However that is not what creates the "bang" so it is not the event that we are interested in (as you point out).
However there is a nitpick you could have had: the speed of light in air is slightly slower than the speed of light in vacuum (by a very small amount) and so theoretically you could transmit a signal that would arrive slightly before you can see the lightning since it is only the speed of light in vacuum that is fundamental.
After all, the speed of light is really just the speed of causality.
No, the speed of light is the MAXIMUM "speed of causality". A causal connection between events can happen at less than the speed of light. A simple example is hearing thunder sometime after seeing the lightning strike in a thunderstorm. The connection between the two events (lightning flash and the thunder) propagates at ~330 m/s (the speed of sound in air). All relativity tells you is that the connection between two events cannot propagate FASTER than light i.e. you cannot detect any effect of the lightning before it is visible.
...because he is also from Texas and can't speak english.
Man, its no wonder he won't fund science. You don't hear the oil tycoons making fun of him. And we can't all speak the Queen's english as they do in the 51st state.
I see that your knowledge of english is surpassed by your grasp of geography.
I am a native speaker of English, grew up in Dallas, TX.
So you aren't a native speaker of English but of American. So don't worry, no more explanation is needed. Besides we've all heard your president speak.
You understand now what I meant by the word "expect", yes? Perhaps you think I used the word incorrectly, but I don't really care at this point.
Now that you have explained that you didn't mean what you wrote then yes I do now understand what you meant to write. However if you are to have much a future in science you will need to learn to be more precise with your language. I'm guessing that you are probably not a native english speaker but unfortunately, particularly when writing papers or your thesis, precise language is required. You might not care but you audience will.
As for "predict", I think that you also understand what I mean.
Once again I now understand what you meant to write. However once again to a native English speaker predict means to foretell. You cannot predict something which has occurred whatever Wikipedia may say.
From a common speech standpoint, hope and expectation are virtually indistinguishable.
No they aren't! Think you your statement "If I had to guess...". This is not consistent with expectation - it is consistent with guessing.
it may predict other particles, but it must predict all of the particles that we have already seen at a minimum.
I think you ought to look up what "predict" means. You cannot "predict" what has already been seen! Perhaps a little English revision would be in order?
I did not say that ALL that SUSY is is the addition of four Higgs! I merely said that SUSY extensions to SM have 5 Higgs particles. Do you comprehend the difference?
Yes. The question is do you? Your original post still suggests that you are confused between SUSY Higgs and a 2HD model. Having reread that post though there is something I forgot to comment on. Quantum field theory does NOT predict either SUSY or the SM. Think of QFT like Newton's laws. You can't use Newton to predict the existance of two balls but you can use them to predict what will happen if they collide under a give set of conditions. QFT is like that. It cannot predict the existence of SUSY but, if you say "lets pretend SUSY exists" it can tell you what a particular model may mean in terms of observed phenomena.
From a theoretical standpoint, no, we should not expect to see SUSY. You are correct. However, the vibe that I have picked up is that the hep-ex community does rather expect to see SUSY.
I think you are confusing hope with expectation. As a member of that community (on D0 and ATLAS) I very much doubt people will be surprised if the LHC does not find SUSY, but they will be disappointed: hence hope and not expectation.
What I meant was that the simplest SUSY extensions to the SM include five particles which are all Higgs bosons. You did not contradict that.
Actually I did contradict that. Models with just two Higgs doublets are not SUSY i.e. you can construct models with two Higgs doublets and no SUSY whatsoever. Just adding an extra Higgs doublet does not mean that you have added SUSY. If SUSY does exist then you need at least two Higgs doublets but the reverse: if you find two Higgs doublets there must be SUSY is not true. It is true that the major motivation for adding 2 higgs doublets is SUSY but not always. I think there is a paper out there which uses a 2HDM model to explain the light neutrino masses...in fact here is the link
On a more pedantic note you only actually add 4 Higgs bosons with a two doublet model because the SM already includes one!
The buzz around the experimental community that I have picked up is that we should see SUSY quite quickly at the LHC, or else not at all.
It is completely dependant on the SUSY model. My personal belief is that, if SUSY is observed in nature, it will not use any of the breaking mechanisms the theorists have come up with (SUGRA, GMSB or AMSB). There is no real motivation to assume any of these breaking mechanisms is correct. It is just a matter of practicality since we cannot mentally cope with ~126 free parameter phase space which generic soft SUSY-breaking gives. So I really don't think you can say that we should see it soon or not at all. It is true that we will likely probe more phase space at the start of the LHC run due to the increase in energy but since there is only one (if any) "true" SUSY model you cannot really play the odds with a single data point!
