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Prospects and Limits For the LHC's Capabilities To Test String Theory

Posted by samzenpus on from the proving-it-maybe dept.

StartsWithABang writes: The Large Hadron Collider has just been upgraded, and is now making the highest energy collisions of any human-made machine ever. But even at 13 TeV, what are the prospects for testing String Theory, considering that the string energy scale should be up at around 10^19 GeV or so? Surprisingly, there are a number of phenomenological consequences that should emerge, and looking at what we've seen so far, they may disfavor String Theory after all.

148 comments

  1. have lot's of crowbars on hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    have lot's of crowbars on hand in case something bad happens (more likely a nuke) and we can say NK did that to get of them.

    1. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by meerling · · Score: 1

      He was making a game reference you racist troll.

    2. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by fisted · · Score: 2

      ...he was making a game reference, and what he got are unforeseen consequences. Sounds about right to me.

      --
      CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
    3. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Done:
      https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/accelconf/IPAC2012/papers/thppd056.pdf

      BTW, Crowbars have been used in Accelerators since the Fifties, initially to prevent RF Drift Tube Miultipactoring in Linacs, and to prevent damaging internal sparking of High Power RF Tubes, like the RCA 4648 in Cyclotron Service, and RCA 6949 in Linac Service.

      Captcha: ruthless

      "...her real name's Ruth, but Uncle Jim told us pirates are ruthless."

    4. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by Woeful+Countenance · · Score: 0

      ... black men are about 7%. this 7% committed 52% of all homicides in the USA between 1980 and 2008. look it up yourself if you doubt me.

      Actually, about half of all homicides are unsolved, so you don't know the race of the perpetrators. What you meant is that 52% of people arrested for homicide were Black. You can look that up, if you like, and maybe look up "selection bias" while you're at it. You fail statistics, but you win a prize for a particularly off-topic post.

    5. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ... black men are about 7%. this 7% committed 52% of all homicides in the USA between 1980 and 2008. look it up yourself if you doubt me.

      Actually, about half of all homicides are unsolved, so you don't know the race of the perpetrators. What you meant is that 52% of people arrested for homicide were Black. You can look that up, if you like, and maybe look up "selection bias" while you're at it. You fail statistics, but you win a prize for a particularly off-topic post.

      you sound like a total nigger-lover. how to cure that: live in a majority black area for one week. tell me how much they appreciate your equanimity.

    6. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by budgenator · · Score: 1

      Those 400MHz klystrons must have some hellatious waveguides to feed!

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    7. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not the waveguides for the Klystrons, it's the Re-Circulators that have to be hellacious. They really only work well with "Clean" RF.
      I don't pretend to know much about RF Power Generation, which means I know more about it than most Modern EEs.
      400MHz is a tricky frequency. Too high for Skin-Effect buggered Coax, too low for Plumbing that can be held in the back of a small Pickup Truck.
      The ten RCA 6949s used in Linac Service mentioned above were directly bolted to the Tanks using very large diameter fixtures. This was because, at ~70MHz, we needed a large conductive surface area to minimize Skin Effect losses. Still, everything that was circular or tubular had Water Cooling, (And on occasion, Freon Cooling...), rings brazed to it. The efficiency was appalling: 1.5 MW in, (Average; 15MW pulsed at 10% Duty Cycle...), generated a couple of hundred Watts of Beam power, at best.

      Still, having a fixed ~70 MHz design made Operating it simple.
      Cyclotrons used in Nuclear Research cover a wide Frequency Range; the Classic K=140 design runs from 5.5 to 16.5 MHz. This involves a lot of Broadband Coupling, and the only thing that keeps people sane is the fact that the Resonating Q is around 20,000. (Bandwidth is not in KHz, it's in degrees of Phase. Typically 3 Degrees off peak before the Plate Current goes nutzoid.) The 4648 was used primarily for Accelerator use; Broadcast Engineers hated it. Due to its Inside-Out Design, Harmonics and Parasitics were rampant. It needed High-Q to be happy. RF-to-Beam Efficiency could be as high as a few percent.
      Once I graduated to Klystrons, I learned a whole new world. We used them in ECRs.
      In a nutshell, the RF Couples to Electrons in a tubular magnetic field, and the Electrons circulate in shells within it, at their Cyclotron Resonant Frequencies. Any stray Molecular Ions introduced get progressively stripped of Electrons as an afterthought, but since we were interested in those Ions, we took some care to extract them.
      Say at 28GHz, 10 KW of RF in generated maybe 10 Nanowatts of +47Xe136. Still, much more efficient than accelerating a lower Charge State and Stripping.
      The waveguides are small enough that a forefinger was a decent diagnostic tool. Just run it along the waveguide until a warm spot is found, do some math, and readjust the Magnetic Fields to minimize the reflected Power.

      Here's a handy RF Employment guide:
      Broadcast RF. Dull. Everything's been done. (I got my 2nd Class Radiotelephone License at 14...)
      RADAR. Still Dull. Varian is the only game in town for the Klystrons, and they suppress innovation. Still, a lot of cool stuff in the Surplus Markets.
      "Digital" RF. The Realm Of The Incompetent. Bob Pease loathed those guys, with good reason.
      Satellite RF. A little interesting. All the cool stuff is in the Antennas, especially with the work being done in Non-Imaging Optics, and in Cooled Detectors.
      Accelerator RF. That's still where it's at. DC to THz. There are maybe 100 Really Good RF Engineers. Worldwide. I worked with two of them. (I'm actually a Beam Optics Guy.)

      This has been fun. I have a lot of stories, like "Brock". "Brock" sailed to Hawaii with his wife and three student nurses in a Westsail 32, which he had built himself. He returned with the nurses, but not the wife. He was on a Sabbatical thinking out how to eliminate the Hard Tube Modulator and Crowbars in a Linac, which were eternally troublesome. It involved a really clever design using Resonant Rogowski Coils. They passed DC and Cyclic RF along nicely, but sucked the life out of any kind of spark.
      Then there was "Judy", who designed a Lock-In Current Amplifier. Nothing really unusual about that, except for the running at 1 GHz IF part. "Judy" was independently wealthy, from inheriting a fairly large chunk of downtown Santa Barbara. "Judy" was phenomenally cheap, but maybe just unaware. "Judy", out of the blue, once gave me a First Edition of "Between Pacific Tides", signed by both Ricketts and Steinbeck.

