Why the LHC May Mean the End of Experimental Particle Physics

StartsWithABang writes: At the end of the 19th century, Lord Kelvin famously said, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." He was talking about how Newtonian gravity and Maxwell's electromagnetism seemed to account for all the known phenomena in the Universe. Of course, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, general relativity and more made that prediction look silly in hindsight. But in the 21st century, the physics of the Standard Model describes our Universe so well that there truly may be nothing else new to find not only at the LHC, but at any high-energy particle collider we could build here on Earth. If there are no new particles found below about 2–3 TeV in energy—particles that the LHC should detect if they’re present—it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more. And even if we build a particle accelerator to the fullest capacity of our technology around the equator of the Earth, we still couldn’t reach those energies.

Comments

Dark Matter and Energy

[rockmuelle]

Well, if we find a way to measure either of those using high-energy experiments, we'll get a few more decades out of the field.

Just when we think we're done, we're usually just at the beginning...

-Chris

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[VernonNemitz]

The original article clearly indicates that such particles need to be found first, within the abilities of the LHC. OR, we need something bigger than the Earth's circumference.

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[dreamchaser]

Except they are talking out of their ass. They don't know for certain, not at all. It's all supposition.

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[david_thornley]

What if the research would require about 20% more energy than the LHC is capable of? It isn't like there's some deep theoretical reason to believe that there's nothing of interest between its top energy and Big Bang-like conditions. IIRC, the LHC is casting doubt on supersymmetry, which suggests that a somewhat more powerful collider might be more useful.

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[MightyMartian]

Exactly my thought. With supersymmetry now in trouble, it does open the door for other theories that could be tested at energy levels that really aren't out of our technical capability.

Besides, there's still a decent chance that LHC is going to find a smoking gun around Dark Matter, so I'm thinking that there is lots of science left for it to do.

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[tnk1]

While I agree with you to some extent, the fact is that it isn't going to be a matter of whether we're missing say 1% or 37% of the energy at the LHC we need to make a breakthrough. The theories and models in question provide only certain situations that you might find new particles, which is likely the basis for what this article is saying.

In other words, its like having a road map that shows a freeway and all of its exits, but we otherwise have no idea where we are on that map. If the next exit is 2 miles from the previous exit, then chances are good we are in this one place on the map with lots of exits. However, if there are no exits even after 10 miles of driving, then the map shows us that we are most likely in this one rural area that doesn't have an exit for 100 miles.

In this case, mathematics and theoretical physics provides us the map with all the possible places you could find particles. Now we have to determine where we are on that map by finding where the next particle is to be found. If it is at LHC energies, then our map says we're likely to find a some new particles with minimal increments of further energy use. If it isn't, then we know we've hit the "rural" area on the map and we won't be seeing another particle for a long, long time because we need an particle smasher the size of the solar system to hit those energies.

Of course, brand spanking new physics could alter the "roadmap", but since the Standard Model does predict *just about* everything we have seen in experiments, then it means our physics is still incomplete, but has become accurate enough that we can predict what would happen down to the place we'd need the hundred million TeV to see anything new or to answer the specific items that the Standard Model does leave open.

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[khallow]

What if the research would require about 20% more energy than the LHC is capable of?

It's not that simple. LHC can find such things, it just takes more time to do the statistics. You really would need an order of magnitude difference in energy to make a difference.

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[rubycodez]

False.

The universe can produce ZeV range particles 10^21, already there are experiments in the works to detect dark matter decays from cosmic rays. Turns out we only need very sensitive detectors for expected decay products.

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[thinkwaitfast]

The SCSC was going to be 5x as powerful as the LHC. We got the ISS instead.

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[rubycodez]

We may not need the LHC or anything like it to find dark matter particles

http://www.symmetrymagazine.or...

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[jelizondo]

Shhh!

It is a secret, we need to build more colliders to, you know, watch shit collide and go up in sparks.

Are you with us nerds or with senator Proxmire?

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Powerful isn't the right word. It would have produced collisions with about three times that of LHC, but with a luminosity of a tenth of the LHC. When it comes to actually doing science with such accelerators, it is not just about how strong the collisions are, but how many collisions there are and how well measured they are. The SSC would have been behind in the later two categories.

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[Ramze]

Actually, you have that a bit backwards. The Standard Model says we're done finding new particles. The Higgs was the last one we expected to find, and it was so necessary to the theory that we could describe all of its attributes long before we actually found it. When we did, it matched the theory perfectly -- too perfectly. We knew its mass, spin, decay rate, and interaction with other particles just from the math before we even found it in the lab. Physicists were both relieved and saddened by the discovery as it meant the standard model was correct and there were no new physics to be found.

It's the idea of finding new particles that is all supposition. We know the standard model can't explain everything, but we don't know that missing particles are the solution. We also don't know how to detect those new particles if they do exist. Gravitons, sterile neutrinos, and black matter particles (whatever those may be) would be electrically neutral and barely interact with anything -- much less a particle detector. We suspect we will be able to detect them indirectly if they exist at all. There is a slim chance that there may be more than one type of Higgs, but other Higgs are not necessary for the theory to work and other Higgs would be at much higher energy levels.

You are correct that no one knows for certain -- that's the whole reason they conduct the experiments. But, the very well known math and theory strongly suggest that we're done. It's the wild supposition arguments that hope there's something more.

And that's not because they don't WANT to find new physics... it's just... quantum mechanics and particle physics are so well understood that it would be extremely surprising to find other fundamental particles -- b/c if they exist, they must be very very weakly interacting with all the known particles or at least very short lived to not cause chaos with the currently understood theory.

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

"we could describe all of its attributes long before we actually found it"

Except the mass, which is what the experiments looked for?

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

We also don't know how to detect those new particles if they do exist

We know with virtual certainty that we will discover them the same way we discovered practically every other particle in the standard model (pace the electron and photon, which were described well before the standard model, and the neutrino, which was expected by earlier theory): by examining the daughter products of high energy collisions, looking in particular for unusual and unexpected variations in the number, magnitude, and direction of jets.

Anything like a neutrino would manifest itself as a change in one of these observables, as it would carry off "invisible" momentum just like neutrinos do, for instance.

If the collisions produce sufficient particles of any type -- from gravitons to axions to spartners -- they'll leave observables, and those can be matched to some model (or perhaps generate *new* approaches to modelling them, which could be a cooler outcome).

Of course, there is no guarantee that these will be produced at all (or in reasonable number) during the forthcoming LHC run. But that would be a useful outcome too, because the value of theoretical physics as a science in this area is not its ability to generate or extend models which encompass new observations (or even propose new observations), but in killing off unsuccessful models and increasing our knowledge about the restrictions placed by nature on microscopic states.

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[RockDoctor]

What if the research would require about 20% more energy than the LHC is capable of?

Technologies are under development (so years to decades away from an engineering proposal) that can exceed the LHC energies on a footprint comparable to the present-day SLAC site. Keeping the machine's dimensions down to the size of existing sites means that building the Next Big Thing remains credible, if expensive.

Re: Dark Matter and Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

...saturnal rings?

Re: Dark Matter and Energy

[marcelfilm2109]

...saturnal rings?

Re:Dark Matter and Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

The point (or attempted point...) of an article like this is that there may be such a large gap between what we can do and what energy range things get interesting again, that it is not just a matter of waiting for another break through or two. Even if plasma based accelerators vastly exceed current capabilities and achieve a TeV per cm acceleration (so LHC shrunk to the scale of a person), and that could be scaled up to SLAC sized, there is the possibility that such a 300 PeV accelerator may still not be enough. This is orders of magnitude smaller than extreme cosmic rays, which may still be another several orders of magnitude short of the scales needed under some of the more pessimistic theories.

Not a physicist but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The source of gravity?

Wormholes, do they exist (outside of theory or models), how to work with them, etc?

There's gotta be more out there.

Re:Not a physicist but...

[toonces33]

The article only talks about experimental particle physics.

Re:Not a physicist but...

[david_thornley]

And, at that point, we're running low on stuff we can experiment with. I don't know how we'd make a wormhole in a lab. It wouldn't end observational physics.

Re:Not a physicist but...

[fredgiblet]

I don't think either of those are relevant to the LHC.

Citation needed

[belrick]

In the article this: "it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more. " is asserted without supporting evidence.

Re:Citation needed

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no evidence it's just an assumption that our only current models of particle physics beyond these energies (i.e. string theory and some versions of super-symmetry) require these ridiculous energies.

But you're right, it's a rather bad assumption that we'll never come up with a theory that's testable at earth creatable energies. People have put a lot of work into the testable versions of super-symmetry, and so far it hasn't panned out. I'd expect if the LHC shows this version of super-symmetry is wrong, someone will come up with some other theory that's testable eventually.

Re:Citation needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Evidence of absence isn't required.

> If the (100+ TeV) LHC discovers something not predicted by the Standard Model (the equations used to describe the known elementary particles and forces), then clarifying this new discovery will become a major target, and possibly the main target, of the 100 TeV machine

Some 100+ TeV LHC are being built, for exploratory purposes.

