So what you're saying is we could have saved these billions of dollars ourselves by having you and I stand 100 feet apart, run towards each other and butt heads under an overpass and look for the Higgs?SmileWavy



KT

Nature has a really good section with multiple stories for those of you genuinely curious folk:

http://www.nature.com/news/specials/lhc/index.html

Reading and understanding...

Mike was giving you a hypothetical example to explain the whole process. It's always going to be a tradeoff between cost, size, energy requirements, and performance.

Mike said Quantum Mechanics compensates for the length of the tunnel. Or at least, that's what I think he said.

Part of the issue is that we don't know how "big" the Higg's is. The Standard Model doesn't give exact values for particles that are several rungs up the ladder from what we've seen. It gives a range of mass. WE also don't want to make TOO big of a collider, because then it will preferentially make the giant particles, and not the slightly smaller ones we're interested (strange and beauty quarks, etc). It's not just there to find the Higg's, they have (probably) dozens of other experiments going on simultaneously looking for other data.


Is it dark matter? Well, yes, in a way, but so are you :D Dark Matter is anything that doesn't give off radiation itself. That would be just about everything in the universe except for fusion driven stars.

Dark ENERGY? That, we don't know. The Higg's was postulated to be the force carrier of mass long before Dark Energy (Quinessence) was "rediscovered". They could be related, or they could be the opposites of each other (think electron/positron).

IROC can give a better idea, but they'll run that ring until they run out of money. The older rings are still cooking along, it's relatively easy to upgrade them. If they expect the Higg's at 40 pounds, and they don't find it (even if they know they should have), then they don't assume that it's a failure, they assume that it's at 41 pounds, or the theories need some tweaking (sometimes input data isn't accurate enough...think of that hurricane in the Gulf right now).

Noted... And appreciated.


KT

Yep! Its called the International Linear Collider (ILC) and it will build upon what is found at the LHC.

Fermilab is one of the possible locations for the machine.

http://www.linearcollider.org/cms/

Mike - who or from where did the Standard Model originate? And is it continually being re-tweaked?

I mean, I think for experiments like this, one would have to have a baseline of what occurred split-moments after the Big Bang. Is this what the Standard Model theorizes?

Great stuff! Thanks...SmileWavy

Our facility has a linear accelerator (linac) that creates a proton beam and then sends the beam into a ring where it is "chopped" into pulses and then the pulses are slammed into a liquid mercury target (about 20 tons of mercury) to produce neutrons. We use the neutrons for material and physics research. So...technically an accelerator only does the accelerating where a collider uses accelerators to generate beams to smash into each other. Our accelerator is only capable of about 1 GeV, but there are ways to increase that. LHC is on the TeV scale. Much larger energies, but then again, their beam is much smaller than ours.

IIRC, the tunnel that the LHC is constructed in was built for something else and the LHC simply utilized it because it was already there. Building a bigger one would have been nice, but everything comes with a price.

Just because you chant that over and over to yourself doesn't make it true.




KT

Saw this and had to laugh:

Large Hadron Collider 'destroys God by accident' < plain > 09/10 08:55:55


GENEVA (AP) – Concerns that the Large Hadron Collider might destroy the Earth proved unfounded on Wednesday, but scientists warned that they may have instead accidentally destroyed God shortly after powering up the machine.

Detectors in the $10 billion machine recorded a massive outburst of Higgs bosons, nicknamed the "God particle" about 3 seconds into the first experiment. Scientists speculate that God may have accidentally strayed into the high-powered beam of photons the collider generates, and been disintegrated.

"We detected so many Higgs bosons in such a short space of time, there's little chance God could have survived," said Dr Tara Sheers, a particle physicist from the University of Manchester.
Despite the unexpected results from the collider's first day of operations, the public should not be concerned over the safety of the machine, said Professor Jim Vordee, a particle physicist at Imperial College London.

Moreover, today's accident should not greatly impact the world's major religions, he said.
"From the results of today's experiment, we can conclude that while God probably did exist, He probably doesn't now.

"Theologically speaking, this is much the same position we were in on Tuesday."

Officials at the organization that operates collider - the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known by its French acronym Cern – have yet to make a statement on God's probable destruction.
However, Steve Myars, head of the accelerator and beam department at Cern, said some sort of letter of apology and condolences to the leaders of the world's major religions might be in order.

"We really didn't mean to 'do a Nietzsche' as it were, and kill God, but then again, God's been dead for over three hours now, and things still seem to be going on pretty much as usual in the universe.

"God may have been destroyed, but it's not the end of the world."

Sounds familiar...


I couldn't resist.


KT

Murray Gell-Mann (a bada$$ of epic proportions) was an American physicist who realized that the particle "zoo" had gone out of control in the 1960s. They were finding new things, and adding them into the list indiscriminately. The Zoo had become loaded with hundreds of particles, and any symmetry was disappearing. One thing that scientists like about the Universe is symmetry and simplicity.

