If we just got rid of Sally Mea and college loans need to be secured with some kind of collateral or simply small enough lender were willing to fork over on credit history alone, the problem would solve it self.
The problem with this, and to some extent student loans in general, is that now you are selecting university students based on wealth and not merit. If you don't have enough collateral to secure the loan - or your parents are not willing to take the risk - then you do not get to go to university no matter how intelligent you are. Society then not only potentially loses out on the next Einstein but also it also becomes less fair leading to all sorts of problems with social unrest.
There is also another issue which the UK is now facing having introduced massive tuition hikes and an increase in loans. Some essential jobs which require a university degree, like teaching, are suddenly experiencing a huge shortfall in new graduates. The reason is that a teachers salary takes decades to repay a large loan while someone going into finance can repay it in a matter of years.
This is why university education should be funded by taxes and the funded positions awarded to the best and brightest. Those who earn more will pay more for their degree through taxes while those whose earn less will pay less. The alternative is that society will need to start paying e.g. teachers a whole lot more money in order to attract sufficient numbers and to do that it will have to raise taxes so ultimately everyone will be paying anyway but in the meantime the affected professions will be in severe trouble.
He didn't con an old lady out of her savings; he made a bet with banks and other investors who should have known better.
Not entirely correct. If he is the architect behind the subprime mortgages then he did not directly con an old lady out of her savings but his actions indirectly wiped half the value off those savings. He deliberately designed an extremely risky investment vehicle to look to the banks like a low risk, high return investment and they did not spot the trick. It might have been entirely legal but it bears all the hall marks of a con and in such a case, while the mark takes some blame for letting their greed overcome their common sense, the person who devised the con takes most of the blame.
It is disturbing that the problem is starting to effect physics.
The problem is not starting to affect physics. The reluctance to let go of Supersymmetry is nothing new and in any case I would argue it as extremely premature given the currently available data.
Take a look over a century ago at the Michelson-Morley experiment. While we regard it as the killing blow to the aether theory of light at the time the first explanations it engendered were suggestions of 'frame dragging' where somehow the Earth was dragging the aether along with it. This was hard to reconcile with astronomical observations but, as always, the first instinct of many is to adapt the existing theory to see whether it can account for the new data. What shifted the field after Michelson-Morley was Einstein coming up with a far, far better theory to explain the data than any aether based model.
Another example is the superweak theory which was invented to explain CP violation in kaon decays. As experiments put ever tighter limits on it theorists dialed down the strength making it weaker. What killed it was the Standard Model providing a better explanation via a complex phase in the CKM quark mixing matrix.
Reluctance to let go of the best theory you have is nothing new. As these theories become more and more constrained fewer people think them likely and start to look for better ones. When someone finds that better explanation and it is confirmed by experiment then the old theory is abandoned. Since Supersymmetry was invented to explain the huge difference between the planck scale (where gravity is important) and the mass of the higgs. Until there is a better explanation for this it is unlikely there will be a consensus to drop SUSY as a candidate theory.
The Standard Model may be the Taj Mahal of empericism. It has plenty of predictive power...but is almost completely lacking in explanitory power.
Sorry but that is completely wrong. It has lots of explanatory power. For example it explains how the electron can have a mass without breaking essential symmetries of physics (via the Higgs mechanism), it explains how the EM and weak forces are two aspects of the same thing, it explains the existence of the different types of mesons and baryons which was such a mystery before the SM that one Nobel prize winner suggested that there should be a fine for discovering anymore particles before we explained those we had found! etc. (and there is a lot more!)
The problem is that we no longer talk about what the Standard Model did explain because we now know the answer so it is not so interesting anymore and we focus on the things which it does not explain. This is the nature of human inquisitiveness. Indeed the Standard Model is an astounding success. It took Particle Physics out of the 'particle zoo' era of stamp collecting and moved it to the forefront of fundamental physics research. It's certainly true that it contains some major holes and because of that nobody thought it would stand up this long to experiment. However it has survived over 40 years and is still the best model we have although some extensions, such as neutrino masses, have been needed.
As for making observations you clearly fail to grasp how science works. The way you find something beyond the SM is that you make a measurement of some process where new physics predicts X and the Standard Model predicts Y and you see which your measurement agrees with. The fact that for 40+ years every time we come up with a new measurement we get Y and never X is because that's the way the universe works. If you are unhappy with it then don't blame the physicists - it's not like we got a say in how the universe was put together!
This kind of 'thruster' simply can't work in any practical way.
Actually that depends. As you remove the electrons the charge will build up which means that you have an increasing electric field. Providing that you kick out the electrons with sufficient energy to escape the field the field will continue increasing and will reach the point where it will breakdown even in vacuum.
