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LHC - Top Science or Titanic Money Pit?
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you have no reason to believe that unless you have a background in particle physics that you have been hiding up until now.
you just flipped a coin and picked the option that would cause the most people to argue with you.
My mom can drive a car and use a computer. She has no idea how either work. That's not really ideal. Alchemists thought they knew 99.99999% about how chemistry worked, just because they could apply a little of it.
Yes. How did you arrive at it? Through reasoned scientific inquiry, or the flip of a coin? If the former, please share. If the latter, why did you post it?
Well, no one has ever observed one.
Look people obviously take offense to me saying I don't believe in it. Fine, so I take it back.
But at the same time, I won't make any decision until I've seen the evidence.
well i wasn't talking about personal knowledge as much as accumulated knowledge. someone knows how that computer works, someone knows how a car works. i doubt that tomorrow we will find out that chemistry has fundamentally changed...
It's not so much that chemistry changes, it's that we now have a new understanding of why chemistry works the way it does.
Except, replace chemistry with physics.
Then God help us all.
The reason people are taking offense to you saying you don't believe in it is because you're dismissing it as if someone woke up one day and conjured up the idea of the Higgs boson out of nothing.
Skepticism is one thing. "I don't believe in it" is another.
yeah but the thing is, answering why is nice but it doesn't change how we apply chemistry. thats why i was specific in the whole applied knowledge thing. when it comes down to it, the stuff we have left to explain isn't going to announce a fundamental change in what we do with science but just the theory behind it.
Especially seeing how nobody's observed light either. If the math adds up, then it works, as I don't need to see a pack of 42 zebras join up with another pack of 58 to know there'd be 100.
Nobody has ever seen me punching you in the face. Doesn't mean it can't (or wont) happen.
Umm... I wasn't really talking about personal knowledge either. Applied Understanding:Operation of thing :: Functional Understanding:Ability to fix/build a car. They couldn't build the computer you are using today, without knowing things about quantum physics we have learned fairly recently. Even now, we don't really understand how a lot of these things work, but we know that they will happen.
Alchemists had applied understanding of chemistry, but they couldn't advance beyond a certain point because they really had no clue what the hell they were talking about. They were totally wrong about how all of it actually functioned.
When it comes to particle physics, we are pretty close to being alchemists.
Yeah, but understanding more about the why opens up new ways of applying it. By research and experimentation, we can find out new ways to do things that we hadn't thought of before.
You just did.
As well as improving our application of ___. Doing X and then Y may work to produce Z, but unless you know why it works you're going to be stuck with how you do it. As soon as you figure that X binds to Y this way you can cut down on waste, or tweak the amounts to make an even stronger Zmk2. &c.
Ultracold gas mimics ultrahot plasma
Would the people working on Einstein-Bose concentrates be the same people dicking around at the LHC? Because I don't really see why we can't be doing both with the best minds focusing on each at the same time.
You will never comprehend this on any level where you should feel comfortable forming an opinion.
No doubt you feel otherwise, which is merely more evidence of your massive ignorance.
Last time I checked, Condensed matter physics and Particle physics are separate fields. They can compete with each other for money, but in the long run we are going to have to do both to get all the answers.
It just seems to me that if anything truly useful were to come from this new physics frontier, it would be at the low energy scale. Other than the CRT level, no one can really afford to own their own particle accelerators. But if you engineer something out of an effect that occurs at the low energy end of the spectrum, then you'd be more likely to be able to create something that would benefit the majority of people.
[mad scientist]
Unless we manage to create a stable and capturable micro-black hole. Then we've got infinite energy. Just place a wire close enough to the event horizon that it can yank off electrons and you've got a new ground potential that makes everything else uphill.
[/mad scientist]
Well, what they figure out at the LHC isn't going to require a personal particle accelerator in order to be applied/become useful. It and supercold materials are at the cutting edge that the crazy ass shit they discover/figure out is likely going to filter its way back to us eventually on both counts somehow.
Look up how they do this stuff. It's pretty cool. But by the time they are getting down to the end, they are floating minuscule pile of particles in a magnetic dish and effectively vacuuming off individual particle to decrease the energy of the rest of the pile. It's a less expensive than a very high energy particle accelerator, but probably costs more than the particle accelerators you'd find at schools.
These things will help out theoretical science, but the exponents on the x10 after all the numbers involved are too big, regardless of how they are signed, to be of much use directly applied.
Condensates have only really been studied for over a decade now. Just like superconductivity, there may an equivalent version of high temperature condensates that occur over a more approachable temperature.
You may be correct. The LHC may prove the Standard Model is correct. Condensates aren't going to do that ever. We need to find out about both.
I don't see why Condensates couldn't be used to fill in the gaps in the Standard Model.
