What's It All About?
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 08:23PM 
TOMORROW a boffin beneath the Franco-Swiss border will stick 50p in the meter, press a button and this Large Hadron Collider machine will spark into life. Now I've read the blurb about protons and Higgins thingies and God particles, and frankly my dear, I don't know if I give a damn because I didn't understand a word of it. I do understand one thing however. Since it was conceived decades ago, with approval gained in 1994, brought a construction period of 10 years and cost us £billions, it sounds like yet another scientific make-work scheme to me.
Or maybe not. Maybe there is some value in this, 'the greatest experiment ever'. So before an egghead creates a black hole or raises Satan or whatever it is they're going to do, can someone tell me (and this is the important part here) in plain, easy-peasy English please, why tomorrow counts and how it is we are not being taken for a very expensive ride?
Ta.
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Reader Comments (21)
>>why tomorrow counts and how it is we are not being taken for a very expensive ride?<<
I don't know about this machine, but particle accelerators have been used for many years to investigate a whole range of physical phenomena: how matter behaves when it approaches the speed of light (and it behaves very oddly indeed), the nature of light and the influence of gravity on light particles, how matter was created from energy, and a million other things. Quantum science, or quantum electrodynamics, in fact goes to the very heart of our understanding of the world (the universe). This science also forms the basis for modern chemistry and, as biologists are now interpreting nature increasingly in terms of chemistry, it affects biological and medical research too.
Quantum science has brought mankind a range of joys from the atom bomb to laser surgery. Practically every discovery leads to a score of inventions within a generation, and this smasher will most probably be no exception.
But mere expectation of future inventions would be a poor motivation to build and run these machines. Simple curiosity is a much better one.
Possible new abundance of free or very low cost energy? Secret of cold fusion? New ways to use atoms to create new drugs? This experiment could reveal many things which could benefit the human race and possibly the planet too. I don't think we are going to get devoured by a black hole. This is just scare mongering by the usual suspects in the tabloids who know little of the science FACT and read too much into the science FICTION. Just my opinion, anyway.
Tomorrow counts, because it's the beginning of the END OF THE WORLD !!!!
W'ere all gonna get sucked into a big black hole...Europe will go first and we'll never know who won the White House.. ;)
Noel Cunningham -
... how matter behaves when it approaches the speed of light
Nope, lost me there.
Samuel -
Possible new abundance of free or very low cost energy? Secret of cold fusion?
Nope, lost me there.
Colm -
W'ere all gonna get sucked into a big black hole...Europe will go first
Splendid, this is English I understand.
Pete,
They may unlock the secret of time travel so you can return to the 19th century. :-)
I think Pete would prefer 1689 , or whereabouts, whenever hat flaming Bill of Rights he's always banging on about was written :)
Colm, I think he would go back to the birthplace of Gramsci en route, and shoot him.
No way. Without Gramsci, who would Pete have to blame all our problems on ?
I predict that absolutely nothing of any practical benefit will come from this experiment.
Quantum mechanics and it's erstwhile Entropic Theory are about as arcane & meta-physical as is possible to get. It's pure mathematical/mental gymnastics with 'particles' called Quarks and Charm. What?! I'll have two pints of both please.
It was recently postulated that these particles actually don't exist, but only 'exist' when looked for. In other words the poet had it right: 'Does the tree in the quad cease to be there when I stop looking at it?'
Black holes. Gimme a break. The only black hole is the one down which our taxes are going.
Colm,
"No way. Without Gramsci, who would Pete have to blame all our problems on ?"
Those 19th century liberals of course!
To put it in simple terms, I think they're going to take a small bit of stuff, and smash it into another small bit of stuff, really really fast, and see what happens.
It might blow up France! Hey, why are they waiting until tomorrow?
The LHC is probably the most exciting development in the last 50yrs. , expect to see the theoretical base for low cost power generation . Very soon more powerful proton beam therapy machines for cancer treatment will come on line and possibly "exotic" particle beam devices for many different medical uses . On the down side the theoretical principles of new weapons are sure to be considered . We live in exciting times .
Bernard,
"I predict that absolutely nothing of any practical benefit will come from this experiment."
