Not the end of the world - Part II

 
GUEST POST BY TOM WHYNTIE

"Love", as Frank Sinatra once sang, "is lovelier the second time around". Physics, as it turns out, seems to be pretty much the same. At least that was the case this weekend, when, for the second time ever (it just doesn't have that ring to it, does it?), we saw bits of proton beam from the Large Hadron Collider splash all over one of our cathedral-sized digital cameras, the CMS experiment. Continuing this already rather tenuous analogy, it's like taking a photo of your own, inanely-grinning face - no-one really wants to see it, but it's good to know that the camera works. And you can always upload it to Facebook.

It also means that, for the second time ever, protons have made it over the Franco-Swiss border and half-way around the twenty-seven kilometre ring of super-cooled, super-conducting, super-duper magnets. While this is undoubtedly a Good Thing, it has to be said that there is an almost inevitable sense of déjà vu. The only noticeable difference is the pace. Understandably, we're taking things much more slowly this time - softly, softly, catchee Higgsy - which is helped somewhat by the fact that we don't have the pressure of an all-singing, all-dancing media launch party.

It's perhaps also valid to ask - now we're getting back to where we were over a year ago - just what have we been doing for the last fourteen months? Well, immediately "post-incident", the impending ski season offered a welcome distraction for most of us. Geneva is but a short bus-ride from some prime Alpine slopes, and for a good few months many CERNites were able to suppress the traumatic memories of spilt helium, burnt-out circuits and twisted collider pipe by taking advantage of the abundance of gravity* and the dearth of friction traditionally associated with mountain ranges.

All very well, you may mutter into your "al-desko" lunchtime baguette (just eat it all, please), but what did we do once the snow, like our hope of pre-Christmas 2008 proton-on-proton action, had melted? Actually, we've achieved quite a lot - even during the ski season.

For a start, the delay meant that we could implement many of the planned equipment upgrades a year early (for example, see this article by Dave Barney). Don't get me wrong - we would have preferred the data - but it does mean the data we'll get will be that much better.

We've also had time to improve how we'll go about "doing the physics". Personally, I've been involved in the CMS collaboration's search for the elusive dark matter, thought to make up roughly a fifth of the universe. In a nutshell, astrophysical evidence tentatively suggests that everything we can see with our telescopes only makes up a fraction of what should be there according to our current cosmological models. One theory, dubbed "Supersymmetry", predicts new, hitherto unobserved particles that fit the bill. We might just see evidence for these at the LHC, which would, rather elegantly, unite the physics of the unimaginably large with that of the impossibly small. Sound odd? It is - and if I've whetted your appetite for more, you can read more here, or listen to this talk I gave at the Royal Institution. You've got to love the web.

Alternatively, you could watch this short film I made for Channel 4, something else a physicist can do while Waiting for Beamo. Let's just hope, on a number of levels, that I don't get the time to make any more.

PS: Bored of the LHC? Me neither, but if you're near London and want something ever so slightly different, Imperial College neutrino physicists are getting all "arty" under London Bridge Station.

*This is, of course, what is technically known as "physics-pedant"-baiting. Enjoy!

Have you been affected by any of the issues in this blog? What do you think the scientists at CERN should have been doing for a year? Do you like skiing? Please leave your thoughts and comments below.

Tom Whyntie is a PhD student at Imperial College London and winner of FameLab 2009. He is currently based at CERN.

Comments

[Mark Hedges]

What if Higgs is like the Aether, and it is the higher-dimensional momentum of particles that warps space? i.e. all fermions move in a way that causes gravitational warp, they cause their own drag as they affect spacetime. Similarly, valence orientation causes a warp in a particular higher dimension that only affects things that also oscillate in that dimension, other charges. Etc.

And dark matter and dark energy... groping in the dark. There's a deficit of gravitational energy at the small scale, and a surplus at the galactic scale, but you don't make a connection there? It's the same energy from the mass of planets and stars, spreading through higher dimensions without effect, then re-intersecting our own surface, from which point it spreads in every direction evenly - giving the appearance of matter where there is none.

