- Update September 24 2008: Due to an electrical failure in two magnets that caused a major helium leak in the collider on September 19, the LHC has been closed down and is not expected to power up again until the 2009 Northern Hemisphere spring.
If time travel is possible, then the first visitors from the future could arrive in the Swiss city of Geneva this August.
It would be a momentous occasion in the history of science, one made possible by the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest particle accelerator ever constructed.
The builders of the Collider hope to recreate the very instants after the Big Bang by firing tiny particles at tremendous speeds through the circular, 27 kilometres in circumference device that has been built deep under Geneva at the CERN physics laboratory (yes, where the World Wide Web was invented in 1990).
While a very few scientists, and a few more scientific doubters, fear that recreating the moments after the Big Bang could create a Black Hole that would swallow the Earth, more plausible than this Armageddon scenario is the possibility that time travellers from our future would choose the moment of the Collider’s inauguration to pay us a visit.
Time travel is theoretically possible under Einstein’s theories of relativity, but physicists who have studied the issue argue that somebody from our future could only travel backwards (possibly via a wormhole in the fabric of spacetime) to the moment of the creation of the first time machine, which the Collider theoretically is.
The fact that travellers from the future have not materialised among us has long been held as evidence that time travel is not in practice possible, but it is equally possible that they have not yet materialised because the primary condition for their arrival has not yet occurred. The energising of the Collider could fulfil the necessary conditions.
Should the Collider show time travel is a scientific reality, it will raise other issues, most importantly the paradox posed by what would happen if a visitor from the future comes to the present time and kills, say, the father of his as-yet unborn father. Some physicists believe the existence of many parallel universes, each with slightly different histories, would solve that paradox.
The Large Hadron Collider project is probably the most expensive physics experiment in history, costing between $US 5 billion and $US 10 billion for its construction and the experiments to be conducted. Some 10,000 scientists are involved.
The Collider will do something essentially very simple: record what happens when protons are smashed together. Protons are a tiny part of atoms, for example they are the nucleus of the hydrogen atom. They were discovered by our very own Ernest Rutherford in 1918. Hadron is the technical name of the class of sub-atomic particles to which protons belong.
The huge magnets in the circular Collider will accelerate bursts of protons at each other in a vacuum colder than space at speeds just under that of light, to see what happens when they collide.
Many physicists hope to see the elusive “Higgs Boson,” which sounds a bit like the Patronus charm Harry Potter creates to ward off the Dementors but is theorised to be an elementary particle of matter, even smaller than a proton, that could bind together the various theories of physics.
Finding the Higgs Boson (dubbed “the god particle” by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman) in that tunnel would go a long way to establishing science’s holy grail, the Grand Unified Theory or “unified theory of everything,” that brings together the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and gravity. Finding it would marry the theories of the very large (general relativity, gravity) with the very small (quantum theory).
So far, the hardest work of the best brains humanity has produced has not been able to come up with this elusive mathematical formula able to tie together everything we know about the universe, time and space .
The excited CERN scientists also hope to find other things not before seen but theorised upon, including micro black holes and “strangelets,” a form of quark, which could help to explain the “dark matter” believed to help hold the universe together, but never seen.
Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up 96 per cent of the volume of the universe, but they are incredibly difficult to detect and study, other than through the gravitational forces they exert. Dark energy was theorised after standard Big Bang Theory (which held that the universe would expand at a decreasing rate until drawn back on itself by gravity into a “big crunch” and a new big bang), was unable to explain why the universe is still expanding at a faster and faster rate (as measured by the outward acceleration of stars and galaxies), 13.7 billion years after the universe and time began. Gravity should have caused a slowing by now, and “dark energy” is given as the explanation of the continuing expansion.
The Collider will enable its operators to recreate the state of the universe during the early stages of the Big Bang, a millionth of a millionth of a second after the beginning of time.
At full power, trillions of protons will race around the Collider ring 11,245 times a second. When two beams heading in opposite directions collide, they will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the the sun, concentrated in a tiny space.
