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specfiction
203 Posts |
 Posted - 04/09/2007 : 10:52:25
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In late 1993, the congress killed the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) near Dallas TX. That was, essentially, the end of my career in science (real science). This year the LHC was supposed to be commissioned. The LHC is a Proton-Proton collider whose center-of-mass energy for particle collisions (and thus energy for making "things") is about 20 TEV (Trillion Electron Volts); the SSC was about twice that. The LHC was built at CERN, a European physics lab located near Geneva Switzerland. Most particle physics will now be done in Europe. All the particle accelerators in the US are decades old and will be completely eclipsed by the LHC.
The main task of the LHC is to discover the unfinished pieces of the Standard Model--our (humans) theory of almost everything. Although the Standard Model is amazingly good--all experiments have confirmed it to more significant digits than virtually any scientific theory we have, it has some very basic missing pieces. The most painful of its shortcomings is that it completely fails to explain "mass," the thing that makes everything real. Kind of a big hole. The leading candidate to explain mass in the context of the Standard Model (which is a quantum field theory) is the Higgs particle, or God particle as it is sometimes called. The Higgs was a subject of great interest to me and to many physicists with whom I worked (many of whom are no longer in physics). Here is the LHC homepage:
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/
And here's something about LHC Physics:
http://www2.cerncourier.com/articles/cern/47/4/20/1
You'll be hearing a lot more about this in the next few years.
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tamarawilhite
USA
12 Posts |
Posted - 04/22/2007 : 17:52:54
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I think the big boom at the Cern replacement collidor is going to suspend further construction of new or existing colliders. If their multiple engineering reviews couldn't catch the minor problem with the magnets, then who will trust millions of dollars to them, much less the results of their research?
We may need to spend the money training more engineers and math majors, so that the scientific projects are built right and have people who can interpert the results.
Tamara Wilhite/Humanity's Edge |
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specfiction
203 Posts |
Posted - 06/21/2007 : 11:12:29
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quote:
Originally posted by tamarawilhite
I think the big boom at the Cern replacement collidor is going to suspend further construction of new or existing colliders. If their multiple engineering reviews couldn't catch the minor problem with the magnets, then who will trust millions of dollars to them, much less the results of their research?
We may need to spend the money training more engineers and math majors, so that the scientific projects are built right and have people who can interpert the results.
Tamara Wilhite/Humanity's Edge
The US has a relatively small footprint at the LHC--we don't have much of a money stake. The Europeans are hosting some American groups if they provide experimental support. The failed magnets at the LHC were designed and built in the US.
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Shadows of the SSC
