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German Lab to Host International Linear Collider
jabberjaw writes "Physicsweb is reporting that Germany's DESY lab has been chosen as the host of the International Linear Collider. Built at an estimated $5bn the ILC will utilizes supeconducting cavities operating at 2 Kelvin rather then the more conventional X-Band accelerators outlined by the US team at Stanford and the Japanese team at KEK. After the ILC's expected completion in 2010 the 30km long lab will have the ability to accelerate electrons and positrons at energies up to 1 TeV."
from The Onion:
Congress voted Monday to cut federal funding for the superconducting monkey collider, a controversial experiment which has cost taxpayers an estimated $7.6 billion a year since its creation in 1983.
The collider, which was to be built within a 45-mile-long circular tunnel, would accelerate monkeys to near-light speeds before smashing them together. Scientists insist the collider is an important step toward understanding the universe, because no one can yet say for certain what kind of noises monkeys would make if collided at those high speeds.
"It could be a thump, a splat, or maybe even a sound that hasn't yet been heard by human ears," said project head Dr. Eric Reed Friday, in an impassioned plea to Congress. "How are we supposed to understand things like the atom or the nature of gravity if we don't even know what colliding monkeys sound like?"
But Congress, under heavy pressure from the powerful monkey rights lobby, decided that money being spent on the monkey collider would be put to better use in other areas of government. Now, with funding cut off, the future of our nation's monkey collision program looks bleak.
Congress began funding the monkey collider in 1983, after Reed convinced lawmakers that the U.S. was lagging behind the Soviet Union in monkey-colliding technology. Funds were quickly allocated so that Reed could spend a week procuring monkeys on Florida's beautiful Captiva Island. Though Reed returned with a great tan and a beautiful young fiancee, he reported that there were no monkeys to be found on the sunny Gulf Coast island. Congress funded subsequent trips to the Cayman Islands, Bora Bora and Cancun, but these searches also yielded negative results.
Two years passed without a single monkey being procured, and Congress was close to cutting the project's funding. It was then that Reed got the idea to utilize monkeys already being bred in captivity. The Congressional Subcommittee for Scientific Investigation was enthralled by the idea of watching caged monkeys copulate, and increased funding by 40 percent.
With a steady supply of monkeys ensured, construction of the monkey collider began on a scenic Colorado site. Despite environmental pressure, a mountain was levelled to facilitate construction of the seven-mile-wide complex. Huge underground tunnels were dug, at a cost of billions of dollars and 17 lives. Money left over was used to build resort homes, spas and video arcades for Reed, his colleagues and several Congressmen.
Construction of the collider's acceleration mechanism was delayed for years, as scientists couldn't decide how to get the monkeys up to smashing speed. Last month, it was finally decided that the collider would employ a system in which the monkeys run through the tunnels chasing holographic projections of bananas. "Monkeys love bananas," Reed said, "and they're willing to run extremely fast to get them."
But now it seems the acceleration mechanism may never be built. With the monkey collider placed on indefinite hold, the huge research facility in Colorado lies dormant. To keep the space from going to waste, Congress Monday voted to convert the empty underground tunnel into a federally funded drag-racing track. The track is expected to create hundreds of jobs in the form of pit crews and concessions workers, and will allow President Clinton to impress important foreign dignitaries with America's wheelie technology.
Despite this promising alternate plan, most involved with the monkey collider project feel the sudden cuts in funding are inexcusable. "It is a travesty of science," Reed said. "I remember the joy I felt in college when I would launch monkeys at one another with big rubber bands, and this project would have been even more enlightening."
Just think what the overclockers could do with THAT heat sink.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I just hope they don't attempt to find the mass of the Higgs-Bosun particle and collapse this type 13 planet into a super dense particule the size of a pea.
abberjaw writes, "Physicsweb is reporting that Germany's DESY lab has been chosen as the host of the International Linear Collider."
physicsweb writes, "Particle physicists have chosen to base the proposed International Linear Collider on superconducting technology developed by an international collaboration centred on the DESY lab in Germany. The superconducting approach was chosen by an international panel ahead of a rival technology developed at Stanford in the US and the KEK lab in Japan."
Looks like abberjaw only read the title but not the first sentence of the article. In fact, site selection has not been made. abberjaw may confirm that this is so by looking at the second sentence of DESY's related press release; hopefully abberjaw can muster the patience to read that far this time. DESY would like to host the ILC and certainly this helps their chances.
One thing people forget about the Higgs boson is that it doesn't necessarily need to be there, at least not in its usually-understood form. In the electroweak theory, there is a symmetry of nature which makes the electromagnetic and weak forces look the same at high energies (i.e. in the early universe when things were very hot). At low energies, this symmetry is "broken", and so the two forces look different. Its sort of like a ball perched at the top of a perfectly symmetrical hill - when the ball stays on top the situation has a lot of symmetry, but the symmetry is gone when the ball randomly chooses one side to roll down. The predictions of this theory have been stunningly successful (it led to a Nobel Prize in the 1970s). In this theory, the Higgs boson and its associated interactions control the way in which this symmetry is broken - it controls the shape of the "hill".
However, all the theory really says is that this symmetry exists and that something breaks it - there's no guarantee that it's a single new particle (Higgs boson) that does the job. There may be several Higgs particles, or even some entirely new physics that breaks this symmetry, and all the experimentally-verified parts still work. The usual idea of a single Higgs boson is only the simplest case.
Even though we don't know what form this new physics will take, there are pretty good (though far from airtight) arguments that say that whatever it is has to happen at energies below about 1 TeV. The idea is that if the "natural" energy of electroweak physics is a billion TeV, say, then it would be very strange for the energy scale of the weak force to be at 0.1 TeV (which it is) - a bunch of really big numbers need to almost cancel, but not quite, in order to get that kind of discrepancy. Physicists are thus fairly convinced that either (1) there is a Higgs boson in this energy range, and so the LHC will find it, or (2) something else even more interesting happens in this energy range, and so the LHC will find that. This is, of course, not a sure thing by any means.