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Higgs Signal Gains Strength
ananyo writes "Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers (here here and here) boost the case for December's announcement of a possible Higgs signal. Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2.5 sigma to 3.1 sigma. Taken together with data from the other detector, ATLAS, Higgs' overall signal now unofficially stands at about 4.3 sigma."
Personally I wish if the higgs didn't exist, it would make things exciting ( from a scientific point of view). But if it doesn't, it would be a huge setback for particle physicist.
I left my statistics degree in my other pants... is 4.3 sigma a good thing? How many sigmas is "certainty"?
Full blown Higgs signal. And the world will turn inside out and we will become Mole People and mocked by a future human and his 2 robot friends.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Apparently, the superbowl coin toss "experiment" has generated nearly as large a statistical anomaly... http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/02/04/a-3-8-sigma-anomaly/
Right now they are sorting through the math on old experimental data.
I'm sure they are waiting for at least 6 sigma to acutally claim anything...
I am frankly shocked that you can say something like this. Of course it's a loss. But just because the results are not immediately applicable to anything does not mean it's worthless. This kind of research increases our knowledge of how the universe works, and that in and of itself is definitely worth publicly funding. We are increasing the sum of human knowledge. There is almost nothing more important.
It's true, but we didn't know that going in.
The real prize is learning what are, and how to manipulate the carriers of dark matter and dark energy.
This is only the first step. What the data suggests is that there's probably a particle there -- however, the higgs has several important properties that are impossible to measure with this dataset yet -- like its spin0 property. Chances are though, that because of how this data fits in with the higgs predicted mass, it really is the higgs.
So, we can detect Higgs but we can't detect multiple typos in the damn summary? Really?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Synchrotron light source
Super conducting wire
Positron emission tomography
So you know, other then the discoveries which led to the entirety of the modern age - oh, and you know, also the internet - this is all a real waste huh?
positron emissions have medical application http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission_tomography
strangely enough, application using one particle, the anti-neutrino, is in the works for reactor monitoring.
muons might be used to catalyze fusion or reduce lifespan of nuclear waste (with fusion products of catalyzed reaction
you are foolish, how can we engineer with the universe's components if we don't learn all we can about them?
How many millions of euro of taxpayer money have gone into this project, which will interest only a handful of scientists?
Approximately $9B, over 15 years, split between 20 nations. So on average, about $30M/year per country. Compared to Iraq or Afghanistan, that's a rounding error. Whatever may or may not come out of the Large Hadron Collider, I rather doubt either of those wars is going to show any ROI.
Why does this sound half-cocked? From the wikipedia page:
Six Sigma is a business management strategy originally developed by Motorola, USA in 1986.[1][2] As of 2010, it is widely used in many sectors of industry
It's business management speak! And why would any physics discussion use management speak?
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma
Only navel-gazing morons mock basic research.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That's because you're a fucktard. I suspect concepts like zero and water being yet cause you the same degree of consternation. Here's my advice to you. Just start jamming pencils into your eyes until the feelings go away.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
you know, the frist prost in this thread actually seems relevant and of decent quality (if a little brief).
A society without research is a society that is going to die ( soon! ).
I bet they said the same thing about electrons, protons, and neutrons several decades ago. The positron is also an important particle in positron emission tomography, which has certainly saved lives. The research that went into the production of these facilities has also yielded very useful things, such as particle counting and cryogenics (neither of which was invented by particle physicists but certainly vastly improved upon by them).
Oh yeah, and the world wide web was invented at CERN, so I guess that was kind of important too...
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay,
Clearly, this was originally
In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, physicists have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay,
and someone sloppily tried to change it to
Physicists working on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay,
but failed.
Just fucking CTRL+C, CTRL+V - no one believes you're writing up your own summary anyway. Just plagiarise in full.
I'll be standing at the gates of the Playboy Mansion waiting for an avalanche of apocalypse sex
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
It's hard to see this search for the Higgs as anything other than a net economic loss. No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology...
