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Big Bang Experiment Begins
Bamelin
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News Big Bang experiment succeeds in 1st major tests
The giant particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland has completed its first major tests, successfully sending beams of protons all the way around a 27-kilometre underground tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border.
CBC News
It was the first of many steps for the Large Hadron Collider, a massive physics experiment built at a cost of $3.8 billion and with a total expected cost of over $9 billion.
At 10:36 a.m. local time, the particle accelerator sent a beam of protons running clockwise through the underground circuit. Five hours later, scientists successfully sent a beam counterclockwise.
The collider will eventually push the protons using a ring of super-cooled magnets to speeds and energies never before reached under controlled conditions, and crash them into one another to create and detect a host of new particles.
The data from those collisions will then be sent to computer networks around the world, including in Canada, where they will be analyzed to try to reconstruct what happened during these collisions.
Scientists hope these collisions will be able to reveal previously unseen particles and give greater insight into the interactions that occurred during the first few moments of the universe.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates the collider and is known by its French acronym CERN, said the LHC has so far operated as expected, helping to dampen speculation that the collider would lead to some form of cataclysmic event.
Last week, the safety assessment group for the LHC published a review that dismissed fears that the collider would create universe-gobbling black holes or anti-matter destroying the Earth.
If particle collisions like the ones created at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, such interactions would have wiped out the planet long ago, the group wrote last Friday in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics.
"Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about 100,000 LHC experimental programs on Earth - and the planet still exists," they wrote.
Leading scientists such as Britain's Stephen Hawking have also declared the project's experiments safe.
The collider is expected to be the most powerful tool yet for physicists hoping to uncover the secrets behind the laws of the universe, both on the tiny scale of quantum mechanics and the huge domain of galaxies and black holes.
One thing in particular they believe they will find is the Higgs boson, a particle thought to impart mass on most other particles. The Higgs boson plays a key role in the Standard Model of particle physics, a framework that has helped to explain the interactions of particles like electrons, quarks and photons for over 30 years. But so far it has never been found.
Cliff Burgess, a physics and astronomy professor at McMaster University in Hamilton and associate member of the Waterloo, Ont.-based Perimeter Institute, said if the LHC can't find it, physicists will have to revisit what they think they know about the makeup of the universe.
"That's actually the best-case scenario for people like me, because that means the theorists are all in business again," he said.
http://technology.sympatico.msn.cbc.ca/abc/news/ContentPosting.aspx?isfa=1&feedname=CBC-TECH-SCIENCE-V3&showbyline=True&newsitemid=big-bang
I've been reading about this experiment over the past few days. Despite assurances that all of this is perfectly safe I can't help but feel like this just doesn't seem like a very good idea. I think I've watched too many disaster movies though.
Could somebody explain to me in plain English what they are trying to do, and if I should be worried that they are trying to do it?
Bamelin on
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We have a thread already.
Edit: That came off kinda dickish after reading it. Not my intent.
I don't visit D and D enough, I should have searched better. sorry!
The thread title is also a misnomer. This has relatively little to do with the Big Bang, and isn't the goal of the experiment.. It certainly doesn't simulate one. The LHC has to do with particle physics, with gaps in models (which does include the Big Bang to some extend, because of our lack of understanding Big Bang models are limited) and with finding particles predicted and not yet found.
Main goal of the LHC: Find the Higgs-Boson. In the Standard Model of physics (which is the extremely succesfull subatomic model, protons, electrons, quarks, photons etcet), this is the "glue" particle, a particle that's needed to make the theory fit, a particle that works on other particles. Of all the particles predicted and described in the Standard Model, it's the only one never seen.
The disaster "controversy" (Really this is more stupid then evolution debates on the internet) is that IF somehow Hawkings radiation doesn't exist, but the theory it's based on is valid (how does that work? I don't know) the collision energies could create a micro black hole. However it's nonsensical for 2 reasons:
1) These collisions happen all the time, and our planet exists
2) You can't say "What if theory X is completely correct except for vital part Y without which theory X is nonsense, then this would kill us!"
What it does is basicly speed up protons until they have ridicilous energy, bang them together (or vs lead), and see what mess you create. Then you try to calculate from the mess what it was exactly that you banged together.
Heck dude, you create a micro black hole through some miracle of idiotic non-science, it somehow maintains cohesion beyond a few trillionths of a second, and what's it going to do? Drop down to the centre of the Earth and not bother anyone.
