On hadron colliders, dark matter and black holes

[meleeguy]

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. It has given me much to consider, and of course, leaves me with more questions than answers.

The heart of computational theory may be said to to be the FSM (finite state machine). There are deterministic and non-deterministic classifications, the former having no ambiguities. There are further two general models of FSM, Moore and Mealy, which have to do with basic operational considerations. In general, actions are taken by the FSM based on input. Thus, I opine there may be a relationship between action and determinism. You can also think of an FSM as being event driven (passive), or as an input reader (active). This last seems important, although I cannot say why.

So we cannot make a measurement and presume whether the particle is entangled (?) or not and yet the measurement may have been influenced at a distance. Curious. This seems to touch on the very nature of randomness, which is very hard to simulate with a computer and is often best seeded with human input in practice.

[Redrobes]

Since were all talking about quantum entanglement (which was supposed to create a provable perfect medium for quantum cryptography) I came across this which I somewhat interesting...
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/F...s/3576.en.html

[torstan]

Thanks for that RR. That's very entertaining! Nothing's perfect I guess.

In other news, the LHC will be ramping up to 3.5TeV per beam and running like this for a year or so. So we can expect lots of high quality data (and hopefully no breakages) but no spectacular discoveries of new particles unless we're really lucky. Still not impossible, just unlikely.

And Obama has completely rebuilt NASA apparently. I've not gone through all the new stuff yet, but I think killing the plan to put people back on the moon is good for science even if it's a blow for public interest in science.

[Redrobes]

I think killing the plan to put people back on the moon is good for science even if it's a blow for public interest in science.

I agree. Now we know its a wasteland and we have already done it, I can see no point whatsoever in having more men jump about, planting flags and driving buggies and so on. The amount of weighty cruft required to keep people alive to get them there and back cannot be justified for such an inhospitable place and no facilities. That and it was dragging loads of budget away from the ISS and a ship to get there and back which has air, electricity, comms, water, a half working toilet, computers and about $30 billion of other gear etc.

[Ascension]

The thing is, I don't think that they had any real aim for going back...it was just a toss out line during a speech. Now if they were going to put a station there as a jumping off point for Mars travel then I could get behind that. Knowing certain factions here in the states they'd probably just stick a bunch of guns on it and say it's to protect us from solar flares so I could not get behind that.

[torstan]

Well it did seem that the money is being refocused into technologies such as reprocessing mechanics that would allow rocket fuel to be created on the moon from local resources. So it looks like the money is going to be used for permanent structures - in the mid distant future - on the moon. It's just not going to be used to put people in those structures... The suggestion seems to be that if we are to put people in space then the private sector will be doing the R&D. Virgin Galactic suggests that might not be a crazy plan, but it does seem a little bizarre. I really don't see why all of this shouldn't be robotic.

[Ascension]

Yeah. Virgin is leading the charge and has the money so if anyone else jumps in there'll be a commercial race instead of a military race. We win and lose either way.

[torstan]

Yep, it's interesting. There are quite few private companies interested in spaceflight. The X-prize is now for a full orbit I think. Not to mention private space hotel projects and private solar sail projects. It does at last feel like we're getting close to the future they predicted in the '50s.

[Redrobes]

Mwah hah hah hah

http://www.flickr.com/photos/skepchi...07033/sizes/o/

and in other less puerile news.... whats happening down there lately ?

[torstan]

That took me a few goes to spot. Oh dear. It really was only a matter of time. Was that photoshopped? I really hope so, otherwise some poor headline writer is i trouble (and I'm never going to be able to scrub that mental image out of my head). I have to say that's just done the rounds of the department here, and I'm guessing will hit our CERN collaborators sometime in the next hour. Thanks for spotting that and giving the guys on ATLAS a good laugh.

You know that somewhere there's going to be a simulated event signal for that...

The rest of the article is actually rather a good summary. Things are going well and the restart has gone smoothly. New collisions are up and the center of mass energy (total energy in each collision) is now 7TeV, which is 7 times the energy at Fermilab, the second most energetic accelerator in the world. It's also now half the design energy originally planned for the LHC. The plan is to run at this energy for the next year to 18 months and generate a large data set before an extended shut down to upgrade systems to hit the design energy. So all is going to plan and the LHC is running at the planned energy faster than (I think) anyone really expected this time round. So the news is good. Now it will go quiet as they aim to increase luminosity (the rate that interactions take place). That's the big challenge and will keep them occupied for a while.