We have an understanding of what particles due at these energy ranges. Physics models predict (with high confidence) accurately. It's only when we get into higher order energy levels that we start to have less confidence. Currently, there is no clear target; more precisely, there are lots of possible targets, but none that we know could emerge to be a major, central one. The reasonable assumption is that we have an accurate understanding, without the need for direct evidence.

tl;dr It's reasonable to believe a high school kid spinning a roulette wheel to find local physics conforming to existing models, without evidence. If we could get the ball to reach near-light speed, then there's a reason to perform experiments.

Re:Citation needed

[jfengel]

The idea is that if we don't find anything, the next most likely place to go looking is at the energy where the strong, weak, and electrical forces unify, around 10^13 TeV. The number they give is a few orders of magnitude below that; we probably wouldn't have to get all the way to the grand unification energy to see hints of new particles. I think that's the evidence you're looking for; it's justified by our present theory.

It's a "reasonable assumption" in that those theories begin to break down at that scale. We expect our theories to hold quite well, which would mean that we wouldn't expect to find anything novel until we got close. And then we have every reason to expect to find new things, which is what you need to help drive a theory that's measurably different from our present one.

Of course we never know what we'll find, but it would be hard to build any sort of intermediate-sized collider, which would cost insane amounts of money, and theory predicts that it wouldn't find anything of value unless it were even bigger. It could be even worse; they might not find anything for a few more orders of magnitude, at which point they'd be probing not just the strong, weak, and electrical forces, but also gravity. We know for certain that the theory breaks down there, but the amount of energy required to probe the breakdown is simply ludicrous.

Re:Citation needed

[TechyImmigrant]

In the article this: "it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more. " is asserted without supporting evidence.

Solid state physics has plenty to look at and it doesn't need things to be that hot. More commonly it needs things to be cold.

Re:Citation needed

[thinkwaitfast]

This was common assumption in the physics world for at least 20 years.

Re:Citation needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to build a "Ringworld" accelerator, 150 million kilometers diameter or more.

Stop thinking so small

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing preventing us from building something bigger than the LHC. This is just the beginning.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[Anonymous Coward]

What we really need is a LHC-Collider; what happens when you smash to LHCs together that are smashing photons together?

Re:Stop thinking so small

[Anonymous Coward]

> And even if we build a particle accelerator to the fullest capacity of our technology around the equator of the Earth, we still couldn’t reach those energies.

Known physics is preventing us. So yes, there is.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[DRJlaw]

There is nothing preventing us from building something bigger than the LHC. This is just the beginning.

While the money representing the $13.25 billion that the LHC project required may be infinite, the labor and resources that it represents is not.

Let's presuppose that you could raise the collision energy of the LHC by 10^12 to cross this so-called "energy desert." If that only requires increasing cost by 10^2.... you're talking more than 1 trillion dollars. For this one science project.

In contrast to other projects such as space, proteomes, etc., there's precious little likelihood that there will be applications for the particles and forces discovered. The energies are simply too high to make these more than single-digit-off technologies. What's the Tevatron doing these days?

Re:Stop thinking so small

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no price too high for knowledge.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[ganjadude]

just imagine a beowulf cluster of those!

Re:Stop thinking so small

[khallow]

There is no price too high for knowledge.

Aside from the obvious fact that no, we aren't actually willing to pay any price for knowledge, you still have opportunity cost. We could spend as in the example given, a trillion dollars to run this new machine or we could spend that trillion dollars on other research, indeed other high energy physics, and get more knowledge.

To claim that there's no price to high is to be profoundly ignorant of economics.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a very idealistic view, but not a realistic one.

While we always need to push the boundaries of knowledge, it cannot be done at the expense of letting our infrastructure deteriorate, or at the expense of having the poorer members of society starve to death, etc.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't say anything about it being a limitation of physics. It's a limitation of our technology. Newer technology that hasn't yet been invented might allow them to be reached on earth - either more powerful accelerators, or a completely different way of accelerating the particles until they reach those energies.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[MightyMartian]

No application we can think of. That's like someone mocking the guys making frogs' legs jump with electrical current in the 18th century. "Oh yes, very interesting, but so what?" And yet, within a half a century or so of those first gimmicky experiments with electricity, we had built the first high speed data network in history, revolutionizing, well, just about everything, and within a few decades of that we were replacing gas lights with light bulbs, people were using welding machines to build large steel structures and that changed, well, everything.

There really is no way you can stick a long term price tag on basic research. Right now, figuring out what lies beyond the Standard Model is an interesting abstraction. But in fifty years, or a hundred years of us cracking that code, who the hell knows what we'll be building? Exotic materials, new propulsion systems, new communications systems, who knows? If the last five hundred years of scientific research has taught us anything, it's that science is the field out of which technical innovation is grows, and basic research is the fertilizer.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[tnk1]

Well they did say with current technology...

And the suggestion that 100 million TeV couldn't be produced with a smasher that girded the Equator means we would have to do a *lot* better than current technology to make such a device because then we're talking about building megastructres in space as being almost the only option from then on.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[DRJlaw]

No application we can think of.

Making frogs legs jump did not cost $13.25 billion dollars. No single high speed data link on earth costs $13.25 billion dollars, or, being generous, the $5 billion capex involved in the facility, omitting the opex entirely.

I meant what I said. Ignoring the reason why I stated that there would not be a reasonable application does nothing to rebut that.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[Anonymous Coward]

what happens when you smash to LHCs together that are smashing photons together?

A Double-Decker with Swiss cheese.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[Anonymous Coward]

I cleaned my feet of toe jam and weighed it. How much would you be willing to pay me to share that knowledge?

Re:Stop thinking so small

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't seem to understand the core concept with physics research. The difference between frog leg experiments and the LHC is that electricity is an obvious phenomenon. Electrical discharges are common, you can see them with the naked eye. We've explored and come up with comprehensive theories for pretty much all physics that can be observed with the naked eye, the microscope, the electron microscope, and now we're seemingly running up against the limits of particle accelerators. The knowledge that we're after is very non-obvious: phenomena that either occur rarely or are extremely difficult to detect, or both.

There's a historical pattern here, of people crossing deserts. The first journey across a desert is arduous, hellish. You have no idea what's on the other side. Often you die before reaching it. Then a crossing succeeds, and some new resource is discovered. Which of course does no one any good; it's far from other people, and as Publius Syrus said, everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it: no purchasers, no value. So then an equally arduous journey needs to be made back across the desert. From what we know of history, there is no resource that goes unexploited. Eventually it will be worthwhile to set up a regular caravan.

Argument by analogy, I know, but we're talking about things which by nature are impossible to value. Physics research gives us tools to affect the fundamental nature of reality. Quantum mechanics has given us thinking machines (or the next thing to it). It took a long time to get there from making frog legs jump, but it's still using the same principles of electromagnetism. Finding a useful purpose for the research coming out of the LHC will take much longer, but who is to say that it will not open the stars to us? Fundamental physics research is an investment of the longest term. Does it make sense to throw trillions at it? Sure -- over a few decades perhaps. Should other sciences get more funding? Probably. But one shouldn't make a judgment about the relative value of either.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[7-Vodka]

There is no price too high for knowledge.

Every human action (and inaction) is a choice between options. Quite often from an incalculably large pool of options and trees.

Choosing to pay for a big science project now is choosing not to do a gazillion combinations of other large and small searches for knowledge. Are you really so confident you know the best course of action?

Obviously, there are additional problems:

1. You are forcibly depriving individuals of their private property for your pet project. This is immoral.
2. There are other goals than knowledge. Worthy goals, which other people may have a higher preference for.
3. There's also obviously a time-preference calculation. Do you want to spend your resources on 10 units of knowledge achieved immediately, or do you spend your resources on the promise of 100 units of knowledge 8 years from now? The obvious answer is the second choice if you ignore time preference. However we have time preference for a reason, what if the knowledge in option two never materializes?
4. If the wrong decision is made, do you stay the course or change directions?

Quickly these decision trees exceed the abilities of any central planner. Funny enough, this is why socialism and communism always fail in the long run. It's almost impossible to central plan very complex systems efficiently and it is entirely impossible to central plan everyone's means for everyone's personal preferences and goals.

Re:Stop thinking so small

[khallow]

That's like someone mocking the guys making frogs' legs jump with electrical current in the 18th century. "Oh yes, very interesting, but so what?"

But that research had considerable short term value. After all, wouldn't you consider it very useful to know that electricity is the basis of biological communication/control between brain and muscle? And the research was cheap. The experiment wasn't that expensive to undertake. LHC is a lot more.

Merely hoping that the long term value of research exceeds its cost, is profoundly unscientific. Even if we choose to ignore that scientific research is no different than any other organized human endeavor, we still have that the systematic and rigorous exploration of scientific research routinely, mysteriously absents itself from the funding of the experiments in question and the valuation of that research.

I think all researchers would benefit from a research economics course in college just like the one they have for engineers.

Article is a complete lie

[Anonymous Coward]

What on earth is this article about? We KNOW the standard model is incomplete. It accounts for neither dark matter nor dark energy, which we know exist. Nor does it account for quantum gravity. Nothing even in the summary is close to accurate.

Re:Article is a complete lie

[cfalcon]

We don't know that dark matter or dark energy exist. At all. They are leading candidates, but they get that way from Occam's razor like reasoning, not direct observation or really even indirect observation.

