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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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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?
this is like saying:
"I'm not an expert in cars, but what if they explode randomly?"
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No, I think you have to deal with some tedious, red, evil robot with spinning blades.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
...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.
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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).
> 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
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.
Incidently, I was told that if Fermilab loses confinement on their Tevatron beam, it hits the ring with the force of a big rig hitting a wall. Hopefully the lost beam is distributed over a large enough section not to cause serious damage, but even then you get to hear an audible "WWHHuuuummmpp". The idea that a bunch of particles can get themselves heard is a little frightening when you think about it.
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.
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.
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