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Horizon Tuesday 9:00 pm BBC2: A $6 billion experiment...

tenbyfifty

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tenbyfifty

tenbyfifty

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In the coming months the most complex scientific instrument ever built will be switched on. The Large Hadron Collider promises to recreate the conditions right after the Big Bang. By revisiting the beginning of time, scientists hope to unravel some of the deepest secrets of our Universe.

Within these first few moments the building blocks of the Universe were created. The search for these fundamental particles has occupied scientists for decades but there remains one particle that has stubbornly refused to appear in any experiment. The Higgs Boson is so crucial to our understanding of the Universe that it has been dubbed the God particle. It explains how fundamental particles acquire mass, or as one scientist plainly states: "It is what makes stuff stuff..."

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Macavity

Macavity

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I sense the era of "dramatic discoveries" is now over? (I'd like to be proved wrong though!) We may have to content ourselves with subtle effects and inferred theories. Maybe LHC'll produce some tiny "primordial" black holes, that fall through the bottom of the apparatus, then oscillate, back and forth, through the earth, chewing away... :D

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GazOC

GazOC

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I read somewhere that the tack that Horizon are taking on this is that the collider might create a black hole that destroys the Earth (I kid you not!!) when it is switched on.

Wouldn't surprise me, the program seems more and more to look for a sensationalist angle to sell the programs on.

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tenbyfifty

tenbyfifty

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I sense the era of "dramatic discoveries" is now over? (I'd like to be proved wrong though!)

Let's not forget that we still don't really have a very good undertsanding of what gravity is.

No force carrying particle yet found for it anyway.

Personally, I think as long as there are enquiring minds there will be dramatic discoveries.

We're at the bottom of the learning curve not the top.

EDIT: read bill bryson's a "short history of nearly everything" to find out how little we know about the world we live in, for example, powerful freak earthquakes which hit places which have never had any serious seismic activity before and no-one knows what causes them.

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GazOC

GazOC

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The thing that gives me pause for thought is that this Higgs Field that we are currenly lookng for to give properties to the other particles is exactly the same concept as The Ether that the Ancient Greeks believed the heavenly bosies floated in.

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James

James

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I read somewhere that the tack that Horizon are taking on this is that the collider might create a black hole that destroys the Earth (I kid you not!!) when it is switched on.

In which case it'll cease to become a $6 billion experiment and become a 6 billion human experiment.

When the Manhattan project scientists were about to test the first atomic bomb there was a lot of concern that a reaction could occur that would effectively destroy the atmosphere. Apparently there was an error in their equations which they were able to track down...

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Astroman

Astroman

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Maybe LHC will shut the stringo-babble up for a while.

Here, here. :?

I sense the era of "dramatic discoveries" is now over?

Probably not, since a similar idea was expressed around 1900 by the commissioner of the US Patent office, Charles H. Duell. :D

I read somewhere that the tack that Horizon are taking on this is that the collider might create a black hole that destroys the Earth (I kid you not!!) when it is switched on.

Wouldn't surprise me, the program seems more and more to look for a sensationalist angle to sell the programs on.

Wouldn't suprese me, either. It also wouldn't suprise me if they failed to mention the amounts of material actually used in collider experiments. You have to remember, that they accellerate particles to very near light speed and slam them together. As an object is accellerated, it gains mass, according to E=mc2, so that the amounts are necessarily very, very small and quite insufficient to create a black hole of any kind, much less one that would do any damage.

The thing that gives me pause for thought is that this Higgs Field that we are currenly lookng for to give properties to the other particles is exactly the same concept as The Ether that the Ancient Greeks believed the heavenly bodies floated in.

I get your point about the basic lack of universal understanding, but you have to remember there have been a number of changes in conventional physics since the Greeks. Newton, Bose, Einstein, Roche, Hawking, Bortz, Chandreshekhar, Boltzman, just to name a few.

I read somewhere that the tack that Horizon are taking on this is that the collider might create a black hole that destroys the Earth (I kid you not!!) when it is switched on.

When the Manhattan project scientists were about to test the first atomic bomb there was a lot of concern that a reaction could occur that would effectively destroy the atmosphere. Apparently there was an error in their equations which they were able to track down...

Yup. The way I heard it, they weren't sure it wouldn't trigger a chain reaction in the atmosphere, turn it into energy and end all life on Earth. Now, that's scary. (I seem to remember a movie along this theme, I think it starred Gregory Peck, but can't be sure.)

In the end, the LHC will create more questions than it answers, which is pretty much par for the course in science, :D, but the answers we get should be doosies!

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Ant

Ant

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Just finished watching it!

They (scientists at CERN) did admit that there was chance that the LHC would create Black Holes. But that they would evaporate almost immediately.

The chances of a black hole being created that could "eat" the LHC or CERN or Switzerland are SLIM. Possible but highly improbable.

Ant

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Macavity

Macavity

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Well, I suppose, I was a bit disappointed. About 10 minutes of "facts", interspersed w/flashing out of focus street scenes and sundry "Red Dwarf Computer" disembodied heads. Aside from the fine Jim Virdee and a UK post doc, no real representation of European Science, rather Leon Lederman and sundry shots of Fermilab! Ah well... :D

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SteelRat

SteelRat

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but apparently they think it did :D

Yeah - Higgs got bored of talking to itself and "allowed" the bang to "become" in the hope it'd get something else to "talk-to" out of it. Light turned out to be an ignorant cuss - it seems :)

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magician

magician

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It seems to me -at the risk of repeating myself-that the pevailing view is , In the beginning there was nothing, and then it exploded! you know if clever goldfish found out all there was to know about their fishbowl, they would still be living in a fishbowl! what could they know about Telecopes, motor cars, birds,or even the Hokey Kokey?

Cheers Frank

P.S. Rita thinks the whole idea a total waste of money! Just off for a stroll around our goldfish bowl!

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Jaffa007

Jaffa007

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Hi all,

Missed the program, but was just reading about the 'magnetic design flaw' in Professional Engineering Magazine 25th April [not mine :lol: the bosses]. One of the accelerators suffered a serious failure during preliminiary high-pressure testing. [English:- something went bang, somebody grabbed their pants and hit the deck! :lol: :lol:]

Apprently the magnets were inadequate to withstand the associated longitudinal forces. They hope to get it fixed in time for the start-up target date of late 2007.

That's probably why the world didn't end around tea time last night :)

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