Sounds like the particle collider people are having tunnel vision.
"1 after the new particle collider": Guess what? we need an even bigger particle collider.
What we really need is to build one on the moon.
Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
61–70 of 254 posts
Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people severely underestimate the scale, complexity, and time it takes to build large scale accelerators. There wont be some magical new accelerator popping up. Building them takes years, sometimes decades. Additionally you need a lot of experience in building, operating and designing those. Having worked in accelerator physics for quite some time my opinion is that China does not have the skills to do this.…
> There wont be some magical new accelerator popping up. There will and it will come from photonics research.
Or even crazier stuff like wakefield accelerators and petawatt lasers. At this point the LHC is like ITER - advancements to the foundational technology have jumped leaps and bounds yet we're still stuck with a huge multi-billion dollar machine running on fairly outdated tech.
Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
#63Let's step back an perfect the physics we know. Perfect fission and fusion first! The short and long term benefits of that is more important the verifying for example the next Higgs boson. While verifying the Higgs is nice there are no practical applications for the knowledge.
Yes, let's "just" do that. But I guess we should make some restrictions:
1) Can't use the any of the theorists or experiementalists who had anything to do with the useless research of the LHC.
2) Can't use any of the hardware research required to make that discovery (all apparently useless):
2a) superconducting magnets
2b) high performance fpga computing
2c) particle detectors
Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Difference is, the discovery of quantum mechanics did not require billion-dollar investment in equipment and manpower (not until work began on nuclear weapon, anyway). Besides, current research in high-energy physics, while being expensive, only brings scientific value and not much at all in the way of practical application (except, perhaps, as a side-effect of building more and more sophisticated equipment - but tha…
How can you be sure that the new science won't have any practical applications?
We haven’t seen any evidence of that in the many years that have passed. We have good science, the Higgs and all, but, frankly, there’s little hope that the energies comparable to those that existed at the beginning of the Universe would be of practical consequence to us (other than the destruction of the Earth).
Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people severely underestimate the scale, complexity, and time it takes to build large scale accelerators. There wont be some magical new accelerator popping up. Building them takes years, sometimes decades. Additionally you need a lot of experience in building, operating and designing those. Having worked in accelerator physics for quite some time my opinion is that China does not have the skills to do this.…
> There wont be some magical new accelerator popping up. There will and it will come from photonics research.
That is really vague. Even if there are interesting advancements in photonics, I seriously doubt that it will be able to accelerate particles to terra electron volts of colision energy in a controlled manner (in the next few years). Everybody I know that works in accelerator physics believes that for large machines, superconducting radio frequency cavities are the way to go.
Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Difference is, the discovery of quantum mechanics did not require billion-dollar investment in equipment and manpower (not until work began on nuclear weapon, anyway). Besides, current research in high-energy physics, while being expensive, only brings scientific value and not much at all in the way of practical application (except, perhaps, as a side-effect of building more and more sophisticated equipment - but tha…
How can you be sure that the new science won't have any practical applications?
If they do it’s nothing we’ll ever be able to harness
Why should society at this day and time then plow millions of man hours and raw materials into proving it literally?
Perhaps when nanotechnology or AI is able to be put to the task, those peoples can then build a very specific machine to prove very specific questions
But this is throwing spaghetti at the wall for what to us will be a moment of excitement then having no clue how to make use of it and a big mess to clean up
Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
#67Sounds like the particle collider people are having tunnel vision. "1 after the new particle collider": Guess what? we need an even bigger particle collider. What we really need is to build one on the moon.
Is it turtles all the way down, or is there a theoretical maximum size of a particle collider where no larger size would yield interesting results?
Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There wont be some magical new accelerator popping up. There will and it will come from photonics research.
Or even crazier stuff like wakefield accelerators and petawatt lasers. At this point the LHC is like ITER - advancements to the foundational technology have jumped leaps and bounds yet we're still stuck with a huge multi-billion dollar machine running on fairly outdated tech.
That is simply not true, the plasma wakefield accelerators are really a rather new technique but they are NOT meant to be used at such high energies, but rather for small experiments. Also (as far as I know), while they do have vastly superior energy gain per meter, you simply can't concatenate several of them (as you do with SRF cavities). So at the current state, if you want to reach TeV of colliosion energy, SRF is the only way to go.
Current plasma wakefield accelerators are in GeV range, we need TeV.
Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
#69Let's step back an perfect the physics we know. Perfect fission and fusion first! The short and long term benefits of that is more important the verifying for example the next Higgs boson. While verifying the Higgs is nice there are no practical applications for the knowledge.
Yes, let's "just" do that. But I guess we should make some restrictions: 1) Can't use the any of the theorists or experiementalists who had anything to do with the useless research of the LHC. 2) Can't use any of the hardware research required to make that discovery (all apparently useless): 2a) superconducting magnets 2b) high performance fpga computing 2c) particle detectors 3) Understanding of background physics (…
In a way, the demand created for tech for the new age of particle accelerators like detectors and magnets will be the thing that eventually cracks fusion. The entire value prop of CFS is predicted on the fact that magnetics have advanced faster than ITER could be built. The LHC is a big driver of that advancement.
Re: Finding new physics will require a new particle collider
#70My personal opinion (and I might be biased since I'm not a collider guy) is that it's time to take a break from the energy frontier and put our efforts into other kinds of physics. There's a whole world out there besides "fixing" the standard model.
I'm having a hard time finding it, but there's a quote from a famous physicist along the lines of "we already have a theory of everything we encounter in daily life, it's just that we can't apply it to practically anything". For instance, we still have no idea how unconventional superconductors work. Of course, they're completely described by plain old quantum mechanics without even using field theory. However, that still doesn't mean we understand them because the theory is too complex.
I'm personally interested in the rising complexity frontier of physics where increased computing power and new methods of approaching problems will help uncover emergent phenomena. Plus, there's other accelerators besides colliders that are essential to this field (x-ray light sources for instance).
We should come back to the energy problem experimentally when we can affordably make a revolutionary accelerator (like x100, not a factor of 2 or 3). That will come when we have mastered advanced acceleration techniques like plasma and wakefield.