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Happy 50th Cern!
Anonymous Coward writes "The facility that has earned three scientists Nobel prizes, provided the impetus for Berners-Lee's hypertext program (aka the WWW), oh and has also helped answer some fundamental questions regarding the universe has turned fifty today! And with the LHC in development, here's hoping for another 50!"
http://www.hitmill.com/internet/web_history.asp
This article in Physics Today discusses the huge budget that CERN operates within as well as some rather large cost overages. So, put some cash in that birthday card!
http://www.busyweather.com/
It's not "Cern", it's C.E.R.N., or at the very least CERN. And it's not "Noble" prizes, it's "Nobel" prizes. And Tim Berners-Lee created HTML, not the WWW (HTML is just one of the many languages used in the WWW, and it can be used outside the WWW, too). And I'm pretty sure the universe hasn't turned 50 today.
Here's the LHC home page for those who want more than a fluffy news media articlea ge/
http://lhc-new-homepage.web.cern.ch/lhc-new-homep
Geez posters, run a spell-check!
They may remain strict and intellectually elegant, like chess, and bear no relation to reality whatsoever. Not to mention that very few even come close to the beauty of classic (that is non-relativistic) quantum theory. In addition it seems that the approach to math involved is quite liberal, the habit that Dirac started with his delta, but that later was taken to some new heights...
:)
What was Dirac's quote about aiming for mathematical elegance above other things again? I can't seem to find it at the moment. Sure classical QM was alot more elegant, but if it doesn't account for relativity, then it's simply not representative of reality, there's not much we can do about it.
:)
Anyway, what I was trying to say is:
in general, people still think of relativity as being completely theoretical. They don't realise that time dilation and such are phenomena that have been observed to occur so many times that there is simply no debate (as far as I know). The ideas of fission and fusion are pretty widespread in society, but very few people outside of geek circles are aware of the wavelike nature of particles. It's been known for almost 100 years, but it's like trying to explain it to people is just too hard, and so noone really bothers. Also, I think people perceive nuclear power as being the height of microscopic knowledge, when really, if you look at the understanding of nuclear forces at the time the bomb was developed (before Yukawa's model etc), it's actually kinda scary how little they knew. But the concepts are just too hard to get across in the infinitesimal attention span of your average joe, apparently. Anyway, your original assertion was that not alot of progress has been made since the adoption of QM, and I have to disagree, but add that most people not knowing about any of it isn't surprising, given that almost noone knows what the Bohr model was all about. But then I suspect you just have a very dim view of the real value of QED and the later, more fanciful theories. You may be right, and I don't think I can help there.
It was a sunday when I went, and not that crowded, and my friend took me through a short tour of the place. They have an educational area set up with a museum, and science exhibits for children, which was very cool. All sorts of modern artifacts from nuclear experiments are lying around courtyards. He showed me the server room, where (i think, my friend wasn't sure either) they had some of the first web servers, and where they are now doing the grid computing stuff.
Another cool bit of CERN, especially for physics geeks, is all the streets are named after famous nuclear scientists. I passed by ones named for Einstein, Rutherford, and others. We didn't get to Feynman that day.
Oh, and the food in the lunch room is not half-bad and cheap for Switzerland.
CERN was a nice place to spend an afternoon, and I wish them another 50 great years.
From the LHC@Home FAQ:
"1.2 What does LHC@home do?
LHC@home helps the construction of LHC. It simulates how the particles travel trough the 27 km long tunnel. With the help of the calculated information, the magnets that control the beam can be calibrated with greater precision."
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
CERN is well worth a try for people who want some experience with working in other countries. AFAIK you need to be started on undergraduate studies in physics, engineering, or computing, and be good at English OR French. First time engagements are normally between two months and three years. The recruitment website explains most of what you need to know. See you here!
But whatever the case, the LHC will allow us to study some aspect of the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism (normally ascribed to the Higgs). If there is a Higgs boson, then either it must be lighter than about 800 GeV (well within the range the LHC is designed to study) or else there must be other new physics at around this energy. Otherwise, calculations for e.g. the scattering of W and Z bosons become nonsensical at around this energy - so by studying such processes we learn something about the mechanism, whatever it turns out to be.
Supersymmetry is trickier. I'm sure that if you just want SUSY as part of your pet theory of quantum gravity it doesn't need to be accessible at the LHC. However, if there is a fundamental Higgs boson, the easiest way of stabilising its mass (i.e. keeping it on the scale above, rather than at the much higher scale grand unification or gravity) is if supersymmetric particles exist at a similar mass scale (they take the opposite signs to normal particles in the radiative corrections, so cancel out the effects which would naturally make the Higgs extremely heavy).
So if there is no fundamental Higgs, there is no particular reason why supersymmetry has to exist in the LHC energy range either (though, as said above, there must be something doing the Higg's job, and that does have to show at least part of its face). But if there is a Higgs, then there is good reason to think that we might get SUSY as well.