People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Forget all that sigma stuff. We want Las Vegas bookmaker's odds.
Have gnu, will travel.
Wait till you hear about derivatives and integrals.
rj
... No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology....
Neutron discovered in 1932. 2012-1932 = 80 years. Not a century yet. Positrons and pions are both important for medical use, muons and neutrinos are powerful tools for imaging the Earth. So you fail on a number of counts.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Using sigmas in science has been around for a long long time. It's something from probability mathematics. You see, the scientists don't consider anything, and I mean ANYTHING, including your own existence to be 100%. However, they will allow for probabilities approaching the point where there really isn't much reason to try and argue about it. (If you hear a scientist say something is 100% probable, then he's just dumbing the explanation down so he doesn't have to do an entire publicity tour for years just to sooth the ignorant baboons worried about something so unlikely it's got less than a 1 in a million chance to happen once in the entire lifetime of a billion universes.)
:)
They call it sigma, because the probability formulas use the greek letter sigma. If you don't know what a sigma looks like,in my opinion it looks like a capital M laying down on it's left side.
On the Lucida Console font, I show it as character 03A3, but I've been having trouble getting it to show properly in this post, it keeps coming up as Σ
What's the probability that you will NOT have a singing winged monkey flying out you backside while doing The Man From LaMancha this year? Honestly I have no idea, but I'd bet it's got AT LEAST 6 sigmas.
Says the poster on a website using a standard (HTML) developed at the LHC. Bravo.
That article selected 14 out of 45 coin tosses and then calculated odds but because of the selection the odds calculation is in error.
My wife, the family's particle physicist (PhD in the field and staff physicist at one of those big boffin-filled accelerator labs) goes to CERN a couple of times a year to confer, and last year brought back one of my favorite Tee shirts, a black shirt with the math that postulates the existence of the Higgs in big white symbols! So, just call me Higgs Boy! :-) FWIW, my father was also a physicist and studied mesons (elementary particles) in the generation before FermiLab and CERN. Because of his friendship with many luminaries in physics and astronomy, I had the opportunity to meet Sir John Douglas Cockcroft, the co-inventor of the modern particle accelerator that was the grand-father of the LHC, when he was in the USA on a visit back in the late 1950's or early 1960's.
Anyway, my wife CAN do the math (I am limited to elementary calculus) and she thinks the proof of the Higgs is not far off. Over half of the problem is knowing where (in terms of energy) to look. After all, they will probably never see the particle itself - just the decay products. It's kind of like seeing the debris flying out of where a house stood after a gas explosion, and from the patterns of flying bricks and timbers, being able to determine what the house looked like, as well as what make of toaster caused the explosion! So, the math is the key to this stuff. As the Buddha said, "May you live in interesting times!"... :-)
Let's see, do any of these require exotic particle theory?
Synchrotron light source? Uses good old maxwell equations to steer electron beams with magnetic fields to make x-ray radiation...
Super conducting wire? The most viable theory behind cooper pairing is QM electron-phonon interaction which doesn't need any exotic particle theory...
PET? That uses simple radioactive sugar (where glucose is fluoridated with radioactive fluorine-18) and the resulting gamma ray decays are imaged...
Not to say that standard-model exotic particle theory isn't interesting, or doesn't explain certain physical things or certain astrophysical phenomena, but unlike QM, theoretical work on exotic particles has yet to prove economically useful. Century old QM theory on the other hand has helped us design flash memory, lasers, GMR disk drive heads, IC lithographic equipment, and has proven useful for racetrack memory, spintronics, quantum dot memory and maybe some day (economical) quantum computers.
Perhaps the time will come for standard-model sub-atomic theory being a big economic payback, but it hasn't happened yet. This might have a lot to do with the fact that other than the standard Hadrons (proton, neutron), and the electron and photons, and practically invisible neutrino, we don't see much, if any, of the other ones except as cosmic radiation or inside particle accelerators, which means economically they are more of nuisance than something to exploit. Who knows, maybe the even the standard model is wrong and we won't see anything economically useful from this theory on exotic particles, but maybe its sucessor theory. We just don't know yet.
