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The Almighty Buck Science Technology

$950 Million Large Hadron Collider Upgrade 'Could Upend Particle Physics' (theguardian.com) 196

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A massive project to supercharge the world's largest particle collider launched on Friday in the hope that the beefed-up machine will reveal fresh insights into the nature of the universe. The approximately $950 million Swiss franc mission will see heavy equipment, new buildings, access shafts and service tunnels installed, constructed and excavated at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, the particle physics laboratory on the edge of Geneva.

The upgrade will make the collider far more sensitive to subtle quirks in the laws of physics, and physicists hope these anomalies will pry open the door to entirely new theories of the universe. If the upgrade goes to plan, the proton beams in the souped-up accelerator, known as the high-luminosity LHC, or HL-LHC, will be so intense that the number of collisions in the machine will be five to 10 times greater than today. The upgrade is expected to take eight years. While new magnets and beam instruments will be installed when the LHC is switched off for two years in 2019, most of the required equipment will be fitted in a longer shutdown from 2024 to 2026, when the revamped machine will switch back on again.

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$950 Million Large Hadron Collider Upgrade 'Could Upend Particle Physics'

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  • CERN (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Let's make that "CERN," not "Cern."

  • can't have both. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The approximately $950 million Swiss franc

    What is it?

    dollars or swiss franc?

    you can not have both.

    • Not really, nobody wants to upend it, just confirm theory. Physics has worked so far according to theory. If we hadn't found the Higgs boson then we'd have upended physics and left with a huge problem. There are some more details we haven't found out yet but theoretically we predict things pretty accurately and the rather esoteric alternative explanations *cough*string/multiverse theory*cough* are either untestable or proven to be unnecessary.

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      That, of course, is the problem. There's no real sign that the standard model needs correction, except that it appears incompatible with Relativity. Whoops. And doesn't handle gravity well. Whoops!

      So we know it needs to be changed, but just how is a real question. Perhaps sterile neutrinos will show us a path forwards, but not unless someone discovers another way to detect them. Otherwise it's just another anomaly that doesn't lead anywhere.

      There are lots of "things with names that we don't have handl

  • by CaptainDork ( 3678879 ) on Friday June 15, 2018 @10:58PM (#56793108)

    ... because it should have been Texas [texasmonthly.com].

    They would have detected the Higgs boson first, and would have attracted the best scientific minds on the planet.

    The infrastructure and support system including housing, lodging, eateries, fuel ...

    The list is enormous and the impact great.

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Republicans cancelled it, they don't understand science's benefit. If God wanted them to be scientists he wouldn't have given them 76 point IQ's and forced them to work in coal mines as if it were a thing of pride, lol.

      • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Friday June 15, 2018 @11:22PM (#56793180) Journal

        Actually Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, and the presidency at the time it was cancelled. They had total control. The effort to shut it down was led by Democrat Jim Slattery of Kansas.

        • They cancelled it out because they could not see the immediate benefit while wanting to show some fiscal austerity. While republican would not have seen the immediate interest either, they would have kept it for the money and economy it would have brought Texas, and while they are vocal for fiscal responsibility in reality it is all bluster and they are utterly fiscally irresponsible when in power.

          In other word anti science republican would have kept the ssc if only for the boundangle , not caring about t
      • " they don't understand science's benefit."

        They do when it's the next weapon system.

    • you can thank the Democrats for that

    • Actually, it should have been in Illinois. The Fermilab Tevatron had all that infrastructure already in place, would have made an excellent feeder ring, and already HAD the best scientific minds on the planet. Unfortunately, Jim Wright (D, Texas) [wikipedia.org] happened to be the Speaker of the House at the time, and he wanted that project for Texas, and, lo and behold: he got it. At least until (after he resigned in disgrace), Congress realized what a boondoggle building the SSC from scratch was, and canceled it.
    • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      Terrible chocolate, though.
    • The scientific community is global. The LHC is there for everybody. It is yours too! The entire point of science as we know it, is that it benefits us all.
      Actually, I suggest you travel there, and notice that you will feel a sense of community with those people that share a common love with you. If you are a good scientist, you can work with them and they will want to work with you.

