Why the LHC May Mean the End of Experimental Particle Physics 191
StartsWithABang writes: At the end of the 19th century, Lord Kelvin famously said, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." He was talking about how Newtonian gravity and Maxwell's electromagnetism seemed to account for all the known phenomena in the Universe. Of course, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, general relativity and more made that prediction look silly in hindsight. But in the 21st century, the physics of the Standard Model describes our Universe so well that there truly may be nothing else new to find not only at the LHC, but at any high-energy particle collider we could build here on Earth. If there are no new particles found below about 2–3 TeV in energy—particles that the LHC should detect if they’re present—it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more. And even if we build a particle accelerator to the fullest capacity of our technology around the equator of the Earth, we still couldn’t reach those energies.
Dark Matter and Energy (Score:3)
Well, if we find a way to measure either of those using high-energy experiments, we'll get a few more decades out of the field.
Just when we think we're done, we're usually just at the beginning...
-Chris
Re:Dark Matter and Energy (Score:5, Informative)
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Except they are talking out of their ass. They don't know for certain, not at all. It's all supposition.
Re:Dark Matter and Energy (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, you have that a bit backwards. The Standard Model says we're done finding new particles. The Higgs was the last one we expected to find, and it was so necessary to the theory that we could describe all of its attributes long before we actually found it. When we did, it matched the theory perfectly -- too perfectly. We knew its mass, spin, decay rate, and interaction with other particles just from the math before we even found it in the lab. Physicists were both relieved and saddened by the discovery as it meant the standard model was correct and there were no new physics to be found.
It's the idea of finding new particles that is all supposition. We know the standard model can't explain everything, but we don't know that missing particles are the solution. We also don't know how to detect those new particles if they do exist. Gravitons, sterile neutrinos, and black matter particles (whatever those may be) would be electrically neutral and barely interact with anything -- much less a particle detector. We suspect we will be able to detect them indirectly if they exist at all. There is a slim chance that there may be more than one type of Higgs, but other Higgs are not necessary for the theory to work and other Higgs would be at much higher energy levels.
You are correct that no one knows for certain -- that's the whole reason they conduct the experiments. But, the very well known math and theory strongly suggest that we're done. It's the wild supposition arguments that hope there's something more.
And that's not because they don't WANT to find new physics... it's just... quantum mechanics and particle physics are so well understood that it would be extremely surprising to find other fundamental particles -- b/c if they exist, they must be very very weakly interacting with all the known particles or at least very short lived to not cause chaos with the currently understood theory.
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False.
The universe can produce ZeV range particles 10^21, already there are experiments in the works to detect dark matter decays from cosmic rays. Turns out we only need very sensitive detectors for expected decay products.
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Shhh!
It is a secret, we need to build more colliders to, you know, watch shit collide and go up in sparks.
Are you with us nerds or with senator Proxmire?
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Exactly my thought. With supersymmetry now in trouble, it does open the door for other theories that could be tested at energy levels that really aren't out of our technical capability.
Besides, there's still a decent chance that LHC is going to find a smoking gun around Dark Matter, so I'm thinking that there is lots of science left for it to do.
Re:Dark Matter and Energy (Score:4, Informative)
While I agree with you to some extent, the fact is that it isn't going to be a matter of whether we're missing say 1% or 37% of the energy at the LHC we need to make a breakthrough. The theories and models in question provide only certain situations that you might find new particles, which is likely the basis for what this article is saying.
In other words, its like having a road map that shows a freeway and all of its exits, but we otherwise have no idea where we are on that map. If the next exit is 2 miles from the previous exit, then chances are good we are in this one place on the map with lots of exits. However, if there are no exits even after 10 miles of driving, then the map shows us that we are most likely in this one rural area that doesn't have an exit for 100 miles.
In this case, mathematics and theoretical physics provides us the map with all the possible places you could find particles. Now we have to determine where we are on that map by finding where the next particle is to be found. If it is at LHC energies, then our map says we're likely to find a some new particles with minimal increments of further energy use. If it isn't, then we know we've hit the "rural" area on the map and we won't be seeing another particle for a long, long time because we need an particle smasher the size of the solar system to hit those energies.
Of course, brand spanking new physics could alter the "roadmap", but since the Standard Model does predict *just about* everything we have seen in experiments, then it means our physics is still incomplete, but has become accurate enough that we can predict what would happen down to the place we'd need the hundred million TeV to see anything new or to answer the specific items that the Standard Model does leave open.