For a high enough field strength virtual electron-positron pairs will gain sufficient energy as they are pulled apart to become real. The electron will be attracted back to the craft to neutralize some of the positive charge there and the positron will be repelled out into space creating even more thrust. The result is that after achieving a critical charge the charge will stop increasing.
However you will need a huge charge build up to get this far and you would probably need high energy gamma rays to give the electrons sufficient energy to escape the intense electric field required (otherwise they will not leave the material). Since you are, at this point, essentially converting energy into mass and flinging it out the back of the craft I also expect that your net thrust would be no different than just reflecting the incident photons.
This is exactly why you let private entrepreneurs do things rather than the government. It'll get done better, cheaper, and faster.
Actually you will typically only get two out of those three. Saying that there should never have been any tax spent on this is really not understanding what these entrepreneurs are doing. The reason that any of these startups are even possible is because of the huge amount of work which has been done on fusion in the past by governments. If none of that money have been spent there would be no fusion start ups because we would not have enough knowledge about fusing plasma to make any sort of even vaguely viable bid for investment funding. In addition some of the startups are actually get tax money to help them startup.
Rather than denigrate the government paid research that got us here you should be looking at a research system which is doing exactly what it should be and working extremely well as a whole. The, yes often ponderous, ship of state takes science on the long, risky and costly journey across a vast ocean of knowledge which does not appear to be very relevant to improving our quality of life until it gets within sight of something extremely useful. Then the entrepreneurs take over and rapidly construct a fleet of many different craft to get to the new shore which is now in sight. Most will sink without trace on the way to that shore but those that arrive rapidly explore and open up new territory for us all to benefit from.
So what we have here is a great example of the system working as it should. It's not a case of tortoise vs. hare and more a case of the tortoise carrying the hare until it is close enough to the finish that it can sprint across the line and win the race faster than either one could by themselves. Government research is slow and it is expensive but that is because they take on the big, slow and expensive research which private enterprise lacks the stamina to do. A successful team plays to each member's strengths and that's exactly what appears to be happening here. So don't complain - all those tax dollars you probably previously complained were wasted on fundamental research may well be about to be paid back...and with a lot of interest if any one of these companies are successful.
I doubt any revolution in particle physics would ever come from *WITHIN* particle physics.
Really? It has already happened once with something called the November Revolution. This was the discovery of the charm quark which completely revolutionized our understanding of what baryons and mesons were and ushered in the quark model.
Prior to that there was the prediction of anti-matter by Dirac followed by its discovery a few years later which showed that we could unite quantum mechanics and Special Relativity. Prior to that there was Rutherford's discovery of the atom which completely changed our understanding of the nature of matter and all the early work with particles which lead to quantum mechanics. In fact if you look back at the last century or so of physics many of the major paradigm shifts in the field have come from particle physics or its clear precursor.
If you think that getting a PhD merely requires you to accept certain beliefs then you have a very poor understanding about how science works. Good PhD students will challenge the beliefs of those examining them and defend their work using the data and analysis they have in their thesis.
As for damaging careers coming up with some radical new idea will greatly enhance anyone's career...provided that they put in the ground work to do the studies needed to convince others of its worth. Big experiments are an issue because the amount of ground work to get one of these funded is huge and this limits the scope of ideas to ones which are clearly going to work.
Lastly though as for thinking of the Standard Model as the truth absolutely nothing could be more wrong. In fact we usually start by pointing out one of its most obvious flaws: there is no gravity in it! Indeed we particle physicists spend all our time trying to break it by looking for physics beyond what it allows for. Whoever finds physics beyond the Standard Model is likely to end up with a Nobel Prize so I'm not sure why you would think we would not he extremely motivated to break it and why this would not be really good for anyone's career.
However, electrons are very nearly massless, so unless they're somehow exciting them with massive amounts of energy, the propulsion from the electrons is unlikely to be significant.
It depends on what you compare it to. Since this process was hitting the graphite with photons it makes sense to compare the thrust produced to that created purely by bouncing photons off a material. Electrons might be light but they have more mass than a photon and so the thrust should be significantly higher.
That may be correct but the article you linked has an incredibly misleading title. This process does not convert photons into electrons it simply imparts the photon's energy to one or more electrons which, in the case of thrust, causes them to be ejected from the graphite. The coupling of electrons to photons is extremely well understood, in fact it is the second most accurately tested scientific theory ever discovered (the first being special relativity). The only way to create electrons from photons is to also create an equal number of positrons. However this requires far higher energy processes ~1 MeV of energy which is many orders of magnitude higher than the energies involved in visible light and would easily break apart graphite which is something they ruled out.
