News: 1592811066

"But CERN wants more hardware to probe largely-unexplored issues such as the nature of dark matter and the preponderance of matter over antimatter."

It's 50-50, why do you think it would be anything else?

It's 50-50, why do you think it would be anything else?

If it were 50:50 there would have been nothing left after the big bang. There had to have been some imbalance so that our matter-based universe could form. The questions they want to answer are "how much" and "why".

So lets now suppose that matter and antimatter are 50-50 mix in the universe. The thing you want to discard as impossible. Yet the only likely reality.

How would you end up with a matter universe or an anti-matter universe? And if there needs to be 50-50 balance, where is all the anti-matter?

My question doesn't need EUR 21B to answer, its a very simple question.

If you made an anti-particle in a matter universe, it has a high probability of cancelling out with a matter particles of that universe. If you make a matter particle in a matter universe it has no anti-particle to cancel out with and so does not cancel.

If you only had 1 more matter particle than anti-particle in the universe, then the probability balance would still exist. The anti-particle would have a slightly higher chance of cancelling and being destroyed, than not cancelling and surviving.

Each new matter particle made, skews the probability further. Now there are 2 more particles than anti-particles, and an even higher probability of forming matter.

As more particles are made, matter or anti-matter condenses ever more rapidly from the soup. The higher the probability difference, the faster it condenses.

Add enough time and you have a matter or anti-matter universe.

So now where is all the anti-matter in the universe? I said there was 50-50 matter and anti-matter so where is the 50% antimatter?

Well if neutral particles must be made of charged particles, (because everything must cancel out), then if you stuck a neutral particle and its mirrored anti-particle next to a monopole, -ve or +ve, it would shifted by the mirrored amount.

So for example, lets call a neutral particle F2 and its anti-particle F2'.

If I stuck that around a -ve monopole, it would form a sandwich, F2 -ve F2' and the corresponding particle would have an orientation and an axis, this is an electron. The -ve monopole is what stops the F2 particle collapsing into the F2' anti-particle. Without it, they collapse together. This is why the electron has spin, motion, direction.... They have that because they have structure.

Anti-matter is everywhere. If you liberate it from matter, it has a high probability of cancelling without the structure holding it separate from matter.

It just appears to be rare, but its not. You make it, it has a slim to none chance of surviving long enough for you to measure it. So you think its rare.

(EBG below "If there was a 50-50 split, you would be seeing flashes of matter anti-matter annihilation all the time." no because the matter isn't being made and cancelled, once its in a structure its stable.)

This is not even wrong. But if, as you claim, electrons are made up of pairs of matter and antimatter particles (and a 'monopole' not sure what that is), then, well, you could collide electrons with things and you'd see structure. We do that, a lot, and ... we don't see structure: electrons appear to be pointlike. For some other particles – hadrons, like protons for instance – we do see structure. Not to mention your 'theory' would completely fail to explain the existence of anti-electrons. And anything else, of course: turns out the particle physicists have done both their homework and their experiments.

'monopole' not sure what that is

I suspect the commentard is referring to a [1]magnetic monopole - a hypothetical particle with just a north or south pole.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole

Yes I thought that, but if that was true electrons would be magnetic monopoles & they're not. I think they were probably just assembling words they'd heard into something that sounds superficially sciency.

Quantum instability. Or social media.

If there was a 50-50 split, you would be seeing flashes of matter anti-matter annihilation all the time.

The conditions that outline how the imbalance could have occurred are given by the Sakharov Conditions. The key being that the universe is known to be asymmetric (CP violation), given the experiments on the weak interaction back in the 60's.

Every thousand years or so you need to [1]double your henge . Same principle with LHC's I should think.

[1] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-stonehenge/giant-circle-of-shafts-discovered-close-to-stonehenge-idUKKBN23T0RC

that would mean going into space but as the [1]LHC uses a vacuum better than you'd find in interstellar space the engineering is going to be interesting.

[1] https://home.cern/science/engineering/vacuum-empty-interstellar-space

My hoover's just packed up. Maybe if we can get the new collider funded they'll shut down the old one and I can put a bid in for their vacuum generator. Well, so long as I can get it up the stairs

You don't need to get it up the stairs. Just dig a tunnel from wherever you are to the Swiss/French border - and connect a long flexible pipe to that.

I hadn't seen that bit about Durrington Walls and Stonehenge. Very interesting. A 1.2 mile wide circle of 30(?) Neolithic pits, each 5m deep and 10m wide. Wow.

Great article in the Grauniad today https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jun/22/vast-neolithic-circle-of-deep-shafts-found-near-stonehenge

Their explanations are totally wrong though.

The pits are clearly just a circle of post-holes for very large posts, which were part of a very, very large roundhouse. Proof indeed that once Giants lived in these islands! (Not sure where they got trees 800m tall for the posts though...)

I think they are going to find it difficult raising the many billions needed for a new collider, after covid inspired global economic suicide attempt.

The money that they are asking for is a small fraction of what we give the men in green uniforms.

I know which one I regard as being of better value.

"Do you have a friend or relative who would make a valuable addition to the Black Mesa team?"

I thought my shopping list was exotic when I added avocado for the first time...

Highly exotic considering avocados usually change into carrots by the time they reach the self-checkout detector... then back again by the time you get them home!

Mine's the one with an assortment of neutrinos in the pockets...

Soon you're talking *real* energies!

...energy recovery linacs.

Damn. I had one of those, but the little knob at the top came unscrewed and got lost, so I chucked it out.

I so want a bright muon beam generator, with the tuned energy recovery linac

I am sure I can find a shark somewhere, to do this right!

