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Tevatron Has Come To the End of Its Run
Med-trump writes "The U.S. government's Chicago-area Fermilab has been at the forefront of high-energy physics. That's in large part thanks to the Tevatron, the machine that first reached the energies needed to discover the last quark in the Standard Model. But the Tevatron has come to the end of its run; at 2pm on Friday, it will be shut down for the last time."
But but but...
Didn't we just hear they were going to generate more data to corroborate the speed of the neutrino?
So Long Farewell Avidazen Goodbye
Auf wiedersehen. It's german ;)
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Noooooooooooooooo!!!
(as revised by George "Tweaker" Lucas)
... or two in honor of the Tevatron's long run.
I'm wondering what's going to become of the physicists that work at Fermilab. I know one of them from my college days. He's worked there since graduating in the late '70s, one of the few physics majors I knew that actually found employment doing work in physics. (Many others seemed to go into software development.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It's actually "Adios, au revoir, auf wiedersehen ... Goodnight!" He's half-remembering the closing song from the Lawrence Welk show.
One can only run the same experiment so many times before the results no longer pay for the operating costs... and all the scientists get bored.
Um, no. It's the song the children sing before going to bed in "The Sound of Music" that he appears to have in mind.
Weird Stuff and hamfests.
"Whatcha want for this 5 volt, 2,000 amp power supply?"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You won't remember any of it tomorrow. We're going to do some Ironman 2 shit and get waaaasted! Another toast to Fermi!
I just heard this sad news. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss it - even if you didn't understand the work, there's no denying its contributions to physics. Truly an American icon.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Just looking at the old data will prove nothing from the old MINOS experiment because it suggests that CERN did it right with the OPERA experiment. The problem before is the margin of error on the MINOS test is far too high causing the measured speed to be faster then the speed of light with a margin of error overlapping the speed of light. They need to do a slight upgrade and redo the tests to get the Margin of Error down.
I don't remember any tevatron in the Sound of Music.
However, there is one thing I am confused about with the muon: it can decay??
I thought fundamental particles are the smallest that small can get, as in, you can't get anything from "splitting" it, there is no substructure within?
Yes, the muon decays. Just because it's a "fundamental" particle doesn't protect it from E = mc^2, so to speak. Since the muon is a heavier version of the electron, it is also more energetic, and thus the tendency is for it to decay to the less massive/energetic electron.
Who else expanded this thread just to see if "avidazen" was some unfamiliar physics term being used in a pun? C'mon, fess up.
Tevatron will be resurrected as... GALVATRON!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I'm just waiting for Anonymous to out this racist AC and post their coordinates. Getting their ass kicked every day for the rest of their life will probably reinforce their racism, but who cares? They're worthless anyway, and only demonstrate to everyone how stupid racism is.
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make install -not war
Are we replacing this lab with another?
Is the US even capable of doing high energy physics experiments here anymore?
I'm sure the richest people need their tax cuts more than the US needs to be where we determine which basic research is best for us. After all, they created all these negative millions of jobs. Or maybe another lying war or two instead of letting the Chinese or Europeans direct humanity's exploration where it best suits them, regardless of what's good for us.
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make install -not war
in yet another science and technology field.
However, there is no reason to fear. The military technology budget is largely unscathed.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
However, there is one thing I am confused about with the muon: it can decay??
I thought fundamental particles are the smallest that small can get, as in, you can't get anything from "splitting" it, there is no substructure within?
Isn't this a little nonsensical that the most fundamental particles are capable of decaying in to neutrinos? (more?)
We create exotic particles by accelerating protons and electrons to extreme speeds and smash them together so the energy is converted to mass. As they fall apart they split into smaller particles and some mass is converted to energy. The whole thing is rather counter-intuitive, it's like crashing two cars at 200 mph and the result is a semitrailer weighing much more than both cars put together. Then that semitrailer falls apart in some random way, maybe giving you a bicycle and two motorcycles.
