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CERN Scientists Looking for the Force
An anonymous reader writes "National Geographic has a fascinating article on the God Particle, which can help explain the Standard Model and get us closer to explain the Grand Unified Theory. The obligatory Star Wars-angle summary is even better: 'CERN's scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter.'"
If they are to find "Grand Unified Theory" I wander if it contains not only "The Function" that explains all interactions in universe but more importantly, why is function evaluated at all and how it is evaluated. Is it possible that any mathematical function can evaluate itself, and if not, is there any other explanation? That would be perhaps more interesting answer then The Function itself.
839*929
Oh dear. This is just increasing the number of people who thing that Star Trek is real. I realise that they're merely out to sell copy, but you'd hope that National Geographic would retain some sense of integrity.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Space isn't even a particle and doesn't have mass, so why should it curve?
I wonder, does gravity affect space or merely everything in that space? Could we tell the difference?
The most incredible thing anyone could hope for is that the higgs boson isn't there.
No higgs boson would be utterly incredible.
No higgs boson would be like the sudden realization that there's no aether. When we had to swallow that one, the result was special relativity and the whole world changed.
After all, the whole concept of the higgs is a scalar field permeating the whole universe giving things inertial mass. That field quantizes into these little happy things called Higgs Bosons, which, if Higgs was right, ought to be producible like any other particle by pumping enough energy into a small enough space enough times for the odds to be in the experimenter's favor. The fact that you ought to be able to make a higgs boson (and, to be cruely explicit, watch it decay in a rather unique way that leaves little doubt that what decayed was a higgs) is a prediction that's almost something of a side-effect of the existence of the higgs.
Higgs seems a lot like the logic of aether applied to the problem of inertia, at a high level. Aether, if you recall, was some stuff permeating the universe through which light travels as waves, giving it its observed properties.
Higgs plugs a hole in the standard model, that of inertia, that happens to also come from the same fundamental something (mass) that results in gravity. Higgs lets us just sort of ignore the whole inertial mass = gravitational mass thing and therefore not worry about annoying things like relativistic quantum gravity, which is enough to give anyone enough of a headache to be unable to apply enough duct tape to make it work (renormalize the infinities away). It also doesn't hurt that the energy levels we're playing with still leave gravity a pretty meaningless force, in terms of the magnitude of its effect on the actual behavior of particles.
If higgs isn't there, there's a lot of work to do in the standard model again. There would be answers we don't have, and some of those answers could very well go to the very nature of inertia and gravity itself. That would mean physicists can stop playing with toy models of 11-dimensional energy spaghetti branes (I'm not a fan of M theory just yet) and get back to some real work that's testable in the real world with a real supercollider, which we just happen to have build, called the Large Hadron Collider.
Right now, to make physicists deal with the holes in the standard model, without going straight to energy spaghetti branes, one has to bring up something annoying like neutrino oscillation. No higgs would be a field day.
No higgs would make the LHC immediately worth every cent, and woth every politician some physicist had to give head to to make it a funded reality.
I hope the Higgs boson isn't real.
Not quite, he does raise the valid question of why spacetime curves, something which I've never seen answered anywhere. It can't be gravity causing the curve, as gravity is the curve, so what causes it is a good question. Obviously the answer is mass, but why and how that mass curves spacetime is still a good question...
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
When I was in high school I read the book "The God Particle" by Leon Letterman (This is a really good book). I was wondering if the he was the first person to call the higgs boson the "god particle".
Ok. Considering a curvature in spacetime is just a convienience. It is useful to construct field theories because you don't have to worry about the time it takes energy to propagate. You just calculate the field at every point and at any point in time. Then you can ignore the particles that created the field and just consider what happens locally to determine the motion of your particle. In other words, the field is just a construction of a differential (as opposed to integral) form of the force equation.
That being said, photons are most definitely affected by gravity. Gravitational fields are created and interact with energy. Thus photons have a gravitational field and attract each other gravitationally (at least theorically, because the induced gravitional field is both incredibly small and utterly dwarfed by the electromagnetic interation of the photon so we haven't been able to measure it yet). Energy is equivalent to mass (think E=mc^2). It is true that photons have no rest mass, but they do have an effective mass, seeing how they are energy carriers. Electrons have a gravitational field. Electric fields have a gravitational field. Even gravity induces a gravitational field (the self-interaction effect, AKA inertia).