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What if the research would require about 20% more energy than the LHC is capable of?
It's not that simple. LHC can find such things, it just takes more time to do the statistics. You really would need an order of magnitude difference in energy to make a difference.
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We may not need the LHC or anything like it to find dark matter particles
http://www.symmetrymagazine.or... [symmetrymagazine.org]
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Technologies are under development (so years to decades away from an engineering proposal) that can exceed the LHC energies on a footprint comparable to the present-day SLAC site. Keeping the machine's dimensions down to the size of existing sites means that building the Next Big Thing remains credible, if expensive.
Citation needed (Score:4, Insightful)
In the article this: "it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more. " is asserted without supporting evidence.
Re:Citation needed (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea is that if we don't find anything, the next most likely place to go looking is at the energy where the strong, weak, and electrical forces unify, around 10^13 TeV. The number they give is a few orders of magnitude below that; we probably wouldn't have to get all the way to the grand unification energy [wikipedia.org] to see hints of new particles. I think that's the evidence you're looking for; it's justified by our present theory.
It's a "reasonable assumption" in that those theories begin to break down at that scale. We expect our theories to hold quite well, which would mean that we wouldn't expect to find anything novel until we got close. And then we have every reason to expect to find new things, which is what you need to help drive a theory that's measurably different from our present one.
Of course we never know what we'll find, but it would be hard to build any sort of intermediate-sized collider, which would cost insane amounts of money, and theory predicts that it wouldn't find anything of value unless it were even bigger. It could be even worse; they might not find anything for a few more orders of magnitude, at which point they'd be probing not just the strong, weak, and electrical forces, but also gravity. We know for certain that the theory breaks down there, but the amount of energy required to probe the breakdown is simply ludicrous.
How many coin toss heads in a row is natural? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlike every other fundamental particle the Higgs has no spin, which means it has no intrinsic angular momentum like electrons, quarks, photons etc. This has the effect that quantum corrections very strongly affect its mass. In fact these corrections apply to the square of the Higgs mass and grow as the square of the energy scale so if the Standard Model is good up to the Planck scale at 10^19 GeV these corrections are of the order of 10^38 in size. Each Standard Model particle has its own correction to the Higgs mass with fermions and bosons providing opposite sign corrections.
Here is the problem though. In the Standard Model there is no symmetry between fermions and bosons and the coupling to the Higgs field, which determines these corrections, are all free parameters. So if we believe that there is nothing but the Standard Model before the Planck scale then we have an amazing co-incidence that a series of essentially random terms each of order 10^38 cancel so precisely that the remainder is of order 10^4.
To put that in context it would be like tossing a coin about 100 billion times and getting heads every single time. I don't know about you but personally I would start getting suspicious that something was fixing the result sometime around toss 100.
This is the issue with the Standard Model: the fact that there is a Higgs at 125 GeV is like the 100 billion coin tosses all coming up heads. The problem is that we do not yet know how nature is fixing the result but it does mean that the new physics required to fix it most likely occurs below ~10 TeV. While this is not a hard limit the higher in energy you go the less natural any accidental cancellation will be so really the energy limit where you expect new physics depends on how many times you can toss a coin and get heads before you believe that something is fixing the result.
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I think the limiting factor is going to be financial. Nobody will be building single purpose science facilities at a cost which is a significant fraction of the GDP. My guess is that something on the scale of $10-20B is imaginable (i.e. something like the failed SSC) but much bigger is not. Now, couple this with the fact that CERN was only able to sell their expansion due to the hunt for Higgs. This was not some nebulous cancellation of perturbative corrections but a very real prize which could then for yea
Limiting Factor is Cleverness (Score:2)
I think the limiting factor is going to be financial.
That's one way to look at it but I prefer to think that the limiting factor is really cleverness. The techniques we use in the LHC to accelerate particles are fundamentally the same as those used since the 1930's albeit with significant, incremental improvements. We have indeed reached the financial limit of current accelerator technology but there are alternatives.
One way, as you suggest, would be to go for new acceleration techniques. Plasma physicists have had some impressive results with particle ac
Neutrino Radiation (Score:4, Interesting)
but the short lifetime of the muon has kept anyone from coming up with a workable proposal so far.
The other problem they had with the muon accelerator proposals which Fermilab looked at a while ago was the lethal amounts of neutrino radiation from muons decaying. While neutrinos rarely interact at energies below a PeV if you get enough of them there can be enough interactions to be dangerous if a human stood in the beam and unfortunately shielding really isn't an option with neutrinos.
