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Fermilab Experiment Hints At Multiple Higgs Particles
krou writes "Recent results from the Dzero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator suggest that those looking for a single Higgs boson particle should be looking for five particles, and the data gathered may point to new laws beyond the Standard Model. 'The DZero results showed much more significant "asymmetry" of matter and anti-matter — beyond what could be explained by the Standard Model. Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons. They say the data point to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but different electric charges. Three would have a neutral charge and one each would have a negative and positive electric charge. This is known as the two-Higgs doublet model.'" There's more detail in this writeup from Symmetry Magazine, a joint publication of SLAC and Fermilab. Here's the paper on the arXiv.
We can all go Sliding to parallel universes, now!
Right?
And people were questioning why we should build such big machines...
That at least 2 of the 5 mass inducing bosons have electrical charge makes the possibility of elecronically controlling the phenomenon more practical/plausible.
This is because they HAVE a charge, and thus, can be manipulated using the EM force.
Simply because you or I cannot find an immediate use for something does not mean that it is not useful. Who knows, in 15 years, knowledge gained through these experiments could lead to a better method of harvesting energy from some unknown source, or coming up with a better means of propulsion or medicine for a problem that we thought was mundane (subatomic cure for the common cold? who knows).
It is for this reason that science should be pursued so that when someone infinitely smarter than you combines this bit of knowledge with another bit, mankind sees a tangible benefit.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
patience dude... patience... once we get time travel out of it, it doesn't matter how long it took right?
This is great and all, but does this mean we'll finally get some great new technologies like artificial gravity, FTL propulsion or communication, quantum-fluctuation energy, or interdimensional travel?
We're still getting new technologies out of the strange sub-atomic stuff others started discovering c. 120 years ago.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So if the Higgs particle is the 'God particle', does this mean that polytheism is the way to go? Yay Hinduism?
My other comment is funny
you gotta love nature. just when you think you figured out what is behind the curtain, nature reveals yet another curtain.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Simply because you or I cannot find an immediate use for something does not mean that it is not useful. Who knows, in 15 years, knowledge gained through these experiments could lead to a better method of harvesting energy from some unknown source, or coming up with a better means of propulsion or medicine for a problem that we thought was mundane (subatomic cure for the common cold? who knows).
At least a redesigned toaster. I think that's doable in 15 years.
I recall when being an "elementary particle" meant that there would be only a very small number of different types. Now a passe' notion, i understand. ...wait, actually I don't understand.
They built the LHC at Cern for something that was found out at the place they were trying to make obsolete.
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
Proton, Neutron, Electron. Have we come up with any new technologies out of any sub-atomic particles since then?
Personally, I find this fascinating. Especially if it means the Standard Model has to be revised (again!), since you can never tell what you're going to get when the theory has to be scrapped....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
If we are going to get time travel out of it we would already be neck deep in time travelers and it would be impossible to get tickets to the world cup. Neither of those things is happening so this result will not give us time travel.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
When Einstein wrote about the stimulated emission of light in 1917 (The paper is called "Zur Quantentheorie der Strahlung"), there was (a) no example of it known in nature (still isn't, I think) (b) no known way to produce it and (c) no known application. Welcome to LaserFest
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Simply because you or I cannot find an immediate use for something does not mean that it is not useful. Who knows, in 15 years, knowledge gained through these experiments could lead to a better method of harvesting energy from some unknown source, or coming up with a better means of propulsion or medicine for a problem that we thought was mundane (subatomic cure for the common cold? who knows).
It is for this reason that science should be pursued so that when someone infinitely smarter than you combines this bit of knowledge with another bit, mankind sees a tangible benefit.
The flaw with this reasoning is that we have all sorts of interesting possible research. It isn't expensive super collider vs no research it is 10 billion dollars used for building a super collider vs 10 billion spent on other research.
Anybody else think this is modern-day snake oil?
No.
Have you ever considered what technologies we wouldn't have today if people hadn't concerned themselves with the surprising spectrum of black body radiation over a century ago?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
nope
Understanding the quantum mechanical behavior of electrons has been very significant in modern semiconductor design and fabrication. A lot of pure research into subatomic particles has contributed to the computer that you used to ask the question. (Also, LED's, and LCD's, etc.)
I apologize in advance for my ignorant questions, but you seem like you might know the answers and be able to break it down for a layman like myself.
