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ASPIRING PUNTERS ARE currently placing bets at close to the speed of light around the biggest, costliest and most capricious roulette wheel ever conceived. There's a pile of chips banking on the Higgs boson cropping up, and an almost equally tall stack on the supersymmetry square. Other gamblers are hedging their bets by dividing their chips between the two, figuring both will be winners but unsure where the skittering ball will drop first.
Some hopeful betters are wagering on an entire row labelled with the exotic figures of the Standard Model, while the more adventuresome are drawn to a single long-odds square, formidably labelled 'Dark Matter'. But the really astronomical odds are found on the squares marked quantum gravity, extra dimensions, microscopic black holes, or the longest shot of all: unparticles.
As you've no doubt guessed, it's a very special game of roulette and the punters are rather unusual folk. The 'wheel' is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. It consists of a roughly circular tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference buried beneath the Swiss and French countryside near Geneva at the headquarters of CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research), the 20-nation body that oversaw the building of the collider and will be responsible for its operation.
The gamblers are theorists and experimentalists in particle physics, some who straddle both those worlds, as well as a coterie of cosmologists. And the croupier is about to declare "Les jeux sont fait".
WHEN THE LHC IS POWERED UP sometime in September 2008 (see, Large Hadron Collider to start within weeks, Cosmos Online), dense beams of protons will be accelerated in opposite directions around the tunnel at nearly the speed of light and nudged into head-on collisions inside four complex detectors. Over the next few years, the punters will pore over vast reams of records of the fleeting subatomic debris from those collisions, using a purpose-built, globe-spanning computing grid.
Their expectation is that they'll resolve some of the biggest puzzles in physics, shed light on related (and even bigger) mysteries about the fundamental laws of nature, and be completely surprised by revelations unsuspected by even the wildest theories that currently exist.
"My hope is that we end up being confused at a much higher level than we are now," says Michigan State University physicist Joey Huston in mock seriousness, quoting the caption from a cartoon that adorns the office walls of many scientists. "But I also think we'll have found answers to some of the profound questions in physics."
All this is on the gaming table because the LHC is about to transport physicists across a previously impassable energy frontier into the terascale, the promised land of New Physics. The terascale is the realm of physics opened up when two elementary particles smash into one another with a combined energy of at least a trillion electronvolts, or one teraelectronvolt (TeV). An electronvolt is the energy an electron acquires when moving between the terminals of a one-volt battery.
Safety Rebuttal
Excellent quality article.
The dice with 3 sixes is a bit ominous. Some of us are hoping CERN does not roll 3 sixes when high energy collisions begin.
A number of PHD level theoretical scientists also have questions about LHC Safety.
The most notable is Professor Dr. Otto E. Rossler, most famous for his contributions to Chaos theory.
Dr. Rossler refutes CERN's safety arguments and proposes that if micro black holes are created (some say the odds are 1 in 1000, others say the odds are 1 in 2) they would grow large enough to threaten Earth in 50 months to 50 years.
Got LHCFacts?
Cosmic Roulette
Intersting article, and very well written. However it would be nice to proffer the objections to the project, as one commentator has suggested. There are two sides to every story. Howabout examining what happens if things go wrong?
A bit of "doomsday" in the article would be enjoyable for the cynics. Moreover, suppose that the negative scenario does happen, are there any procedures in place to rectify them? I mean, flipping the on-off switch isn't exactly going to make a black hole go away, if one is created.
cosmic roulette
The earth is already bombarded with cosmic rays many thousands of times more energetic than the beams at CERN. If high energy collisions were dangerous, catastrophe would have happened already.
