Large Hadron Collider Nearly Ready (pics)

[Aoie_Emesai]

Originally Posted by PhantomRay

Its starting to look like a stargate.
I can't help it, but to think of Help! A Black Hole Ate My Laboratory!

I think they might find unexpected things along whit the expected, of course it doesn't have to be strangelets, monopoles or blackholes. Its large enough and has the energy capacity to make various undiscovered matters appear via scientific. They did it even in smaller scales, imagine what this machine can discover ?

Sarcasm aside and expensive or not. It has a very high scientific value ^^

[james0246]

Originally Posted by Nightbat®;1777239[cold hard truth

alot of children wouldn't have starved to death or die of some innocent flu with that money[/cold hard truth]

3.2 to 6.4 billion is not that much. I mean, the total GDP (just to give a partial example of Europe's wealth) for Europe last year was something like 12-13 trillion dollars (8 trillion euros), hell your country's GDP was something like 500 billion euros. So 3.2 to 6.4 billion is nothing in comparrison.

[aohige]

Originally Posted by Nightbat®

[sarcasm]So at least we have a technological way to prevent overpopulation[/sarcasm]

[cold hard truth]alot of children wouldn't have starved to death or die of some innocent flu with that money[/cold hard truth]

You completely missed the larger picture.

The scientific discoveries that could come out of this is so big, it has the potential for great advancements in technologies, and even create new foundations of industries. Which, in turn, could produce new jobs, economical growth, and other incentives. Which, in turn, could help people feed their kids. Of course, if the findings doesn't come out to be as beneficiary as one hoped, there would be some waste in the money spent... but in comparison to other much, much, MUCH worse waste we see fundings used for everyday (like oh, I dunno, dropping bombs in 3rd world nations?) it's hardly anything to consider.

What you're saying is equal to stating that any funding going into NASA space programs, software and computer engineering, IT infrastructure, or any other R&D that doesn't DIRECTLY feed the mouth of starving populace are all wasteful garbage. I can't see how anyone with a shred of common sense could agree with this.

Please ponder on what you're saying. Seriously. With that kind of mindset, your starving population will forever be starving.
Do you think the Japanese would be where they are as highly successful industrial nation with low poverty rate, if they never bothered to spend the risk of funding R&D for the technological advancements? Are Japanese fascination with robotics complete waste of money? And where would South Korea and Taiwan be, if they didn't rise from the shadows of Europe and Japan in the recent years to do their own independent technological developments, leading them to produce superior electronic products? A society will never become successful if they neglect the importance of research and discoveries, and they will forever be left with starving, poor populace.

[Reckoner]

I remember hearing about this thing. Could this be what will lead us to our destruction is 2012 ? But seriously this looks like humanity's next break through.

[Nightbat®]

Originally Posted by aohige

You completely missed the larger picture.

The scientific discoveries that could come out of this is so big, it has the potential for great advancements in technologies, and even create new foundations of industries. Which, in turn, could produce new jobs, economical growth, and other incentives. Which, in turn, could help people feed their kids. Of course, if the findings doesn't come out to be as beneficiary as one hoped, there would be some waste in the money spent... but in comparison to other much, much, MUCH worse waste we see fundings used for everyday (like oh, I dunno, dropping bombs in 3rd world nations?) it's hardly anything to consider.

What you're saying is equal to stating that any funding going into NASA space programs, software and computer engineering, IT infrastructure, or any other R&D that doesn't DIRECTLY feed the mouth of starving populace are all wasteful garbage. I can't see how anyone with a shred of common sense could agree with this.

Please ponder on what you're saying. Seriously. With that kind of mindset, your starving population will forever be starving.
Do you think the Japanese would be where they are as highly successful industrial nation with low poverty rate, if they never bothered to spend the risk of funding R&D for the technological advancements? Are Japanese fascination with robotics complete waste of money? And where would South Korea and Taiwan be, if they didn't rise from the shadows of Europe and Japan in the recent years to do their own independent technological developments, leading them to produce superior electronic products? A society will never become successful if they neglect the importance of research and discoveries, and they will forever be left with starving, poor populace.

Seems that most scientists also claim "common folk" miss the bigger picture
they Do because they Can, no matter what the consequenses all in the name of "progress"

Most of world's current best technologies were developped in wartime
So, if there's more war we will have better technology and with that a better world

Good thing btw you put "could" in bold
because without it, you make it sound like the hydrogen bomb was the best thing that ever happened to mankind

[C.A.]

This was one of the things I looked most forward to, besides the telescope, the lab at the south pole and the first true cold fusion reactor. Currently couldn't remember all their abbreviations lol

When the LHC starts running, it will push quantum physics alot and we can really be looking forward to much high tech developments and possibilties of realising some science fiction lol

[Nightbat®]

Neg repped:

you're an idiot and an ass

And only because I think ethics are more important than progress without sugarcoating it verbally?

Well, at least I'm brave enough to leave my name with it

[WanderingKnight]

And only because I think ethics are more important than progress without sugarcoating it verbally?

