Posted on 11/26/2007 5:45:08 PM PST by curtisgardner
Not if the road leads out of Boston...
As a physicist, I have never met a secular or religious peer who has said this about evolution, ever. And I have discussed the topic widely, at universities and at national laboratories.
As for the Higgs boson, it's understandable that some physicists would express the desire not to find it--or rather, to find that it doesn't exist. The purpose of any experiment is not to verify a theory, but to disprove it, if it can. If the Higgs is found, it's a long-expected event, an anticlimax. If no Higgs is found, it means our theories are spectacularly wrong, and that there are undreamt-of vistas of physics waiting to be explored.
I’ve sometimes wondered about the obvious. Why not find a suitable underground location or set of locations in which to set off fusion explosions, and tap the resulting heat. And as a bonus we get to keep up to the minute with nuclear weapon research....
Perhaps the difference is that physics specialists tend to see all other sciences as ‘more soft science’ than physics? Math specialists tend to think physics is “softer’ than pure math, though the more theoretical realms of both tend to be somewhat “detached”, shall we say?
Most scientists seem to consider the soft sciences like psych and sociology as “all soft, no science’.
Physicists might not live a cushy existence, but it might be just the life they desire. Should they be funded on the public dime? Can you make a case that HEP deserves the billions of taxpayer money that it receives, without using the argument that many other unquestionably wasted billions are also spent on other things?
Not if the road leads out of Boston...
Depends on which side of the city limits you are on, methinks. (8^D)
Yes, but to do a proper job of it would take more time than I have.
Instead I'll leave you with one thought: by my calculations, sometime in 1997 the additional wealth created by ONE spin-off technology of high-energy physics--the World Wide Web you are using now--became larger than the amount of money spent by the human race on the entire science of high-energy physics up to that point in time. (And it has exponentially diverged since then.) The science has paid its mortgage in full; the rest is gravy, and you're welcome.
(Many more arrows in that quiver.)
Bingo. The Apollo program didn't pay out by getting us to the moon. It payed out by learning everything needed to get there, which could then be applied to all sorts of things.
No, it simply means that no Higgs was found. Perhaps that is because it doesn't exist. Perhaps it is because the $15B tool didn't work as anticipated. Either way, you can't prove a negative.
Good enough. Thanks.
If no Higgs is found, it means our theories are spectacularly wrong, and that there are undreamt-of vistas of physics waiting to be explored.
No, it simply means that no Higgs was found. Perhaps that is because it doesn't exist. Perhaps it is because the $15B tool didn't work as anticipated. Either way, you can't prove a negative.
I stand by my statement. According to the theory, the Higgs particle spectrum should not only be observable by the LHC, but should be obvious. As for the LHC not working, either it's colliding protons, or it isn't. If it isn't colliding protons, or the detectors aren't reconstructing the collisions, nobody will draw any physics conclusions from that. The machine might fail in many ways, sure, but there's no way for the machine to fail such that the only symptom would be that the Higgs particle is missing.
If the LHC is colliding protons at the specified (and easily measured) energy, either the Higgs particles are evident, or they're not. If they're not evident, it means that either they don't exist, or they're much rarer than thought, or they're hidden in the data somehow, but in any of these cases, the theory is still wrong.
The LHC is as close to guaranteed discovery as science gets.
I know that it fulfills the practical purposes, and eliminates a massive range of other possibilities, but I find it irksome when anyone claims they can prove something doesn't happen or isn't there. The best that can ever be done is to prove that you did not observe it or it did not happen as anticipated.
Personally, I think the failure to take into account the effect of the ether on the phlogiston is going to skew the results. ;^)
That's true, but I'm not saying that if they don't find the Higgs, it doesn't exist. I'm saying that if they don't find the Higgs, the theory is wrong.
The danger, in fact, is not that they'll miss an existing Higgs particle, but rather the other way around: it has been said (by Chris Quigg) that the LHC will discover the Higgs whether it exists or not! If you simply erase the Higgs particle from the theory by fiat, it causes the W particles to become strongly interacting, forming a bound state (called a "technirho") that experimentally behaves very much like a Higgs particle, and which indeed plays a very similar role in breaking the electroweak symmetry.
Measurement difficulties (and recovery/salvage of the measurement devices) is just one of the “practical” problems that prevent this approach.
A fusion bomb of course is immensely destructive, and produces a wide variety of particles from the instigating explosion (typically a fission bomb), then more debris and partial particles from the compressed secondary bomb (the hydrogen bomb itself), plus “junk” from the Lithium, tritium, and other internals. All of this stuff is being blown out in random directions away from the bomb.
Plus instantaneous heat and light and blast forces - as you noted.
For physics research you need many minutes of observation of specific energy level particles coming from a known direction - then you “sort” through the many images to find the ones that tell you something. (Kind of like colliding two trucks and looking for the pistons and bearings and fragments of engine castings.) If the detectors only have a few microseconds before they themselves are destroyed, then you have very little chance of finding the reaction you need.
You must have controlled high energy reactions in front of the detectors to that, so using fusion bombs will create heat and light, but not (unfortunately) usable research.
Thanks to all contibutors. Thread more interesting than article BUMP!
Music to read this thread by...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVpLLmD98os
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