7 ms·

No, measurements at the LHC really are, and will, progress our understanding. Let me give the measurement of the Higgs as an example. There is very strong evide

No, measurements at the LHC really are, and will, progress our understanding. Let me give the measurement of the Higgs as an example. There is very strong evidence that a Higgs boson should exist. An observation of the Higgs boson would provide empirical confirmation of that idea. However, the fact there's a Higgs boson doesn't expand our understanding very much, since after all, we strongly suspected it was there. Measurements of the Higgs boson quantum numbers, on the other hand, provide very useful expansions of our understanding. The parameter space of possible Higgs bosons is so large that its impossible to know where it could be and different regions correspond two very different possible physics. So the measurement of the Higgs' mass, spin, couplings, and even the number of Higgs bosons are actually quantitative improvements to our understanding. The problem is that if you're not a physicist, it is very difficult to explain to you why this measurement is something more than empirical. Lay people can easily understand that a new particle has been observed, but not so much how that expands our understanding. I'd also like to point out that most of the people who came up with the ideas that are being tested are still alive. The standard model as we know it didn't really start taking shape until the 1970s.

cobrausn 15y ago
Out of curiosity, then, what potential applications could be had from these physical measurements of the Higgs, i.e., where could we see any real-world benefits of our newfound knowledge? Everything I have ever read about it never divulges any of this information, so if you know, I'd like to know. I should also point out that I'm not 'against' these kinds of projects, merely dubious about their usefulness outside of the scientific community (and hoping I'm wrong).
- moonchrome 15y ago
  Well that's actually a logical question. If you need a multi billion dollar collider size of a small town to even observe these events it's not likely to get practical use any time soon.
  - wnight 15y ago
    We don't need anything to observe the effect of 'mass'. We may need a multi-billion dollar machine to observe a tiny little thing happening at the middle of the effect so that we can better understand it. What you're saying is like "if this watch gear is too small for me to touch, it's too small to matter".
    - moonchrome 15y ago
      No, if watch gear is too small to have any observable effect no matter what I do - it's irrelevant.
      - wnight 15y ago
        You work very hard at maintaining your irrational thoughts.
- mattheww 15y ago
  Honestly, nobody knows what kind of potential applications could come from these measurements. But by the same token, nobody knew that Fermi's splitting of the atom would lead to nuclear power (and weapons), measurement of Hydrogen line splittings would eventually lead to semi-conductors, and the study of bacteria would eventually lead to antibiotics. Besides the giving us applications that we can literally not imagine today, the "engineering" feats required to do cutting edge science always brings new technologies that benefit the real world. Just think that accelerators that would have been used for cutting-edge particle physics 50 years ago are now commonly used in hospitals to treat cancer.
  - cobrausn 15y ago
    I agree completely with the second statement (and it is a big reason why I support NASA and space exploration in general), but Uranium, Hydrogen, bacteria... these are all things we can study easily and interact with all the time, and studying them can produce uses for them. The Higgs is something we have to spend 7 billion dollars (admittedly a pittance in the grand scheme) just to have the potential to observe it, so surely you can see why I (and many others, I'm sure) might be a bit skeptical about ever having a use for any knowledge we gain about it outside of academia. I really hope you are correct and this expansion of our knowledge about the makeup of the universe proves to have some real world benefits down the line, I just find myself a bit unsure about the truth of that statement these days.
    - transphenomenal 15y ago
      This is pure speculation on my part about possible applications to measuring the Higgs. Since it is the Higgs Field(?) that gives matter its mass, I suppose in the future, though this may be pure science fiction, that after our understanding of the Higgs is enough, we may be able to use it to change the mass of things, which would have an extreme amount of potential in transportation as well as other things I am not thinking of right now.
    - bermanoid 15y ago
      The Higgs is something we have to spend 7 billion dollars (admittedly a pittance in the grand scheme) just to have the potential to observe it, so surely you can see why I (and many others, I'm sure) might be a bit skeptical about ever having a use for any knowledge we gain about it outside of academia. Similar arguments can be used to suggest that we should rid colleges of literary theory, gender studies, philosophy, sociology, large swaths of psychology and economics, most fine arts, probably half of research-level math, and so on, leaving only the fields that consistently give actionable real world results (basically leaving only the pseudo-vocational fields like CS, education, and engineering, and a very trimmed list of research fields like chemistry, bio, medicine, and the few cherry-picked bits of practical physics that we need so that the other fields can still progress). We reject these arguments, though, because as a society we value (and fund accordingly) the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, even in cases where it's highly disputed whether there's any "knowledge" to speak of at all (I won't name names, but that list above...). Of course, then the matter of cost comes in, and I certainly wouldn't claim that 7 billion is an amount we should shrug our shoulders at, whether information about the Higgs alone is worth that amount of money or not is definitely up for debate...as much as I might like to bitch about how inconclusive, statistically flawed, and poorly conceived most psychology studies are, they're not costing billions of dollars to run.
- lmm 15y ago
  I thing the usefulness will be enormous, but only in the very long term. Remember, Faraday was asked the same questions about his work on electricity. Obviously the big thing the Higgs is giving us is clues towards a theory of quantum gravity. We don't and can't know how useful that would be, but you only have to look to the last unification (QM) to see the potential. Perhaps my answer is "something that is to quantum computers as quantum computers are to regular computers", but we haven't even built a useful quantum computer yet. At the same time, transistor design for "regular" computers relies heavily on QM. So perhaps a better answer is "something that is to today's computers as today's computers are to things that were around in the '20s". But what that is, we can't even imagine - if we knew what the theory would look like, we wouldn't have to discover it.
- bfe 15y ago
  For a great reply to this, read the chapter "Maxwell and the Nerds" in Carl Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World". We can never do a good job guessing what eventual engineering applications will emerge from researching the frontiers of physics, which at each stage seems like the most uselessly esoteric pursuit possible. But we've been through this enough to know that the eventual applications are way more awesome than we could have guessed. Maybe we can revisit the subject in thirty years on a weekend trip to the Moon on a spaceship powered by feeding dust into a micro black hole and rendered almost massless with a Higgs field damper.