Ethics make sense if you place your criticism in the correct places. As I've said over and over in this thread, you would do good to put your effort into something that costs much more than this and doesn't produce anything useful, like wars. In the end, if you pursue this path of "ethics", you'll find that you'll have to criticize everything, including your own stance as an individual with privileges not shared by the majority of the world population. Are you willing to let all your privileges go? A lot of people would not starve if you spent on them the money you pay for your internet connection.

I'm telling you this as a person who lives in a third world country, with real poverty needs; much more real than those you'll ever seen in any first world country.

[james0246]

Originally Posted by Nightbat®

Neg repped:


And only because I think ethics are more important than progress without sugarcoating it verbally?

Well, at least I'm brave enough to leave my name with it

LOL, you were neg rep for your stance. That is stupid. While I think you are very short-sighted and are very incorrect in your assertion that this project is a waste of money (and the implicit argument that the project will produce no results that will positively effect every day life), that is no reason to give you a neg rep, so I will be nice and give you a postive (semi-pity) rep just to balance the scales.

btw, Feeding poor kids is not really a foreign ethical concern (i.e. foreign aid should not be provided simply to feed children). Rather establishing a working government that will help to support the constituents is a true governmental ethical concern.

And, to repeat myself again, 3.2-6.4 billion euros is nothing. Especially when you realise that this is money spread out over a decade (construction started in 1995) and at least a 1/4 of the money came from outside sources.

[bleachfanxd]

Deep Impact anyone?

[Vexx]

United States HHS (health and human services) service outlay estimates are 697,950,000,000 US dollars for one year.

[Phantom-Takaya]

Now if it opens up either a portal to another dimension or to clear across another universe, let's hope Wraiths don't pass through. haha

[Quarkboy]

I'm actually going there next week for the International String Theory Conference, which is being held at CERN in honor of LHC's starting up.

I'm pretty sure they'll let us down there, but I'm not sure there'll be as much interesting things to see since it should be completely assembled at this point.

In any case, as someone who's PhD thesis had a lot to do with what this experiment may observe (MAY being the operative word...), I'm looking forward to seeing what it finds...

For the more technically inclined (and/or those of you with a college level background in physics), the experiment could really see 3 basic categories of things:

1. It could discover the Higgs particle, the only particle in the "standard model" of particle physics that has yet to be observed.

2. It could discover evidence of new particles beyond the standard model... many theorists think that there should be an extra symmetry called super symmetry that implies a whole other set of partner particles with high masses, so it's hoped that this experiment will see one of the lightest of these "super" particles.

3. It could see evidence of exotic behavior, including extra dimensions, black hole formation, particles with strange properties like tensor states or high-er spin...

And then there's also possibility number 4: It sees nothing new. Nothing at all except the particles we already have observed from the standard model.

Number 1 almost everyone expects to see. If LHC doesn't see the Higgs, something is very very wrong with the standard model, because there is a lot of very strong theoretical evidence that the higgs must be below a certain mass or the theory itself becomes unstable. So actually seeing nothing at all would be quite a discovery, as it proves that the standard model by itself must be totally redone.
If you see the higgs, but nothing else, well..... That's sort of the worst case scenario for physics jobs. There are plenty of nice theoretical questions left out there, but who's going to fund another machine that costs a trillion dollars and is even bigger just so we can "perhaps" see something new?
If that happens I predict the end of these large scale collider experiments.

Then possibility 2 is interesting, but problematic for theorists. If there are new particles, it can be extremely difficult to pin down exactly which theory is "correct". Since the 1980s, we've come up with a ton of workable phenomenological theories and there was even a paper published a year or so ago that estimated that no matter WHAT combination of data LHC sees, we could construct 100 or so theories that match the data. So then the selection becomes one of which of these theories is the "nicest"....
Chances are we'll end up writing computer programs to cycle through 1000s of symmetry groups and particle contents, adjusting moduli trying to fit a few data points, and'll end up with 5000 theories all about as good, and all exceedingly complicated and ugly.

Then of course there is outcome 3, where crazy shit happens. If the thing really does form a black hole, it'll probably be a 5 dimensional one, by the way, because the machine isn't powerful enough to form one in 4 dimensions (it takes less energy to form a higher dimensional black hole because there's more "space" for it to extend out into). That'll produce a really really crazy signature in the detector, since it'll evaporate into hawking radiation, but at a time scale much slower than the scattering so it'll looking like a delayed burst of random black-body particles. Also if there are large extra dimensions, we should be able to see them because some of the particles will "escape" into those dimensions and become missing energy.

In any case, we won't get answers for quite a while. Even after it starts taking data, the analysis will take nearly 2 years and be done by 2 parallel teams of 1000 scientists. (Although people in the know will undoubtedly leak info if there is really some great discovery).

[C.A.]

Originally Posted by Quarkboy

I'm actually going there next week for the International String Theory Conference, which is being held at CERN in honor of LHC's starting up.

Wow lol, I believe I do understand your post, but I have no real idea how to follow up. I guess that's the difference between people who actually study the subject and people like me who only has interest and reads up for it.

I think the string theory is highly plausible, and really hopes the LHC can prove it well.

And I think that unless scientists' understanding of black holes have been seriously wrong, the micro black holes that could form, would definitely not be a threat to our existance lol.