      Cultures sticking together makes sense, as long as it doesn't result in a filter bubble. ... But nationalism is just plain absu

    • They would have detected the Higgs boson first, and would have attracted the best scientific minds on the planet.

      It would have been the perfect Creationist honeypot - attract all the best scientific minds to America, and then watch Trump gut anything and everything having to do with reason, rationale, or scientific thought.

    • The problem with science in the US is that it has been overrun by MBAs and liberal self-centered asswipes that think they should get money just because they deserve it. So both the administration and the scientists aren't productive and even in the basic sciences countries like China and Israel are eating the US for breakfast. The west is having a brain drain towards the Middle East and Orient.

      In Europe you've got a little bit of a break because the government is obligated to spend the huge taxation but dol

      • The problem with science in the US is that it has been overrun by MBAs and liberal self-centered asswipes that think they should get money just because they deserve it.

        MBA's may be a problem, but you're just shaking your personal marotte [wikipedia.org] when complaining about liberals. Problems for science in the US are mostly on the other side of the aisle [newrepublic.com]. Some of the most powerful Republican politicians can come up with absolute howlers [sciencemag.org] and go on to create legislation related to areas they're so blatantly ignorant about, but the party and their voters have no problem with that. The Republican president is proudly scientifically illiterate [scientificamerican.com], but can and does name leaders of science (or

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Perhaps that was designed a few years too early. The designs I saw looked a bit overly ambitious. More so than CERN. But perhaps CERNs super collider couldn't have been build without the preliminary work on superconducting magnets done for the Texas project.

      Sometimes things really do need to be attempted several times, because of what you learn on the earlier attempts.

      • In this case, how to grow mushrooms [orlandosentinel.com]?

        March 27, 1994

        FORT WORTH, TEXAS — Forget physics. Think fungus. A petroleum engineer has his eyes on miles of dark, damp tunnels where scientists once contemplated smashing atoms. Naresh Vashisht wants them to grow mushrooms instead.

  • The harder you smack things together, the more and smaller the pieces will be that fly off.

    • But that's the beauty of particle physics: if the things are traveling fast enough, the pieces that fly off are actually BIGGER than the pieces that collided.
  • by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Saturday June 16, 2018 @12:30AM (#56793358) Homepage

    i've been studying alternative theories to the Standard Model for years. by amateurs, semi-amateurs, "professionals" operating outside of the peer-reviewed process for "some reason" (see below), as well as academics operating within the peer-reviewed community: piotr zenczykowski, sundance osland bilson-thompson (yes a real person!), and many more.

    the amateurs... dang. there's a lot of crap out there.

    the semi-amateurs... yyeah they actually get somewhere, generally, but they tend to want to contribute to the Standard Model because that's what everyone else is doing.

    professionals operating outside of the peer-reviewed process: i'll describe these below. they're extremely rare (as in: there's only really one group, led by one person)

    academics: these tend to focus on the Standard Model. the two that i mentioned - piotr and sundance - actually based their work on Haim Harari's "Rishon Model": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - it was extremely popular in the 1980s but unfortunately did not go anywhere.

    there's also "String Theory" which has taken literally decades of extremely talented mathematicians (reducing - or wasting - the world-wide available pool of mathematical talent in the process, was one complaint i saw made by other academics, a few years ago).

    all this means we basically have a lot of effort being spent on a theory with at least TWENTY SIX completely unexplained "magic constants"! https://spinor.info/weblog/?p=... [spinor.info]

    the one exception to this is work by someone called dr randall mills, whose work started somewhere in the 1990s, and, after 30 consistent self-referencing papers (because no peer-reviewed journal would accept them) he and his team published a whopping 1750-page book containing the material. it's *dynamite*. it's the *only* one of the theories that i cannot dismiss "out of hand". it makes sense, it's consistent, it's self-consistent, there *are* mistakes, there *are* "missing pieces"... but the core makes perfect sense even to me with A-Level maths.