Because some gravitation spreads infinitely, there's a growing amount of gravitation re-intersecting and radiating from the boundary of the universe - the strange attractor called "dark energy" is the gravity of the matter we see, reflected back at us after it spreads through higher dimensions without effect. Geometrically, the amount at the edge must be growing, but it might wind up with a stable universe someday, when it's big enough.

Ask yourself, have you cargo-culted Higgs because you're a robot incapable of thinking outside the boundaries laid out for you?

[luisancho]

God's particle if any will be the black hole, which balances the Universe converting electroweak energy (ours) into mass, according to Einstein's first equation: M=e/c2. Since in the fractal paradigm (5th age of science) we model black holes as top quark stars and top quarks as per nambu, last year nobel prize, are Higgs particle (same mass, self similar equations) what lhc WILL DO is a massive number of top quarks, which will deconfine, form an Einstein-Bose condensate and create a top quark black hole, which will absorbb the mass of this planet and clean up the human species, whose arrogance and ingorance of the true laws of this Universe is apalling. This sad end to mankind however is avoidable, and in infinite other planets where the game of history is played, the LHC will never be comissioned because humans will advance their minds farther than their machines of self-destruction. In those other worlds a magnificent beautiful age of knowledge opens with the discovery of the fractal structures of space and time, with the underrstanding of the self-generative processes of the Universe, its deterministic forms, its ultimate meaning, which is the process of creation of fractal, poli-dimensional in-form-ation, not the process of flattening and energetic death of the big-bang… ‘Physicists are only interested in the canvas, not in the painting and the painter’Nietzsche ‘physicsts never have to ask why’ Feynmann ‘2 things I deem infinite the Universe and the stupidity of physicists, and I am not sure of the latter’ Einstein ‘Physicists are often wrong but never in doubt’ Landau

This machine is a relic of the cold war, appropiately cancelled by Clinton and now when we have privatized our wars and market them so well, this 'quark cannon', is marketed as an instrument of research. The human mind is the ultimate instrument of research and no longer needs to prove false outdated theories of the XX century that the hierarchical, fractal, infinite Universe in which man is 'a mush lost in a rock in a corner of the cosmos' (schopenhauer), just dust of space-time...

[Charlotte]

Don't blow up the world!! I haven't been to Brazil yet.

[Maxwell Edison]

Nice speech Luisancho, but you're forgetting that the LHC is only marginally more powerful than previous colliders. Linear colliders at Fermilab are theoretically of sufficient energy to discover the Higgs; however, they do not have as sophisticated instrumentation. Since Fermilab has not generated any black holes, any black hole created by the LHC will have very small mass, and will decay very quickly by Hawking radiation. There simply is no danger it will "eat the planet".

The "arrogant humans" notion is quite ridiculous, especially when you offer as an alternative, an equally arrogant notion that your "fractal theory" is truth. That is not science, it is fanciful philosophy.

[Kevin]

@Luisancho
What dark matter planet did you fall off??? You might want to read your comments before you post them. You made absolutely no sense.

By the way. Physicists do ask why or they wouldn't have built this Cold War relic that you so quaintly called it.

[Orlando Gibbons]

I loved those two comments, even though I didn't understand them!

[Lennie]

Um...yeah.

[Rocky]

The real question is: Will the vast discoveries provided by the repaired LHC truly benefit mankind by improving the design of the Alpine ski-lifts?

[Andrew]

My hopes are that they discover these strange particles and before we know it we'll be manipulating gravity and we wouldn't need slow ski lifts cos we could go ski wherever and whenever we wanted!

[Peter]

haha, Luisancho's comment is quite similar to rants we used to get at our maths department; generally from 'mathematical physicists' who had found a new source of propulsion using an undiscovered form of general relativity :S

My favourite was when I was manning the maths stall at a science fair in the main museum of my city. I sat for ten minutes with one of these guys who kept trying to tell me that Pi repeats itself, and then proceeded to run his finger through a printout of the first 10,000 digits looking for the repeating pattern. Hilarious.

But on the topic, lets hope it doesn't blow another 'gasket' this time, we want to see some data!!