Slashdot Mirror
The Next Big Particle Accelerator
Guinnessy writes "This year more than a thousand physicists gathered for three weeks at Snowmass Village, in the Colorado Rockies near Aspen, to talk about the future of particle physics in the US. Physics Today has a report on the meeting which says that the community should build a 500-GeV electron-positron linear collider. That's powerful enough to make mini black holes."
Cool. They can zap every remaining bit of power that California has left to make a black hole for a nanosecond.
This year more than a thousand physicists were sucked into a mini-blackhole.
it's a sig, wtf?
One more super particle accelerator means one more chance for physicists to blow up the world.
If the e-mail hoax is to be believed, anyhoo.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
but then walmart will want to sell family-sized black holes...
whats the world coming to?
seriously... first fusion, then black holes. what's next? soon we will be back at the arms race... again..
--donabal
Safety First Day?
As long as there are people living below the poverty line, blue skies projects like this should not get funding from the federal government.
So which is the most embarassing way to die : the way Lupe Velez did, or the way Bob Crane did?
So they build a 500-GeV electron-positron linear collider. The next you know Michael Jackson will buy one to sleep in because it makes him younger.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Unfortunately, I doubt that it will get built.
Like the SCSC before it, it will end up on the cutting floor of a supposedly cost-conscious Congress.
I doubted that the current Congress would've approved something like this to begin with. With the current state of economy, and the fact that eventually we'll have to clean up the giant mess that the recent anti-terrorism and airline support bills have made of our budget, the outlook is grim.
Hopefully they won't waste a lot of money partially building it and then abandon it like the SCSC.
Black holes are yummy yummy good!
WTF? Lameness filter encountered? Reason Junk character post. I'll give you junk characters!!! HAH!
can I use this thing to catch ghosts?
Or will BAD THINGS happen?
I bet a beowulf cluster of those would really suck.
Best Slashdot Co
Homer Simpson gets sucked into a black hole and ends up in our world, so if we get sucked in, do we end up in Springfield?
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
I may not be a expert in particle physics but opening a mini Black hole. Maby they can do it, but, what if there theories about controling it are dead wrong. I know enought about physics to know that somthing is not true untill tests prove it to be true. And since this is not tested, you can't prove it to be true. But testing and proving that the ideas of a black hole are true but how to control it / what might happen may not be true coud be rather bad.
Be honest, it is rather interesting to me, but I am a little afraid at the same time tht this might be a step to far right now.
my 2 cents plus 2 more
What is the hope with this? Scientists seem to be on the quest for the smallest possible things. If it were merely for the academic quest of finding smaller stuff I'd be all for it. However, it seems to me that in their search for particulars, they hope to understand the universal. It just seems like their heading in the wrong direction.
Yeah, let's kill a bunch of innocent people because their oppressive gang of unelected warlord leaders *may* be harboring Osama ibn Laden, who *may* have been responsible for the WTC incident...
I'm sure your opinions have made you a lot of buddies at the office, but when you die you will face the Creator, who only knows Truth. Remember: it's "Thou shall not kill", not "Thou shall not kill, except it's perfectly cool to kill non-Christians", or "Thou shall not kill, except people who are ethnically similar to the people who have sinned against America, the land of the Chosen".
I love Molly Shannon!
Just like in Andromeda - they bad guys have a weapon called a Point Singularity Projector (PSP) - a weapon that fires miniature black holes..
:o)
Once again, science fiction paves the way for science fact!
This could actually be kinda cool. I mean, money aside, they'll actually be able to start peeking into things that we can't go to yet. We can barely get off our own planet, let alone go check out the local scenery. This thing would let the smart-folks exmaine lots of local stellar stuff, after a fashion. Could be a great boon to scientific research.
Things you can say to your dog that you can't say to a girl: "How about a nice bone?"
I wonder if the billions proposed to be spent on esoteric particle research would better be spent on applied materials science. Just a thought....