Re:Article is a complete lie

[david_thornley]

There are gravitational fields where we can be pretty sure there's no conventional matter. Assuming that an incredible successful theory like General Relativity is accurate, that's observing dark matter.

Re:Article is a complete lie

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a big assumption for a theory that's incompatible with quantum theory and predicts singularities.

Re:Article is a complete lie

[tnk1]

We know the SM is incomplete. But we have a very good idea where we'd have to go to find the answers.

There's a difference between not knowing something because you have no idea where to look, and not knowing something because you know where to look, but you can't get there.

You might have a map leading to a horde of gold somewhere on Mount Everest. You have good coordinates and everything. Still, good luck actually trying to confirm that in person, let alone collecting it without a massive undertaking.

Re:Article is a complete lie

[TapeCutter]

Something we can't see is generating a gravitational field, something we can't see is expanding space itself. These are very well documented observations that have been given the names dark matter and dark energy. General relativity predicted dark energy, nobody believed the prediction. At the time people believed the the Sun was powered by coal, they were wrong but the observation "the sun is hot" was and still is undeniable. Similarly we can dream up all sorts of things to explain the expanding universe but the fact it is expanding is a robust and repeatable observation.

Re:Article is a complete lie

[david_thornley]

In what way is dark matter incompatible with quantum theory? Dark particles of whatever don't show up in the Standard Model, but there isn't anything in that model that says that nothing else exists. Why does the theory predict singularities? Singularities come from particularly concentrated mass, and it's a lot easier to concentrate mass that reacts electromagnetically. (What's wrong with singularities anyway?)

What other theory do you have to account for gravitational fields without matter that's not more cockeyed than the idea of dark matter?

Just turn it up

[richy freeway]

Turn it up to eleven.

Re: Just turn it up

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they could just rename it: the Really Large Hadron Collider. Heck, starting from Large there's lots of room to grow (huge, giant, enormous, gargantuan, etc.; plus prefixes: ultra-large, hyper-huge, etc.)

Re: Just turn it up

[thinkwaitfast]

Have you seen how big telescopes are named?

Hubris

[fyngyrz]

And even if we build a particle accelerator to the fullest capacity of our technology around the equator of the Earth, we still couldn’t reach those energies.

...within the context of currently understood science and technology.

Which is exactly the same contextual caveat Lord Kelvin failed to incorporate in his thinking.

Here's your money quote: Until we know everything, we don't know everything. And I assure you, we don't know everything.

--me

Re:Hubris

[Anonymous Coward]

And I assure you, we don't know everything.

My son does, he's made it a point to remind me on a near-daily basis.

Re:Hubris

[AchilleTalon]

Well, the point is not there isn't anything else to discover, the point is at which energy levels we can expect to find something. His assumption is based on the current theories and at which energy levels we can hope to find something. There is no reason we should observe particles at all energies and an energy desert is very likely and plausible. So, should we invest ressources, money and energy into the business of searching new particles at all energy levels without at least some indication they exists? Given the amount of money needed here, I don't think so. We should go ahead if we have a strong enough indication it may pay off.

In the mean time, we still have astronomical observations we can rely on and cosmic particles we can try to use given some are accelerated at energy levels much higher than what the LHC or any upcoming accelerator can reach. The problem being the luminosity, but in the case of cosmic particles, we have plenty of time to accumulate results on very long period of time to compensate for the infeasibility to build a large enough accelerator to reach these levels.

Re:Hubris

[fyngyrz]

You missed my point. His quote is based upon the current technologies we have to accelerate particles.

Re:Hubris

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said! They quoted Lord Kelvin and then immediately made the same mistake. What is the subtext here, "Lord Kelvin was arrogant and foolish, but we are not and there's no way we'll make the same mistake?"

Literally everything is wrong with the OP:

1). We already know that Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are correct and mutually incompatible. Yet all scientific history leads us to believe they must be integrated and reconciled. Which suggests there is physical law we don't understand (String Theory, Loop Quantum Gravity and all the rest are just interesting hypotheses at present);
2). There is suggestive evidence regarding Dark Matter and Energy. Whatever they are, we don't know, but it has to be important;
3). There is no serious, viable physics describing singularities;
4). The trigger for the Big Bang is still unknown;
5). Particle/Wave dualities are not fully explained. The Copenhagen Interpretation is ultimately unsatisfying;
6). Superconduction is not fully explained;
7). Quantum entanglement can cause information transmission faster than the speed of light. All explanations of this are nothing more than arm waving and efforts to divert attention from the core problem;
8). The LHC is a machine. It's an artifact of our ability to build things, our cleverness with technology. The suggestion that exploring higher energy levels can only be done with similar but larger machines fundamentally misunderstands this. In time we will be able to build different machines with the same aim. Just because the LHC is state of the art now, are you really so short-sighted as to suggest we can never do better? You sound like a Victorian, lamenting our fundamental, permanent inability to travel faster than 40 MPH, due to the fact that horses will never become any faster. While true it's irrelevant!

Re:Hubris

[TapeCutter]

What is the subtext here, "Lord Kelvin was arrogant and foolish, but we are not and there's no way we'll make the same mistake?"

Jebus, do geeks not understand humility and self-deprecation? By quoting Lord Kelvin he is saying - even great minds sometimes forget that by definition today's science will be 'wrong' tomorrow, what follows is the best answer we have right now.

'wrong' - Maybe it will be clear if I link to a popular sci-fi writer.

Re:Hubris

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't the seesaw mechanism proposed for explaining neutrino oscillations require something to exist in the desert? I thought this was one of the more accepted explanations.

Should read "baryonic matter"

[gurps_npc]

As there very well may be some dark matter (one of several types of non-baryonic matter), left for us to investigate. The LHC and it's ilk simply can not detect dark matter.

WTF collider even bigger?

[Anonymous Coward]

Large scale space structures are planned by futurists using asteroid resources. The limit there is available asteroids. About one planet worth. Perhaps we would be better off making a virtual collider in space without all the hardware. Or skip it and do experimental testing of applied methods and skip the predictive physics. That's how we did it with rope and the wheel.

JJ

Re:WTF collider even bigger?

[HiThere]

If you're going for that approach, use a linear accelerator rather than a ring collider. (You would probably still want storage rings, etc.) That would let you handle leptons as well as baryons. And you don't need anywhere near as many steering magnets. Of course you don't get the multiple cycles through your accelerator, but it's fairly easy to mimic that by increasing the length, and since you're out in space and don't need to build the enclosure, you could even alter the distance between magnets in different experiments. You might want to build this fairly far out in the system, though. You want the solar wind to be weak enough not to be a problem (unless you orient it to point directly at, or away from, the sun, in that case perhaps you could use it...control would be a bit dicey, though). It might well be possible to build an accelerator over a AU in length. Controlling noise would be a problem, and station keeping. And power. But I don't see any reason that it isn't doable in principle.

Yeah, right ....

[Anonymous Coward]

"... Standard Model describes our Universe so well ..."

Dark Energy

Dark Mater

Quantum Gravity

Data loss in black holes

to just name a few.

It describes those sooooo well.

SM might cover the bulk of observed phenomenon but until you can point at anything you see and say "this is how/why that works" it is incomplete and humanity must never stop seeking answers.

And didn't someone say something similar about how everything that could be invented had?

captcha: "stagnant"

Re:Yeah, right ....

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion, all these indicate that the first theory which will be modified is GR. And yes, I am a physicist.

Re:Yeah, right ....

[flargleblarg]

Dark Mater

Is that a Pixar short based on Cars?

Re:Yeah, right ....

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with modding GR is that it's so damn accurate; fuck'n Einstein. (No not you, the fucker who came up with damn thing.)

Seriously, the anti-science people think physicists are trying to protect Einstein as the god and savior; fuck no. You break Einstein, and you go down in history as being as great if not greater than Einstein.

Re: Yeah, right ....

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's the ex-wife of Dark Vader.

Hard to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

that anyone would be stupid enough to say this out loud, let alone in print... And then to have it presented to the slashdot community seriously, is incredible.

Re:Hard to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

And then to have it presented to the slashdot community seriously, is incredible.

Could you imagine if presenting something to the slashdot community was considered credible peer review? The sum total of black hole knowledge would be found at goatse.cx

Re:Hard to believe

[thinkwaitfast]

My nuclear physics teacher said the same thing about the SCSC back in the 80's/90's. I've even heard it said on popular science education shows.

Just to be clear

[dlenmn]

TFA isn't saying that there might be no new particles. High energy physicists agree that there have to be new particles. TFA is saying that there will be new particles, but they may be almost impossible to find. That would be a bummer, but such is life. I think it's amazing that we've been able to probe such small length scales, but there are limits to what we can do given our resources.

The 19th and 20th century will stand out

[ganv]

When we look back from the year 5000, the years between 1800 and 1980 will stand out as the time period during which we figured out the main fundamental science to understand how the world around us works. We are not at the end of particle physics. There will be lots more to learn from higher energy and higher luminocity colliders, as well as studies of extremely high energy cosmic rays and astronomical data. But even if a bunch of new particles with masses in the TeV range are found, they won't change the models we use to describe materials, biology, planet formation, or neuroscience. Particle physics may make new discoveries or may turn cold, it is hard to say, but you can be essentially certain that it will not be practically useful.