It's easy to overestimate the impact of new theories. I'll wager that most cars today are still designed mostly assuming newtonian dynamics, and even more primitively, they got to the moon with a very low precision value for pi. Someday theories prove their worth, just like QM so it's worth investing, but overstating the case isn't being intellectually honest.
To bring a more understandable analogy to the current audience. If you are a computer programmer, your boss may indirectly use Turing computability theory to claim that it isn't impossible for you to write a program to do what he wants it to do, and perhaps P~NP might be something in the back of your mind when you look for algorithms, but the latest computability theory about NP-intermediate set problems probably doesn't yet have any economic value to anyone (after all, they are still NP problems even if not NP-complete). Might be valueable some day, though...
That was almost a haiku if you drag "wire" out into two syllables, but the last line completely strays. What about this?
Synchrotron light source
Positron tomography
Superconductors
Research physicists are probably the most innovative people on the planet, and for the most part don't give a fig about the commercial uses of their inventions! Why do you ask? Well, they are doing stuff that has never been done before that requires equipment that has never existed before. So, they have to invent it and then build it.
What have they given us you ask?
1. Superconducting magnets that are necessary for MRI scanners.
2. Lasers (Gordon Gould) - can you spell Xerox?
3. High intensity synchrotron (x-ray) radiation that has enabled major advances in medicine (Cornell University, Wilson Lab in cooperation with the NIH)
.
.
.
The list is too long to fit here, I think.
Indeed. It is much better to hold a gun to his head and instead demand money for holding guns to foreign poor people's heads while killing their countrymen and burning down their villages. Considering the whole of the LHC project cost about $9 billion, while the wars in Afghanistan/Iraq suck up more than $12 billion per month, it think it's a bloody good deal.
High-energy physics research has created extremely beneficial spin-off of technology, without being the primary purpose of that research.
The argument against direct economic benefits from modern high energy physics is stronger than you think. All the examples you give are for particles that had clearly measurable signatures in the 1930s. The Higgs and other particles that might be detected for the first time in the 21st century have such incredibly tiny effects on our world that we haven't been able to measure them despite looking diligently for a long time (40 years since the publication of the standard model). We can indeed engineer without knowing everything about what the universe is made of...in fact few engineers learn quantum mechanics and essentially none learn general relativity. All that is required to engineer is a model that gives predictions at the accuracy needed for design. And I can quite confidently predict that no engineering design in the next century is going to need the Higgs mass or anything beyond the standard model. That said, of course we should keep trying to figure out what the universe is made of...both because it is very interesting and because it may matter for engineering purposes in a millenium or two.
Does ANYONE proofread these articles before posting them? The grammar in the summary made me vomit stuff I never even ate.
Those 3 things are technologies developed by Experimental Particle Physicists who wanted to test Particle Physics Theory.
Then there is this little thing called the world-wide-web invented by this guy Tim Burners-Lee to enable Particle Physics working at CERN to better collaborate.
Do these spin-offs count to CERN or Particle Physics net economic worth?
Reading some of the papers, it is clear that the data is being selectively interpreted to yield a desired conclusion. This is yet another case of continued government funding depending on making progress in proving a particular result, in this case, the existence of the Higgs particle.
Reading your post, it is clear that the article is being selectively interpreted to yield a contentious opinion. This is yet another case of trolling.
Whoever modded this insightful, I present to you a thought experiment: Re-read the comment, and then look up insightful, and then explain how this offers any insight.
But wars usually do precede economic boom period.