Maybe the Higgs boson test will, like other species that tried to make one, turn us into merely a dark stain on the space-time fabric.
Until we get proton's to CONSIDERABLY higher energies that we currently do we will be do nothing that cosmic ray's don't do to the top of our atmosphere everyday. So, since we have so far failed to disappear in a puff of smoke we can conclude that the LHC will not cause this ot happen either.
Supersymmetric Higgs is the equivalent particle (actually 5 particles, IIRC) to the Standard Model's Higgs boson which is predicted by a Quantum Field Theory which includes supersymmetry and predicts all of the particles that we have already seen.
A few corrections. a SUSY Higgs is NOT the equivalent of adding 5 new particles to the SM but, infact involves doubling the number of particles and then adding 4 new Higgs bosons (since the SM already has one). What you are thinking of is a two Higgs doublet model which does NOT require SUSY i.e. we can have 5 Higgs bosons without Supersymmetry.
But more importantly, within a few months of LHC startup, we should see SUSY.
Woa! Nobody should expect to see SUSY ANYWHERE! For all we know, although it is a beautiful theory, it may be completely wrong! Even if it does occur in nature it may not occur within reach of the LHC energies. While the solution to the fine tuning problem would require SUSY at a "low" energy (compared to the GUT scale!) the upper limit is very rough. If SUSY occurs at 10TeV it is somewhat unnatural but by no means a huge problem even 100Tev is probably not out of the question - and this is assuming that nature uses SUSY to solve finte tuning - it may well not. Don't get me wrong - I'm someone looking for SUSY - and I hope to see it but it is by no means expected no matter how keen theorists get about it!
Heck, I must have accidentally invaded a 1000 different people on my last trip to New Zealand. Don't want to even think about how many people I invaded in Italy.
You took photographs of random people inside their homes without them being aware of it? That IS what we are talking about here. Not people sitting outside in their garden or walking down the street or in a public building but in their own private homes. If that is really what you spent your holidays doing then I'd suggest you seek help!
So you don't think there is ANY difference between someone glancing in at your window as they walk past and someone talking a photograph through your window and then posting it on a website? What about someone standing outside your house all day just looking in at the windows? Why do you stop at the street facing windows - afterall can't your neighbour take photos through your rear facing windows?
Privacy is a strange concept: it is not just what gets seen but who sees it. If we think we should have laws to protect it then those laws have to take that into account.
what about Pegasus then? How did it manage to survive? It was a modern ship and yet seemed to have networked computers. Clearly they managed to secure their networks because they survived encounters with the Cyclons.
the pictures show what anyone driving down the street would see. there aren't any privacy concerns because the pictures don't contain anything private- i know this may come as a shock to the mental midget in TFA, but glass is transparent.
But there are different levels of privacy. In this case the question I would ask is: if the people photographed inside their own homes knew that there was going to be a van passing down the street taking photographs and putting them on a public website for all to view would they still have left the curtains open? If the answer is yes then I would say an invasion of privacy has occurred because it is not reasonable to expect someone to be taking photos like this.
But it isn't even remotely reasonable because she keeps her blinds open! If you don't want someone to take pictures of you, or see you doing the nasty, or anything else inside your house, close your blinds, otherwise you have no expectation of privacy
If you take that attitude the result is that nobody can ever have any privacy except while in a completely closed room with the windows shut and curtains closed. Is that REALLY what you want? I think the problem here is that people tend to talk about privacy in black and white terms but it is not really so. For example it is one thing to quickly change your clothes, leaving your underwear on, without closing the curtains knowing that there might be a risk of your neighbour briefly catching a glance of you. But nobody would expect a van to be driving round which will take a picture of you half naked and then post it on a website! In this case the invasion of privacy has occurred not because of what the person saw but because of what they did with it. That being said taking a photo of a cat is not really a breach of privacy, unless the cat itself cares!
For my money I would like to see privacy laws with this flexibility built in. the only exception I would make is "public interest" i.e. if a politician pushing family values is photographed having an affair that would be clearly public interest and the expectation of privacy should not hold (the public needs to know she is two faced so they can choose not to vote for her again).
There was a story in the UK papers quote a few years ago about a guy who kept getting woken up in the early hours of the morning by repeating computer modem calls. After contacting BT he traced the call to a local supermarket who had incorrectly entered his number in the list to call. Trouble was it only called his number after the first on the list was busy so it only happened a few times a week. He repeatedly contacted them asking them to fix it and after a month of them not doing so he had his mate with a computer hook it up to await the incoming call.