Re:The 19th and 20th century will stand out

[Crashmarik]

Your paucity of imagination beggars mine.

Re:The 19th and 20th century will stand out

[Anonymous Coward]

People been pushing that idea forever. They were all wrong, and there is no reason to think that anything has changed and now that you say it it's true.

'Particle physics may make new discoveries or may turn cold, it is hard to say, but you can be essentially certain that it will not be practically useful.'

How the fuck do you know? Damn straight it's hard to say, it's actually impossible to predict the future, as far as we are aware. What if there's *loads* of new discoveries and they turn everything on it's head? Wouldn't be the first time. Newton's shit was tight and seemed like it explained it all until we had time and resources to dig deeper. IMHO high end physics shares more with philosophy than science and will continue to do so until there are experiments that prove or disprove the weird and wonderful stuff being proposed these days.

Re:The 19th and 20th century will stand out

[david_thornley]

Seriously, Lord Rutherford, didn't you predict that physics was essentially complete around 1900? Sure, there were a few things not yet understood, like Mercury's orbit, the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, black-body radiation, that sort of thing, but it certainly wasn't going to upset physics.

I assume you also agree that, even if there is some new physics that might explain black-body radiation and the photoelectric effect, that it can't possibly have practical applications, dealing with things far too small to be manipulated.

Re:The 19th and 20th century will stand out

[ganv]

I recommend you read the history more carefully. In 1900 the best scientists knew that they did not understand what matter was or why it had such strange spectra (Kelvin even spent quite a bit of effort trying to develop vortex descriptions of atoms.) They knew that they didn't know where the sun's energy came from. They knew that they knew almost nothing about how cells worked. But surprisingly, it turns out that they already did know most of what we currently think is important to teach to engineering students. There is no quantum mechanics or relativity in mechanical or civil engineering curricula, and it is a tiny part of EE and chemical engineering curricula. Even something on the order of half of introductory chemistry would be familiar to a chemist in 1900. Michaelson said "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered" in 1903, and you would have a very difficult time today making the argument that he was wrong. Engineers use classical physics and empirical materials science much much more than they use the quantum physics discovered this century.

Now fast forward to 2015. The anomalous experiments we have involve dark matter on the scale of galaxies and dark energy on the scale of the visible universe. What part of our solar system is not described adequately enough by the standard model and general relativity that you have reason to expect it will allow new technology? What do you expect the lifetime of particles beyond the standard model to be? (The Higgs Boson lifetime is 10^-22 s and I don't know of any technology that uses particles with lifetimes shorter than muons with lifetime of 10^-6 s.) There will be major breakthrough in science and technology in the future. Much of it will be in understanding and designing complex systems. But practical engineering is going to be done using things whose fundamental constituents are adequately described by the standard model and general relativity. It is simply wishful thinking based on a faith in progress that makes people so certain that fundamental science is going to keep revolutionizing our lives the way it did in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Re: The 19th and 20th century will stand out

[Anonymous Coward]

Our lives are going to be revolutionized a lot in the next decades, but not by knowledge and progress. Rather by the end of them. We are exhausting resources, and once they're gone, no more science. Sorry.

Re: The 19th and 20th century will stand out

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of science is not done on these large projects that require pooling lots of resources. Research can be resource intensive, especially if done on an accelerated timescale. But for nearly any level of resources, there is science that can and would be done. I've lost count of the number of projects I've seen that ran entirely off of decades old equipment sitting around some place, and it was just a matter of finding someone to put the time into it.

Re:The 19th and 20th century will stand out

[david_thornley]

Sure, physics around 1900 had some holes in knowledge, and Lord Rutherford acknowledged that while claiming that most of the work was done. He expected some sort of resolution on things like the photoelectric effect and the orbit of Mercury that would more or less conform with the physics he knew. I'm using him as an example of an eminent scientist who said a stupid thing through failure of imagination.

I don't understand why in one paragraph you claim that most engineering uses science as Rutherford knew it, and in the next you claim that practical engineering relies only on the standard model and relativity. It looks to me like you're saying that changes in the knowledge of science that really don't affect practical engineering affect engineering, in which case I don't see why future advances in science wouldn't affect engineering. The more precise we get, the more theoretical accuracy we need, and it isn't obvious to me that that's played out. We need relativity to set our GPS clocks. Will there be a new technology next century that requires much greater precision, provided by some new physics breakthrough?

It may be that further advances in physics won't have much effects on our lives. There's certainly a lot of development still in the current physics. On the other hand, I consider it premature to think that we've adequately explained the Universe, or that new physics won't make much difference.

Hmmmm....

[Mephistro]

"And even if we build a particle accelerator to the fullest capacity of our technology around the equator of the Earth, we still couldn’t reach those energies."

There are far bigger accelerators 'out there', and they're called quasars, pulsars and black holes. Even if the claims in the article apply, the study of high energy cosmic rays could help us to discover and study new particles, In a similar way to what is being done with neutrinos.

Disclaimer: IANAPP :-)

We still know so little

[cjonslashdot]

And yet physics cannot explain consciousness - seems like we have quite a way to go. (Although quantum mechanics seems to tell us that consciousness and reality are somehow linked - seems like there might be quite a bit to explore there.) And we still do not understand our where our universe sits in the total scheme of things - are we in a black hole? And do we really think that there is no new physics in the range of size down to the Plank length? For those who think that we know a-lot about reality, I recommend the book "Doubt and Certainty", by George Sudarshan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._C._George_Sudarshan) and Tony Rothman.

Re:We still know so little

[tomhath]

And yet physics cannot explain consciousness

Nor should it. Consciousness is a human invention, something we tell ourselves that we have even though it only exists in our minds.

Re:We still know so little

[wonkey_monkey]

And yet physics cannot explain consciousness

Define "explain." And how do you know it "cannot" explain it?

quantum mechanics seems to tell us that consciousness and reality are somehow linked

No, it doesn't.

Re:We still know so little

[Anonymous Coward]

>(Although quantum mechanics seems to tell us that consciousness and reality are somehow linked - seems like there might be quite a bit to explore there.)

No it doesn't, but there are some booga-booga types that will pretend that that is the case.

Re:We still know so little

[Anonymous Coward]

Nor should it. Consciousness is a human invention, something we tell ourselves that we have even though it only exists in our minds.

It can't be a human invention, consciousness is part of being human. It is something. "we" presupposes consciousness. Of course it only exists in our minds: Everything only exists in our minds. I can only conclude that you're either not conscious or stupid.

Re:We still know so little

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't, but there are some booga-booga types that will pretend that that is the case.

Yeah, booga-booga types like Roger Penrose.

Re:We still know so little

[lister king of smeg]

And yet physics cannot explain consciousness

Nor should it. Consciousness is a human invention, something we tell ourselves that we have even though it only exists in our minds.

wait a minute...

something we tell ourselves that we have

who is telling who? We (our consciousness or sense of self) tell us that we exist. = Cogito ergo sum. so for so good.

even though it only exists in our minds

and exists in what? itself...?
You are saying our mind is a fiction that only exist in our mind?...?
You do see the contradiction there right?

Re:We still know so little

[thinkwaitfast]

Penrose

Re:We still know so little

[Anonymous Coward]

(Although quantum mechanics seems to tell us that consciousness and reality are somehow linked

No, that's an extrapolation (a shaky one) from quantum mechanics really does say.

Re:We still know so little

[cjonslashdot]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:We still know so little

[cjonslashdot]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:We still know so little

[wonkey_monkey]

Yes? And? That doesn't actually answer anything.

We just opened the box.

[Anonymous Coward]

We've barely just scratched the surface of that box.

Most of what we know in particles physics is BASIC, at best. We understand some basic reactions, force mediators and that is about it.
We still don't full understand higgs, if we even truly HAVE found higgs, dark matter and energy, graviton or some other method of gravity, super-dense materials, space itself, quantum entanglement and about a million other things. Million is almost not even an exaggeration at this point with all the different discrete things we have found. (okay, it is, but still!)

Honestly, physics, and particle physics especially, is just getting to the really really exciting parts.
So much is going to be found out over the next 50 years alone, never mind the next few hundred.

If it doesn't? No point living after that I guess. If the universe was that boring, I wouldn't want to live.

Re: We just opened the box.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude...no point in living? We men haven't even learned how women work...do humanity a real favor and tackle that one. :)

Look for other things.

[fahrbot-bot]

... particles that the LHC should detect if they’re present ...

If only this thing could collide and detect small and medium hadrons.

Lacking scientific imagination ...

[hawkingradiation]

The summary is obviously full of holes, because there are plans to make matter/antimatter colliders that would harness way more energy. So yes we have identified a need, and we know that the Standard Model is incomplete and needs more work. Saying there is nothing new to discover truly lacks a scientific imagination. This is the same sort of bs that prevented the LHC or equivalent from being constructed in the US: "Will we find the 'God' particle?"