    now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model, where funding is ONLY available if you are working on the STANDARD MODEL, and where deviations from the STANDARD MODEL result in you never receiving funding again... you see where this is going?

    basically i am trying to point out that upgrading the hardware really isn't going to help. the academic peer-reviewed system is so broken that i have really not a lot of hope that things will change. if you are not familiar with this concept, you can google it for yourself: https://www.google.co.uk/searc... [google.co.uk]

    this article - which i had never seen until now - is particularly fascinating: https://www.nature.com/news/pe... [nature.com] which points out that peer-review is "a response to political demands for public accountability". whilst we may claim that, in concert with internet searches and connectivity arxiv (and vixra) are helping to bypass that and allow "public comments" over time to help spot mistakes, it doesn't help with the top journals, which is what most academics read and take seriously. and if those journals are biased....

    • it's *dynamite*. it's the *only* one of the theories that i cannot dismiss "out of hand". it makes sense, it's consistent, it's self-consistent, there *are* mistakes, there *are* "missing pieces"... but the core makes perfect sense even to me with A-Level maths.

      Genuinely not trying to troll you here, but this sounds like classic Dunning-Kruger effect. It's entirely possible that someone with the expertise you don't have (i.e. a particle physicist) could point out glaring inconsistencies that you are overlooking.

      • Genuinely not trying to troll you here, but this sounds like classic Dunning-Kruger effect.

        It's not Dunning-Kruger if he's fully aware that he could be wrong, if he's fully aware that he doesn't know everything. His comment is fine, he present his status as an amateur physicist with very good math skill. Seems he understand his skill level, and isn't over-estimating it.

        • That is not how I read GP's comment at all. As I see it they are making clear, strong claims about particle physics and string theory.

        • by lkcl ( 517947 )

          Genuinely not trying to troll you here, but this sounds like classic Dunning-Kruger effect.

          It's not Dunning-Kruger if he's fully aware that he could be wrong, if he's fully aware that he doesn't know everything. His comment is fine, he present his status as an amateur physicist with very good math skill. Seems he understand his skill level, and isn't over-estimating it.

          appreciate you defending me, but as a point of order i have to point out that my maths level is well below what you give the impression that i understand :) i have both memory problems and some sort of extremely strange logic-dyslexia (but extremely well-honed pattern-recognition and 3D visualisation skills).

          as a software engineer i've had to compensate for the lack of ability to do walk-throughs of basic maths and boolean logic by writing unit-tests, and developed a programming style that verifies the out

          • ok well anyway, I don't think you have Dunning-Kruger.

            It's amazing how many non-psychologists, people who've never even taken a psychology class, are naturally gifted and talented at diagnosing Dunning-Kruger.
      • by lkcl ( 517947 )

        Genuinely not trying to troll you here, but this sounds like classic Dunning-Kruger effect. It's entirely possible that someone with the expertise you don't have (i.e. a particle physicist) could point out glaring inconsistencies that you are overlooking.

        you know what? if someone *actually fucking well bothered to even look* i would be absolutely delighted. sorry for swearing as emphasis, but it's completely insane and terribly frustrating that the only people who will look at dr randall mill's work - not

        • by Shimbo ( 100005 )

          basically there's something really, really wrong with society, that people with the willingness to study and further science are basically quite literally in some cases expected to starve themselves.

          I don't think it's wrong that society is not expected to fund people's hobbies. If people want to try to lead into gold or whatever 'non-standard science' on their own time, that's fine. Don't expect me to pay for it though.

          • by lkcl ( 517947 )

            basically there's something really, really wrong with society, that people with the willingness to study and further science are basically quite literally in some cases expected to starve themselves.