If nothing happens, for example if the Higgs Boson does not appear, then $US 10 billion will not have been poured into a tunnel under Geneva for no result — even a confounding result would be a scientific leap. Though scientists might have a devil of a job raising money for a similar project again.
But if it works as its creators hope, and particularly if switching it on produces something extraordinary such as the arrival of visitors from our future, or even just the Higgs Boson, then science, and maybe the world, will never be the same again. In the classic phrase of Stephen Hawking, it would enable us to “see inside the mind of god.”
As an article on CERN’s website says: “The next few weeks will be an emotional time at CERN. The product of some 15 years of work is coming to fruition and tensions are riding high as the equipment is tested. Soon, the first protons will be smashed together and the secrets of our universe will begin to unravel.”
Watch this space.
39 Comments
May 19, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I read, or tried to read an article about this in New Scientist, but my mind hit a brick wall, and I just couldn’t work it out. Thank you for your lucid explanation.
May 19, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Eh, if “nothing happens”, that is not the same as “no result”. It would be very interesting, and push inquiry off into new directions.
May 19, 2008 at 8:55 pm
A couple of weekends back I re-read The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams. Its a collection of unpublished writings, speeches and so forth collected after he died.
One of the things he was often asked, at Sci-Fi forums, was if he thought time travel would be possible.
He reckoned it had already been discovered, and hushed up, by the insurance industry.
This is because every time you have a loss and try to claim, you’ll find a clause in the insurance contract excluding coverage for the very thing you are claiming for, and you will never have noticed that clause before.
May 19, 2008 at 9:08 pm
The mind truly boggles at this concept of time travel via the Collider when those who theoretically could be transmitted from some future time materialise amongst us and explain how the paradox of their arrival and the earth after reaching the Global Warming tipping point is cast devoid of all human life.
Perhaps if this machine comes to naught Geneva would be well placed for an advanced tube train system.
May 19, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Does anyone else have any qualms about the morality of spending ‘between $US 5 and 10 billion’ on this proton collider thing, when a substantial proportion of the 4.6 billion people on Earth don’t have access to adequate food, clean drinking water and basic sanitation?
I was interested in the passing reference to Steven Hawking’s phrase about ‘knowing the mind of God’. The search for a single unified theory (Theory of Everything) could be seen to have religious overtones, and Steven Hawking certainly uses a quasi-religious tone in ‘A Brief History of Time’. Physicist Leon Lederman’s 1993 book was called ‘The God Particle’, and essentially argued for funding of a $10 billion-plus supercollider, the sole purpose of which was to find the Higgs Boson that Poneke refers to above, or, in Lederman’s words, ‘.. the God Particle.
Physicists as high priests, leading humanity ‘upward’ towards divine knowledge..?
May 20, 2008 at 5:14 am
If nothing happens then they could sell the idea as the biggest fridge magnet ever created.
I hope it works….then again, this whole thing reminds of this movie “the mist” based on a Stephen King´s book in which the military (its always the troops) create some kind of wormhole to another dimension and then a buncho of gigantic critters come out and raise havoc along a small rural community in some place or the other…
Hope the thing works to whatever consequences it comes to.
May 20, 2008 at 7:12 am
Does anyone else have any qualms about the morality of spending ‘between $US 5 and 10 billion’ on this proton collider thing, when a substantial proportion of the 4.6 billion people on Earth don’t have access to adequate food, clean drinking water and basic sanitation?
The past thirty years have seen sub-Saharan Africa receive roughly $1 trillion in aid money, loans and debt relief with the result that disease, poverty and famine in the region are now far worse than ever. Spending 5% of that to conduct the greatest science experiment of all time sounds like a splendid investment to me.
May 20, 2008 at 7:16 am
So exciting. I live in Geneva. Everything else is pretty dull here, especially (f.Carol’s.i.) the morally defensible stuff. Hey, Nestle are just down the road too, and make that kind of profit. I’d rather be pouring my chocolate money into a really big, awesome punt on the future of the collective knowledge of humanity.
Deborah, my string theory education is pretty much the PBS documentary ‘The Elegant Universe’, fully available online, which lapses into analogies with slices of toast. It’s awesome though.