First, how did Einstein postulate the existence of stimulated emission of light? Did he have some type of lab where he did experiments leading him to this conclusion, or is it all purely mathematical?
Second, who figured out how to produce it, and how?
As an engineer, this is the part I'm most interested in in this subject area: getting from some theorized effect in physics to being able to create and control this effect at will, and then coming up with useful applications for it. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like schools gloss over all this stuff; they talk about Einstein coming up with E=mc^2, briefly mention some guys working on the Manhattan Project, and boom, next thing you know there's atomic bombs exploding.
I wonder what other interesting properties in physics have been written about, perhaps even verified experimentally, but no one's yet devised a way to harness them.
You can't win if you don't play.
Simply because you or I cannot find an immediate use for something does not mean that it is not useful.
When your useful something is about to explode any picosecond, you'd better find an immediate use quick.
yea, and that fat guy goofing around with a kite and a key in a thunderstorm was totally wasting everyone's time too.
like being able to build ZPM's?
Okay, but this doesn't tell me where my gravity gun is-- Yeah sure I'm getting along great with this crowbar, but seriously give me my gravity gun.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
What would be the point of that? People in the future would already know the outcome.
Anybody else think this is modern-day snake oil?
No. And on the other hand, no.
"Excuse me, did you say 'Trekker'? The word is 'Trekkie.' I should know; I created them." -- Gene Roddenberry
Einstein was purely a theoretical physicist. He knew the state of the current experiments (Young's, various astronomical observations), and the state of the current math (specifically Maxwell and Boltzman). Beyond that, he managed to figure out brilliant thought experiments that pointed his math in the right direction, and was able to work with new interpretations of existing phenomena (such as his statistical interpretation of light phenomena). Actual lasers were first demonstrated in 1960.
The reasons schools gloss over the engineering aspect are that it takes a very long time, a lot of people and a lot of tedious, small increments to go from a new physical effect to a working application. There's very little to be consistently learned about the engineering process that isn't already known.
As for an interesting property that hasn't found an application: quantum entanglement. Yeah, we're kinda seeing baby steps, but consider how long people have been working on it, and how many supposed breakthroughs we've had. There isn't a gadget you can buy at radioshack that uses this.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
not the portentious/pretentious "God Particle".
Leon Lederman called it The Goddamn Particle because finding it---or them---is so vexatious.
His editor changed the title of the book, removing the -damn, to make it more commercially successful.
quoth Peter Higgs: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/30/higgs.boson.cern
Shall y'all moderate this "Informative" or "Funny"?
Unfortunately they are all here playing chatroullette.
People from the future are dicks.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I guess that Gauss et al. should not have wasted their time on pure mathematics fields (such as number theory) that had absolutely no practical applications at the time.
(I'm pretty sure he hasn't ever considered that)
there is this interesting feature of human nature where if you don't have tangible experience with something yourself the concept must either be wrong or not exist in the first place. "I don't understand the science behind quantum physics / global warmning / whatever and haven't heard a plausible car analogy to explain it, therefore all the scientists have made a big mistake and doesn't exist." the arrogance of introspective existence or something. or maybe just a lack of empathy.
If we are going to get time travel out of it we would already be neck deep in time travelers and it would be impossible to get tickets to the world cup. Neither of those things is happening so this result will not give us time travel.
Perhaps we're already knee deep in them and don't even know it. They're probably really good at creating identities for themselves, and if they ever fuck up, they could go back and fix it. Or perhaps this period in time is considered to be a pretty shitty time to come back to, so they don't bother?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
At least a redesigned toaster. I think that's doable in 15 years.
Powered by FreeBSD.
No no, by GNU/Hurd
Make it 20 years then.
Support SETI@home
First, how did Einstein postulate the existence of stimulated emission of light? Did he have some type of lab where he did experiments leading him to this conclusion, or is it all purely mathematical?
Perhaps it was just a "hunch".
Do you know why Kepler thought the Sun had to be at the centre of the solar system, and what he kept working at his planetary model until he got the math to work? He believe that the physical order followed the divine order: that God, as the source of all Truth and Light, was orbited by all other entities. The Sun, as the source of light in our realm of reality, therefore had to be orbited by all the entities in the sky:
As he indicated in the title, Kepler thought he had revealed God’s geometrical plan for the universe. Much of Kepler’s enthusiasm for the Copernican system stemmed from his theological convictions about the connection between the physical and the spiritual; the universe itself was an image of God, with the Sun corresponding to the Father, the stellar sphere to the Son, and the intervening space between to the Holy Spirit. His first manuscript of Mysterium contained an extensive chapter reconciling heliocentrism with biblical passages that seemed to support geocentrism.[15]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler
Intermediate vector bosons are also charged, but there is still no practical way to engineer weak force.
