On hadron colliders, dark matter and black holes

[RPMiller]

@jfrazierjr - This won't give us any energy. Rather we pump energy in to get the particles up to speed and then study the results after they collide. It's like pumping a load of petrol into two trucks, watching the fireball when they collide and then measuring how far the bumper went.

@RP - the protons will collide in a vacuum - the center of the pipe is as empty as the engineers can get it to reduce the chance of them accidentally hitting something other than the proton that is coming the other way. Therefore the collision itself is almost identical to a collision in outer space. In fact, at the atomic scale, even gas is mostly empty, so it's functionally the same as collisions in the atmosphere too, which is where the cosmic ray interactions happen. What happens to the debris afterwards - when it flies off and hits the solid bit, the detectors, is essentially just garbage collection. We pick up the bits and see what happened. So the detector doesn't influence the collision itself. In this way, the collision should be as identical to a collision that occurs outside a detector as possible. Otherwise all we'd be studying was how physics works inside a detector - which wouldn't really help us to understand the wider world

Interesting. I'll be very intrigued to hear about the data collection and the results there of.

Have they given any percentages on chance of success for the whole experiment?

[torstan]

@RPMiller: There's no real chance of the machine 'failing' as such. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that there is a Higgs boson. If it finds it, Peter Higgs gets a Nobel along worth the experimentalists that find it. If there is no Higgs found, then the entire Model has been disproved - which would be a major result as it would mean that one of the best tested theories ever constructed would be disproved. Finally it could (and is widely expected to) produce a whole world of new matter that we've never seen before, in which case it is champagne all round and a lot of work for me.

The way it could fail is to not actually produce collisions of the energy required, at the rate we need. That would be an engineering failure and is possible, though, we hope, very unlikely. Nevertheless, the collider is scheduled to run for 10 years at least, so even if it doesn't work as expected when it starts, it should be fixed soon enough in that 10 year window. We'll have to wait and see what first runs this summer produce to know how well the machinery is working. Something this large, complex and unwieldy is guarranteed to have teething trouble when they flick the on switch. The question is how serious the problems are and whether they can be fixed before the first physics run next spring (it turns off during the winter because electricity is too expensive and the experimentalists need downtime to tinker).

@Neonknight - There are many theories with extra dimensions, all of which differ on their nature. Every one of them has a good reason why we haven't seen them yet. These generally fall into one of two categories - either atoms can't move in them, but more exotic matter such as gravitons (a hypothetical particle that transmits gravity) does. Or they are very small and circular. By circular I mean that if you travel far enough in that dimension you get back to where you started - like in the Meteors! or Maelstrom games where if you fly off the right of the screen you come back on the left. In the case of these dimensions, the width of the screen is of an atomic scale, so you would never notice the process of moving across it and coming back to where you started.

There are theories with other universes that are separated from us because of the way space-time might split in quantum mechanics (ala quantum leap and parallel universes) but that is a different use of the word 'dimension'.

[torstan]

@ toff: nprb

@ Karro: Now that there is a top plan for at Cthulhu game... Hmmm, sounds like a fun start to an adventure.

@RPMiller: Forgot to mention, I looked it up. The expected data output is around 15 petabytes a year. That will be written to tape on site and simultaneously sent out to two or three other storage facilities around the world to avoid problems from data corruption, or say a fire. Each of those will be accessible from the Grid.

[Karro]

@ toff: nprb

@ Karro: Now that there is a top plan for at Cthulhu game... Hmmm, sounds like a fun start to an adventure.

It came to me all at once upon reading your first post... I'd have posted it sooner but was distracted by work...

Is "NPRB" secret mad-scientist code?

[jfrazierjr]

@ Karro: Now that there is a top plan for at Cthulhu game... Hmmm, sounds like a fun start to an adventure.

See.. what you do here is get some players who know nothing about whats going on with your work... start the game... freak them out with some really off the wall crazy crap(and I mean WAY crazy) in the game. Then tell then that the project you are working on is doing the same thing and try to convince them that the world "really" won't end like it did in the game.

Heh.. that's where RPMillers suggestino about animated gifs and the whole "fog" doing the show/hide tokens for a fraction of a second while moving closer to the players would be just freaking awesome in Maptool!

Joe

[Robbie]

I had to do it...sorry...

May I now present to you the site of CERN LHC...August 2012.

[jfrazierjr]

I had to do it...sorry...

May I now present to you the site of CERN LHC...August 2012.

heh.... you should have thrown in some of the world monuments being sucked toward the event horizon.....

[Karro]

See.. what you do here is get some players who know nothing about whats going on with your work... start the game... freak them out with some really off the wall crazy crap(and I mean WAY crazy) in the game. Then tell then that the project you are working on is doing the same thing and try to convince them that the world "really" won't end like it did in the game.

Heh.. that's where RPMillers suggestino about animated gifs and the whole "fog" doing the show/hide tokens for a fraction of a second while moving closer to the players would be just freaking awesome in Maptool!

Joe

See, now that's just mean

I had to do it...sorry...

May I now present to you the site of CERN LHC...August 2012.

I work in a cube farm, at least for today... This pic was incompatible with that fact. I almost broke the code of silence...

[NeonKnight]

Am I the only one who keeps reading the title as on HARDon colliders, or am the only sicko here?

[CC_JAR]

I had to do it...sorry...

May I now present to you the site of CERN LHC...August 2012.

And as for that pic..
they just had to divide by zero, didn't they?