“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that is not the reason we are doing it. ”
Richard P. Feynman
you didn't understand. these are things that were developed while studying exotic particles, for the study of exotic particles. anyway, if you have a lot of money, feel free to give it to the research you think matters, and let people decide in a hundred years if you were right or not.
new sig
... I'd hardly call any of those companies lean.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
How are you going to toss a coin if NFC payments are going to replace coins? Throw up an iPhone and if the screen brakes, it's tails?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Water being yet also causes me some degree of consternation. I feel there is a temporal paradox at play.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Only because you burnt everything down / blew everything up.
"In my experience, theoretical physics is like sex: Theoretical"
Sheldon...are you really afraid of birds, or are you just acting like you are to amuse us?
Synchrotron light source
Super conducting wire
Positron emission tomography
I was so hoping that was a haiku....
So you're demanding the right to stay a dumb cunt?
So I wonder if they have factored into their Higgs Boson experiments the possibility that they don't exist and neither does the CERN collider. I'll bet they haven't! Junk scientists!
Well, it's obvious you don't understand anything that you've read.
Do these spin-offs count to CERN or Particle Physics net economic worth?
I guess if you count Antihistimines, Tang and Microwave ovens count for WWII's net economic worth (via Moon rockets and radar).
Does that mean we should fight WWIII to see what stuff comes out? Just because something useful came out of some investement in some highly expermimental research doesn't mean that the research programme itself was worth pursuing (might be, but shouldn't it stand on it's own merits first).
Getting lots of smart people together yields cool technology. Doesn't mean that original goal that got them together has economic value, though. Think about HURD and MULTICS for example. We got GCC and UNIX as spin-ofs and they of course have value. Who is going to argue that HURD and MULTICS have economic value?
But the publicly-funded LHC should have never have happened.
John Titor? Is that you?
I was up to 4-sigma on the Higgs boson... until I took an arrow to the knee.
Now that is funny, since the Higgs field has huge effects on our world and the universe as a whole. Ridiculous to attempt a prediction of time scale from when knowledge of a particle's "signature" will lead to engineering application. What was the time span from Madam Curie's work to commercial nuclear power?
“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that is not the reason we are doing it. ”
Richard P. Feynman
CERN is then a damn expensive bitch but so far we are far from a happy ending.
No, he just is obsessed with money, someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
They call it sigma, because the probability formulas use the greek letter sigma. If you don't know what a sigma looks like,in my opinion it looks like a capital M laying down on it's left side.
In statistics they use the lower case sigma. It looks like a 6 laying down on its right side and the curved part of the upper line removed (YFMV*)
*Your font may vary.
To respond to this so late, but...
Normally, when dotters take to correcting a post en mass, there isn't a reason to cover anything; however, the logic of, "We got these things 25-50 years later from a theory, but anything that doesn't contribute this quarter is a waste of money," would be sufficient to kill the theory of economic value versus investment. We got lots of things from the money dumped on the Space Race and the succeeding era, but from a dollar in to dollar out that month, year or even decade perspective, it wouldn't have appeared to be that affordable, even though those technologies, from fuel cells (more than just one type), to photovoltaics, to advanced ceramics and plastics, account for more economic profit today than the most expensive year of the US Independent Space Exploration Era.
I, however, wanted to plug, in a non-spammy way, a couple of places on YouTube that shows current payoff. While it doesn't focus on the LHC, it's a follow up on technologies that are otherwise related to what is being done at the LHC.
http://www.youtube.com/user/BackstageScience?feature=g-all-s#p/u/43/12KaFItjgl0
This is YT Channel BackstageScience, with a feature call for the video titled, "Lap of a Synchotron". In this video (as well as the many in that list), you will find discussion about many of the assists to, primarily, materials science that comes from the many research activities in the beamline branches.
http://www.youtube.com/user/DiamondLightSource
This is the same facility, but these videos are more on the individual research projects going on at that facility.
Synchotrons are relatively expensive, and when they were the new thing, they were more expensive to construct, maintain and run than many infrastructure projects; they were the LHC of their time. Now, we have safer planes, improved medicine and more advanced super- and semi-conductors. Intentionally producing nanoparticles has been a relatively new thing for commercial industries, but that new economy is entirely dependent on technology like the synchotron.