May 20, 2008 at 7:56 am
Well, time travellers have already had a chance to show up and reveal themselves; there was a conference for them at MIT in 2005. The website is still up:
http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/
Unfortunately either none came or none of them admitted to be time travellers.
May 20, 2008 at 9:15 am
Excellent article, thank you Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms/Dr (?) Poneke. I only discovered your blog a few months back, but it has already become essential reading. Next to the Waiter Rant, of course.
@Carol: Absolutely! I’d rather we spend money on this, than trying to get to Mars. What we might learn from the Geneva work is potentially very useful, even if the insurance brokers do turn up to switch it off.
May 20, 2008 at 9:39 am
Carol, I would rather have that $10 billion used in CERN rather than poured into military adventures such as Iraq, where the money would go if not spent here, rather than into foreign aid, where it mainly ends up lining the pockets of the wealthy anyway. And as you say, even a ‘nothing result’ is interesting.
The ‘god particle’ rhetoric is rather overheated, BTW.
May 20, 2008 at 9:42 am
>Perhaps if this machine comes to naught Geneva would be well placed for an advanced tube train system.
Only if the passengers don’t mind crashing in to oncoming passengers at close to the speed of light.
May 20, 2008 at 10:19 am
OK, my qualms are not widely shared, and on second thoughts I’d have to agree that the LHC project has the potential to be a huge milestone in the intellectual evolution of humanity, and, come August, I’ll be as agog as anyone to see what happens in Geneva.
But I still remain to be convinced that the quest for a Grand Unifying Theory isn’t, at heart, a quasi-religious rather than scientific quest. The mind of God, the God particle, does God play dice? Grand preoccupations indeed. But arguably of limited relevance to everyday life here on Earth. And yes, I understand that this kind of dull, prosaic thinking wouldn’t have put a man on the moon.
May 20, 2008 at 11:43 am
Carol I have similar qualms about the expenditure but better this than the war machine. of course its probably funded by people who want to make into some kind of weapon.. but you know…
About the aid in Africa – you have got to wonder wbout the mis-spending. Tipping aid into a country is a bottomless pit unless it comes with some sort of recovery strategy. Spend money on wells, clean water etc. I read some where recently that a lot of the aid has gone to corrupt governments to fight civil wars, repress the people etc. I’d rather start with the populace – “teach a man to fish” and all that. Donate money for micro business, agricultural education etc.
May 20, 2008 at 11:57 am
Well, I think it’s a little spurious to claim, as many of you have, that if the money wasn’t spent on the experiment at CERN then it would necessarily be spent on the military budget or poured into aid (and yes, I know that it was me that raised the question of whether it would be better spent on aid in the first place). But aren’t we talking about competition within the science budget?
May 20, 2008 at 12:55 pm
This is a fantastic pursuit of knowledge. Whether the Higgs Boson is found or not, I think it will raise more fascinating questions. Remember though, it is probably just ‘turtles all the way down’.
May 20, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Poneke, your paragraph describing dark matter is incorrect :
> Dark matter was theorised after standard Big Bang Theory
>(which held that the universe would expand at a decreasing
>rate until drawn back on itself by gravity into a new big
>bang), was unable to explain why the universe is still
>expanding at a faster and faster rate (as measured by the
>outward acceleration of stars and galaxies), 13.7 billion
>years after the universe and time began. Gravity should
>have caused a slowing by now, and “dark matter” is given
>as the explanation of the continuing expansion.
What you have described here is “dark energy” which is quite different from dark matter. Dark matter was dreamed up when it was found that many galaxies are spinning faster than they should and extra matter was required to hold them together. There have been other observations that have supported the existence of dark matter, such as gravitational lensing by galaxies.
However, the existence of dark matter is by no means certain. There are some alternative theories that modify the way in which gravity works over large distances which have also had some success at explaining observations (eg MOND – Modified Newtonian Dynamics).
But other than that, this is an excellent layman’s explanation of the LHC and its possible discoveries.