      This Captcha thing is getting very weird. Captcha: unaware

    8. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by dave420 · · Score: 1

      You are making a (literal) surface judgement based on your own prejudices. You have conveniently ignored all other factors and accepted race as being the real driver, even when a rational person would evaluate all the evidence. If you looked at poverty instead of race, you would see that black people are far more likely to be poor, and poor people are far more likely to commit crimes. But that would not let you be a racist fuckhead, so I can understand why you ignored that and just went with your gut instinct of lazy, lazy racism. Your parents must be proud to have raised such an illogical, hate-filled muppet.

    9. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by Dog-Cow · · Score: 1

      Maybe the GP is female and enjoys having a real cock in her pussy, instead of the spaghetti noodle hanging off your crotch.

    10. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That is why feminists should be killed and men should marry little girls.

      (Allowed: Deuteronomy 22 28-29, hebrew)

      Always with you... "Muh dick" to win an argument.

      If this weren't a women's cuntry you'd have no argument.

    11. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by stridebird · · Score: 1

      nicely put.
      i'm proud of yer, son,

    12. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      STFU n' quit cryin: Face the music here http://linux.slashdot.org/comm...

    13. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by Tyrannicsupremacy · · Score: 1

      52% Of convicted murderers are black, is what he is trying to say, i think. In America, that would make a black person 700% more likely to commit murder than any other race.

      --
      http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
    14. Re:have lot's of crowbars on hand by Woeful+Countenance · · Score: 1

      It really is a lot like doing magic tricks for dogs.

  2. font size by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why do these sites have 800000pt font?

    1. Re:font size by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As soon as I saw this post I figured it had to be medium.com (of course I didn't read the article.)

    2. Re:font size by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why do these sites have 800000pt font?

      To give you some trivial thing to bitch about, I suppose.

    3. Re:font size by ArchieBunker · · Score: 1

      Because they assume everyone uses a phone with a 4 inch screen.

      --
      Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    4. Re:font size by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Job well done, then.

  3. Medium.com by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    yet again.

    1. Re:Medium.com by jandersen · · Score: 1

      Can't we muster a popular appeal against posting vapid articles from medium.com here? Please? Or at least post them with a mandatory icon warning people that this is heavy on glossy pictures and light on worthwhile information?

      Who writes this stuff anyway? Clearly somebody with a strong interest in big photos of impressive looking things; whereas I suspect that most of us would be far more interested in good, solid, factual information, without illustrations, unless strictly needed. Is it 'samzenpus'? Does he/she have a glycerine complex?

  4. Prove me wrong... by franzrogar · · Score: 0

    ...but I want to remember that the existence of Higgins' particle was in contradiction of the String theory plausibility.

    1. Re:Prove me wrong... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Higgs mechanism is different than the Higgins.

    2. Re:Prove me wrong... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Higgins' particle was what Higgins put in the Ferrari so he could String Magnum along. Well, that's one Theory.

      Captcha: Expert

      Actually, I am, on some things. Not those wussy 8 Cylinder jobs, but the real thing.
      One problem is the lubrication used on the Magneti Marelli double-point distributer breaker plates. (V12- two distributers, four sets of mechanically resonant tuned points- note the three springs on each floating point. Clever.) Back in the late fifties, it was refined from the Ear Wax of virgin Italian Schoolgirls. It was a rare commodity then, and pretty much unobtainable now.
      Ferrari did play around with Magnetos, which work fine on low RPM aircraft engines, but proved weak at engine speeds over 8000 RPM. Marelli then came up with the Dynoplex, which made Lucas systems look reliable.

    3. Re:Prove me wrong... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, the Higgs boson is not in contradiction to string theory. Some theories were developed in case the Higgs boson was not found, or predicted multiple particles, those will be contradicted as data becomes more concrete. The particular mass of the Higgs boson contradicts a very specific version of supersymmetry, but not supersymmetry in general, nor string theory in general.

  5. Not a surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    String Theory is the result of an attempt to rectify QM and Relativity using pure math. It was not born from evidence. So, evidence will; be its undoing,

    1. Re:Not a surprise by Coren22 · · Score: 2

      Was that semicolon an indication for putting your sunglasses on?

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
    2. Re:Not a surprise by Brain-Fu · · Score: 1

      More likely the semicolon was a deliberate attempt at getting attention, which would result in more responses, higher mods, and greater visiblity.

      (Yes, I did that on porpose, too).

      (and that)

    3. Re:Not a surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wasn't that also the case with the derivation of the Dirac equation? Yet experiment bore out both the existence of antimatter and an explanation of the fine structure splitting for the hydrogen atom spectrum.

    4. Re:Not a surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It was not born from evidence.

      Quite the opposite, it is born from the evidence that general relativity and quantum mechanics hold quite strongly, and is an attempt to find a theory that covers both. This is a process that has been done many times in physics, finding a theory that is a superset of different ideas, giving a more concise, general explanation. Sometimes in the past it worked, sometimes it didn't, as with any proposed theory.

    5. Re:Not a surprise by stridebird · · Score: 1

      Maxwell's equations. The goddam speed of light pops out of it. It pops right out of the math(s). IMO it's one of the most startling discoveries ever made and proof of the accuracy of using mathematics to model our Universe.

  6. String Theory\0 by Greyfox · · Score: 4, Funny

    If string theory does end up being proven, they're going to have to be careful not to overwrite the null terminator, or the universe will sigsegv.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

    1. Re:String Theory\0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm wondering why all the heavy particles that were found with the colliders, were not observed during all the nuclear tests that were done during the 30 or years or so from 1945 till 1975.

    2. Re:String Theory\0 by BCGlorfindel · · Score: 1

      I'm wondering why all the heavy particles that were found with the colliders, were not observed during all the nuclear tests that were done during the 30 or years or so from 1945 till 1975.

      I know nothing of particle physics, but I thought it was that the particles are very short lived?