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Neutrion? Do you have a link. The only think I've read about lethal doses of neutrinos is this https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ [xkcd.com] which suggests you'd have to be about 2.3AU from a supergiant undergoing core collapse. (yes, XKCD, but plenty of citations).
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The other problem they had with the muon accelerator proposals which Fermilab looked at a while ago was the lethal amounts of neutrino radiation from muons decaying
I don't know where you got this from but it's not even remotely plausible. A muon beam intense enough to produce lethal levels of neutrinos would be intense enough to burn a hole through the Earth, and would have killed everyone via perfectly ordinary Bremsstralhung radiation long before neutrinos came into play.
SI Prefices (Score:2)
1e8 * 1e12 = 1e20 eV, which I suppose is kind of like GeV.
1GeV=1e9 eV. The 'G' is the SI prefix 'giga-'...just like the 'T' you correctly identified as 'tera-'! ;-)
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In the article this: "it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more. " is asserted without supporting evidence.
Solid state physics has plenty to look at and it doesn't need things to be that hot. More commonly it needs things to be cold.
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Just turn it up (Score:2)
Turn it up to eleven.
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Hubris (Score:2)
Which is exactly the same contextual caveat Lord Kelvin failed to incorporate in his thinking.
Here's your money quote: Until we know everything, we don't know everything. And I assure you, we don't know everything.
--me
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Well, the point is not there isn't anything else to discover, the point is at which energy levels we can expect to find something. His assumption is based on the current theories and at which energy levels we can hope to find something. There is no reason we should observe particles at all energies and an energy desert is very likely and plausible. So, should we invest ressources, money and energy into the business of searching new particles at all energy levels without at least some indication they exists?
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You missed my point. His quote is based upon the current technologies we have to accelerate particles.
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What is the subtext here, "Lord Kelvin was arrogant and foolish, but we are not and there's no way we'll make the same mistake?"
Jebus, do geeks not understand humility and self-deprecation? By quoting Lord Kelvin he is saying - even great minds sometimes forget that by definition today's science will be 'wrong' tomorrow, what follows is the best answer we have right now.
'wrong' - Maybe it will be clear if I link to a popular sci-fi writer [tufts.edu].
Should read "baryonic matter" (Score:2)
Just to be clear (Score:2)
TFA isn't saying that there might be no new particles. High energy physicists agree that there have to be new particles. TFA is saying that there will be new particles, but they may be almost impossible to find. That would be a bummer, but such is life. I think it's amazing that we've been able to probe such small length scales, but there are limits to what we can do given our resources.
The 19th and 20th century will stand out (Score:2)
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Your paucity of imagination beggars mine.
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Seriously, Lord Rutherford, didn't you predict that physics was essentially complete around 1900? Sure, there were a few things not yet understood, like Mercury's orbit, the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, black-body radiation, that sort of thing, but it certainly wasn't going to upset physics.
I assume you also agree that, even if there is some new physics that might explain black-body radiation and the photoelectric effect, that it can't possibly have practical applications, dealing with th
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I recommend you read the history more carefully. In 1900 the best scientists knew that they did not understand what matter was or why it had such strange spectra (Kelvin even spent quite a bit of effort trying to develop vortex descriptions of atoms.) They knew that they didn't know where the sun's energy came from. They knew that they knew almost nothing about how cells worked. But surprisingly, it turns out that they already did know most of what we currently think is important to teach to engineerin
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Sure, physics around 1900 had some holes in knowledge, and Lord Rutherford acknowledged that while claiming that most of the work was done. He expected some sort of resolution on things like the photoelectric effect and the orbit of Mercury that would more or less conform with the physics he knew. I'm using him as an example of an eminent scientist who said a stupid thing through failure of imagination.
I don't understand why in one paragraph you claim that most engineering uses science as Rutherford kn
We still know so little (Score:2)
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And yet physics cannot explain consciousness
Nor should it. Consciousness is a human invention, something we tell ourselves that we have even though it only exists in our minds.
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And yet physics cannot explain consciousness
Nor should it. Consciousness is a human invention, something we tell ourselves that we have even though it only exists in our minds.
wait a minute...
something we tell ourselves that we have
who is telling who? We (our consciousness or sense of self) tell us that we exist. = Cogito ergo sum. so for so good.
even though it only exists in our minds
and exists in what? itself...?