They could easily come from all the material which is surrounding the graphite. As the charge builds up on the graphite due to all the electrons being expelled it will develop an increasingly strong electric field eventually will pull electrons from the walls of the chamber. Since the vacuum will also not be perfect the remaining gas molecules could also transfer charge by moving back and forth between the graphite and the chamber walls.
A similar effect exists in the LHC where the electrons are 'helped' to leave the walls by synchrotron radiation hitting the walls of the beam pipe and are then dragged along by the electric field of a bunch of protons forming a electron cloud. This effect is one of the primary limiting factors on the number of protons we can have in an LHC beam.
So they'd need to carry hydrogen and split off its electrons or something to neutralize the charge.
Actually this could provide more thrust. Use sunlight to propel the craft until it has built up a large enough electric charge that the efficiency of the thrust begins to drop (since it will take an increasing amount of energy to expel the electrons from something with a large positive charge) and then introduce a stream of neutral gas into the sponge. This should strip the electrons off the gas and the remaining positively charge ions will then be repelled by the positive graphite and provide even more thrust.
Of course this means that you need to have a fuel source but it's likely to be far more efficient than current rocket fuel plus there it no need for it to be something explosive like hydrogen - you could probably use Xenon which is a noble gas and so extremely inert and so a lot safer.
The one advantage we have with Netflix over broadcast stations is that it is on demand and, like websites, it is conceivable that if the ads become obnoxious it will motivate someone to provide a plugin to Ad Blocker to deal with them like there is for YouTube.
Actually if that is done well then I don't mind it at all since it is almost invisible. However when done badly it is the most obnoxious of all advertizing since it is impossible to avoid as it is part of the show.
Actually before the Higgs the problem with the model was that the particles all had non-zero masses. This breaks symmetries which we observe to be held in nature and was a huge problem and also gave rise to the violation of unitarity: if there were no masses there would be no unitarity violations.
Part of the beauty of the Higgs mechanism is that not only did it explain how the particles could have masses while the symmetries of nature we observe are preserved but it also called out the unitarity violations which the non-zero particle masses caused!
Every model has its problems though. The issue with the SM is that the Higgs mass is so much lighter than the Planck scale. This means that there has to be something probably not much higher in mass than the scales we have already probed. However this is not a hard constraint. The higher the energy of this new physics the less "natural" but with only one universe to play with there is no way to be certain that a one in a million chance did not occur when setting up the laws of nature....it's just not very likely.
It sounds like he was answering a different question: "What is the shape of a black hole?". That's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. Asking whether they have a shape is akin to asking: "Does something which exists have a shape?". In fact this article is actually a violation of Betteridge's law because the answer is 'yes', Black Holes do indeed have a shape although that answer imparts no useful information whatsoever.
Asking questions like "Does a Black Hole have a shape?" makes you have doubts about those qualifications though. In physics you need to be careful to be precise. Anything which exists has a shape and yet he is not questioning the existence of Black Holes nor even whether they are spherical but rather whether they appear distorted from spherical by their gravitational field bending light.
Before the Big Bang there was no space and it is debatable whether there was any time either. So if all space and (perhaps) time can be created from nothing why do you have a problem with the reverse happening at some point?
Any SUSY is going to provide a dark matter candidate.
Actually that is not quite correct. A majority do but there are searches conducted at the LHC for something called R-parity violating SUSY. In these models the lightest SUSY particle can decay and SUSY does not explain Dark Matter.
These models are generally less popular because there are very strong limits on them from existing data. In particular these models allow for flavour changing neutral currents and thing like baryon number violation and there are extremely strong limits on both processes not being seen (although we do eventually expect to see baryon number violation).
Does the higher energy and luminosity have any real chance of creating dark matter that we didn't see at the lower energy
Nobody can really answer that: we are going beyond the energy frontier and nobody can really say for certain what, if anything, we will find. However if those two broad assumptions I stated above (weakly interacting and thermally produced) are true for Dark Matter then, barring some pathologically strange model for new physics, we should see Dark Matter whether it is from SUSY or something else.
The reason these assumptions put a limit on the mass is that the heavier the particle the earlier the universe will cool to the point that no more can be produced. If this happens really early on i.e. very massive particles, then these particles will be so dense that they will interact and annihilate back into whatever produced them and so there will be very few left, too few to explain Dark Matter. Similarly if they are too low in mass then there will be far more of them because they decouple from the universe later when it is less dense but then the lower mass per particle means that there is still not enough to explain Dark Matter.