I don't see why String Theorists have nothing really interesting to say about low energy physics either though.
The LHC seems like one big crap shoot. Smash stuff together at an order of magnitude higher energy level than we've ever seen and hope that we can make some sense out of the results.
Because whichever answer we come out with we learn an awful lot.
These things are too small to be "seen." So using "seeing one" as evidence of its existence/nonexistence isn't going to work.
Basically, scientists have narrowed down all of existence to two major groups of things: fermions, and bosons.
Fermions make up what we call "matter." Quarks and electrons are kinds of fermions. Quarks form protons. And protons + electrons make atoms. Atoms, as you probably know, make up your body, the air, everything in your house ... everything that you can touch.
Bosons make up what we call "energy." Photons, for example, are a kind of boson. A photon is a single "chunk" of light. The forces that make the individual parts of an atom stick together are also bosons—the so called "weak force" and "strong force"—are also made of bosons (respectively, gluons and W- or Z-bosons). So in a way, atoms are made of fermions held together with bosons.
See here for a fancy chart:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Standard_Model_of_Elementary_Particles.svg
Now, all of these particles have been experimentally verified to exist. You can't see any of them, but we've recorded their patterns such that we can be completely certain that they exist.
The problem is, in order for this model of "existence" to makes sense, there needs to be some other particle that carries mass. This particle, the so-called Higgs boson, hasn't been experimentally verified to exist. But its existence fills a "hole" in the functionality of all the rest of these particles that we've observed. Which is to say, right now, the evidence points strongly towards the existence of the Higgs boson.
So if the Higgs boson does not exist, it would be like if we solved a complicated math equation for X and instead, once we plugged it into a calculator, got some completely different number. We would have to rethink everything we know about quantum physics.
Does this help you understand why you can't just say things like "I don't think the Higgs boson exists, because we haven't seen it"? It's really not that simple.
[Particle Physics ignorance]
Hm... so if the Higgs Boson doesn't exist... could we look at it the same way as say... a system of linear equations that has an infinite number of solutions? One of an infinite number of solutions to a differential equations? A single value of a Random variable with infinite support?
[/Particle Physics ignorance]
I'm curious to see if the entire particle physics community does a collective
A wizard and Lucy Lawless.
So any chance we could end up with hover cars or some kind of really spiffy holodeck technology out of what we learn with the LHC?
If the Higgs Boson is discovered, can we advance the Standard Model of particle physics? With the LHC, can we observe behaviors of the Boson and, if so, what are some possible impacts of that?
If the Higgs Boson isn't discovered, does that move particle physics back to square one? It seems like this question is both really scary and really exciting, so I'm sure it's one that's been asked frequently.
Make whatever assumptions you want, that doesn't make you right.
IANAHEPP
If it's not discovered it may be that conditions weren't right (not high enough energy, whatever) but will most likely be accepted that it doesn't exist. I guess this could cause a split in factions. Also, from what I understand it wont be square one per se but it wont be too far off. (Will it?)
If it is discovered it will probably lead to a lot of growth in the Standard Model if only because it will increase people's confidence in it. I'm not sure if there are any equations out there just waiting for the properties of the Higgs Boson to get plugged in in order to predict new and crazy stuff but I hope we'll soon find out.
Back to square one? No, but it would be a pretty big upset of the ol apple cart. The Standard Model (which predicts the existance of the Higgs Boson) has been very successful. Its accurately predicted the existance and properties of particles, forces etc. So The Standard Model itself isn't totally wrong, but its probably not totally right either. If the Higgs Boson was not seen a lot of people would stick by the model, and instead think there is a problem with our observations; the detectors are broken, the experiment is flawed, or something like that. Basically they'd keep trying. Others would start to review the Standard Model and see if there are other ways to get the answers they need.
Only if the Higgs Boson is convincingly shown not to exist will there be a sudden, major change in particle physics. Simply not seeing it isn't enough; we haven't seen it for decades already, a few more in wait wouldn't cause a revolutionary change, at least not right away.
But unlike superconductivity, condensates were predicted long before. They're called Bose-Einstein because those are the individuals that first theorized they would occur. It just took a long time to develop the techniques to perform the experiment. So I doubt there are high-temperature condensates waiting to be found, since there is no theoretical explanation of why there would be.
I imagine it would play out something like the results of the Michelson-Morley experiments. A lot of things would change pretty quickly, but it might take a while for a new theory to fundamentally account for them.
Aside from that, it's an experiment twenty years in the planning and implementing, and now on the verge of producing the results it was designed to. Abandoning it would be a titanic waste of the money and effort already expended.
Go whine about the stimulus bill in a thread about the stimulus bill. This is like popping into a thread about Halo Wars and saying "I can't believe how much money they spent on this! Still it's not as big of a waste as the economic stimulus bill!"