6 ms·
The physics involved is fascinating, although a true appreciation of what a Higgs Boson is would take years (i.e. most of a PhD). The organisation of such a va
by Jabbles 14y ago
The physics involved is fascinating, although a true appreciation of what a Higgs Boson is would take years (i.e. most of a PhD).
The organisation of such a vast data-processing task has surely brought about many discoveries in "big-data" and parallel computing that are not directly related to the discoveries in physics. Much like the research into the magnets that power the accelerator has led to new MRI machines. To people who don't see the point in "science for science's sake", this is a massive spin-off of CERN that will hopefully greatly benefit the world.
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/computing http://home.web.cern.ch/about/computing
- eranation 14y agoTo those who forgot, the web as we know it was also pretty much invented at CERN [1] so anyone who is against "science for science's sake" is indeed missing a major point. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web#1979.E2.80.931991:_Development_of_the_World_Wide_Web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web#1...
- berntb 14y agoI agree with your general point, but your example is doubtful. Gopher existed before WWW and filled the same niche. It wasn't as elegant, but it (or something else) would have grown up without WWW. The reason, in my cynical opinion, why the web took over from Gopher was not that it was technically superior, but that it allowed people to add pictures to their documents.
- cpa 14y ago> it allowed people to add pictures to their documents. Which very well may be a good definition of technical superiority for the lay man :)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- micampe 14y agoThe most important difference between Gopher and HTTP were not images, it was hyperlinks instead of a hierarchical structure.
- Aloisius 14y agoGopher had links. At its core, gopher was links. It was a hierarchical menu system of proto-URLs (host port and path). The primary benefits of www over gopher at the time were that the web supported text input (you had to use wais just to search gopher and you couldn't build say, a forum) and html which allowed embedded images and formatting.
- Aardwolf 14y agoExactly, and we all know the internet cannot be the internet if it doesn't have cat pictures.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- InclinedPlane 14y agoThe key innovation of the web was that it used a human editable markup language that allowed links to other content to be intermingled with content. This turned out to be more revolutionary than anyone would have thought.
- cygx 14y agoYou're actually strengthening his point: 1. Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota, so it comes from academia as well 2. Part of what killed it off was the University trying to make money from it through licensing fees
- Retric 14y agoPart of me is rather skeptical that the giant mound of assumptions about hardware, software, and physics backing this discovery is correct. However, I have a lot more faith in them then I do in most human endeavors and I fundamentally don't understand what's going on. Which I find to be an odd feeling.
- randomdrake 14y agoYour skepticism is exactly what science is all about! I find it to be a wonderful feeling. I've loved watching the tête à tête between the 24-hour news and this extremely important science community. More than once, extraordinary claims have been made and completely overblown by the media. Meanwhile, these talented scientists have remained levelheaded, critical, and extremely careful in their announcements. Watching the FTL[0] discussions, for example, was just so much fun. It actually gave me more faith in humanity to see so many people fact checking each other and challenging each other to prove something in civilized ways. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anom...
- raverbashing 14y agoTheir assumptions are validated by everything else working and showing up as expected Still, I have a similar feeling, that there may be some hidden 'tuning' to make things match, or some assumptions or values that have been erroneously determined or set.
- btilly 14y agoMany of the parameters are actually not specified by the theory, and have to be fitted by experiment. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization for one of the reasons why.
- shardling 14y agoI don't think that renormalization has much to do with this! :P It's enough to say that the standard model has to have some input from the real world -- mostly the masses of the particles and their mixing angles. Renormalization just makes it harder to talk about what a particle's mass "really" is; it doesn't really increase the number of parameters in the theory.
- DougWebb 14y agoAre there any predictions for possible daily-life-affecting spin-offs from the new physics itself, rather than just from the engineering advances made in the search? Or do the energies involved preclude any direct practical uses?
- eswangren 14y agoThat's a nearly impossible question really. Who could have predicted that Einstein's research would eventually lead to cellular phones?
- claudius 14y agoThe energies themselves aren’t that high, the problem is that the energy densities are high - the Planck mass, for example, which is usually taken as the highest possible energy in particle physics beyond which we have to take gravity into account, is equivalent to a mere 21 μg. However, ‘practical’ uses of these physics are not immediately obvious in the way special relativity is necessary to get decent GPS[0]. Nevertheless, both the engineering advances _and_ the mathematical tools invented during such research prove very useful time and time again - methodology from String Theory, for example, is used in trying to find dynamical descriptions of superconductors, which, if found, will affect daily life strongly (hopefully). The key point to keep in mind here is that predictions about the future are rather hard and we have no idea what weird things people come up with in twenty or thirty years time, let alone a hundred years. Or could you have predicted the global cat picture viewing machine mentioned next door in 1913? [0] And to understand why more than 3 to 4 GHz are rather impractical if you want to keep the CPU and RAM physically separated, btw.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoQuite so. We can't predict the future, nor can we fully predict all of the potential applications of any given theory, but we do know that not understanding the fundamentals of how things work in our Universe is certain to limit our options. Many of the most important bits of scientific knowledge in industry today were at one time just as esoteric subjects of research as the study of the Higgs field is today.