Body & Soul2 mins ago
The God Particle.
60 Answers
Have you read it? Did it make you question you're very being and short time through life?
Any revelations?
Any revelations?
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Hello Jim360. A few hours ago i was blind and a nobody but now i'm talking to a world renowned quantum physicist or so i believe :)
So jim360, i do have a lot of question although i have left them at home although hidden and secured.
Off the top of my head and i don't expect you to answer truthfully unless you're a unaware sockpuppet which is a small possibility but unlikely knowing your iq.
What exactly is your chosen field you major in?
What exactly are you looking for?
What have your superiors told you they want you to look for?
Have you or your colleagues ever been asked a theoretical question which raised your brows? If so what was the question?
After the accelerators have done their jobs and the individual quarks and gluons (Partons) recombine The debris contains particles such as pions and kaons, antineutrons/antprotons do any damage at all to the space/time continuum?
Have you seen any damage even on a nanoscale or would i be right to imply that this wouldn't be part of your particular voyage?
Got to run, nice speaking with you though qwould prefer f2f so i could judge you on your eye contact and bod lang, not calling you out but just prefer to draw or withdraw my conclusions thusly :)
So jim360, i do have a lot of question although i have left them at home although hidden and secured.
Off the top of my head and i don't expect you to answer truthfully unless you're a unaware sockpuppet which is a small possibility but unlikely knowing your iq.
What exactly is your chosen field you major in?
What exactly are you looking for?
What have your superiors told you they want you to look for?
Have you or your colleagues ever been asked a theoretical question which raised your brows? If so what was the question?
After the accelerators have done their jobs and the individual quarks and gluons (Partons) recombine The debris contains particles such as pions and kaons, antineutrons/antprotons do any damage at all to the space/time continuum?
Have you seen any damage even on a nanoscale or would i be right to imply that this wouldn't be part of your particular voyage?
Got to run, nice speaking with you though qwould prefer f2f so i could judge you on your eye contact and bod lang, not calling you out but just prefer to draw or withdraw my conclusions thusly :)
"World-renowned" is, perhaps, a bit of a stretch, but I'll take it :). Anyway, in rough order...
"Majoring" doesn't really capture what I do, as I don't do anything other than physics at the moment. But my work is related to the decays of particles called B mesons. I'm looking to improve the predictions and refine techniques for extracting information about these decays (which is funnily enough what my supervisor told me to do). The aim of this all is to better understand how particle physics works -- and perhaps more to the point, how it doesn't work, for as soon as we find something that doesn't match what we expected to see then everyone gets excited because that means that there's something new out there, some physics we don't understand yet and can then work on understanding better.
"Have you or your colleagues ever been asked a theoretical question which raised your brows? If so what was the question? "
Not really sure what you mean by this one if I'm honest. Inside the community most people are currently focused on interpreting random experimental measurements and trying to fit them into a reasonably coherent framework. Perhaps you could pick a specific example of what you mean.
"After the accelerators have done their jobs and the individual quarks and gluons (Partons) recombine The debris contains particles such as pions and kaons, antineutrons/antprotons do any damage at all to the space/time continuum? "
No.
"Have you seen any damage even on a nanoscale or would i be right to imply that this wouldn't be part of your particular voyage?"
Again I'm not entirely sure what you mean. The detector itself broke once or twice but apart from that "damage on a nanoscale" is a phrase that seems to have no meaning.
The thing you have to remember is that however fancy the kit at CERN is, the stuff that goes on inside it is perfectly natural. Cosmic Rays, for example, contain all sorts of exotic particles -- mostly kaons -- and occasionally have energies far, far higher than those at CERN. If there were a problem with particles being flung around at this sort of energy we'd have been dead long ago from natural causes before CERN killed us all.
"Majoring" doesn't really capture what I do, as I don't do anything other than physics at the moment. But my work is related to the decays of particles called B mesons. I'm looking to improve the predictions and refine techniques for extracting information about these decays (which is funnily enough what my supervisor told me to do). The aim of this all is to better understand how particle physics works -- and perhaps more to the point, how it doesn't work, for as soon as we find something that doesn't match what we expected to see then everyone gets excited because that means that there's something new out there, some physics we don't understand yet and can then work on understanding better.
"Have you or your colleagues ever been asked a theoretical question which raised your brows? If so what was the question? "
Not really sure what you mean by this one if I'm honest. Inside the community most people are currently focused on interpreting random experimental measurements and trying to fit them into a reasonably coherent framework. Perhaps you could pick a specific example of what you mean.
"After the accelerators have done their jobs and the individual quarks and gluons (Partons) recombine The debris contains particles such as pions and kaons, antineutrons/antprotons do any damage at all to the space/time continuum? "
No.
"Have you seen any damage even on a nanoscale or would i be right to imply that this wouldn't be part of your particular voyage?"
Again I'm not entirely sure what you mean. The detector itself broke once or twice but apart from that "damage on a nanoscale" is a phrase that seems to have no meaning.
The thing you have to remember is that however fancy the kit at CERN is, the stuff that goes on inside it is perfectly natural. Cosmic Rays, for example, contain all sorts of exotic particles -- mostly kaons -- and occasionally have energies far, far higher than those at CERN. If there were a problem with particles being flung around at this sort of energy we'd have been dead long ago from natural causes before CERN killed us all.
jim; On another thread (Accelerating Expanding Universe) you say it is no use me quoting famous scientists if I don't understand them!!!
Yet I understand what they are saying very well - what is there not to understand about the reservations of Stephen Hawking and others, all cleverer in the field that I and who knows, maybe even you.
