Particle Physicists Offer a Road Map for the Next Decade (nytimes.com) 43
Particle physicists should begin laying the groundwork for a revolutionary particle collider that could be built on American soil, a committee of scientists wrote in a draft report on the future of particle physics released on Thursday. From a report: The machine would collide tiny, point-like particles called muons, which resemble electrons but are more massive. Muons provide more bang for the buck than the protons used in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and would push the search for new forces and particles deeper than ever into the unknown. The siting of such a project, perhaps at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, would restore American particle physics to a position of pre-eminence that was ceded to Europe in 1993 when Congress canceled the giant Superconducting Super Collider. But it will take at least 10 years to demonstrate that the muon collider could work and how much it would cost.
"This is our muon shot," the committee, charged with outlining a vision for the next decade of American particle physics, said in a draft report titled "Exploring the Quantum Universe: Pathways to Innovation and Discovery in Particle Physics." The draft is being presented and discussed at a meeting in Washington, D.C., on Thursday and Friday, and at Fermilab next week. The draft report also highlighted a need to invest in next-generation experiments probing the nature of subatomic particles called neutrinos; the cosmic microwave background, relic radiation from the Big Bang; and dark matter, the gravitational glue holding galaxies together. The panel also recommended participating in a future facility in either Europe or Japan, dedicated to studying the Higgs boson, the discovery of which in 2012 was key for understanding how other particles get their mass.
"The size of the universe we now see as 14 billion light-years across was actually smaller than the size of a nucleus" early in cosmic time, said Hitoshi Murayama, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the committee. "So our field is actually not just looking for the fundamental constituents, but getting a bigger picture of how the universe works as whole." The committee, formally known as the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, was tasked by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to lay out a road map for the future of the field. The three-year process began by soliciting input from the particle physics community at large, and the final report will serve as a recommendation for what national agencies should prioritize over the next decade.
"This is our muon shot," the committee, charged with outlining a vision for the next decade of American particle physics, said in a draft report titled "Exploring the Quantum Universe: Pathways to Innovation and Discovery in Particle Physics." The draft is being presented and discussed at a meeting in Washington, D.C., on Thursday and Friday, and at Fermilab next week. The draft report also highlighted a need to invest in next-generation experiments probing the nature of subatomic particles called neutrinos; the cosmic microwave background, relic radiation from the Big Bang; and dark matter, the gravitational glue holding galaxies together. The panel also recommended participating in a future facility in either Europe or Japan, dedicated to studying the Higgs boson, the discovery of which in 2012 was key for understanding how other particles get their mass.
"The size of the universe we now see as 14 billion light-years across was actually smaller than the size of a nucleus" early in cosmic time, said Hitoshi Murayama, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the committee. "So our field is actually not just looking for the fundamental constituents, but getting a bigger picture of how the universe works as whole." The committee, formally known as the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, was tasked by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to lay out a road map for the future of the field. The three-year process began by soliciting input from the particle physics community at large, and the final report will serve as a recommendation for what national agencies should prioritize over the next decade.
Why bother (Score:2)
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It's usually the Democrats who say that the 100 billion could instead be used to end whirled hunger.
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In fairness the SSC that was being built in Texas was mostly hated by everyone but Texas. That's the reason in 1993 the Space Station got funding and the super collider got nixed. More States had fingers in construction of the space program and space station that relied on the shuttle, than the SSC that was mostly employing Texas voters.
Let us never forget that it was Rep. Jim Slattery and Rep. Sherwood Boehlert that was leading the charge for cancelling the SSC. The former is Democrat and the latter is
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Republicans will of course fight this and they'll ultimately win :(
Twelve months from now, all branches of the federal government will have a distinctly anti-science stance and projects like this will no longer be possible.
Superconducting Super Collider debacle (Score:2)
After that debacle in 1993, it will be a long time before the non-US particle physics community trusts Congress to keep its word when it comes to funding high-dollar physics projects.
"A long time" being at least until the last non-American scientist whose career was hurt by the cancellation retires.
1993 was only 30 years ago. People in the industry still remember.
Re:Why bother (Score:5, Funny)
Republicans will of course fight this
It shoots particles. Second Amendment, guys.
This, according to Pew, pew, pew Research.
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Much better than "This is our muon shot" from the article... I would withhold funding just based on the bad pun.
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Last time around, the more they narrowed down the location, the more legislators quit supporting it. Everyone wanted the money spent in their own state.
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And this, right here, is why scientific discovery slows down and we don't end up getting applied science that creates actual benefits.
Undoubtedly, there were people making the same criticisms of the Gemini and Apollo program in the 1960s. And out of that we got satellite communications, the entire semiconductor industry, and countless advancements in materials science.
First comes discovery. THEN comes applied science. It doesn't work in reverse, which is what you're asking for. And you probably know tha
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Ya, take quantum mechanics, what the hell were those bozos thinking back when it was being invented when no possible use-cases were proposed. And that Einstein guy boring us all to tears over relativity, totally useless. We should also mention the early work on DNA. Hell, you cannot even see those damn genes. And lasers, those morons spent billions developing those useless things.
