Given the possibility that when the Large Hadron Collider turns on, we won't immediately be swallowed up by a black hole, there may some interesting discoveries. To that end:
In 1993, the UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave, challenged physicists to produce an answer that would fit on one page to the question 'What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?'
Winning answers here.
(h/t: Slashdot, via Buzz Out Loud)
11 comments:
Higgs speculation, like String Theory speculation, are based upon a perceived need to equate the gravitational force with the other three forces (the electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces). Both speculations are also the product of a perceived need to maintain symmetry within our mathematical models.
Indeed, both may make sense. But without them, a lot of problems go away - like dark matter, dark energy, multiverses, etc, etc...
Everything I know about the Higgs boson I learned from The Goddam Particle (one of my all-time favorite books), so I can't really debate your claim intelligently.
Or know whether I agree with it, for that matter. The first part sure sounds right, but my kneejerk reaction is not to buy your second paragraph. Aren't dark matter and dark energy, by definition, outside of our ken? What difference would it make it in our understanding of them if we discarded the Standard Model, or whatever it is that we're using now?
It's all a very dependent chain of assumptions, and as they wobble, we add explanations - post-Big Bang cosmic inflation, the dark energy and dark matter that cause and result from it, string theory to build a theory of quantum gravity that will maintain symmetry, 11 dimensions to make string theory mathematically coherent, multiverses to make 11 dimensions work, yadda, yadda...
Heck, if you go back to Hubble's day, you can examine the assumptions that underlie or creaky superstructure upon which we build stellar distance estimates - standard candle assumptions like Cepheid stars, supernova types, etc.
It's all very rickety. Sure, it may be right, but I wonder...
What you get when you mix high energy colliders, Professor Otto Rossler's charged micro black hole theory and bake for 50 months to 50 years?
Answer: A golf ball
Don:
I take your point about one thing being piled on top of another, but still, there have been a huge number of really smart people working on this for a long time. While I grant the possibility that it could all come tumbling down the way it has in the past, I just don't think it's very likely. I think there are more than assumptions at play here -- a lot of the building blocks have considerable evidence to support them, and lots of physics fits together quite reasonably. It also makes very good predictions, and as Hawking has noted, we now have to spend a huge amount of money to produce a result we can't explain.
Granted, what we have is a partial understanding at best. Also granted: it may be a mistake to think that everything can be unified into one theory, and some of the recent theorizing (string theory, multiverses) that tries to achieve this strikes me as hand-waving, too.
I wonder, though, why you say that dark matter would just "go away" if we threw out some of what we now believe. Isn't there a real problem explaining how galaxies maintain their shapes if you don't posit the existence of something besides what we can observe? It is my (admittedly shallow) understanding that a spiral galaxy can't persist if all you admit is regular matter and current beliefs about gravity.
jt:
Thanks for sharing your views. I am not going to get into the debate that you probably want to have. Judging by the comments you've made in the talk pages on Wikipedia, I think what you're looking for is proof of a negative. I trust you know how that's generally impossible to provide.
I also think you're taking the viewpoint of a tiny minority -- none of who seem to be physicists -- as gospel, and dismissing out of hand the credibility of the overwhelming majority of people who actually know what they're talking about.
Such an attitude is nothing more than conspiracy thinking, to my view.
I don't understand how you can believe that virtually everyone with advanced training in particle physics would be eager to do something that poses the dangers that you are imagining. Why would they want to do that? Do you think there's some kind of global death wish among these thousands of really smart people? It just makes no sense to believe such a thing.
Hi Brenden,
I don't think there is a global death wish, I think there is general apathy and ignorance of the problems with the safety arguments on the part of physicists and a potential virtual repeat of the management decision to launch the Shuttle Challenger in freezing weather.
There was great pressure to launch on time (a teacher was on board, much press coverage and President Reagan was waiting to comment on the launch). There was no proof of safety, but no proof of danger either. Managers "reasoned" that it must be safe enough to launch, downplayed technicians' concerns and gave approval to launch.
To answer your other question, goto LHCFacts.org to see a list of many PHD level theoretical scientists who have commented publicly about their concerns that safety has not been reasonably proven before micro black holes might be created by the Large Hadron Collider.
The most famous is Professor Dr. Otto Rossler, he is a multi-award winning, world famous contributor to theoretical sciences, professor of theoretical bio chemistry, a visiting Professor of theoretical physics and math, founder of the field of Endophysics, contributor to micro relativity, Chaos theory, etc. A Wikipedia search on "Rossler" will return several pages devoted to his contributions to science.
Professor Rossler's concerns can be read in his article "Biggest Crimes of Humanity".