I so want a bright muon beam generator

Is a bright muon beam one that can do the Times crossword in under 5 minutes?

Possibly find a new particle or actually solve homelessness?

I know which problem I would solve.

Possibly find a new particle or actually solve homelessness?

If you restrict yourself to only solving the little problems you'll never get very far. Finding that new particle might be the key to unlimited cheap energy, which would go a long way to solving all sorts of economic problems, including homelessness. We'll never know unless we try.

I'll go and tell the guy on the street corner he's going to have to wait a while...

But what do know is that we will have spent £21bn that cannot be spent anywhere else.

If you restrict yourself to only solving the little problems you'll never get very far. Finding that new particle might be the key to unlimited cheap energy, which would go a long way to solving all sorts of economic problems, including homelessness. We'll never know unless we try.

One of the problems with this sort of argument is that it ignores opportunity cost.

There is a very limited amount of research money. And a dozen ways that could be used to produce cheap energy that it could properly fund. Backing a complete outsider on the off-chance that it may turn up something useful is not good sense. It's like betting most of your money on the 1000 to 1 horse.

If you gave everyone who is homeless a free house, it wouldn't solve homelessness

If you gave everyone who is homeless a free house, it wouldn't solve homelessness

See [1]the Cobra Effect .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

That's because you don't understand what CERN is for. Which is fair enough because neither does CERN mostly.

If we're going to have a long-term future as a civilisation ('long-term' being more than a lifetime ahead), we need two critical technologies (we need others, but we need these two).

The first is really good batteries. Well, you carry around with you a machine which pretends to be a communication device but is in real life part of a large-scale test and development effort into good batteries. It's unfortunate that this effort is having bad side-effects: social media and the awful consequences of it, such as Trump & the other cartoon characters who have leaked into the world and will probably kill most of us. But battery development is proceeding well.

The second is, unfortunately, something you can't fool people into testing in bulk for you, because it's not very domestic: large-scale superconducting power systems. You need these because you are going to need to ship enough electrical power to run half the world half way around the world, from where the power is made to where it's needed, and you're not doing that unless you have really enormous, really reliable, superconducting power networks.

Well, that's what CERN is: it's a huge test and development environment for production superconducting power systems: by far the biggest in the world. Yes, there's some interesting particle physics strapped onto the side of it, but that's not what it's for: what its for is the development of really large-scale, production superconducting power systems and the people who understand how to build and run them.

What it's for is giving civilisation hope of a future. That is unfortunately not something you can sacrifice, unless you don't want a future.

Surely particle physicists aren't mandate to resolve social problems?

And the €21bn hasn't disappeared, it has been redistributed so it is still available to solve homelessness if the various people and organisations who have been given it so wish. In fact, you never know one of the many tens of thousands of direct or indirect jobs that have been created or saved with this investment may go to someone who is homeless, or to someone who frees up their job and someone homeless then takes it over.

Sometimes, unfortunately, no amount of money can be used to 'solve' all homelessness - mental health doesn't work that way.

Homelessness is a massively complex social / political / economic and medical nest of problems. Involving money, mental health, addiction, family breakdown and heaven knows what other issues. And €21bn split over the next 30 years probably isn't even enough to solve it in one single medium sized country. Let alone the whole world.

Given that the LHC is an internationally funded science research project - finding that kind of money shouldn't actually be all that difficult. Particularly as it's been receiving regular funding for ages now - presumably the arguments that persuaded governments to give it the cash last time still apply - and it's not as if it hasn't been doing good science so far.

Of course their real reason for asking for this funding may well be to develope the alchemion - that particle that needs to be added to any element in order to turn it into gold. At which point their funding needs are over. Or it's possible they already have, and this funding proposal is just a smokescreen...

THIS IS A VERY VERY VERY BAD IDEA !!!

A Large Hadron Collider SIX TIMES MORE POWERFUL than the one at today's CERN is will bring the energy density level targeted towards a single small area of space/time MULTIPLE TIMES at 146+ Tera Electron-Volts MAY NUCLEATE a Vacuum Meta-instability Event where our current vacuum state falls towards a lower-than-current energy level and that means ALL the current universal constants are changed, which then means we all turn into a quark-gluon mush spreading outwards towards the rest of the universe at the speed of light!

See Link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum

DEFUND CERN NOW !!!

All Quarks Matter!

I Can't Stabilize!

V

we all turn into a quark-gluon mush spreading outwards towards the rest of the universe at the speed of light!

Wheeeee! Count me in.

And looking on the bright side, we would no longer have to worry about COVID, Trump, Greta, BREXIT, the Chinese...

Where have I heard a quote like that before? Oh, yeah...

"Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously, and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light." --Egon Spangler (Harold Ramis), Ghostbusters , 1984

I thought the whole point of the Stargate was that you get reassembled at the other end of the wormhole...

[i]a quark-gluon mush spreading outwards towards the rest of the universe at the speed of light![/i]

That's just the remains of last-night's curry.

Ha, very good StargateSg7 - nice use of caps in particular. Pseudo-science bit subtle though...

(... reads comment history of StargateSg7... )

I am no longer confident that was a joke.

See [1]Poe's Law .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Still about the same power output as a bee passing wind

Can we have a new Register approved unit, the bee fart?

Roughly, 1 eV = 1.60218 × 10^(−19) Joules

So, 1 TeV = 1.60218 x 10^(-7) Joules

I'm sure there is a definitive guide to animal flatulence available on the web.

Aperture Labs and GladOS are proud to announce the 2021 bring your Daughter to work day...

Is there cake?