BackstageScience has a video titled, :"Muon Man", which is an interview with one of the scientists in general. If you asked someone 25 years ago what practical applications existed for muons, you would have been told they can be used to detect time dilation in accordance to Special relativity or changes in a protons charge field. Today, we use the to detect restricted radio-active materials and peer into the inner workings of large-scale geological activities, which will eventually allows us to detect volcanic eruptions and, quite possibly, earth quakes.
With regard to this specific project, the LHC's job is to understand the fundamental structures of energy at very small scales. The idea it's stuck on the Higgs boson research shows a lot of ignorance, but the kind one might expect from the limited understanding that comes from someone who would say, "[A]nything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon," is exotic or has never produced any useful technology. E^2=M^2C^4+P^2C^2 has brought us anti-matter, which eventually led to improved medical technologies. The fact is, large projects, like the LHC, are necessary for such advancements, but too expensive for even a single portion of the economic spectrum to manage for the initial time between theory and application. To say it was too expensive because you can't see any advantage in it shows a failure of understanding how doctorates lead to economic and social advantages. Perhaps you should join slashdot with the moniker Lysenko, so, we will all know how ignorant you are about the importance of advancing science through large scale. publicly funded projects.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Yes, they call it sigma because non-statisticians tend to assume every probabilistic phenomenon follows a normal distribution. The normal distribution's functional form depends entirely on two factors: it's mean and it's variance. The square root of the variance, the standard deviation, is often denoted by the greek letter sigma. But doesn't need to be and, in fact, is sometimes inappropriate..
So, these managerial types come along and toss all that out, and completely neglect that the standard deviation could just as easily be signified by any letter (including non-greek ones). But they standardize it by saying "everything follows a normal distribution *and* we will always denote it's standard deviation by sigma." In this line of thought, 6sigma corresponds to 6 'standard deviations' above the mean. The "intuitive" conclusion is that if the data show some random process to be 6sigma away from its mean, then the data reasonably support the whatever hypothesis is under consideration.
Simply put, only on slashdot have I seen the bastardized 6sigma terminology employed and angrily defended when discussing empirical/applied physics. Usually, managers apply 6sigma to things like production quality assurance and safety measures. I have yet to see an actual, peer-reviewed published physics article use 6sigma terminology. (They very well may. All I'm asking is one reference to a world class physicist using the terminology when talking to other world class physicist.)
Getting lots of smart people together yields cool technology. Doesn't mean that original goal that got them together has economic value, though.
Yes... It really does...
Everything we have today, when converted to your "economic value" was derived by some people doing something they didn't originally thought was going to give them "economic value".
Everything...
The human race literally benefits from any new and seemingly useless activity that it attempts to undertake. Someone much later eventually finds out how to make money out of that idea.
Let me give you a small example... The magazine "New Scientist" is only economically viable because people like reading about new non economically viable (yet) research. So particle physics is already generating revenue for some people.
This site is generating revenue from your visit because you chose to read about this story. Especially as you are anonymous and can see adverts.
It's already economical. In fact it's even better that it's done with public money because private industry (the only industry that generates a little thing called TAX) can just use the useful bits without spending huge amounts on R&D.
So the original goal of sating ones curiosity always has economic value. Even if you just watch other people do it on TV or read about it on Slashdot.
true, the fundamental religious prove that point .....
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
No one is forcing you to pay taxes. So get back on your high horse and ride it to the nearest homeless shelter.
Leave those clever enough to discern a benefit to continue to improve my quality of life (for which I gladly pay tax).
That is about 1/3 rd the amount Sarkozy spends in a year.
It's hard to see this search for the Higgs as anything other than a net economic loss. No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology...
People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.
