It wouldn’t be a bad idea. I’m serious, why should billions of dollars be going to highly theoretical and potentially very dangerous projects instead of real, physical research in the fields of medicine or ecology, either of which would benefit people in a real way instead of a theoretical one.
Dude - this won’t destroy the world. It isn’t even potentially capable of destroying the world, even if you dial it up to eleven. It simply doesn’t generate energies beyond those the Earth has already been exposed to many, many millions of times, thanks to cosmic-ray impacts. In fact, if it makes you feel better, you could think of this thing as a “cosmic-ray simulator”. Now, as to whether or not pure research is worth this kind of expense - eh, I dunno. But it really, honestly, isn’t going to hurt anybody.
In other words you don’t want to learn anything or listen to anyone, you just want to rant. Shouldn’t you have opened this in the pit?
No, it’s just that “String Theory” doesn’t make any sense. It might as well be ancient scriptures from a religious cult. I have been reading about it on Wikipedia and it looks as if it was devised by a madman. I cannot possibly see how it could be beneficial to anyone.
We’re going to spend billions of dollars, and risk destroying the earth, for this mumbo-jumbo? And I don’t care how much I may sound like a Luddite or worse - it’s impossible to condemn this without sounding anti-progress and backwards, so I’m going to own that. Fine. This is utter madness, and I am baffled as to how CERN even got the money to do this in the first place.
John Titor said the Hadron Collider would enable the invention of time travel…
d&r
Or, it could have gone to wars and weapons that would have killed enormous amounts of people. Think of all the lives saved by diverting money from those atrocities ![/sarcasm] And as for it producing anything useful ( as if pure knowledge isn’t worthwhile ), I’ve never heard of anything useful coming from pounding on the table and demanding ignorance, either, like you’re doing.
And as said, there’s zero chance of it blowing up the world or making black holes. I did hear someone suggest at another board that whoever turns it on should say “Commence primary ignition !” before pushing the on button.
I’m not demanding ignorance, I’m suggesting that we shouldn’t spend billions of dollars and risk mass destruction!!! I like your attitude towards religious fanaticism, I don’t see why it doesn’t extend to scientific fanaticism as well. I think spending billions of dollars (and running even the tiniest risk of destroying our planet) definitely qualifies as scientific fanaticism. String theory, like I said, reads just like the bullshit religious mysticism that you rightly condemn. Also, why do you think that the money would go towards war? Switzerland doesn’t go to war against other nations.
There’s no risk.
No, it doesn’t. Nor does building a collider to test theories resemble religious behavior, since it may very well disprove those theories.
As I pointed out, I was being sarcastic. Your extolling of all the lovely things it could have gone to is silly, because you have no reason to assume it would go to any of those things.
I’m not saying it would have gone to those things, I am saying it should have. A man can at least hope for a better future in which money is spent on medical research that can actually help thousands or millions of people in a tangible way, or water filtration or irrigation systems or ecological projects that would benefit civilization and the environment, instead of a giant machine that might, possibly, perhaps maybe produce a vague, theoretical particle that can be used for…uh…we don’t know. Maybe something to do with energy.
Come on. This is insane!
Well, perhaps it would make a little more sense if you had taken that physics course in highschool. Maybe it would be a good idea to have a vague idea what you are talking about before condemning it.
I don’t want to be overly condemnatory. Actually, that is not entirely true. Staying within the bounds of this forum, people who dismiss an area of thought without understanding it really annoy me. It is like creationists who haven’t the slightest idea what evolution actually is, or people who dismiss modern science while reaping its benefits.
I would suggest you take the time to learn about what is actually going on before you continue your diatribe. Your ignorance of the matter is glaringly obvious by your repetition of histrionic warnings of the end of the world. I am sure some of our esteemed colleagues here could point you in the right direction to begin your education.
Please, someone explain String Theory to me. I desperately want to understand it, but looking at that Wikipedia article I’m afraid I’ve seen streaks of dog piss in the snow that make more sense.
Out of everyone I’ve ever met, I have only known one guy who talked about String Theory and claimed to understand it. He spent several months in an inpatient mental health clinic, and is still heavily medicated. That has been my only experience, albeit indirect, with this bizarre theory.
If there’s a spike in UFO sightings anytime soon I think I’ll provoke an abduction, they’re either here to screw up/alter the collision (to save us?) or sit and munch popcorn laughing at how we’re gonna blow ourselves up. At least being an alien slave has the chance to witness new technology and can make for some wacky adventures revolving around my rebellion, being dead can’t make any wacky adventures. (Or they could be here to congratulate us on reaching level 3 of the tech tree, earth is at level 2 technology you know).
Or neglecting those possibilities (best word I could think of… bite me), I’m eagerly waiting for its activation.
I highly recommend Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe. If you can’t grasp the fundamental concepts afterwards, there’s just no hope for you.
First of all, there is no risk. Seriously. The Earth is more likely to spontaneously fly apart than for any of the things you’ve mentioned to happen.
And so we don’t know what benefits (other than knowledge) it will have. That’s usually the case. We’ll probably figure something after we’ve discovered something. Keep in mind, it’s usually hard to predict a discovery. If you already knew about it, it wouldn’t really be a discovery.
I’m totally not on board with Argent’s Luddism in the thread, but Elegant Universe left me a bit cold – Brian waxed very poetic on the state of particle physics, and what String Theory could be, what it could mean, what we may figure out one day. But he really didn’t explain that well what String Theory is. YMMV.
All the dozens of different subatomic particles we observe are merely different vibrational modes of tiny one-dimensional strings. There. Is that so complicated?
Part of the reason that string theory is so tenuous is because we don’t have experimental data to confirm or falsify it. The theoreticians are way out ahead of the experimentalists so a lot of what they’re doing comes across as building castles in the air.
Projects like the LHC provide the sorts of experimental results that keep the theoreticians honest. If you think that string theory is nothing but quasi-mystical posturing then you should be HAPPY that the experimentalists are doing something to keep physics firmly anchored in the real world!
Yes. It is so complicated. What is a “string?” By what means does this string vibrate?
No one knows.
What we know about subatomic particles is currently described by a theory known as the Standard Model. The Standard Model describes how electrons and protons and neutron and photons and neutrinos and muons and all the rest behave in all the experiments we’ve run so far.
Unfortunately there are a couple of problems with the Standard Model. For one thing it doesn’t include the effects of gravity. That’s a big gap. For another thing it’s very messy. There are literally dozens of fundamental particles and numerous unexplained constants. We can determine the values of the constants experimentally, but we don’t know why they have the values they have or why particles come in so many different varieties.
String theory is an attempt to create a theoretical framework that brings gravity into the Standard Model and simplifies the number of fundamental particles and constants.
The problem is that we don’t have enough experimental data. The theorists have been able to construct several different string theories that fit the data but we have no way of knowing which is correct or even if any of them are. Hence the need for experiments like the LHC. By colliding particles at higher and higher energies we can observe new behaviors that hopefully will tell us which of the competing theories is correct.
I’m sorry, I think I’m still going to have to stand firm on my position. You’re stringing me along here.
How am I stringing you along? I’m trying to explain as clearly as possible in layman’s terms what the scientists are trying to accomplish.
And all that business about it being dangerous is just silly. Far more energetic events happen in the upper atmosphere all the time. If it were that easy to destroy the Earth it would have happened billions of years ago.