    3. Re:String Theory\0 by rubycodez · · Score: 2

      Fission and fusion bombs produce low energy particles, compared to colliders. Less than a couple dozen million electron volts at most.

    4. Re:String Theory\0 by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      I'm wondering why all the heavy particles that were found with the colliders, were not observed during all the nuclear tests that were done during the 30 or years or so from 1945 till 1975.

      Better instrumentation and better understanding would be my guesses.

      It's awfully hard to measure things you don't know are there, don't expect to be there, and don't have things which can detect them.

      I'm pretty sure Higgs was mocked for his idea of the Higgs boson. Flash forward, and our understanding is much better ... and now he was right all along.

      Likewise, I'm betting the LHC doesn't have detectors for unicornions ... because we have no theoretical model for unicornions.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    5. Re:String Theory\0 by Coren22 · · Score: 2

      Also, likely a nuclear explosion would have destroyed the detector used to discover the extremely short lived heavy particles.

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
    6. Re:String Theory\0 by idji · · Score: 2

      they were certainly created, but they occur amongst BILLIONS of other events. Part of the magic of the LHC is to ignore all of this and focus only on the interesting EXTREMELY RARE interactions.

    7. Re:String Theory\0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      string energy scale should be up at around 10^19 GeV or so

      And on a 64-bit machine the maximum string length happens to be 1.84*10^19. Coincidence? I think not!

    8. Re:String Theory\0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      they were certainly created, but they occur amongst BILLIONS of other events. Part of the magic of the LHC is to ignore all of this and focus only on the interesting EXTREMELY RARE interactions.

      I wish the interactions of your fingers and the shift/caps lock keys were extremely rare.

    9. Re:String Theory\0 by Rob+Riggs · · Score: 1

      Yes, exactly. Nor did we have have the same technology available for the detectors, storage for capturing the petabytes of raw data, or the computing power necessary for both filtering and then later analyzing that data.

      --
      the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
    10. Re:String Theory\0 by kencurry · · Score: 0

      they were certainly created, but they occur amongst BILLIONS of other events. Part of the magic of the LHC is to ignore all of this and focus only on the interesting EXTREMELY RARE interactions.

      I wish the interactions of your fingers and the shift/caps lock keys were extremely rare.

      +5 funny - people say A/C posts should be ignored. The fools.

      --
      sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
    11. Re:String Theory\0 by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 1

      String theory encompasses more than just C strings; there's no null terminators on many other string types, such as cheese, for example.

    12. Re:String Theory\0 by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 1

      My roommate is an expert on string theory and the laws of grabbity. I really should trim her claws.

      --

      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

    13. Re:String Theory\0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      +1 - and today I have no mod points!

    14. Re:String Theory\0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The difference between a fusion based bomb and a particle accelerator is like the difference between a freight train and a supersonic missile. The bomb is like the former, has a lot of total energy, but no individual part is going that fast and it is difficult to focus all of that energy into a tiny point (e.g. if someone standing on the tracks they go splat, but most of the energy is still with the train). The missile has less total energy, but is going way, way faster. The fusion bomb creates a huge number of somewhat faster particles, but something like the LHC will create particles that individually have nearly a million times the energy of the highest energy particles that come out of a nuclear bomb.

      Similarly, your question would be like asking why is there a difference between 1 W of radio vs 1 W of visible light vs 1 W of gamma rays.

    15. Re:String Theory\0 by AchilleTalon · · Score: 1

      Because the energy in the center of mass of the LHC is much more higher than any nuclear tests can achieve. The energy of a nuclear reaction is around 200 MeV while the LHC's energy in the center of mass is 13 TeV, something like 60 000 higher. No comparison can be made with a nuclear reaction.

      --
      Achille Talon
      Hop!
    16. Re:String Theory\0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

  7. Truth trumps fantasy. This is a surprise? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Because string theory is all mental masturbation by people not interested in explaining reality, are we actually surprised when it doesn't explain reality? I'm not.

  8. One quote from the article that is nice... by Hussman32 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "The production of tiny black holes is one of the predictions. "

    No concerns at all with that one.

    Man I hope they know what they are doing.

    --
    "Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
    1. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course they don't. The whole point is to learn something. Obviously, if they already knew what they were doing, they wouldn't need to do it.

      Which is the worse fate:

      1) Scientific stagnation, resulting in the current state of worldly affairs perpetuating itself as-is for billions of years until the sun blows up.
      2) A micro-black hole destroying the planet a few years from now.

      Reflect on the big picture and these two results look nearly identical. One is less depressing due to being a bit shorter, in fact.

      And the upside of taking a chance is this outcome:

      3) A game-changing fact about the universe is learned, and humanity is never the same again.

      WORTH IT!

    2. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Coren22 · · Score: 4, Informative

      More energetic collisions happen in the upper atmosphere all the time when cosmic rays enter. If there was concern of black holes eating the earth, it would already have happened.

      Here's some great camera footage at the LHC for you if you are really concerned:

      http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lh...

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
    3. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Hussman32 · · Score: 2

      That webcam is pretty cool, I wonder how long befo

      --
      "Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
    4. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by iMadeGhostzilla · · Score: 1

      We really have no idea what kind of profound ramifications this could have for the planet and even beyond. Let's find out.

    5. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Immerman · · Score: 0

      I'm seeing an awful lot of assumptions there.

      1a) I don't see how limiting research to areas where we don't specifically predict potentially dangerous outcomes translates to scientific stagnation. Worst case scenario, we could do such experiments on the moon - if it turned into a black hole, supermassive stranglet, etc. only nighttime lighting (and any unfortunate species unable to adapt) would be affected on Earth, and there would no doubt be lots of useful applications for such an exotic moon. And that would likely only delay the research by a few centuries. And there's lots of fields of science beyond fundamental physics, most of which will likely be largely unaffected by any breakthroughs at this point. I mean we already have microscopes that can image individual atoms, and tools to manipulate them. How much more can fundamental physics realistically contribute to our understanding of biology, chemistry, psychology, etc.?

