Where our future is being hatched…
August 2, 2008 – 3:58 pmThese are beautiful pictures from LHC. The Large Hadron Collider is the latest super collider. It announces a shift back to Europe as the center place for High Energy physics. Back in April, CERN held Open Day 2008 so we took that opportunity to make a family trip from the US to Geneva to visit the facility. This was an old dream of mine, from the time when I was learning physics in high school and LEP was nearing completion. I never visit LEP, and I missed the opportunity to see the ongoing work on LHC four years ago, during CERN’s last open day. So with LHC coming online this year, I wanted to get into the tunnels before full commissioning.
This is the beam pipe as it enters the LHCb detector. Just outside of this picture, on the right side was where the beam pipe connected to the accelerator. The main goal of LHCb will be to explore the matter/anti-matter asymmetry and try to explain how the universe went from an equal amount of both, to the predominately matter-made universe as we know it today. LHCb is only one of the four massive detectors built around the accelerator. These detectors will be serving six experiments focussed on different aspects of modern physics. ALICE will be traveling back in time to immediately after the Big Bang, looking at a hypothetical state of matter where quarks roamed freely. ATLAS and CMS will be, among other things, looking for the holy grail: finding the elusive Higgs boson, the hypothesized corner stone of the standard model. LHCf will be chasing cosmic rays, and TOTEM will complete the measurements of other experiments. What’s interesting is that the accelerator itself is built by CERN, while the experiments are the result of massive collaborations between research facilities worldwide… the ultimate ‘BYOD (bring your own detector) to our particle smashing party’.
The most interesting aspect of my visit there was the patience and passion displayed by all the physicists I met. These people are lucky enough to do something they are passionate about, and the willingness to share it with anyone coming with an open mind. This is basically to science what Stallman and the FSF have tried to do for software: the idea of Open Science. The highest question on my mind was of course “so what happens if the Higgs does not show up?”. Aside from actually being the most interesting scenario, and the one likely to save jobs rather than slash them (finding the Higgs would represent the end of a nearly 40-year chase and would probably close the door on a number of alternate theories and experimentation currently seeking it), he suggested that a plausible scenario would be that what we call the Higgs could be the accumulated effects of a number of distinct particles, the multiplicity of particles explaining why the detector would not show one where we expected it.
As usual, in parallel with the grounds braking science, a lot of doom’s day predictions have been going-on, and in the most foolish american tradition, layers have joined the party …. Aside from the cheer stupidity of some of the claims that can be found on the Internet (Enrico Fermi should really not have made his famous joke about igniting the entire atmosphere, as they were on the verge of the Trinity test), this lawsuit also demonstrates the incredible arrogance of some people who do not question for a minute whether or not a US court has any jurisdictions in matters happening IN OTHER SOVEREIGN COUNTRIES… As I cannot for a second imagine that the people involved in this frivolous lawsuit are that incredibly ignorant, I favor the explanation that everyone involved is just in there for the publicity. June was supposed to be the scheduled date for a hearing on whether or the not the complaint was receivable by the court.
Considering Wagner’s past track-record as a naysayer I am not surprised to find him behind this lawsuit. However, I find really comical that on his own web site he would shamelessly quote himself as the “leading scientist” who brought forward the concerns that started it all.. I guess he could not really say because no serious scientists seemed to have any unaddressed concerns about the science behind LHC, this is how I recycled my old write-up from another silly crusade to try to get people to notice me, seeing how lonely I feel now that I am retired and all. What I wonder though is how an obscure retired government employee with only a minor in physics (public knowledge from the court papers he filled) can find the money to finance this crusade… I guess there are a lot of organized groups in America today that are afraid of mankind getting out of the mud puddle where we come from to use our brains for other things than blind obedience, that would finance anything as long as it promotes living in caves with candles and the fear of the unknown.
Interesting links
In basically two hours, mostly spend scouting the excellent Apple documentation, I was able to display the page formatting dialog as a sheet.
