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Search for Higgs "God Particle" Gets Interesing
holy_calamity writes "The Large Hadron Collider is in trouble again. It will start work sometime in spring 2008, not November this year as planned. The delay has been blamed on an 'accumulation of minor setbacks,' and comes on top of a 'design fault' that saw breakdown of magnets supplied by the competing Fermilab. Yesterday Slate nicely rounded up increasingly loud rumors among physicists that Fermilab may already have seen the Higgs particle, the 'holy grail of particle physics' the LHC was build to find."
"God"? What has god got to do with this?
-------
1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
or does this sound like the beginning plot to DOOM 3?
>for it's editor
Did you mean that? Poignant!
u-bend
"the LHC was build to find"
Looks like everyone could use some proof reading. Or is this a quantum leap in tenses?
the higgs particle is one of the last yet undiscovered predictions of the standard model.
if we find the higgs it makes the standard model more convincing as far as its predictive power but by no means means it is correct.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
So, they're messing about with the Higgs Boson--that means the planet is about to collapse into the size of a pea, if I remember things correctly.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
as interesing (sic) as the search for a Slashdot spellchecker!
Why should any scientist hope that standard model will or will not turn out to be true? Nature doesn't care how many billions was spent on a new particle accelerator. Just be happy that we may have discovered something new and move on to a million things that we still don't understand, including much of what's happening on our own planet.
I'm getting rather bothered by continuously seeing these /. posts implying that scientists are so non-cooperative. The last few stories about LHC have even nearly insinuated that it was somehow Fermilab's fault that there were design issues with the magnet structures, almost as if the mistakes had been intentional.
/. editors become aware of the slant they have continuously put on the LHC setback stories.
Perhaps the men and women working in the more news-worthy branches of accelerator physics have to try and defeat each other. My experiences have only ever been constructive and helpful; contemporaries offering knowledge, insight and advice to help my research succeed, rather than breaking the equipment so they can steal the glory.
I hope that
[/sarcasm]
... are these large hadrons anyway? Couldn't they have built a small prototype machine for colliding tiny hadrons first, then scaled up when they had got it all sorted out? Idiots!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
GALAHAD: I seek the Grail! I have seen it, here in this castle!
DINGO: Oh, no. Oh, no! Bad, bad Zoot!
GALAHAD: Well, what is it?
DINGO: Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Zoot! She has been setting alight to our
beacon, which, I have just remembered, is grail-shaped. It's not the
first time we've had this problem.
GALAHAD: It's not the real Grail?
DINGO: Oh, wicked, wicked Zoot. Oh, she is a naughty person and she must pay
the penalty, and here in Castle Anthrax, we have but one punishment for
setting alight the grail-shaped beacon: you must tie her down on a bed
and spank her.
GIRLS: A spanking! A spanking!
the next thing to do is to repeat the experiment and verify the result from an independent source. it will only cost 8 billion dollars.
While many top people set their sites on the LHC, a core of dedicated scientists have stuck by their guns and continued their research at Fermilab. Now they may be having the last laugh.
Commendations for their dedication and hard work!!!
Maybe someone can convince our politicians to continue work at Fermilab instead of shutting it down in the near future.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I saw the original Russian version made in the '70s (yeah, queue the "In Soviet Russia, movies make you!", jokes) . It was a very original movie.
Basically, these cosmonauts go to a space station orbiting Jupiter, I think, or one of the outer solar planets. Anyway, on the station, anything their thinking of, will manifest. For instance, the protagonist really misses his wife who died a number years before. She appears. But, she's not completely human: she rips through a metal door with her bare hands. Also, she doesn't remember much. The other station members just kind of live with it for the exception of one who committed suicide.
Anyway, I won't give out too much of the movie, but if you want something along the lines of "2001", this is a movie to see. I haven't seen the American remake with George Clooney.
It's also a good break from most of what passes for SciFi these days, you know: monster in space kills everyone on space station, space ship, or colony except for the hero who just barely escapes with his/her life only to discover that the monster isn't dead - cue sequel. Basically, rip offs of the "Alien" movies.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Infiltrated dot Net
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Because if this particle exists, and behaves as described, that would mean that you'd find enough energy for a "big bang" in, say, a cubic meter of empty space.