Stephen Hawking has said;
“The God particle found by CERN could destroy the universe,” Hawking wrote in the preface to a book, Starmus, a collection of lectures by scientists. The Higgs Boson could become unstable at very high energy levels and have the potential to trigger a “catastrophic vacuum decay which would cause space and time to collapse and… we would not have any warning to the dangers,” he continued.
Hawking is not the only voice in the scientific wilderness predicting possible catastrophe if CERN continues in the atomic fast lane. Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson told Eugene Mirman on his Star Talk radio program that the experiment could literally cause the planet to “explode.”
“Ask yourself: How much energy is keeping it together? Then you put more than that amount of energy into the object.” Tyson was confident of the result: “It will explode.”
Yet I understand what they are saying very well - what is there not to understand about the reservations of Stephen Hawking and others, all cleverer in the field that I and who knows, maybe even you.
Stephen Hawking has said;
“The God particle found by CERN could destroy the universe,” Hawking wrote in the preface to a book, Starmus, a collection of lectures by scientists. The Higgs Boson could become unstable at very high energy levels and have the potential to trigger a “catastrophic vacuum decay which would cause space and time to collapse and… we would not have any warning to the dangers,” he continued.
Hawking is not the only voice in the scientific wilderness predicting possible catastrophe if CERN continues in the atomic fast lane. Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson told Eugene Mirman on his Star Talk radio program that the experiment could literally cause the planet to “explode.”
“Ask yourself: How much energy is keeping it together? Then you put more than that amount of energy into the object.” Tyson was confident of the result: “It will explode.”
Ask that question seriously Khandro and you'll get a serious answer.
Still, I'll pre-empt you. Stephen Hawking is not wrong, but what he says really -- really, really, really!!! -- needs to be put in its proper context, and taken out of it, as you have just done (unwittingly, I am sure), makes serious and important scientific work sound like a prediction of Doomsday that cannot possibly be taken seriously.
So let me explain what Hawking's talking about, why he is right, and why he is also very, very misleading -- and why you've therefore been horribly misled into thinking that there is somehow a serious danger.
This is only going to be a brief overview because -- again, I cannot stress this enough -- the quote only makes sense in the context of physical equations I can't explain here, if nothing else because AB doesn't support the relevant format. However, the basic point is that:
1. There is a parameter in the Standard Model that describes the coupling of four Higgs bosons to each other.
2. The value of this parameter changes with energy scale.
3. This parameter can even become negative in certain cases (when it "starts out" being positive).
4. If that happens, then the effective mass of the Higgs Boson can spontaneously go from 125 GeV to something many, many times greater. (This is a version of quantum tunnelling.)
5. If *that* happens, then the mass of everything in the Universe also jumps to the same scale, and basically everything blows up (or at any rate atoms can no longer remain stable, etc etc).
6. This last thing is what Hawking etc is referring to, and it's a real effect. No quibble from me there.
7. However, this effect is very sensitive to two quantities that aren't known precisely, namely the mass of the Higgs boson and also the mass of the top quark.
8. For current values, the parameter does indeed flip negative but in such an extreme way that, if true, the "half-life" of this type of Universe collapse is something approaching many times larger than the lifetime of the Universe. Billions of years away, anyhow.
9. But as I say that's couched in uncertainties about the masses of the main particles involved -- a couple of % out either way on the top mass, for instance, and either things happen faster or not at all.
10. It's *also* possibly affected by "new Physics" that we haven't discovered yet, rendering the entire argument above bogus anyway.
Conclusion: Yes, the LHC *could* cause the planet to explode, but only in such extreme and unlikely circumstances that it's not worth worrying one iota about.
Second conclusion: you still have no idea what you are talking about.
Still, I'll pre-empt you. Stephen Hawking is not wrong, but what he says really -- really, really, really!!! -- needs to be put in its proper context, and taken out of it, as you have just done (unwittingly, I am sure), makes serious and important scientific work sound like a prediction of Doomsday that cannot possibly be taken seriously.
So let me explain what Hawking's talking about, why he is right, and why he is also very, very misleading -- and why you've therefore been horribly misled into thinking that there is somehow a serious danger.
This is only going to be a brief overview because -- again, I cannot stress this enough -- the quote only makes sense in the context of physical equations I can't explain here, if nothing else because AB doesn't support the relevant format. However, the basic point is that:
1. There is a parameter in the Standard Model that describes the coupling of four Higgs bosons to each other.
2. The value of this parameter changes with energy scale.
3. This parameter can even become negative in certain cases (when it "starts out" being positive).
4. If that happens, then the effective mass of the Higgs Boson can spontaneously go from 125 GeV to something many, many times greater. (This is a version of quantum tunnelling.)
5. If *that* happens, then the mass of everything in the Universe also jumps to the same scale, and basically everything blows up (or at any rate atoms can no longer remain stable, etc etc).
6. This last thing is what Hawking etc is referring to, and it's a real effect. No quibble from me there.
7. However, this effect is very sensitive to two quantities that aren't known precisely, namely the mass of the Higgs boson and also the mass of the top quark.
8. For current values, the parameter does indeed flip negative but in such an extreme way that, if true, the "half-life" of this type of Universe collapse is something approaching many times larger than the lifetime of the Universe. Billions of years away, anyhow.
9. But as I say that's couched in uncertainties about the masses of the main particles involved -- a couple of % out either way on the top mass, for instance, and either things happen faster or not at all.
10. It's *also* possibly affected by "new Physics" that we haven't discovered yet, rendering the entire argument above bogus anyway.
Conclusion: Yes, the LHC *could* cause the planet to explode, but only in such extreme and unlikely circumstances that it's not worth worrying one iota about.
Second conclusion: you still have no idea what you are talking about.
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