You are saying our mind is a fiction that only exist in our mind?...?
You do see the contradiction there right?
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And yet physics cannot explain consciousness
Define "explain." And how do you know it "cannot" explain it?
quantum mechanics seems to tell us that consciousness and reality are somehow linked
No, it doesn't.
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Yes? And? That doesn't actually answer anything.
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Look for other things. (Score:2)
... particles that the LHC should detect if they’re present ...
If only this thing could collide and detect small and medium hadrons.
Lacking scientific imagination ... (Score:2)
Neutrinos (Score:5, Informative)
Has this guy never heard that the mere fact neutrinos have a mass does not fit in the Standard Model, and that plenty of good experimental physics can be made on these particles?
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Neutrinos with mass certainly DO fit in the Standard Model. In fact, all 3 known left-handed neutrinos are a part of the standard model. Neutrinos are even known to oscillate between the 3 types. Originally, neutrinos were assumed to be massless as their mass is so incredibly tiny it couldn't be detected when the particles were first proposed and discovered. Their insignificant mass didn't alter any predictions the model made on particle physics at the time. That does not mean that they aren't more
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Sorry, but the Standard Model predicts *massless neutrinos*, while oscillations found in experiments prove non-zero masses.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model_(mathematical_formulation)#Neutrino_masses/ [wikipedia.org]
The extensions to the Standard Model that you mention could accommodate positive masses, but none of these is standard or unambiguously supported by experimental evidences yet.
Sounds like bollocks to me (Score:2)
Why the LHC May Mean the End of Experimental Particle Physics
But Probably Won't, So Shut Up?
If there are no new particles found below about 2–3 TeV in energy—particles that the LHC should detect if they’re present—it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more.
So they're going to stop looking on the basis of a "reasonable assumption"? Not how science works, last time I checked.
Perhaps it should have been "Why the LHC may mean the next few years or even centuries of experimental particle physics might be a bit less exciting."
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The title is obvious nonsense, but the "reasonable assumption" is the Standard Model.
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Surely a good way to test reasonable assumptions and make them even more reasonable (or overturn them) is to check all the places the assumption tells you not to bother looking.
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In normal scientific terms, yes, but the Standard Model, especially now that the Higgs has finished the puzzle, is as pretty close to "here's a map of where you'll find each particle within these ranges" as you're likely to see. The next range is also quite generally defined by the nuclear forces, and it's considerably higher than anything we can reasonably do right now (i.e., nowhere close even if we build an accelerator that circles the earth's equator.
known limitation (Score:2)
I remember going to a talk around 2003 where the upper limit of particle smashers was discussed by radius and compared to theoretical energy values for various particles. It's a known problem - and there have been (expensive) suggestions put forth for years.
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This is why paywalls suck:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-amateur-scientist-1989-04/
This article describes the solution.
Onion Said it First (Score:2)
One year after confirming the existence of the Higgs Boson, or “God Particle,” scientists at CERN say they are struggling to find other uses for the giant particle accelerator. http://www.theonion.com/video/... [theonion.com]
Nonsense (Score:2)
_EVERY_ time somebody says "There's nothing new to be learned", within a few years we discover that there are vast realms of reality that we had never suspected might exist. Between "string theory" and "dark matter" and "dark energy", there are enough assumptions and hand-waving to make me think that we're about at that stage again.
"Real Soon Now", we're going to discover that the current generations of physics professors have been chasing after imaginary rabbits and that reality is very different. Our und
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_EVERY_ time somebody says "There's nothing new to be learned",
That's great, but that's not what the article says.
It says we don't know how to build the machine that will demonstrate the new stuff.
Question from the ignorant (Score:2)
I've seen many comments that make many good points.
We have the obvious which is "using LHC technology, scalin
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A spool won't help. It's not the length that matters, it's the radius of curvature.
Basically, accelerating electrons make changing electromagnetic fields and that means they produce photons. The charged particles zipping round the circular path emit radiation since that's constant acceleration. The smaller the curve and the faster they go, the more they emit. The energy released like that is what determines the maximum speed. Once the radation out matches the energy in, they go n
To Quote Arthur C. Clarke (Score:2)
(who had some damned wise things to say about a LOT of stuff .. curiously enough even the LHC:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quo... [brainyquote.com]
"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Can we stop linking to this shitty blog please (Score:2)
Almost every article has tons of assumptions, lots of hand waving, refuses to correct mistakes even when pointed out, etc.