            I don't think it's wrong that society is not expected to fund people's hobbies. If people want to try to lead into gold or whatever 'non-standard science' on their own time, that's fine. Don't expect me to pay for it though.

            patronage, particularly during victorian times, was basically how scientific enquiry got funded. and the arts, and much more. it was a "golden age". many industrialists became extremely wealthy, and it was "de rigueur" amongst your wealthy peers to either (a) fund some scientific research in the hope that the people you funded would make something that you could make MORE money out of (b) you were so rich you just did it anyway.

            now, would some of those people so funded have been fraudsters? quite probab

    • Is that the same Randall Mills from Brilliant Light Power?

      • by lkcl ( 517947 )

        Is that the same Randall Mills from Brilliant Light Power?

        yes it is. his work on hydrinos was a side-effect of the underlying (sound, zero-postulation, zero-appromations) theoretical work into the electron, proton, neutron and neutrino (and a couple others like the muon). that work in turn came out of his pioneering improvements to NMR resonance, where, due to the extreme strength of the magnetic fields involved, "standard" theories of the neutron, electron and proton just don't hold up.

        • Yeah, i'll pass.

          • by lkcl ( 517947 )

            Yeah, i'll pass.

            ... and? why would that matter to me (or anyone else)? what relevant contribution do you have to make to scientific enquiry? more disbelief? more scorn? are you paid to rubbish other peoples' work? are you being paid by the U.S. Government to discredit people? are you being paid by the Russian Government instead? what is your motivation for expressing and spreading "disbelief"? if you are not being paid, are you on a personal crusade to destroy scientific enquiry? are you out to personally discredi

            • Gotta admit, after starting to read a bit more about what lkcl is on about at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - it's actually a pretty amazing rabbit hole.

              If I am not totally mistaken, there was a TED talk a while back that tried to summarize up some of this?
              https://www.ted.com/talks/garr... [ted.com]

              • by lkcl ( 517947 )

                Gotta admit, after starting to read a bit more about what lkcl is on about at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - it's actually a pretty amazing rabbit hole.

                jaezuss that's a cluster**** gone sideways :) i bet you the discussion is two orders of magnitude longer than the original page.

                If I am not totally mistaken, there was a TED talk a while back that tried to summarize up some of this?
                https://www.ted.com/talks/garr... [ted.com]

                that's a really informative talk, good find. i love the 3D representation of particles, how he goes from 2D to 4D to 6D and it's all projected down to 2D. if you ever want to explore that for yourself with an HTML5 "thing" you can play with it here: http://deferentialgeometry.org... [deferentialgeometry.org]

            • Nah. I'll just wait for until his alternative energy company actually comes up with a viable product.

              Until then excuse me if i lump them with the likes of Steorn and the like.

    • now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model, where funding is ONLY available if you are working on the STANDARD MODEL, and where deviations from the STANDARD MODEL result in you never receiving funding again... you see where this is going?

      OK, but what are these "non-standard" scientists going to do differently? Do they have experiments that would be a better application of our (collective) money than an upgrade in the standard model?

      Even if the standard model is somewhat wrong (it's mostly right, just like Newton's model is mostly right), then what experiments would we do differently to verify it?

      • by lkcl ( 517947 )

        now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model, where funding is ONLY available if you are working on the STANDARD MODEL, and where deviations from the STANDARD MODEL result in you never receiving funding again... you see where this is going?

        OK, but what are these "non-standard" scientists going to do differently? Do they have experiments that would be a better application of our (collective) money than an upgrade in the standard model?