One could have said the same thing about what Farrady found about electromagnetism, that the economic benefit wasn't much. The practical application of the higgs field we can only guess at now, but being able to dick about with the mass/inertia of matter for instance would have truly epic applications. This is about as insightful as saying in 1825 that electricity might be able to be used to make stuff move. Look how that technological revolution turned out.
It may not be very useful but it could equally well be the opposite. However from any particular point in history you can pretty much trace the current state of technological civilization back to some discovery at some point. I seem to notice a correlation between the effort in the discovery and how it transformed everything.
The higgs is a big deal for the future of mankind, if you don't immediately understand that it's kind of difficult to explain why.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Tell us more about the Higg's field's huge effect on our world. It seems more funny to me to claim that it is a huge effect when it has so far been unmeasurable and might just become measurable in the next months or years with thousands of the worlds most brilliant minds working on a multi-billion dollar machine for decades. Seems kind of like the argument that God is a huge part of our world since in my mind he causes everything that happens in it. So far theories about God haven't been very useful for engineering applications, so they are not covered in the engineering curriculum.
The whole business about future economic applications is guesswork. Some people make totally unsubstantiated guesses that unknown discoveries will lead to magical new technology. They are almost always extrapolating discoveries of big effects from 100 years ago onto tiny effects that might be discovered in the near future. (Your example of Currie's work on radioactivity actually killed her no? Seems like a useful definition for a big effect that avoids the math. Do you have a mechanism to propose by which the Higgs is going to kill someone?) I am making an educated guess based on quantitative knowledge of the size of the measurable effects of the Higgs. The past 80 years have been on my side with no one identifying a current application of a particle discovered since 1940. Do you have some money that you want to put down on a bet about significant engineering applications in the near future that require knowledge of the Higgs mass? If so, let me know how to reach you.
Well lesse, with no higgs field you would float off into space as you'd have no mass..
Pretty good, but work some actual content into it. Haiku is not merely formula. "The essence of haiku is "cutting" (kiru). This is often represented by the juxtaposition of two images or ideas and a kireji ("cutting word") between them, a kind of verbal punctuation mark which signals the moment of separation and colours the manner in which the juxtaposed elements are related"
See:
the tree cut,
dawn breaks early
at my little window
See, the dawn breaks early because the tree has been cut...which used to block the light. There's depth in the meaning of the words, not merely their rhythmic arrangement.
Absurd. Money and economic productivity are not the highest priority of everyone in our society. The common misconception you hold is devastating, an anathema to enlightenment. You hear that? Your philosophy is the Jersey Shore of human thought.
posting to undo accidental bad moderation
Note that if they were to have failed to find the Higgs, we would still not have flown off into space. We have very good models of gravity and inertia from general relativity which are totally unaffected by the Higgs mass. When they start using the Higgs mass in calculations of satellite orbits, then you will have an argument. I predict that is at least a century away. No one has a good argument against me yet.
Just noted a rounding error in my earlier comment...it has been 79 years since the neutrino discovery but only 72 since 1940 of course.
I'm pretty sure all the construction workers, truckers, miners, electricians, painters, carpet layers, doctors, accountants, file clerks, receptionists, .... that have worked on this project were very interested in where the money was going. People act like when you spend money on something it just goes into a hole, never to be seen again. All of those euros are still circulating through the economy, and thousands of ordinary people have benefited directly. Sounds like pretty good ROI to me.
Now the environmental impact of digging a giant tunnel, mining tons of rare-earth elements, and powering megawatt experiments is another story.
Unless you cut taxes while going to war.
:(){
They will probably attribute the increase in Higg's signal strength due to global warming.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
And yet, without the un-economical research that lead to those things, we wouldn't have them. The danger of letting the bean counters run the world is that we confine ourselves to mostly producing yet another X At that, X is most often an entirely un-necessary consumer product of minimal quality.
The synchrotron came into existence as an 'atom smasher' to probe particle physics. The synchrotron radiation we find so useful these days was actually an undesirable but unavoidable loss of energy. One day, we realized that it was actually very useful, but we wouldn't likely have enen imagined it's existance had we shunned the un-economical research.