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While the money representing the $13.25 billion [ibtimes.com] that the LHC project required may be infinite, the labor and resources that it represents is not.
Let's presuppose that you could raise the collision energy of the LHC by 10^12 to cross this so-called "energy desert." If that only requires increasing cost by 10^2.... you're talking more than 1 trillion dollars. For this one science project.
In contrast to oth
Re:Stop thinking so small (Score:5, Interesting)
No application we can think of. That's like someone mocking the guys making frogs' legs jump with electrical current in the 18th century. "Oh yes, very interesting, but so what?" And yet, within a half a century or so of those first gimmicky experiments with electricity, we had built the first high speed data network in history, revolutionizing, well, just about everything, and within a few decades of that we were replacing gas lights with light bulbs, people were using welding machines to build large steel structures and that changed, well, everything.
There really is no way you can stick a long term price tag on basic research. Right now, figuring out what lies beyond the Standard Model is an interesting abstraction. But in fifty years, or a hundred years of us cracking that code, who the hell knows what we'll be building? Exotic materials, new propulsion systems, new communications systems, who knows? If the last five hundred years of scientific research has taught us anything, it's that science is the field out of which technical innovation is grows, and basic research is the fertilizer.
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Making frogs legs jump did not cost $13.25 billion dollars. No single high speed data link on earth costs $13.25 billion dollars, or, being generous, the $5 billion capex involved in the facility, omitting the opex entirely.
I meant what I said. Ignoring the reason why I stated that there would not be a reasonable application does nothing to rebut that.
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That's like someone mocking the guys making frogs' legs jump with electrical current in the 18th century. "Oh yes, very interesting, but so what?"
But that research had considerable short term value. After all, wouldn't you consider it very useful to know that electricity is the basis of biological communication/control between brain and muscle? And the research was cheap. The experiment wasn't that expensive to undertake. LHC is a lot more.
Merely hoping that the long term value of research exceeds its cost, is profoundly unscientific. Even if we choose to ignore that scientific research is no different than any other organized human endeavor, we s
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There is no price too high for knowledge.
Aside from the obvious fact that no, we aren't actually willing to pay any price for knowledge, you still have opportunity cost. We could spend as in the example given, a trillion dollars to run this new machine or we could spend that trillion dollars on other research, indeed other high energy physics, and get more knowledge.
To claim that there's no price to high is to be profoundly ignorant of economics.
Would you pay a 100% income tax? (Score:3)
There is no price too high for knowledge.
Sure, when you're spending Other People's Money. But would you be willing to contribute 100% of your income to a new collider?
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There is no price too high for knowledge.
Every human action (and inaction) is a choice between options. Quite often from an incalculably large pool of options and trees.
Choosing to pay for a big science project now is choosing not to do a gazillion combinations of other large and small searches for knowledge. Are you really so confident you know the best course of action?
Obviously, there are additional problems:
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Well they did say with current technology...
And the suggestion that 100 million TeV couldn't be produced with a smasher that girded the Equator means we would have to do a *lot* better than current technology to make such a device because then we're talking about building megastructres in space as being almost the only option from then on.
Also, stop thinking so BIG. There are other ways. (Score:2)
There is nothing preventing us from building something bigger than the LHC.
Like building it in orbit - or solar orbit. B-)
But that's just scaling up a particular method of accelerating particles. There are other ways to get to higher energies in MUCH shorter distances.
For instance: plasma acceleration [wikipedia.org], both wakefield and other approaches.
A couple laser pulses into a plasma and you can create fields that accelerate electrons to a couple GeV in as many centimetres, something that takes about four orders of
Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton (Score:5, Insightful)
So, StartsWithABang starts by telling us that Lord Kelvin was a fool for thinking there was nothing left to discover and then he goes on to say practically the same thing.
I see.
Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite, he's saying there's lots left to discover. There just might not be anything left for the LHC to discover.
I suspect even that is false, that there will be all kinds of science to be done with it. But it may be true we don't discover any new particles with it by smashing things together, which is the thing it was built for.
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There are collisions happening at energies MUCH higher than any man-made collider will ever achieve right above our heads, in the upper atmosphere, every second. It's just still much cheaper to build giant colliders than a reasonable detection system to gain new information from those collisions.
Once we've milked the LHC for all it can give, if it doesn't provide clues to it's successor, then we can start trying to catch cosmic rays in a controlled manner.