        Even if the standard model is somewhat wrong (it's mostly right, just like Newton's model is mostly right), then what experiments would we do differently to verify it?

        these are extremely pertinent and insightful questions that i deliberately didn't ask in the reply that started this thread, as i wanted to keep it to just one (albeit long) point. if it's ok with you i'm going to do a "wandering tour" before directly answering, ok?

        first thing: the standard model is "right" because as you can see from those "magic constants" listed in that link to spinor.info https://spinor.info/weblog/?p=... [spinor.info] it's *MADE* to be "right" by virtue of the unexplained magic constants be

        • Einstein did some of his most insightful work while making a living as a patent specialist. Don't blame "**FUNDING**" for the inability of all the alternative theories to come up with testable predictions. If the theory doesn't have obvious flaws and has a testable prediction, it will eventually gain enough respect from the theorist and enough curiosity from experimental scientists. Even Einstein's groundbreaking "special relativity" was mostly ignored at first
          • by lkcl ( 517947 )

            Einstein did some of his most insightful work while making a living as a patent specialist. Don't blame "**FUNDING**" for the inability of all the alternative theories to come up with testable predictions. If the theory doesn't have obvious flaws and has a testable prediction, it will eventually gain enough respect from the theorist and enough curiosity from experimental scientists. Even Einstein's groundbreaking "special relativity" was mostly ignored at first

            i honestly and truly wish that what you say here had happened. i wish that theoretical physicists would even take a single glance at the work, on the basis that the calculations for the electron g/2 and mass come out to 10 decimal places accurate. can you tell me, why are theoretical physicists from the rest of the scientific community not looking at that?

            i have friends in a small group, we're supposed to be open-minded, having seen how closed-minded the scientific community can be when it comes to "again

        • I read your post twice and I'm still not sure what the answer to my question was.

          btw, it doesn't bother me that there are magic numbers. We have the gravitational constant, and no one has any clue why that is the number it is.
          • by lkcl ( 517947 )

            I read your post twice and I'm still not sure what the answer to my question was.

            btw, it doesn't bother me that there are magic numbers. We have the gravitational constant, and no one has any clue why that is the number it is.

            yeah, i know: that one really bothers me that it's only accurate to around 6 decimal places, planck's constant is 10 if recall without looking at nist.gov CODATA website.... the most accurate is the rydberg constant at 12... but planck's constant trashes the accuracy of a whole stack of constants down to only 10, including electric charge, as, fascinatingly, the constants involving planck, mass and electric charge are all self-referential (cyclic). bit of a bummer, that! :)

            as a reverse-engineer i've had t

          • by lkcl ( 517947 )

            I read your post twice and I'm still not sure what the answer to my question was.

            sorry, the answer was: despite wishing that science actually worked that way (that eventually someone notices the theory and it gets the attention it deserves), in this particular case i suspect that, sadly, that will be several decades before it occurs. some time after the Standard Model's flaws are finally admitted and people *finally* start looking for alternatives. right now, they're just so blinkered that you could walk up to one of them in the street, put the paper in front of them and go "HERE! AN

    • I haven't read his stuff myself but googling for more information on Randall Mills and GUTCP reveals some not-so-possitive links:

      First of all wikipedia:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      There is a LOT of serious criticism there. It is enough to notice that his company has not produced anything real and testable since it started in 1991.

      The review here also gives the usual crackpot smell (see Numerology and more for example). Equations and results are not derived but rather scotch taped together:
      http://sjbyrn [sjbyrnes.com]

      • by lkcl ( 517947 )

        So, I think we can safely ignore this. At least until a physics defying battery shows up on the market.

        ath1901: the battery is just one direction, that mills was forced to explore because, just like tesla, mills was only able to get investor funding for the *theoretical* work by promising something that would "make money".

        unfortunately, as you've probably seen from the wikipedia page (which i deliberately haven't read), there are a lot of fuckwits who are basically doing the secular "mob rule" equivalent of an Inquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        do you follow "mob rule", ath1901? you know how that

        • No, not mob rule. It's just my version of due diligence.

          I try to read the criticism of a book/person/body of work before digging too deep into something and risk getting personally invested. I look for both the severity and the type (methodological, factual, omission or distortion of fact, overreaching conclusions etc). After I know the critique I read the actual work (if still interested).