Then again, maybe there's no reason to.
As for an interesting property that hasn't found an application: quantum entanglement.
I don't think this is quite correct. Many applications involving cryptography and secure communications have been thought of for this, from what I've read about it. Getting it working is another matter. Some have even thought of using it for FTL communications (but I don't know if the phenomenon is actually FTL or not).
It seems to me the applications shouldn't be that difficult to dream up. Of course, hindsight is 20-20 and I wasn't actually there to know if no one really thought of applications for lasers before they were invented, but it seems like several useful applications for them should have been fairly obvious right away, as soon as they were thought of in theory: applications involving precise measurement would be the first thing to come to mind.
I'm pretty sure coming up with applications for nuclear fusion didn't take long either: obviously, someone thought it would make a great bomb early on.
Of course, for any physics phenomenon or technology, there's going to be further applications that no one thinks of until later, after the technology becomes more commonplace, such as using lasers for Pink Floyd concerts or playing with cats. But it seems like a few initial applications for most phenomena should be readily apparent even before anyone's managed to verify it experimentally.
I'm not a historian of science, but my understanding is that it was purely mathematical -- invented before the relevant quantum mechanics was known. As my undergrad QM text (Griffiths, p 356) says, "Einstein was forced to 'invent' stimulated emission in order to reproduce Plank's formula." I believe he justified it with a fairly abstract thermodynamics argument (he didn't identify a mechanism, he just showed it had to be true or else thermodynamics would be violated). Sorry that I can't cite sources -- I don't have them handy.
Mods: granted this is off-topic, but I'd like to indulge the parent post's questions. I am a biophysicist.
Let me have a stab at explaining the history of stimulated emission and lasers.
Einstein predicted stimulated emission based just on two things: the fact that atoms can absorb light and the fact that thermodynamically, as you approach infinite temperature all possible arrangements of particles become equally likely. Consider a collection of atoms that have a ground and an excited state. As temperature (and black-body radiation) increases, more and more photons will pump atoms into the excited state. Excited states naturally decay after a certain lifetime, but without stimulated emission, at higher temperatures more and more atoms would get pumped into the excited state, until an arbitrarily large fraction of atoms would be in the excited state at arbitrarily high temperature. However, from thermodynamics we know that as you approach arbitrarily high temperature there will be a 50/50 mix of ground state and excited atoms, since high temperature favors disorder (entropy) and 50/50 mixes are maximally disordered. Therefore, there must be a process whose rate is proportional to the intensity of the thermal radiation in the system that takes an atom from the excited to the ground state; this is stimulated emission.
Different people give credit to different inventors of the laser, but you can make a good case for Charles Townes' input being timely and critical. He figured out that putting a gain medium (a material with population inversion - more atoms in the excited than the ground state) in an optical resonator would produce coherent light through stimulated emission. He turns 95 next month, and is still going strong last I heard.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
What would be the point of that? People in the future would already know the outcome.
I am an Australian so I already know the outcome of games involving my team but that wouldn't stop me from watching the game.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Positrons. It's not that the rest aren't useful (for analogous uses - essentially as probes of structure. Think of any field where physical structure needs to be probed. Then think of exotic particles as more useful probes that can replace light or that can probe more exotic properties of matter (like spin)). It's just that miniaturizing collider technology or getting otherwise practical sources for these particles is a major PITA. The day that happens is the day we can all have ghostbusters-style proton packs and kick some ectoplasmic ass. But I digress.
the arrogance of introspective existence or something. or maybe just a lack of empathy.
Or maybe just the lack of science education. I took a college-level chemistry class recently. It kicked my ass, but it was worth it. When you can sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and predict the results of some experiment mathematically, then go into a lab, perform the experiment, and see your results proven correct, you really get a feeling for, "Hey, maybe they really aren't just making all this shit up."
Unfortunately, not many people today are given this experience/forced to have this experience.
Breakfast served all day!