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Because you'd still be trying to build an object larger than the earth. It's going to be rather expensive.
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Umm, no. The Ice Cube detects neutrinos, not cosmic rays. Completely different thing.
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> Not quite, he's saying there's lots left to discover. There just might not be anything left for the LHC to discover.
Not quite, he's saying there's lots left to discover. We just don't know how to build the machine to discover it.
But of course that's really just particle scientists talking to accelerator builders. Astronomers are discovering new physics all the time, and its so weird that most in the field cover their ears, chant "la la la!" and pretend it doesn't exist.
Like, for instance, the story tha
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The article only talks about experimental particle physics.
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And, at that point, we're running low on stuff we can experiment with. I don't know how we'd make a wormhole in a lab. It wouldn't end observational physics.
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We know the SM is incomplete. But we have a very good idea where we'd have to go to find the answers.
There's a difference between not knowing something because you have no idea where to look, and not knowing something because you know where to look, but you can't get there.
You might have a map leading to a horde of gold somewhere on Mount Everest. You have good coordinates and everything. Still, good luck actually trying to confirm that in person, let alone collecting it without a massive undertaking.
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There are gravitational fields where we can be pretty sure there's no conventional matter. Assuming that an incredible successful theory like General Relativity is accurate, that's observing dark matter.
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Dark Mater
Is that a Pixar short based on Cars?
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Why all these constants?
Because we're using the wrong units.
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Care to enlighten us? Or are you just going to sit around pointing at how TFA is wrong on a obscure subject without actually informing anyone of anyhthing.
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Care to enlighten us? Or are you just going to sit around pointing at how TFA is wrong on a obscure subject without actually informing anyone of anyhthing.
If the subject is obscure to you, you would not understand the explanation.
Why don't you wait to find out with everyone else after we run the experiments at SLAC?
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Ah ok, so you don't know. Was that really so hard to just say so?
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"I don't believe you know X! Prove it by disclosing X to me! You will do this because you are as stupid as I am assuming you to be!"
Is this how you got your first information that VAX/VMS error logs were world-readable, and thus disclosed failed login credentials and password typos that made it easy to log in as someone else? You tricked someone into telling you about the log file by appealing to their hubris?
Nice troll, though...
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"I don't believe you know X! Prove it by disclosing X to me! You will do this because you are as stupid as I am assuming you to be!"
Well, you're claiming to be smarter than the people that built CERN. I think it's a fair assumption that you are in fact not. And your vague claims about knowing how to do it better than all the world's physicists are at best funny.
Is this how you got your first information that VAX/VMS error logs were world-readable, and thus disclosed failed login credentials and password typ
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"I don't believe you know X! Prove it by disclosing X to me! You will do this because you are as stupid as I am assuming you to be!"
Well, you're claiming to be smarter than the people that built CERN. I think it's a fair assumption that you are in fact not.
First of all, I never made that claim.
Second of all, I don't really consider your opinion any more relevant than that of Charles Holland Duell.
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First of all, I never made that claim
You claimed it would be trivial to substantially beat the LHC. If it were trivially obvious to the world's pyhsicists, they would have beat that better system. Ergo you are claiming to be smarter than the world's physicists, but apparently not smart enough to follow a logical line of reasoning. Interesting.
You're still also full of it because you're unable to back up your completely wild claim.
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As someone actually in the "obscure" field of accelerator physics, you are just full of it. There is nothing close to "trivial" methods to reach the energies that a lot of new physics theories are suggesting is needed.
Well, not that I believe an AC that has no academic standing, you are at least not as condescending and childish as serviscope_minor, so I will give you a hint:
Smart people build better accelerators.
Brilliant people build better beam targets.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If you wanted to refer to FACET, you could have at least mentioned the name so that others who are curious can look it up, instead of just assuming you're a troll (and those that know about it can still view you as troll/naive because of your awkward wording...). However, everything I said in the previous post still applies. Nothing about the work at SLAC will bring a trivial replacement for LHC in the next decade. In a long time scale it will yield improvements, but they are going to be much more diffic
Re: (Score:2)
If you're going for that approach, use a linear accelerator rather than a ring collider. (You would probably still want storage rings, etc.) That would let you handle leptons as well as baryons. And you don't need anywhere near as many steering magnets. Of course you don't get the multiple cycles through your accelerator, but it's fairly easy to mimic that by increasing the length, and since you're out in space and don't need to build the enclosure, you could even alter the distance between magnets in