Re: OT: Unleash the Protons!

On Sep 10, 7:31 pm, Bob Casanova <nos...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:31:03 -0700, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by macaddic...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(macaddicted):





The Large Hadron Collider starts up, more or less

AFP

<http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12201756&;
fsrc=nwl>

THE Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a machine whose experiments will
measure events that happen within a millionth of a billionth of a
billionth of a second. What no one seems to be able to measure, though,
even to an accuracy of several weeks, is when it really opens for
business. Is it the moment when the first protons are injected into its
27km-long ring? Is it the moment when they first travel all the way
round that ring? Is it the moment when they are first made to collide
with each other, thus generating the exciting new sub-atomic particles
that are the whole point of the exercise? Or is it the moment at which
those collisions have become stable enough for real scientific data to
be collected from them?

Well, popular opinion—or, rather, a tacit agreement between the
authorities at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory whose baby
the LHC is, and the journalists who report on these matters—decided on
the second. Though individual bits of the machine have been under test
for several weeks, a complete circuit gives everyone the excuse to
declare victory and splash the LHC as the "machine that will unlock the
mysteries of the Big Bang", in the hope that politicians and the public
will take notice.

The protons were duly unleashed at 9.30am on Wednesday September 10th,
and the world's press duly assembled at CERN's headquarters in Geneva to
witness the event. Someone suggested that a big red button, like the one
traditionally pressed by the villain towards the end of James Bond
films, should be used to speed the protons on their way, but that was
deemed too flashy. Instead Lyn Evans, the physicist in charge of the
collider, cautiously nursed the first proton beam around the circuit an
eighth of the way at a time. Then, to prove the point, he will send one
in the opposite direction.

Razzmatazz aside, the LHC is an awesome machine. When it is running at
full throttle, the protons going round it will be travelling within 30cm
a second of the speed of light. That speed, beyond which it is
impossible to accelerate, is 299,792km a second. The power of
accelerators has risen more than a thousandfold since the 1960s, and
they have come even further since the one of the first cyclotrons was
tested by Ernest Lawrence at the University of California at Berkeley in
1931. That device was a mere 30cm in circumference, and gave its protons
a hundred-millionth of the energy that the LHC imparts. But the basic
idea behind both devices is the same.

A combination of electricity and magnetism accelerates the protons and
thus endows them with energy. They are then brought to a sudden halt by
a collision with something else, at which point the energy is converted
into mass, creating new particles, according to Einstein's well-known
equation, E=mc?. The main difference, apart from the scale of the
machines, is that the cyclotron fired its particles into a static target
whereas the LHC uses contra-rotating beams to achieve head-on
collisions.

The real news, of course, will come when CERN actually finds something.
But then, too, the question of "when" will be moot. Scientific
discoveries are only occasionally eureka moments. More often, the data
have to be collected, reviewed, analysed statistically, found wanting,
collected again and re-analysed. Eventually, if all has gone well, a
clear result will emerge. It then has to be written up, reviewed by
critical peers and, if it passes review, published in a scientific
journal.

That process is likely to be shorter for results from the LHC than it is
for most scientific papers because the convention in physics is,
increasingly, to do without the peer review and post papers online. Then
all and sundry can tear them to shreds if they do not measure up.
Moreover, promising but unconfirmed results are likely to
leak—particularly if they concern the Higgs boson, the LHC's famous
first target. Scientists can be as garrulous as politicians when
propping up a bar.

The Higgs—which is required by theory in order to explain the existence
of mass—has become such a cliché that it will be a relief when it does
turn up. Then effort can be directed towards other things, such as
probing the mysteries of gravity, doubling the number of known particles
through a mechanism called supersymmetry and even generating minuscule
black holes. Indeed, if the boson's properties obey the strictures laid
down for it by Peter Higgs and the other physicists who predicted it way
back in the 1960s, the moment of discovery may turn out to be something
of an anticlimax. Assuming that moment can be defined, of course.

I guess the Luddites and their tame ambulance chasers (or
should that be "black hole chasers"?) weren't able to stop
it; good thing IMHO. My only real regret is that the US
didn't build the SSC.
--


i've spent a fair amount of time in the lovely town of waxahachie..and
the folks there are sorry it wasnt built. surprising given the
ignorance of science prevalent in texas.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT: Unleash the Protons!
    ... THE Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a machine whose experiments will ... thus generating the exciting new sub-atomic particles ... The protons were duly unleashed at 9.30am on Wednesday September 10th, ... Scientists can be as garrulous as politicians when ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: OT: Unleash the Protons!
    ... THE Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a machine whose experiments will ... thus generating the exciting new sub-atomic particles ... The protons were duly unleashed at 9.30am on Wednesday September 10th, ... Scientists can be as garrulous as politicians when ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Sci Am proposes SR wrong and Aether exists
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  • Re: The aether is made out of ordinary protons and electrons
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  • Re: Speed limit at C a misconception?
    ... > per second, but a popular misconception is that, according ... It hasn't, yet, as far as the received opinion of most scientists is ... but each one has a spin of its own ... and then you measure the polarization of both particles at the same ...
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