Blog 20160810 Hadron fail
[GB: Editorial from Nature]:
Physicists need to make the case for high-energy experiments
The disappearance of a tantalizing LHC signal is disappointing for those
who want to build the next big accelerator.
10 August 2016
LHCb Experiment/LHCb Collaboration
Visualization of a typical event in CERN’s LHCb experiment, with subatomic
particles including pions and kaons in different colours.
Science thrives on discovery, so it’s natural for physicists to mourn this
week. As the high-energy-physics community gathered in Chicago on Friday, hopes
were high (if cautious) that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s
particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, had chalked up another
finding to build on the discovery of the Higgs boson. Not so — the
bump in the data that had caused such excitement was washed away with a flood
of data that revealed it to be a mere
statistical fluctuation.
Ordinarily, physicists would be satisfied if the LHC continued its
bread-and-butter existence of confirming with ever-greater precision the
standard model — a remarkably successful theory that is known to be
incomplete. But the excitement over the bump has left them hungry for more. As
is evident from the 500 theory papers written about the bump, physics is ready
for something new.
That the LHC has not turned up anything beyond the standard model does not
mean it never will. The machine has collected just one-tenth of the data that
scientists hoped to amass by the end of 2022, and just 1% of those it could
collect if a planned revamp to increase the intensity of collisions goes ahead.
But the dry spell worries some. The idea of supersymmetry predicts that heavier
counterparts to regular particles will become evident at higher collision
energies. Before the LHC was switched on, fans of the theory would have gambled
on being able to see something by now. And if the dry spell extends to a
drought, high-energy physics could descend into what some call the nightmare
scenario — the collider finds nothing beyond the Higgs boson. Without
‘new’ physics, there is no thread to pull to unravel the countless mysteries
that the standard model fails to account for, including dark matter and
gravity.
There remain strong reasons to build a successor machine. But without
another discovery, the public’s delight in high-energy physics could fade:
there comes a time when exploration alone no longer satisfies.
Convincing funding agencies to cough up several billion dollars to
continue the same approach will therefore be tough, especially when neutrino
and lab-based precision experiments cost a fraction of the price. It will be
physicists’ job to consider carefully the worth of pursuing that discovery
strategy. And if high-energy colliders remain essential, they need to work on
their sales pitch.
Nature 536, 125 (11 August 2016)
doi:10.1038/536125b
From nature.com
08 March 2016
17 March 2016
05 August 2016
Observations.
ReplyDelete1 A conservative would say finish the data collection and analysis at least to more than 50% level of that available before asking to build another expensive device.
2 Data bumps are part of normal science.
3 Glenn seems to not consider space as real..."Apparently, the Higgs boson is still kicking, along with the gravity wave that waved through perfectly empty spacetime in the LIGO experiment."
Space is filled with a wave like energy Glenn, there is no "empty" space.
George
Of course I was being facetious about LIGO. You are right that there is no such thing as "empty spacetime or empty space." LIGO, if correct, would prove the existence of a medium through which a wave could travel. That medium must be aether. It certainly cannot be energy, since that is just a calculation. And it certainly cannot be matterless motion, as you suggest.
ReplyDelete