Large Hadron Collider
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No. I thought the part about Stephen Hawking having a fight with him would have underlined that.Raeil said:
They are collecting thousands of terabytes of complex data a day last I heard. I think I heard somewhere that they may of actually discovered the Higgs Boson particle. Not too sure though.
Yeah unfortunately if you mention any scientific research to the average person, they consider it wasting money. No matter what it is.wooty said:
thats what my physics teacher said. it would be the size of an apple.Daverson said:
i might be remembering wrong though...
Yeah, can't wait to hear the spin the media will come up with that one once they realize its potential.AC10 said:
"The nutjobs at CERN are are trying to blow up the world!!!!!"
Heh, cold fusion my ass, fusion power looks like a kid lighting matches next to antimatter annihilation engines.
It takes time. First, they had to do countless experiments just to test if the sensors were working correctly. They spent a year doing experiments that had already been done by other colliders just to find out if their sensors were properly calibrated. Then there were technical difficulties involved with some segments of the collider leaking coolant, which is a big no-no. They had to postpone tests for months until they managed to chill that segment down to the appropriate temperature.
Now they are doing experiments that no one has (or can) do elsewhere. The thing is, the results take a LONG time to process. Every time they do an experiment, they get a mountain of data. That data has got to be processed and examined by scientists. Computers can't do the thinking for them. They have to manually check the data to see what it reveals.
Then they have to check to see if the results can be replicated. This is a common misconception that the public has about science: we don't just run one experiment then hold the result to be true. We run multiple tests and we do our best to replicate results - we get multiple (often competing) teams to test each other's results and critique the methods used - this is to try to lessen the impact of personal biases and preferences that scientists have affecting the results. If 10 different, independent, often hostile teams of scientists (and scientists CAN be hostile to each other, let me tell you) all come to the same conclusion, chances are it's PROBABLY true. If 50 different teams all reach the same conclusion, we're pretty confident that the results are accurate.
The LHC is doing good, hard, honest work that can't be done anywhere else. No serious physicist ever feared the LHC creating a Black Hole, and no serious physicist ever expected the LHC to have revolutionized science by now. When they were building the damn thing, they told the public that, at best, it would take 5 years before they started getting really useful results, and that it all likelihood, it could take 10 years before it started being useful.
But even if the LHC never finds the Higgs Boson or helps uncover a new theory of physics, the negative results that it generates are incredibly useful. It looks like the LHC has disproven the super-symmetry theory. You might scoff at the usefulness of "disproving" a theory, but it's an integral part of science. If we couldn't disprove theories, there wouldn't be much point in making them now would there? The fact that scientific theories are falsifiable is one of the biggest strengths of science. If Super-Symmetry is incorrect, as it looks like it is thanks entirely to the LHC, then it forces scientists to come up with better theories. Negative results are, of course, not as desired by scientists as positive results, but without negative results, we could chase blind alleys and false leads for ages. Negative results are incredibly useful.
The LHC is doing good, solid work. In my opinion, it has already justified its price tag. Science is a long, messy, difficult process. You can't be disappointed just because you haven't gotten results in a few years. If scientists were as willing as the public to abandon all hope and sink into despondent misery just because they didn't get results as soon as they thought, they'd all have given up long ago. It took thousands of years to get to where we are, and in all likelihood, it will take thousands of years to get to where we want to be. But the journey is always worth it, because the alternative is stagnation and a static existence which satisfies no one.
Now they are doing experiments that no one has (or can) do elsewhere. The thing is, the results take a LONG time to process. Every time they do an experiment, they get a mountain of data. That data has got to be processed and examined by scientists. Computers can't do the thinking for them. They have to manually check the data to see what it reveals.
Then they have to check to see if the results can be replicated. This is a common misconception that the public has about science: we don't just run one experiment then hold the result to be true. We run multiple tests and we do our best to replicate results - we get multiple (often competing) teams to test each other's results and critique the methods used - this is to try to lessen the impact of personal biases and preferences that scientists have affecting the results. If 10 different, independent, often hostile teams of scientists (and scientists CAN be hostile to each other, let me tell you) all come to the same conclusion, chances are it's PROBABLY true. If 50 different teams all reach the same conclusion, we're pretty confident that the results are accurate.