Cheers,
Brent.
[Poneke: Thank you yes of course you are right, that will teach me to write this stuff from the top of my head. I have amended it. The LHC will look into dark matter and dark energy.]
May 20, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Carol – ok then better to spend the money on scientitfic research that relieves majority world suffering? OR really are there just to many epople, trying to live in marginal areas?
May 21, 2008 at 12:21 am
Carol- while I’d certainly rather see the money spent on social equality, as far as scientific spending goes, this is nowhere near a waste. Sadly, if you pulled the science budget to reign them in, it’s likely that important projects would be hit as well as unimportant ones. There are better areas to pull money from- such as tax cuts, military spending, etc…
Poneke- it’s also worth mentioning that the possibility of the LHC catalysing time travel is incredibly slim.
May 21, 2008 at 12:45 am
Above all other discussions, pertaining to CERN LHC, the quantum time-dilation is the main topic! References Used: Einstein/Rosen/Heisenberg “Uncertainty Principle”/Tesla/Schrodinger/Hawking/Michio Kaku/Irina Aref’eva/Igor Volovich/John G. Cramer/ and anonymous particle physicists at Jefferson Labs (CEBAF)//. Two proton beams @7 TeV, can disturb the Quantum particles’ pathways, that travel back and forth into the future moment, establishing pre-agreed arrangements, which paves the Universal movement of Space/Time forward, moment by moment. To alter the Quantum pathways will eventually cause a random shift in these pathways, that will change the Nuclear positionings, just enough to create a warp-curvature of Time/Space; thus producing the Einstein-Rosen bridge: Wormhole Effect! This disturbance would be called a Quantum Inversion Induction Wave Function Event Horizon, that could backwash through the Cern Superconductors, and Detectors hardware array! This would amplify the event-horizon singularity effects. Fact: Cern Lhc has multiple precision energy upgrades planned for the coming decades; their goal is perhaps a 200-400 Tev combined random particle collisions, and eventually the ‘coin’ will land on it’s edge, and the lightning shall strike thrice, simultaneously! Fact: The U.S. Navy Department moved the Tesla manuscripts to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, for the purpose of LHC design, and Cern superconductor upgrades. The LHC appears exactly similar to a Tesla machine design, and his view was: ‘If given the right design, and enough pure energy with extreme focus, Time-Travel dimensionally would be possible, by creating a vortex (wormhole) Time-Tunnel effect’. This is not science-fiction, it is science-fact! Fact: Cern is not located in Geneva, Switzerland by accident, it is located ‘outside’ of Jurisdictional Interference, and Control! The Physics Review Board should mount an official forum-committee to intercede with safety precautions, and risk evaluation measures immediately, by drafting a panel of experts, that could at least communicate alternate suggestions for testing protocols. Fact: The Cern/Fermilab physicists are being affected by some sort of gag-order against stating negative concerns about Cern, and it’s impact upon Earths’ environment! Simply stated: A Time-Rip Wormhole, causing unknown parameter Relativistic-Shifts is on our Event Horizon for the future! It may take longer than September 2008, but eventually the Higgs Particle will just become a secondary discovery. Estimated local Temporal Effects: 12-30 Hours/ 30-60 Miles outer-perimeter. This estimate is conditional upon Cern emergency shut-down capabilities. The positive outcomes of these experiments is unfathomable, but the risk factor is: Will we live to see them?
May 21, 2008 at 2:21 am
LHC is exciting for researchers in particle physics. I was probably one of the last group of students to have conducted experiments (a whole week) in the former University of Auckland , nuclear accelerator, known as the AURA-2 in 1996 before it was demolished to make way for the new Computer Science building on Wellesley street opposite AUT. The experiment was to bombard a small gold thin foil target with a beam of protons (proton scattering). The proton beam source was Hydrogen gas which was continually pumped into a vacuum chamber where it came into contact with a moving high-voltage charged conveyor belt where electrons are being stripped off from the hydrogen atoms (those that are in contact with the belt), therefore leaving just the bare protons which are then guided into the synchrotron. The experiment ran all day for 5 consecutive days. The thin gold foil target thus scattered the proton beam aimed at it, where these protons were scattered everywhere even to the direction of where the source of protons came from , ie, the proton gun. The computer controlled detector had to be temporary stopped every hour for about 5 minutes, so that the recording of the number of protons that had been captured by the detector on a specific angle had to be retrieved. The accelerator was not turned off, only the detector which moved around in 360 degrees relative to the gold target which was located at the center.