Don't think small

[Anonymous Coward]

>And even if we build a particle accelerator to the fullest capacity of our technology around the equator of the Earth, we still couldn’t reach those energies.

So build one the size of the solar-system.

Neutrinos

[Framboise]

Has this guy never heard that the mere fact neutrinos have a mass does not fit in the Standard Model, and that plenty of good experimental physics can be made on these particles?

Re:Neutrinos

[Ramze]

Neutrinos with mass certainly DO fit in the Standard Model. In fact, all 3 known left-handed neutrinos are a part of the standard model. Neutrinos are even known to oscillate between the 3 types. Originally, neutrinos were assumed to be massless as their mass is so incredibly tiny it couldn't be detected when the particles were first proposed and discovered. Their insignificant mass didn't alter any predictions the model made on particle physics at the time. That does not mean that they aren't more well understood today, nor that they have some magical capability that doesn't fit the framework of the standard model. They were just assumed to be massless because they moved at near light speed and there didn't seem to be any right-handed neutrinos detected that would show they interacted with the Higgs... also, every particle interaction that created them didn't have any missing mass that would need to be accounted for by the neutrino ejected from the collision.

There are theories on how and why the neutrinos oscillate between the 3 mass states and on how they interact with the Higgs to generate those masses. There are even theories that include right-handed "sterile" neutrinos that we haven't yet detected (and possibly can't ever hope to detect based on theories of their properties.) The fact that we can't prove it and don't have any good experiments in progress to figure it out doesn't mean the 3 flavors of neutrinos with their various masses don't fit perfectly well into the standard model as-is. These tiny, fast, ghostly particles just don't interact with regular matter very often, nor do they interact with electro-magnetic fields... so, it's very difficult if not impossible to devise experiments to definitively tell us much about how they generate their masses from the Higgs (or some unknown source) or why there are no detectable right-handed neutrinos (assuming they even exist... and if they do, that they exist for long enough to be detected before flipping back to left-handed ones).

 

Re:Neutrinos

[Framboise]

Sorry, but the Standard Model predicts *massless neutrinos*, while oscillations found in experiments prove non-zero masses.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model_(mathematical_formulation)#Neutrino_masses/
The extensions to the Standard Model that you mention could accommodate positive masses, but none of these is standard or unambiguously supported by experimental evidences yet.

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[Anonymous Coward]

So, StartsWithABang starts by telling us that Lord Kelvin was a fool for thinking there was nothing left to discover and then he goes on to say practically the same thing.

I see.

How many coin toss heads in a row is natural?

[Roger W Moore]

There is a good reason for that - there is no supporting evidence and, in fact, very strong evidence suggesting that it is completely wrong...but that's what you get with 'startswithabang', it usually ends with a whimper. The one of the most damning bits of evidence that there is something well before 10^19 GeV (no clue where he gets the 1^8 TeV figure from) is that the Higgs mass 125 GeV/c^2.

Unlike every other fundamental particle the Higgs has no spin, which means it has no intrinsic angular momentum like electrons, quarks, photons etc. This has the effect that quantum corrections very strongly affect its mass. In fact these corrections apply to the square of the Higgs mass and grow as the square of the energy scale so if the Standard Model is good up to the Planck scale at 10^19 GeV these corrections are of the order of 10^38 in size. Each Standard Model particle has its own correction to the Higgs mass with fermions and bosons providing opposite sign corrections.

Here is the problem though. In the Standard Model there is no symmetry between fermions and bosons and the coupling to the Higgs field, which determines these corrections, are all free parameters. So if we believe that there is nothing but the Standard Model before the Planck scale then we have an amazing co-incidence that a series of essentially random terms each of order 10^38 cancel so precisely that the remainder is of order 10^4.

To put that in context it would be like tossing a coin about 100 billion times and getting heads every single time. I don't know about you but personally I would start getting suspicious that something was fixing the result sometime around toss 100.

This is the issue with the Standard Model: the fact that there is a Higgs at 125 GeV is like the 100 billion coin tosses all coming up heads. The problem is that we do not yet know how nature is fixing the result but it does mean that the new physics required to fix it most likely occurs below ~10 TeV. While this is not a hard limit the higher in energy you go the less natural any accidental cancellation will be so really the energy limit where you expect new physics depends on how many times you can toss a coin and get heads before you believe that something is fixing the result.

Re:How many coin toss heads in a row is natural?

[Compuser]

I think the limiting factor is going to be financial. Nobody will be building single purpose science facilities at a cost which is a significant fraction of the GDP. My guess is that something on the scale of $10-20B is imaginable (i.e. something like the failed SSC) but much bigger is not. Now, couple this with the fact that CERN was only able to sell their expansion due to the hunt for Higgs. This was not some nebulous cancellation of perturbative corrections but a very real prize which could then for years validate the technical prowess of a entity like EU. So unless there is something truly fundamental, firmly expected and magically marketable to politicians beyond CERN LHC scale, then it is unlikely to happen.
Frankly, it is just as well. If I were a politician, I would allocate any new funding for identifying ways to reach higher energy scales cheaper. We need to shrink things like the ATLAS experiment down to lab-on-chip level. We need hard drives which can fit all data from CERN for a year on one platter. Give it a few hundred years of progress, shrink technology as much as possible, then scale up as need be.

Re:How many coin toss heads in a row is natural?

[Anonymous Coward]

something well before 10^19 GeV (no clue where he gets the 1^8 TeV figure from)

1e8 * 1e12 = 1e20 eV, which I suppose is kind of like GeV.

Re:How many coin toss heads in a row is natural?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone claiming they can reach higher energy scales cheaper is lying.

Build a linear accelerator, and special relativity redshifts your accelerating E field down to nothing.
Build a synchrotron, and the Bremsstrahlung losses grow at a horrifying rate as you increase the energy. AND special relativity still redshifts your accelerator field down to nothing, but at least you get to reuse the same accelerator sections.

Either way, the only solution is machines of rapidly *increasing* size, cost and energy consumption. Fundamental physics is a pitiless, ice-cold bitch to be sure.

There is perpetual interest in converting a light lepton accelerator (or at one point, the Tevatron) into a muon accelerator, but the short lifetime of the muon has kept anyone from coming up with a workable proposal so far. And, like all lepton accelerators, it would be awesome for precision measurements but you'd still need a bigger one to reach higher energies.

Re:How many coin toss heads in a row is natural?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or it's just that most other universes in the multiverse had the terms not cancelling which led them to not be able to support life, and it's all just essentially selection bias.

Re:How many coin toss heads in a row is natural?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the reasons for the multiverse theory coming into vogue. The easiest way to explain a billion coin tosses coming up heads in a row is to assume that you're actually doing quadrillions of coin tosses, at which point you expect that at some point there will be a run of a billion heads. There's no need for a "fixing function" if we just happen to live in the universe where the forces cancel out... if we didn't live in that universe, we wouldn't exist. No way to prove that's what's going on, at the moment, but the theories are being explored as more and more "balancing options" are crossed of the list by experimentation.

Re:How many coin toss heads in a row is natural?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're pretty legit man. I can't help but get the impression that you do this shit for a living and aren't simply showcasing something you learned in casual reading?

Re:How many coin toss heads in a row is natural?

[Anonymous Coward]

Laser acceleration (1 GeV/cm)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration

Just gotta up the beam current...

Re:How many coin toss heads in a row is natural?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's one of the ATLAS (one of the premier LHC experiments) collaborators; you can see his name on their authors' lists. He's also involved with PINGU, which observes astrophysical neutrinos.

Re: How many coin toss heads in a row is natural?

[Anonymous Coward]

Either way, the only solution is machines of rapidly *increasing* size, cost and energy consumption. Fundamental physics is a pitiless, ice-cold bitch to be sure.

In all seriousness, maybe the solution is to get particle physicists a shrink? Maybe this is a psychological barrier and not a physical one? Maybe physicists feel... inadequate?

also a Resonance Cascade will end most stuff as we

[Anonymous Coward]

also a Resonance Cascade will end most stuff as well. Better stock up on crowbar and ammo

Cracks in the Standard Model

[cyocum]

I guess the writer hasn't read this yet then?

Sounds like bollocks to me

[wonkey_monkey]

Why the LHC May Mean the End of Experimental Particle Physics

But Probably Won't, So Shut Up?

If there are no new particles found below about 2–3 TeV in energy—particles that the LHC should detect if they’re present—it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV or more.

So they're going to stop looking on the basis of a "reasonable assumption"? Not how science works, last time I checked.

Perhaps it should have been "Why the LHC may mean the next few years or even centuries of experimental particle physics might be a bit less exciting."

Re:Sounds like bollocks to me

[jo_ham]

The title is obvious nonsense, but the "reasonable assumption" is the Standard Model.

Re:Sounds like bollocks to me

[wonkey_monkey]

Surely a good way to test reasonable assumptions and make them even more reasonable (or overturn them) is to check all the places the assumption tells you not to bother looking.

Re:Sounds like bollocks to me

[jo_ham]

In normal scientific terms, yes, but the Standard Model, especially now that the Higgs has finished the puzzle, is as pretty close to "here's a map of where you'll find each particle within these ranges" as you're likely to see. The next range is also quite generally defined by the nuclear forces, and it's considerably higher than anything we can reasonably do right now (i.e., nowhere close even if we build an accelerator that circles the earth's equator.