That's a common myth. It was actually his bastard son
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
ok, what with genetics, medicine, computer, cell, and other technological discoveries and advances being dominated by the US, we're supposed to think physics might be in that group too? But what about all the slashdot articles that say science in the US is dead? Obviously there has been a mistake. If the US isn't dominating everything, then there is cause for alarm and we must all get upset and stuff. And obviously the US is just failing in science and technology. Raise our fists in anger! America, Fark Yeah! //grumbles about inconsistent /. editors, walks off
Beautiful. Never read a more perfect summary of the necessity of doing pure science.
Whenever you look more closely, the universe is immediately replaces by something more complex and even more bizzare...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"OK, so you think that time flows that way, do you? Interesting."
As an engineer, this is the part I'm most interested in in this subject area: getting from some theorized effect in physics to being able to create and control this effect at will, and then coming up with useful applications for it. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like schools gloss over all this stuff; they talk about Einstein coming up with E=mc^2, briefly mention some guys working on the Manhattan Project, and boom, next thing you know there's atomic bombs exploding.
You should start by reading about this guy named Fermi.
If there are a plethora of god particles. We may have to rethink more than just physics models.
(but I don't know if the phenomenon is actually FTL or not).
It is, that's what makes it cool. When particles are entangled, if you move one the other moves with no outside influence - the action is instantaneous and distance doesn't matter. The hard part right now is keeping them entangled at a distance - the further apart you move the particles the harder it is to keep them from losing their entanglement. So long as they are actually entangled, though, distance doesn't introduce any kind of delay in the reaction of one particle to another. If they could get it to work across the world it would be phenomenal, but so far they've only managed a few feet.
In any case, the parent poster was talking about actual applications of quantum entanglement today. As you said, we've got ideas, but no applications yet.
I personally think understanding how/why mass exists is going to do a lot in the area of energy at first, and if it opens up a more correct theory of physics the sky is the limit really. There is no telling what it might do for us.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I wonder if this would help out Lisi's theory that the organization, and expression, of particles lines up with the mathematical E8 Lie group?
Garrett Lisi on his theory of everything | Video on TED.com
Google: natural laser
First Hit: http://laserstars.org/news/MWC349.html
I guess that Gauss et al. should not have wasted their time on pure mathematics fields (such as number theory) that had absolutely no practical applications at the time.
I'm sure someone wasted their time on pure mathematics fields that had absolutely no practical applications at the time. Gauss wasn't one of those people. He wasted his time on fields, including pure mathematical fields, that had considerable application then and now. For example, his experience with number theory carried over to make a computation for the position of Ceres that was vastly simpler than existing methods and which since has become the "least squares method", one of the fundamental computing tools for many fields of science.
This myth that one need not consider the value of the science that is researched is pervasive yet it fails to describe how science has actually been done. Yes, Gauss worked on a number of problems (such as the planar geometry problem of constructing a 17-sided polygon with straight edge and compass) that didn't have application (some still don't). But it's worth noting that as a result of his effort, he became knowledgeable about a great deal of mathematics, very proficient with computations, and discovered many other things during his lifetime that he wouldn't have, if he hadn't had been so aggressive in exploring mathematics. Nor would he have been a decent teacher of research mathematics with a number of important students.
To be very blunt, any person who works on a field where there is no value returned in their lifetimes has never made it into the history books as a serious scientist. Every so often, you might find someone who anticipated a future development, but because it didn't catch on in their lifetimes, it's just of historical interest with no relevance to the development of the field (for example, the steam engine was invented in ancient Greece yet it has no relevance until the 17th or 18th century).
In practice, now as then, scientists generally had important problems that they were trying to solve. And many, if not most of those scientists also worked on less importance, sometimes nearly irrelevant problems. But that latter work was low cost. You didn't have to sink ten billion dollars to play with quaternions or zap someone with a Leyden jar.
Even if we grant your point quoted above, do you really think you can justify multi-billion dollar projects on the grounds that extremely cheap mathematicians puttered around centuries ago? A billion dollars is probably more than adequate to fund several thousand potential Gausses over their lifetimes. Maybe something like 20,000 mathematician years, if you spent it all now rather than through careful financing. Using your logic, that seems a lot bigger investment to me than pushing the envelop slightly on certain energetic particle collisions. I bet you'd be hard pressed to find any science that has a cost to scientific quantity comparable to mathematicians. So why not spend it all on mathematicians? My take is that any rebuttal of that argument has to take into account the value of the science involved.
It's fun to observe from the periphery - this result, the recent confirmation (maybe) that neutrinos have mass (otherwise they couldn't interconvert among their three types)...more and more cracks are appearing in the Standard Model. It's exciting. And probably the answer is 42.
