Interesting/promising measurements at CERN

No insult taken. But I remain unconvinced (despite the fine pictures). There are too many things that are assumptions in all this for my liking, and too many things that are seem made up to fit new data with existing theories, assumptions or presumptions. I'll happily admit that the details are way beyond my understanding.

However, it is without doubt that neither the current state of quantum mechanics, nor general relativity, cover everything. Each work well for a broad range of cases, but they contradict each other in other areas. So we know there are things missing in the theories. And it is often in these more extreme areas that current hypotheses are harder to swallow - such as cosmic inflation. I am not saying these things are wrong, or that I know of better explanations - merely that they are not well justified but seem arbitrary and contrived. I'd feel more comfortable with a gravitational theory that had slightly greater tailoff over distance than currently thought, or a physical constant that is not /quite/ constant and thus time and distance measurements of distant objects is wrong. I'd feel even more comfortable with good, solid data and evidence backing up some hypotheses that is not based so much on assumptions and other weakly confirmed theories.

All this requires more research and experimentation - in high energy physics, telescopes, space probes, etc.

Yeah it's hard to dive right into a subject without knowing all the jargon and such. It may not be what interests you but a good undergrad cosmology text is a decent start.

George H.

At GeV energies? What are you planning to use for photoresist? Or mask substrates? How are you going to stop those gammas in much less than a micron?

It's also not above 20 MeV.

Of course, but what we're talking about is specifically colliders whose design is based on 100% speculation and which cost tens of billions of dollars.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yup, I was listening to Brian Keating talk with some of the Cern guys involved. The 'joke' he told was At 3 sigma, they invite you to give a seminar, but you pay for the airfare and hotel. At 5 sigma they invite and pay for everything. At 7 sigma you get the Nobel. GH

No they won't, because at those energies you can't control the depth at which the energy gets deposited.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

No, actually, the current interest is carbon ions, mainly because the Bragg peak is a lot sharper, which provides better control over the irradiated volume. The energy sets the depth of penetration. Reaching the required energy is not a problem.

The issue is to limit damage to surrounding healthy tissue.

The guys who worked on MedAustron were just around the corner from my lab.

Jeroen Belleman

One thing they could do is spend the money better. For 10% of NASA's annual budget, we got a completely new vaccine technology that turned a novel vaccine out in massive volume, in *one year*, that appears to be ending an unexpected pandemic.

High energy physics just isn't that urgent. They haven't come up with any unexpected new physics in 30 years or more, and the theoreticians now think that spinning theories completely untethered to any possible experiment at accessible energies is a scientific activity. (It isn't.)

We should wait until we have actual evidence of either an anomaly that the Standard Model doesn't explain, or data from cosmological or dark-matter studies that gives us some defensible _numerical_ estimate of the energy levels at which we should expect to find $20B worth of new physics. Naturalness arguments are worthless.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

It interests me, but there is too much that interests me and too little time to learn enough detail in every interesting topic. It's been a while since I have read much one cosmology, so maybe it is time to catch up again.

My son and colleague Simon did a bunch of work on the DEAP3600 dark matter detection experiment at TRIUMF and SNOLAB. (He was the FPGA guy responsible for the timing and event discrimination.) I agree that the gravity evidence shows there's something going on there, but as you say, nobody knows what it is yet.

Except for the old Wagoner limit based on the cosmic deuterium abundance. (Bob Wagoner was one of my graduate quantum professors--a very smart and personable guy but not a great teacher.)

But that doesn't excuse us from doing our best to allocate limited resources wisely. Dumping more tens of billions down the collider drain on spec certainly ain't that.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We found that out fifty years ago, using an electron linac. Nobody's saying that high energy physics was never any use. It just hasn't been any use for the last 30 years.

And of course knowing the structure of the proton is primarily a cultural achievement.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Well yes but the money was not a problem, they just did it.

I agree most of the activity is useless. But how can you tell which is going to come up with something? Or how can those with the money know who will discover something and who is just a good ... well, not fraud but just in need of a job.

Waiting may be not the best strategy. If you wait there will be someone who does not and will be there ahead of you... OTOH jumping the gun is not good either, hard to tell - and impossible to tell in this case, it is about the unknown. Since we can afford fundamental research we should be doing it, sacrificing it for comfort will result in less knowledge and thus ultimately less comfort.

Dimiter

Clearly they are digging deeper than what is known. And we cannot tell if that knowledge will be just a cultural thing simply because we do not have the knowledge to call it anything.

Knowing there are things like atoms has been even less than a cultural thing in the medieval times.

Dimiter

Who cares? Suppose the Red Chinese had discovered the quark model in

1970, and we didn't find out until today. We'd have missed some pretty physics, but they wouldn't have been able to build any better semiconductors, or weapons, or, well, anything. TeV stuff is much less useful even than that.

I disagree. There's nothing special about high energy physics except a hangover from the Manhattan Project. People talk about training the new generation of high-energy physicists, but if they're just going to pour their careers down a rathole as their predecessors did, that's a pure waste, and they should go do something productive instead. (There are lots of other areas in physics, after all. Or they could build gizmos.)

Who said anything about comfort? I don't disagree about doing research, I just don't like waste--whether financial or human.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

EUV lithography is now at 13 nm, around 100 ev.

They explode tin drops with an IR laser. No particle accelerator.

I'm not dissing cultural achievements. The Hubble pictures, for instance, are one of the great cultural achievements of the 20th Century. So was walking on the moon. (Once or twice.) The Standard Model is in that class as well.

But they're very expensive as cultural achievements go. Nobody needed to throw billions of dollars at Picasso or Stravinsky or Leonard Bernstein or Hemingway.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Back in the late '80s, IBM installed a synchrotron in the basement of Building 600 in the East Fishkill fab to do X-ray litho experiments. They had mask and resist technology, and could have done it, except that it never became economic--regular litho advanced further and faster than anyone expected.

It isn't a bad trick doing 14-nm litho with 193-nm light!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That is an impressive effort, but thinking it occurred in a year is a mistake.

Most of the vaccines are permutations of existing technology, e.g. the Oxford AZ vaccine that was prepared in a few weeks. The mRNA vaccines have been deployed for the first time, but have been in development for a long time.

Yup; string theory seems to be philosophy rather than science :)

Don't forget that the LHC pushes many technological areas, e.g. fast collection of vast amounts of data, then serious processing needed to turn it into information.

Plus KiCad of course :) I really ought to kick its tyres sometime.

Sure, everything's based on previous work. But without the money and the urgency, that would have taken many more years. Operation Warp Speed was an excellent example of how to do government-backed R&D. The F-22 Raptor, F-35 Lightning, B-1 Boondoggle, Space Shuttle, and ISS, not so much. At least they cancelled the Superconducting Supercollider.

They could rebuild Arecibo with a bit of the dough they saved. I'd like to see that. (And no, I don't care whether the Chinese have a bigger one. There's lots of interesting stuff out there to look at.)

And Apollo allegedly gave us Tang and PTFE. What a deal! ;)

AWS does that, and makes beaucoup dinero besides.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

There is a huge gap between artistic work and exploration. Fundamental knowledge is never just a cultural achievement, what you are saying calling it that is repeating yet again John's slogan "what do we need science for". (obviously under "science" I mean fundamental research, mentioning it to not leave it to context alone) We need exploration because we don't know what is out there as long as we have not explored it. Like sailing west to get to India, most have called this even less than a cultural thing back in the day.

Dimiter