August 06, 2008
What have we done... Pictures of the large hadron collider from the big picture blog. Wow...just wow.
I dunno, I more and more I look at this and see a lot of money that could instead go to fundamental but human-scale projects. Or to, say, computational physics.
The Higgs is interesting and important. But: after this you're cut off, particle physics. If you want to go to any higher energies go talk to the astronomers and find out where nature's already done this.
By the way: anyone have a better plain-english run down of what the big deal is than the above link?
Assuming that the electroweak symmetry is broken by a Higgs--if they discover a 120 GeV Higgs particle and nothing else, then it will be really hard to justify future particle physics experiments.
But my main complaint was that the SSC was pretty much completed. It was more wasteful scrapping it than it was saving the money needed to finish it.
And yeah, the Higgs mechanism is notoriously hard to explain using plain english--I've seen a few attempts, and they all end up either being really wrong, or not being plain english at all.
October 14, 2438 - LUCERNE: An article published in the November issue of 21st Century Archaeology postulates that the St Etienne valley, a 2.500 square-km circular depression that is home to Coq-sur-la-pont, is actually a 400-year old man-made crater. Scientists are unclear what kind of impact might have created the crater. According to Dr Friedrich Auslichen, an archaeologist familiar with the site, "our test results don't match up with what you'd expect from an incoming meteor or other satellite. Actually, it almost seems like a bomb went off from inside the earth, and pulled everything down. But we know that's not possible."
Further tests are ongoing. Coq-sur-la-pont is best known for its famed "Well with no Bottom" and its cheese.
The black holes that would be produced at the LHC (assuming that they will be, which is only plausible in some of the more farfetched versions of string theory) will be very small. Steven Hawking taught us that black holes radiate out their mass, and that the rate at which they do this is related to the inverse fourth power of their mass.
What this means is that these black holes would be really, really unstable, and would radiate their mass away almost instantaneously. They'd be visible to the detector people, because (I am told) there would be a pretty clear signature associated with this, but unless everything we know about particle physics and general relativity is wrong, the LHC is not going to produce macroscopic, stable black holes that will eat up macroscopic parts of the Earth.
There is still the point that an infinitely large loss times an arbitrarily small but finite probability has an infinitely large negative expectation.
There is also also the point that events with this much energy and more are happening in the atmosphere above the Earth all the time thanks to high energy cosmic rays. Some would say that since the Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years it is improbable for the LHC to end it all. CERN has a safety concerns webpage.
If you need any more information, maybe this rap video will be of assistance.
Gordon Freeman spotted at the LHC. Watch out for the creation of interdimensional portals.
No one is holding a crowbar...we're screwed.
Live LHC webcams - hilarious
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And just think, the SSC would have been awesomer, and have been running for several years by now.
Thanks, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton!
posted by Valatan at 10:51PM CST on August 06