Define instantaneous when simultaneity is relative. Would you be able to communicate with people in the past from really far away? If you were in a spaceship and you were going really fast (good fraction of c) would your voice get all deep in a FTL transmission? If ou wer going c and you turned the headlights on...
I personally think understanding how/why mass exists is going to do a lot in the area of energy at first, and if it opens up a more correct theory of physics the sky is the limit really. There is no telling what it might do for us.
I've believed for some time that understanding the true nature of gravity would be revolutionary, and possibly allow such things as FTL propulsion and artificial gravity and other Star Trek-type things needed for deep-space travel. I guess the same would go for mass, as the two appear to be intertwined.
If we are going to get time travel out of it we would already be neck deep in time travelers and it would be impossible to get tickets to the world cup. Neither of those things is happening so this result will not give us time travel.
Maybe this is the prime reality, and time travel just hasn't been discovered yet. Once it has been, your memories will be different, because the world cup will have been impossible to get tickets for.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fair enough, let's address those claims.
The construction of LHC was approved in 1995, way before there was a crisis in Europe. The total project cost (about half of the $10B figure according to this) is therefore spread across more than 15 years (assuming not all experiments have been run) and 20 countries. CERN's budget for last year was about $1B (see previous link) and a similar figure in 2008 and I fully expect them to spend that money on nuclear research, as per their charter; there are other organizations that concern themselves with world hunger, bank bailouts, etc.
Now, let's put the numbers into perspective.
There are *individuals* that can finance the LHC 5 times over. Speaking about countries, in 2009 Germany was the largest contributor to CERN with ~$200M, which was roughly 0.006% of their GDP.
Oh, and by the way, the discovery was made at Fermilab's Tevatron, which is both older and significantly cheaper than the LHC.
Since it sounds like you might have an answer, I've had this question for a long time. If a particles heat can be represented by it's entrophic motion, and since motion is limited by the speed of light, is there an absolute maximum temperature for a particle? Can a particle use uncertanty to violate this limit? Sorry for the off-topic post, but I've never had a better oportunity to ask this question and expect an intelligent answer.
No man is an island... But I wouldn't mind having a bigger moat.
If you're interested in a very well written history of early nuclear physics and the atomic bomb, I'd highly recommend Richard Rhodes book The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It does a phenomenal job of covering the theory, experiments and engineering involved in big chunk of nuclear research. It is very well written and has compelling mini-biographies of several of the scientists. No Einstein lasers though.
Nah. All time travelers from the future are Americans, and none of them actually care about soccer. That's a kids game.
Besides, most of them are back trying to figure out who the little Aramaic-speaking, middle-eastern, liberal Jew is and what he did with the real, white, English-speaking, American, registered Republican, Jesus.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Rhodes' "Making of the Atomic Bomb" has an excellent recap of the path the atomic physics took from discovery of atom to the atom bomb, with a strong focus on how the physical experiments were married to the theoretical. In fact, there are a number of examples of people uncovering results in physical experiments without realizing the implications. For instance, the Joliot-Curies ran experiments which demonstrated the existence of both the neutron and positron, without realizing it. Others came up with the theory, realized the Joliot-Curies misinterpreted their findings and achieved glory. Doesn't go too in-depth on some phenomena like the photoelectric effect, but I can highly recommend it for the path between the birth of quantum physics and the atomic bomb.
At a certain energy, the particle will eventually be torn apart into its constituent subatomic particles. This is effectively what the super-colliders and particle accelerators do.
Muon spin resonance is real technology.
When particles are entangled, if you move one the other moves with no outside influence - the action is instantaneous and distance doesn't matter.
No -- if you move one particle, the other doesn't move instantly. Entanglement is much more subtle than that; in fact, it's hard to explain what exactly is shared between the particles without using math. One point is important, though: it's not possible to send information faster than light using quantum entanglement. So, all that talk about "instantaneous" reaction is a little misleading.
The hard part right now is keeping them entangled at a distance - the further apart you move the particles the harder it is to keep them from losing their entanglement.
The difficulty in maintaining (quantum) coherence has nothing to do with the distance between the particles. It's just that the particles must be kept completely isolated from everything else -- any interaction with anything else breaks the entanglement.
So long as they are actually entangled, though, distance doesn't introduce any kind of delay in the reaction of one particle to another.
