The Large Hadron Collider will shut down at the end of 2011 to address design and safety issues.
Until then, it will run at a maximum of 7 trillion electron volts…instead of its designed max of 14 trillion.
The problem involves the copper sheaths around the superconducting joints in the tunnel. The copper sheaths are a failsafe mechanism designed to take up the current if one of the magnets in the Large Hadron Collider warms up – an incident known as a … gulp…”quench”.
Apparently where Large Hadron Colliders are concerned, there’s nothing worse than hot magnets.
In a series of coordinated announcements at several US laboratories, researchers said they believed they had captured dark matter in a defunct iron ore mine half a mile underground. The claim, if confirmed next year, will rank as one the most spectacular discoveries in physics in the past century.
Tantalising glimpses of dark matter particles were picked up by highly sensitive detectors at the bottom of the Soudan mine in Minnesota, the scientists said.
CERN announced early Monday that the Large Hadron Collider has become the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator.
The LHC pushed protons to 1.18 TeV (trillion electron volts — GREAT SCOTT!!!), surpassing the previous record of 0.98 TeV.
But it’s not stopping there…eventually the LHC is heading towards a universe crushing 7 TeV!!!
Next, the intensity of the beams will be increased for about a week, and then collisions to calibrate the machine will be carried out through December.
Perhaps the time travelers that are supposed to be mucking up the works are on holiday this week.
For decades, physicists have struggled to marry quantum mechanics. Other forces of nature, like electromagnetic forces, can be described quantum-mechanically by the motion of photons. But when you attempt to work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton, you quickly run into trouble—the answer to every calculation is infinity.
But now Petr Hořava, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks he understands the problem. It’s all, he says, a matter of time.
Einstein famously overturned the Newtonian notion that time is absolute—steadily ticking away in the background. Instead he argued that time is another dimension, woven together with space to form a malleable fabric that is distorted by matter. The snag is that in quantum mechanics, time retains its Newtonian aloofness, providing the stage against which matter dances but never being affected by its presence. These two conceptions of time don’t gel.
The solution, Hořava says, is to snip threads that bind time to space at very high energies, such as those found in the early universe where quantum gravity rules. “I’m going back to Newton’s idea that time and space are not equivalent,” Hořava says. At low energies, general relativity emerges from this underlying framework, and the fabric of spacetime restitches, he explains.
Can Hořřava gravity claim the same success? The first tentative answers coming in say “yes.”
Dr. Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Dr. Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, a pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson particle, which physicists hope to produce with the Large Hadron Collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.
I’ve always enjoyed watching this video…part of “What the Bleep Do We Know”. Any time I feel too sure of myself, it has a way of putting things in perspective.
Wednesday, March 10
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Was Einstein Wrong?