For a weakly interacting particle this 'sweet spot' turns out to be within reach of the LHC. This makes no assumption whatsoever about Supersymmetry only that the particle interact with the weak force. However if they only interact through the Higgs then the mass will be higher or (worse) if via gravity then much, much higher. Another possibility is that Dark Matter was not thermally produced in which case you need to know the production mechanism to find out what it says about the mass.
Can you explain why it is found acceptable for the standard model to allow calculation of probabilities greater than one (one of the reasons the Higgs was proposed)?
The Standard Model does not allow for calculation of probabilities greater than one. The Higgs is part of the Standard Model and you only get this effect, called violation of unitarity, for processes like WW scattering if the Higgs is not there. Since the Higgs was found the SM is complete and there is no problem with violating unitarity.
Well assuming it takes a minute in a 650W microwave to cook your disgusting boiled sausage that's roughly 60*650=39kJ of energy, lets call it 40kJ. The LHC beams contain roughly 360MJ. The beams take roughly 90 microseconds to make a complete orbit (27km/3e8 m/s) so that is a power of roughly 4TW (=4 million MW).
Now the sausage is probably only about half a nuclear interaction length (guess) so only about 18% of the protons will interact per sausage crossing and not all of that energy will actually be converted into heat since much will go to secondaries. So lets be conservative and say that 1% of the incident energy heats the sausage. Hence the the time for the sausage to get 40kJ will be 40e3/(4e12*0.01) = 1 micro second.
Assuming the sausage absorbs 1% of the total beam energy (which will happen in under a millisecond) then it will have about 900 times more energy than it needed to cook it which is the energy released by slightly less than 1kg of TNT...and this is one of the reasons why the LHC is know as the Big Bang machine!;-)
On the other hand, if no new physics is discovered, could this be the Michelson–Morley experiment of the 2000s?
That's probably very unlikely. Michelson-Morley was testing a prediction of the best understanding of light at the time. The non-observation of changes due to motion through the ether was clear evidence that the best understood theory for light was wrong.
Now we have found the Higgs the established model, called the Standard Model, has no more predictions to make: we have found it all. The problem is that there are some phenomena which the Standard Model cannot explain, like Dark Matter, and it relies on some amazing fine-tuning of parameters to have such a light Higgs (the odd of this happening by chance are about the same as winning a lottery 5-6 times in a row...and if someone did that nobody would believe it was simple luck!).
The solutions to these issues involve speculation by theorists and there are multiple candidates. Supersymmetry is probably the leading one but if we fail to see SUSY in the coming run then I, and a lot of my colleagues, will probably start to doubt it as the most likely explanation. However even then it might still be that SUSY is the explanation but at a higher energy scale that we can reach and just a more-than-minimal variety of it.
Personally the thing I expect the most for us to find is Dark Matter. this is based on two broad assumptions that cut across many different theoretical models: that Dark Matter interacts through the weak force and that it was thermally produced in the Big Bang. If these assumptions are correct then the mass of the Dark Matter particle has to be in reach of the LHC. However this is still far from any sort of guarantee: there are other models for Dark Matter out there with good motivation which we would not see e.g. axions.
Actually that is conjecture as there is currently no evidence that protons decay. I'll grant that the expectation is that there are high energy processes which violate baryon number and if this is true then it should be possible for a proton to decay. However there is a simple way around this: suppose the initial conditions of the Big Bang just included a slight excess of baryons? No B violation is needed and protons are absolutely stable.
As you can probably guess I'm a particle physicist and not a cosmologist. However even in the dark energy models presumably a 'big rip' condition is reached in the voids between gravitationally bound objects since there is nothing to stop the acceleration? If so then surely the implications for the stable pockets is not really known since all our understanding of causal disconnection is based on GR which would no longer be valid in the regions between the galaxies.
Rather than poorly written, mistake filled blog pages on basic physics why not just link chapters from a physics textbook? The content is the same, there would be fewer mistakes in the physics since books are reviewed and edited and the writing style is less annoying.
The blogger this time forgets to include the knowledge that the universe's expansion is accelerating. We learnt this about a decade ago so it's not exactly new. The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks. Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist.
Now whether heat death or the 'big rip' kills off intelligence first is probably not clear - and I'm not sure I would really believe anyone who claims to know given the unknowns. However since space-time itself has a limited lifespan then intelligence clearly has a limited lifespan too unless we eventually figure out a way to leave the universe. That might be a tricky problem but we do have a lot of time to try and figure out a solution
Slashdot Mirror
If we just got rid of Sally Mea and college loans need to be secured with some kind of collateral or simply small enough lender were willing to fork over on credit history alone, the problem would solve it self.