Okay, particle physics are not my cup of tea, but I am going to assume that if people are even beginning to think about building a five billion dollar particle accelerator, there must be some really good reason.
So would someone who does have a clue enlighten the rest of us as to just WTF this thing would actually be good for? I mean, is this going to provide us with new ideas, knowledge, and technology that can greatly benefit mankind, or does it just let some really badass physicists find out what happens when they slam particles together really fast?
If it were merely for the academic quest of finding smaller stuff, they'd be looking down JonKatz pants!
BWAHAHAHAH!
Can you imagine a big-ole-goat cluster of these!
BWAHAHAHAH!
fnord
At this point, it seems that Very Big and Very Small are at two ends of a spectrum which looks a lot like a circle (kind of like left-wing and right-wing.) IOW, the same structures, e.g. strings, which manifest themselves at the smallest levels of matter, also seem to manifest on a grand, nearly universal scale. Human-scale (i.e. Newtonian) physics may actually be the exception to otherwise universal rules, an island of what we call normality in a sea of micro- and mega-scale weirdness.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
What about 1.21 gigawatts?
(btw, the submitter meant energetic enough to make a mini-black hole. considering the very short time span that's not all that much power)
324006
Gee thats odd, I don't remember the article mentioning black holes. I did read the same article as the rest of you guys right?
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
Scientists need to understand the forces that control matter, and they can most easily do so by looking at the "small stuff." They are working on a theory that there are up to 12 dimensions that exist based on the collisions/particle interactions they have observed.
This machine will cost a lot of money, but how much will determine if it will get built. While Japan might be a great place to do it to keep symmetry, we need to learn from the SSC failure. It was (partially) built in Texas in spite of the fact that it would have been much cheaper at Fermilab. If this machine will be built cost considerations must be foremost. That probably means Fermilab again is the only realistic place.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
...nobody really knows how gravity works, at a fundamental level. Gravitons, gravity waves, a quantum mechanical theory of gravity--all these things are related and outstanding (as in "not done yet").
Those of us with even a passing familiarity with science can surely think of applications for a fundamental theory of gravity, but for the others of you here's a hint: anti-gravity, time travel, faster than light drives.
324006
Building a high-luminosity linear electron- positron collider with a collision energy of 500 GeV--upgradable to 800 or 1000 GeV--was, for most participants, the obvious next big undertaking of the world particle-physics community.
After all, there's nothing cooler than overclocking a black hole.
Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"
once they use all power reserves, could we then refer to California as "the black state with the black hole?"
*grin*
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Nowhere in the article does it mention creating mini-black-holes. The purpose is to try to create Higgs bosons and to precisely measure their characteristics to get a better handle on how electroweak symmetry breaking works.
To create mini-black-holes, you'd need a Planck-energy accelerator. This is beyond our current ability to build, and will remain so for quite a while. Scientific American had an article many years ago about what you'd have to do to build a conventional linac that powerful; it ended up having to be constructed in space and taking 2% of the sun's power output to run.
On a more mundane scale, we have experimental evidence (from cosmic rays of the same energy) that nothing catastrophically bad happens in collisions at energies of up to about 1.0e30 eV. We're not going to produce energies this high for a very long time either (current accellerators get in the 1.0e13 range at most; that's 100,000,000,000,000,000 times too low to be a concern).
...GeV = giga-electron volt = 10^6 eV, and that is a buttload of energy. That is the kinetic energy the particles will have when they collide, which is all they care about.
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
just think, with a inter-continental deliverable blackhole (ICDB), there wouldnt be all those pesky bodies to clean up when we want to use the real estate either!
heh!
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
> As long as there are people living below the poverty line, blue
> skies projects like this should not get funding from the federal government.