Would you pay a 100% income tax?

[tepples]

There is no price too high for knowledge.

Sure, when you're spending Other People's Money. But would you be willing to contribute 100% of your income to a new collider?

known limitation

[ThorGod]

I remember going to a talk around 2003 where the upper limit of particle smashers was discussed by radius and compared to theoretical energy values for various particles. It's a known problem - and there have been (expensive) suggestions put forth for years.

Re:known limitation

[Maury Markowitz]

This is why paywalls suck:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-amateur-scientist-1989-04/

This article describes the solution.

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[vux984]

Not quite, he's saying there's lots left to discover. There just might not be anything left for the LHC to discover.

I suspect even that is false, that there will be all kinds of science to be done with it. But it may be true we don't discover any new particles with it by smashing things together, which is the thing it was built for.

This whole post is ridiculous

[NicknameUnavailable]

There are still particles known to exist with no supporting theory for why they exist.

Onion Said it First

[SunTzuWarmaster]

One year after confirming the existence of the Higgs Boson, or “God Particle,” scientists at CERN say they are struggling to find other uses for the giant particle accelerator. http://www.theonion.com/video/...

Ironically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if we discovered new physics at the current LHC energy levels, putting them to practical use would require accessing the particles involved at much smaller scales. There are desktop collide today...but they don't reach anywhere near LHC levels...

Re: Ironically...

[Anonymous Coward]

*colliders*

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[CreatureComfort]

There are collisions happening at energies MUCH higher than any man-made collider will ever achieve right above our heads, in the upper atmosphere, every second. It's just still much cheaper to build giant colliders than a reasonable detection system to gain new information from those collisions.

Once we've milked the LHC for all it can give, if it doesn't provide clues to it's successor, then we can start trying to catch cosmic rays in a controlled manner.

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[LifesABeach]

Why can't LHC's be built in space?

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[Anonymous Coward]

We've already started such things, with the Ice Cube Telescope looking at the collisions of cosmic rays with a kilometer cube block of ice and the the Auger Observatory looking at cosmic rays striking the atmosphere. There is a lot of room for improvement though, and the observations are now where near as detailed as with the collisions in LHC.

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[fredgiblet]

Building it would probably be a bigger endeavour than all the satellites and space stations we've launched combined. I'm sure it's possible, but you're probably looking at trillions of dollars.

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

it’s a reasonable assumption that there might not be anything new to find until energy scales of 100,000,000 TeV

Nope, not a reasonable assumption at all.

Re: breakaway science/civilizaiton

[Anonymous Coward]

The LHC in space wouldn't give any better results than the LHC on earth. It's about acceleration distance, so you need a bigger distance and more powerful magnets to get higher power. Or you wait till something that has been accelerated by a galaxy hits a slow moving nitrogen atom in the upper atmosphere.

Wake me up when dark matter/energy are explained

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many unknowns to declare discovery done. What is time? Why discrepency between current theories? Why all these constants?

Limiting Factor is Cleverness

[Roger W Moore]

I think the limiting factor is going to be financial.

That's one way to look at it but I prefer to think that the limiting factor is really cleverness. The techniques we use in the LHC to accelerate particles are fundamentally the same as those used since the 1930's albeit with significant, incremental improvements. We have indeed reached the financial limit of current accelerator technology but there are alternatives.

One way, as you suggest, would be to go for new acceleration techniques. Plasma physicists have had some impressive results with particle acceleration but while the accelerating gradients are incredible there are major issues with reproducibility, scaling and intensity.

Another way to go is to let nature do the acceleration for you. There are an increasing number of experiments looking for or studying exceedingly high energy particles from astrophysical sources e.g. IceCube, Hesse, Auger etc. The problem there is that there are not very many of these particles so you need a big detector to have a chance of seeing enough to be able to study them.

Lastly you can let quantum mechanics give you access to physics well above the energy scale that you are at through 'virtual' particles. For example nuclear beta decay is only possible through the W-boson which has a mass ~80 times that of the proton and so larger than some of the nuclei which beta decay! If we can observe rare decays of particles which the Standard Model says are forbidden we can start to get some idea of the new physics out there. An example of this is the search for proton decay which 'grand unification' models of the fundamental forces suggest should happen through extremely heavy (10^16 times the mass of a proton) particles which is why the proton is so incredibly stable.

So that's three possible ways around the financial limit of ever larger accelerators so with the 'easy', incremental option off the table really we are now only limited by how clever we can be in coming up with ways around this.

SI Prefices

[Roger W Moore]

1e8 * 1e12 = 1e20 eV, which I suppose is kind of like GeV.

1GeV=1e9 eV. The 'G' is the SI prefix 'giga-'...just like the 'T' you correctly identified as 'tera-'! ;-)

Re:Wake me up when dark matter/energy are explaine

[fisted]

Why all these constants?

Because we're using the wrong units.

Neutrino Radiation

[Roger W Moore]

but the short lifetime of the muon has kept anyone from coming up with a workable proposal so far.

The other problem they had with the muon accelerator proposals which Fermilab looked at a while ago was the lethal amounts of neutrino radiation from muons decaying. While neutrinos rarely interact at energies below a PeV if you get enough of them there can be enough interactions to be dangerous if a human stood in the beam and unfortunately shielding really isn't an option with neutrinos.

Re:Neutrino Radiation

[serviscope_minor]

Neutrion? Do you have a link. The only think I've read about lethal doses of neutrinos is this https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ which suggests you'd have to be about 2.3AU from a supergiant undergoing core collapse. (yes, XKCD, but plenty of citations).

Re:Neutrino Radiation

[radtea]

The other problem they had with the muon accelerator proposals which Fermilab looked at a while ago was the lethal amounts of neutrino radiation from muons decaying

I don't know where you got this from but it's not even remotely plausible. A muon beam intense enough to produce lethal levels of neutrinos would be intense enough to burn a hole through the Earth, and would have killed everyone via perfectly ordinary Bremsstralhung radiation long before neutrinos came into play.
 

Re:Neutrino Radiation

[Anonymous Coward]

What? The cross-section of a neutrino in the 100s of GeV for interacting with the human body is such that maybe one in a trillion will interact, and that is rounding up, and assuming electron neutrinos. Were they seriously proposing something with a luminosity higher than LHC? Otherwise, a person standing right in such a neutrino beam would never notice, and probably actually have zero interactions.

Re:Neutrino Radiation

[Roger W Moore]

Taking your interaction rate without question a trillion is 10^12. The LHC has several orders of magnitude more protons than that in each beam and remembering that muons decay it seems entirely reasonable that a muon collider would probably need even more to have the same number of particles. Even one interaction could be serious at these energies since it will shatter a nucleus and create a shower in the body however the rate would more likely be hundreds per second given the same particle counts as the LHC.

The threat was bad enough to be seriously considered: see this paper.

Also, stop thinking so BIG. There are other ways.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

There is nothing preventing us from building something bigger than the LHC.

Like building it in orbit - or solar orbit. B-)

But that's just scaling up a particular method of accelerating particles. There are other ways to get to higher energies in MUCH shorter distances.

For instance: plasma acceleration, both wakefield and other approaches.

A couple laser pulses into a plasma and you can create fields that accelerate electrons to a couple GeV in as many centimetres, something that takes about four orders of magnitude more path length in classic accelerator approaches. You're talking doing on a tabletop what had been done on a "staple across the San Andreas fault".

And this technology is just getting started. Given big enough laser systems (on the scale of those at the National Ignition Facility) I don't see any reason you shouldn't be able to both get somewhat stronger and keep it up for miles. (Or, in solar orbit, for astronomical units.) Getting the timing of things like wakefilds right is just a matter of geometry, not anything fancy.

Unless some new particles screw it up, of course. But that's what you're looking for, right? B-)

Nonsense

[kenwd0elq]

_EVERY_ time somebody says "There's nothing new to be learned", within a few years we discover that there are vast realms of reality that we had never suspected might exist. Between "string theory" and "dark matter" and "dark energy", there are enough assumptions and hand-waving to make me think that we're about at that stage again.

"Real Soon Now", we're going to discover that the current generations of physics professors have been chasing after imaginary rabbits and that reality is very different. Our understanding of the universe will be completely changed - again - and we'll be in for a new era of discovery. Where that will lead, I can barely guess.

Re:Nonsense

[Maury Markowitz]

_EVERY_ time somebody says "There's nothing new to be learned",

That's great, but that's not what the article says.

It says we don't know how to build the machine that will demonstrate the new stuff.

Heisenberg

[Anonymous Coward]

The coolest thing about physics is the uncertainty principal. Even now, some experiments are casting doubts upon the "standard model". Trust me (the husband and son of particle physicists), we "haven't seen anything yet"! There are wonders that we mere humans cannot comprehend just waiting to be discovered!

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the best AC comments I've read in the 8 years I've masochistically visited this site.

Look up

[Anonymous Coward]

And even if we build a particle accelerator to the fullest capacity of our technology around the equator of the Earth, we still couldnâ(TM)t reach those energies.

there is a great vacuum over our heads...