It turned out that the call was the supermarket's stock taking system trying to phone a central depot to order more stuff. Given the simplistic nature of the system the guy's mate fixed the stock levels for lots of items to zero and then told the system to call the next number on its list. The following day they drove past the supermarket to find loads of lorries there trying to deliver things they already had. The supermarket eventually figured out what happened and tried to sue. However, given the very primitive computer laws in force at the time the case was thrown out because the supermarket had initiated the call and so legally it was assumed that they wanted to talk to the computer on the other end. Needless to say the nuisance calls stopped!
A source said: "The heavy workload -- nine months of 16-hour days every year -- has started to take its toll. It was decided the best thing for the show was go out at the top next year."
If he works 16 hours a day for 9 months on Doctor Who then exactly how much time does he spend on Torchwood? Sounds dodgy to me - I'll believe it when I hear it from the beeb.
Not quite: CP Symmetry
on
MacGyver Physics
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It should be noted that parity is preserved; it just turns out that the opposite version occurs in anti-matter.
No that just means that parity is broken oppositely for matter and anti-matter. If you are refering to the combined symmetry i.e. doing a parity inversion followed by switching all matter from anti-matter then this is know as CP symmetry (C=charge conjugation [matter <-> antimatter] and P=parity).
Fortunately the CP symmetry is broken too but the effect is a lot smaller than parity violation. This CP violation allows us to unambiguously differentiate between matter and anti-matter which is useful if we ever get visted by aliens because we'd like to know whether they are made of anti-matter or not before they set foot on the planet! Of course nature already seems to have used CP violation to solve the problem for use: astronomers can find no evidence of any significant anti-matter in the universe which means that early on in the Big Bang CP violation must have caused more matter than anti-matter to be created and what we are is the leftover matter (in fact it is one of the Sakharov conditions for the Big Bang). The exact mechanism of ho this happened is unknown but if we find CP violation with neutrino mixing (so far we only see it in quark mixing) then we may be able to explain it.
Easy test of whether skulls absorb EM radiation
on
How Bad Can Wi-fi Be?
·
· Score: 1
Can skulls really 'absorb' EM radiation?
This is very easy to answer. Look at someone's skull. If it does not look shiny like a mirror then it is absorbing visible light which is EM radiation. If you really want to escape EM radiation then it will take some effort. You can't just go into a dark room: rooms are dark only because the black body radiation spectrum of room-temperature objects peaks in the infrared part of the EM spectrum which we cannot see.
To truly escape EM radiation you would need to be cooled to absolute zero (-273C). I think it is safe to say that this will almost certainly prevent you dying from cancer.
So since retirement communities are typically not lived in by the landlords (assuming a rental not purchase model) does this mean that they can no longer discriminate against younger people wanting to move there? Or is there an exemption for that too? If so then how is it OK for older people to decide to not want live with younger people but not vice versa?
This is the maximum energy available per proton collision - most collisions actually occur at far lower energies because the proton is made up of quarks and gluons, each of which only carry a part of the total energy, and these are what actually collide.
To get an idea of how big this really is imagine you gave all the protons in 1 gram of hydrogen the same energy. In 1g there are Avogadro's number of protons i.e. 6e23 so you would need ~1.2e18 joules!
IIRC the LHC projected luminsoity is something like 1e16 protons in the ring. However, accelerators are very inefficient and only a tiny fraction of the energy used is translated into proton energy. In the case of the LHC a considerable fraction of the energy is actually spent in refrigeration plants producing liquid helium to keep the superconducting magnets superconducting.
The problem with something this expensive is that the average person, including myself, cannot see, even if it provides every answer they hope for it, how that will change my everyday life in the least.
Yet here you are posting on a website. The web was developed at CERN for those of us working in large, international collaborations to communicate. It also turned out to be pretty good at letting everyone else communicate too. So without CERN there would be no Slashdot for you to post your comments on how you don't think science has done anything for you!
Actually that is a problem I have noticed in North America. In Europe we generally put a set of lights on a pole at the side of the road next to the stop line because it is impossible for traffic in front to block the view plus it is cheaper to build. Being tall I find the overhead lights terrible to spot. They are either obscured by traffic in front (if at a distance) or obscured by the roof if closer. Tailgating is NOT the problem putting the lights where they are obscured IS.