The scaremongering over CERN is ridiculous.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) the media in the UK went with a different track of thought to make this a story. Which is:
"Should we really be spending so much money so that these egghead theorists can prove some obscure hypothesis about the universe? Surely nothing useful will come of it, just more pontificating over topics that are beyond the comprehension of and of no interest to you, the average dullard, and will have no practical effect on your life."
Gah, I hate media sprouting crap to make stories. Good reporting is one thing, but making up controversy whilst using the cover all terms "some people say this is controversial..." just irks me no end.
Oh, and anyone who's ever used a computer, as the theories enabled the invention and progressive refinement of the transistor.
And most modern medicine, as QED's complete theory of chemistry has led to massive advances in biochemistry enabling modern pharmaceutical development.
Science is done for science's sake, but technology is never far behind.
That's the view of Sir David King, the former Chief Scientific Officer of the UK. So it's not an entirely manufactured viewpoint. Dr Brian Cox said pretty much the same thing to him as Seol, in a debate on last night's Newsnight.
Well until someone can write a business plan around it and people can buy it in stores with packages that have marketing jargon instead of scientific jargon folks will react like it's the devil's work. Hell, when my aunts and mom were pregnant, my grandmother came and took away the microwave because she was scared the radiation would turn the babies into mutants. She laughs about it now. It takes time for people to get comfortable with new advances. Especially when the advances are theoretical and can't be explained in concrete, easily digestible methods.
I know, I watched it. That wasn't strictly his view because he was still interested in seeing it and seeing the results of it, he just questioned whether it was worth the investment at the current time. If nothing else, it's an understandable viewpoint. I still felt Cox shut down Paxman's stance pretty sharpish.
I'm not sure that I agree that it does sound the same. He's not saying that CERN will have no appreciable benefits for people, in that quote he's saying that Tim Berners Lee could have applied his genius elsewhere and also received results, and likewise here, it's a question of whether there aren't more important endeavours to be undertaken with those resources.
The thing is, I don't think I really agree with that stance he's proposing either. Most scientific discoveries and applications aren't built out of the genius of one man alone, they're built out of the thousands of man-hours of pure grindwork that's put into obtaining a meaningful result. Tim Berners Lee arguably conceived of the modern internet and laid the groundwork for it, but he sure as heck didn't build the entire thing. I just think it's a spurious argument to suggest that if he had worked in a different field we'd be on the way to solving our energy crisis or something. Lee's a Computer Scientist, you can't just say "well what if he wasn't and he was in fact researching solar energy? What if he had discovered something miraculous that the other amazing geniuses currently studying the field didn't?"
Heck I could take that argument the opposite direction. What if we didn't have the modern internet? What state would our world be in? Our economy? Technology sectors? Any number of logistics related fields? If you're willing to say that his research for CERN was the reason he "invented" the world wide web, can we truly quantify just how valuable that development has been to us? How much worse off we may or may not be without it? I can't come close to that kind of understanding, I just know that the difference between that world and this would be enormous.
Now you could say "well all these researchers and resources could be used for looking into other fields", and you'd be right, but it's not strictly an "either / or" deal here.
I guess I feel that energy research is an important field, but I also feel that the research pumped into CERN yields its own incredible results for us, and with a better understanding of the nature of the atom, potentially even solutions to our energy crisis. Heck, we'd be far worse off today without the concept of nuclear energy as it is. Like I said, it's not a strictly "either / or", research into pure theoretical physics has lead us to incredible solutions and technologies.
I should take the opportunity to point out that I don't agree with King, it's just that his views have been the ones used to promote the idea of a controversy. Largely, I agree with you, but I thought it should be pointed out that King doesn't.
However, the LHC is going to tell us incredibly important things about how the universe works. On a fundamental level, this is knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and that is worth an enormous investment by itself. I am concerned at the anti-intellectualism that recoils at that idea.
I see. I can understand that viewpoint, but pure scientific research has always resulted in offshoot technology being developed for and from it. Beyond that, we can't predict what further research from CERN may provide any more than what benefits further solar research may provide.
I know. And to a large extent I agreed with Dr. Cox on that newsnight interview when he said he was surprised that King was adopting that viewpoint. The potential developments for fusion and fission power research alone could be monumental.
This.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't use Windows 98, LHC people. PLEASE!
The LHC is going to simulate events that are happening in our atmosphere even as we speak right?
and one of the things they expect/hope to find is the Higgs Bosen which gives (or creates?) mass to particles?
Wouldn't this be detectable in an uncontrolled environment? It seems like the sudden creation of mass would be detectable at some level.