Although I understand your point, there are a few issues to consider. The first is that, since the poverty line is more or less a percentage measure, there will always be people below it (it's like saying, "until everyone earns in the top 60 percent wage bracket"). The second is that there will always be social issues that require funding, but it's very short-sighted to say there should be no funding for science until all of the relevant social issues are solved, since all of the relevant social issues will never get solved, and pure science research often leads to practical applications that solve some of the social issues. You must always remember that funding is never an all-or-nothing proposition, and it shouldn't be. The developers of radio science could never have imagined that someday their ideas would be used (in MRI) to diagnose diseases without surgery, and saying that such studies shouldn't have been funded until we cured all diseases would have been very short-sighted.
In short, most funding poured into scientific studies is wasted. The problem is, you never know beforehand which projects will be duds and which will transform the world. So, we must strike a balance, and this particular machine has showed much promise in revealing new secrets, so its price tag may very well be paid back with a cure for cancer or cheap, renewable energy that will make coal- and oil-fired power plants obsolete.
Virg
Anyone a fan of Lexx? They get stuck on Earth, which they classify as a "Type 13" planet, a planet on the verge of self-destruction in their search for the Higgs-Boson particle (the particle theorized to be the basic building block of all mass in the universe.
p hy sical/11PART.html
Type 13 planets usually get compressed to the size of a pea due to their discovery.
If they didn't find it last year in Geneva... they may find it with something else.
http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/07/11/science/
"The more you know, the less you understand."
*may* be harboring Osama ibn Laden, who *may* have been responsible for the WTC incident...
yeah you keep telling your self that and you *may* become convinced.
"Slashdot is about legos and staplers." -Cmdr. Taco
This is a true story that took place at Yokosuka Japan. There is an American Naval Base there. When I first arrived in the spring of 1981 there was a white building on the corner of the property that the Naval Hospital was located. I learned that this building was the Morgue where many of the bodies of American Service Members killed in combat at Korea and Viet Nam had been staged prior to returning home to their families in the United States. Shortly after my arrival, bulldozers demolished the building to make way for two high rise apartment buildings that would house American Service men and their families. My family and I would be housed in one of these buildings after its construction. The buildings were named Kyuban and Jyuban Towers. The Japanese words for nine and ten, (there were already eight of these towers on base). Immediately after construction was completed, my wife was notified that she was to move into an apartment in Kyuban Towers, I was out at sea. She complied, and it wasn't long before she started noticing strange occurences in the apartment. Minor things like the lights being on and she was sure she had turned them off. Months later I returned home, and was please that we had moved into much better housing on base. But I was met with strange stories from my three year old son. He told me of a "Marine Sentry" who visited him each night in his room. I assured him that he was dreaming. My first night home I tucked him into bed and turned off all of the lights in the house. At 3:00 AM I was awaken by a presence at my side of the bed. It was my son, and all of the lights were on in the apartment. I asked him what was going on, and he said that the "Marine Sentry" was in his room and wanted the lights on. I ofcourse checked out his story to make sure the house was safe. No one else was in the house besides my family and I. I tucked my son back into bed and turned off the lights. The next morning I asked my son to discribe for me the man who kept visiting him in his room. That three year old boy floored me when he discribed an Infantry Marine in full combat gear. This problem continued for several weeks. One time, a buddy of mine suggested that I turn the lights out at the breaker box which was out of my sons reach and my son did not know where the box was. So I did. At 3:00 AM I awoke to the same scenario as always. So then my buddy agreed to spend the night in my sons room with him. At 3:00 AM I awoke to an awful rukus in my sons room. My son ran into my room to tell me that Mr. ***** was fighting with the Marine Sentry. When I arrived in my sons room, my buddy was sitting on the floor in the coner of the room, the bedroom looked as if a bar brawl had just occured. My buddy told me that he woke up and seen a Marine standing over him, he was wearing face paint to camoflague his appearance, and was in full combat gear. The Marine face looked as if he were in a jungle and he had stumbled onto an enemy camp. It was clear that the Marine was on a mission. But no Marine was there. From that night on, no one in the house seen the Marine again, but either he or one of his friends was still in the apartment as we still experienced strange occurrances. We could be setting at the dinning table eating and all of a sudden the tv would come on and go to full audio. Or, the washing machine lid would open and close and the washer machine would start up by itself. Try setting on the toilet without the bathtub/shower turning itself on. We put up with it as it seemed more amusing than annoying. We were never awakened in the middle of the night again though. Finally during our last week in the apartment it was obvious that the "ghost" wanted us to stay. Things began to disappear.