This would indeed be a major prize. But we already know quite a lot about how dark matter and dark energy behave. In particular, they introduce no currently measurable changes in known laws of physics in our corner of the galaxy. This follows immediately from the fact that we only detect dark matter on galactic length scales and dark energy on scales much larger than that. Combine that with some knowledge of the accuracy of current precision measurements and you conclude that their effects on things on human scales are very very small. So even when we learn what they are, we are almost certain to be unable to manipulate them in any significant or useful way. Can you identify any candidate for dark matter that has any conceivable way of being manipulated by humans for useful technology? They are very different than the discoveries of quantum theory and solid state physics for which there was technology already in use that required the theory for explanation and improvement. Of course the future is unknown and we enter with an open mind. But expecting radical new technology from new physics is easier when you don't know how accurate our current theories are on human scales.
Then there is this little thing called the world-wide-web invented by this guy Tim Burners-Lee to enable Particle Physics working at CERN to better collaborate.
Do these spin-offs count to CERN or Particle Physics net economic worth?
No, I really don't think they do. At least they shouldn't where science is concerned.
If you set out to do X, and pour millions of dollars into doing X, but in the end you fail at doing X, even if in the process you end up doing Y, it is still the case that doing X in itself was not a sensible goal. You would have been better and cheaper to just sit down and do Y from the beginning.
We might as well say that gathering giant multi-story piles of $10 banknotes into heaps and burning them is a worthwhile economic endeavour because doing it will teach us a lot about the science of paper folding, stacking and combustion. Or that spending all your income on the horse races will teach you a lot about the mathematics of probability. Yes, it will as a side effect.... but is it actually a sensible investment priority?
The sad fact appears to be that since the 1930s, high-energy and particle physics has delivered hugely disappointing diminishing returns. Especially compared to what was accomplished in the three decades before. The exotic particle zoo remains almost entirely a lab curiosity, fusion seems to constantly struggle with unexpected behaviour of plasma dynamics, fission can power steam engines but remains fundamentally unstable and toxic... while good old electromagnetics - QED at best, but mostly pre-QED Maxwell - keeps quietly delivering revolution after revolution.
Something is strange with this picture. Most of the really revolutionary pre-WW2 physics got done on a shoestring budget by today's standards. Seems like the massive amounts of government and military money that got poured into physics after the Manhattan Project didn't really lead to all that much. Certainly not to revolutions on the scale of the uranium and plutonium bombs. In retrospect, the H-bomb still seems like the pinnacle of the investment/return curve for "new physics". And that was in the 1950s. The big advances since then seem to mostly be materials science and industrial processes; impressive, but not theoretically ground-breaking. The theoretical "breakthroughs" since then like QCD seem sterile when it comes to actual applications outside of explaining what goes on inside a particle accelerator.
This is not what I expected when I learned about physics in high school in the 1980s. I was expecting a singularity-like curve of ever-increasing breakthroughs by the 2010s; instead we seem to have a curve of the opposite shape, generating quantitatively vast amounts more data, but qualitatively less interesting ideas. We're still just tinkering with variables in what's essentially a theory locked down in the 1930s.
Again, note that this is just an outsider's view of theoretical physics, not of science or industry as a whole. No doubt many of the theoretical advances since the 1930s look really exciting to insiders. But are they? The computer revolution seems to be an anomaly by comparison; I'm not sure a Moore's Law exists for theoretical physics.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
What was the time span from Madam Curie's work to commercial nuclear power?
About 50 years, depending on how you calculate it. Radium isolated by the Curies in 1906. First commercial power plant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Origins) in Russia in 1954.
But note that the key theoretical idea, the fission chain reaction, surfaced via Szilard as early as 1933, and Fermi's reactor was 1941. So from the first glimmerings of a practical nuclear fission theory to a practical demonstration was less than a decade!
