A Giant Takes On Physics

[MGS4-SS]

Has anyone tried to find answers in spirituality? Ask someone who has tried, he'll tell you.

And the proof / backup of those answers would be? Let me guess, "God said so"?

[.Enigmatik]

I just don't think this is a good idea. Man should stop meddling with physics at one point. One false move with this machine and it's Chernobyl all over again... but this time worse.

[MGS4-SS]

I just don't think this is a good idea. Man should stop meddling with physics at one point. One false move with this machine and it's Chernobyl all over again... but this time worse.

Chernobyl was not caused by men meddling with physics, it was caused by stubborn men that were not physicists and knew nothing.

[.Enigmatik]

Chernobyl was not caused by men meddling with physics, it was caused by stubborn men that were not physicists and knew nothing.

I know that, but what I meant is if something goes wrong it will be a disaster close to those proportions.

[Shibby]

It's all under ground and as far as I'm aware there is no nuclear fuels are used what so ever. And they most likey have systems in place to prevent fire from spreading outside the complex.

[primexx]

I know that, but what I meant is if something goes wrong it will be a disaster close to those proportions.

If something goes wrong the worst that can happen is that the collider overloads and needs repair. These collisions require so much energy that the most that will come out of it would be a big-bang that's a few micrometers big that lasts for a few microseconds. It won't do any physical damage. (note, actual numbers I know not, but it's on the same scale)

It's all under ground and as far as I'm aware there is no nuclear fuels are used what so ever. And they most likey have systems in place to prevent fire from spreading outside the complex.

They dont need to have any containment devices more than what is standard in the facility already.

[jebus197]

There are some funny old ideas on this forum.

Basically I will try to break it down in layman's terms what this experiment is about.

To understand what scientists are doing here you have to understand something about the nature of space.

In the early 20th century scientists made a discovery about the stars in the Universe that showed that the light of some stars had a longer wavelength than other stars, while others had a shorter wavelength. What this means is that the further something is away from you, the longer it takes the light emitted from it (or bounced off from a particular object) to reach your eyes and the nearer it is to you, the shorter the time period it takes to reach you also. When a wave of light travels a further distance to reach you the more 'stretched' the wavelength of the light becomes. The shortest wavelengths of light are in fact light we can't see, these include X-ray, Gamma Rays, Ultra Violet etc, while the longest wavelengths of light are the visible light we can see and the other 'invisible' (to us at least) end of the spectrum, which is infra-red, radio waves, microwaves etc.

So when scientists talk about light coming from distant objects, they tend to speak about it in terms of whether it is redshifted (nearer to the longer wavelength end of the spectrum) or blueshifted (nearer the shorter end of the spectrum). So when scientists looked at the stars and saw that some where heavily blueshifted and some were heavily redshifted, it told them something interesting. It told them that some of the stars were much further away, while other stars were much nearer!

Now that might not sound like am amazing revelation. I mean you can look at the sky on your own and work out for yourself that some stars really are nearer and some are further apart. But what this also did was allow scientists for the first time to measure how near some stars are and far away other stars are also. Since we know how fast light travels it also provides us with a very useful measuring stick. (Which is why laser range finders are regularly used in architecture and building projects and on rifles etc. because we know exactly how long it takes for a beam of light to travel a certain distance). So when scientists looked at the night sky and saw that some stars were more redshifted than others, it provided a very useful tool for calculating the size of the Universe. However at that time everyone thought that the Universe was static. Not static in the sense that nothing moved - but in the sense that it had a fixed size and fixed dimensions that never changed. (Even Einstein believed this when he devised his Special and General theories of Relativity - something that he later called his 'greatest blunder').

That idea of a fixed size for the Universe persisted for many years, until around 1926 when a scientist called Edwin Hubble (the person the Hubble Space Telescope is named after) who was looking at the sky in an attempt to classify the galaxies according to their content, distance, shape, and brightness patterns, noticed something very unusual. Not only were all the stars and galaxies in the Universe red shifted to different degrees, by observing redshifts in the light wavelengths emitted by the galaxies, he saw that galaxies were moving away from each other at a rate constant to the distance between them (which is known as Hubble's Law, or Hubble's constant). The further away they were, the faster they receded. (Which means that the further back in time you go the faster apart all of the stars and gallaxies were moving). By thinking about this a little more scientists worked out that if everything in the Universe is moving away (or expanding) from everything else at a constant rate, then clearly everything in the past must have once been much closer together. Therefore if you ran the history of the Universe like a movie in reverse, the further back in time you went the closer together everything would be - until you reached a point where everything in the Universe (including space and time and all of the matter in the Universe) was condensed into a single extremely dense finite point. In fact, if you do the sums and run the process in reverse back far enough you quickly realise that this point was so dense and so small that it was compacted into an area smaller even than the nucleus of an atom. This led to the calculation of the point where the expansion began, and eventually to confirmation of the big bang theory. Hubble calculated it to be about 2 billion years ago (because telescopes during the time Hubble made his discovery weren't as powerful as the telescopes we have today, so his instruments weren't as precise) but more recent estimates have revised that to about 14 billion years ago. (This is normal in science as our instruments and measurements get better, we revise our theories and hypothesis' to match the new observations and new discoveries we make).

