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LHC Reaches Record Energy
toruonu writes "Yesterday evening the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the first time accelerated protons in both directions of the ring to 1.18 TeV. Even though the 1 TeV barrier per beam was first broken a week ago, this marks the first time that the beam was in the machine in both directions at the same time, allowing possibly for collisions at a center of mass energy of 2.36 TeV. Although the test lasted mere minutes, it was enough to have detectors record the very first events at 2.36 TeV. LHC passes Tevatron (the particle collider at Fermilab that operates at 1.96 TeV) and becomes the highest energy particle collider in the world (so far it was effectively just the highest energy storage ring...)"
A greater understanding of physics may well be worth the excessive use of energy, as it may lead to better sources of energy tomorrow.
Lately I've been wondering how worthwhile attempts to e.g. stop climate change are when, if Kurzweil is right, we'll hit the Singularity in only a couple of decades and then all of humanity's environmental and technological problems may well be solved.
Nobody agrees on when the singularity is coming. We're nowhere near producing an innovative AI, let alone anything genuinely intelligent in software, so technological progress is stuck going through human systems for a while yet. I am more inclined to believe the predictions that technological advances will start coming too fast for humans to follow in centuries to come, not decades. Our job is to make sure that civilisation doesn't fall apart in a mess of overpopulation and resource shortage before then. Global warming carries with it a huge risk of reducing food supplies below that that we'll need in order to ever reach the point of singularity.
..or so the theory goes. Norway's largest newspapers all did stories on this earlier today. Here is from one of them: Vg.no, and here is another dagbladet.no.
The first image from vg is taken with a long shutter time (or long exposure, or what the english expression is) on a tripod.
americans might consider these newspapers NSFW. Most norwegian ads contain a fair amount of tits and ass. just sayin'.
"he, who has quotes in his signature, is a douche" - unknown.
The easiest answer is that it is for understanding the underlying world better than we do today. The whole scientific world can be worked up in a hierarchical structure.
The fundamental layer is where the deeper understanding of the universe and interactions are explained, the four interactions that we know now, the elementary particle content etc.
Then comes the layer that has atomic physics that explains how the fundamental particles behave in combined systems, how they can interact in complex structures and what rules there are about such reactions etc.
That information is then usable for other fields like chemistry, the rest of physics, etc. And on top of that come the applied sciences like biology, material science, etc.
So whenever a fundamental discovery is made in the lowest possible layer it slowly propagates upwards over a substantial period of time. If you think on the discovery of electron and quantum mechanics that then explained the electromagnetic interactions, then over quite a period of time you finally reach the point that you have computers. Without the original fundamental discovery of electromagnetic interaction this would not have been possible. Without understanding the strong force and electroweak force we couldn't have nuclear energy (I'll just wait until someone goes off on a nuclear bomb tangent here). Without electroweak interaction we wouldn't have had X-ray machines.
So it all comes down to the fact that if fundamental research is not done, then those huge leaps will simply not happen. Yes, there are plenty of avenues still to explore in the higher layers and there's probably work left for centuries, but if we don't do the fundamental research this speed of progress will slow down and probably stop at some point. We have actually been in this position once. Around the end of 19th century when a lot of physicists thought that the physical explanation of the world is complete and the applications were ranging far and wide only to be shattered by unification electrostatics and magnetism and not long after the discovery of weak interaction.
Soo... long story short. LHC is looking at the fundamental layers of the universe and if we should have a discovery of similar magnitude, like say the discovery of the Higgs particle and the associated Higgs field would add a new interaction to the map. This would be the fifth interaction and so far every single new interaction has brought revolution in science and technology and a huge amount of new energy sources.
You know Maxwell was considered a nutcase for working with magnets while he could have been a respectable doctor or smth. But we wouldn't be having this discussion here if he hadn't done those experiments. It's just that we have gotten so far in the search that we have to look at higher and higher energies to hunt the new knowledge hence the big colliders and hence the excitement over new energy regions reached.
But if you don't care about any of the other stuff, then you probably care about the MRI machines. From what I know the machines are these days possible because a full industry for superconducting magnets was created when the Tevatron experiment had to be built. Once it was done the same production capabilities allowed for a lot of new things to be done. The same goes for LHC related construction work that has also sparked a lot of engineering progress that is being used already now. And any kind of diagnostic imaging system is a direct descendant from particle physics detectors as they essentially do the same thing on a lower scale.