The problem with this, and to some extent student loans in general, is that now you are selecting university students based on wealth and not merit. If you don't have enough collateral to secure the loan - or your parents are not willing to take the risk - then you do not get to go to university no matter how intelligent you are. Society then not only potentially loses out on the next Einstein but also it also becomes less fair leading to all sorts of problems with social unrest.
There is also another issue which the UK is now facing having introduced massive tuition hikes and an increase in loans. Some essential jobs which require a university degree, like teaching, are suddenly experiencing a huge shortfall in new graduates. The reason is that a teachers salary takes decades to repay a large loan while someone going into finance can repay it in a matter of years.
This is why university education should be funded by taxes and the funded positions awarded to the best and brightest. Those who earn more will pay more for their degree through taxes while those whose earn less will pay less. The alternative is that society will need to start paying e.g. teachers a whole lot more money in order to attract sufficient numbers and to do that it will have to raise taxes so ultimately everyone will be paying anyway but in the meantime the affected professions will be in severe trouble.
He didn't con an old lady out of her savings; he made a bet with banks and other investors who should have known better.
Not entirely correct. If he is the architect behind the subprime mortgages then he did not directly con an old lady out of her savings but his actions indirectly wiped half the value off those savings. He deliberately designed an extremely risky investment vehicle to look to the banks like a low risk, high return investment and they did not spot the trick. It might have been entirely legal but it bears all the hall marks of a con and in such a case, while the mark takes some blame for letting their greed overcome their common sense, the person who devised the con takes most of the blame.
It is disturbing that the problem is starting to effect physics.
The problem is not starting to affect physics. The reluctance to let go of Supersymmetry is nothing new and in any case I would argue it as extremely premature given the currently available data.
Take a look over a century ago at the Michelson-Morley experiment. While we regard it as the killing blow to the aether theory of light at the time the first explanations it engendered were suggestions of 'frame dragging' where somehow the Earth was dragging the aether along with it. This was hard to reconcile with astronomical observations but, as always, the first instinct of many is to adapt the existing theory to see whether it can account for the new data. What shifted the field after Michelson-Morley was Einstein coming up with a far, far better theory to explain the data than any aether based model.
Another example is the superweak theory which was invented to explain CP violation in kaon decays. As experiments put ever tighter limits on it theorists dialed down the strength making it weaker. What killed it was the Standard Model providing a better explanation via a complex phase in the CKM quark mixing matrix.
Reluctance to let go of the best theory you have is nothing new. As these theories become more and more constrained fewer people think them likely and start to look for better ones. When someone finds that better explanation and it is confirmed by experiment then the old theory is abandoned. Since Supersymmetry was invented to explain the huge difference between the planck scale (where gravity is important) and the mass of the higgs. Until there is a better explanation for this it is unlikely there will be a consensus to drop SUSY as a candidate theory.
The Standard Model may be the Taj Mahal of empericism. It has plenty of predictive power...but is almost completely lacking in explanitory power.
Sorry but that is completely wrong. It has lots of explanatory power. For example it explains how the electron can have a mass without breaking essential symmetries of physics (via the Higgs mechanism), it explains how the EM and weak forces are two aspects of the same thing, it explains the existence of the different types of mesons and baryons which was such a mystery before the SM that one Nobel prize winner suggested that there should be a fine for discovering anymore particles before we explained those we had found! etc. (and there is a lot more!)
The problem is that we no longer talk about what the Standard Model did explain because we now know the answer so it is not so interesting anymore and we focus on the things which it does not explain. This is the nature of human inquisitiveness. Indeed the Standard Model is an astounding success. It took Particle Physics out of the 'particle zoo' era of stamp collecting and moved it to the forefront of fundamental physics research. It's certainly true that it contains some major holes and because of that nobody thought it would stand up this long to experiment. However it has survived over 40 years and is still the best model we have although some extensions, such as neutrino masses, have been needed.
As for making observations you clearly fail to grasp how science works. The way you find something beyond the SM is that you make a measurement of some process where new physics predicts X and the Standard Model predicts Y and you see which your measurement agrees with. The fact that for 40+ years every time we come up with a new measurement we get Y and never X is because that's the way the universe works. If you are unhappy with it then don't blame the physicists - it's not like we got a say in how the universe was put together!
This kind of 'thruster' simply can't work in any practical way.
Actually that depends. As you remove the electrons the charge will build up which means that you have an increasing electric field. Providing that you kick out the electrons with sufficient energy to escape the field the field will continue increasing and will reach the point where it will breakdown even in vacuum.
