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> This marks the beginning of work that could lead to the discovery of fundamental new physics... Many of them have described Tuesday's event as the beginning o
by chime 17y ago
> This marks the beginning of work that could lead to the discovery of fundamental new physics... Many of them have described Tuesday's event as the beginning of a "new era in science".
We don't often hear things like that in hard sciences like physics. For thousands of years, humans have been "discovering" nature and trying to piece together a puzzle.
> "If you want to discover new particles, you have to produce them; and these new particles are massive..."
We're no longer sitting by idly, waiting to find the next piece so we can fit it somewhere. Humans are making the next piece, whatever it may be. Not to use the oft abused phrase lightly, I think this is a paradigm shift in our study of sciences where we've taken serendipity out of the equation and replaced it with engineering. LHC isn't a science project. It is the industrialization of discovery, for at the scale they are operating, it has to be.
Personally, I highly doubt we'll find Higgs anytime soon or ever. However, I'm pretty certain LHC will push the limits of our knowledge further.
- arethuza 17y ago"we've taken serendipity out of the equation" Unfortunately, serendipity is exactly what is at the heart of scientific and technological progress. Look at CERN, we fund particle physics, what do we get: the Web.
- ThomPete 17y agoAgree And actually CERN is also hoping for unknown, unknowns as have been pointed out by one of the project leaders in the live cast.
- DannoHung 17y agowait a minute... that sounds remarkably like one cuil. If you asked me for a hamburger and I gave you a raccoon. If you asked me for particle physics and I gave you the World Wide Web.
- rubidium 17y agoNot to downplay the LHC, but scientists and physicists have been creating the material ("making the next piece") for fundamental new physics for a while now. The quantum hall effect, Bose-Einstein condensates, nuclear explosions, etc... LHC certainly is a big step in particle physics, but I'd be hesitant to label it a paradigm shift. Nature is nature; it's there and waiting to be figured out... but sometimes it doesn't naturally create what it's capable of creating.
- nollidge 17y agoTo be pedantic regarding your last sentence, these sorts of collisions do happen in nature. It's just that they're pretty much impossible to observe given that we have to look really, really close and they're so spread out.
- FlorinAndrei 17y agoThink of telescopes. You can advance the theory of astronomy all you want, but unless you build a bigger mirror to better see the stuff actually going on up in the skies, you won't get very far.
- rjurney 17y agoPhysics experiments in the 18th/19th century were hard to setup as well, given the capabilities of the time.