Well, sure, for a suitable definition of "reaction". And remember it's a one time deal: once you interact with one of the particles, the other one suffers the "reaction" and then the entanglement is broken.
If they could get it to work across the world it would be phenomenal, but so far they've only managed a few feet.
Actually, it has been done over a few kilometers, see for example this paper.
It's great that it worked for you, but lots of people aren't receptive to even that.
Richard Dawkins did a documentary where he went into a poor school where the majority of students believed the world was just 6000 years old etc. He took a class to the beach to look for fossils. He thought that if he could just get the kids to find a real fossil for themselves, and actually hold it, then it might give them (as you put it) a feeling for "Hey, maybe they really aren't just making all this shit up."
Did it work? Hell no. The documentary tries to hide that, but what they don't say seems to be as revealing as what they do say. The whole class managed to find only 2 fossils (This is abysmal - it was a beach where you could find dozens by yourself in a day). And they only showed interviews afterwards of two of the classmates, and all they would say was pretty much "it was durrr okay"
(Link http://www.secularism.org.uk/whydawkinsisrightandhiscriticsar.html )
First thing I thought of when I read this is that there are five fundamental forces in the universe:
1. Electricity
2. Magnetism
3. Gravity
4. Weak Nuclear
5. Strong Nuclear
Considering that the Higgs boson was, in part, supposed to help explain how mass worked, it makes me wonder if this is the reason for the number they're arriving at.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
The Temporal Prime Directive which is stopping all those time travellers.
There's always the possibility for surprise, however slightest it is. Time travellers don't have that.
I am an Australian so I already know the outcome of games involving my team but that wouldn't stop me from watching the game.
Aussie Aussie Aussi... Ah, fuckit, lets go to the pub and watch the game there.
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
These idiots just keep finding more things to investigate, it is almost like they don't care that textbooks will need to be reprinted.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Disregarding the whole boring soccer thing, you seem to imply that if time travel becomes possible, then it already "happened-will happen"
This is wrong because even in a time travel enabling universe there would still be the concept of "first time" and also because time travel might have many different dynamics that void this argument.
(that being said I am not really deffending the idea of time travel being possible at all, I'm just telling you that you are not disproving it with those arguments)
No, I am building a joke around the idea. If you are interested John Varley did this with his novel Millennium. It started with a great tightly written time travel story Air Raid which became a really crap movie Millennium. The novel was based on the movie and Varley turned it into an essay on time travel SF. Its a lot of fun including a bit where the time travellers need to fake the cockpit voice recording of a crashed airliner so they tape the replay session and...
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Hi General Fault,
It's a particle's kinetic energy, not its speed, that's related to temperature. (The constant of proportionality is called Boltzmann's constant k, related to R, the ideal gas constant.) Since particles become more massive as they approach c and kinetic energy depends on both mass and speed (.5 * m * v * v), the energy starts going more into increased mass and less into increased speed as you approach c. In fact you can put an arbitrary amount of kinetic energy into them with them still traveling slower than c. Ridiculously-energetic particles still go slower than light - for instance the particles at the LHC travel at something like 99.999% of the speed of light. So really high-temperature objects would start having their particles get more massive rather than substantially faster.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
Maybe one way nature avoids paradoxes is by simply not allowing the past to see the future---but not the other way around? That would mean you could have time travelers, but we would be unaware of them (and they'd have no way of altering things that have consequences to their existence). Sort of like the ability to view a very detailed recording of history...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Do you mean that time travellers could observe us but not interact? The influence of observers on the observed seems to be pretty much embedded in quantum mechanics and (when you think about it) classical mechanics.
Of course our records are a kind of time travel (we watch old movies) and we all travel into the future.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
...last time we ended up with a particle zoo, we found that they were made out of a few smaller particles (quarks) that never really revealed being separate particles, but where you could find it out indirectly.
What if that’s also, in a way, the case here?
Or something else that is not a direct property of the Higgs particle, but only of the situation/position/forcefields/... it is in.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I agree - when an investment banker can make $10 billion in one year I really don't think it was that big an investment or wasted opprotunity - 10 million dollar mansions in the hamptons and 200K sports cars or running up the prices of commodities when there is no real demand are true wasted opprotunities...
You'll never see my work on the preprint server (wrong email address). You can buy it on a t-shirt, watch it on YouTube, or look at non-peer reviewed papers.