For a high enough field strength virtual electron-positron pairs will gain sufficient energy as they are pulled apart to become real. The electron will be attracted back to the craft to neutralize some of the positive charge there and the positron will be repelled out into space creating even more thrust. The result is that after achieving a critical charge the charge will stop increasing.
However you will need a huge charge build up to get this far and you would probably need high energy gamma rays to give the electrons sufficient energy to escape the intense electric field required (otherwise they will not leave the material). Since you are, at this point, essentially converting energy into mass and flinging it out the back of the craft I also expect that your net thrust would be no different than just reflecting the incident photons.
...which was precisely why shining a laser onto an object and seeing very obvious thrust was a surprise.
This is exactly why you let private entrepreneurs do things rather than the government. It'll get done better, cheaper, and faster.
Actually you will typically only get two out of those three. Saying that there should never have been any tax spent on this is really not understanding what these entrepreneurs are doing. The reason that any of these startups are even possible is because of the huge amount of work which has been done on fusion in the past by governments. If none of that money have been spent there would be no fusion start ups because we would not have enough knowledge about fusing plasma to make any sort of even vaguely viable bid for investment funding. In addition some of the startups are actually get tax money to help them startup.
...and with a lot of interest if any one of these companies are successful.
Rather than denigrate the government paid research that got us here you should be looking at a research system which is doing exactly what it should be and working extremely well as a whole. The, yes often ponderous, ship of state takes science on the long, risky and costly journey across a vast ocean of knowledge which does not appear to be very relevant to improving our quality of life until it gets within sight of something extremely useful. Then the entrepreneurs take over and rapidly construct a fleet of many different craft to get to the new shore which is now in sight. Most will sink without trace on the way to that shore but those that arrive rapidly explore and open up new territory for us all to benefit from.
So what we have here is a great example of the system working as it should. It's not a case of tortoise vs. hare and more a case of the tortoise carrying the hare until it is close enough to the finish that it can sprint across the line and win the race faster than either one could by themselves. Government research is slow and it is expensive but that is because they take on the big, slow and expensive research which private enterprise lacks the stamina to do. A successful team plays to each member's strengths and that's exactly what appears to be happening here. So don't complain - all those tax dollars you probably previously complained were wasted on fundamental research may well be about to be paid back
I doubt any revolution in particle physics would ever come from *WITHIN* particle physics.
Really? It has already happened once with something called the November Revolution. This was the discovery of the charm quark which completely revolutionized our understanding of what baryons and mesons were and ushered in the quark model.
Prior to that there was the prediction of anti-matter by Dirac followed by its discovery a few years later which showed that we could unite quantum mechanics and Special Relativity. Prior to that there was Rutherford's discovery of the atom which completely changed our understanding of the nature of matter and all the early work with particles which lead to quantum mechanics. In fact if you look back at the last century or so of physics many of the major paradigm shifts in the field have come from particle physics or its clear precursor.
If you think that getting a PhD merely requires you to accept certain beliefs then you have a very poor understanding about how science works. Good PhD students will challenge the beliefs of those examining them and defend their work using the data and analysis they have in their thesis.
As for damaging careers coming up with some radical new idea will greatly enhance anyone's career...provided that they put in the ground work to do the studies needed to convince others of its worth. Big experiments are an issue because the amount of ground work to get one of these funded is huge and this limits the scope of ideas to ones which are clearly going to work.
Lastly though as for thinking of the Standard Model as the truth absolutely nothing could be more wrong. In fact we usually start by pointing out one of its most obvious flaws: there is no gravity in it! Indeed we particle physicists spend all our time trying to break it by looking for physics beyond what it allows for. Whoever finds physics beyond the Standard Model is likely to end up with a Nobel Prize so I'm not sure why you would think we would not he extremely motivated to break it and why this would not be really good for anyone's career.
However, electrons are very nearly massless, so unless they're somehow exciting them with massive amounts of energy, the propulsion from the electrons is unlikely to be significant.
It depends on what you compare it to. Since this process was hitting the graphite with photons it makes sense to compare the thrust produced to that created purely by bouncing photons off a material. Electrons might be light but they have more mass than a photon and so the thrust should be significantly higher.
That may be correct but the article you linked has an incredibly misleading title. This process does not convert photons into electrons it simply imparts the photon's energy to one or more electrons which, in the case of thrust, causes them to be ejected from the graphite. The coupling of electrons to photons is extremely well understood, in fact it is the second most accurately tested scientific theory ever discovered (the first being special relativity). The only way to create electrons from photons is to also create an equal number of positrons. However this requires far higher energy processes ~1 MeV of energy which is many orders of magnitude higher than the energies involved in visible light and would easily break apart graphite which is something they ruled out.
Where the heck those extra electrons came from?