Please, don't say stupid things. If RHIC did not create any Black Hole, and neither Tevatron did, how could NLC (or however you want to call it) cause problems? Absolutely non sense....
Why would they want to make another one after Disney's Black Hole? That was the worst movie ever!
just in case you never saw the movie:
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue52/classic.htm
If mini black holes can be created with collisions on the order of 5*10^11eV(=500GeV), then these cosmic rays should have produced mini black holes. There is no evidence that these much more energetic cosmic ray showers created a black hole, so I think we can safely say that mini black holes either are not produced by subatomic particles or that they have no noticable effect on normal matter.
Hemos, I think you might be able to Patent the Playing a buffered live stream. Then you can charge them (and everyone else) fees. Wait, maybe I shouldn't have said that because that would give somebody ideas...
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
How the hell is this funny? Think before you mod!
A "beowulf cluster" is not an amount. A cluster of 2 is an amount. A cluster of 1,000,000 is another amount. Whether either of these is "large" is dependent upon context. A beowulf cluster of black holes has no meaning.
Not every comment involving a beowulf cluster deserves to be modded up as "funny" or "insightful".
Hence, the only humour present here (sadistic as it is) is the fact that someone modded this comment up as funny!
What's the difference between a mini-black hole and a regular, run-of-the-mill, black hole? I mean, they are both singularlities, right? You don't get much more "mini" than that.
God bless /. for allowing people like this to rack up karma points.
my Ford Exploder^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Explorer? Or my Pinto?
. . . that killed the SCC was that it required rebuilding Fermilab first. (It's a step up system, you need the smaller one to inject particles into the bigger.) This was 25% or more of the budget. When killed it was at 40% completed. Add the two, and you get 65%, enough that few politicians will kill the project.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
It is much like the study of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, this study lead to nothing but a better understanding of quantum phenomenon. BUT, examing this came many applications: Lasers(espicially the diode laser, the pen laser) solid-state electronics (computers), fission (power reactors) and numerous others. Yes, some super-weapon was developed from this that could/can destroy the world, but more good was done for society (industrial western) than harm.
On the subject of costs, $5billion is a lot of money for an individual, but this much divided amoung participating countries over 5-10 years construction time is a drop in the bucket of any countries budget. Hell, one stealth bomber costs on the order of $5 billion.
No sorry,
Temp public works jobs do spread the cash around and help the economy in a bad situation. Perminant public works jobs mearly expand in scope (like a black hole) and drain the economy because they are not selfsustaining fiscally but rely on you and I being able to fork over the tax dollars to pay for them.
No, but it might send you back in time, stuck in other people's bodies, and cause you to hallucinate about a badly dressed guy who keeps slapping a brightly-colored Newton.
They want to build a machine that creates silly black holes but they cut funding to the Superconducting Monkey Collider.
We could have a much greater understanding of our universe by accelerating monkeys to near-light speeds and smashing them together. But congress cut funding the facility after some animal rights wackos said it wasn't nice. The expensive collider facility had allready been under construction since 1983 and taxpayer were spending 7.5 billion a year to finish construction.
To keep the 45 mile underground facility from going to waste, it has become a federally fundered drag-racing track. But great science could have come from the Monkey collider. But now we'll never know.
Based on that theory mentioned some time ago of gravity possible varying significantly below a few millimetres in width due to extra mini dimensions.