The data collected were then use to calculate the atomic mass of Gold, various energy levels of excitations of Gold nucleon, spin of the Gold nucleon and others, then compared those to what had already been known and published in the literatures. This was fun.
There were only 2 nuclear accelerator in NZ, one was AURA-2 at the University of Auckland and the other one was at Mt. Albert CRI. Now AURA-2 is dead and I believe that the CRI one is the only one that exist in the country at the moment.
Carol, may I ask you if you’re Libertarianz or a die hard left winger? If you’re Libertarianz, then I somewhat agree with you that researches such as the LHC project could be done by private enterprises. If you’re a die hard left-winger, then you would be the first one to moan about the commercial benefits that private enterprises & corporations reaped when they commercialize their inventions which had been funded privately. See, the greenies labeled big corporations as evildoers of this planet.
[Poneke says: Please keep party politics out of a post about particle physics.]
May 21, 2008 at 10:20 am
I thought there was a particle accelerator at Seaview in Lower Hutt at GNS
[Poneke says: There are two, I was given a tour of them the other week!]
May 21, 2008 at 11:09 am
Falafulu, I’m neither a Libertarianz (emphatically not), nor a die-hard left winger.
The point I was trying to make, not very well I guess, is that science exists in a social context, and society is entitled to question spending priorities where public money is involved. On reflection, I share the general excitement about the LHC project though I do retain a minor qualm or two about the cost. It seems to me that the time travel aspect is more or less a sideshow, and that the discoveries that are more widely tipped to be made (finding the Higgs Boson, finding supersymmetry) are going to be much harder to explain in terms comprehensible to the general public.
May 21, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Carol said…
But I still remain to be convinced that the quest for a Grand Unifying Theory isn’t, at heart, a quasi-religious rather than scientific quest.
No, I think you’re quite wrong by a huge margin here. Searching for GUT (Grand Unifying Theory) is a scientific quest. Imagine what sort of technology that would be created if GUT is fully understood, ie, being discovered? If you can enjoy using your computer, cell phone and other modern electronic gadgets of today, then you would probably say, Thank God that pioneers in Quantum Mechanics in the last 100 years had conquest the unknown theories of the physical universe to produce knowledge that makes technology as semiconductors possible, which is the foundation of almost all electronic gadgets of today on the planet (semiconductors are designed using the rules of Quantum Mechanics – QM) . If the same attitude existed when the founders of QM first proposed the theory then proceeded over the years to test and extend to cope with its limitations, I think that most of the things that we take for granted today (MRI imaging, Lasers , CD players, Fibre-optic communications, etc…) would have never arrived.
Carol said…
The mind of God, the God particle, does God play dice?
Yes, God does actually play dice with the Universe. In a paper published in 1998 by Prof. Anton Zellinger, et al , from Innsbruk University, they showed that God does play dice with the Universe, and that result completely proved Einstein was wrong. The experiment is briefly described here, but the original paper was published on Physics Review Letters – Volume 81. The title of this paper : Violation of Bell’s Inequality under Strict Einstein Locality Conditions
Carol said…
But arguably of limited relevance to everyday life here on Earth. And yes, I understand that this kind of dull, prosaic thinking wouldn’t have put a man on the moon.
C’mon Carol, tell me what you see around you? Electronic gadgets do surround you. This means that developing new theories and discovering their predictions are relevant for everyday life here on Earth, aren’t they?
Carol said…
the discoveries that are more widely tipped to be made (finding the Higgs Boson, finding supersymmetry) are going to be much harder to explain in terms comprehensible to the general public.