They could easily come from all the material which is surrounding the graphite. As the charge builds up on the graphite due to all the electrons being expelled it will develop an increasingly strong electric field eventually will pull electrons from the walls of the chamber. Since the vacuum will also not be perfect the remaining gas molecules could also transfer charge by moving back and forth between the graphite and the chamber walls.
A similar effect exists in the LHC where the electrons are 'helped' to leave the walls by synchrotron radiation hitting the walls of the beam pipe and are then dragged along by the electric field of a bunch of protons forming a electron cloud. This effect is one of the primary limiting factors on the number of protons we can have in an LHC beam.
So they'd need to carry hydrogen and split off its electrons or something to neutralize the charge.
Actually this could provide more thrust. Use sunlight to propel the craft until it has built up a large enough electric charge that the efficiency of the thrust begins to drop (since it will take an increasing amount of energy to expel the electrons from something with a large positive charge) and then introduce a stream of neutral gas into the sponge. This should strip the electrons off the gas and the remaining positively charge ions will then be repelled by the positive graphite and provide even more thrust.
Of course this means that you need to have a fuel source but it's likely to be far more efficient than current rocket fuel plus there it no need for it to be something explosive like hydrogen - you could probably use Xenon which is a noble gas and so extremely inert and so a lot safer.
The one advantage we have with Netflix over broadcast stations is that it is on demand and, like websites, it is conceivable that if the ads become obnoxious it will motivate someone to provide a plugin to Ad Blocker to deal with them like there is for YouTube.
Actually if that is done well then I don't mind it at all since it is almost invisible. However when done badly it is the most obnoxious of all advertizing since it is impossible to avoid as it is part of the show.
Actually before the Higgs the problem with the model was that the particles all had non-zero masses. This breaks symmetries which we observe to be held in nature and was a huge problem and also gave rise to the violation of unitarity: if there were no masses there would be no unitarity violations.
Part of the beauty of the Higgs mechanism is that not only did it explain how the particles could have masses while the symmetries of nature we observe are preserved but it also called out the unitarity violations which the non-zero particle masses caused!
Every model has its problems though. The issue with the SM is that the Higgs mass is so much lighter than the Planck scale. This means that there has to be something probably not much higher in mass than the scales we have already probed. However this is not a hard constraint. The higher the energy of this new physics the less "natural" but with only one universe to play with there is no way to be certain that a one in a million chance did not occur when setting up the laws of nature....it's just not very likely.
It sounds like he was answering a different question: "What is the shape of a black hole?". That's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. Asking whether they have a shape is akin to asking: "Does something which exists have a shape?". In fact this article is actually a violation of Betteridge's law because the answer is 'yes', Black Holes do indeed have a shape although that answer imparts no useful information whatsoever.
Asking questions like "Does a Black Hole have a shape?" makes you have doubts about those qualifications though. In physics you need to be careful to be precise. Anything which exists has a shape and yet he is not questioning the existence of Black Holes nor even whether they are spherical but rather whether they appear distorted from spherical by their gravitational field bending light.
Before the Big Bang there was no space and it is debatable whether there was any time either. So if all space and (perhaps) time can be created from nothing why do you have a problem with the reverse happening at some point?
Any SUSY is going to provide a dark matter candidate.
Actually that is not quite correct. A majority do but there are searches conducted at the LHC for something called R-parity violating SUSY. In these models the lightest SUSY particle can decay and SUSY does not explain Dark Matter.
These models are generally less popular because there are very strong limits on them from existing data. In particular these models allow for flavour changing neutral currents and thing like baryon number violation and there are extremely strong limits on both processes not being seen (although we do eventually expect to see baryon number violation).
Does the higher energy and luminosity have any real chance of creating dark matter that we didn't see at the lower energy
Nobody can really answer that: we are going beyond the energy frontier and nobody can really say for certain what, if anything, we will find. However if those two broad assumptions I stated above (weakly interacting and thermally produced) are true for Dark Matter then, barring some pathologically strange model for new physics, we should see Dark Matter whether it is from SUSY or something else.
The reason these assumptions put a limit on the mass is that the heavier the particle the earlier the universe will cool to the point that no more can be produced. If this happens really early on i.e. very massive particles, then these particles will be so dense that they will interact and annihilate back into whatever produced them and so there will be very few left, too few to explain Dark Matter. Similarly if they are too low in mass then there will be far more of them because they decouple from the universe later when it is less dense but then the lower mass per particle means that there is still not enough to explain Dark Matter.