I seem to remember reading an abstract for the proposal on xxx.lanl.gov.
In any case, far from confirmed, and yes, even if the black holes are created, they evaporate almost instantaneously just as the they would if created by cosmic rays (but hopefully in a characteristic fashion we can measure)It'd be neat though if in fact they are created, and we could figure out a way to feed them fast enough. Perhaps even give them a charge?
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0108005
This one actually proposes trying to observe natural black hole creation!
I know I found one discussing testing it in a supercollider too, however.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
If you think that's not nice, have a look at Bonsai Kittens.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
You know, I'm a big fan of scientific experimentation, but when it comes to technologies that have even the slight possibility of being destructive - as in "goodbye planet earth and the human race" kind of destructive - perhaps it would be best to conduct this sort of research off-world. I think the technology is there to try permanent bases on the moon at least. Maybe on the moon, or on a space station, or an asteroid somewhere. Just not here.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
http://college1.nytimes.com/guests/articles/2001/0 7/10/856062.xml
Of course, these theories predict energy ranges "just within the reach of newly proposed accelerators." Once those accelerators are built and see nothing, the theorists will come back with adjustments so that they are "just beyond the reach of current accelerators, but within the reach of the next generation...."
How convenient. The Higgs mass keeps creeping up as well.
It is also highly misleading to credit high energy physics of the early 20th century with the development of semiconductor technology. This field owed very little to high energy research of any kind. Basic quantum mechanics was done to solve problems of atomic physics and thermodynamics (i.e. problems that even chemists would have recognized at the time), and then very quickly (even by Einstein) applied to solid state problems. The people who did cosmic ray (high-energy) research went nowhere.
Basically, the energies probed by these accelerators explore degrees of freedom that are frozen out at room temperature. This physics may have had important practical applications if we were living three seconds after the big bang, but now, a few billion years later, things have cooled down to pretty low energies. That's why we have to spend billions of dollars to recreate high-energy conditions again. Don't fool yourself that this has any future practical impact.
Well, actually, there's no harm in fooling yourself. Just don't try to fool others.
can anyone explain [...] what we expect to get out of this one?
mini black holes.
Actually, the theories don't predict any particular energy range. All we know is that, if true, the range must be beyond what's already measured. This issue is hardly limited to this kind of experiment, of course. Take for instance photon mass. We don't know that it's zero, and we can never know that it's zero, we can only put increasingly better bounds on it, until and unless we find out that it's not zero.
You might have to understand more nuclear phsyics or just know this otherwise to realize that anything that is created along the lines of a black hole (by humans, for now) will have no adverse effects on the earth. Just a bunch more paranoid freaks sending out email telling everyone what they're scared about.
Yes, this is a problem with hadron colliders.
If the SPS confinement is lost, the beam will drill a hole through the machine. This has happened, when a lightning strike tripped the power.
The LHC requires a special beam dump, because if the beam is lost it will deposit enough energy that it will literally blow up the machine where it hits. It won't rupture the tunnel or anything, but it will cause quite a mess.
I saw some of the early work on the SSC emergency beam dump. The problem is that you have to turn on the deflection magnet very rapidly (and properly sync'd with the particle bunches), so that one bunch goes entirely down the "normal" beamline, and the next gets entirely deflected down the dump. You do not want any particles to be in the way when the magnet is partially on: they'd bend only partway, and slam into the throat of the "wye" between the lines.
You also have to tie the trigger into the safety systems, so if anything trips -- RF, loss of power, magnet quench, whatever -- the beam is automatically dumped before it's lost.
Leptons are less of a problem. If the LEP beam was lost, it would just harmlessly slam into the beampipe wall. Well, mostly harmless: it'd create a shower of "noise" particles, which if it happened in the wrong spot, might go into one of the experiments. This might damage some of the more sensitive electronics, crystals, or whatnot. I think Aleph claimed this happened once.