Of course if there are new discoveries they would be incomprehensible to the general public, but it is not a popularity contest because the general public’s understanding of the science is limited. Look, we do have technology today in use that the general public of the past never understood even if they were explained to them. Fore Example, we do have PET (Positron emission tomography) scanners available at our hospitals as a result of Nobel laureate pioneers & theoretician such as Paul Dirac work in predicting & theorizing the existence of anti-matter. Experimentalists established that later in early & primitive nuclear accelerator of the day, that yes, there is something called antimatter. Positron in the PET scanner is the anti-matter of electron. Same mass but opposite charges. Positron is positive while electron is negative. Now, the theory had expanded to predict that other particles have corresponding anti-particles (antimatter particles). These anti-particles had been confirmed (observed) and although there would be no obvious application of those discoveries, there would be a time in the future that commercial applications would be developed from these new knowledge. I imagine if James Maxwell who formulated the laws of Electromagnetism is resurrected today to see that everywhere most people carrying a mobile phone, where its engineering & design does involve the theory of Electromagnetism. I bet you that he would be excited about something that he pioneered, which he had no vision of what might be its possible application or use in the future generation? He will probably say to you, hey Carol, do you like what that mobile phone is bringing to civilization?
I am not a historian, but I had a drink and a chat with a friend a some of weeks ago and he mentioned that one of the reason the super powers of the past (center of civilization) in the middle east declined over the last 1000 years or so and the western civilization bypassed them, was the quest for scientific discovery in mid eastern were thrown out, where people revert to practicing & adopting mysticism. On the other hand, the western civilization adopted science & reason and abandoned mysticism in those dark ages. And look what is happening today? If such negative attitude is directed to science & reason as in the case of the LHC, then I am sure that if it permeated in western societies for a lengthy period (100 years or so), our grand children would be growing up on a civilization on the decline. Perhaps the mid-eastern countries (or China/India) would be the Westerners of today.
May 21, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Falafulu, thank you for this very informative summary. I take most of the points you have made (though I’ll reserve judgment about God!). Honest, I’m not a Luddite, just a sceptic.
May 21, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Falafulu Fisi – thank you for providing a very insightful and interesting commentary in your reply to Carol.
In your last paragraph you relay the thought that …… “one of the reason the super powers of the past (center of civilization) in the middle east declined over the last 1000 years or so and the western civilization bypassed them, was the quest for scientific discovery in mid eastern were thrown out, where people revert to practicing & adopting mysticism.”
An interesting historic view, http://www.christiansofiraq.com/civilizationmay96.html, over this time frame explaining the gain and loss of M.E. intellectual accomplishment is outlined in a letter directed to Carly Fiorina CEO of Hewlett Packard Corporation by Peter BetBasoo an Assyrian from Iraq and the co-founder and director of the Assyrian International News Agency
May 22, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Serum,
Thanks for the pointer to that letter explaining that the enlightenment of the Arab culture was due to Assyrians. Most interesting.
Brent.
June 27, 2008 at 12:26 pm
It looks like dark matter and dark energy could be the same thing after all :
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/02/06/dark-matter-and-dark-energy-the-same-thing/
July 30, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Poneke got it wrong, it is not 27km in diameter but 8.6km (about 5.3 miles). See pix from CERN at Scientific American site
http://www.sciam.com/page.cfm?section=large-hadron-collider
July 30, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Poneke got it wrong, it is not 27km in diameter but 8.6km (about 5.3 miles). See pix from CERN at Scientific American site
The circumference then. CERN’s own website confirms it is 27 km around:
http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/
July 30, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Brent Jackson said…
It looks like dark matter and dark energy could be the same thing.
Einstein had already established that over a hundred years ago (1905) in his paper on Special Theory of Relativity (STR) that matter (mass) and energy (radiation) are the same thing. He established this via his famous equation, E = m*c^2 (energy equals the mass of an object times the square the speed of light). Energy is inter convertable with mass, ie, mass can change into energy as well as energy can convert into mass (matter).
