Re: re dinosaur head
Here be Dragons! or Welshmen... not sure which is more scary!
Now that all the fanfare over the sighting of a Higgs-like boson in the Large Hadron Collider has died down, CERN scientists have a few burning questions about the particle. The gigantic proton accelerator will be shut down this year, but physicist Paris Sphicas told The Register the boffins should be able to gather enough data …
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I was reading the other day in New Scientist that there are actaully already signs of anisotropy in the particle's decay, which lend support to supersymmetry.
The article is behind a paywall, but IIRC the general gist is that observations so far show more decays into pairs of photons and fewer into other particles (I think it was B-mesons) than expected for the Standard Model.
So we have the higgs field, which is what gives things mass, essentially defining them as things rather than just pretty lights, and the higgs boson which is the particle that transports the higgs field, which floods the universe and is everywhere, communicating this existence of mass...
... is it just me, or have they re-invented luminiferous aether?
Boffin 1: Ok, I divided this with this...and I've got a 3 left over.
Boffin 2: Hmmm. Long division wasn't my forte either.
B1: If I publish this, I'll look like a muppet who can't divide.
B2: I know - just pretend it's the sign of an "extra dimension". I've got a few sums that don't work either which I can bury in there too.
B1: But won't someone check our workings?
B2: Pfft. They're as good at long division as we are. Plus they don't have their own LHC to compare results to either.
B1: ..and it'll give us an excuse for the grant extension!
As a non-scientific type person - would that make me a noboff? - it's always struck me, in regards to the question of our universe's missing anti-matter, that the bleeding obvious answer would be a mirror anti-matter universe existing in parallel with our own.
The latest results from the LHC have confirmed my long-held theory about QED, the standard model and supersymmetry, namely that I'll never be able to understand them no matter how many simple analogies these so-called boffins come up with to try to explain things.
It's like trying to teach a caveman to play scrabble.
It's simple. Quantum effects are just exchanges. It's not a wave or a particle. It's just an exchange of information (or energy).
The Higgs exchanges the information or energy of mass in this case. A nice little Youtube video is here...
http://youtu.be/3_RhISgoXUs
(I had a mental block on QM and wave/particle stuff until I saw this video. :P )
It's my opinion that even those most intimately familiar with these theories and the experiments don't understand them. At least not in the way you're trying to.
The thing is that when you get this deep into it, you can't explain or understand it in terms of familiar, everyday examples and analogies and if you try to then you get an imperfect picture which breaks down very quickly, leaving you more confused than when you started.
I think one of the finest (and most essential) talents of physicists is the ability to just trust the numbers without needing to 'understand' them in the traditional sense. In the end I think that's what all of this is - a bunch of numbers and equations. The numbers and the equations work (and work very well) but they don't do you and me much good.
That's not, in any way, to lessen the achievements of this field - quite the contrary. Humans just aren't equipped to understand these things 'properly' so we do what we can which is to understand the sub-atomic universe through mathematics. It's a spectacular testament that, even faced with an impossible task (the understanding of reality on a fundamental level,) these scientists persist anyway and in doing so, advance our knowledge and quality of life.
SO I suppose the upshot is to just not worry - no one understands these things in that way - if they did then they could explain it to the rest of us without having to use long strings of otherwise unintelligible words. Like this from the wikipedia article on something to do with String Theory:
"These conditions imply that the first integral Chern class c1(M) of M vanishes, but the converse is not true. The simplest examples where this happens are hyperelliptic surfaces, finite quotients of a complex torus of complex dimension 2, which have vanishing first integral Chern class but the canonical bundle is not trivial."
That's a part of a description of a mathematical concept (a 'Calabi–Yau manifold') used as a part of string theory and is in itself something that is impossible to visualise and with no acceptable real-world analogies. The fact that such a concept even exists and its mathematics understood and in use it as mind boggling and impressive to me as (theoretical) object itself.
"The thing is that when you get this deep into it, you can't explain or understand it in terms of familiar, everyday examples and analogies"
Indeed - a mathematician friend once tried to begin an explanation for some system with: "Imagine a 2D space. Now a 3D space. OK? Now imagine an N-dimensional space where N is greater than ..."
We try our best to explain science stuff; it's often a fun challenge to squeeze a complex subject into one sentence. But that's for lunchtime reading, not all-night study.
C.
Non-scientists often ask for a simplified, non-mathematical explanation. What they don't understand is that the two adjectives are mutually contradictory. Mathematics is the simplest language we've got for describing how the universe works.
And no, we don't know why. Maybe God is a mathematician.
I'm reading flatland at the minute. Just got to the bit where the square explains to his grandson the relation between mathematics and geometry for 2D and the grandson asks if anything can be raised to the third. And I've seen Marcus De Sotoy's TV programme twice now where he tries to explain the hypercube in the Grande Arche in Paris, but I'm still not quite getting it.
What are the odds that someone will use the recently derived Higgs data to fix their version of the Standard Model, correct all those pesky infinities and end up with an equation that among other things leads to a method of building a device that jumps dimensions?
AC/DC
(most likely to be based on rotating magnetic fields interacting with a pair of counterrotating superconducting disks, with an accelerometer to tune the resulting gravitomagnetic interaction so it stabilises)
As a warning to all eastern members:
"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1127343?ln=en
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Spin_(public_relations)#Techniques
"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]
source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report
ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264
cheap eastern labour. dead-end carrier path.
How could the scientist possibly find the "higgs", as the velocity of the traveling particles is not 100% of light?
So the absolute total energy needed to produce, is already behind the eight ball?
And are they also forgetting the energy it takes the person/s to "see/find" the particle into the equation?
To get 100% of the results you first need 100% of the forces involved and not CLOSE TO.
ABSOLUTE ENERGY equals INPUT, OUTPUT and USAGE (A.E.I.O.U) or another way to put it E/m=c2.
Ssh, don't tell ConDem that, they will invent a "Quark Tax" or something similar to extract more money from the pockets of us poor taxpayers.
Its bad enough with "Envirowhiner taxes" aka petrol and diesel excise duty, rumour has it that the sale of electric vehicles has been reduced in the EU thanks to the Battery Directive making the resale of used packs illegal as they now have to be recycled at a designated company.
Let me please explain my self in the formula E/m=c2.
The ENERGY is DIVIDED THROUGH the MATTER.
And by the way, the total number of humans on the planet have now reached the toatal age of the universe (or very close to, so soon "will come of age"). To explain further, the combined total of hiumans (energy to forn YOU) and the total percieved age of the universe is equal. (utilizing the inner and outer enegy) so utilizing man produced physics all energy is exhausted, (besides the individaials perception).