...) matter are constantly being created, due to the off chance that a higgs boson would decay into a top and bottom quark and one of the top quarks decays into an electron and a few other things that will combine into a proton and voila ... a hydrogen atom ... out of nowhere. Literally out of nowhere.
In short, this particle has enough energy for massive events, and it's omnipresent.
Also it decays, meaning that (minute quantities of
Eventually, gravity (in short : by passing through a black hole, yes through, you read correctly), it will recombine into the original higgs boson.
So basically this will reduce "God"'s role in the creation of the universe further back before the big bang, by essentially verifying another prediction by the standard model, which will probably result in the following "creation" facts :
1) the universe has always existed, it neither came into existance, nor will it "ever" end (which is a bogus question anyway, since time only exists INSIDE the universe, it's pointless to ask what was there before the beginning of time, like it's pointless to ask where the moon is on the surface of the earth : it just isn't a location)
2) there are many, many, many big bangs, ours was neither the first, nor will it be the last, a big bang will occur "spontaneously" every x (trillion trillion) years.
3) the reason we haven't heard from people created in other big bangs is simple : it's not possible due to the massive distances involved, which are uncrossable, even by mere (massless) light.
I've long held (mostly out of sheer amusement) that the reason we haven't been contacted by space aliens is that every intelligent species proceeds through roughly the same sequence of scientific discovery, and they all get to an inevitable point of trying an experiment which invariably wipes out their entire planet & civilization.
We almost had it with the first nuke test, when scientists allegedly acknowledged there was a non-trivial chance that detonating the first fusion bomb would set the planet on fire.
Maybe the Higgs boson test will, like other species that tried to make one, turn us into merely a dark stain on the space-time fabric.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
You must bee knew hear.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
A few questions for those in the know... Why is the Tevatron scheduled to shut down in 2009? Couldn't there be more science performed there? What ever happened to the 26 mile radius accelerator that was planned for New Mexico? It seems that a particle accelerator can do more than just find weird particles. $8EU seems extravagant for one tiny little thing. Any thoughts or answers? Peace
There's a good wrap-up of this at http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/the-higgs-r umor-spreads-again/
He's been following it since the rumor first surfaced. Imagine how the LHC folks will feel if this turns out to be accurate. Billions spent to search for a particle that is found before their collider is even complete.
I think he's also attributed to the wiki-quote...
Looks like everyone could use some proof reading. Or is this a quantum leap in tenses?
No, but if you actually find this particle it gives you authority to ignore the laws of grammer - much like it seems to ignore the laws of physics.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
For some reason I instantly imagine a picture of Cmdr. Taco, captioned in big block letters, "Me can has proof reader?" And a picture of Cowboy Neal captioned, "im in yer posts, mesin up yer speling"
I'm getting rather bothered by continuously seeing these /. posts implying that scientists are so non-cooperative. The last few stories about LHC have even nearly insinuated that it was somehow Fermilab's fault that there were design issues with the magnet structures, almost as if the mistakes had been intentional.
The scientists are not to blame. Fermilab has a herd of bison. We fiddled with the magnet structures. We're not so dumb as we look.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
I thought the Higgs-Boson was mass free because of it's nature as the particule responsible for mass...
Upon reading wikipedia, I was wrong: link
The Standard Model does not predict the value of the Higgs boson mass. If the mass of the Higgs boson is between 115 and 180 GeV, then the Standard Model can be valid at energy scales all the way up to the Planck scale (1016 TeV). Many theorists expect new physics beyond the Standard Model to emerge at the TeV-scale, based on unsatisfactory properties of the Standard Model. The highest possible mass scale allowed for the Higgs boson (or some other electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism) is around one TeV; beyond this point, the Standard Model becomes inconsistent without such a mechanism because unitarity is violated in certain scattering processes. Many models of Supersymmetry predict that the lightest Higgs boson (of several) will have a mass only slightly above the current experimental limits, at around 120 GeV or less.
Sorry.
Pffft! We could build 2 for the money we are pissing away on the 2012 olympics.
Or, more likely, we could build 1 for $80,000,000,000.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
http://asymptotia.com/2007/06/04/hunting-the-higgs -is-not-a-dzero-sum-game/
Why bother then? Just get a Slashdot account! It worked for me.