LHC - another white elephant
The whole dark matter concept is a patch up band-aide to save big bang from the dustbin of scientific history. It is futile. Einstein’s field equations for the static vacuum gravitational field, i.e. Ric = 0,violates his ‘Principle of Equivalence’ – the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass, and the laws of Special Relativity, cannot manifest in a spacetime which is by definition empty, that contains no matter. QED. Consequently, if his energy-momentum tensor is zero there is no Einstein gravitational field. Hence his field equations take the following form:
Gij/k + Tij = 0, (subscripts)i,j = 0,1,2,3, k = constant,
wherein the Gij/k are the components of a gravitational energy tensor. Thus the total energy of the gravitational field is always zero; the Gij/k and Tij must vanish identically; there is no possibility for the localisation of gravitational energy (i.e. there is no possibility for Einstein’s gravitational waves). Moreover, this means that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity violates the experimentally well established conservation of energy and momentum, so if the usual conservation of energy and momentum is valid (bearing in mind that there is no experimental evidence to refute it) then Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is invalid. Also, Einstein invented his pseudo-tensor by which he and subsequent big bangers and LIGOers and LHCers claim that his gravitational energy can be localized. However, Einstein’s pseudo-tensor is a meaningless concoction of mathematical symbols for the following reason – it implies the existence of a 1st-order intrinsic differential invariant which depends only upon the components of the metric tensor and their 1st-derivatives (to see this just contract his pseudo-tensor and apply Euler’s theorem). But the pure mathematicians G. Ricci-Curbastro and T. Levi-Civita proved in 1900 that such invariants do not exist! In addition, Einstein and the subsequent big bangers and LIGOers and LHCers resort to linearisation of Einstein’s field equations to localize his gravitational energy. This too is nonsense, because linearisation implies the existence of a tensor which, except for the particular case of being precisely zero, does not otherwise exist, as proven by H. Weyl in 1944. So the big bangers and the LIGOers and their international counterparts such as the AIGO in Australia and VIRGO in Europe, are all destined to detect nothing.
As for black hole collisions, mergers and binaries producing gravitational waves, that too is nonsense by the foregoing. To amplify, let’s assume for the sake of argument that black holes are predicted by General Relativity. The simplest black hole is the so-called “Schwarzschild black hole”, obtained from Ric = 0, which is a statement that there is no matter in the Universe. Since the ‘Principle of Superposition’ does not apply in Einstein’s theory, owing to it being non-linear, one cannot, by an analogy with Newton’s theory (where the Principle of Superposition holds), just arbitrarily insert lumps of matter into any given spacetime for his gravitational field. Now according to the black holers and gravitational wavers , two “Schwarzschild” black holes (concocted by stupidly applying the ‘Principle of Superposition’ of Newton’s theory), each obtained separately from Ric = 0 (an empty spacetime), can mutually interact in a mutual spacetime that by definition contains no matter! That is nonsense, but the simplicity of it escapes their poor brains. Furthermore, before one can talk of black hole interactions it must first be proved that the two-body problem is well-defined within General Relativity. This can be done in only two ways, (a) derivation of an exact solution to the field equations for two bodies, or (b) proof of an existence theorem by which it can be shown that Einstein’s field equations contain latent solutions for such a configuration of matter. There are no known solutions to the field equations for the interaction of two or more bodies, so option (a) has never been fulfilled, and no existence theorem has ever been proven, so option (b) has never been fulfilled either. Moreover, General Relativity has not been able to account for the simple experimental fact that two fixed bodies will approach one another upon release. So all talk of black holes interacting is nonsense. However the whole issue is moot, since black holes are in fact forbidden by the Theory of Relativity (it forbids infinite densities), and owing to the violation of the usual conservation of energy and momentum, General Relativity is invalid, and with it the alleged big bang. The LHCers various claims for bangs and holes are just plain poppycock. Finally, despite the claims that black holes have been "discovered" all over the place, nobody has ever found one because the signatures of the alleged black hole, (a) an infinitely dense point-mass singularity and (b) an event horizon, have never been found. Claims for their discover is wishful thinking, not science. The LHC is just like LIGO et al, a massive gravy train for its participants, at the great expense of the taxpayer.
More non-mathematical details are here:
http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/Unicorns.html
For those who want the mathematical proofs, go here:
http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2008/PP-12-11.PDF
And here: http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2007/PP-09-14.PDF