Slashdot Mirror
However that is not what creates the "bang" so it is not the event that we are interested in (as you point out). However there is a nitpick you could have had: the speed of light in air is slightly slower than the speed of light in vacuum (by a very small amount) and so theoretically you could transmit a signal that would arrive slightly before you can see the lightning since it is only the speed of light in vacuum that is fundamental.
After all, the speed of light is really just the speed of causality.
No, the speed of light is the MAXIMUM "speed of causality". A causal connection between events can happen at less than the speed of light. A simple example is hearing thunder sometime after seeing the lightning strike in a thunderstorm. The connection between the two events (lightning flash and the thunder) propagates at ~330 m/s (the speed of sound in air). All relativity tells you is that the connection between two events cannot propagate FASTER than light i.e. you cannot detect any effect of the lightning before it is visible.
We'll find out June 29.
No, that's when we'll find out if people will give up a million pounds for a mobile phone.
007 - why you do you have to a shot at W?
...because he is also from Texas and can't speak english.
Man, its no wonder he won't fund science. You don't hear the oil tycoons making fun of him. And we can't all speak the Queen's english as they do in the 51st state.
I see that your knowledge of english is surpassed by your grasp of geography.
I am a native speaker of English, grew up in Dallas, TX.
So you aren't a native speaker of English but of American. So don't worry, no more explanation is needed. Besides we've all heard your president speak.
You understand now what I meant by the word "expect", yes? Perhaps you think I used the word incorrectly, but I don't really care at this point.
Now that you have explained that you didn't mean what you wrote then yes I do now understand what you meant to write. However if you are to have much a future in science you will need to learn to be more precise with your language. I'm guessing that you are probably not a native english speaker but unfortunately, particularly when writing papers or your thesis, precise language is required. You might not care but you audience will.
As for "predict", I think that you also understand what I mean.
Once again I now understand what you meant to write. However once again to a native English speaker predict means to foretell. You cannot predict something which has occurred whatever Wikipedia may say.
From a common speech standpoint, hope and expectation are virtually indistinguishable.
No they aren't! Think you your statement "If I had to guess...". This is not consistent with expectation - it is consistent with guessing.
it may predict other particles, but it must predict all of the particles that we have already seen at a minimum.
I think you ought to look up what "predict" means. You cannot "predict" what has already been seen! Perhaps a little English revision would be in order?
I did not say that ALL that SUSY is is the addition of four Higgs! I merely said that SUSY extensions to SM have 5 Higgs particles. Do you comprehend the difference?
Yes. The question is do you? Your original post still suggests that you are confused between SUSY Higgs and a 2HD model. Having reread that post though there is something I forgot to comment on. Quantum field theory does NOT predict either SUSY or the SM. Think of QFT like Newton's laws. You can't use Newton to predict the existance of two balls but you can use them to predict what will happen if they collide under a give set of conditions. QFT is like that. It cannot predict the existence of SUSY but, if you say "lets pretend SUSY exists" it can tell you what a particular model may mean in terms of observed phenomena.
From a theoretical standpoint, no, we should not expect to see SUSY. You are correct. However, the vibe that I have picked up is that the hep-ex community does rather expect to see SUSY.
I think you are confusing hope with expectation. As a member of that community (on D0 and ATLAS) I very much doubt people will be surprised if the LHC does not find SUSY, but they will be disappointed: hence hope and not expectation.
What I meant was that the simplest SUSY extensions to the SM include five particles which are all Higgs bosons. You did not contradict that.
Actually I did contradict that. Models with just two Higgs doublets are not SUSY i.e. you can construct models with two Higgs doublets and no SUSY whatsoever. Just adding an extra Higgs doublet does not mean that you have added SUSY. If SUSY does exist then you need at least two Higgs doublets but the reverse: if you find two Higgs doublets there must be SUSY is not true. It is true that the major motivation for adding 2 higgs doublets is SUSY but not always. I think there is a paper out there which uses a 2HDM model to explain the light neutrino masses...in fact here is the link
On a more pedantic note you only actually add 4 Higgs bosons with a two doublet model because the SM already includes one!
The buzz around the experimental community that I have picked up is that we should see SUSY quite quickly at the LHC, or else not at all.
It is completely dependant on the SUSY model. My personal belief is that, if SUSY is observed in nature, it will not use any of the breaking mechanisms the theorists have come up with (SUGRA, GMSB or AMSB). There is no real motivation to assume any of these breaking mechanisms is correct. It is just a matter of practicality since we cannot mentally cope with ~126 free parameter phase space which generic soft SUSY-breaking gives. So I really don't think you can say that we should see it soon or not at all. It is true that we will likely probe more phase space at the start of the LHC run due to the increase in energy but since there is only one (if any) "true" SUSY model you cannot really play the odds with a single data point!