JT:
Is it valid to compare a few NASA bureaucrats who knuckled under to White House pressure to the unanimous view of all those physicists who have been involved with the LHC? Sadly, No.
The shuttle was an established program with known, real risks stemming from the limitations of the engineering available. No one involved in the program viewed the risks as non-existent. It had well-defined safety parameters to minimize these risks; those parameters were ignored for political reasons by a few top administrators who held an undue amount of clout. The majority of the technical people involved did not agree with their reasoning. You might read Part 2 of this book for an understanding of how far from consensus was the decision to launch Challenger under the existing conditions.
By contrast, the "risks" associated with the LHC that you describe are speculation that illustrate the principle that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. They are not viewed as real by anyone who has the proper training.
Also, the worst-case scenario for the shuttle involved the loss of seven lives. Tragic for them, but hardly earth-shattering. Your imagined worst-case scenario, on the other hand, really does involve the entire planet. So, again, do you really think, given the number of physicists who have been involved for decades in the planning of the LHC, that this never occurred to any of them? And that if it did, they just dismissed it without further thought? Your airy explanation of "general apathy and ignorance" simply does not stand up when a reasonable person gives the LHC's design history a moment's thought.
To the handful of people that you've managed to find to feed your fears …
I think Khukri has already made the case for why we don't care about Otto Rossler's views on this matter. As for the other "authorities" to whom you appeal, none of them appear to have any relevant expertise. Werbos is an economist, political scientist, and mathematician. Tutt does have a Ph.D. in physics, sort of, but her work is in radiation health issues. Beldev is a metallurgist, more or less, and it would also appear, a crank. Blodgett has no Ph.D. and no special training in physics; he appears to have dabbled in statistics, sociology, economics, computer programming, cartooning, and poetry. Wagner has "studied" physics, but he has no degree in it; his Ph.D. in law. From an unaccredited school. And so on.
Further, even if there were some reason to believe that these people were qualified to weigh in on this, the quotes you attribute to them on your blog (which The Google shows you have cut and pasted onto many other sites around the Web) are by and large not sourced. Where you include links to support the quotes, they're mostly blank or point back to your own blog, including the quotes posted on your own blog [sic]. Where actual external links exist, they point to comments made during interviews given to fringe newspapers or that were posted in Web forums (assuming that the username is actually real). I see nothing of these people's views in any peer-reviewed journal.
In the faint hope that your mind is not completely made up, I'll close by referring you to CERN's FAQs and safety reports on the matter.
I say "faint" because I have looked through what you've written on your blog and on various discussion pages on Wikipedia. I expect you'll be back to respond to this -- zealotry rarely admits fatigue -- but you should not expect me to respond further.
Hello bjkeef,
I am impressed that you did so much research!
Dr. Steven Hawking and Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson were only able to repeat debunked safety arguments apparently directly from CERN's public relations safety web site.
Sometimes the truth hurts, but Earth deserves better than flawed safety arguments and unverified safety reports that even hand picked scientists would only approve by a 4 to 5 majority.
Your say "zealotry" I say "denial".
Thank you for the forum, the last word is yours if you wish.
Amazing. Hawking and Tyson know the same physics as physicists working on the LHC. And even more amazing, they debunk idiocy when talking to a general audience using the same physics-based reasoning.
In other news, Hawking and Tyson agree with mathematicians at the Institute for Advanced Study that 2+2=4 and repeat this misinformation wherever they go! Will these sinister conspiracies never cease?
And as far as repetition goes, you might have a look in the mirror. Everything you've posted on the Web is identical to everything else you've posted on the Web -- Black holes will destroy the Earth! CERN is lying! Five other wingnuts agree with me!
I see that in your "references," you have once again linked to your own site. You have also linked to a PDF file whose authors couldn't be bothered to identify themselves, which is posted on a site whose owners could not be bothered to create an "About Us" page. Mmmm. Nothing says "credible" like anonymous sources.
You finish by linking to a "journalist, photographer, and novelist," who repeats the same sort of uninformed FUD that you do. I see that he uses the same smoke screen as you do, by saying "Dr." Wagner. Reminder -- this lunatic does not have a physics degree. He has a piece of paper from a non-accredited law school.
Finally, I notice that you can't even be content to quote Gillis correctly. Leaving aside whether he's right about his claim, he says "4/5 majority." This is not that same as your "4 to 5 majority." I'm utterly unsurprised that your understanding of arithmetic is at the same basement level as your understanding of physics and your ability to think critically, but you might reflect on this one point, anyway. You gotta start somewhere.
I'm not stealing the last word, just correcting my mis-typing.
"4 of 5" not "4 to 5".
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