Slashdot Mirror
LHC Powers Up To 4 TeV
An anonymous reader writes "Due to a decision made at Chamonix, the LHC will operate with a 4 TeV beam energy in 2012. This will allow them to collect as much data as possible (15 inverse femtobarns for ATLAS and CMS) before the whole accelerator complex gets shut down for about 20 months to prepare for even higher energies. 'By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs,' said CERN's Research Director, Sergio Bertolucci. 'Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics.'"
That is a fairly large amount of energy, and the benefit to science seems substantial... neat!
I hope they find success within the 124 to 126 GeV range.
They could easily double their funding if they told the US military there may be a way to weaponize the Higgs. Or at least they could call it a black hole gun. It might be hard to find a ship large enough to mobilize it.
Given that we don't "Know" anything of note for sufficiently rigorous definitions of the word(arguably, capital 'K' "knowledge" seems to alternate between being a philosopher's dream and being a straw man...), 'know' makes pretty decent shorthand for the somewhat unwieldy long-form account of the precise flavor of the information provided by science.
What they will discover is that the Higgs both does exist, and doesn't exist, at the same time.
By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs
If the scientists have any sense of humour at all, they will schedule the final test at maximum power for December 21st, 2012.
And in any case it wouldn't be hyperbole. If I've told you once, I've told you a million times, hyperbole is wild exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Claiming that something is 100% reliable rather than, say, 99.5%, is not hyperbole. It is just slight overstatement.
Now please remove yourself from my philosophical lawn.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
1. There are thing that are known.
2. There are things were we knew we don't know.
3. There are things that we know that we didn't knew we know.
and
4. There are things that we simply aren't aware of.
Life is not for the lazy.
The bump around 125 is fairly close to a discovery already. The first time they release fully analyzed data at all this year will be enough for a five sigma discovery. After seeing what kind of lag they have between data gathering and release, I'd say the discovery will be announced in August.
The enemies of Democracy are
I first read that as THC powers up, I thought they'd found some new super marijuana.
This sounds like a job for Donald Rumsfeld:
There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.
I am officially gone from
I couldn't resist. I just e-mailed them a suggestion to do it on December 21st. I bet they won't but it's worth a try.
Even if they only announce that date and play along with it for a month or so ... it would still be the Best Troll Evah!
PS: What's Brian Cox's email? I bet he'd do it.
No sig today...
"Yawn. Wake me when it gets to 10 Tev." *sigh*
The man was a poet. Cheers.
Life is not for the lazy.
Get strict enough, and I don't even Know if I exist. I might be a very stubborn delusion of someone's day dream.
Apparently, if that is so, it must be a very boring day dream.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
No, we will not "know that a Higgs particle exists". We may have an incredibly strong indication that it does, enough to strongly believe it exists, but we will not know with 100% certainty that the particle exists, the experiments were infallible, and the data was accurate.
Given that I cannot know with 100% certainty that the keyboard I'm typing on right now exists, I'm willing to allow that there's a certain vernacular usage of the word "know" that does not imply the absolutely impossible: 100% certainty. But thanks for stating the bleeding obvious...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
My pet peeve with the use of "know" in relation to science stems from the public confusion as to what science can and cannot absolutely know.
Thanks to overstating the abilities of science to prove something, juries now expect DNA evidence in trivial cases, the discussion of competing theories is seen as indecision, and a scientist who accurately states a probability is often portrayed as inconclusive. By substituting "have compelling evidence" in place of "know", scientists could make accurate statements and educate the public at the same time.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I liked his poetry better than his ethics... the aspartame intervention at the FDA is like a textbook example of regulatory capture and abuse of power.
You're right, though, he was a poet...
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.
It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't--
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.
--Donald Rumsfeld, 2003-02-28 DoD briefing
If you want to go down that lane, you have to start at the real problem, we cannot be sure that "we" exist the way we think we exist. As all observations made by us are based on assumption that "we" exist, we can never be certain of anything based on what we observe.
As a result we can never be certain of anything. At all. However we can be "reasonably certain", and this is one such case.
Why do we need to know anything to an absolute 100% certainty?
The difference between 99.99999999999% and 100% certainty is not relevant when it comes to believing that something exists.
From TFS:
'Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics.'
I can't help but point out that knowing if the Higgs exists will increase our information about the universe by a maximum of 1 bit. (Knowing its mass and decay modes probably would give us more like a dozen or two bits of information - more than 1 bit but still not much.)