      1b) Even if fundamental scientific progress were to somehow come to a complete stop, that doesn't mean worldly affairs continue along the status quo indefinitely. Technology will continue to evolve after all. We already have all the fundamental scientific knowledge necessary to completely colonize our solar system and, with enough patience, even other stars, all we need to do is work out the applied technology (fusion, high-power ion drives, etc). To say nothing of applied social technologies (religion, democracy, economics, etc) - good luck stopping those from continuing to evolve.

      Reflect on the big picture, and life ever having arisen on Earth at all becomes almost certainly irrelevant.

      3) We've got several millenia now of discovering game-changing facts about the universe at an ever-increasing pace. And yet to all appearances humanity itself has changed hardly a whit. What makes you think the next discovery will be different?

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    6. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Immerman · · Score: 0

      There's one substantial difference though - reaction density. Creating one micro black hole or strangelet in the upper atmosphere may be a non-issue, it will evaporate long before it can absorb enough matter to stabilize. Create dozens or thousands of them within a miniscule target region and a small fraction of a second though, and you have to start worrying about how they might interact with each other.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    7. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Charliemopps · · Score: 1

      The singularities (they are not blackholes) have a diameter smaller than the width of the nucleus of an atom. So, even if they were created, survived more than a trillionth of a second without evaporating, or any of the other improbabilities that come along with this... the statistical likelihood of them colliding with any particle at all is basically 0. If it were possible, every star in the universe would have collapsed into a black hole seconds after forming.

      When they building a accelerator around the event horizon of a blackhole and start testing stuff that hasn't happened since the birth of the universe, let me know. I'll worry then.

    8. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Every time a race of beings gets to this point, it's.. POP goes the back hole and we all fall in. No wonder there are many black holes. hope voyager is past the event horizon, so there willl be some evidence of us having been here!

    9. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's so weird how the sentence gets cut off, but there is still time to click the "Submit" button.

    10. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by rwise2112 · · Score: 1

      It's so weird how the sentence gets cut off, but there is still time to click the "Submit" button.

      Time distortion!

      --

      "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
    11. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, you countered the GP's assumptions with plenty of your own. Like this gem:

      most of which will likely be largely unaffected by any breakthroughs at this point.
      I am sure plenty of people alive during the dark ages felt the same way. How wrong they were.

      We already have all the fundamental scientific knowledge necessary to completely colonize our solar system
      Nonsense! That line has been fed to gullible investors...but the tech is simply not there yet. Maybe it will get there, but that is an assumption.....

      to all appearances humanity itself has changed hardly a whit Oh really? Humanity spent the overwhelming majority of its life on earth as hunter-gatherors, roaming forests in small tribes, doing little more than breeding and fighting other tribes for territory. Then, somebody started farming, and before anyone could blink we had cell phones, airplanes, and trips to the moon.

      You cannot tell me that our rate of gain of scientific knowledge has petered out, nor do you have a leg to stand on trying to say that there is nothing new to discover.

      Honestly, I would laugh if I didn't believe you were serious.

    12. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Aliens.

    13. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Immerman · · Score: 1

      Absolutely, the technology is not there yet. But the fundamental science underlying the technology is. The two are interconnected, but NOT synonymous.

      As for humanity changing - you are talking about human *technology*, I am talking about humans themselves. Two very different things. We've become far less lethally violent as population density has increased and made violence much more destabilizing, but otherwise we seem to be basically the same creatures as described in the most ancient legends.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    14. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by An+ominous+Cow+art · · Score: 1

      Perhaps he was dictating?

    15. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Immerman · · Score: 1

      Oh, and as for my assumptions - yes, I could be wrong - but of all the things that might possibly emerge from new fundamental physics, it seems *extremely* unlikely that any of it would be particularly applicable to non-physics science. Well, beyond the potential fount of xeno-biological knowledge and/or interaction with alien civilizations if it led to some sort of FTL travel :-D.

      Our technology is already on the cusp of allowing us to observe living organisms on the atomic level - while it's not impossible that some new physics might allow even more detailed and non-invasice information gathering, or even reveal that the ultimate source of the spark of life is not actually the biological organism, introducing new fields of science, neither would have much impact on biology itself, other than potentially accelerating it's advance by a few centuries.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    16. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The density of particles within the LHC isn't that different than from the initial spray of particles in a shower in the upper atmosphere, and also completely irrelevant to the scale of a micro black hole, which is so much smaller than a proton, it would still miss things going through a neutron star.

    17. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We don't get to marry cute little girls anymore and women rule us.

    18. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Immerman · · Score: 1

      Assuming of course, that it behaves according to our untested theories.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  9. medium blog != news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It would be more helpful and informative to post links to either scientific sources, or actual news articles. The links in this article are to 1) a previous slashdot post and 2) a blog website. I like to support scientific blogs, but I don't want to read them as 'news'.

  10. Which string theory? by gstoddart · · Score: 2

    Aren't there like 40 things called string theory, ranging from merely odd or unlikely all the way up to batshit crazy?

    I've gotten the sense over the years there's so many things called string theory you can't coherently say what any of it is, or how you'd test it.

    Hell, I'm not even convinced many physicists take it seriously. Which means for the layperson, it mostly sounds like gibberish.

    It just has all the hallmarks of being so unexplainable as to be meaningless. Which I'm sure is grounded in my lack of understanding due to the fact that it's so magical as to be unexplainable.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      https://xkcd.com/171/

    2. Re:Which string theory? by umghhh · · Score: 1

      This is good enough reason to take a week off and watch all of the BBT seasons - I am sure the answer is somewhere there.

    3. Re:Which string theory? by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1

      Which means for the layperson, it mostly sounds like gibberish.

      In fairness, almost everything from high-energy physics sounds like gibberish to everyone but the people running the experiments.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    4. Re:Which string theory? by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Sure, but ... if Richard Feynmann

      criticized string theory in an interview: "I don't like that they're not calculating anything," he said. "I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation--a fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true.': These words have since been much-quoted by opponents of the string-theoretic direction for particle physics.

      I'll flat out admit I can't come close to understanding the voodoo which is string theory.

      But that Feynman didn't either, and I've heard more recent quotes from physicists who basically say they don't know what it is either ... I feel I'm in good company.