Einstein then extended his STR into General Theory of Relativity (GTR), ie, the generalization of gravitation. The most amazing generalization that he proposed at the time (1916), since knowing that mass (matter) and energy (radiation) are interconvertable , ie, they’re equivalent (summed up in his the Equivalence Principle), he went on to say that if matter falls under the influence of gravity (Newton gravitation), then energy must be falling under under the influence of gravitational force too. This was a blind leap of faith (using logical deduction, ie, If A is some kind of B and B is some kind of C , then therefore , one can conclude that it follows that A is some kind of C). Mass is equivalent to energy (E = m*c^2) and mass falls under the influence of gravitation field, therefore energy is somehow should also fall under the influence of gravitation field. At the time (1916), no one in the scientific community could believe that such thing exist in nature, ie, falling energy. Light rays is a beam of energy (photon particles), where the confirmation of Einstein’s falling energy was observed during the total eclipse in 1919, a British expedition to Brazil and West Africa, directed by Arthur Eddington (English Astrophysicist), confirmed that Einstein’s prediction was correct, and the Newtonian predictions wrong.
It was observed that during the eclipse, light still reached the earth from distant stars (not from the moon), but those light rays (suppose to be travelling in a straight line) were in fact bent by the gravitational field of the Sun (ie, the rays were falling towards the Sun), therefore reached the earth unaffected by the moon which blocked the Sun’s rays during the eclipse. After this observation, Eintein’s name became house-hold.
Today, this property is being used by Astronomers to detect the existence of black-holes (known as Gravitational Lensing), similar to a curve lens that is commonly found in cameras or glasses today. Black holes can’t be seen directly, but if a distant star’s light ray is observed on earth to be bent, it is then inferred that the unseen galactic object must be a black hole (or some form of dark matter), since its gravitational field is pulling the rays (falling) towards it.
There has been some theories that has been proposed over the years about the missing mass (dark matter), but since technology is advancing faster today those unanswered questions will be answered in the next decade or so (perhaps sooner than that I suppose with the available of high energy accelerator as LHC).
August 7, 2008 at 9:16 am
Ooooh only 2 days to wait now until the big switch on… and my guess is that if we don’t in fact get swamped by time travelers from the future, the poor city of Geneva we’ll most definitely get swamped by people ‘claiming’ to be from the future
Unless of course that black hole turns out to be a little bigger than they’ve estimated… And then there’s little point worrying really!!!
Or maybe, sometime in our future, mankind develops a safe means of dealing with black holes and this is somehow revealed to us moments before it’s too late on Saturday???
I’m really not sure whether to plan for Sunday now???
[Poneke adds: CERN's website says the first beam will be sent a-colliding in the first week of September, though the system has now been cooled down to its operating temperature.]
August 7, 2008 at 10:42 am
If nothing happens, for example if the Higgs Boson does not appear, then $US 10 billion will have been poured into a tunnel under Geneva for no result,
Results don’t usually come in the first trial if it failed. A 2nd, 3rd, 4th… attempt, can still yield the result they’re looking for. This frequently happens as the designers of the experiment ran into something unexpected or unforeseeable during the design time.
The longest prediction to date that has been verified, from the day the theory was published to the day it was confirmed by observation in laboratory was the BEC (Bose-Einstein-Condensation). BEC was theorized and published by Einstein in a paper in 1925 (extension of Bose’s work) and it took 70 years to be confirmed. In 1995, Prof. Carl Wieman at University of Colorado. Wieman won the Physics Nobel Prize of 2001 for his work on reproducing BEC as predicted by Einstein. I attended Prof. Wieman’s Sir Douglas Robb (public) Lecture in 2005 at Auckland University and it was packed (2 lecture theaters hooked up by video link) largely by members of the public.
Physicists at University of Otago was the first in the Southern Hemisphere to reproduce BEC in the late 1990s. BEC is important tool in research for nano-technology and the manufacture of efficient semiconductor for super-fast computer chip. BEC can be formed from ten’s of thousands of individual atoms that their (wave)function overlap in which they collectively behave as a single unit (or super-atom) rather than behaving individually, ie, the unit is homogeneous. This is the property that chip-makers such as Intel are interested in capturing for manufacturing of semi-conductor devices. If the semi-conducting material is homogeneous (during wafering), they have less defects, therefore lead to high performance chip. Defects in the manufacturing of semiconductor devices is the limiting factor in the devices performance because they’re unavoidable in today’s technology. BEC looks set to push further the limitation of semi-conducting devices.