The LHC is doing good, hard, honest work that can't be done anywhere else. No serious physicist ever feared the LHC creating a Black Hole, and no serious physicist ever expected the LHC to have revolutionized science by now. When they were building the damn thing, they told the public that, at best, it would take 5 years before they started getting really useful results, and that it all likelihood, it could take 10 years before it started being useful.
But even if the LHC never finds the Higgs Boson or helps uncover a new theory of physics, the negative results that it generates are incredibly useful. It looks like the LHC has disproven the super-symmetry theory. You might scoff at the usefulness of "disproving" a theory, but it's an integral part of science. If we couldn't disprove theories, there wouldn't be much point in making them now would there? The fact that scientific theories are falsifiable is one of the biggest strengths of science. If Super-Symmetry is incorrect, as it looks like it is thanks entirely to the LHC, then it forces scientists to come up with better theories. Negative results are, of course, not as desired by scientists as positive results, but without negative results, we could chase blind alleys and false leads for ages. Negative results are incredibly useful.
The LHC is doing good, solid work. In my opinion, it has already justified its price tag. Science is a long, messy, difficult process. You can't be disappointed just because you haven't gotten results in a few years. If scientists were as willing as the public to abandon all hope and sink into despondent misery just because they didn't get results as soon as they thought, they'd all have given up long ago. It took thousands of years to get to where we are, and in all likelihood, it will take thousands of years to get to where we want to be. But the journey is always worth it, because the alternative is stagnation and a static existence which satisfies no one.
My point was that the human eye can see a lack of colour (eg. black). You can't see a black whole in space because everything else is black. If the black hole was in front of you, it would be a big black sphere, where there used to be transparent air. (I'm assuming that the black hole wouldn't bend the light around itself so much that it would be completly enveloped. If it did that might change things but even then, i'm fairly certain that its just a question of proximity.)Daverson said:
No, I remember watching a really long show about it. They basically said it could, and probably does, make black holes all the time. However these black holes are so small and subatomic that they just collapse in on themselves even further and disappear. I'd trust that guy. He had glasses.Crazy_Dude said:
The news people got bored when it didn't:
1.) Blow up the world
2.) Swallow the world
or
3.) Be misused in any way in an argument for or against a political party
1.) Blow up the world
2.) Swallow the world
or
3.) Be misused in any way in an argument for or against a political party
String theory gets called a myth all the time, assuming that's what he's referring to. And there is indeed debate on whether or not it qualifies as a theory, as it currently does not make any new testable predictions. One flavor of string theory would be falsified if the higgs boson is not found, but the entire theory is pretty vague so its hard to pin down a way to test it. And this sucker has been kicking around for some 50 years now not making new predictions, all the while mostly dominating particle physics due to some academic politics. Lee Smolin wrote a pretty damning book about this, its called "The Trouble With Physics."PingoBlack said:
BTW, the standard model, which is the current front runner for the Theory of Everything(its missing some parts), predicts a higgs boson. The long and short of that is that there is in fact a higgs boson..... probably. What the LHC is for is trying to observe it. We're basically positive the particle is real, its just the mass of it is up for debate. The reason Hawking hopes it is not found is that if the standard model is correct in its prediction, then there is basically nothing else we can learn from the LHC, and a collider large enough to yield new data would have to be roughly the size of the milky way. It would really make the entire exercise seem like kind of a waste, vindicating a theory we basically already believe.
erm... not quite, in a way you are right if there was a scope large enough, with colour behind the black wholes effect we would see the distortion as a lack of said colour, however if we were in the main effect of the gravity (as we would be in your example) we wouldn't see ANYTHING because within its effects light will never reach our eyes.alias2 said:
Oh, you were talking about actual apples. Sorry. For some reason I thought you were implying something else entirely... (I haven't been getting much sleep recently)TrilbyWill said:
I just pulled the number off some website, don't know how accurate is it. It's in the right order of magnitude anyway. Apologies again.
You'd see a black sphere, but that's the event horizon, not the black hole itself. You can never physically perceive the actual material of the black hole as light (and by extension, time) breaks down beyond this point.alias2 said:
me neither and therefore i have this tendency to write things wrongly and i say something completely different.Daverson said: