LARGE HADRON COLLIDER! LARGE HADRON COLLIDER! LARGE HADRON COLLIDER!
-Zippy
I have one annoyance with the LHC: we didn't build it here in the 80's as the SSC, but I can't fault CERN for that. But I'll take my physics wherever I can find it, and in that respect, I care not what border the calorimeter is behind. Plus, the folks at CERN made a great video:
LHCb sees where the antimatter's gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They're lookin' for whatever particles they can find
Anyway, I'm sure everyone already knows what this thing is, so I won't go into detail in the possibility that black holes will be formed or a giant VW bug sized stranglet will form that will convert Democrats and Republicans alike into fuzzy quantum blobs, later to disentigrate into independant mesons. No, the LHC means three things to me, all of it in this song:
Charge parity violation, how? HOW?
Will we see supersymmetric particles?
Is there a Higgs, or not?
The first question will clear up an important observational fact: the universe seems to consiste wholly of regular ANSI standard, Grade A matter, and not equal parts antimatter. The strong force, which we will gleefully rend asunder with 7 TeV of energy doesn't seem to break CP symmetry, while photons and its cousins, the Z and the two W, and may be related to why there is matter and no antimatter. At least, I suspect it might, and the more energy we throw at the problem, the clearer the picture may become. That's what the LHCb detector is for.
The second may be related to the third question: are there heavy shadow particles that are counterparts to the lighter ones we see all the time? Supersymmetry has the potential to sweep a lot, and I mean a LOT, of messy mathematics under the rug with the awesome power of renormalization. Pump enough energy into these collisions and you can make almost anything at the required energy domain. As a bonus, it will be another nail in the coffin of the M-theory superstring fanatics that won't die.
And the Higgs...that little fat boson (or family of bosons...WE DON'T KNOW) may be able to tell us why things have mass in the first place, and unlock a brand new series of questions that will be truly new physics no matter what. It will either validate the Standard Model and extend it or force us to toss it out the window...either way, we get new physics and new particles with new interactions and, oh, I will spend many hours just trying to understand what is coming out of ATLAS and CMS.
I don't get too excited over lead ion collisions, so I don't care about ALICE. Give me electrons or protons please. Monopoles won't come out of ion collisions. (Oh yeah, if there are really such things as monopoles (and I doubt there are) this is the machine that will finally find them.)
One thing.
The accelerators are cooled by liquid helium, not something you can just pick up at the corner store as you can with plutonium. The bulk of the helium comes from Algeria, and...Russia.
I swear, if Russia cuts off the helium supply and the magnets can't be cooled and I don't get to know the last act of the Higgs saga, I will advocate nuclear carpet bombing from their western border and advancing across Moscow until the helium is delivered.
Man's technology has exceeded his grasp. - 'The World is not Enough'
Zealous Nobel Prize hungry Physicists are racing each other and stopping at nothing to try to find the supposed 'Higgs Boson'(aka God) Particle, among others, and are risking nothing less than the annihilation of the Earth and all Life in endless experiments hoping to prove a theory when urgent tangible problems face the planet. The European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) new Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is the world's most powerful atom smasher that will soon be firing subatomic particles at each other at nearly the speed of light to create Miniature Big Bangs producing Micro Black Holes, Strangelets and other potentially cataclysmic phenomena.
Particle physicists have run out of ideas and are at a dead end forcing them to take reckless chances with more and more powerful and costly machines to create new and never-seen-before, unstable and unknown matter while Astrophysicists, on the other hand, are advancing science and knowledge on a daily basis making new discoveries in these same areas by observing the universe, not experimenting with it and with your life.
The LHC is a dangerous gamble as CERN physicist Alvaro De Rújula in the BBC LHC documentary, 'The Six Billion Dollar Experiment', incredibly admits quote, "Will we find the Higgs particle at the LHC? That, of course, is the question. And the answer is, science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing." And CERN spokesmodel Brian Cox follows with this stunning quote, "the LHC is certainly, by far, the biggest jump into the unknown."
The CERN-LHC website Mainpage itself states: "There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions,..." Again, this is because they truly don't know what's going to happen. They are experimenting with forces they don't understand to obtain results they can't comprehend. If you think like most people do that 'They must know what they're doing' you could not be more wrong. Some people think similarly about medical Dr.s but consider this by way of comparison and example from JAMA: "A recent Institute of Medicine report quoted rates estimating that medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people a year in US hospitals." The second part of the CERN quote reads "...but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator,..." A molecularly changed or Black Hole consumed Lifeless World? The end of the quote reads "...as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe." These experiments to date have so far produced infinitely more questions than answers but there isn't a particle physicist alive who wouldn't gladly trade his life to glimpse the "God particle", and sacrifice the rest of us with him. Reason and common sense will tell you that the risks far outweigh any potential(as CERN physicists themselves say) benefits.
This quote from National Geographic exactly sums this "science" up: "That's the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out."
Find out more about that "stuff" below;
http://www.SaneScience.org/
http://www.LHCFacts.org
http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/anon1.htm
http://www.lhcdefense.org/
http://www.lhcconcerns.com
Popular Mechanics - "World's Biggest Science Project Aims to Unlock 'God Particle'" - http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/extreme_machines/4216588.html"
This sounds like Dan Kettler spam. Remember him, deskmerc? Ah, the old days of alt.paranormal. Skepticult!
This is depressing. So the people behind these organizations would rather just... what, exactly?... not know? Don't look into the telescope, Galileo! God doesn't want us to know about His holy forces, and if we don't stop looking, he's going to suck us into a black hole that leads straight to hell.
I think people like this should have the courage of their convictions, and reject all technology that is the result of man's hubris. No intarwebs for luddites!
I just read this idjit's "Sane Science" site, and I think that their tagline sums them up really well:
"Imagination is more important than knowledg [sic]"
We can just imagine that knowledge doesn't need an e anymore than their arguments need substantiation.