Slashdot Mirror
EU Scientists Working On Laser To Rip a Hole In Spacetime
astroengine writes "Those pesky physicists are at it again; they want to build a laser so powerful that it will literally rip spacetime apart. Why? To prove the existence of virtual particles in the quantum vacuum, potentially unravel extra dimensions and possibly find the root of dark matter. The $1.6 billion Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility (known as ELI) will be built somewhere in Europe by the end of the decade and physicists are hoping the ten high-powered lasers — delivering 200 petawatts of power at a target for less than a trillionth of a second — will turn up some surprises about the very fabric of the Universe."
Commencing Primary Ignition....
Standby...
Standby...
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
Alright folks, listen up: This is not an appropriate time for a shark joke. This is very clearly an opportunity for an Alan Parsens or Preperation H reference.
Anybody caught making a Frickin' Sharks joke will be permanently labeled a virgin.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
If spacetime is ripped apart, where and when will any observations of any phenomena they are studying occur?
In the event of an alien invasion, can we point it upwards?
The combined power of 10 separate lasers would be focused down to a very small volume, creating conditions more extreme than in the center of our sun.
So they'll essentiallly be turning the Earth into the Death Star
And we feel good about letting Europeans man the switch?
Will they be wearing dark suits with funky helmets?
They need to call it "light" because politicians are stupid enough to ban if they call it "radiation" - although a powerful enough laser won't be visible light, but UV radiation...
Nerdy news for your nerdy needs? http://www.soylentnews.org Soylent News is people!
... we get invaded by the Strogg?
--
BMO
Another terrible headline, but the article is partly to blame. This isn't about ripping a hole in space time, it's just about putting energy in the vacuum so a bunch of virtual particles become real particles.
P.S. THE DEVICE WILL GO ONLINE IN 2012 AND END THE WORLD!!! AREN'T I CLEVER? PULL MY FINGER!!
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Damn! I hate it when that happens.
Have gnu, will travel.
... until the universe segfaults.
power of this fully operational battle station! Fire at will commander.
I've never understood what Will did that everyone always wants to fire at him.
That actually happened several times. Ever heard of Louis Slotin or Harry Daghlian?
*All* particles are mathematical abstractions.
someone accidentally caused a nuclear fission without taking proper precautions at a lab
That happened, at least twice. See the WIkipedia entries for Harry Daghlian, Jr and Louis Slotin.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
The answer is not what is given. The answer is:
1. Pork 2. Some researchers get media attention 3. Some researchers might get to play with the laser.
The whole idea is so lame. Please, give the money to a real condensed matter physicist, or a chemist or a materials scientist please.
I'll feed ya, Anonymous Coward! :-) Why is it lame? Potentially (and admittedly it will eat giga-watts of electricity) it could confirm some very fundamental elements of theoretical physics. That, to me, is worth every giga-penny. Advancement of fundamental knowledge is money well-spent. Do you have something against science on the frontiers? Just askin'.
200 petawatts is easy enough to produce - it's 200 joules over one femtosecond. (Chances are the pulse is somewhat longer than one femtosecond, but there are two ways to produce large power numbers - large amounts of energy, or very short timeframes.)
I'm guessing...plaid and flannel.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I think the idea is that you relatively slowly charge up some kind of energy bank, eg ultracapacitors or something, using relatively low power. And then you discharge the bank very very fast - so you get 200 petawatts output, for a trillionth of a second, and then the energy banks are drained and need to be recharged.
It's possible that the energy capacitance is actually an inherent part of the laser physics rather than being stored electrically. I'm not really sure what the details are.
But, 200 PW for one trillionth of a second is actually only 200 kJ total energy if I've done the math correctly - ie about 9% of the dietary energy content of a Big Mac. This would not actually take very long for the world's total electrical generation capacity to deliver. :)
$1.6 billion is a bargain to have space and time ripped up. The money won't be missed anyway.
Why is it lame?
Because the shark question has not been considered. I would fucking pay extra taxes to see space-time ripping laser sharks.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The electric field started out as a model of how charges interact, then he noticed that waves in the electromagnetic field would produce energy transfer at a speed that was the same as that of light.
Einstein's theory of relativity was just a model of how gravity works, a gravitational field was just a mathematical tool for predicting the motions of objects, and black holes were mathematical curiosities that probably did not exist in reality. Today we have observed binary star systems gradually changing their orbits as they lose energy due to gravity waves. Frame dragging of space itself surrounding the earth has been empirically measured in satellites, and several black holes have been found by astronomers.
Quantum mechanical wave functions were models for how elementary particles work, and the Dirac equation predicted negative energy solutions, suggesting each particle had a double of opposite charge. A few years latter the positron was discovered.
Circulation in fluid dynamics is a mathematical quantity used in predicting the flow of fluids. As it happens it cannot simply disappear without viscosity, leading to the concept of vortex tubes, the most famous example of which is a tornado.
Perhaps the greatest prejudice to new ideas is however found in mathematics. Whenever new numbers have been discovered, how have we named them? Negative, irrational , imaginary ... As it happens complex numbers are inherent to the laws of quantum mechanics. You would have a very hard time trying to explain why matter sticks together without them.
Shipping costs aren't that much, depending on what you're shipping and how much. If you divide up the project and make the Canadians responsible for some significant-sized part, that can be shipped when complete.
Think about it: we North Americans buy stuff from the Europeans all the time: ships, marine diesel engines, large industrial equipment, cars, etc. The fact that they're in Europe doesn't make that much of a difference. China's far away too, but that doesn't keep us from buying stuff from them, even in small quantities; I've had PC boards made in China and the cost to Fedex them here is pretty small.