We don't really know how that process happens, the particles we're talking are less than 0.000000000000001m in charge radius, moving at near light speed and it happens so fast it looks instantaneous. I'm sure scientists would love to observe what's going as a fundamental particle grows or loses mass, but we're not there. Hell, the accelerators have more than enough trying to track what went into and what came out of a decay, far less see one in progress.
I guess you can say they're called fundamental until we've found something even more fundamental, just like we once thought the atom was the smallest possible unit. That energy can become mass and mass become energy means it's more than just a substructure, the energy must somehow get trapped in that structure as mass. And then tear that structure somehow breaking free. I think you'll have a row of Nobel prizes if you figure out exactly how though.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
http://goo.gl/kqXJa
among the highlights - they get the data from CERN in realtime, and can actually control the LHC remotely.
oh, and the buttons to stop & start the tevatron are pretty cool ;)
What's "Goodnight sweet prince" in german? ;)
Um, no. It's the song the children sing before going to bed in "The Sound of Music" that he appears to have in mind.
Isn't it from Blazing Saddles?
Gute nacht suesser prinz
(in suesser the ue should be a u with an umlaut, the ss an esset)
This is not the funny you're looking for.
I just want to know if it will make some awesome deep BZHOOOOOOOOooooooooowwwp sound or something when it winds down, like you would expect something that big to make.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
That's what you get for not reading the book :P
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
One of the many problem with the Standard Model is that most "fundamental" particles decay. No, that doesn't really make sense - for somehting to decay without external interaction it needs some sort of internal state, and thus something more fundamental must be going on. Nevertheless, the Standard Model is still the best model, with decades wasted on string theory that led nowhere there's not an obvious replacement candidate.
It's too bad though abotu Muon decay - Muon catalized cold fusion would otherwise be quite easy (it still is possible, it just takes more power to make the Muons by far than you get from the fusion).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Dann ist mein Job ist getan
Gute Nacht süeßer Prinz
Just testing. Somehow I didn't expect that to work.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
I'm waiting for people to wise up, stop taking the bait and feeding the trolls.
Internet vigilanteism seems infinitely more probable, sadly.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Quantum physics doesn't make sense. So decay without any internal state, or external interaction is par for the course. For what it's worth, Bell's theorem proves that quantum randomness occurs without local hidden variables. Quantum events are wholy, truly, completly, utterly non-deterministic. There is nothing inside a particle that will help you predict when it will decay, it's all down to probability.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Err, that's not really what Bell's theorem is about, and anyhow it's a bit silly to use "proves" - this isn't math, we don't prove things.
The non-determinism of Quantum mechanics is a useful model, but there's no real reason to believe it's "true" in some deep sense (as with any other model). All the same results (at available experimantal energy levels) would be predictied by a model that has "psuedo randomness" from complex internal state, but such theories aren't very interesting on that basis - they'd need to predict something unexpected to be interesting.
The Standard Model is deeply unsatisfying on many levels. Just because people have gotten used to it doesn't make it any less awkward or any more elegant. What it is is predictive, so we're stuck with it for now.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Nothing you said contradicts anything I said. Yes the thoery allows it. No, it still doesn't make sense for a fundamental partical in isolation to spontaneously change state, nor is there any real reason to believe the Leptons are fundamental "point" particles, it's just that there isn't a better theory around right now. One could easily model a lepton as a combination of smaller particles explaining muon decay much like quarks explain neutron decay, but what would that accomplish in and of itself? You can always create alternative theories for the same data.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Slashdot would have to be hacked first - assuming anon post IPs are recorded.
But if it makes you feel any better he's only doing it to troll you and probably isn't really racist IRL. If you want to see real racism, there are white supremacist message boards out there...the real racists aren't anywhere near as creative. Everything they say is like a slow-witted failed comeback.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I've read a lot about Bell's theorem, and everything I've read indicates that that is exactly what Bell's theorem is about. If that's not what Bell's theorem means, why is it one of the most profound results in all of science?
