lot of the really "cool" stuff comes from - semiconductors, which makes /. possible, came from experiments in refining "practical" quantum theory. The real (applied) benefits cannot be easily seen, since this will go beyong the limits of our current understanding. However, if you ever want to explore such concepts as anti-gravity, warping space for faster than light travel (required if we are to explore the stars), then this is the only ticket in town.

  • SUSY (Score:3, Interesting)

    by styopa ( 58097 ) <hillsr@color a d o . e du> on Tuesday October 02, 2001 @05:55PM (#2380487) Homepage
    Unfortunately I was unable to attend the Snowmass conference (I was studying in St. Petersburg, Russia), so I my information from the conference comes from fellow students in Uriel's Army (People from Snowmass would understand).

    Anyway, the Next Linear Collider (NLC) is very important for many reasons. Here are a few.
    • It is a multinational effort. The High Energy Physics (HEP) physicists know that the US government will not foot the entire bill. The HEP budget in the US will only increase by 0.6% (Physics Today June 2001)this year, so after ~3% inflation, thats a 2.4% decrease in spending power. We are hoping for funding from Japan and the EU. This type of physics already ignores boarders, but a multinationally funded collider will only help.
    • It will increase our knowledge of physics and the universe. The finding of the Higgs Boson, and perhaps other particles, will shed some light on what are the proper paths theorists should begin to look at.
    • Supersymmetry (SUSY, MSUGRA, etc...). This is the field that I am currently working in. I won't go into the nitty gritty details, instead explain to why some might find it interesting. If any of the flavors of supersymmtry are proven this provides strong evidence towards the leading string theories. Unfortunately we need a MINIMUM of 500 GeV to find the supersymmetric partners, and 800 GeV to have any cross section of the supersymmetric partners of the quarks.
    • Particle physics is not excatly thriving in the US right now. Maybe because we cannot come down and explain in simplistic terms what we are doing. If it is going to survive we need to do something big. Nothing big has occured since 1994 when the Top Quark (see sig) was discovered. The blips of the Higgs that CERN reported are shakey at best and currently RUN II at Fermilabs does not have the luminosity needed to find the Higgs.


    If you live in the US please contact your congressmen and tell them that you support the creation of the NLC.

    If you are in Europe, especially Germany, please contact your representatives and tell them that you support Tesla (the competing design for the NLC, the European design).

    If you live in Japan, either NLC or Tesla.

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