Particle physics is great, and doing it carefully *does* increase our knowledge of the world, but only by the tiniest of margins. Imagine if all those thousands of super-bright minds had been focused on some other task for decades? What kind of magic tech would we have by now? The ratio of opportunity cost to benefit is sky high.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
As long as we don't have to put up with Bill Murray and that damned groundhog, I'm OK with it.
Have gnu, will travel.
True. And your point is? The sun still rose, it was just blocked. The blocking could have been predicted with more accurate data (big rock incoming) but in no way contradicts the theory "the earth rotates about its axis every 24 hours, causing the sun to be in and out of the shadow of the earth every 12 hours."
Not a sentence!
do you have your Crowbars ready?
Nobody mentioned it yet, but the 4 TeV is the energy per proton, so the energy of each collision is 8 TeV. 2011 operated at 7 TeV.
To be fair we don't know that with one hundred percent certainty that you exist. You might be a bot that passes the Turing test.
for most people, the difference between 0% and 99% certainty is not relevant when it comes to believing that something exists.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Thanks to overstating the abilities of science to prove something, juries now expect DNA evidence in trivial cases,
That's CSI's fault, not scientists'.
By substituting "have compelling evidence" in place of "know", scientists could make accurate statements and educate the public at the same time.
But there's a quantitative difference between those things. We have compelling evidence for the existence of Dark Matter, or the KT impactor. We know neutrinos, W&Z bosons, and quarks exist with a degree of certainty that makes it bizarre to say anything but "know". The evidence is beyond compelling.
Seems to me like using the same terms to refer to a broad range of evidence is more likely to cause confusion. It could falsely imply that a rock-solid scientific fact has the same degree of surety as something for which merely compelling evidence exists.
Maybe the right tack to take on educating the public would be to explain that while knowledge is never 100% certain, science has exceedingly high standards for saying they "know" something -- and explain what that standard is!
By the end of this year, barring unforeseen circumstances, CERN will know whether the Standard Model Higgs exists or not.
The enemies of Democracy are
To know is impossible. Everything is claim and counter claim. We establish an idea for a period of time only. Everything is up for review therefore to know is simply a transient claim.
Hate to be that 1% because you can't know anything given that definition which makes the word entirely useless.
So, yes we would "know". It's your mis-understanding of the definition of the word. Not everyone else's that's the problem here.
Due to a decision made at Chamonix, the LHC will operate with a 4 TeV beam energy in 2012.
Is a lot of energy. In fact, I think it is what the Mayans were talking about.
Silence is a state of mime.
we can say that we KNOW massive objects behave in a manner predicted by Newton's laws of motion to a degree of accuracy.
we can say that we KNOW in certain situations (extreme gravity, or whatnot) that these objects diverge from the behavior predicted by Newtonian physics and we have to whip out the Einsteinian maths to get a similar result, but one that agrees with reality to a far greater degree of accuracy.
that doesn't mean we KNOW these laws are correct, just that they agree with observation up to the limit of the accuracy of our measurements.
in most cases that is good enough.
rest assured, that when we see a headline "Einstein was wrong!!1!", that the world keeps turning.
juries now expect DNA evidence in trivial cases
Hey, if the TV can help people understand the power that they have as juries to nullify the law, then I'm all for it. Of course, that's not what you're saying, but one can dream...
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Yes! If it were me, I'd just walk up to the control panel, turn the dial to 4 and hit the ON button.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
While I don't disagree with Gould regarding the issue of physics in classrooms, I really think it would be better to keep the epistemology clear and well-taught and stop talking about scientific facts outside of the fact that "so-and-so observed such-and-such and this is the data that was recorded."
The fact is that we consistently observe apples falling. We model this using various gravitational models (relativistic, Newtonian, etc). Only an idiot might say that if he drops an apple it won't fall as the default position. But this does not necessarily validate existing gravitational models.
Heisenberg repeatedly argued that data does not imply theory (see his book "Physics and Philosophy"). There is always room for competing models in science. No model can remotely be labeled as "fact."
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Here is a quick discussion on the increase in energies from Steve Myers, director for accelerators and Sergio Bertlucci, director for research: https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1423359
Good to be fair - don't think I do might be a bot that passes the Turing test! Do you like one hundred percent?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.