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Space Telescopes Vs Particle Accelerators?
RobotWisdom asks: "As I follow the scientific results from the Hubble and other space telescopes, it sure seems like they're delivering a ton more bang-for-the-buck than particle accelerators could ever dream of.
If we can map the universe at every wavelength, won't this be data enough to -deduce- the particle laws? Is there still any reason to waste any money on accelerators?"
Your name and address has been forwarded to the American Physical Society :-).
You need both. Telescopes tell you about the behavior of large collections of atoms. Accelerators tell you about the behavior of individual atoms and particles. If you are interested in how stars evolve, you need to know the behavior of atoms on both the large and small scale.
I was just reading a book that pointed out the fact that Earth based neutrino detectors only detect about 1/3 as many neutrinos as predicted by our models of the Sun. Is the Sun running cooler than predicted by the models, or is our understanding of the neutrino incorrect?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Astronomical objects are by nature very far away and uncontrolled. Anything could be happening that you don't see.
It's certainly true that Astronomers have no control over the processes they watch - however, there is choice over what you watch. Part of the art of astronomy is learning how to pick up the threads of other observations to determine what to look at next.
Also, there is no opportunity to see very high energy phenomena.
I blinked a bit when I saw this. Or maybe your definition of high energy phenomena is a little higher than mine. I'd put intracluster (i.e. clusters of galaxies) gas at 10^9K as being a high energy plasma, along side supernovae, neutron stars, quasars, molecular outflows (from stars), black holes and gamma ray bursts as all belonging to the high energy phenomena bracket. There are plenty of others - without high energy phenomena the astronomers would be out of a job.
The latest colliders can make a quark-gluon plasma. When's the last time you heard of an astronomer seeing that?
What are it's macro properties? [Ed - glib comment alert!] If you can tell me that, I can probably find some astronomers who'll look for it.
These exotic particles and matter like this are short-lived, so their properties are almost impossible to infer from astronomical observations, which take many years to reach us.
Well - true up to a point. Astronomical observations do take a long time to reach us. But because space is not a particularly dispersive media the signal received still maintains much of its time resolution without distortion. Even fast changing properties can be observed - take for example millisecond pulsars. However, if you are talking about low energy events which occur in localised regions or which are easily masked by surrounding gas/dust, then you won't see these.
Comparing Astronomical observations and Particle Physics observations is useful up to a point. Astronomy relies on many parts of modern physics to interpret the data received, and if you cut off funding to one part of physics, you are almost certainly imparing the understanding of other parts of physics as well. Part of the problem that Particle Physics has is that it has a limited store of pretty pictures that can be trotted out to the general public. Astronomy has never has this problem - as telescope technologies have pushed ever on, we've discovered that the multitude of phenomena out there make extremely good posters as well as providing us with a deeper understanding of the universe. So I suspect that Particle Physics is almost certainly giving us bang-for-the-buck - the problem is that much of that information is too technical for most people to understand and that there are only limited opportunities for news-worthy items for the general public. So you tend to miss out on it.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Additionally, it also depends on your perspective. Particle accelerators have done much more to advance our understanding of the physical laws than telescopes (or most other instruments). On the other hand, nothing has given us a better sense of the grandeur of the Universe and our part in it than telescopes. There are probably more "gee-wiz" discoveries to be made by telescopes because we have only recently been able to escape the bounds of our atmosphere which has opened up a whole new realm of wavelengths to our eyes. However, particle accelerators have already made all the easy discoveries and they are now probing the heart and soul of the physical laws.
It is a very exciting time for either field.