Exactly. After all, there's a reason why he's named Lucifer.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The LHC is not being built for the express purpose of finding the Higgs boson. It's being built to find whatever there is to find at very high energies, and the Higgs boson is simply one of the most anticipated possibilities. There are four main detectors around the acceleration ring, and each contains a bewildering array of instrumentation to detect all sorts of things that might occur. Even if Fermilab beats LHC to this particular confirmation, there is plenty of purpose to continuing LHC, contrary to the /. summary's implication.
I hope that /. editors become aware of the slant they have continuously put on the LHC setback stories.
They BECOME editors to inject their slant, whether about Bush, RIAA, DMCA, capitalism, america, or anything else.
What does... God... need... with a particle?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
The t is very unstable and quickly decays. Therefore it didn't survive long enough to make it to the front page.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The article on Slate.com tries to add some sort of America vs Europe thing and then tries to downplay the whole use of the LHC. What nonsense.
on the Enterprise...
I bet he was damn glad when Al showed up and with the help of Ziggy got him the hell out of there!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The more we understand the universe around us, the bigger God gets.
Of course the bigger Gods gets, the more the bible becomes a collection of stories by men, and then edited by a council of people, and not the direct word of God. Something some people can not handle.
But the heart of your post is correct-If someone believe Pink Invisible Ponies created the universe, then no amount of logic will change that.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Fermilab may already have seen the 'holy grail of particle physics' the LHC was build to find
:P
The problem is that the damn thing rolled under the couch. LHC still has some time, since there's lots of chip bags and old sandwiches that it could be hiding under at Fermilab
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
~Vexed and loving it!
Let us count the ways:
1) These are rumors of rumors. Even IF there is something there, it will not be possible to fully understand what is going on at the Tevatron. And rumors like this have come and gone many times. LEP discovered the Higgs, or not. Fermilab discovered the top quark at a lower energy, or not. Fermilab discovered sub-structure in quarks, or not.
2) Most of the scientists involved in the two big Fermilab experiments are also members of one of the two big CERN experiments.
3) Even IF Fermilab discovers the Higgs and CERN verifies that it really is the SM Higgs, that is not the end of the story. There are strong suggestions that there must be more new physics (Higgs not withstanding) at the edge of the Tevatron's reach or beyond (i.e. in the LHC range). Supersymmetry (SUSY) is probably the leading explanation, but by no means certain. Sure, there is some extremely tiny chance that the new physics is at a quadrillion times the LHC energy, but almost no theorists believe this. (The author states/suggests that most do which is patently false.)
As a good indicator, look at how many people on the LHC experiments are gearing up to look at various physics aspects of the LHC data. You'd probably find a mix something like 20-30% looking at Standard Model physics (not Higgs, but including top). 20-30% looking at the Higgs, 30-40% looking at SUSY, and 10-20% looking at other new physics models: extra-dimensions, black-holes, compositeness, 4th generation.
I'm trying to make sense of what you're trying to say. It's not working.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Why must we use physics to support atheistic antagonization of religious people?
I think the real question here is, why does religion have to try to explain unexplained phenomenon? Historically it's done a VERY poor job of that. Every time religion tries to explain away something, along comes someone like Galileo or Darwin with an explanation that doesn't require a god.
Religion should get out of the explanations business, and I'd argue even the "don't eat that" business and focus on the "don't do this/that" business. Not that we're all happy with the particulars of the "don't do this/that", but at least no one can prove you wrong.
There's always gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the natural world. Pulling out a god to fill the gaps is a losing game.
AccountKiller
>which actually completes your small theory of strings,
Those aliens sure have poor command of the English language.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Thats a subplot in Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Supersymmetric Higgs is the equivalent particle (actually 5 particles, IIRC) to the Standard Model's Higgs boson which is predicted by a Quantum Field Theory which includes supersymmetry and predicts all of the particles that we have already seen.
A few corrections. a SUSY Higgs is NOT the equivalent of adding 5 new particles to the SM but, infact involves doubling the number of particles and then adding 4 new Higgs bosons (since the SM already has one). What you are thinking of is a two Higgs doublet model which does NOT require SUSY i.e. we can have 5 Higgs bosons without Supersymmetry.
But more importantly, within a few months of LHC startup, we should see SUSY.