So what does this have to do with this experiment? Well when scientists looked at the early Universe and came up with the idea of the Big Bang, they did what scientists almost always do and looked for ways to find evidence supporting their theory. They reasoned that if there had indeed been a Big Bang it must have caused a lot of heat and that the further back in time they went the hotter the Universe would have been. Naturally after 14 Billion years, the wavelength of the heat (or radiation/light - since these are the same thing) would be extremely, extremely long (or highly redshifted) and would be extremely difficult to detect. In many ways it is a bit like trying to detect the heat from a campfire a few million years or so after the fire has been put out. Nonetheless no matter how weak (or redshifted) this heat was, their calculations showed that it should still be there. Unfortunately, even though the calculations they did predicted that this heat should be fairy evenly distributed across the sky, it took a really long time before scientists and engineers could build instruments sensitive enough to detect this heat (which they referred to at the cosmic background radiation) and it wasn't until 1989 that scientists finally managed to design instruments that could detect it. They put these instruments on a satellite called The Cosmic Background Explorer (or COBE for short) and then began making measurements of the sky. Amazingly when they looked at the information they had collected, they found that it matched exactly with the calculations they made for what the sky should look like if the Big Bang had actually occurred. There is a very famous and very nice image of the experiments that confirmed the scientists findings which can be seen here. It's probably quite a hard image for non scientists to understand, but the bluer patches basically represent the hotter(or blueshifted/hotter part of the sky and the red patches represent the cooler (or redshifted) parts of the sky. But really it's the pattern (or distribution) of the heat that the scientists found interesting, as this matched their predictions exactly - if in fact the Big Bang had happened in the way they predicted it had happened. So in a way this image is like the smoking gun of the Big Bang itself.

Ever since then scientists have been looking for newer and better ways to refine their measurements and build better and more sensitive instruments. For a long time scientists have been using particle accelerators (which basically work very like your old CRT television) by firing a beam of particles round a very long course, both guided and accelerated by magnets (a bit like a maglev train) in huge near vacuum conditions to a speed very near to the speed of light. (Which is the fastest that anything can go). For a long time before even COBE was launched scientists have used these particle accelerators like big huge guns to smash tiny subatomic particles into other subatomic particles to see what would happen. This is because doing this allows scientists to look at the way matter must have behaved immediately after the Big Bang first occurred, because the energy and heat that these particle accelerators can generate, are as close as we can come to the conditions that must have existed during that time. Matter behaves in very strange and unusual ways at these extremely high energies - but even though this is the case the scientists are very clever and even before they ran these experiments (or before they had sensitive and powerful enough instruments/particle accelerators to run them) they were able to make mathematical predictions about what they should see. Amazingly again as time has gone on and our particle accelerators and instruments have become more sensitive and powerful, almost all of the predictions that scientists made using mathematical modeling of what should happen have been confirmed, thus providing even more compelling evidence that our predictions about the the Big Bang and all our theories on how matter and everything in the Universe came to be really are extremely accurate.

Unfortunately the instruments and particle accelerators we have now are not quite powerful enough (although they are extremely powerful) to allow us to test all of the predictions that our mathematical models and theories have made. So we are doing again as scientists always do and building a much bigger, much more powerful and much more sensitive instrument in order to test further - in this case in the form of the most powerful particle accelerator ever created.

What this will enable us to do is to recreate the conditions that existed only a tiny, tiny fraction of a second (something like 10 to the minus 43 of a second - which 1 second divided 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000) after the big bang first occurred. We will then look at what happens when we collide particles into each other under these very extreme conditions and see if they match the predictions we have made, which we have been unable to confirm with our previous instruments because they have not been powerful or sensitive enough.

However scientists are very confident that we will be able to confirm these predictions, due to our excellent success rate with doing so in the past. While we have many pieces of the puzzle already in place, there are still a few small parts missing. One of these parts is a subatomic particle that is predicted by our models which is known as the Higgs Boson but which so far our instruments have not been good enough to produce or to see. If this new particle accelerator enables us to find the Higgs Boson, this will be a major leap forward and possibly the crowning glory in our understanding of both all of the bits matter is made up of and in many ways too, how matter itself came to be the way that it is a very short time after the Big Bang first occurred.

It will also provide a major part in the bigger puzzle that scientists are trying to solve - which is not just what matter is made of, or how it was created in the Big Bang - but also it will provide a big part of a solution to a theory that literally explains everything that we see, from how chemical bonds work, to what makes matter and light behave the way it does, to understanding space and time and gravity, to essentially an understanding of the full underpinnings and mechanisms that make the entire Universe itself work. Eventually we hope to understand the Universe just as much as we may currently understand the workings of a steam engine, or an internal combustion engine, or a television, or indeed a computer.

Our hope is that one day we can look out to the Universe and understand it no longer with just a scientists curiosity - but with an engineers eye - with a full and complete understanding of all of it's most intimate workings. The amazing truth is that we have already made a great deal of progress towards that goal - and although it might take us a thousand, or two thousand years (or more) before we finally complete this task (if we can find a way not to destroy ourselves first) a great many scientist are very confident that one day this 'theory of everything' will be within our grasp and all of the major outstanding puzzles will eventually be solved.

