Large Hadron Collider nearing completion

Great Debates
121

As someone who’s been working on LHC physics for the past year, it’s definitely exciting to see that it’s about to come online. However, I have decided to move to another project for personal reasons. In any case, the first physics collisions are definitely a milestone, but it will still be years before we can hope to get much new physics out of it. Background signals and systematic errors will have to be well understood, and the nature of nature is such that we will basically have to wait for years, colliding around the clock, before we reconstruct enough signature events to claim any discovery. People I talked to about this say 5 years is the earliest before we’ll see any Higgs discovery claims, and probably significantly longer than that is more realistic.

With regard to the practical results from the LHC, my feeling is that we probably won’t be able to see any difference in our lives whether or not the Higgs is discovered. We have many constraints on what it could and couldn’t be, and the bottom line is that if we need a multi-billion dollar, state-of-the-art collider to catch even a glimpse of them, its hard to imagine how that could ever be scaled down enough to be practical. The real payoff will have to be mostly intellectual (not that there’s anything wrong with that.) However, there are of course some fringe benefits that shouldn’t be ignored. For example, Fermilab (which is the American HQ for Compact Muon Solenoid research) attracts the best and brightest from around the world to Batavia, IL. Many settle here and we benefit. Also, the development of the LHC has prompted the invention of new electronics, new detection methods, new computational algorithms to sift through all this data. Some of these advances will likely find there way into less cosmic areas, and we all benefit. Whether this justifies the expense is really a matter of taste, but compared to the cost/benefits of Iraq, the war on drugs, or any number of other government funded money drains, this is a bargain.

And as for the issue of the money being spent on medical or biological research, this is really a pittance compared to the funding, public and private, that those fields generate.

122

Patience. Destroying the Earth is hard.

123

Well, the first thing you might learn is that “string theory” (or superstring theory, or as the family of models are more generally known, M-Theory) does not hinge on the success or failure of the LHC to produce a Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is a particle predicted by the current Standard Model of particle physics as a particle that mediates interactions between other force mediating bosons including, cleverly, itself. It’s discovery also may give clues as to why particles have mass and how those masses are fundamentally determined, and it is an implicit part in the well-established electroweak theory. In addition, measurements of the Higgs boson may give validity to some hypotheses integrating gravity with the Standard Model to result in a true “Theory of Everything”.

The Standard Model itself is in essence a set of rules for how particles can interact, but does not address why fundamental parameters are what they are or the underlying mechanic of what it means to have force interactions between particles. There are a vast number of hypotheses, including M-Theory and associated string, supersymmetric string, brane cosmologies, quantum loop gravity theories, and other high wierdness which seek to address the that question. In analogy, the Standard Model is like a rulebook for chess, telling you how and when the pieces can move, but not why one move is better than another. The various hypotheses, including M-Theory, are the game theories of chess like Renaud and Kahn’s The Art of the Checkmate, Nimzowitsch’s My System, Watson’s Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy, et cetera; since chess is not a solved game, no theory of how to play has ultimate precedence, although some are clearly better than others and all are built on less advanced theories that came before them.

As for understanding string theories, there are probably a few hundred people on the planet who have the intellect and have spent the years of devoted study to really understand the intricacies of these theories sufficient to provide any worthwhile criticism beyond the general complaint that such theories provide a large number of parameters that are essentially tunable nearly any set of experimental results. On this basis, string theories are not really complete scientific theories because they are not falsifiable by present means; that is to say, they do not make any express claims that can be defeated. They, and the technology that could potentially test fundamental claims, are far from mature. This doesn’t make these theories wrong but merely woefully incomplete, a point that would not be contested by anyone working in the field.

At any rate, while the potential products resulting from the LHC–which include not only the Higgs boson but also other exotic particles like magnetic monopoles, stable quark matter, supersymmetric particles, and others–may give some insight or define parameter limits for those working on M-Theories, it is not expressly build for this purpose but rather to more generally give insight as to how fundamental particles interact and whether predictions from any of a wide range of theories are on the mark. Perhaps this is not of interest to the o.p. and it almost certainly won’t turn up any application of immediate value, but it is of substantial interest to the people working in particle and condensed matter physics to help figure out what they know and where to go from here. The LHC may or may not be the next Michelson-Morley experiment, which opens up whole new realms of understanding of nature and applied knowledge; to criticize it because we do not know what it will yield is like complaining that your meal tastes bad before you even look at the menu.