Woa! Nobody should expect to see SUSY ANYWHERE! For all we know, although it is a beautiful theory, it may be completely wrong! Even if it does occur in nature it may not occur within reach of the LHC energies. While the solution to the fine tuning problem would require SUSY at a "low" energy (compared to the GUT scale!) the upper limit is very rough. If SUSY occurs at 10TeV it is somewhat unnatural but by no means a huge problem even 100Tev is probably not out of the question - and this is assuming that nature uses SUSY to solve finte tuning - it may well not. Don't get me wrong - I'm someone looking for SUSY - and I hope to see it but it is by no means expected no matter how keen theorists get about it!
Doesn't the Higgs boson turn back time 13 seconds?
This week is "the Trigger and Physics week" for ATLAS, which is one of the two major experiments at the LHC. The opening talk by the head of the collaboration clearly laid out the LHC schedule, but on slides that are not published on the agenda. The original article that is referred in the /. gist has gotten it wrong!
The LHC schedule can not be publicly released until it is approved by the CERN council, which is meeting on the 18th of June. Presumably, once approved, CERN will make a public statement about the plans.
Currently, the plan is to close the experiments for "bake-out" and readying towards a full LHC cool-down and vacuum test around end of March. "Closing the experiments" means that the beam-pipe is one sealed throughout the 27km ring, which seriously limits the movement, fixing and other assembly tasks of the detector communities, so this is a "deadline" for detectors to be "ready for data-taking".
It takes anywhere between a month or two to ready the ring for insertion of *a* beam. It is looking likely right now, that *a* beam will be inserted into the ring around mid-May. However, that is not enough for the operation of the LHC. The LHC is a Collider, so it needs *two* beams to collide. Colliding two beams within an average design beam spot of 16 microns, is no easy task after having them traveling around 27km. (Before the beams are steered the collide, they are "squeezed" to a smaller radius so that the "density" of collisions are higher. This density of collisions, is what determines the luminosity, or, the number of interactions that happen between two beams, and gives the effective high resolution power of the collider.)
Once "one" beam is commissioned inside the LHC, the other beam, traveling opposite to the first one, will be commissioned. Noone really knows how long it will take to really understand and fine-tune the path (or orbit) of the beams inside the ring, but that is what determines when the LHC will get collisions and the first real data will start flowing, if the detectors, can actually time-in and calibrate, and move/push the data off of the detectors into the Grid for analysis. Now, Lyn Evans, who is the head of the LHC commissioning has repeatedly said that he imagines that is will take at least 3 months to get collisions, once a single-beam is commissioned..
So FALL 2008 is the earliest any realist is expecting to see collisions from the LHC. Then the ball is in the detectors' courtyard to collect data continuously and efficiently, to be able to calibrate all detectors in a timely fashion, to identify and fix detectors problems, and to push the (high bandwidth) data out to the analysis farms...
First physic results out of the LHC will not be before Summer 2009... The first paper will be a boring "foo is the multiplicity of events" and the next will be "bar is the cross-section for Drell-Yan/mininum bias processes" paper. The one after that might be interesting though!!
scientific progress goes boink.
Tell him we've already got one. It's very nice.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Can we please drop all these "holy grail" and "god particle" and other such nonsense terms?
There is no "god" or religion. Never was. It's all fairy tales for physically mature children.
If we can get past the childish and immature references to non-existant things SCIENCE *may* be able to progress.
This has been a Public Service Announcement.
Thank you.
Personally I believe that the reason we have not been contacted by extraterrestrial intelligence is that humans are dumb as hell. Who would ever want to communicate with such stupid and warlike creatures like us? A significant portion of our scientific research is driven by our militaries in their attempts to build bigger and more sinister weapons. Many academics doing research are more interested in their reputation and careers rather than the truth of science. Extraterrestrials are probably hiding from humanity, not because they are afraid of us, but simply because they feel that we do not deserve any contact with intelligent beings.
That theory amuses me too, but apparently there is plenty of high-energy events on Earth from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere, so these particle accelerators aren't really doing anything particularly unusual (for now), just making things happen in places where we can observe them more easily.
I live in Holland. I'm more concerned about that dragonfly than about the Higgs boson.
Dingo: Do you think this scene should have been cut? We were so worried when the boys were writing it, but now we're glad! It's better than some of the previous scenes I think.
