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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.
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
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.
Turn it up to eleven.
> 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.
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
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"... 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"
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.
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.
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?
"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 :-)
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.
... particles that the LHC should detect if they’re present ...
If only this thing could collide and detect small and medium hadrons.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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?"
Society use your Sciences
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?
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.
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.
The article only talks about experimental particle physics.
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
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.
I guess the writer hasn't read this yet then?
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."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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?
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.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
There are still particles known to exist with no supporting theory for why they exist.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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/...
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.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Why can't LHC's be built in space?
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.
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.
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.
I don't think either of those are relevant to the LHC.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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-'! ;-)
Why all these constants?
Because we're using the wrong units.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
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.
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-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
_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.
Umm, no. The Ice Cube detects neutrinos, not cosmic rays. Completely different thing.
Because you'd still be trying to build an object larger than the earth. It's going to be rather expensive.
It _does_ detect muons from cosmic ray interaction with the atmosphere, which are easily distinguished from neutrinos.
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.
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
(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."
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?
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.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
> 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!
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.
Ah ok, so you don't know. Was that really so hard to just say so?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"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...
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.
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.
history does repeat itself
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
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.
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:
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.
Liberty.
"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...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Almost every article has tons of assumptions, lots of hand waving, refuses to correct mistakes even when pointed out, etc.
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.
"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.
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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???
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
More stupid. Who could have predicted relativity in Kelvins time?
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
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?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
So, that means we build a huge accelerator in space, right?
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.