ANAQP though. If you are, I'd love to be corrected.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
One way to look at it is that the fields corresponding to the various particles always exist and may therefore undergo interactions, even if they are in the "ground" state (no real particles) at any time. So you can regard the "internal state" as not of the particle but as of the field itself, and that can change between different excitation (number of particle) states just like an atom can undergo a transition between excited and ground state. E.g. the muon field, electron field, neutrino fields etc. can interact with each other via the weak interaction fields.
Or, to take a different approach, there is absolutely no requirement for the laws of nature to be intuitive, which is I suspect what you really mean by "make sense".
Ah, when I read it back I couldn't figure out how to pronounce it. That makes much more sense.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Well I see by the clock on the wall.
That it's time to bid you one and all:
Goodbye Goodbye
So long So long
Farewell Farewell
Adieu Adieu
Be good Stay Well
Bye Bye Keep Warm
Relax At Ease
Take Care Stay Loose
Adieu mon vieux.
A la prochaine.
Goodbye 'til when we meet again!
Not before going to bed. Before escaping from the Nazis during their singing performance.
I love it when the nuns pull the coil wire out of the Nazi's car so they can't start it and chase after the Von Trapp's car!
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I don't care if they "trolled me". The fact is that I welcome someone outing them and kicking their ass. I'm perfectly happy to talk with other people about them, even if they get to watch.
The idea that "they're not really racists" because there are worse racists who don't hide it is part of how stupidity like racism manages to survive and replicate itself through the generations. When someone says things like that, they're a racist. They might be "kidding", but it doesn't matter. That kind of talk in public is part of what keeps people down - including keeping down the racists. Even though more serious racism keeps people down more, the less serious racism is still racism. And I don't see what they've posted here as anything less a "slow-witted failed comeback". It's just an echo chamber of the stupidest, most infantile phrases and terrible ideas, coming from the same cesspool soul.
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make install -not war
No, intuitive is right out. If you mean each particle has a field of every potential particle superimposed ... that's a very interesting interpretation, it does almost make sense, if the internal state is some complex interaction between these multiple waves. But sadly it wouldn't seem to clean up any of the other awkwardness of the Standard Model.
Ultimately, from a sense of elegance rather than intuitiveness, you'd expect the complexity of the currently "fundamental" particles to be an emergent behavior from some more fundamental elements that are themselves dead simple. We know it doesn't take much for this level of complexity to arise from simpler building blocks, and there are some intriging theories about what's going on down at Plank (length) scale. But those can only be interesting if they start predicting unexpected results that a higher-energy accelerator can look for. Fortunately, outside of America someone is still looking.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What's "Goodnight sweet prince" in german? ;)
fick mich in den Arsch Baby (from the 90s classic Laid in Denmark).
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Most slashdotters will now be wondering why you spelled it with a funny B in the middle.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Um, no. It's the song the children sing before going to bed in "The Sound of Music" that he appears to have in mind.
Isn't it from Blazing Saddles?
Yes, you've got it exactly right, and it couldn't possibly be from the earlier film The Sound of Music, and even if it was there would be no way of checking in about ten seconds via Google, would there?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
But if it makes you feel any better he's only doing it to troll you and probably isn't really racist IRL.
I find that implausible, for the simple reason that if I were trolling slashdot I'd choose something that people actually care about here. Although slashdot isn't particularly racist, you certainly get a lot of right wingers moaning about political correctness ("it is my god given right under the Constitution to call a spade a spade, and I'm not talking about the garden implement").
You're much better off mocking Linux or praising Microsoft if you just want to get a reaction.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I wonder what happens to all the liquid helium in the system. Isn't it worth on the order of 100k USD? Perhaps it could be sold of and turned into a scholarship?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Except the German ones, natürlich.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.