      I accept that my tiny little money brain isn't up to the task. But I'm not the only one saying "WTF?" about string theory.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    5. Re:Which string theory? by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1

      No, I agree. If Feynmann can't follow their calculations, there's something largely amiss. Then again, that was a while ago and for all I know they might be making perfect sense now.

      But I still contend that "it sounds like gibberish to laypeople" is a pretty low bar to set. It's almost impossible to describe something like QCD to non-phycisists without stopping twice a sentence - "well, not a literal color", "not 'up' like in 'gravity'", etc. - even at the high school textbook level.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    6. Re:Which string theory? by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      Oh, sure. There's a lot of background knowledge required to follow any of it.

      But, honestly, even among people with a reasonable foundation in science ... string theory falls into two camps: a) those who make crazy strange metaphors as if they understand it, and b) those who roll their eyes at the people who use crazy strange metaphors as if they understand it.

      So, I conclude that string theory causes an extreme polarization of dork-ions, a lot of hyperbole, and way too little actual understanding or predictive value to be of much use. ;-)

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    7. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mine involves cheese... not sure about the others.

    8. Re:Which string theory? by DarkFencer · · Score: 1

      There may be 40 things called string theory, but they all boil down to a few things:
        - point particles are actually vibrating strings
        - there are extra spatial dimensions
        - there isn't much in terms of specific testable predictions made by string theory

      The LHC tests may show things that hint at extra dimensions (of small but testable size, not planck length). This in and of itself wouldn't prove any of the individual string theories. But showing nothing that could indicate super symmetry or extra dimensions or other 'stringy' things would be an issue for strong theory.

      Disclaimer, I am not a physicist (string or otherwise).

    9. Re:Which string theory? by avandesande · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately 'silly string' theory has taken over entire physics departments (such as at Princeton) and wasted a huge amount of mind share. Cold fusion is mote in comparison.

      --
      love is just extroverted narcissism
    10. Re:Which string theory? by sjames · · Score: 1

      Imagine a "theory" with a bunch of adjustments. So many adjustmentrs that no matter what happens, there is some adjustment that canm be made such that it "retroactively) predicts it. That is string theory.

      The big problem with string "theory" is that it predicts everything and so, nothing.

      String toolkit might be a better name. It is just that, a bag of parts and tools that might one day be used to construct a theory that predicts something in particular.

    11. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Feynman died in the mid 80s. We've had a good couple of "revolutions" in string theory since. Not that his comments aren't to be taken seriously, but the "string theory" he talked about then is not the "string theory" we talk about now. We now effectively have four or five "string theories" each of which are related to the others via "dualities" (ultimately, ways of transforming aspects of one theory to find exactly aspects of another), and are also related via a duality to supergravity. This both suggests that there is *something* interesting in the theories - be it pure mathematical or be it physical; now that we don't know - and also that there is a single theory that they are the limits of in various regimes. Enter M theory, a "theory" we know nothing about bar its limits in a few different regimes. (We don't know much about what those regimes are, either, merely that they exist.)

      I'm no fan of string theory either, for many of the same reasons. I'm particularly no fan of the bullshit that comes along when "string phenomenologists" take some mathematical aspect, yank it out of context, apply it to some contrived setup in some higher-dimensional form of general relativity, and then pretend that any of this means anything. It doesn't, it means utterly fuck all. The people who instead pick some point of the string landscape and boil it down all the way to 3+1d spacetime are at least doing physics, even if to my knowledge few of them have found anything that suggests that they've got our universe out of it. The phenomenologists are just fucking around.

      But at the same time, there's enough there that I'm happy people are working on it - I just wish that it wasn't such an enormous pit of funding and that other areas of high-energy theoretical physics would get more a look-in. I'm also not happy with the way that high-energy physics is presented to the public. On the one hand, we have people who've seen one Brian Greene documentary and think they know how the universe is set up, and on the other we have *Nobel laureates* giving plenary speakers at major conferences saying stupid, *stupid* fucking things like "We know that supersymmetry is real". No, you stupid fucking cunt, we do *not* know that. This was at a conference in Munich in, hmm, must have been 2008 or 2009. I was very offended even then, and the higher energy the LHC gets to and the increasing bouncing of MSSM parameters to lift them *just* out of range of the LHC, the more pissed off I get. Stupid. Fucking. Stupid. Fucking. Arrogant. CUNT.

      I'm not sure I have a coherent point here :) I just like being able to call a Nobel laureate a stupid fucking cunt, and to advise slight caution against taking Feynman as the last word. A word worth listening to, definitely, but he wasn't talking about quite the same theory as we have now (and he was not, himself, infallible).

    12. Re:Which string theory? by Greyfox · · Score: 1

      Inasmuch as I can follow it, a lot of it seems to be "Well the math seems to work (or can be made to work) so we should be looking for these specific things." Also, it seems like every time an experiment is done trying to prove any of the collection of things in string theory (Or supersymmetry, for that matter,) they always seem to end up not validating what the experiment was trying to prove.

      --

      I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

    13. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, quite. For all that I said above about how we should cut string theory a bit of slack, the E8 group contains within it the standard model, and a lot more besides. What the fuck do you expect to find if you base a theory on E8xE8? Fuck's sake. Of *course* it has the standard model in it. It's got every other fucking thing in it too, and a hell of a lot more besides.

    14. Re:Which string theory? by ve3oat · · Score: 2

      Anyone interested in other aspects of this question should read (if they haven't already) "The Trouble with Physics" by Lee Smolin (New York, 2007). He used to be at the Perimeter Institute (maybe still is). Smolin's book isn't just about the physics but also about the sociology of some of the physicists. A good read.

    15. Re:Which string theory? by budgenator · · Score: 1

      It's not that bad, you just have to read "The Jabberwocky" to them for a warm up first.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    16. Re:Which string theory? by budgenator · · Score: 0

      Imagine a "theory" with a bunch of adjustments. So many adjustmentrs that no matter what happens, there is some adjustment that canm be made such that it "retroactively) predicts it. That is string theory.

      The big problem with string "theory" is that it predicts everything and so, nothing.