The Higgs-Boson is a class of particle (quite obvious) that belongs to the boson family, ie, particles that have whole-integral spin number, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4,… There are only 2 types of particles in the universe which are boson & fermion. Fermion, particles have half-integral spin, 1/2, 3 /2, 5/2, …
BEC and Higgs-boson belong to the boson family, which was developed by Einstein and Bose in the 1920s (which they called Bose-Einstein statistics), and every particle that obeys this statistics is a boson. Peter Higgs proposed this type of particle in 1964, which it turned out (theoretically) to obey Bose-Einstein statistics and that is why it is called Higgs boson.
If the Higgs boson is confirmed (big IF) in the CERN’ LHC experiment this year (2008), that’s only a 44 year gap (2008 – 1964), which is still below the 70 year gap of BEC.
[Poneke adds: Yes you're right of course and I meant to amend it at the time I wrote it, and I have now.]
August 7, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Thanks for the explanations Falafulu Fisi.
A couple of points though. The nature of “dark energy” is unknown. It is not known whether it is actually energy, so equating “dark energy” and “dark matter” by equating energy and matter is not a solid argument.
Your write up of the experimental confirmation of gravity affecting light is not very clear.
Falafulu Fisi wrote :
It was observed that during the eclipse, light still reached the earth from distant stars (not from the moon), but those light rays (suppose to be travelling in a straight line) were in fact bent by the gravitational field of the Sun (ie, the rays were falling towards the Sun), therefore reached the earth unaffected by the moon which blocked the Sun’s rays during the eclipse. After this observation, Eintein’s name became house-hold.
It fact the moon’s presence and effect on the light rays is irrelevant. Your paragraph would be better written as :
It was observed that during the eclipse, light reaching the earth from distant stars (supposed to be travelling in a straight line) were in fact bent by the gravitational field of the Sun (ie the rays were falling towards the Sun). A solar eclipse was required so that telescopes could be used to view stars near the Sun while the moon blocked the Sun’s rays during the eclipse.
Cheers,
Brent.
August 7, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Yeah, Brent thanks for pointing out what I have missed in my explanation which made it not clear enough.
August 7, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Brent Jackson:A couple of points though. The nature of “dark energy” is unknown. It is not known whether it is actually energy, so equating “dark energy” and “dark matter” by equating energy and matter is not a solid argument.
More than just unknown – its still not clear whether either even exists to begin with. Skepticism about the existence of dark matter has been increasing over the past decade or so.
September 8, 2008 at 4:28 am
According to me let us wait…..
It would eventully be in the benifit of mankind…
I think such great projects, if successful, will even lead to excellent cooperation between nations to conduct even bigger projects for benifit of mankind like to tackle Global warming.
Many news channels in India like INDIA TV are continuously brodcasting and thretening people that there may be only 3 days for humans on earth.
These type of channels are Superstitious and misleading the people.
September 17, 2008 at 5:58 pm
In this era the entire world form a group and finding for Universal secrets for that they started in Geneva one Experiment.Let us wait sometime for the result.
I hope it should be sucess and we can reveal the secreats.
September 20, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Hey,
I am dinesh from india. The test that has been conducted by the scientist in geneva could create some disasters. As scientists said it could create various particles of different gases, may be it could have a chance of creating black holes, so all of u just think of why this dark matter(universe) can’t be a massive black hole…all are well known about the characteristics of black hole…The black hole swallows the nearby stars and other objects…once these objects are swallowed…it couldn’t get out of black hole no more…even the light, knows the entry of black hole but itself dont know where’s the exit….. it still travels inside the black hole so why can’t be this massive universe can’t be a black hole…..This is my assumption, i never want to argue this one is the real fact….