What will we do when we have all of this understanding and complete knowledge of how the Universe works? Well this is a very philosophical question and isn't really anything to do with science or what other scientists believe, but one idea (which is my favourite) is that if we know how the Universe works, we could always (given enough time) develop the technology to make another Universe of our own. (We may be talking about millions of years, by which time if humanity has survived, it will have evolved into something unrecognisable to us, but we have to remember that a couple of million years is still only a tiny blip in the entire history of the Universe). Perhaps if we did this we could build a Universe that was equally capable of spawning intelligent life such as ourselves as our current Universe is and make an experiment whereby we wait to see if they can figure out all of the things we that we figured out. And so on and on it could go, with new Universes and new forms of intelligent life each discovering after the other how they and their Universe came to be.

That might sound an awful lot like I am saying that in order for the Universe to exist there must be a Creator - but that is not what I am saying at all. We still don't know how the Universe, or the Big Bang came to be - even though we can push our understanding back to a tiny fraction of a second (10 to the minus 43 of a second, as above) after it first happened it is simply too impractical and there is not enough evidence yet to say what caused it. There is certainly no evidence that some kind of 'God' caused it, as this takes a much larger logical leap to say this, rather than simply admitting that we do not know yet. (However saying that we do not know something does not mean that we will never be able to know it - after all that is what science does, we make discoveries and learn to understand things that we didn't understand before. So saying that we do not know something yet is OK in science and is normal. But just because we don't know something yet, we don't do what a lot of non scientists do and simply ascribe the cause of something we don't understand yet to a supernatural being, or some kind of magic or other). In any case if you want to make that very large logical leap to say that God was responsible for the Big Bang (which seems like a very random thing to do, given the lack of evidence for anything very conclusive yet) then you have to pin God down to having acted only in several billionths of a billionth of a second - after which his services and his intervention (as far as most scientist can work out) no longer seems to have been required - since the mechanisms that govern the Universe seem to be perfectly capable of govening themselves after this point without any need for the involvement of a God, or an supernatural forces at all. (Indeed everytime we have looked for a cause for something so far, we have always found that cause to be natural - and we have never yet found anything to be caused by something that was supernatural).

All the same who knows? The Bible says God created man in his own image - but maybe one day (if we all live long enough) we may well succeed in creating God in our image instead? (Since it appears that the main quality some people ascribe to a 'God' is the ability to create a Universe). Although if you think about it, logically there is no reason to assume that the ability to create a Universe (or Universes) does in fact make you a god. Maybe all it it actually means is that you are really, really clever and are a really, really good engineer? After all if you showed someone who had lived in an Amazon jungle a Television who had never seen anything like this before, they might be inclined to think of you as a God - but you and I know that just knowing how to make something, be they televisions, microwave ovens, or indeed Universes, does not by definition necessarily make you a God at all. Making a Universe is probably not all that different to building a steam engine - all you really need is the knowlege how to do it and the right tools to make it possible.

Edited June 2, 2007 by jebus197

[Shetland]

great post^

[jebus197]

Thanks - and just in case anyone thinks the idea of humans creating a Universe is a crazy idea, it is actually something that physicists often think about quite a lot and are even now in the process of thinking of ways that it could be done:

http://www.casavaria.com/sentido/science/2...ew-universe.htm

Of course the current limitations in our technology might ultimately prevent us from succeeding - but the beginnings of the theoretical basis to achieve such an objective are already underway - and as time progresses and our technology improves, there is no reason to assume that one day in the future we will not succeed.

But again, even if we do succeed at this, it is clearly silly to think that this might make us Gods. We will just be in a position where we understand a lot more than we do now and are much better at designing the right kind of experiments.

Before we can do this though, we will need to have learned all of the natural processes and mechanisms that gave rise to the birth of the Universe - and at that point at least, it will surely become impossible for anyone to ascribe a supernatural cause to it's origins.

To a religious person the ability to create a Universe seems to be the qualifying quality that makes up a God. To a scientist however, it will simply be another experiment - just like the great many other experiments that humans have conducted in the past.

[remix17]

jebus197, that's an amazing contribution. Thanks so much for taking the time to write it all down!

I am extremely excited to see the results of this experiment next summer. Imagine all that we could learn.

[jebus197]

Thanks, I have tried really hard not to use too much flowery or complicated language - so I hope it helps. ;)

[Echilon]

Finding the Higgs Boson would be an impressive achievement. Good luck to them (Y)

[Captain_Wang]

Jebus, even though from what I skimmed through of your post it seems I'm mostly familiar with; I'm going to be reading it all tomorrow when it gets quiet at work, looks like it will clear a few things up for me on the subject. Thanks for taking the time.

[Nicholas-c Veteran]

the end of the world as we know it!!!

[Andrew Lyle Global Moderator]

i watched a special on making this.. it's pretty insane how this thing is so massive, just to smash some particles together.. i hope it's worth it :D

[LightIdea]

For some reason I'm picturing lisa simpsons tooth world...