      String toolkit might be a better name. It is just that, a bag of parts and tools that might one day be used to construct a theory that predicts something in particular.

      So your saying that Climatology is a sub-discipline of String Theory?

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    17. Re:Which string theory? by penandpaper · · Score: 1

      But.. But... It has "theory" in the name that means that you are just not smart enough to understand and I am a super genius! If I use my patented off hand metaphor to describe it, I could get my own TV show! However, describing dork-ions seems self defeating.

    18. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I meant to mention this book in my rant above. String theory is well worth the study, but the way it's sucked up all the funding for multiple decades is inexcusable, and that's one of (many) points Smolin makes in the book.

    19. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The same applies to quantum mechanics, but that is still in vogue so is defended fiercely.

    20. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The big problem with string "theory" is that it predicts everything and so, nothing. String toolkit might be a better name. It is just that, a bag of parts and tools that might one day be used to construct a theory that predicts something in particular.

      I could say the same thing about calculus. Just because String Theory was poorly named doesn't mean it wouldn't ever be useful.

    21. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sure, but ... if Richard Feynmann

      criticized string theory in an interview: "I don't like that they're not calculating anything," he said. "I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation--a fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true.': These words have since been much-quoted by opponents of the string-theoretic direction for particle physics.

      That is a pretty good description of the religious approach to "science", as opposed to a theory consisting of falsifiable things that you can use to predict with, and whereby turned-out-to-be-false predictions mean that the theory was just falsified. IOW, they've thrown falsifiability out the window, and with that, their "science-ness".

      I'll flat out admit I can't come close to understanding the voodoo which is string theory.

      But that Feynman didn't either, and I've heard more recent quotes from physicists who basically say they don't know what it is either ... I feel I'm in good company.

      I accept that my tiny little money brain isn't up to the task. But I'm not the only one saying "WTF?" about string theory.

      My knowledge of physics is limited to highschool level classical mechanics. I'm confident that quantum mechanics is something you can calculate with. Apparently you cannot with string theory. Why bother, then?

    22. Re:Which string theory? by sjames · · Score: 2

      Actually, quantum mechanics made a few actual predictions that proved to be dead on.

    23. Re:Which string theory? by sjames · · Score: 1

      Climatology has proven much more predictive than string theory.

    24. Re:Which string theory? by sjames · · Score: 1

      Calculus was never claimed to be anything else.

    25. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a good read if you like rants of jealousy and factual inaccuracies.

    26. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, I agree. If Feynmann can't follow their calculations, there's something largely amiss.

      If Feynman can follow something from the grave, then ....

    27. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Feyman makes it sounds like String Theory is the Agile Development of the physics world ("you're doing it wrong").

    28. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Neither was quantum field theory, which is more what string theory in general is like: a framework. QFT has near infinite possible variations if you don't know what Lagrangian to use, as you can create all sorts of arbitrary fields with different coupling coefficients, etc. But eventually data narrows down what fields actually do something, and those that can't be seen, etc. You could still in principle tack on more fields in a way that they can't be observed with current technology, but that doesn't change what things like SM have done with the framework.

    29. Re:Which string theory? by sjames · · Score: 1

      True, but it seems string theory attracts more woo and people trying to claim it predicts something.

    30. Re:Which string theory? by waveman · · Score: 1

      See also Peter Woit's book "not even wrong" and his blog here. http://www.math.columbia.edu/~...

      My question is: What observation from the LHC would disprove string theory? If ST is compatible with every possible experimental outcome, it predicts nothing.

    31. Re:Which string theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are an infinite number of string theories, but as soon as you include supergravity, all of those string theories become solutions to a single M-Theory model. Instead of vast numbers of incompatible theories, you have one theory with tweakable parameters.

    32. Re:Which string theory? by budgenator · · Score: 1

      Get back with me when they make a prediction outside their error bars.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    33. Re:Which string theory? by sjames · · Score: 1

      Already happened unless you stretch the error bars because it's inconvenient to your political convictions.

    34. Re:Which string theory? by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      "It might still be true" also leads to discoveries. If you have reason to believe a theory is correct, anomalies are a way to explore previously unexplained cases. To give an example, Newtonian gravitation predicted Kepler's laws and some variations from them, but not the exact orbit of Saturn. It turned out that the anomalies could be explained by a planet further out, and one was indeed found. It also had problems with the orbit of Mercury, but that turned out to be a relativistic effect, a case where Newtonian laws of motion and gravity mostly worked but needed refinement.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    35. Re:Which string theory? by OutOnARock · · Score: 1

      so string theory is the systemd of physics?

  11. They are just going to end it all. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Seriously, with all of the phony science and made up theories and "Yeah that sounds good enough" mentality running around shouldn't they step back and think. Maybe this thing will blow up in our faces and maybe we could end all life. So maybe we should really think about and understand what we are doing BEFORE we do it. Seems like there is a lot at stake to just whip into this and "just see what happens". Don't get me wrong I love theoretical physics, it's one of those things you love but you just don't want to live next door to it.

    1. Re:They are just going to end it all. by budgenator · · Score: 1

      Dude If that thing spawns an "Earth eating black hole" living next door to it would be like about Mars. What everybody forgets is a blackhole has conservation of mass, charge and angular momentum, so a blackhole whizzing around the LHC ring would act pretty much like every other thingy whizzing around with the same mass, charge and angular momentum. Even if the blackhole escaped the ring, it would only be a blackhole as long as it's energy was high enough to maintain it's event horizon; that energy is dependant on it's velocity, which is a vector involving speed and direction! Yeah that's right a quantum blackhole can un-blacken if it collides with another particle and loses energy, it can un-blacken through Hawking radiation and it's only black if your close enough to it's direction of travel.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
  12. You can't falsify string theory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The problem is, that there are 10^520 possible variations of string theory models that can represent our universe, and if we fail to find any of the results 'predicted' by string theory, then string theorists can just re-arrange the variables in their models, and pick from one of the other 10^520 variations - and can shift the goalposts like this pretty much forever, unless we have the gigantic breakthrough in string theory research, that we've been waiting for 30 years already, with no end/hope in sight...