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That's not *totally* wrong. You can't predict what benefits will result from research. And I don't know enough about the LHC results to say that there HAVE been any specific benefits.
FWIW, I'd prefer that the money was spent on adapting humans to live in space (or rather mechanisms supporting human life in space). But I'm not *certain* that that would have any better result.
P,S,: Note that I said "life in space", not "on Mars". I'm actually thinking more about the asteroids. In either case it's not re
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CERN's LHC archive is probably the largest single not-social-media dataset in the world.
holy grail (Score:2)
Particle physics will never find all particles, because what it is about is smashing things together at ever increasing ridiculous energy levels. It can only end when the entire energy of the galaxy is used to smash two particles together to see what happens.
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It can only end when the entire energy of the galaxy is used to smash two particles together to see what happens.
That is what a prominent theory calls a Big Bang except instead of a Galaxy it uses the entire Universe. Wait did we just solve their holy grail? No more need for funding.
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it uses the entire Universe
And next we'll fund an accelerator that can handle two universes.
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Particle physics will never find all particles, because what it is about is smashing things together at ever increasing ridiculous energy levels. It can only end when the entire energy of the galaxy is used to smash two particles together to see what happens.
The fact that you felt it appropriate to reference the "holy grail", says it all.
And that end result doesn't paint a picture other than self-destruction.
Yes. In fact I DO believe humans can be THAT ignorant. Look at human history and prove me wrong.
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Doctors without Borders. Feed America. The Red Cross.
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He didn't say they always were, just that they could be. And he's right.
Your point that they can also act benevolently is also correct. They don't contradict each other.
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The goal of particle physics is not to find all the particles. The goal is to verify some theories and toss out others. By doing so, we expand our understanding of how the universe works and eventually new technologies come out of it.
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If a commonly accepted theory is correct, it's impossible to find all the particles. According to this theory each "particle" is just an particular combination of energy states. Put things in a higher energy state, and new resonances appear. By analyzing which states are how stable we can refine out understanding of the universe from the base upwards.
I'm not sure I accept this theory, and even if it's true it doesn't predict how much energy you'll need to add to get the next sort-of-stable state. Refine
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Fermilab has more pressing problems with the truck traffic on Butterfield Rd.
That's an ongoing operational problem. The New Madrid fault has the potential to break a very large capital investment into little pieces.
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Stanford's SLAC is real close to the San Andreas fault. I could see a gully marking it from my window in one of the electronics labs. After a mild rumble one time, though it was after my time there, my contacts there said it was an opportunity to re-align magnets and instrumentation. Things ran better after than before.
Science is losing in the US (Score:2)
Pew Research says Americans no longer trust scientists, and that crosses party lines.
Nature reports that the US has been reducing science funding for decades (NSF, DoE, and NIST), and 2024 is expected to be a 25 year low.
Half the population (or at least of the voters who matter) is actively anti-science because facts tend to undermine their stated beliefs.
Not that great things aren't still being done, but the clock appears to be ticking.
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Muon Lifetime (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlike protons and electrons, muons aren't just hanging around - you need to create them (and anti-muons) copiously as a precursor to the actual accelerator. That kind of thing has been done before: there's plenty of history with electron-positron [wikipedia.org] colliders [wikipedia.org], for which you first need to create the positrons.
Another challenge, though, is that muons will spontaneously decay within about 2.2 microseconds - so whatever you're going to do with them has to happen very, very quickly after they are generated. Thankfully, that 2.2-us lifetime is at rest: once they are accelerated to 99.999% the speed of light, time dilation stretches their lifetime [wikipedia.org] considerably. Finally, whatever muons do decay before collision will create a spray of decay products, and some care is needed to make sure that doesn't contaminate the measurement's you're trying to make.
The Muon g-2 [wikipedia.org] experiment demonstrates that we have the capability to generate and manipulate muons long enough to do meaningful and precise physics on them. With a fresh design I expect it would yield really neat results. Who knows, we may find that muon accelerators yield practical applications beyond this basic research. These kind of investments usually do.
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This was the kind of comment I was looking for. Thank you for getting past the predictable political bullshit and helping to explain some of the details about what they'll be attempting to do.
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"This is our muon shot" (Score:4, Funny)
Don't quit your day job...
Road Map for the Next Decade (Score:2)
I sure hope Google [slashdot.org] doesn't have anything to do with it.
Here's the thing (Score:2)
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You don't seem to understand. Not finding those particles was as important as finding them would have been. Either result takes a sheaf of theories and runs them through a shredder, but until you look, you don't know which sheaf.
"it will take at least 10 years to demonstrate" (Score:2)
"that the muon collider could work." So, not physics for the next 10 years but the 10 years after that.
the physics is not clear (Score:2)
" 'The size of the universe we now see as 14 billion light-years across was actually smaller than the size of a nucleus' early in cosmic time".
I kind of have a problem with that because if you pack the mass of the universe into the size of an atom, why didn't gravitational forces immediately collapse that into something more powerful than a massive black hole? Apparently the energy present in this proto-universe was so large it could prevent black hole collapse. But then why, after some expansion that dilut