Posted on 11/16/2010 5:24:57 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
(Reuters) - Scientists at the CERN research center say their "Big Bang" project is going beyond all expectations and the first proof of the existence of dimensions beyond the known four could emerge next year.
In surveys of results of nearly 8 months of experiments in their Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they also say they may be able to determine by the end of 2011 whether the mystery Higgs particle, or boson, exists.
Guido Tonelli, spokesman for one of the CERN specialist teams monitoring operations in the vast, subterranean LHC, said probing for extra dimensions -- besides length, breadth, height and time -- would become easier as the energy of the proton collisions in it is increased in 2011.
Other CERN physicists say the success so far of the world's largest scientific project suggests that some great enigmas of the universe they have in their sights could be at least partly resolved much sooner than they thought.
"One year ago, it would have been impossible for us to guess that the machine and the experiments could achieve so much so quickly," said Fabiola Gionotti, spokeswoman for another research team in the surveys, issued on CERN's website (www.cern.org).
RESULTS ALL THE TIME
"We are producing new results all the time," she added. The existence or otherwise of the Higgs, never yet spotted but believed to provide the glue giving mass to matter, should be settled one way or another by the end of next year.
The $10 billion LHC, whose operation and monitoring involves scientists and research centers in 34 countries, went into full operation on March 31, smashing protons together at near the speed of light with increasing energy.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
OK
Whoa Nelly! Pack it up folks, we’re moving!
Maybe that dimension is where the liberal’s common sense is hiding.
Do you there is a dimension without leftists and child molesters and stuff?
Wish they’d hurry up...four dimensions just ain’t enough for all of us and Pelosi, Reid and Obama too!
Say, I wonder what the carbon footprint is on a puppy like that?
“Maybe that dimension is where the liberal’s common sense is hiding.”
Along with all of those socks.
Man I cannot WAIT till the LHC is turned up to “11”..This thing is gonna blow science doors off. Lot’s of obstacles, but impressive what they have pulled off so far.
I bet you believe in the tooth fairy too. ;)
Sorry CERN, but we beat you with proof of that.
Just look inside the greatest waste of matter in the known universe inside the Beltway...
Imagine getting something useful and productive for as little a 10 billion dollars!
Obama and the Democrats would have to spend at least twice that.
For a cost of a mere one billion dollars annually, CERN will attempt to discover extra dimensions we cannot exist in. Kick in a scant one billion dollars more and CERN will attempt to discover atomic particles that exist for only fractions of a second.
And what is the return on investment? Oh, just a whole lotta nuthin’ except for more scientists insisting that a higher budget is completely necessary while they wave the flag of atheism in our faces.
They should rename this mother of all vanity projects the Largest Waste of Money. CERN LHC is a profligate waste of money and is utterly unjustifiable. To put it in perspective, you could build seven Space Shuttles and a new JSC mission control center building with the cash that CERN has already frittered away on this useless project - and to date it has produced a grand total of absolute nothingness.
That project required physicists with the ability to manage and analyze huge quantities of data. Most of those physicists lost their jobs.
A large number of them ended up on Wall Street and used (or misused) their math skills to create the algorithms that sustained exotic securities like mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, etc.
Maybe it would be best to keep these physicists occupied with relatively harmless occupations such as discovering additional dimensions and short-lived particles.
Ever since that last batch of physicists was dumped onto the job market, life in the known four dimensions has become much less tolerable for those of us with multi-year half lifes.
I hear that that universe is three streets down and two doors to the right.
However, in this case I don’t know which of the eleven dimensions “down” and “right” refer to.
Not since 1967.
: )
If history is any guide, these experiments will turn up results that no one predicted.
Actually, however many dimensions there may be, we exist in all of them already.
Think about it this way. A two-dimensional stick figure on a sheet of paper doesn't directly perceive the 3rd dimension, but it surely exists in it because we can take a ruler and measure the "vertical" distance between any two sheets of paper. Or we can measure angles (2 or more) between them, if the sheets are not parallel.
One thing that a 2D drawing can't do is to naturally travel through the 3rd dimension (such as to crawl from one sheet of paper to another.) But he can sometimes see shapes leaking onto his sheet from some other sheet; and if he has control over some machines he can have his sheet of paper (or a small piece of it) raised or lowered to give him access to other sheets.
The n-th dimension can be visualized by us as a magical box with a knob. You rotate that knob and you travel along some other dimension that is perpendicular to all our dimensions. Like traveling in time, you stay where you were but things change around you. Only the time is not involved, but some other dimension - which will look to us just as time looks like. We are continuously falling down the time axis; but we may be stationary in other dimensions.
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