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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!"
I have Anonymous Coward's email address! I shall let him know how I feel about him.
http://www.hitmill.com/internet/web_history.asp
"Today, the Geneva facility is at the forefront of developing the Grid, a "super-internet" which will enable physicists to handle the surge of data that will come out of the LHC."
Is it me, or is that like a geeky sweet nothing in the ear?
Scientists believe this machine, due to come online in 2007, will enable them finally to understand why all the things we can see and touch have mass.
;-)
No, the only thing that we can see (a photon of certain wavelength) does not actually have mass!!! BBC got it wrong...
Paul B.
Ooo great persons who have contributed to the growth of porn.
Im non-Anon!
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
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/
That can't be true. I know people older than 50...
This is worse than the Creationists that believe the Earth is 6000 years old.
Just ridiculous.
and the folks at fermilab celebrated with cake!
Can humanity possibly put a price on knoledge? Is there a limit to the ammount of money we should spend to learn - to further our understanding of the world around us?
/mod me off topic if you want
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
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
If I wasn't making this comment, I'd mod down that moron ASAP...
Come to think of it, this is the least useful post I've ever made on Slashdot. Should I be proud of that?
Goo goo g'joob.
it will never be over. .. what? .. early on in 20th century? If there's any "deeper understanding" gained since it certainly didn't make it into the wild yet...
the more we learn about nature, the more opportunities for speculation open up. I may be wrong on that but it certainly seems that particle physics didn't really make any progress since quantum theory was accepted in
Over in the sense that all that's left are questions like 'What is energy?'
Just like the future of physics since 1894 lay in the seventh decimal place.
it will never be over. the more we learn about nature, the more opportunities for speculation open up.
.. what? .. early on in 20th century? If there's any "deeper understanding" gained since it certainly didn't make it into the wild yet...
No, the more we learn about nature, the closer we come to the truth, which may or may not be open ended. Asserting that it will never be over assumes more knowledge than any of us have.
I may be wrong on that but it certainly seems that particle physics didn't really make any progress since quantum theory was accepted in
Given that in this day and age that popular media still represent the electrons in an atom following exact orbits in the fashion of newtonian mechanics is a pretty good indication that very little of modern physics has made it 'into the wild'.
Now if you'll indulge me in a gratuitous attempt at being insightful, I was recently contemplating that in the long run, mastering electromagnetic waves might have been the most disasterous technological breakthrough in history. Of course, we'll never know for sure until at least a few decades or centuries, but the significance of the telephone and semiconductor cannot be underestimated. How can we be so sure that they are Good Things?
There's that quote about our technology surpassing our humanity, blah blah, and everyone always talks about cloning or flying cars or laser guns that kill without a bang (karma whore opportunity to link to the short story here). Rarely do people think about the present in that context and almost never to history. I think there is a good argument that the telephone was perhaps the first moment in history where technology played an active role in replacing a person's community. I could be full of crap (likely) but maybe THAT was the moment when our technology surpassed our humanity.
Nothing else made it possible to import someone else's community into our own. It wasn't a night and day shift from postal service to IRC addicts and kids in rural states expressing violent rage somehow related to pop culture (and I'm trolling here about violence on TV creates violence in Colorado - bear with me). The miracle of communcations at the speed of electromagnetism made it possible to inject someone else's society, customs, culture, values, ethics, and attitude into our own, no matter how poorly those things fit.
Before this stuff, if you wanted to disconnect yourself from your neighbors and your community, you were a freaking recluse - the town outcast, the weirdo who never left his house, the werewolf (karma whore opportunity to link to the hypothesis that werewolf stories grew out of society's earliest serial rapists/murderers), the drunkard, et cetera. Now you're just a normal guy/gal whose "community" consists of Jon Stewart (I'm guilty of that), CNN, Fox News if you must, Martha Stewart, Hollywood, The Sopranos, and so on. I grew up in a small town in the midwest but now I live in suburban D.C. and don't know the name of a single person in my apartment building.
Are we so sure that the future is where our technology surpasses our humanity? Are we so sure that the "technological revolution" is such a GOOD thing? I'm not even whining about violence on TV or in the movies - I'm whining about the fact that all these great inventions make it SO EASY for me to replace the life that surrounds me with a life that's imported from 3,000 miles away.
And this isn't some holier-than-thou rant, either. I'm just as guilty of living in the midst of all of this as anyone. I'm not suggesting some plan of action, either. I just wonder if, in The Big Book of Human History, there will be a chapter called, "Instantaneous Global Communication and the Five Hundred Years of Crap that Followed".
No, it was Al Gore who "took the initiative in creating the Internet."
PS - you can't say that's been debunked - that's an exact quote
I was rather taken aback when a few weeks ago, this response got me an earful of "The WEB!?? You guys are responsible for that PORN-FILLED WASTELAND!???"
I guess I'll stick to saying, "I work in a lab."
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.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
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.
Oh, and the food in the lunch room is not half-bad and cheap for Switzerland.
Yes, maybe, but they have a very limited repertoir... (And I suppose you didn't go to Restaurant #3, at the Prevessin site, that's French cuisine at its worst...)
(Reminds me of the heydays of the mad cow disease, when restaurant #1 put up signs assuring that all meat served was Swiss. Problem was only that Switzerland was #2 in number of mad cow disease cases. So now you know how the Mad Scientist enters the picture. And if you wonder about the sheep on the CERN grounds, they are living dosimeters.)
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.
I wouldn't worry about the sheep. That's what TLD's(thermoluminescent dosimeter) and graduate students are for. The sheep are actually there to detect neutrinos.
Long live Schrodinger's cat...
Those supposedly older than 50 were never born, but just appeared as n-year-old people (complete with memories and all) at creation time.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.