Doug
TheStandUpPhysicist
http://bit.ly/GEMtshirt the t-shirt
http://bit.ly/GEMpdf Close as I can do to a paper
http://bit.ly/GEMnb Transformed paper into a Mathematica notebook to check the math
http://bit.ly/GEMnbpdf The notebook as a pdf file
Lots of stuff on YouTube
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
If time travel is possible, it will probably never be discovered (or rather, will be discovered, then reversed by someone changing the time line). 'Time travel discovered' is a state of unstable equilibrium in that, so long as it is possible, people will go back in time to change some feature of their lives. Since there will always be some improvement you can make, people will keep going back until they inadvertently change things so that time travel is never discovered, at which point the timeline will enter a state of stable equilibrium, because people will have no way of changing it, except in the usual way.
A scientist plays with the mathematical model and, eventually, gets an interesting equation/formula and can say: mathematics allow it, the physics don't forbid it, so it must be possible.
An engineer, on the other hand, is paid to solve a problem and he looks for the science that would best serve him.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
It dismays me that whenever I (in other circumstances) also claim that the US is the only country to have used a nuke on an enemy, someone says something along the lines of "it wasn't really a nuke". It doesn't matter that they were small yield. They still pretty much wiped out a large part of both cities and irradiated the surrounding areas in a single blast.
But they were only small nukes, so I guess they don't count?
The only saving grace of this mentality is that it reveals people are still ashamed that this ever occurred. So ashamed they're trying to twist the logic so it appears it never happened.
I think you are jumping the gun more than just a little. An extra Higgs doublet (which is where the extra Higgs bosons come from) is just one possible explanation. A far more likely explanation, IMHO, is that there is some systematic error which D0 has not accounted for. However even if it is a real effect there are certainly other explanations that simple extra Higgs bosons. For example I'm sure some SUSY models could explain it (although these do come with extra Higgs bosons as well!).
A far more interesting result is the recent data from MINOS which suggests that the mass splitting between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos might be different. While, again, it may well be (in fact some would say very likely) that the effect will disappear with better data if it is proven then this would violate CPT which is a core symmetry of relativity i.e. special relativity would be broken if the result is confirmed. So if you want to get excited about a still-not-yet-confirmed result I'd suggest you go after that one since the implications are far wider reaching.
If nothing else the research Tevatron results can provide some direction for further testing by the LHC whenever they finally get that beastie up and running at full tilt.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
To calculate the light spectrum of a star you need three components. Light from spontaneous emission, light from stimulated emission and lastly absorbtion. How these three source contribute again depends on star size, temperature and metal composition. That's one example.
When people say that Quantum Mechanics is not compatible with General Relativity, this is one of the problems they have in mind. Quantum entaglement is instantaneous, but that specific feature doesn't really make much difference, since it can't be used to communicate data.
Rethinking email
At most times, the conservation of momentum prohibits the particles to change into something else. That is one of the reasons people use coliders to make those experiments, when a particle colides with another one with the same momentum amplitude, but inverse direction, the total momentum is zero.
Also, the particles don't change into their constituents. They change into lots of things that may already be there or not, depending on the experiment.
Rethinking email
At this point in time, I'd question whether they would fund anti matter weapons research. Tactically, do we really need a bigger boom than a nuke?
How else are they going to blow up the moon?!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I prefer the converse of that: given that we're working our way towards computer simulations that are more and more real, what are the chances that we're currently experiencing in the original?
My favorite take on unreality is that we're a simulation running on some grad student's professor's computer, taking a few % of the CPU, no big deal; it resolves chairs, people, cars, and sometimes (depending on the lighting), dust. However, once we achieve nanotechnology, it will need to resolve (and keep track of) every individual atom, making the simulation take more and more CPU cycles until the professor says, "shut it down, I need to get some real work done."
Thus nanotechnology is both saviour, and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
presumptions.
1) That time travel is cheap
2) That we are interesting enough to time travel to
3) That you would recognize them4) The people in the future haven't realized what a boring waster current Soccer is.
4) And that they would want to come see something that's pretty well known.
Almost as bad a Steven Hawking having a party and then sending the invites after the party to any time traveler
How much hubris does that guy have?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The easiest way to teach peopel this is with electronics.
Make the math, assemble. Change the math, change a piece of the design.