Left Head: Our was better visually.
Dennis: Ours was committed, it wasn't just a string of pussy jokes.
Bridgekeeper: Get on with it.
Tim: Yes! Get on with it!
Army: Get on with it!
Dingo: Oh, thank you, thank you!
God: Get on with it!
True, but the biggest reason given by scientist is the possibility of a Higg. If that gets discovered else ware, it becomes difficult to change focus and keep funding.
That might be an easy selling point for fill-in-the-box politicians, but personally I'm much more interested in seeing if there are K-K partners at the LHC, and I don't think a lower-energy collider can find them.
If we do find them, that includes and excludes several competing string theory models, and will tell us something about the dimensionality of the universe.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Indeed. But it does occasionally merge with the h and e quarks. Thus the formation of "the" grammartron.
Apparently though, in an electromagnetic field the h and the e quarks can get reveresed forming "teh" anti-grammartron. This has also been noticed with the r and o quarks in the "pron" anti-grammartron and the strange spontaneous phase shift of the o->p quark in the "pwned" anti-grammartron.
~X~
~X~
(-1, Didn't See The Film)
Sometimes ignorance truly is bliss...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Religion proffers numerous unprovable, often flatly wrong, assertions about the natural world, and relates these unprovables to a supernatural world. References abound - here's one winner: "It still moves".
Your soda can analogy is faulty, as both participants in the discussion are describing testable observations of said soda can. Religion, on the other hand, offers no testable observations (not unlike certain modern cosmological theories, by the way).
You assert that religion "informs our relationship to the universe"; in fact, religion obscures our relationship with the natural world, by positing thunderbolt-wielding gods, fairies in the forest, and numerous ridiculous stories about reward or punishment in the "next world", or reincarnation as a cat. And noodly appendages, but that's another story.
Unfortunately, where your discussion finally fails is here:
Consistently and steadily, the diligent and careful application of reason and the scientific method have pulled away the veil religion and other superstitions have placed before humanity's sight. In the long run, religious explanations have repeatedly yielded to the supremacy of tolerance, reason and science, and they ever will.
Again, see: "It still moves".
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
Who would ever want to communicate with such stupid and warlike creatures like us? A significant portion of our scientific research is driven by our militaries in their attempts to build bigger and more sinister weapons.
Let's be serious for a second: the military will never go away, and it never should. The fact is, you can't know what's out there, what threats and dangers exist, and defensive and offensive technology of any kind is simply a sound survival strategy. Other than an offensive weapon to destroy or deflect its trajectory, how would you prevent an extinction-level asteroid from hitting the earth?
Once that feat becomes easy, and we start exploring space, how do you know there won't be further dangers that require even more destructive power? Developing military technology is just good sense. I won't argue that the applications of said technology make sense, but its development makes perfect sense.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Damnit, it was more of a brain fart than ignorance :P Of course I saw the film! Who here hasn't?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Actually no, civilization progressed in three stages: 1) How can we eat?, 2) Why do we eat?, and 3) Where shall we have lunch?
The lack of space aliens is owing to the lack of eight star restaurants. They cannot abide hearing "Do you want fries with that?"
SETI requires closing down McDonalds which is why Clinton refused to fund it.
Of course I saw the film! Who here hasn't?
yeah, we're all in the 12-step program.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The thing is, there is a good probability that we've already created at least one Higgs boson at Fermilab. The problem with this kind of science isn't making one, it's that you have to make 3000 (or more). The problem then is that you lose 3000 of them because the decay chains of the Higgs boson turns into something you can't separate from background (along with other event selection requirements), this eliminates 99% of the potential Higgs events. In the next stage you then lose another 70% of the remaining events because the kinematics of the ideal decay look like a background (you can still extract some statistical significance from them, however). This leaves you with a handful of events that are 'signal like', seeing these events has to be statistically significant, so you have to know the errors on your models and on the data very well (the error isn't on the data itself, it's on our understanding of the data; i.e.. the calorimeters don't measure energy perfectly, so that error is here).
So if we discover it, it's not because of one Higgs being produced, it's because we've collected enough events that look like Higgs, separated them from the background and understood the errors on our measurements. It's a very difficult task.
