They did it then! Mini Big Bang in a test tube...

[Tim]

...albeit a rather large one

BBC News - Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates a 'mini-Big Bang'

Be interesting to see what the research reveals.

[Paxo]

No noticeable geographical shift towards Switzerland then. Ah well, life goes on as normal.

Steve..

[glowjet]

Fascinating, but from first impressions from the TV it looks like someone was pointing a camera at the night sky on Nov 5th.

[barkis]

What are the odds on finding the HB then, or is that Mother Lode still a ways off?

Ron.

[Macavity]

I have this vision of a guy in a boiler suit, with a dustpan:

"The sooner those guys go back to using non-leaded..."

[Sam]

I was wondering what that big bang was!

[Rusty Strings]

What puzzles me is that they created it from smashing lead ions together and the physicists would have us believe that the big bang appeared spontaneously from nothing so how is a it a proper test?

[beamish]

John, they not actually recreating the Big Bang, they are re-creating the environment just after. As for spontaneous creation of the BB, well that's questionable regarding the whole existence of a "singularity" what with current thinking

[Tim]

Indeed, the only thing they seem to agree on is that nothing came from nothing.

[Paxo]

The way you have to think of it is not as nothing but something with no stuff in it!

Steve..

[brianb]

something with no stuff in it

So the perfect model would look something like a cross between the Treasury and the space between Jeremy Clarkson's ears?

The issue with the Big Bang is surely the opposite ... nothing with some stuff in it ... that's what's hard to grasp. And yes, we can't recreate the BB, but we can create something like the conditions a few Planck times afterwards. We'll probably get the inflation, too, if the Treasury carries on the way it has been doing for the last few years

[beamish]

meeiow

[RobH]

But we're all still here.....not sucked off into an alternate reality by a mini black hole.......or are we :D:D

[Macavity]

A bit of light reading:

Quark?gluon plasma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As I see it: When one collides protons with protons (or anti-protons) the amount of material is limited. A few quarks etc., embedded in glue(ons). As in Rutherford scattering (qv), the majority of events originate from HARD scattering between quasi-free quarks etc. within a "bag" of characteristic size of the proton.

Heavy Ion collision, of sufficient energy, allows a "melting" of ALL the constituents of the (Lead) protons and neutrons, so that the result is a "sea" of freely moving quarks, within a "bag" of around the size of the (two) Lead nuclei. This is, of course, (probably!) a far better approximation of the universe, shortly after the big bang. Not really a "plasma", but rather a LARGE "quantum-mechanical entity".

My own belief is that, the attendant physics will be complex and detailed (expensive?) in the analysis. I'm not holding my breath for any abrupt "re-writing" of the current theories... But you never know.

[George Jones]

What are the odds on finding the HB then, or is that Mother Lode still a ways off?

Ron.

Because of issues related to the accident, the LHC is only operating at half power right now. The LHC is scheduled to be brought up to full power in 2013. The Tevatron in the U.S. has just had its life extended by three years.

The race is on!

[ollypenrice]

So the perfect model would look something like a cross between the Treasury and the space between Jeremy Clarkson's ears?

Quote of the week!!

Olly

[themos]

I wish CERN's PR people would not keep bringing the Big Bang into it. When did this meme appear and why is it so long-lived? They are not doing anything that other accelerators hadn't done before, except going at higher energy densities. The lead ion experiment just probes bog-standard nuclear physics at extreme conditions, conditions that might prevail in cores of massive neutron stars.

[TheThing]

Hmm, not very impressed by the scientist - '...scientists from all over the world....from 33 contries...'

Has the mini big bang shrunk the world or moved several contries under water?

[Paxo]

So the perfect model would look something like a cross between the Treasury and the space between Jeremy Clarkson's ears?

The issue with the Big Bang is surely the opposite ... nothing with some stuff in it ... that's what's hard to grasp. And yes, we can't recreate the BB, but we can create something like the conditions a few Planck times afterwards. We'll probably get the inflation, too, if the Treasury carries on the way it has been doing for the last few years

The exact quote from Michio Kako is don't think of nothing as nothing, think of it as just an abscence of stuff.

Steve

[kev]

Indeed, the only thing they seem to agree on is that nothing came from nothing.

Well, start with noth, you finishing with nothing, so what you lost - nothing...

So .... always look on the bright side of life....

!

[themos]

In quantum mechanics, there's a limit to how empty you can make something. Vacuum is to be understood "as empty as possible".

[delsix]

Because of issues related to the accident, the LHC is only operating at half power right now. The LHC is scheduled to be brought up to full power in 2013. The Tevatron in the U.S. has just had its life extended by three years.

The race is on!

The LHC is currently in uncharted waters. Events in the sub-atomic realms take place at quite specific energy levels. So simply turning the LHC upto 11 may well miss events that occur in the zone between the known (where we are now) and the maximum power levels of the LHC. So you ramp up the power slowly, with the hope of finding interesting physics on the way (finding nothing is just as interesting btw).

So the safety concerns, which necessitates taking things slowly, actually allows more science to be undertaken in the zones which otherwise may have been skipped over.

[Macavity]

I wish CERN's PR people would not keep bringing the Big Bang into it.

Interesting and FAIR? Until I came to SGL, I'd happily distributed a now-long-obsolete pamphlet, entitled "Big Bang Science" to everyone I knew. <G> Maybe astronomers view the Big Bang as their private fiefdom. [teasing]

As to CERN PR, well the toilets are not were not without graffiti re. "suggestions to the management". LOL. But, in a moment of genuine pathos re. a now lost career, I was moved to look at a Youtube PR video re. CERN. In a recent poll, 97% of staff declared themselves "proud" to work there. Makes ya think?

I still wish (all, and other) national science could come close to generating a similar atmosphere. To my mind, Ph.D. studies and Research Associateship seem to be becoming a bit too much like "The Apprentice" these days.

[George Jones]

If I remember correctly, one of the contractors didn't deliver up to spec, and this caused a meltdown shortly after the LHC's beam was turned on in the fall of 2008. Some (but not all) of this was fixed, and I don't think CERN is confident enough to run at full power until more replacements are made during a long-term shutdown, sometime around 2012.

With respect to Higgs, the LHC and the Tevatron can do two things:

1) find ranges of masses from which Higgs is excluded;

2) discover Higgs.

According to page 3 of

http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=35&sessionId=5&resId=0&materialId=slides&confId=89312,

in 2011, the LHC will be able to exclude Higgs from a wide range of masses, and will only be able to discover Higgs in the mass range 160 - 170. According to the graph at the top right of page 2 from the same document, data from the Tevatron seems already to exclude the mass range 160 -170. If these data and their interpretation are correct, then the LHC will not be able to find Higgs until 2013 or later.

[themos]

There is no Higgs.