But note that what they were talking about at Snowmass is a linear collider: no circulating beams. So just stop injection, and you're set. I suppose there might be some benefit to a last-minute dump to protect the detector, but it'll have to be triggered from the detector site itself.. remember the beam is essentially travelling at the speed of light! No upstream alarm signal will get there in time.
What the hell are you talking about? The SSC was supposed to be in Texas. Fermilab is in Chicago. How on earth could Fermilab be used as a step up system? Furthermore, what do you mean "rebuilding Fermilab"? Fermilab is built, was never unbuilt, and is running just fine.
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
How does a collider in Texas require modifications to a collider in Illinois? I find it hard to believe that the SCSC was dependent on Fermilab for a particle source. I think you're thinking of a completely different collider project.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
they should make a black hole and then jump into it
I can see I wasn't clear enough in my post. Perhaps the word "replicating" instead of "rebuilding" would have been appropriate. In order to build the SSC in Texas, you had to replicate Fermilab to acclerate the particles to entry velocity. If you build the SSC in Illinois, then you've got Fermilab (as in, a 25% head start) and you just build the bigger ring.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
Anyway, the Next Linear Collider (NLC) is very important for many reasons. Here are a few.
If you live in the US please contact your congressmen and tell them that you support the creation of the NLC.
If you are in Europe, especially Germany, please contact your representatives and tell them that you support Tesla (the competing design for the NLC, the European design).
If you live in Japan, either NLC or Tesla.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Particles with MILLIONS of times the energy we are proposing hit our upper atmosphere every day. And we're still here. This speculation about the universe disappearing is completely bunk.
Do an order-of-magnatude estimation of the cost to put one of these in orbit or on the moon. And remember it costs about $10,000 per pound to put stuff up there.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
That might have worked on me. My youngest brother would have eaten them all just to prove he could.
I thought I had made clear that I don't believe in large ED -- not without some explanation of the dynamics that make them large and stable, determines their size and geometry (the free parameters) (same applies to string theory and compactification). But large ED is what has led people to claim that black holes might be produced at colliders and this is why I mentioned it.
;-)
And afaik, they were not invented to create a reason for building accelerators but to solve the hierarchy problem - how can the Planck mass (as extrapolated from Newton's law in 4d) be so many orders of magnitude larger than the electroweak scale (the other popular explanation of course is supersymmetry).
And no, the Higgs mass does not keep creeping up, it is to some extent a free parameter but correlated to the others (in the standard model -- beyond that there may or may not be a Higgs at all). If the LHC doesn't find it, the standard model is ruled out. This would quite significant -- only massless particles, no beta decay, all well established low-energy phenomena. (Unless you bring in a modified theory of frozen-out dof of course.)
Also I'm sorry if I led anyone into thinking that HEP drives technological advance. I personally don't care so much. I just want to know -- personal itch to scratch, ESR might say. Maybe it has some use, maybe not. I think the Web came out of CERN though
However, for (theoretical) physics, and this includes condensed matter, it has been of crucial importance. Quantum field theory, gauge theory, renormalization group were all developed in high energy, by people interested not at all in low-energy effective degrees of freedom. Later they turned out to be quite useful in condensed matter: critical phenomena, superconductivity, etc. Same thing the other way around, the most prominent example is the Higgs mechanism applied to the electroweak gauge symmetry. There are so many examples where you take concepts and intuition from one branch of physics and make use of them in a completely different field.
From the article:
> He reminded his audience that the joint work on the copper linac design in the US and Japan was undertaken with the understanding that the machine would be sited somewhere on the Pacific Rim, presumably in Japan or California.
I understood that most of the Pacific rim (certainly Japan and California) are prone to earthquakes - isn't this undesirable for something large with fine tolerances?
