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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.
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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
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.
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.