For a weakly interacting particle this 'sweet spot' turns out to be within reach of the LHC. This makes no assumption whatsoever about Supersymmetry only that the particle interact with the weak force. However if they only interact through the Higgs then the mass will be higher or (worse) if via gravity then much, much higher. Another possibility is that Dark Matter was not thermally produced in which case you need to know the production mechanism to find out what it says about the mass.
Can you explain why it is found acceptable for the standard model to allow calculation of probabilities greater than one (one of the reasons the Higgs was proposed)?
The Standard Model does not allow for calculation of probabilities greater than one. The Higgs is part of the Standard Model and you only get this effect, called violation of unitarity, for processes like WW scattering if the Higgs is not there. Since the Higgs was found the SM is complete and there is no problem with violating unitarity.
Well assuming it takes a minute in a 650W microwave to cook your disgusting boiled sausage that's roughly 60*650=39kJ of energy, lets call it 40kJ. The LHC beams contain roughly 360MJ. The beams take roughly 90 microseconds to make a complete orbit (27km/3e8 m/s) so that is a power of roughly 4TW (=4 million MW).
;-)
Now the sausage is probably only about half a nuclear interaction length (guess) so only about 18% of the protons will interact per sausage crossing and not all of that energy will actually be converted into heat since much will go to secondaries. So lets be conservative and say that 1% of the incident energy heats the sausage. Hence the the time for the sausage to get 40kJ will be 40e3/(4e12*0.01) = 1 micro second.
Assuming the sausage absorbs 1% of the total beam energy (which will happen in under a millisecond) then it will have about 900 times more energy than it needed to cook it which is the energy released by slightly less than 1kg of TNT...and this is one of the reasons why the LHC is know as the Big Bang machine!
On the other hand, if no new physics is discovered, could this be the Michelson–Morley experiment of the 2000s?
That's probably very unlikely. Michelson-Morley was testing a prediction of the best understanding of light at the time. The non-observation of changes due to motion through the ether was clear evidence that the best understood theory for light was wrong.
Now we have found the Higgs the established model, called the Standard Model, has no more predictions to make: we have found it all. The problem is that there are some phenomena which the Standard Model cannot explain, like Dark Matter, and it relies on some amazing fine-tuning of parameters to have such a light Higgs (the odd of this happening by chance are about the same as winning a lottery 5-6 times in a row...and if someone did that nobody would believe it was simple luck!).
The solutions to these issues involve speculation by theorists and there are multiple candidates. Supersymmetry is probably the leading one but if we fail to see SUSY in the coming run then I, and a lot of my colleagues, will probably start to doubt it as the most likely explanation. However even then it might still be that SUSY is the explanation but at a higher energy scale that we can reach and just a more-than-minimal variety of it.
Personally the thing I expect the most for us to find is Dark Matter. this is based on two broad assumptions that cut across many different theoretical models: that Dark Matter interacts through the weak force and that it was thermally produced in the Big Bang. If these assumptions are correct then the mass of the Dark Matter particle has to be in reach of the LHC. However this is still far from any sort of guarantee: there are other models for Dark Matter out there with good motivation which we would not see e.g. axions.
baryons would have decayed
Actually that is conjecture as there is currently no evidence that protons decay. I'll grant that the expectation is that there are high energy processes which violate baryon number and if this is true then it should be possible for a proton to decay. However there is a simple way around this: suppose the initial conditions of the Big Bang just included a slight excess of baryons? No B violation is needed and protons are absolutely stable.
As you can probably guess I'm a particle physicist and not a cosmologist. However even in the dark energy models presumably a 'big rip' condition is reached in the voids between gravitationally bound objects since there is nothing to stop the acceleration? If so then surely the implications for the stable pockets is not really known since all our understanding of causal disconnection is based on GR which would no longer be valid in the regions between the galaxies.
Rather than poorly written, mistake filled blog pages on basic physics why not just link chapters from a physics textbook? The content is the same, there would be fewer mistakes in the physics since books are reviewed and edited and the writing style is less annoying.
The blogger this time forgets to include the knowledge that the universe's expansion is accelerating. We learnt this about a decade ago so it's not exactly new. The problem is that as the rate of expansion increases the volume of the universe which you can travel to without exceeding the speed of light shrinks. Given enough time it will become smaller than atoms and then nuclei etc. until you get to the planck scale and then nobody knows what will happen since we need a working quantum model for space-time itself which does not yet exist.
Now whether heat death or the 'big rip' kills off intelligence first is probably not clear - and I'm not sure I would really believe anyone who claims to know given the unknowns. However since space-time itself has a limited lifespan then intelligence clearly has a limited lifespan too unless we eventually figure out a way to leave the universe. That might be a tricky problem but we do have a lot of time to try and figure out a solution