    It's not uncommon to hear among physicists critical of string theory, that we could be centuries away from falsifying the theory - even millenia.

    1. Re:You can't falsify string theory by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      or just go with what Feynman said, it's experimentally unverifiable and thus nonsense and a waste of time

  13. Checklist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Pop-sci - check
    medium.com - check
    Ethan - check
    Every single fucking day - check

    Slashdot shillsquad is good to go

  14. they may disfavor String Theory after all by davstok · · Score: 1

    After all?

  15. TeV, GeV by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But even at 13 TeV, what are the prospects for testing String Theory, considering that the string energy scale should be up at around 10^19 GeV or so?

    Why the switch to GeV? Stick with a prefix and call it 10^16 TeV.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    1. Re:TeV, GeV by countSudoku() · · Score: 1

      I'll second that! I was thinking the same thing; why is GeV somehow bigger that TeV, or is it a typo, or something else? I'm going to read about this on wikipedia. I can usually catch a gist or two from there.

      --
      This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
    2. Re:TeV, GeV by BlackPignouf · · Score: 1

      My calculator tells me that 10^16 = 10 XOR 16 = 26.
      Only 13 TeV to go! :)

    3. Re:TeV, GeV by halivar · · Score: 1

      Wait, is that metric TeV, or English Customary TeV?

    4. Re:TeV, GeV by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      One GeV is the approximate (order-of-magnitude) scale of QCD quark confinement. Thus it is the scale measure that particle physicists usually think in terms of. I imagine that people who study atomic-scale interactions think in terms of Angstroms for the same reason. In fact it is pretty common to use a set of units in which c = hbar = 1 so that energy, momentum, and mass can be conveniently measured in terms of GeV, GeV/c, and GeV/c^2. If you like to do that sort of thing.

  16. a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by ericbg05 · · Score: 4, Informative

    "The production of tiny black holes is one of the predictions. "
    Man I hope they know what they are doing.

    Microscopic black holes disappear quickly due to Hawking radiation. So if your goal is to destroy the earth, creating a microscopic black hole is not the way you want to go.

    The bigger a black hole is, the more slowly it evaporates. So if you want your black hole to do any damage, it'll have to be more than a certain threshold size. Turns out that minimum-size black hole you'll need to destroy Earth is roughly the mass of Mt Everest.

    If we take the density of such a black hole to be 3 * 10^18 kg/m^3, then our black hole will look like a ball with a radius of about 12 cm, i.e. it looks like a soccer ball.*

    See here for more details.

    * no idea if my density assumption is reasonable. I'm not a physicist -- I got the number from 20 seconds of googling. The volume of your black hole may vary.

    1. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

      Turns out that minimum-size black hole you'll need to destroy Earth is roughly the mass of Mt Everest.

      This must be why evil mad scientists are always found underneath large volcanoes. Everything is clear to me now.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    2. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The volume of your black hole may vary.

      In my best George Takei voice: "Ohhhh Myyyyy"

    3. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by jfengel · · Score: 2

      It's denser than that. The Schwartzschild radius of a black hole with a mass around 10^15 kg (a rough guess) is about 10^-12 meters (about a picometer). Give or take a few orders of magnitude. Wolfram Alpha has a convenient Schwartzschild radius calculator. The evaporation time for a black hole that big is 10^30 seconds.

      The smaller a black hole is, the denser. The number you give is for a star-sized black hole. There isn't any known way to form grain-of-sand sized black holes, though they might have formed in the very early universe. In which case one could be wandering through the solar system at this very minute....

    4. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 2

      That's fun. A 1 meter radius blackhole would have a mass of around 673500000000000000000000000 Kg

      You could put it in the back of a minivan and drive it around advanced societies, giving the less advanced places time to catch up.

      --
      I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    5. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by lgw · · Score: 1

      I propose we adopt "mass of Mt Everest" as a new Slashdot standard of measument - measuring mass in Libraries of Congress was always awkward.

      I believe the mass of Mt Everest estimate is correct for the Earth-destroying black hole - it's the point at which matter infall at the density of the Earth's interior exceeds Hawking radiation. In a vacuum, the magic mass is about the mass of the moon - the point at which the Hawking radiation is cooler than the CMBR, and so you won't have a net loss for 10^lots years.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    6. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by jfengel · · Score: 2

      Found this:

      http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawki...

      It says that a 3K black hole has a mass of 4x10^22 kg, a bit larger than the Everest-sized black hole.

      The Everest-hole hole is extremely hot, 10^8 K, but it's still radiating so slowly that it'll take 10^21 years to evaporate, so it would be more than enough to destroy the earth.

      I'm not quite sure how to solve for one that would be hot enough to suck in the earth before evaporating, but I see that a black hole that would last 1 second is a mere 70 million kilograms, with a radius of about a picometer.

    7. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by lgw · · Score: 1

      It says that a 3K black hole has a mass of 4x10^22 kg, a bit larger than the Everest-sized black hole.

      The moon is just over 7x10^22 kg.

      m not quite sure how to solve for one that would be hot enough to suck in the earth before evaporating

      The hard part is determining the rate at which a small black hole would consume matter. Very small black holes simply don't have the cross-section to consume matter fast enough to live. The hole would have to live long enough (and still have a cross-section large enough) for the few seconds needed to fall through the ground and get deep enough to pass the water table and into denser crust. From that point it's a matter of its cross-section, speed, and the density of the rock its passing through.

      My best estimate for the Mt Everest mass is 4*10^15 kg, which gives a radius of 6 pm - seems big enough to eat silicon and iron atoms.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    8. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by budgenator · · Score: 1

      Close but the Schwartzschild radius solution only applies to non-rotating bodies and any particle I can think of that is subject to relativistic mass increases also have spin, a closer fit would be a Kerr–Newman metric, however I'd assume that these solutions ignore external gravitational fields, which might be valid approximation over interstellar distances, it might not be valid in Earth's atmosphere for cosmic rays or inside the LHC. Perhaps a real physicist could chime in with a more learned point of view.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    9. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by sconeu · · Score: 1

      Turns out that minimum-size black hole you'll need to destroy Earth is roughly the mass of Mt Everest.