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[daknapp]

Umm, no. The Ice Cube detects neutrinos, not cosmic rays. Completely different thing.

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[Anonymous Coward]

Just create a machine that builds the segments automatically in a slight curve until it goes around. It may take hundreds of years, but once you have it going...

Re:Also, stop thinking so BIG. There are other way

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see any reason you shouldn't be able to both get somewhat stronger and keep it up for miles. (Or, in solar orbit, for astronomical units.) Getting the timing of things like wakefilds right is just a matter of geometry, not anything fancy.

How to scaling up wakefield accelerators is still an open, complex issue, and the whole reason why they haven't taken the table top models and just made a more expensive building size one that can out perform traditional accelerators.

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[Anonymous Coward]

Ice Cube detects a huge number of cosmic rays. When looking for neutrinos, they have to filter the cosmic rays out, or look only at neutrinos that are coming up from the ground. The data from the cosmic rays is still there regardless, and a fair amount of researchers are looking at non-neutrino data. Additionally, looking at atmospheric neutrinos gives you data about cosmic rays (with enough fidelity to see the shadow of the moon). Heck, even the predecessor, the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array, has muon right in its name.

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[SuricouRaven]

Because you'd still be trying to build an object larger than the earth. It's going to be rather expensive.

"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[tlambert]

"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

Actually, there are a couple of rather trivial methods by which such energies can be achieved, and you don't even need something as large as an LHC for any of them.

Re:"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[serviscope_minor]

Care to enlighten us? Or are you just going to sit around pointing at how TFA is wrong on a obscure subject without actually informing anyone of anyhthing.

Re:"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[tlambert]

Care to enlighten us? Or are you just going to sit around pointing at how TFA is wrong on a obscure subject without actually informing anyone of anyhthing.

If the subject is obscure to you, you would not understand the explanation.

Why don't you wait to find out with everyone else after we run the experiments at SLAC?

Re:"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone actually in the "obscure" field of accelerator physics, you are just full of it. There is nothing close to "trivial" methods to reach the energies that a lot of new physics theories are suggesting is needed. And while SLAC does a lot of fine work pushing forward accelerator physics, traditional accelerators are not going to gain another order of magnitude any time soon because we're at material limits for the actual RF chambers used to accelerate beams. Plasma based accelerators still have several orders of magnitude in scaling up to go before they can replace traditional accelerators, and no one is quite sure of how to get them to scale better.

Even then, if we magically had a thousand fold energy improvement to our accelerators tomorrow, we would still me many orders of magnitude short of of what theorists want and we may possibly actually need. But that isn't going to happen just tomorrow. Accelerators will get stronger, more space efficient, higher luminosity, etc., but it will be a slow process, far from trivial with the many roadblocks being dealt with now.

Re:"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[serviscope_minor]

Ah ok, so you don't know. Was that really so hard to just say so?

Re:"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[tlambert]

"I don't believe you know X! Prove it by disclosing X to me! You will do this because you are as stupid as I am assuming you to be!"

Is this how you got your first information that VAX/VMS error logs were world-readable, and thus disclosed failed login credentials and password typos that made it easy to log in as someone else? You tricked someone into telling you about the log file by appealing to their hubris?

Nice troll, though...

Re:"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[tlambert]

As someone actually in the "obscure" field of accelerator physics, you are just full of it. There is nothing close to "trivial" methods to reach the energies that a lot of new physics theories are suggesting is needed.

Well, not that I believe an AC that has no academic standing, you are at least not as condescending and childish as serviscope_minor, so I will give you a hint:

Smart people build better accelerators.

Brilliant people build better beam targets.

Re:"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll, though...

I would say this is self descriptive, but you could've been more efficient by writing even less and still trolling people just as much. On the other hand, if you were being serious, you could also have written a lot less by just naming the technology/research/a paper, allowing people to learn from themselves and shutting up people calling you a troll. Instead, you seem more interested in playing a game, and have shown zero actual knowledge of the subject, even when others have called you out on it with actual details.

Re:"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[Anonymous Coward]

If you wanted to refer to FACET, you could have at least mentioned the name so that others who are curious can look it up, instead of just assuming you're a troll (and those that know about it can still view you as troll/naive because of your awkward wording...). However, everything I said in the previous post still applies. Nothing about the work at SLAC will bring a trivial replacement for LHC in the next decade. In a long time scale it will yield improvements, but they are going to be much more difficult than anything done before. As already said, plasma accelerators still have scaling issues. Just because you can achieve some amazing acceleration gradient doesn't mean you can just carbon copy it ten times and get ten times the energy.

Re:"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[serviscope_minor]

"I don't believe you know X! Prove it by disclosing X to me! You will do this because you are as stupid as I am assuming you to be!"

Well, you're claiming to be smarter than the people that built CERN. I think it's a fair assumption that you are in fact not. And your vague claims about knowing how to do it better than all the world's physicists are at best funny.

Is this how you got your first information that VAX/VMS error logs were world-readable, and thus disclosed failed login credentials and password typos that made it easy to log in as someone else? You tricked someone into telling you about the log file by appealing to their hubris?

Holy non sequiteur, Batman! Where did that analogy come from? I've never used VAX/VMS and your analogy doesn't make any sense anyway because it doesn't relate to the subject at hand. Or are you trying to prove to me that you know arcane facts about obscure operating systems so clearly you are also smarter than all the world's physicists?

Nice troll, though...

Ah yes, calling out dishonest now is trolling. Righty ho...

Re:"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[tlambert]

"I don't believe you know X! Prove it by disclosing X to me! You will do this because you are as stupid as I am assuming you to be!"

Well, you're claiming to be smarter than the people that built CERN. I think it's a fair assumption that you are in fact not.

First of all, I never made that claim.

Second of all, I don't really consider your opinion any more relevant than that of Charles Holland Duell.

Re:"we still couldn’t reach those energies"

[serviscope_minor]

First of all, I never made that claim

You claimed it would be trivial to substantially beat the LHC. If it were trivially obvious to the world's pyhsicists, they would have beat that better system. Ergo you are claiming to be smarter than the world's physicists, but apparently not smart enough to follow a logical line of reasoning. Interesting.

You're still also full of it because you're unable to back up your completely wild claim.

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[Cyberax]

It _does_ detect muons from cosmic ray interaction with the atmosphere, which are easily distinguished from neutrinos.

Re: Wake me up when dark matter/energy are explain

[Anonymous Coward]

Then we could just use those units that turn all constants to 1, pi, e , etc but for the pesky fact that there are more constants loose than units to choose.

Question from the ignorant

[LostMyBeaver]

First of all... this is the first article in a REALLY long time on Slashdot where I've seen genuine intelligence being applied in the comments. There are absolutists, nay-sayers, pragmatists and more here and I swear, I feel like I've grown smarter from the comments which is just so rare for most articles. So... thank you everyone for contributing to my personal education, I mean this wholeheartedly.

I've seen many comments that make many good points.

We have the obvious which is "using LHC technology, scaling an accelerator to the next useful step would require a longer 'straight stretch' than we have available"

There's also "The possibility and benefits of acquiring a budget to consider another accelerator undertaking at the suggested massive scale, even if achievable wouldn't be profitable as the results we expect to gain based on current theory couldn't justify the project when the money can be better spent on studying other sciences which can be applied more easily"

There's also "We have ideas of what to look for next, but we're lacking legitimate proposals for how to make the observations." followed by "We're pretty sure we can observe these things if we slam enough energy into it."

The nice ones I see are the people who suggest thinking outside the box and using techniques like beaming lasers into plasma to produce higher voltages in smaller spaces. (did I summarize that properly)

I have seen a few small comments about better sensor technology. A few about data storage and processing constraints. I've seen of course the mandetory goofing around and as always the statements made by the ignorant providing solutions to problems they can barely spell let alone understand.

Let me ask a few small questions and hope for an answer from the people here who I believe are quite brilliant on this topic.

1) Does an accelerator have to be in one big line or is it acceptable to wrap it around a core like thread on a spool?

2) Do we actually need higher voltages to produce the reactions we're looking for or do we theorize these reactions happen at levels achieved within the limits of the LHC but we lack the knowledge or tools (maybe even theories) to observe the results?

3) While SM doesn't appear to explain everything, what is an example of what it fails to explain? (Wikipedia didn't help me here)

4) While I wish I could devote 20 years of my life to becoming knowledgeable enough to understand this topic, I am curious, beyond satisfying our curiosity, what additional benefits to we hope to achieve by detailing the standard model further? Higgs to me made sense, but I don't understand what components we feel we're missing that are scientifically profitable beyond what we already have found. It feels like finding another digit of PI. Unless we find a way to make PI a rational number, I don't see that the next 1 or 1 million digits will matter much.

5) To use the PI example again... could we ever complete the standard model? Or will it be like PI... no matter how many digits we find, there will always be more afterwards?

I thank you in advance if you do in fact take the time to answer my questions. I have 20 more, but I just grabbed the first 5 that came to me. I feel I've made it sound like I'm on the budget committee trying to pull funding, but in reality, I'd love to see the next step. If a complete and accurate standard model is even possible I would love to see it happen. I'm just curious as to whether a completed standard model is actually possible.

