December 17, 2009--Big Physics
The Europeans last week successfully cranked up their super particle collider at CERN near Geneva Switzerland, launching a steam of sub-atomic protons in opposite directions around and around in a 17-mile long circular tube to such a velocity that they produced 1.2 trillion electron volts of energy before they slammed into each other.
Out of such collisions, when they turn the volume up even more, it is expected that the results of these colossal collisions will spin off other particles, never before seen, that theorists say will give scientists their first close-up look at condition that occurred milli-seconds after the legendary Big Bank that set whatever our universe is into its current existence.
According to the usually-reliable Wikipedia:
Got that?
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as it is called, was built by a coalition of 20 European governmental partners and cost $9 billion; and considering its esoteric, seemingly impractical purposes, this money was not easy to come by.
In fact, in the United States, at about the same time the LHC was proposed, we began work on an even larger collider under ground in Texas. It was to be 24 miles in diameter and would have generated 20 trillion electron volts, dwarfing the LHC. If Congress had not pulled the plug on funding, it would be up and running by now and it would have had a much greater impact on new physics than the LHC ever will.
But $11 billion seemed like too much to spend, especially to the anti-science conservatives who were in charge of Congress at that time. Who cares about Higgs bosons, some cried. Maybe when generating full power, others worried, it would create a Black Hole and consume not only Texas but all the other nearby Red States. And anyway, the bible doesn’t say anything about these tiny sub-atomic particles, much less the Big Bang.
And at $11 billion, something this impractical was too much to spend on a huge toy for a bunch of physicists who are so out of touch with reality that they forget to wear shoes even in the winter.
So the project was killed.
As a consequence, as reported recently in the New York Times, big science in this country has already begun noticeably to slip into second or third place in the world. (Article linked below.) Yes, some U.S. scientists will be allowed to put their hands on the new machine, but only for limited amounts of time and only when the Europeans give them permission.
According to University of Texas physicists and Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg, the discoveries that are likely to accrue at the LHC will invigorate the labs of Europe, not the United States. And, he says, “There is also the depressing symbolism in the fact that the hottest new results in fundamental physics will for decades not be coming from our country.”
And, for anyone who doubts the practical benefits of things even this esoteric, to cite just a few examples, the World Wide Web was invented by particle physicists at CERN, detectors developed first for theoretical experiments are at the heart of the technology that powers life-saving medical PET scan devices, and MRI machines would not exist if it weren’t for the commercial application of the very kinds of technology that were developed to accelerate proton particles in other accelerator-colliders.
So we are being left in the scientific dust. The list that catalogues the many ways we are slipping in the world is lengthening. That’s a big bang you don’t need a PhD or the LHC to understand.
Out of such collisions, when they turn the volume up even more, it is expected that the results of these colossal collisions will spin off other particles, never before seen, that theorists say will give scientists their first close-up look at condition that occurred milli-seconds after the legendary Big Bank that set whatever our universe is into its current existence.
According to the usually-reliable Wikipedia:
Physicists hope that the collider will help answer the most fundamental questions in physics, questions concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, especially regarding the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity, where current theories and knowledge are unclear or break down altogether. These issues include, at least:
Is the Higgs mechanism for generating elementary particle masses via electroweak symmetry breaking indeed realised in nature? It is anticipated that the collider will either demonstrate or rule out the existence of the elusive Higgs boson(s), completing the Standard Model.
Is supersymmetry, an extension of the Standard Model and Poincaré symmetry, realised in nature, implying that all known particles have supersymmetric partners? These may clear up the mystery of dark matter.
Are there extra dimensions, as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we detect.
Got that?
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as it is called, was built by a coalition of 20 European governmental partners and cost $9 billion; and considering its esoteric, seemingly impractical purposes, this money was not easy to come by.
In fact, in the United States, at about the same time the LHC was proposed, we began work on an even larger collider under ground in Texas. It was to be 24 miles in diameter and would have generated 20 trillion electron volts, dwarfing the LHC. If Congress had not pulled the plug on funding, it would be up and running by now and it would have had a much greater impact on new physics than the LHC ever will.
But $11 billion seemed like too much to spend, especially to the anti-science conservatives who were in charge of Congress at that time. Who cares about Higgs bosons, some cried. Maybe when generating full power, others worried, it would create a Black Hole and consume not only Texas but all the other nearby Red States. And anyway, the bible doesn’t say anything about these tiny sub-atomic particles, much less the Big Bang.
And at $11 billion, something this impractical was too much to spend on a huge toy for a bunch of physicists who are so out of touch with reality that they forget to wear shoes even in the winter.
So the project was killed.
As a consequence, as reported recently in the New York Times, big science in this country has already begun noticeably to slip into second or third place in the world. (Article linked below.) Yes, some U.S. scientists will be allowed to put their hands on the new machine, but only for limited amounts of time and only when the Europeans give them permission.
According to University of Texas physicists and Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg, the discoveries that are likely to accrue at the LHC will invigorate the labs of Europe, not the United States. And, he says, “There is also the depressing symbolism in the fact that the hottest new results in fundamental physics will for decades not be coming from our country.”
And, for anyone who doubts the practical benefits of things even this esoteric, to cite just a few examples, the World Wide Web was invented by particle physicists at CERN, detectors developed first for theoretical experiments are at the heart of the technology that powers life-saving medical PET scan devices, and MRI machines would not exist if it weren’t for the commercial application of the very kinds of technology that were developed to accelerate proton particles in other accelerator-colliders.
So we are being left in the scientific dust. The list that catalogues the many ways we are slipping in the world is lengthening. That’s a big bang you don’t need a PhD or the LHC to understand.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:31 AM
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