And if you do software work, the shipping cost becomes irrelevant.
The place where the distance becomes a problem is if you're working hand-in-hand with teams in other locations, and have to fly people and equipment back and forth a lot, or have people stay up late or get up early to talk on the phone with each other. That's why having multiple teams working on the same problem is usually a bad idea; instead, you need to divide up the problem into more independent parts that the different geographically-dispersed teams can work on on their own until it's time for final integration.
Let's rip up space and see what's underneath. What could go wrong?
Advice: on VPS providers
Yes, but they took it as a major snub. After all, the crisis threatens the existence of the entire European Union, and Britain is (population-wise and economy-wise) one of the larger members of the EU. So it makes sense they'd want to at least be present during any big meetings, even if they haven't yet changed to the shared currency.
I'm not the original AC, but I'll give you a two part argument for it's being lame.
1. The energy density for this device, while pretty spectacular, is still way, way below the range where current competing theories predict exotic results. This has been a problem for projected particle accelerator of the future designs as well, since at least before the Superconducting Supercollider design that was to be built in Texas was canceled by the US Congress. One of the reasons we have gone ahead with new accelerators even though we (as a species) are still tremendously short of achieving the energy levels needs for more direct tests is a few 'work arounds' have been theorized. These are phenomena that are in the range the machine at CERN or others can reach, but that theoretically may be indirectly influenced by Super-symmetry or other theories we can't test more directly. Without some relatively indirect test like this, the Uber-laser still won't be nearly powerful enough to accomplish anything. So, either there's some sort of indirect prediction from one of the String theory variants, or Super-symmetry, or some more exotic theory, and that indirect prediction is down in the energy range that this thing achieves, or they are basically just gambling on something completely unexpected showing up. Since the article doesn't really explain what that indirect, inferential prediction might be, It's seems more likely than not there isn't a specific one. (Of course, it's possible the interviewer didn't get everything into the article.).
2. The article also states that the energy achieved by this device will be equal to a temperature greater than the center of the sun. That sounds impressive, but we've seen some much more energetic events in astrophysics. Lots of Nova/Supernova variants, neutron star related events, and quasars involve energy densities way beyond both the center of our sun and this laser device. We should at least possibly have seen some evidence for the same kind of effects as this widget is supposed to possibly produce by studying existing astronomical events. While that's not absolutely always a good guideline, I know, in the absence of an indirect prediction based on existing theory, I'd be willing to gamble somewhat if the device aimed to mimic the energy densities of some astrophysical event and could point to theories from there as evidence for this 'hole ripping' or 'cosmic hernia' effect. It's not uncommon for sub-atomic physics to take cues from Astrophysics and Cosmology, and vice-versa, but that too doesn't seem to be happening in this case.
Who is John Cabal?
The universe tunneling to a lower energy state would destroy all existing structure in the universe instantly. They wouldn't be annoyed at all, they would simply cease to exist like everything else we know.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
and admittedly it will eat giga-watts of electricity)
Well, yes, it's 200 petawatts, but the amount of energy is less than that of an incandescent lightbulb running for an hour. 200 quadrillion watts * 1 trillionth of a second * (1hr/3600s) * (1 kWh/1000 Wh) = .05556 kWh (in other words, the amount of energy used by about 56 watts over the course of an hour).
And it would propagate across the universe at the speed of light so they would get little warning of it except when the wave hits them then [carrier lost]......
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
First the shear amount of dumb laser jokes is astounding. It seems very few people bothered to read any of the other posts or bothered to consider that maybe someone else on Shashdot had ever seen Austin Powers. Or Star Trek. Or your favorite SF series here. Real herd behavior in action.
Next, the number of people whining about 200 PETAWATTS!!!!!! was really sad. Are the posters hear actually that ignorant about the concept of instantaneous power values and pulsed power systems? I am surprised by this level of technical ignorance.
Also, does anyone seriously think that a project of this size would be approved without an air tight argument that the experiment will operate in a domain where there are likely to be measurable results? Is it even vaguely possible that physicists picked "200 petawatts of power at a target for less than a trillionth of a second " by guessing? They have a well reasoned case to do the experiment, and part of this is a way to measure the results. But many of the post deride the practicality of the experiment, and even make specific statements that it won't work and that key measurement components are nonexistent. All based around a badly written publicity piece and their extensive personal knowledge of ultra high powered lasers and the mathematics of virtual particle production in the ground state of the space-time vacuum.
The worst and most puzzling part is the shear amount of hostility shown towards science. Assuming that it pork spending, saying it useless, that it can't show anything interesting, that the resources would be better spent somewhere else. All without a shred of logic or reference to any external source. This is the kind of anti-intellectual crap I expect from Fox News, not Slashdot readers. All I see here is a few true nerds surrounded by a bunch of fakes who either express their ignorance directly or try and hide it by making a ridiculous hostile comments.
Why is Snark Required?
i wouldnt want to meet those conditions before we know that we actually know what we are doing.
They know what they are doing and the headline and summary are sensionalist bullshit with the intention to cause strong reactions like yours.
If you can't handle the way headlines are written then please stop reading them or at least stop comment on them.
He's right though. I go through phases of not reading the comments on science-related articles here for that very reason - the general level of commentary is awful. Sure, not everyone has the knowledge and/or experience required to comment meaningfully, but it would be nice if they would refrain from doing so.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Noone is ripping anything. It's just a sensationalist article. Energy concentrations far bigger than this happen in the Universe.
Of course there are many events in the Universe far more powerful than this, and good old spacetime survived them all. The article states some heavy bullshit.