Re:Question from the ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Does an accelerator have to be in one big line or is it acceptable to wrap it around a core like thread on a spool?

No. For example, the LHC is not straight, it's round. You could probably make it like a toroidal coil if you really wanted, but the idea is that it has to be "almost straight", because the more you curve it the more centripetal acceleration you get on the particles, leading to energy loss through EM radiation. As some other commenters noted, there might be some other methods of accelerating particles over smaller distances, e.g. plasma.

2) Do we actually need higher voltages to produce the reactions we're looking for or do we theorize these reactions happen at levels achieved within the limits of the LHC but we lack the knowledge or tools (maybe even theories) to observe the results?

Yes. Not voltages per se but energy, which particle physicists measure in electron-volts. 1eV is the kinetic energy an electron (or proton for that matter) gains when traveling over 1 volt of potential difference, but you don't actually use 1 trillion volts to accelerate particles to 1TeV, the accelerating is done "in steps". You need high energy in order to produce those interesting reactions before you can begin to observe the results.

3) While SM doesn't appear to explain everything, what is an example of what it fails to explain? (Wikipedia didn't help me here)

Dark matter, dark energy, gravity, and as somebody else noted, why the numbers describing things such as the strength of forces, which are "free parameters" in the SM, have the values they actually have. The SM allows you to "plug in" these numbers into the calculations, but gives no explanation or indication whatsoever as to why or how those values come up. They are basically measured experimentally.

4) [...] what additional benefits to we hope to achieve by detailing the standard model further? Higgs to me made sense, but I don't understand what components we feel we're missing that are scientifically profitable beyond what we already have found. It feels like finding another digit of PI. Unless we find a way to make PI a rational number, I don't see that the next 1 or 1 million digits will matter much.

See answer to 3. Also, while we know exactly how to calculate the nth digit of PI, and have software to do so, we don't really know how the Universe works "deep inside". So of course new discoveries will be scientifically profitable; whether they will be financially profitable is a totally different matter. That being said, some interesting technologies have emerged from CERN et al, as they were needed to support the science being done. See grid computing for example.

5) To use the PI example again... could we ever complete the standard model? Or will it be like PI... no matter how many digits we find, there will always be more afterwards?

Possibly, possibly not. We can't know until we try. But it is certainly incomplete *now* and that means it's worth researching further.

Re:Question from the ignorant

[serviscope_minor]

... thing about a spool ...

A spool won't help. It's not the length that matters, it's the radius of curvature.

Basically, accelerating electrons make changing electromagnetic fields and that means they produce photons. The charged particles zipping round the circular path emit radiation since that's constant acceleration. The smaller the curve and the faster they go, the more they emit. The energy released like that is what determines the maximum speed. Once the radation out matches the energy in, they go no faster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, wrapping it in a spool won't help. The particles actually go round the circle many times and have their energy boosted on each go round.

Remember, Lord Kelvin was wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember Lord Kelvin was wrong. This is a common conceit among those of the current "in" theory, that it is all just dotting the is and crossing the t's. That Reality is all just what the theory said. If you don't test it, how will you know?

Even now, we know of problems in the Standard Model, but many say it is perfect. It doesn't match with Relativity, it has a fixed clock and fixed space, but experiments have borne out General Relativity, proving Quantum Physics wrong in this matter already.

Quantum physics looks like statistical classical physics, yet that doesn't show that there could be a deeper deterministic version of reality?

When physics turns from a description of reality into claims that it is reality, it has turned from science into philosophy; when we stop testing physics, it turns into religion. And we know what people do to those who question religion.

It is only according to current theory that there might not be anything left until we get massive accelerators, but current theory is not the only theory out there that match current observables, there are several other theories lying about that also match, but are rejected because they don't predict any testable differences in the current regime. That does not make the current theory correct in all aspects, only reasonably accurate in its description within the tested regime. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (ie. just because an asteroid hasn't fallen down and killed you doesn't mean an asteroid can never fall down and kill humanity)

100 years from now..

[Anonymous Coward]

This prediction will look just as silly as the one that's derided here...

We will ever learn?

And what about those anomalies they just detected?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a few days ago CERN announced in the “Physical Review Letters” an important article regarding an anomalous effect discovered by the Large Hadrons Collider in the experiment LHCb. B mesons have an anomalous tendency to decay into tau leptons instead of into muons, in which they are supposed to decay along the Standard Model.

AFAIK this is the third kind of anomaly not fitting in the Standard Model they found. And there are a lot of other unexplained phenomena found by other institutes that cannot be explained with the Standard Model, either.

Those who claim that the end of physics is near nowadays will one day sound as stupid as Lord Kelvin does to us.

Re: Wake me up when dark matter/energy are explain

[Anonymous Coward]

There are unitless constants for which no change in units will remove or change.

Re: breakaway science/civilizaiton

[Anonymous Coward]

Good science takes patience and a willingness to let go of scientific dogma from time to time.

To Quote Arthur C. Clarke

[Toad-san]

(who had some damned wise things to say about a LOT of stuff .. curiously enough even the LHC:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quo...

"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[Maury Markowitz]

> Not quite, he's saying there's lots left to discover. There just might not be anything left for the LHC to discover.

Not quite, he's saying there's lots left to discover. We just don't know how to build the machine to discover it.

But of course that's really just particle scientists talking to accelerator builders. Astronomers are discovering new physics all the time, and its so weird that most in the field cover their ears, chant "la la la!" and pretend it doesn't exist.

Like, for instance, the story that came up right here on /. a few days ago about a fully developed galaxy only a few million years after the start of time. Nothing we currently know can explain this, so we just say it started that way. No problem! Black hole information paradox? Who cares! Mach's principle is based on what, exactly? The "distant stars"! Wavefunction collapse? Shut up and do your homework!

so much bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

pure hubrus to assume we have the entire universe figured out hell they havent explained dark matter and energy out beside the mere concept of them

Re:Your (lack of) Brains

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of what you say is either ignorant or incorrect.

3). There is no serious, viable physics describing singularities;

Please.

4). The trigger for the Big Bang is still unknown;

There's no basis for even theorizing about that. At this point it's not really a question for science to answer.

5). Particle/Wave dualities are not fully explained. The Copenhagen Interpretation is ultimately unsatisfying;

No, you simply do not understand the particle/wave duality. And the Copenhagen Interpretation is just an interpretation, not an explanation, and it doesn't change experimental results.

6). Superconduction is not fully explained;

Nothing is fully explained. Empiricism doesn't go in for full explanations, nor absolute truths. Low-temperature superconductivity does have a good explanation. We have hypotheses for HTS, but this has fuck-all to do with the LHC, which is concerned with high-energy physics, not condensed matter physics.

7). Quantum entanglement can cause information transmission faster than the speed of light. All explanations of this are nothing more than arm waving and efforts to divert attention from the core problem;

No it cannot, and you clearly have no idea what it even is. I understand that it's distressing to think that locality is not observed for all phenomena, but you can't dismiss empirical evidence just because you don't like it.
As for #8, you're misinterpreting the article. It's not suggesting that we will never build a machine to probe those energy levels. It's saying atomic physics isn't something you can figure out with a microscope (It took Rutherford to start us down that track). You're arguing against a straw man.

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[Phoghat]

history does repeat itself

Can we stop linking to this shitty blog please

[UnknownSoldier]

Almost every article has tons of assumptions, lots of hand waving, refuses to correct mistakes even when pointed out, etc.

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[lucien86]

First thought - two things pretty much totally incompatible - general relativity and black holes. (the problem is the physics inside the outer event horizon)
Astronomy now has pretty much watertight proof that black holes exist.
Doesn't look good for general relativity..
No new physics???

Re:And what about those anomalies they just detect

[lucien86]

More stupid. Who could have predicted relativity in Kelvins time?

Re:And what about those anomalies they just detect

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that there is any evidence of Lord Kelvin actually saying it, but it is attributed to a speech in 1900, and sometimes thought to come from other speeches in the late 1890s. This is already after interferometer experiments started showing problems with aether theory, Lorentz earlier work, and even Searle and others thinking faster than light travel is impossible due to relativistic mass reaching infinity. Relativity was not developed in a vacuum without warning.

Re:breakaway science/civilizaiton

[Anonymous Coward]

General relativity by itself has no problem with black holes, at least outside the event horizon which is all that matters for observation. The problems only come up when you bring quantum mechanics into it. Astronomy's evidence of black holes is in no way "watertight" when it comes to those issues that quantum mechanics brings up, as all the evidence amounts to is a dark, dense object. Alternative proposals of other objects that would exist if black holes couldn't form would also fit existing observations, and it might not be until something like the Event Horizon Telescope that some of that stuff can be falsified.

Re: breakaway science/civilizaiton

[beastofburdon]

I think the willingness to leg go of "scientific" dogma is always the hardest part.
It has always been what has held us back, and it didn't get much better after science broke free of religious dogma. Groups of scientists just started to create their own dogmas at that point. Some of these dogmas are from ignorance or deference to those seen as betters and some of it is created due to corruption to maintain power for individuals or corporations.

Space!

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

So, that means we build a huge accelerator in space, right?