          For example, one of my favorite podcasts was "STEM Talk" and I Dr Diamond talking about statins and cholesterol and I r

    • it makes sense, it's consistent, it's self-consistent, there *are* mistakes, there *are* "missing pieces"... but the core makes perfect sense even to me with A-Level maths.

      You're OK with a theory with mistakes visible and missing pieces... but you're bothered by theories with "magic constants"? Interesting double standard you have going there.

      now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical an

      • by lkcl ( 517947 )

        it makes sense, it's consistent, it's self-consistent, there *are* mistakes, there *are* "missing pieces"... but the core makes perfect sense even to me with A-Level maths.

        You're OK with a theory with mistakes visible and missing pieces... but you're bothered by theories with "magic constants"? Interesting double standard you have going there.

        not at all. there's a huge difference between the theories. also, please don't think that by saying "yes i have noticed mistakes" that those mistakes are deal-breakers: the signs are, to me - (the hypothesis that i am working on is ) - that there's simply a third or fourth term missing from some of the equations that results in inaccuracies creeping in at the *TENTH* decimal place and beyond. you can't possibly tell me that inaccuracy at the TENTH decimal place means that an entire theory should be throw

        • dr mill's work uses planck's and alpha and NOTHING else. there's zero supposition, zero approximation, zero guess-work, zero postulation.

          And (as you yourself point out) multiple mistakes and missing pieces.

          applying occam's razor or kolmogorov complexity, whatever metric you choose, there's absolutely no comparison between the two theories.

          Why would I use completely irrelevant metrics? The only relevant questions are a) does it fit existing data?, and b) does it make testable predictions?

          And yes, m

    • Do you mean Dr. Randell Mills? For those curious, his site is here [brilliantlightpower.com]

      Wiki is not very kind [wikipedia.org]...

      Anyway, if you really are looking for alternate theories, might I suggest my own alternate theory [just-think-it.com]?

      • by lkcl ( 517947 )

        Anyway, if you really are looking for alternate theories, might I suggest my own alternate theory [just-think-it.com]?

        appreciated. to evaluate it, i need to see some papers: some mathematical equations, i don't mind if they're in text form or PDF form, however PDF is the standard format. words outlining the "features and benefits" without actually giving the *actual* maths and a step-by-step recipe on how a mathematician can follow them, won't help, and nor will videos of the same.

        do you have something like that available? i use vixra as it's self-publishing.

    • You seem like a fairly open minded guy. What do you think of the idea that gravity is a just time gradient that respects Lorentz's Law of Invariance?

      Long story short, Time moves faster the further you are from a mass. It would be the Time gradient that gives a sense of gravity. Is there any a priori reason I should stop investigating this?

      The original idea that prompted this line of thought has to do with galactic rotation curves, but the implications are exceedingly... erm, interesting.

  • It is for the LHC [xkcd.com], but it could be adapted...

  • I have a monorail for sale. It will upend transportation as we know it. You're gonna LOVE it!
  • The cracks in the SM are getting too large to ignore. The LHC cannot now, nor can it ever, probe at the scales we need to correct the serious gaps in the SM. Throwing a billion dollars at it is not a good use of our wealth. If you want to throw money at something, spend it on upgrading LIGO or getting LISA off the ground sooner, which are two tools that can open new windows on the universe right now. The SM needs to be corrected, and the LHC cannot help with that.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Theory and experiment go hand in hand. The LHC has all but eliminated most of super-symmetry for instance. Higher luminocity will knock off some more theories. But frankly, the theorists don't have good experiments that tell them anything. They came up with a bunch in the 80s/90s, and they're all mostly kaput now!

      If you want to throw money at something, spend it on upgrading LIGO or getting LISA off the ground sooner,

      LIGO is a US project. LHC is Europe. Would you really expect Europe to give money to

  • Hopefully what happened to Praxis will not happen at CERN

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • can somebody please convert this figure to brapples for me?

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