They build these things then a few years later need to rebuild to build a bigger one, why not build a really HUGE one and do it once so the researchers will have decades worth of use from it without having to rebuild again
500 GeV, try 500TeV
There are a couple of things you must note about particle accelerators. First, when they say 500 GeV (giga electron-volt, linear accelerator - the particles actually collide with an energy of 1000 GeV (or 1 TeV) because the electron (E-) and positron (E+) are accelerated in different directions, each with a potential of 500 GeV. Note that in a collision, the full 1 TeV is available for use in creating new particles. In a "stationary-target" experiment (such as ramming a proton into a stationary proton target), only about 10% of the acceleration energy is available for use in creating new particles and probing the depths of the nucleus. Also, when they say "500 GeV", note that the SSC (superconducting super-collider planned for Waxahachie, Texas) was supposed to be 10 TeV -- so since it was cancelled, this is just playing catchup to that. I know people like sources for info. The God Particle by Leon Lederman. This is one of the greatest books I've read in a while -- it's written by the director (for 10 years) of Fermilab and he's a Nobel winner - I totally recommend it.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Why idea of "spin-offs" is being used so many times and without success?! May be because it is wrong :) (Historical remark - it was the main argument during SSC hearing in 1993)
:)
"semiconductor technology would be unthinkable without basic research in quantum mechanics in the first decades of the 20th century" - true, but now think how little money were spent on basic research in quantum mechanics? And how many Scientists were around without $B funding copared to the bunch of administrators these days.
If one follow reasoning and facts (as true scientific research should do) then conclusion is:
Less money - more science
Spinoffs are only applicable to the small "seed" research programs; any large research program should have clear measurable goals with price tag visible; it is intrincically unefficient and a waist of money and doesn't bring any spinoffs.
Rockshell
>
Could the scientist involved please their black holes somewhere other than next door to me?
Why can't this thing be built in space? Then the real estate wouldn't as expensive.
And I want to know how/if OOP is objectively better beyond vague cliches, but nobody has decent evidence.
I might be a "troll", but you still have no evidence that oop is better.
oop.ismad.com
Table-ized A.I.
The jolly candylike button. Oooh its so tempting....
In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
You are right, better destroy Monn and cause no end of natural disaster than directly exploding the earth...
BTW, mini black hole need an ENORMOUS quantity of energy to emerge (as far as I understand things like Infinite Mass = Infinite Energy..)
BUT Destroying Moon to protect Earth is like burning your house to prevents Termits to eat it..
Well, do as you wish, but if possible do it in another universe 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
BRAVO!!!! That is the most concise and logical explanation to date that I've heard that could shut up any conservative or liberal about scientific spending. Our country is where it's at because of people's umlimited imagination and the freedom to think openly. Our country is at the best at ALMOST everything. But we can get better by funding research that will payoff in unforseen exceptional ways.
For the record I wasn't referring exclusively to high-energy physics. Some of the more risky biological and nuclear experimentation would be better if not conducted on earth, so that radiation/invasive species/deadly diseases wouldn't spread so easily.
As for high energy physics, it would best be pursued on a space station, maybe at a lagrangian point or farther, or on an asteroid.
As for the cost, I never said you had to ship all the components from earth. Naturally space-based manufacturing should be in place before hand. There is plenty of money and products to be made up there, if only you're willing to take the initial costs and risks.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Christianity: It's always trying to ram crap down your throat.
sigs are for suckers
The average taxpayer has only 2% of the understanding needed to decide which lines of research are most promising and deserving of funding. Thank goodness the taxpayer is not in direct control of this!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The average American living below the "poverty line" has access to running water, penecillin, and free entertainment broadcast over the television networks. The wealthiest king of 500 years ago had none of these things. Poverty still exists in America only in a relative sense. In an absolute sense, it is as defeated as smallpox.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
just as it did the Superconducting supercollider. That project was largely doomed by an inability to justify scientifically the several different detector packages that the different political factions wanted to build because they couldn't agree to work together on a single, coherent project. This new project will fail similarly; particle physics is dead in this country.
Besides, it is really a good idea to let these guys make black holes?