The particulars of a particle accelerator
I've mentioned the Large Hadron Collider in the past. Here's the latest bit (which didn't seem to mention the high-energy incident from a few weeks ago.
"The day [the LHC] turns on will be a moment of truth for CERN, which has spent 13 years building the collider, and for the world's physicists, who have staked their credibility and their careers, not to mention all those billions of dollars, on the conviction that they are within touching distance of fundamental discoveries about the universe. If they fail to see something new, experts agree, it could be a long time, if ever, before giant particle accelerators are built on Earth again, ringing down the curtain on at least one aspect of the age-old quest to understand what the world is made of and how it works.
"'If you see nothing,' said a CERN physicist, John Ellis, 'in some sense, then, we theorists have been talking rubbish for the last 35 years.'
"Fabiola Gianotti, a CERN physicist and the deputy spokeswoman for the team that built the Atlas, said, Something must happen.'
"The accelerator, Gianotti explained, would take physics into a realm of energy and time where the reigning theories simply do not apply, corresponding to an era when cosmologists think that the universe was still differentiating itself, like a dividing embryo, evolving from a primordial blandness and endless potential into the forces and particles that constitute modern reality.
"She listed possible discoveries like a mysterious particle called the Higgs boson that is thought to endow other particles with mass, new forms of matter that explain the mysterious dark matter waddling the cosmos and even new dimensions of spacetime.
"'For me,' Gianotti said, 'it would be a dream if, finally, in a couple of years in a laboratory we are going to produce the particle responsible for 25 percent of the universe.'"
"The day [the LHC] turns on will be a moment of truth for CERN, which has spent 13 years building the collider, and for the world's physicists, who have staked their credibility and their careers, not to mention all those billions of dollars, on the conviction that they are within touching distance of fundamental discoveries about the universe. If they fail to see something new, experts agree, it could be a long time, if ever, before giant particle accelerators are built on Earth again, ringing down the curtain on at least one aspect of the age-old quest to understand what the world is made of and how it works.
"'If you see nothing,' said a CERN physicist, John Ellis, 'in some sense, then, we theorists have been talking rubbish for the last 35 years.'
"Fabiola Gianotti, a CERN physicist and the deputy spokeswoman for the team that built the Atlas, said, Something must happen.'
"The accelerator, Gianotti explained, would take physics into a realm of energy and time where the reigning theories simply do not apply, corresponding to an era when cosmologists think that the universe was still differentiating itself, like a dividing embryo, evolving from a primordial blandness and endless potential into the forces and particles that constitute modern reality.
"She listed possible discoveries like a mysterious particle called the Higgs boson that is thought to endow other particles with mass, new forms of matter that explain the mysterious dark matter waddling the cosmos and even new dimensions of spacetime.
"'For me,' Gianotti said, 'it would be a dream if, finally, in a couple of years in a laboratory we are going to produce the particle responsible for 25 percent of the universe.'"
The particulars of a particle accelerator
mr damon, 00:02
1 Comments:
It has always seemed strange that a field requiring the most facile of imaginations still works so hard to find a beginning and predict an end to a universe that couldn't care less about the components to a good story. Is there anyone seriously considering the universe to be a never ending, always changing continuum? Or does such a theory threaten the livelihood of 80% of scientific jargon loaded, bullshit artists?
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