Maybe the Higgs boson test will, like other species that tried to make one, turn us into merely a dark stain on the space-time fabric.
Until we get proton's to CONSIDERABLY higher energies that we currently do we will be do nothing that cosmic ray's don't do to the top of our atmosphere everyday. So, since we have so far failed to disappear in a puff of smoke we can conclude that the LHC will not cause this ot happen either.
Supersymmetric Higgs is the equivalent particle (actually 5 particles, IIRC) to the Standard Model's Higgs boson which is predicted by a Quantum Field Theory which includes supersymmetry and predicts all of the particles that we have already seen.
A few corrections. a SUSY Higgs is NOT the equivalent of adding 5 new particles to the SM but, infact involves doubling the number of particles and then adding 4 new Higgs bosons (since the SM already has one). What you are thinking of is a two Higgs doublet model which does NOT require SUSY i.e. we can have 5 Higgs bosons without Supersymmetry.
But more importantly, within a few months of LHC startup, we should see SUSY.
Woa! Nobody should expect to see SUSY ANYWHERE! For all we know, although it is a beautiful theory, it may be completely wrong! Even if it does occur in nature it may not occur within reach of the LHC energies. While the solution to the fine tuning problem would require SUSY at a "low" energy (compared to the GUT scale!) the upper limit is very rough. If SUSY occurs at 10TeV it is somewhat unnatural but by no means a huge problem even 100Tev is probably not out of the question - and this is assuming that nature uses SUSY to solve finte tuning - it may well not. Don't get me wrong - I'm someone looking for SUSY - and I hope to see it but it is by no means expected no matter how keen theorists get about it!
Heck, I must have accidentally invaded a 1000 different people on my last trip to New Zealand. Don't want to even think about how many people I invaded in Italy.
You took photographs of random people inside their homes without them being aware of it? That IS what we are talking about here. Not people sitting outside in their garden or walking down the street or in a public building but in their own private homes. If that is really what you spent your holidays doing then I'd suggest you seek help!
there is no expectation of privacy
So you don't think there is ANY difference between someone glancing in at your window as they walk past and someone talking a photograph through your window and then posting it on a website? What about someone standing outside your house all day just looking in at the windows? Why do you stop at the street facing windows - afterall can't your neighbour take photos through your rear facing windows?
Privacy is a strange concept: it is not just what gets seen but who sees it. If we think we should have laws to protect it then those laws have to take that into account.
what about Pegasus then? How did it manage to survive? It was a modern ship and yet seemed to have networked computers. Clearly they managed to secure their networks because they survived encounters with the Cyclons.
the pictures show what anyone driving down the street would see. there aren't any privacy concerns because the pictures don't contain anything private- i know this may come as a shock to the mental midget in TFA, but glass is transparent.
But there are different levels of privacy. In this case the question I would ask is: if the people photographed inside their own homes knew that there was going to be a van passing down the street taking photographs and putting them on a public website for all to view would they still have left the curtains open? If the answer is yes then I would say an invasion of privacy has occurred because it is not reasonable to expect someone to be taking photos like this.
But it isn't even remotely reasonable because she keeps her blinds open! If you don't want someone to take pictures of you, or see you doing the nasty, or anything else inside your house, close your blinds, otherwise you have no expectation of privacy
If you take that attitude the result is that nobody can ever have any privacy except while in a completely closed room with the windows shut and curtains closed. Is that REALLY what you want? I think the problem here is that people tend to talk about privacy in black and white terms but it is not really so. For example it is one thing to quickly change your clothes, leaving your underwear on, without closing the curtains knowing that there might be a risk of your neighbour briefly catching a glance of you. But nobody would expect a van to be driving round which will take a picture of you half naked and then post it on a website! In this case the invasion of privacy has occurred not because of what the person saw but because of what they did with it. That being said taking a photo of a cat is not really a breach of privacy, unless the cat itself cares!
For my money I would like to see privacy laws with this flexibility built in. the only exception I would make is "public interest" i.e. if a politician pushing family values is photographed having an affair that would be clearly public interest and the expectation of privacy should not hold (the public needs to know she is two faced so they can choose not to vote for her again).