CMOS technology has been proven as one of the most important achievements in modern engineering history. In less than 30 years, it has become the primary engine driving the world economy. Device scaling makes this possible. For decades, progress in device scaling has followed an exponential curve: this has come to be known as Moore's law. Downscaling such devices like MOSFETs to their limiting sizes is a key challenge of the semiconductor industry now. Therefore device simulation requires new theory and modeling techniques, what helps to improve the understanding of device physics and design, for structures at the sub-100 nm scale, and complements experimental work in addressing this challenge. We present a new approach, which allows us to make predictions about performance of future MOSFETs. The quantum-mechanical features of the electron transport are extracted from the numerical solution of the quantum Liouville equation in the Wigner function representation.
Moore's law: new playground for quantum physics
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14783715
Quantum cryptography, or quantum key distribution (QKD), uses quantum mechanics to guarantee secure communication. It enables two parties to produce a shared random bit string known only to them, which can be used as a key to encrypt and decrypt messages.
An important and unique property of quantum cryptography is the ability of the two communicating users to detect the presence of any third party trying to gain knowledge of the key. This results from a fundamental part of quantum mechanics: the process of measuring a quantum system in general disturbs the system. A third party trying to eavesdrop on the key must in some way measure it, thus introducing detectable anomalies. By using quantum superpositions or quantum entanglement and transmitting information in quantum states, a communication system can be implemented which detects eavesdropping. If the level of eavesdropping is below a certain threshold a key can be produced which is guaranteed as secure (i.e. the eavesdropper has no information about), otherwise no secure key is possible and communication is aborted.
The security of quantum cryptography relies on the foundations of quantum mechanics, in contrast to traditional public key cryptography which relies on the computational difficulty of certain mathematical functions, and cannot provide any indication of eavesdropping or guarantee of key security.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography
The Poles' gift, to their western Allies, of Enigma decryption, a little over a month before the outbreak of World War II, came not a moment too soon. Former Bletchley Park mathematician-cryptologist Gordon Welchman has written: "Ultra [the British Enigma-decryption operation] would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German military... Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use."[32] After the war, Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill was to tell King George VI: "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war."[33]
Aaaare...I see now..
Large Hadron Collider: Every home will have one.
Mind you, I do recommend wearing an extra jumper tomorrow, and packing an Alpha-Centauri to English dictionary, just in case we get sucked into a black hole. The Alpha-Centaurians are notoriously difficult to deal with, when you just pop in on them unexpectedly, or so I'm told by the Mighty Tharg.
"just in case we get sucked into a black hole"
Not to worry, that might not happen. They may just forget to carry the 1 somewhere, and conjure into existence enough anti-matter to annihilate the universe. But at least it will be easier to find a parking spot.
Forget all the propaganda about Armageddon, black holes and another BIG bang.
I predict it'll be a very expensive DAMP SQUIB!
Large-scale scientific and engineering projects often provide important spin-offs which greatly improve our lives, unlike the money which is thrown down the black hole of social 'sciences'. This is real science: it needs full funding, and it will pay back the investment.
Getting back to this thing, I have to honestly admit that I'm feeling a little relieved that the blooming thing has broken down, and will be out of action for a few months.
What I would really like to know is, what would have happened if the breakdown had occurred whilst the machine was in full-flow? No-one seems to have asked nor answered that question in the MSM.
I have heard one of the scientists involved, say that "the energy released by the proposed collisions is no greater than that of two mosquitos colliding at normal speeds". Now, I understand the equation "momentum = mass times velocity", and so they are saying that although the velocity is so very high, because the mass of the particles is so very small, the overall energy released is no greater than (the mosquitos)".
OK, but if so, then why the need to house the thing so far underground, and to cool the surrounding atmosphere to almost 0 Kelvin?
Somehow, I just don't trust the words of Hawking & Co. They seem to me to be hell-bent upon proving or disproving their almighty standard model, regardless of the possible consequences.
For them to speculate that "collisions releasing such energy occur all the time in the atmosphere, and we are still here; the earth's destruction would have already happened, if this posed a threat".. Heard it all before. Famous last words all over again. Plus that doesn't sound like a very scientific argument to me. I'm glad it's broken down.
Oh and another thing: how much wattage is this thing draining from the national grid(s) of France & Switz? Exactly how much electrical power does this thing use? And more to the point, who is paying for it? Is it being TOTALLY financed out of the private funds of these scientists? If not, then is the cost being passed on to domestic energy consumers? And if so, were they given any choice in the matter?
Need I even ask?
Tom
It brings to mind Michael Fish's infamous "relax, I can asure you there isn't going to be a hurricane ..
Yes, and of quotes such as "The era of tory 'boom and bust' economics is over". Ha ha!