It's a cheap way to go becasue it can be done with a VOhm meter, to resisters and a battery.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
An thus shall we name the Bosons: Larry Moe Curly Shemp Joe
See the first third of the free-on-the-Internet movie Zeitgeist, which describes how most religions are "Sun-God religions". This then makes perfect, circular sense: we observed that everything came from the Sun, formed it into a God, passed it down through various religions (Horus comes to mind), and then idiotic religious zealots decide that they are the center of the universe, and killed scientists for disbelieving; and then finally, the scientists were right all along, but so were the early religions. Weird.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Do *you* remember the winners, or even the teams, in the last couple dozen world cups? Sure, you could look them up, but...
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Why Dawkins Is Right and His Critics ARRRR!!
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Babbage, Da Vinci, and several others had ideas that couldn't be effectively implemented in their own age, yet we still remember them. On the whole, if an idea is useful enough it is usually rediscovered by science when it becomes practical. Sometimes we may forget who the originator was or name a discovery after a re-discoverer, but it's *all* built on the shoulders of giants.
As you said, the problem is how to divvy up the money. Is it worth funding 20,000 mathematicians for a year? Most of them would be mathematicians anyway. What 20,000 physicists can't do on their own is build a large hadron collider.
I believe CDF said they did not see this CP violation and its quite possible that the D0 result will no longer be significant as statistics are increased.
Babbage, Da Vinci, and several others had ideas that couldn't be effectively implemented in their own age, yet we still remember them.
That would be a wrong way to look at them. I have ideas that can't be effectively implemented either (for example, using the Wolf 424 binary system as a natural "spaceship" for traversing the galaxy at somewhere over 500 km/s in a different direction than the Solar System). Does that mean I'll be remembered too?
As I see it, these names confirm my claims. They're famous for what they did, not for what they thought about, but couldn't do. Da Vinci has a lot of architecture, artwork, and ideas that worked out in his time. Similarly, Babbage didn't get the first computer to work, but he advanced the state of analogue computing considerably (and this was to play a major role in human society through to the end of the Second World War).
We already have time travel. It goes with space travel; or moving. That's where all the (special or general) relativity stuff comes in - spacetime and all that (I prefer timespace, personally).
The tricks to travelling through time at a different rate would be:
a) travelling through time at a different rate without having to bother travelling in space;
b) managing to go faster than the speed of light and hence travel back in time (my understanding is that light sort of.. stays stopped in time)
c) managing to slow down the relative speed you are travelling at so as to travel relatively faster through time.
The other way involves wormholes; or tunnelling directly from one part of spacetime to another; but that would possibly be rather hit-and-miss and you would likely want some sort of gates at the endpoints; if anything, that is more likely to come out of the Higgs-particle experiments, due to being around bending spacetime via gravity. Personally, the most likely sort of technologies I hope to see come out of this research is the ability to manipulate gravity, but that could be decades, if not centuries away - what we really need is a good power source first.
err, but that creates a paradox
The question shows that you are stuck to the classical way of thinking: events happen at specific points in space-time, and you can exactly pinpoint the time when something occurs (in a frame of reference).
In quantum mechanics, events don't happen at points in space-time, but between waves which interact in all of space-time. It's not exactly possible to say when something happened, so it's not exactly meaningful to say two things happened simultaneously. One way of looking at it is to say everything happens simultaneously to a (vanishingly) small degree.
Only probability keeps you from using quantum mechanics for FTL communications. This is kind of analogous to the second law of thermodynamics, which is only true in the probabilistic sense. If we can develop an infinite improbability drive...
When people say that Quantum Mechanics is not compatible with General Relativity, this is one of the problems they have in mind.
Not really. Special Relativity already has this "feature", and Quantum Mechanics is compatible with it since the late 1920s (see the Dirac equation).
Quantum Mechanics (specifically, the Standard Model) is incompatible with General Relativity because GR describes gravity as a distortion of space-time, but in the SM the other forces (electromagnetic, weak and strong) are carried by bosons. These are fundamentally different views of nature, and there seems to be no coherent way of reconciling them.
Since this is been nicknamed the GOD Particle is it possible that the first three could be called The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost? Now what shall we call the other two?
As soon as you said "kenetic energy" it all clicked. The temperature is in effect unlimited by the very nature of E=mc^2. The temperature being a measure of E must be infinite for the particle speed to reach c. Balanced by the fact that the relative mass would also be infinite at c. Nice... Thank you - unless I've got it wrong, then please correct. But it seems pretty simple now.
No man is an island... But I wouldn't mind having a bigger moat.