There was a story in the UK papers quote a few years ago about a guy who kept getting woken up in the early hours of the morning by repeating computer modem calls. After contacting BT he traced the call to a local supermarket who had incorrectly entered his number in the list to call. Trouble was it only called his number after the first on the list was busy so it only happened a few times a week. He repeatedly contacted them asking them to fix it and after a month of them not doing so he had his mate with a computer hook it up to await the incoming call.
It turned out that the call was the supermarket's stock taking system trying to phone a central depot to order more stuff. Given the simplistic nature of the system the guy's mate fixed the stock levels for lots of items to zero and then told the system to call the next number on its list. The following day they drove past the supermarket to find loads of lorries there trying to deliver things they already had. The supermarket eventually figured out what happened and tried to sue. However, given the very primitive computer laws in force at the time the case was thrown out because the supermarket had initiated the call and so legally it was assumed that they wanted to talk to the computer on the other end. Needless to say the nuisance calls stopped!
A source said: "The heavy workload -- nine months of 16-hour days every year -- has started to take its toll. It was decided the best thing for the show was go out at the top next year."
If he works 16 hours a day for 9 months on Doctor Who then exactly how much time does he spend on Torchwood? Sounds dodgy to me - I'll believe it when I hear it from the beeb.
It should be noted that parity is preserved; it just turns out that the opposite version occurs in anti-matter.
No that just means that parity is broken oppositely for matter and anti-matter. If you are refering to the combined symmetry i.e. doing a parity inversion followed by switching all matter from anti-matter then this is know as CP symmetry (C=charge conjugation [matter <-> antimatter] and P=parity).
Fortunately the CP symmetry is broken too but the effect is a lot smaller than parity violation. This CP violation allows us to unambiguously differentiate between matter and anti-matter which is useful if we ever get visted by aliens because we'd like to know whether they are made of anti-matter or not before they set foot on the planet! Of course nature already seems to have used CP violation to solve the problem for use: astronomers can find no evidence of any significant anti-matter in the universe which means that early on in the Big Bang CP violation must have caused more matter than anti-matter to be created and what we are is the leftover matter (in fact it is one of the Sakharov conditions for the Big Bang). The exact mechanism of ho this happened is unknown but if we find CP violation with neutrino mixing (so far we only see it in quark mixing) then we may be able to explain it.
Can skulls really 'absorb' EM radiation?
This is very easy to answer. Look at someone's skull. If it does not look shiny like a mirror then it is absorbing visible light which is EM radiation. If you really want to escape EM radiation then it will take some effort. You can't just go into a dark room: rooms are dark only because the black body radiation spectrum of room-temperature objects peaks in the infrared part of the EM spectrum which we cannot see.
To truly escape EM radiation you would need to be cooled to absolute zero (-273C). I think it is safe to say that this will almost certainly prevent you dying from cancer.
They mean that superscript tags don't work when submitting stories to slashdot. If should read 10^6 and 2^20.
So since retirement communities are typically not lived in by the landlords (assuming a rental not purchase model) does this mean that they can no longer discriminate against younger people wanting to move there? Or is there an exemption for that too? If so then how is it OK for older people to decide to not want live with younger people but not vice versa?
This is the maximum energy available per proton collision - most collisions actually occur at far lower energies because the proton is made up of quarks and gluons, each of which only carry a part of the total energy, and these are what actually collide.
To get an idea of how big this really is imagine you gave all the protons in 1 gram of hydrogen the same energy. In 1g there are Avogadro's number of protons i.e. 6e23 so you would need ~1.2e18 joules!
IIRC the LHC projected luminsoity is something like 1e16 protons in the ring. However, accelerators are very inefficient and only a tiny fraction of the energy used is translated into proton energy. In the case of the LHC a considerable fraction of the energy is actually spent in refrigeration plants producing liquid helium to keep the superconducting magnets superconducting.
The problem with something this expensive is that the average person, including myself, cannot see, even if it provides every answer they hope for it, how that will change my everyday life in the least.
Yet here you are posting on a website. The web was developed at CERN for those of us working in large, international collaborations to communicate. It also turned out to be pretty good at letting everyone else communicate too. So without CERN there would be no Slashdot for you to post your comments on how you don't think science has done anything for you!
Actually that is a problem I have noticed in North America. In Europe we generally put a set of lights on a pole at the side of the road next to the stop line because it is impossible for traffic in front to block the view plus it is cheaper to build. Being tall I find the overhead lights terrible to spot. They are either obscured by traffic in front (if at a distance) or obscured by the roof if closer. Tailgating is NOT the problem putting the lights where they are obscured IS.