I did and knocked over my monitor, pulling my phone to the floor and unplugging my UPS which then started screaming like Sarah Michelle Gellar in a crappy teen horror movie. I won’t do that again!

Stranger

124

But all you’d need is an eesie-weensie-little black hole and the pre-launch publicity of the LHC promised that was a possiblity, and not on the “anything’s possible” level, either. pouting

125

Screwed up.

126

There’s a chance you could make a tiny black hole . . . if it turns out the universe has extra dimensions of a certain size. Currently there’s no evidence that that’s the case, but it is possible.

However, even if the LHC does create a black hole, that black hole wouldn’t eat the Earth.

(1) It would actually evaporate due to Hawking radiation before it could eat much of anything.
(2) Even if it didn’t evaporate, it would almost certainly be traveling at such a velocity that it would fly off into space before eating anything.
(3) Even if it didn’t fly off into space or evaporate, it would be so small that it would take it forever to eat anything.
(4) If all of this is wrong, then cosmic rays that are hitting the Earth all the time should have created an Earth-eating black hole by now, which they haven’t.

See here, here, and here.

127

Technically, an “eesie-weensie-little black hole” is too big for Hawking radiation to cause it to evaporate. You’re thinking of a “teeny-weeny-itsy-bitsy black hole.”

So what you are saying is that, even if the LHC had been built at Fermilab, I’d have to keep paying my mortgage after it went online, especially since my homeowner’s policy has an “act of scientists playing God” clause.

128

God, Schmod, I want my monkeyman!

129

I think they should spend the money on those guitars that are, like, double guitars.

130

At current exchange rates, 2.6 million francs equals just under 2.5 million US dollars.

Would you rather see 2.5 million dollars be spent on pure science, or 2 million spent on one person’s private residence? Now what’s the less-beneficial use to society for that much money?

131

We spent the equivalent of 135 billion of today’s dollars on sending men to the moon. Get some perspective here. There are a lot bigger wastes of money going on.

I’ve always been wary of pointing out the opportunity costs of anything in comparison with funding cancer/aids/alzheimers research. I’m willing to bet that the majority of people spend a majority of their money on shit they don’t really need. For example, why buy a fancy car when you can buy an old junker instead and pay the difference to charity? CDs, novels, guitars, alcoholic beverages of all kinds… all pretty useless in comparison with AIDS research.

The pursuit of pure knowledge may seem pretty useless. But compared to a crappy hollywood movie that everyone will forget about in a year, I’d say knowing the fundamental properties of matter should rank higher up on our list of priorities.

132

Only $2m? Climbers.

133

What’s the worst thing that could happen when this thing is fired up?

134

The power company’s computers might screw up and send me the LHC’s bill/

135

That it doesn’t work, they find out that it was made out of substandard materials by a dishonest contractor, and that it’s a very expensive pile of junk. Or some idiot is poking the wrong cables when it’s turned on and gets electrocuted. That’s about it; the latter being much more likely than the former.

136

Some poor sap’s pet theory, the one he’s (or she’s) been working on and promoting for the past 35 years, gets completely disproved.

137

That’s kind of the whole point of the LHC.

138

That house cost $2 billion.

:confused: I can see wanting to live in a palace, but who wants to live in a 27-storey skyscraper?!

139

Here’s something for you to read, Argent:

Happy slumbers!

140

You know, I was going to respond to this by saying that it sounds to me a lot like the Michelson-Morley attempt to measure the luminiferous aether. Then Stranger had to go and mention them before me. Can we institute some sort of board rule requiring him to let us less informed folks contribute our tidbits before he waltzes in with the comprehensive responses?

Anyways, I’m almost entirely ignorant of the more esoteric bits of particle physics, so I’m not about to predict that the Higgs boson they’re looking for will turn out not to exist, but that’s always the most exciting part of science anyways - the prediction of your carefully developed theory turns out to be wrong, and you have to make some fundamental shifts in how you think about the problems resulting in the next great leap in understanding.