      This must be why evil mad scientists are always found underneath large volcanoes. Everything is clear to me now.

      Well... that, and the unlimited geothermal power, and, of course, the availability of lava pools for unnecessarily slow dipping mechanisms!

      --
      General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
    10. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by HiThere · · Score: 1

      Are you sure? ISTM that it would initially prefer either electrons or protons, and when it had swallowed a couple of them it would repell any more. (Electrons are smaller, so it might prefer them, but they are also more uncertain as to their position, so it might prefer a proton.)

      So say it swallowed an iron nucleus. This would give it a strong positive charge, so it would repell any additional nucleus. The question is could it also swallow electrons, or would they go into orbit around it?

      *My* guess says that it would need to be sufficiently larger that gravitational effects would dominate over electromagnetic effects. OTOH, since 6 picometers is around 1000 times the size of an iron nucleus perhaps I'm overestimating the problem. That said, what's going to slow it down? This is an accelerator, so even if it created something with the mass of Mt. Everest, it wouldn't be at rest, and would, in fact, be moving far above escape velocity.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    11. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by lgw · · Score: 1

      I know the "proton-sized black hole with a positive charge" with an electron orbiting it has been studied - but I don't know what was concluded. But you won't get "orbits" out to maybe 3x the radius of a black hole, so no danger of that for the Everest hole.

      The LHC uses two beams colliding from opposite directions, so the total momentum of a collision is low. If most of the energy of collision goes into making the black hole, then the mass of the black hole would be much higher than whatever collided, and thus it's velocity would be much lower than the difference in momentum of those two particles.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    12. Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by HiThere · · Score: 1

      Yes, it would be much lower. But that "much lower" would still be expected to be well above escape velocity. I mean the difference between 0.999...c (say 290,000 km/s) and 12 km/s is HUGE. (And I rounded the speed of the particle down, and escape velocity up.)
      Even a 99.99% cancellation of velocities would still be well above escape velocity. It's true, though, a 99.999% cancellation would be below escape velocity. That kind of efficiency after a collision seems (to me) unlikely.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  17. I don't believe in strings. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And, as such, I don't believe in kites.

  18. Exotic Moon by Latent+Heat · · Score: 1

    You can see one of those a couple miles out on the highway out of town, but there is a 2-drink minimum . . .

  19. Cue Prof. Frink by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

    "You can tell everyone that you were here when the human race learned...
    that this collider isn't powerful enough to tell us anything new.

    (Paraphrasing from memory - that ep was on last night.)

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  20. Yoyo heated and spinning. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Look at a Heated Yoyo. It has kinetic, gravitational, thermal. Does that qualify as a mutlidimensional energy manifestation, in the same sense that String Theory talks about multidimensions? Then spin it into gasoline, set it on fire..another dimension!?!?

    1. Re:Yoyo heated and spinning. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it doesn't. You're talking about something that has 3 spatial dimensions, 1 time dimension, and then some thermodynamic characteristics that are described in a *phase space* - and not even that, they're described by a set of averaging operators that act on that phase space to yield thermodynamics. The extra dimensions in string theory are extra dimensions - that is, extra spatial dimensions. It's rare to find a theory with multiple time dimensions. Everything you're talking about is purely thermodynamical, which means that it's *statistical* and ultimately comes from a theory of statistical mechanics. Absolute fundamental difference.

  21. Much more than 40! by tlambert · · Score: 1

    Aren't there like 40 things called string theory, ranging from merely odd or unlikely all the way up to batshit crazy?

    Much more than 40!

    For every string theorist, there are two string theories (something to do with pair production....).

  22. ...and even more inaccurate than usual by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are several mistakes in the article as well. Supersymmetry is not a consequence of String Theory. It was invented to explain the huge difference between the Higgs mass and the energy scale where gravity becomes important (the fine-tuning or hierarchy problem). It was only after its invention that String Theorists realized that they needed it to make their theories work. In fact it is entirely possible that Supersymmetry exists and String Theory does not whereas the reverse is far less likely so it is wrong to say that SUSY is a consequence of String Theory.

    Similarly the use of String Theory to solve non-perturbative QCD is not some new, fundamental principle but is simply a result of applying the maths developed for String Theory to a different problem. Hence studying the quark-gluon plasma is, at best, a test of some of the maths developed for String Theory but really tells us nothing at all about the physics. For a simpler analogy if you demonstrate that calculus works this does not imply that Newton's Laws of Motion are correct even though calculus was co-invented by Newton so he could write down and apply his laws.

  23. Experimental Proof for String Theory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At a fundraiser for Santa Barbara Arts and Lectures, physicist Brian Greene gave a mini-presentation on String theory before the main event at UCSB later that evening.

    Curious about the difficulty of experimentally working at the scale of 10^-50 or thereabouts, and with many deep pocketed donors present in the room, I asked, "What experiment could you design to prove the existence of String Theory?"

    Brian's answer: A supercollider the size of the galaxy.

    Checkbooks closed.

  24. Watch Leonard Susskind in action by doom · · Score: 1

    If you'd like to actually know something about string theory, I suggest watching some of Leonard Susskind's lectures:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    You will then be in the position of being able to intelligently criticize the theory, instead of quoting other people's jibes.
    Susskind is not interested in bullshitting anyone, by the way... quoting from memory: "This is why a lot of us found string theory to be so promising. And it keeps promising and promising."

  25. Linux's string theory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now linux has it's own string theory.

    Systemd.

  26. While everything good in life is banned. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Marrying little girls. Marrying more little girls. Etc.

  27. String theory more like string queery by Tyrannicsupremacy · · Score: 1

    I'm not even a physicist and i could tell that string theory was BS just from listening to the proponents talk about it on documentaries.

    --
    http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
  28. Garbage Summary as per usual. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why does the summary give the collision energy in TeV and then string energies in GeV?

    Who would do something so unabashedly stupid?

    Collision Energy: 13 TeV
    String energy: 10^16 TeV (aka 10^19 GeV).

    Fucking.
    Why.

  29. \r\0\0\0String Theory by DeVilla · · Score: 1

    There are safer ways to do it.