I hope to see you post something about your visit to the conference when you return.

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by C.A.

Wow lol, I believe I do understand your post, but I have no real idea how to follow up. I guess that's the difference between people who actually study the subject and people like me who only has interest and reads up for it.

I think the string theory is highly plausible, and really hopes the LHC can prove it well.

And I think that unless scientists' understanding of black holes have been seriously wrong, the micro black holes that could form, would definitely not be a threat to our existance lol.

I hope to see you post something about your visit to the conference when you return.

The chances of LHC "proving" string theory are essentially zero, though many of the things it could observe might be "better" described by string theory, for example extra dimensions.
But even there the logic is a bit vague: String theory requires extra dimensions (10 or 11, depending on how speculative you want to be), so if we observe more than the usual 4 then string theory becomes a lot more plausible.
Actually seeing strings themselves (which you can detect because of modified scattering behavior) is basically ruled out already. If the strings were that big, then we would have already seen the side effects of them in previous experiments.
String theorists will also say that supersymmetry is evidence for string theory, but considering supersymmetry was around long before string theory was, I think that's a bit grasping at straws.

Actually one of the conclusions of my thesis research was that if the LHC observes a new neutral Z boson (called a Z' ) which is strongly leptophobic, i.e. interacts only weakly with leptops compared to hadrons, than that is evidence for string theory, specifically a brane world scenario where such particles are ubiquitous.

[Nightbat®]

@ wanderingknight and James3wk

If it works, nice
The whole idea with what they're trying to prove bugs me
"The existance of a hypothetical particle" WTF? it's like sending an expedition to the northpole to find Santa
or buying a very fast car to be able to reach both ends of the rainbow before it disappears
and HOPE the pot of gold will be able to pay for the car

[WanderingKnight]

"The existance of a hypothetical particle" WTF? it's like sending an expedition to the northpole to find Santa
or buying a very fast car to be able to reach both ends of the rainbow before it disappears
and HOPE the pot of gold will be able to pay for the car

I repeat, you have absolutely no idea how science works.

Failing to find the Higgs particle is not a failure at all.

[Vexx]

"The existence of a hypothetical particle" ...

We've developed this lovely set of mathematical equations we call the Standard Model that nicely describes all existing behavior of particles. Problem is - it also insists that there are particles we've not seen yet. If we can't experimentally detect them - there's something terribly wrong with our understanding of physics and the mathematical model of it.

There was a similar crisis with the neutrino last century. The math said it was there - no one could find it for decades (until sufficiently powerful tools were built).

[james0246]

Originally Posted by Quarkboy

Actually one of the conclusions of my thesis research was that if the LHC observes a new neutral Z boson (called a Z' ) which is strongly leptophobic, i.e. interacts only weakly with leptops compared to hadrons, than that is evidence for string theory, specifically a brane world scenario where such particles are ubiquitous.

I know your location says Tokyo, but are you over at UWMadison? I know they published a paper recently dealing with leptophobic Z' boson, though it has been a while since I read it, so I am unsure if it is your paper or if it deals with the same ideas you have.

And since you did not describe what a brane was, let me take a crack at it (bear in mind that it has been years since I extensively studied theoretical physics, and even then I was focused more on astrophysics so I have some understanding of brane cosmology). Branes are pieces of spacetime of any number of dimensions. A zero-dimensional brane is a point, like a particle. A one-dimensional brane is a curve, like a line (or a string). A two-dimensional brane is a surface, like a membrane. Et cetera. I think you can keep adding dimensions branes as long as there are dimensions of space to accommodate them (thus the variable description p-brane). Branes are also used to explain why gravity is so weak (in comparisson with the other forces).

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by Vexx

"The existence of a hypothetical particle" ...

We've developed this lovely set of mathematical equations we call the Standard Model that nicely describes all existing behavior of particles. Problem is - it also insists that there are particles we've not seen yet. If we can't experimentally detect them - there's something terribly wrong with our understanding of physics and the mathematical model of it.

There was a similar crisis with the neutrino last century. The math said it was there - no one could find it for decades (until sufficiently powerful tools were built).

Well, it insists there is _one_ particle we have not seen yet. Just one. The previous one was the top quark which was discovered definitively about a decade ago.

The fact is this experiment is an order of magnitude more powerful than any other accelerator experiment ever done. In the past decade or so (maybe more...) there really hasn't been any result from these types of experiments that hasn't been predicted properly (there have been a few cases of short term enthusiasm like with the magnetic moment of the muon, but they were always traced back to statistical fluctuations or actual data analysis errors). LHC is the first experiment in a long time where we basically don't know what it will see... it pears 10 times deeper into the dark. Now, some of that is simply physics intuition that there is always more to the puzzle to be seen, and previous experience seems to bear that out, but whether this machine can really see high enough energies is a completely open question.
String Theory could be completely right, there could actually be 10 dimensions and we're all living on some brane-world sheet.... but if the string constants are too small and interactions with the excited string states too small, no planetary based experiment would ever detect it. (you could come up with some fanciful sci-fi type experiments involving collapsing jupiter into a black hole, but then you'd get sued by Gainax)