What's missing in the rest of theoretical physics is anything approaching a key insight like the fission chain reaction. We simply don't have anything that looks like it could be "scaled up" in energy output. The opposite seems to be the case - every tiny data point now requires vastly increased energy input.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
we'd have gravity but no inertia, big problem. the Higg field's effect is huge (admittedly in case our Standard Model is true in that regard)
No, there is more to physics than theoretical high energy physics. We have solid state physics (solar cell design falls in there), geophysics, fluid flow....plenty of emerging energy sources covered by ongoing developments in physics.
It is only huge in a theoretical world that is quite disconnected from engineering reality. You seem to mean that the standard model has a large inconsistency with reality without something like the the Higgs mechanism. OK that might be theoretically huge. But to an engineer it just means some ad hoc modeling is currently required. If the Higgs mechanism is wrong the theorists will come up with some other way to fix up their model. But at the moment, neither the Higgs or any competing mechanisms make predictions about the physical world that are large enough to be measurable, so it doesn't matter for anything but theoretical consistency. That seems like a pretty good definition of tiny and not huge. When do you think the mass of the Higgs is going to be used in any engineering calculation besides the design of particle accelerators? By the way, you are wrong about inertia. General relativity includes inertia just fine...you don't think Einstein missed such an obvious point in 1916 do you? What you likely mean is that GR doesn't explain where mass comes from...but it didn't claim to. It just takes the initial mass distribution as a given. It works great for engineering purposes...although in practice they simply use Newton's theory because even it is good enough for almost everything.
Slew, I think you are right. Certain theoretical inconsistencies seem so pressing to resolve to a theorist, but not all theoretical or fundamental advances end up being very useful. I would probably go farther than you in saying that the quantitative effects of the Higgs are so small that we have good reason to guess that it will not have technological relevance for a century or more. And overstating the case for practical importance of scientific research can end up badly...the public learns to disbelieve what scientists say when they are consistently promised the moon and it never appears. The real reasons to fund the LHC are 1) it develops one of the best human dreams...the dream to understand.and 2) The spin-offs from giving money to brilliant people to use to solve fundamental questions have usually turned out to be worth the investment to society even when the fundamental theories were not very useful.
'The higgs is a big deal for the future of mankind, if you don't immediately understand that it's kind of difficult to explain why.' You are going to have to explain if you hope to convince anyone except the people who make their salaries looking for new particles. There is a major problem with your analogy between the Higgs and electricity in 1825. The models of matter and energy that were available in 1825 left huge unexplained parts of everyday life. Electricity turned out to be the beginning of our understanding of light and chemistry and neurology in addition to providing illumination and motors. But the best models that we have at the moment have almost no quantifiable deviations with a vast range of measurements. If you compare predictions from Quantum Electrodynamics and from the Standard Model, you don't get any significant differences in predictions for chemistry and hence biology and geology. So confirming or improving the standard model is not going to make any difference either.
Wrong, the Einstein equivalence principle *postulates* equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass, declares it by fiat. I am an engineering physicist, straddle both worlds. You can't say today what application would be made of a particle in the future. No one in the 1930s thought we'd have practical applications using antimatter including antiprotons or antineutrinos in 2012
That is right...GR uses a very accurate model of the equivalence of inertia and gravity as a postulate. Knowing the Higgs mass will do nothing to improve the quality of the predictions of the effects of gravity and inertia. It might satisfy some curiosity about why certain particles have the mass they do, but it will not improve engineering models in any significant way. You claim no one knows what the future holds...certainly no one knows with certainty. But we all make our best guesses and then we plan and distribute research funding accordingly. You are implicitly guessing that new particles will lead to new technology. I am arguing that your guess will be wrong over the next century. And if you think discovering the antiproton or antineutrino is equivalent to discovering the Higgs, you simply don't know the magnitude of the measurable effects of these particles. Try to estimate the number of anti-protons that collide in the LHC for every Higgs that is detected.