Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
Welcome back to Science Thursday. This particular film was shot by CERN interns during some downtime, of which they have quite a lot actually since it’s broken more often than it’s working.
Science!
What a lot of people don’t know about the Large Hadron Collider is that it’s basically been operating at half capacity since an accident during the test phase blew out a large section. Now, after two years of re-building, it is poised again to create that Black Hole Apocalypse that swallows the Earth into it’s singularity (not to worry, as it turns out micro Black Holes are unstable and loose mass (energy) through Hawking Radiation at a rate too great to sustain themselves indefinitely, so you can rest assured that we’re far more likely to die of Global Climate Change).
Anyway it’s been down for two years (much like Shell’s Arctic drilling scheme) and started it’s run up to full capacity next week. Beyond nailing down the Higgs Boson, a lot of what they expect to find is nothing.
Huh?
Scientific method. A Theory is not a Theory unless it makes predictions that are experimentally disprovable-
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
The dog did nothing in the night-time.
That was the curious incident.
A lot of the work for CERN from here on out is testing some of the predictions of various Theories and seeing if the experimental results match. The fuzzyness of the Higgs Boson for instance could indicate Supersymmetry which predicts up to 5 types of Higgs Bosons.
If the Standard Model is in fact correct, it covers only 4% of the observed Universe. 27% is “Dark Matter” that is currently undetectable but exerts a huge Gravitational influence (umm… Black Holes are detectable so it ain’t that). “Dark Energy” even less so, but this is the force that observationally inflates the Universe beyond a size where Gravity can ever collapse it.
The Large Hadron Collider might, might produce energy levels sufficient to detect Dark Matter. Nobody is talking about Dark Energy yet.
Oh, and ‘Dark’ in this context means undetectable by current means, might as well call it Rebellion.
So how to do you detect the undetectable? Why, by it’s absence. The hope for Dark Matter is that certain types of collisions will, instead of producing results that conform with the Standard Model, lose detectable energy (mass) in a replicatible way that advances the math describing it’s nature.
Or not.
Cern restarts Large Hadron Collider with mission to make scientific history
by Ian Sample, The Guardian
Sunday 5 April 2015 15.48 EDT
The pat on the back and call to arms marked the restart on Sunday morning of the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. More than two years after it handed researchers the Higgs boson, and was closed down for crucial upgrade work, the machine is ready to make scientific history for a second time.
How that history will be written is unknown. High on the wishlist for discoveries are dark matter, the invisible material that appears to hang around galaxies and makes up more than 25% of the universe; hidden extra dimensions that would explain why gravity is so puny compared to other forces of nature; and an explanation for why the world around us is not made from antimatter.
But there is another history that keeps scientists awake at night: the possibility that the LHC’s discoveries begin and end with the Higgs boson, that it finds nothing else over the next 20 years it is due to run. As Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and professor at the University of Texas in Austin, told the Guardian: “My thoughts on the possibility of the LHC telling us nothing new don’t go beyond hopeless fear.”
…
Until now, the Large Hadron Collider has run at only half its design energy. The machine was restricted to 7TeV collisions after a weak connection led to a short circuit that caused an explosion less than two weeks after it was first switched on in September 2008. The blast covered half a kilometre of the machine with a thin layer of soot and closed the collider for more than a year. The repairs cost the lab £24m.The machine was switched back on in 2009, but Cern took the precaution of running at half energy to slash the risk of another accident. The gamble paid off. On 4 July 2012, the lab’s Atlas and CMS detector teams declared they had discovered the Higgs boson months before the machine was shut down. A year later, Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh-based physicist, and François Englert from Brussels, won the Nobel prize for their work on the particle, which is thought to give mass to others.
…
The Higgs boson was the last piece of what physicists call the Standard Model, a series of equations that describe how all the known particles interact with one another. Though successful, the model is woefully incomplete, accounting for only 4% of the known universe. With the LHC, scientists hope to find physics beyond the Standard Model, a first step to explaining the majority of the cosmos that lies beyond our comprehension.“The LHC will be running day and night. When we will get results we don’t know. What is important is that we will have collisions at energies we’ve never had before,” said Arnaud Marsollier, a Cern spokesman.
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)
Science News and Blogs
- The Moon Was Formed in a Smashup Between Earth and a Near Twin By Jesse Emspak, Smithsonian Magazine
- For the first time, scientists find complex organic molecules in an infant star system, By Rachel Feltman, Washington Post
- A few unwanted goldfish turn into thousands and endanger a Colorado lake, By Nick Kirkpatrick, Washington Post
- Dear Humans, Industry, Not Your Activities, Is Causing Climate Change, by Aaron Huertas, Huffington Post
- Report: Silence and denial surround Oklahoma’s “frackquake” problem, by Lindsay Abrams, Salon
- If We Dig Out All Our Fossil Fuels, Here’s How Hot We Can Expect It to Get, by Michael Greenstone, The New York Times
- This Cosmic Ring Photo Is the One to Rule Them All, by Calla Cofield, Live Science
- Brontosaurus Rising, By Elif Batuman, The New Yorker
- The NSA’s plan: improve cybersecurity by hacking everyone else, by Trevor Timm, The Guardian
- Homeopathy: How 200-Year-Old Junk Science Created Junk Medicine and Lasted Until This Day, By Larry Schwartz, AlterNet
- SPOILER ALERT: Google is trying to get rid of spoilers, The Guardian