I worked with the chair of the Higgs group at CDF last summer, it was rather enlightening. They have a lot of work to do though. What it comes down to is there are two competing experiments/detectors at Fermilab, CDF and D0. They do not cooperate very much to keep them from becoming biased and so they have confirmation of discoveries. Back when LHC was looking to turn on in 2007, the only way Fermilab could possibly have a Higgs discovery is if the two experiments collaborated and released a joint Fermilab Higgs result. Even then, Fermilab would quite possibly need to be (statistically) lucky for the result to be a discovery of the Higgs. Now however, with an extra half year of data, analysis and checking, Fermilab might just discover the Higgs before the LHC even turns on. Even after the LHC turns on, it'll take a while for Physicists working on LHC to analyze the data, so the Fermilab people have a bit of time there as well. Agreed, or at least a "-1 Uninformed".
Whoops, 99% of 3000 is 2970, not 3000.
God is purely a man-made concept, created in history when he couldn't explain things that were happening, and later used as a tool by the church or other religious leaders to control the population.
The Higgs boson has nothing to do with our puny concept of a "god" we created in our minds and impose on others. It is pure science, the exact antithesis of organized religion as we know it today.
I've only been through 10 steps... I'll have to wait a few years for the supposed 11th step.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
However, they are reflections of the original turtle as when you have two mirrors face each other. In other words, self-similarity allows a kind of rolled out recursion that likely resolves your paradox.
But, you are treading on dangerous theological ground. You would equate the creation with the act of creation (logos) and you are not up to comprehending the act. If you take, say, designing and building a house as an analogy, you ultimately find that there is no unique creation that has occured because the idea of an artifical cave is a very old one. Creativity is innate in humans but not comprehended by them. There is something new under the Sun every day but it is unrecognized and not appreciated immediately. The act of creation is diffuse; a tuning in to something larger.
Because of this, perfect physics does not provide explanatory power and cannot sustitute for core theological mysteries. Your question looks to find room for God in a remote place (the physical law originator) but theologically this just flows out as a minor consequence of the original Word and is not some hideaway.
You are, of course, presuming with no evidence whatsoever that extraterrestrials do not wage war and that this activity is somehow in conflict with "true intelligence".
He's saying he'd rather see a cure developed using public funds so that anybody can make it for $10 a pop today.
The government doesn't do anything today - for all intents and purposes, it has unlimited money and will exist tomorrow and always whether or not it succeeds today. Additionally, the politicians controlling the levers of government have no incentive to do anything - they keep their jobs by maintaining their popularity, not necessarily by accomplishing anything.
On the other hand, if a private company fails, they have not only squandered a large amount of their finite money, but might even go out of business. Lookee at Amtrak, for example - politicians placing stops not where rail service was needed, but where votes were needed. Even with the ticket costs it charges, it bled federal coffers of $1.2 billion dollars this year. A private company would long have died, but Amtrak has chugged merrily along since 1971, despite being made obsolete by something called a "highway."
so that anybody can make it for $10 a pop today, vs a privately developed one sold at $10 million a pop with $10 being the hope for fifty years down the line.
Any selfless philanthropist can work on a cure for cancer. But, there are a lot more greedy people than selfless philanthropists.
How to get the greedy people to work on medicine that benefits everyone? Let them sell whatever they end up inventing at whatever the heck they want. This way you don't disqualify 99% of the population from medical research and get cures you otherwise wouldn't have. Any cure is better than no cure, and even expensive cures come down in price.
And I see you only acknowledge laise faire capitalism and aristocracy as the only choices. Whatever happened to democracy?
Democracy is a form of government. Aristocracy and "laissez-fair" capitalism are methods of allocating resources. They're related, but separate concepts. In the early years of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, we had what resembled a laissez-fair economic system running under a democratic government.
What a sad commentary when the only "worth" someone can see as "true" is the dollar value placed on it. Aside from more philosophical questions, it should be pretty obvious to any capitalist that one can distort and hide something's value so as to either artificially increase or decrease its price
The grandparent poster wasn't talking about "price", but "what people were willing to pay for it."
The best example of this is an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. Calvin sits at a box, selling "swift kicks in the butt" for a dollar. Calvin is baffled at the snail's pace of his ass-kicking business, when "everyone needs what I'm selling!"
The price of a swift kick was a dollar. The price people were willing to pay for a swift kick was obviously a lot less. This sense of value is what the grandparent referred to as the "the only true measure of anything."
And it's true - what people are willing to pay for something is the ultimate democracy in the sense that everyone by virtue of their existance plays a role in deciding the value of an item. In a free market, the value people have chosen ("the price people are willing to pay") dictates the actual price charged for an item.
Or has the voice of the people no worth, since in a secret ballot election you can't (reliably) buy votes?
Gee, how does a pound of people-voice cost? Free markets are the voice of the people.
DATABASE WOW WOW
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Albert Einstein once said
"If the Higgs-particle disappeared off the surface of the Hadron-collider then man would only have four picoseconds of life left. No more protons, no more electrons, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
And ze big black hole would rule!
- Ze Laws ov Termodynamics? BAH!
Kelvin vas a fool!
Mit Hydrogen + Pinoqachole ve can break zes laws anytime!
I agree with your hypothesis, but thought I'd mention the story behind that "non-trivial chance". Right before the Trinity test, some people realized that the nuke just might be hot enough to start a chain reaction in the atmosphere, either by setting it on fire or by triggering fusion among the elements of the atmosphere. So, Oppenheimer did the math and found that, although it was possible, the nuke wasn't nearly hot enough to pull it off. Even still, there was a betting pool on whether the world would end because of the test.
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
Doom 3, plot, in the same sentence?
Go back to sleep, Anonymous!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"God particle" is an affectionate term for the particle use by Actual Scientists. Stop whining about its.
Hard core pendantry can be really ugly, kids.
But if you must: the term was coined by Leon Lederman, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988. That scientific enough for you?
The technologies that are likely to wipe out civilization are not particle accelerators or the occasional nuke, but the internal combustion engine, coal-fired power plants, air travel, and biological weapons. Massive climate change and flooding are almost inevitable, as are worldwide epidemics that will kill off a large part of humanity.
Those will not wipe out humans altogether, but they may take us back into a pre-technological stage, and whether the technological revolution is going to happen again and at some point avoid those pitfalls is an open question.
Did anyone else read that as "Hardon Collider"?
*Snikers*
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Ya know, the "totality of physical law" is not a bad definition for "God", even for many religious people.
joudanzuki
Maybe the Higgs boson test will, like other species that tried to make one, turn us into merely a dark stain on the space-time fabric.
Until we get proton's to CONSIDERABLY higher energies that we currently do we will be do nothing that cosmic ray's don't do to the top of our atmosphere everyday. So, since we have so far failed to disappear in a puff of smoke we can conclude that the LHC will not cause this ot happen either.
Stanford Physics Departnment has 40 year long satellite development and deployment to test an obscure warping of space near rotating bodies called frame-dragging. It cost like 700 million dollars. This is the infamous gravity Probe B satellite where they had to machine a sphere to the smoothness of an atom. In the meantime radio astronomers already verfied frame-dragging. The Stanford experiment is supposed to have 20 times better precision if it worked perfectly. however there is an unexpected source of instrument noise that has degraded results. Tehy are hopeful longer measurements and better computer processing might improve resutls.
You asked.
You're both making the same mistake man has made for centuries: Assuming that the creator "God" is Good.
The Greeks had it right; God(s) can be petty, jealous, selfish, hateful creatures too. What does it tell you, that even the Christian Bible tells us "God created Man from his image."
Face it: your God's got ulterior motives. Doubt him.
One of the testable results of his proof was that the Higgs bosun had to have a certain mass for the universe to collapse in the specific way needed to create the Omega Point.
For the laymen, a Higgs bosun is a very very massive particle the Standard Model predicts should add to the mass of ships. They have never been detected by current instruments, causing many scientists to doubt they exist. Proponents point out that possibly they haven't been detected because so far all the instruments have been land-based.
Clearly more research is needed.
I really shouldn't feed the trolls... Especially after someone so much more well informed than you responded above me... But riddle me this: Which President was the first President to provide Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research?
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
007 - why you do you have to a shot at W?
Man, its no wonder he won't fund science. You don't hear the oil tycoons making fun of him. And we can't all speak the Queen's english as they do in the 51st state.
Maybe if it's a really tiny particle-sized ship.