On hadron colliders, dark matter and black holes

[RPMiller]

I am living not so far from the Hadron collider. When they will launch the first test, I will try to post here to tell you how dark is the black hole ;-)

Something tells me that the Internet access may be an issue. LOL

[RPMiller]

I had to do it...again...this one is animated

You stopped too soon. Isn't the Earth supposed to get turned inside out?

[torstan]

@Arcana: That's brilliant! I'll definitely be passing that round the office....

[torstan]

@Turgenev: Much as I dislike the telegraph, that's actually a very reasonable article. Thanks for the link.

[Redrobes]

Beeb has a whole section of their web site devoted to it now !

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7543089.stm

Hope you caught El Regs slightly more irreverent take on the whole thing

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09...nuum_unripped/

[torstan]

Very good. Yes I noticed the BBC is having a big bang day. It's nice to see a physics experiment generating so much interest - it's just a shame we won't get big results for 18 months!

[Redrobes]

Yes, its great. Maybe all physics experiments should have the capability to swallow the earth so that the media get interested ! All the astro radio telescopes funding got the chop in the UK and the ISS is going to be stranded by the US as from 2010 from a lack of shuttles unless there is a rethink about NASA funding. Perhaps they are not dangerous enough to open administration and government purse strings.

And what you doin' in Scotland now. I thought you were over the pond now you jet setter

[torstan]

I've had a bit of an international month of it. Poland to the UK at the start of the month - along with a separate removal of a full flat's worth of furniture, a month in the UK including wedding next weekend and then off to NY at the end of the month. I'm currently down in Southampton teaching students how to do dark matter calculations.

The BBC does seem to have latched on to the destroying the world aspect - which is fair enough as it is a great way to capture people's imaginations. The down side is that people phone up in abject fear and ask us not to do it - this happened to my old supervisor yesterday. It will be great for the funding bodies to see an experiment they funded getting so much attention, particularly as particle physics is usually way too dry to get much attention. We're always jealous of the astrophysicists as they get all the pretty pictures and everyone therefore thinks that space is cool (which it is).

The LHC was exempt from the cuts this year because the UK is legally tied into funding it. The question will come when the next collider is planned. If the LHC doesn't find anything exciting then it will be extremely hard to convince the funding bodies to cough up - again you'd have to feel that that was fair enough. The problem comes if we find nothing at all - because that would be a huge result - as it would disprove a theory that has stood for decades. However convincing governments that not finding something was really exciting is a pretty hard sell!

And just a short clarification - a few of the radio telescopes that were going to be dropped got refunded again as it would have cost the UK too much to pull out. However the STFC funding debacle was a bit of a nightmare. Hope that all sorts itself out.

[jfrazierjr]

So, whats the point of this experiment? If won't blow up (or implode as the case may be), whats the point? I mean, is this expected to find us a new power source for cheap efficient energy (I kind doubt it given how much it costs), or solve world peace (well, if the world ended, it would achieve that objective), cure hunger, or give all the people of the world free health care?

From a armchair conspiracy theorist who pretty much made D's in physics in high school, I just don't get the point. Oh, and don't you dare say "just to see if we could".

I mean, are there any real expected improvements to society that are expected within a few years of the project gathering its data (assuming the world does not implode) or do we just not know what might be dreamed up until it is dreamed?

[torstan]

Funnily enough this question is getting asked quite a lot at the moment. Everyone is saying that it costs a lot. Yes, it cost £3 billion which is objectively an awful lot of money. This money is split between contributions from all the countries involved and has been spent over more than 10 years of research, development and construction. It's still a lot of money - but remember that the money is sourced from a lot of countries so the orders of magnitude are a little different from normal - and still a tiny fraction of what the US spent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq (over a mush shorter time period).

Right, now the finance is out of the way let's get on to the point of the whole endeavour. First let's note that the LHC should be compared to experiments such as the Hubble space telescope. It is a scientific instrument designed to progress the knowledge of a branch of physics. If we'd gone out to design a new power source we'd be working on fusion power and creating a fusion power station - which is actually happening and costing a similar amount of money. In that case the cost is in the design, and should allow cheaper power stations to be built in countries around the world later that generate power from water and lithium.

The LHC will advance our knowledge of theoretical particle physics. This is useful to humanity because it will provide useful technologies further down the line. Electromagnetism was a purely theoretical construct in the same field that now gives us everything to do with electricity and electronics. Relativity was a dry theory about the speed of light which now gives us lasers and theories of radioactivity and nuclear power (and yes, the bombs too - that's one reason CERN bans cross-over technology proposals with the military). We don't know what theories will arise out of the collider, because if we knew the next theory, we wouldn't have to build the collider. I can assure you though that as soon as we know what the new theory is, there will be lot of very clever and ambitious people trying their damndest to come up with industrial applications.

In the shorter term, the experiment has a load of useful spin-offs - the previous collider gave us the protocol that runs the web. This one should mark a sea-change in the scale of distributed computing with the creation of the largest ever distributed computing network - the Grid. As CERN is a non-profit based organisation, these inventions are allowed owed into the world for free. Equally, the work at CERN has led to developments in climate modelling, cloud formation, medical imaging, cancer treatment and the safe disposal of radioactive waste through nuclear transmutation. These developments can be used by the countries that fund CERN and provide an economic and social benefit. Any time a new experiment is proposed at CERN it has to show that the technologies developed will be of use in wider society.

So we have built it to search for new theories. That's the goal. We expect the end result to benefit society. We know that the technology developed on the way there is already benefiting society.

Importantly, there are very few international collaborations of this scale in the world and very few endeavours that require this level of technological innovation. If there were no LHC, many of these technologies would never be developed.