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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.'"
"Use the Large Hadron Collider, Luke."
...but shouldn't they be focusing on something much more worthwhile?
Like a working model of a lightsabre. Now that'd be really cool...
The Mothership
I don't believe in the God Particle. ...you knew that was coming.
No. According to Newton's Law of Gravitation the force of gravitation allows two particles with mass to attract one another.
This doesn't cover all particles.
The Mothership
If there is no Higgs Boson, oh well...the collider has many other uses that can help move our scientific development along.
Christ I sounded like a politician right there...but it's true.
Living With a Nerd
From a linked article:
That's the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.
and you get to do it with really expensive, shiny toys :)
The Mothership
These are not the particles you are looking for.
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
They're affected by curved space due to gravity.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Well, to people who think that a Higgs boson is gravity, I guess it is informative. For everyone else, it's sort of like saying "a watermelon is NOT a puppy dog".
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Parent pretty much sums up particle physics, and why people don't get it.
If they don't find a Higgs boson, they're still stepping into a massive new range of collision energy. I think the LHC will produce collisions with a total energy of 14TeV (I haven't read about this for a while).
This step up allows all sorts of other interesting experiments to be run too.
Not to mention, GP smells a little under-the-bridge. But so does every post related to religion on slashdot.
SciAm, Discover and Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log on MSNBC have all covered CERN's history and present project(s; there's two different Higgs experiments being built), and managed to do so without the silly-assed references to God particles, The Force and Star Wars. Is it too much to hope for that /. will someday stop putting out stuff written for adolescent mentalities and tastes? Probably so, since it's getting worse instead of better.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Unfortunately folks are mixing Newtonian and Einsteinian explanations of gravity. In Newtonian physics, the particles exert attraction on one another, in Einsteinian physics spacial geometry is curved around gravity wells (whether that's an atom, a human or a black hole), and it is that curvature that causes bodies to attract.
Cue the bowling ball on the mattress with the marble moving towards it. That's a reasonable analogy of what goes on.
Then cue quantum mechanics, which takes such a delightful model and tosses it on its head.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I think you're a little confused. The large hardon collider won't work properly if you're behind it - you want the large black hole collider, next door.
which is totally what she said
Not necessarily. Wait 'til you cut your puppy open and you'll be glad you did.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
But this all has nothing to do with Gravity in the sense of "things attracting each other due to their mass", or rather "mass curving space-time". The Standard Model does not incorporate Gravity in the picture (that's why it's called the Standard Model of Particle Physics, not Physics as a whole). The theory for this force is (still!) called "General Relativity". Despite a lot of really intelligent people (no self-compliments here, I have stopped working in the field as I felt way too stupid for it) trying really hard, we still don't have a generally accepted theory for how Gravity and the other, (quantum) theories can be combined in a principled manner. CERN might help a lot with this but, ultimately, we might have to wait till the big crunch, if it ever comes, to see how all those fields really unite.
But really people, why do we need Star Wars to make this sound cool? This is an amazing universe of ours. It doesn't need George Lucas to make Light and Magic.
I know we shouldn't rely on /. for physics advice, but last weekend, on the advice of a misguided commenter, I kicked a deuterium atom down the linear accelerator in my backyard the wrong way, and hoo boy! I won't be hearing the last of that one for awhile.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
ILM did it.
Yes, we all hate the midistupidans. Let's get over it already. We won't convince Lucas to cut them out of the new trilogy, so either endure it or refuse to watch it.
Sorry, but it's really getting old. It's a friggin' movie. Well, two trilogies, but it's not a religion for crying out loud. I'm with Sir Guinness here, who told a fan that he'll only sign his autograph if he won't watch the movie ever again. It's a movie. A fantastic movie (I'm talking Ep IV and V and to a lesser extent VI here), but still just a movie.
Yes, the second trilogy (I-III) can't hold a candle to the old movies, neither in quality, nor script, nor acting. So they weren't great. Ok. I didn't like the change in pace one bit, but it's still Lucas' movies. Not mine. I may say that I don't like it. But when I keep repeating that over and over and over and over even after the movies have been out for near a decade, I start to look like some kind of fanboy without a life.
For the sake of Pete, get over it already!
(Yes, I have plenty of karma to burn, now mod me Troll and keep whining about midiwhatever)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually, in general relativity, gravitation is linked to energy and momentum, not just (rest) mass (well, to the stress-energy tensor, which includes not just energy and momentum per unit of space - energy and momentum density - but the flux of energy and momentum), which is why, for example, photons, with no rest mass, are still affected by gravity and affect other particles through gravity.
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.
Let's start with your followup question: the curvature of space is no more a "mental model" than other objects more modern science, such as photons, DNA, or other galaxies. It is a fact in the following sense: the world around us behaves (to a great accuracy) as if it is "really" curved, there "really are" electrons and photons, "there is" a big molecule called DNA with a double-helix structure etc. If you want, a pattern of dots on a photographic plate is a "fact". The double helix is a mental model that explains this fact. But the distinction is not useful when you're doing physics. If you accept that the goal of physics is to predict the behaviour of the world to a given accuracy, you should also accept that it is not useful to make the distinction between what the world "really is" and what it "appears to be" (for our purposes here -- not as a metaphysical question).
Next, you are confused because you are trying to use two different mental pictures of gravity at the same time, and probably don't have a good mental picture of photons. So I will analyze the situation from the points of view of both Newtonian mechanics+Special relativity and General Relativity. In Newtonian gravity, particles are affected by gravity which is an interaction between all pairs of particles. If A attracts B then B attracts A, in fact with the same magnitude of force. The interaction is proportional to the mass, so an object of "zero mass" won't interact with anything, but such an object doesn't make sense anyway (what happens to F=ma in this case?).
Now what about electromagnetic radiation? You can treat it either as a electric and magnetic fields filling space, or as composed of photons. In either case, it has momentum (do you know about light sails?) and also energy (you can be heated by sunlight!). Special relativity says (E=mc^2) that if you have energy you also have mass. You can now make a naive model in which the elecromagnetic field generates gravity according to its energy density (every small piece of space contains some elecromagentic field, this has energy and hence mass; it is a source of gravity), or you can make a model in which each photon generates gravity according to its mass. In the second case you can even calculate the effect of other masses on the photon -- the deflection you will see for a photon passing near the sum is about half what is observed in practice.
The picture above is not self-consistent. The reason is that Newtonian mechanics allows for action-at-a-distance (gravitational fields propagate at infinite speeds) which cotnradicts relativity. A better picture is that of General Relativity: the space itself is now allowed to change with time. Now there are two separate effects: first, bodies moves along the analogue of "straight lines" in a curved space; second, the curvature of space changes with time -- both under its own effect (gravitational radiation, if you want) and under the effect of the "contents" of space. The "contents" including everything in space. That includes elecromagnetic radiation -- it has mass, momentum, and can act as a source for gravity, by changing the curvature of spacetime.
Part o
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.