He realized that by understanding the particles at a deeper level (quarks) that many of these apparently different things were actually the same particle (or close brothers), being "viewed" different ways. His Eightfold Way was a new way to structure the Zoo, and brought a huge amount of symmetry to it. It also (for the first time) allowed them to look higher up the ladder, and start predicting new particles based on this symmetry. This was done with the Omega Baryon, and was the first time that particle physics had predicted a particle (Quantum did it back in the '30s when Dirac predicted the positron).

The Standard Model is this new symmetric Zoo.

as for the Big Bang...we can use "standard" physics to turn the clock back quite a ways (gravity, electromagnetism, etc). however, when the energy levels of the Universe were quite high, those theories start to collapse. The error ranges explode, the force equations diverge, and things get weird. By forcing high energy conditions in colliders, we hope to get a glimpse of some of the environment at an energy level higher than we can currently calculate. By doing this, we hope to get a beacon where we can try to get the standard physics to point as we get closer to the Big Bang.

Looks like a lot of interesting material. Thanks for the link.


KT

So, what happens when a hardon collides with a black hole?? The big bang? Makes physical sense...:cool:

Aurel

Your avatar hates you now...

What color are Higgs bosons supposed to be? Do they spin, and if so, in which direction?

Well, I can see one of the physicists already gave himself the God look...I hope that`ll help him recreate the universe!
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1221067755.jpg

Aurel

Okay, I finally get it. LOL! (I'm a bit slow this morning from staying up, thinking about this thread...)

Zero spin, no color (the Higg's boson is an elementary particle, like the quarks...it's not made up of quarks).

It can't have a color if it's dark matter, right?

In the art world, black is sometimes regarded as "colorless," or "missing color."

[QUOTE=trekkor;4171745]I find our conversation here frustrating at times./QUOTE]

Whassamatta you, Trek?! Are you stubborn again or what? :)

Seriously, the links various posters have put up here will take you to a lot of good info. If you take the time to read and understand it you'll probably find most if not all of the questions you've posted here answered or irrelevant to the topic being discussed.

You will not, however, find any ifo that is intended to buttress or refute whatever spiritual beliefs and convictions you may have; it's scientific info - has absolutely nothing to do with spiritual belief.

Take heart, good felllow. MANY scientists have personal beliefs in a supreme power, be it organized for them under Christianity, Judaism or whatever, that don't pose a conflict for them in their search for scientific knowledge.

SmileWavy

They tested it today - worked as expected. In the next few weeks we may hear about a portal to another dimension opening up! Actually, what will prolly happen is something completely wierd and unexpected and will throw the brain trust into a tizzy for a few more years.

Particle physics is like a women, as soon as you think you understand you relize you have no real clue...

Actually, in the artist's world of "pigment", black is the presence of all colored pigment and white is the abscence of all colored pigment (escept white, of course).

In the physicist's world of "light", black is the abscence of light and white light is the presence of the full spectrum of light.

These two statements are not contradictory.

A recent thread bounced around with the semantics involved in discudssing this.

And in the particle physics world, "color" is a definition of which quarks are involved in making up the particle. It has nothing to do with color.

Color in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is a fundamental property of quarks and gluons and has nothing to do with the electromagnetic spectrum of light and optically perceived "color".

It's an unusual term of art, isn't it?

Indian girl commits suicide over 'Big Bang' fear

"In deeply religious and superstitious India, fears about the experiment and the minor risks associated with it spread rapidly through the media."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26641652/

The extreme-physics people kinda went off the deep end in the late 60s and early 70s... ;)

Didn't the Eightfold Way come after Murray Gell-Mann spent some time living with Tibetan monks? ;)

As I remember the explanation, black absorbs light, thus giving off no color. White (as do other colors), reflects light. That's why they're colors.

Gawd. It's the one thing I knew would happen over this event. :rolleyes:

I find that "particularly" interesting to learn. :)

Interesting thread, this.

I beleive so, it is directly modeled after the Buddhist Eightfold Path.

For anyone interested in reading the history of this stuff, and the characters involved in it, there are some great books on the subject.

"Strange Beauty" by George Johnson is the bio of the afore mentioned Gell-Mann, talking both about him and the research.
"The Inflationary Universe" by Alan Guth is about Inflation and the Big Bang, as discussed by the inventor of it.
Anything by or about Feynman...he created quantum chromodynamics.

Great. Thanks for the leads. I'll check these out.

The "Nature Blog" about the test is really quite informative and interesting.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/blog/events/starting_the_lhc/

I just spent the last hour reading through it and learned a ton about what they actually did for the first test, saw some of the images of the results, etc.

Highly recommended.

Feynman was a real character. I have read alot of his stuff. I'm not much of one to have "heroes", but I would like to be like Richard Feynman.

Man, they all were. Going back for 100 years, physicist have all been kooks, but the best of the best have always been interesting characters as well. It's still that way (you gotta seem them wandering around your lab, I *know* they still infest Fermi).

I thought color came from electron's jumping from the ground state to the excited state and then back down to the ground state?