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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.
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.
I bet a beowulf cluster of those would really suck.
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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
First of all, the arms race worked.
Second of all, mini-black hole doesn't mean what you think it means.
Third of all, the potetial for these is unlimited, clean, electricity.
forth of all, the walmart line was pretty funny.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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?
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
this is like saying:
"I'm not an expert in cars, but what if they explode randomly?"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
There wouldn't be a problem, black holes that small would evaporate so quickly as to never be any risk. Plus it would be virtually impossible to accidently create one in the process of doing other things. And besides, cosmic rays of several hundred GeV smack into our atmosphere every day.
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).
There is the (remote) possibility that the submitter actually knows somthing about particle physics and what it takes to create miniature black holes.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
> 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
Well, the fields are closer than you think. "Esoteric particle research" boils down to a better understanding of quantum phenomena, which includes nailing down the band theory of solids (among other things)--very important in understanding how to make stuff adhere and cohere.
No, this doesn't have immediate application in the sense of "does material A or material B work better?" but it can help us answer the question "How do I design a material C to work the best?"
See this story.
The main reassurance we have is that cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere do get to highly energies than we've ever created. Hence if those energies can create mini black holes, then it must happen naturally in the upper atmosphere. Mini black holes from the upper atmosphere have yet to the destroy the Earth, so there is good reason to believe that nothing created in the accelerator will either.
"I may not be a expert in particle physics"
Heavens! I find this statement absolutely shocking from someone named after a Dragon Ball Z character... I never would have guessed.
;-p
This sig is xenon coated, and will glow red when in the presence of aliens
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
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.
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.
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?
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
"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.
>This doesn't make much sense. Say, for example,
>our sun suddenly collapsed into a black hole.
>Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but it would still
>have the same gravitational pull. Just because
>you make things smaller does not mean their mass
>increases.
That's right. People are worrying over nothing. Of course, there are big differences very near the black hole, but not at any reasonable distance scale. Tiny black holes aren't much of a threat to anything.
Matt Reece
>but gain this could still turn out to be a total
>failure. and thats a hell of a lot of energy
>they ae using to make this mini black hole. So
>no matter what why you want to look at it (black
>hole taking out the generator, Overload lead to
>explosion) there is a lot of risk here. And
>thats what I want to get across.
There is no threat. First, a few hundred GeV is not a lot of energy. It is a lot relative to the masses of fundamental particles (proton mass is ~ 1 GeV) but not compared to the sorts of energy scales you're used to dealing with on an everyday basis. Second, the goal of the accelerator is *not* to create a black hole, but to probe new physics at this high energy scale, like (hopefully) the Higgs mechanism (giving us a better understanding of electroweak symmetry breaking), and (again, hopefully) supersymmetry. There are many very good signs that we will learn a lot about physics in these energy scales, gaining insight into mechanisms that were previously out of the reach of our colliders.
Electron-positron colliders are in some ways cleaner (in terms of the data we get from them) than proton-antiproton colliders (like the Tevatron at Fermilab or the planned LHC at CERN). The problem with building them is they must be linear; particles moving in a circle lose energy (it's called synchrotron radiation), and since electrons are so light they lose a *lot* of energy, so we can't use them in circular colliders like we can protons. One possible future alternative is a muon collider; muons are heavy enough to not emit much synchrotron radiation, so we could use them in a future collider, and the physics of muons is much like that of electrons, so we keep the "cleanness." This is farther in the future, though. One difficulty is that muons are harder to produce than electrons or protons; one way might be hitting a fixed target with a beam to produce pions, which then decay into muons.
Anyway, my point is that the physics going on here is fairly well constrained by what we already know, so no disasters will happen. We will learn about physics in a bit more detail than we currently know about it, though, and a linear electron-positron collider has advantages that other types of colliders we could currently build don't. (Of course, it has its disadvantages too, but getting data from multiple kinds of experiments is important to be able to understand the results). There is absolutely no threat of a "mini black hole" eating the Earth, or the collider, or much of anything else. There's no sense worrying about disasters here. The decision to make is whether public funds should be spent on basic research, not on any dangers of this research.
Matt Reece
"And I can show you a bunch of people who work harder than 99% of America, and are STILL barely getting by, barely able to feed and clothe their kids.
"
Ok, I'm not part of this argument, but I'll bite anyway. Give specifics, not just vague "possible situations." I'll even let you get away with "harder than 90% of America", since 99% is very hard work indeed.
I am very interested because I have managed people at the low end of the social ladder occasionally. The people that the temp agency would scrape together and send to us to do basic manual labor. Most of them won't pay attention to training and look for every excuse to goof off. Most of them. But a small percentage don't: they listen to training, they aren't afraid of hard work, some will try to figure out better or easier ways to do the work. I don't know how this small percentage wound up on the bottom of the labor pool, but I can promise you that at my plant they didn't stay there very long. It is too rare to find someone who is really willing to put in hard work to just waste them away in a low value job. Did they suddenly become rich? No, of course not... but they are allowed to climb to the next ladder of the labor pool, and if they can handle the more complex or difficult work, then they go even higher. It is always nice when such people are also good learners, but even "simpletons" who you know will carry at task through to completion without goofing off as soon as a supervisor isn't looking got snatched up into full time work and a higher pay grade so that they wouldn't be lost.
I think it is possible that a thinking person who will work hard could find himself or herself on the bottom of the economic ladder. I don't believe that they would stay there very long. Even someone who is a slow learner, but is honest and willing to work "harder than 99% of Americans" can find plenty of places that will be happy to employ them and, while they might never get rich, could rise out of poverty.
Of course, as long as we keep defining poverty as a percentage of the average income, then we will always have it.
I admit that you could possibly prove me wrong with the phrase "barely able to feed and clothe their kids" because if someone really tried, they could have A LOT of kids. Is that what you mean, that you know someone with like twenty-four kids below age 18?
Or is it your definition of "barely able to feed and clothe." I have known some spoiled brats that would consider not having the latest $150+ Nike shoes "barely clothed" even though I played just fine with pair of Chuck Taylor All Stars. Perhaps there might be someone who is a workaholic who is so additcted to the consumer and name-brand culture that they don't budget properly for the essentials. I mean, we don't all have to be Amish, but we don't have to turn brand loyalty into a religion either.
So give us the specifics. You can use fake names to protect the subjects if you like, but use real people... if you really know them. Are these people just a victim of a very temporary setback? Are they baby factories? Do they lack budgeting skills? If it is just "the man" keeping them down, then I suggest that you give them the phone number of a good temp agency that supplies industrial labor pools; if they really work that hard, then it shouldn't take them long to find an employer that sees their value and brings them on full time.
Smaller black holes have a lower rate of sucking (M$ jokes welcome), but a higher rate of evaporation. Therefore large ones will continue to grow, and small ones will not last very long. The mini black holes created in particle accelerators have very short lifetimes, comparable to that of other exotic particles.
(Disclaimer: IAAP)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The black holes would evaporate if Hawking radiation is for real. The first physical test of whether or not Hawking radiation really takes place would be observing mini black holes made in an accelerator...
-- SIGFPE
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?