cobrausn 15y ago

Out of curiosity, then, what potential applications could be had from these physical measurements of the Higgs, i.e., where could we see any real-world benefits of our newfound knowledge? Everything I have ever read about it never divulges any of this information, so if you know, I'd like to know. I should also point out that I'm not 'against' these kinds of projects, merely dubious about their usefulness outside of the scientific community (and hoping I'm wrong).

moonchrome 15y ago
Well that's actually a logical question. If you need a multi billion dollar collider size of a small town to even observe these events it's not likely to get practical use any time soon.
- wnight 15y ago
  We don't need anything to observe the effect of 'mass'. We may need a multi-billion dollar machine to observe a tiny little thing happening at the middle of the effect so that we can better understand it. What you're saying is like "if this watch gear is too small for me to touch, it's too small to matter".
  - moonchrome 15y ago
    No, if watch gear is too small to have any observable effect no matter what I do - it's irrelevant.
    - wnight 15y ago
      You work very hard at maintaining your irrational thoughts.
mattheww 15y ago
Honestly, nobody knows what kind of potential applications could come from these measurements. But by the same token, nobody knew that Fermi's splitting of the atom would lead to nuclear power (and weapons), measurement of Hydrogen line splittings would eventually lead to semi-conductors, and the study of bacteria would eventually lead to antibiotics. Besides the giving us applications that we can literally not imagine today, the "engineering" feats required to do cutting edge science always brings new technologies that benefit the real world. Just think that accelerators that would have been used for cutting-edge particle physics 50 years ago are now commonly used in hospitals to treat cancer.
- cobrausn 15y ago
  I agree completely with the second statement (and it is a big reason why I support NASA and space exploration in general), but Uranium, Hydrogen, bacteria... these are all things we can study easily and interact with all the time, and studying them can produce uses for them. The Higgs is something we have to spend 7 billion dollars (admittedly a pittance in the grand scheme) just to have the potential to observe it, so surely you can see why I (and many others, I'm sure) might be a bit skeptical about ever having a use for any knowledge we gain about it outside of academia. I really hope you are correct and this expansion of our knowledge about the makeup of the universe proves to have some real world benefits down the line, I just find myself a bit unsure about the truth of that statement these days.
  - transphenomenal 15y ago
    This is pure speculation on my part about possible applications to measuring the Higgs. Since it is the Higgs Field(?) that gives matter its mass, I suppose in the future, though this may be pure science fiction, that after our understanding of the Higgs is enough, we may be able to use it to change the mass of things, which would have an extreme amount of potential in transportation as well as other things I am not thinking of right now.
  - bermanoid 15y ago
    The Higgs is something we have to spend 7 billion dollars (admittedly a pittance in the grand scheme) just to have the potential to observe it, so surely you can see why I (and many others, I'm sure) might be a bit skeptical about ever having a use for any knowledge we gain about it outside of academia. Similar arguments can be used to suggest that we should rid colleges of literary theory, gender studies, philosophy, sociology, large swaths of psychology and economics, most fine arts, probably half of research-level math, and so on, leaving only the fields that consistently give actionable real world results (basically leaving only the pseudo-vocational fields like CS, education, and engineering, and a very trimmed list of research fields like chemistry, bio, medicine, and the few cherry-picked bits of practical physics that we need so that the other fields can still progress). We reject these arguments, though, because as a society we value (and fund accordingly) the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, even in cases where it's highly disputed whether there's any "knowledge" to speak of at all (I won't name names, but that list above...). Of course, then the matter of cost comes in, and I certainly wouldn't claim that 7 billion is an amount we should shrug our shoulders at, whether information about the Higgs alone is worth that amount of money or not is definitely up for debate...as much as I might like to bitch about how inconclusive, statistically flawed, and poorly conceived most psychology studies are, they're not costing billions of dollars to run.
lmm 15y ago
I thing the usefulness will be enormous, but only in the very long term. Remember, Faraday was asked the same questions about his work on electricity. Obviously the big thing the Higgs is giving us is clues towards a theory of quantum gravity. We don't and can't know how useful that would be, but you only have to look to the last unification (QM) to see the potential. Perhaps my answer is "something that is to quantum computers as quantum computers are to regular computers", but we haven't even built a useful quantum computer yet. At the same time, transistor design for "regular" computers relies heavily on QM. So perhaps a better answer is "something that is to today's computers as today's computers are to things that were around in the '20s". But what that is, we can't even imagine - if we knew what the theory would look like, we wouldn't have to discover it.
bfe 15y ago
For a great reply to this, read the chapter "Maxwell and the Nerds" in Carl Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World". We can never do a good job guessing what eventual engineering applications will emerge from researching the frontiers of physics, which at each stage seems like the most uselessly esoteric pursuit possible. But we've been through this enough to know that the eventual applications are way more awesome than we could have guessed. Maybe we can revisit the subject in thirty years on a weekend trip to the Moon on a spaceship powered by feeding dust into a micro black hole and rendered almost massless with a Higgs field damper.