ANYTHING that is deflected by a gravitational field's curved spacetime is by definition interacting with gravity. Curved spacetime IS gravity, not just an effect of it. If two objects don't attract each other gravitationally, then they wouldn't be deflected by a gravitational field. Think neutrons in an electromagnetic field. They have no electric attraction (to first order anyway) and they are, for exactly the same reason, unaffected by a magnetic or electric field (again to first order).
I browse with a +6 bias on troll (for the comedy), so your comment was near the top :)
About a year ago I was lucky enough to attend an informal talk given by Dr Helen Heath of Bristol University, who is involved in the LHC project. At the talk, somebody asked pretty much the same question; what if it finds nothing? Isn't it an awful waste of money that could be spent on $GOOD_CAUSE?
The answer was this: While it certainly is an expensive great big hole in the ground, the project has been funded by taxes on European citizens, and there's quite a lot of them. The grand total came out at something like 2 pounds sterling (~$4) per taxpayer. It has already advanced our technology to the point where pretty much anybody would be happy with the cost.
First IAAP (just not a PhD Physicist, so if that is your definition of a real Physicist, well then I guess I don't qualify).
Secondly, it is not necessarily true to say Space doesn't curve. We are three-dimensional beings and thus cannot perceive anything in the fourth dimension. That is not to say that space-time is a physical dimension. It is a handy mathematical model which may or may not have an actual physical representation. The simple fact is, that if there is a fourth physical dimension to space, and there are many who believe there may be, and it doesn't violate any laws, so it is possible. Thus it is possible that Space is truly curved and we in like manner to Flatlanders cannot directly perceive higher dimensions. So the answer, as in many advanced Physics problems is that we really just don't know whether Space is curved or not, although you'll get all kinds of science speak that makes you think we do know.
Lastly, it is common to refer to space as curved when dealing with many problems, and there are real reasons to consider the possiblility that space is truly curved, due to the properties of space around massively heavy objects, such as blackholes and our own Sun, which is massive enough to "bend" light. Or perhaps space-time is curved by the mass of the Sun.
Spacetime does exist and is very real. There are at least 4 dimensions of space (string theorists suggest 10) and one of time. They are not mathematical models at all - they are very much real.
Gravitational lensing is an example of a physical manifestation of such. Light (ie photons) has no mass and therefore is not subject to gravity as per Newtonian physics (ie gravity acts on mass). Light travels in a straight line in three dimensions (well, two at a time) and appears to curve because those dimensions are curved. There is no "straight" in our universe - its all curves baby.
Also, the expanding universe cannot be happening as observed with only 3 spacial dimensions. There have to be four dimensions in order for everything to move away from us equally in three dimensions. That's why there is not "centre" of the three dimensional universe, any more than there is a "center" for the two-dimensional surface of the Earth.
Its hard for us to "see" spacetime but that does not mean it is a mathematical abstraction. It is as real as gravity and atoms.
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
It doesn't. Curved space is a perfect explanation for why things moving in a straight line curve through space, aka planets, stars, light, etc. But nobody is sure why the gravity attracts to objects together in the first place. The theoretical graviton is supposed to transfer force in the same way that the other forces are transmitted but none has been seen because the energies required are phenomenal. Phenomenal as in about a billion times what the LHC can produce. Gravitons - in theory again - act at Plank lengths (10-33 cm) which is why its hard to test.
Nobody was sure why electromagnetism produced electricity for a while either even though Faraday had proven the relationship through observation. This had to wait for relativity and the concept of electrons to explain. Magnetism is caused by the time dilation of electrons as they travel down the wire - yes its a relevalistic effect of the transmission of electricity.
Gravity is not cracked yet.
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
I've been wondering about the same thing, particularly when it comes to the marbles-on-a-rubber-sheet analogy. The sheet is obviously curved because our familiar Newtonian gravity pulls the ball/marble downwards. But that curvature then becomes Einsteinian gravity. So the analogy is a prime example of circular reasoning.
A somewhat related issue is, why is the speed of light constant? Special relativity seems merely an observation of how the universe works, not a particular insight as it doesn't explain the basic premise.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Personally, I'm hoping that the Higgs boson is not found, as further evidence that the Heim Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_theory), and not the Standard Model, is a more accurate model for quantum physics.
Among other advantages over the Standard Model, the Heim model predicts particle masses from the fundamental physical constants, predicts the existence of dark energy, explains all four fundamental forces, and suggests novel ways the speed of light could be exceeded.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.