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News from the LHC

Started by Igor, December 13, 2011, 03:28:04 PM

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P3nT4gR4m

I had a look at magnetic flux on wiki and my brain puked up glittery snot all over the inside of my cranium. I can get my head around some of these things, up to a point but, as soon as the dumbed down metaphor shit breaks down, I'm done. I have no head for maths and I'm pretty sure this is a huge part of the problem.

I think a lot of it is because I don't get quantum tiny stuff at all. I can visualise air because it's pretty much just water with the bits spread out a lot more and I've spent most of my life observing and learning how water behaves when forces act on or through it. when I heard about spacetime and the examples were saying to visualise it in 2 dimensions I didn't really need to I can see it as vortices in air or water, just radial instead of linear. So that shit all makes perfect sense to me.

When I heard about the Higgs field I was thinking that what was going on was similar but now I realise that what's actually going on, the bit that they're talking about at least, is at the quantum scale which doesn't seem to translate to "real world" macro stuff at all.

No big deal, really. I find this shit interesting and I enjoy when I come to understand something new but it really doesn't affect me one way or another if I don't get it. Building teleporters and antigravity boots is someone else's department, I'm just here to put the shit to nefarious purposes for shits and giggles.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 11, 2012, 08:23:39 PM
I think a lot of it is because I don't get quantum tiny stuff at all.

It's easy.  The universe cheats to balance the books.

If you aren't offended by quantum physics, you didn't understand it.  So when you get pissed off, you're there.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Nephew Twiddleton

I think im going to start cracking into that mit open course ware stuff.

Problem is where to start? Maybe brush up on algebra finally learn calculus and hit up whatever itro to physics they have up there?
Strange and Terrible Organ Laminator of Yesterday's Heavy Scene
Sentence or sentence fragment pending

Soy El Vaquero Peludo de Oro

TIM AM I, PRIMARY OF THE EXTRA-ATMOSPHERIC SIMIANS

LMNO

Math might help, but I'd honestly suggest LessWrong http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ and, not surprisingly, my Dad's book http://www.amazon.com/Constructing-Reality-Quantum-Particle-Physics/dp/1107004837

There is some math, but you can get by without it.  The biggest hurdle to overcome is to stop thinking in analogies and metaphors.  Both Dad and Elizer do their damndest to try to explain Quantum Physics without them.

Nephew Twiddleton

Hardcover price for your dads book is 17.23 :fnord:

yeah man- ill order it. Its been a while since ive gotten  a new book.
Strange and Terrible Organ Laminator of Yesterday's Heavy Scene
Sentence or sentence fragment pending

Soy El Vaquero Peludo de Oro

TIM AM I, PRIMARY OF THE EXTRA-ATMOSPHERIC SIMIANS

tyrannosaurus vex

It pisses me off that quantum physics is as interesting as it is completely unintelligible to me.
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

P3nT4gR4m

To be perfectly honest I'm excited enough by the idea that people somewhere are finding the answers to these questions that I feel I don't need to understand it myself. I'm struck by the fact that the people who do "get" it have all spent significant chunks of their existence learning lots of stuff that enables them to understand it.

That said, I understand enough or I'm smart enough that, every now and again, a little bit of it will make sense to me. I dig it when that happens which is why I ask all the dumbass questions, in the hope that I might get my head around another little chunk. I dont dig it enough that I'm motivated to study tons of complicated shit so I can get the whole picture and then come up with my own equations, tho. I have computer programming for that  :lol:

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

tyrannosaurus vex

Yeah once in a while I'll get a little piece of it, but too often I get stuck in the map and have no sense of the territory. I understand that's part of it. Humans have no frame of reference for an actual 4D space, for example, so all we have are maps. I just want to understand completely. Unfortunately, it's way too hard to find that much LSD these days.
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

Xooxe

Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on July 11, 2012, 08:23:39 PMWhen I heard about the Higgs field I was thinking that what was going on was similar but now I realise that what's actually going on, the bit that they're talking about at least, is at the quantum scale which doesn't seem to translate to "real world" macro stuff at all.

I remember a thread around here about The Secret and someone came up with the idea that everyone's wishes would cock-block each other so that nothing would actually come true. From my (admittedly facile) understanding of the trajectory of particles, they fuck with each other from all the way across the universe so that boring shit like light reflecting at the same angle as incidence becomes normal on a large scale. This is the hippy equivalent of Jesus being sent to Earth to pioneer a regulatory mandate for safer water treatment procedures.

Bu🤠ns

I feel the same as you, Pent...but luckily Fermilab is about twenty minutes north of me and they conduct public tours on the first Sunday of every month.  I have to go to this...I'd love to ask some questions but, to be honest, I'm not sure which questions to ask.

LMNO


Bu🤠ns


The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Triple Zero on July 07, 2012, 11:47:30 AM


Are you just repeating this because Roger said it once?

Oh, yeah, and bump for the asshole comment of the fiscal quarter.

I hope you enjoy your membership in Citizens Against Roger.  Eartha and Charley should be along with your welcome wagon gifts before too long.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

hirley0

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on July 16, 2012, 03:11:45 PM
"What's a particle?"

the 1 & only electron in its ICE {aka solid {{aka parked state of being
that is to say | not in its Liquid or gasIOUs states {Comprenda'?

& it really does like to park & bark a lot :

hirley0

Quote from: Igor on December 13, 2011, 03:28:04 PM
The Large Hadron Collider
(This is a link to the liveblog of it that I was following)

Higg's boson.

So here's a quick reminder of why it is so difficult to find:
First, it is only detectable at high energies. This is why we need such a powerful machine to look for it.

Second, the theoretical results that predict the existence of the Higgs do not predict its mass. So we do not know at exactly what energy to start looking. This makes things more difficult when combined with the next point.

Third, it does not exist for long. The LHC produces new particles by smashing old ones together very fast. The new high-mass particles do not exist long enough for the detectors to register them. What they do register are the results of how the high-mass particles decay. The decay modes of the Higgs are very well-understood, so they know what to look for. For example; two high energy photons moving in opposite directions perpendicular to the proton beam. The problem then, is that these photons may also have arisen from other "background" effects from normal Standard Model processes. The scientists deal with this by using a lot of statistical analysis. Fortunately, they have vast amounts of data to work with. The LHC can produce 40,000 collisions per second.

So what have they found this year? The conference presented results from the two main detectors; CMS and ATLAS. They both narrowed down the energy range at which the Higgs may be found.

ATLAS has excluded 112.7-115.5GeV and 131-453GeV. (GeV stands for Giga-electronvolt, which is a unit of energy) This leaves a gap between 115.5 and 131GeV The current theoretical prediction for the Higgs is between 114 and 149GeV, so this is in line with what was expected.
So that's where the Higgs isn't. What's more tantalising is an indication that there may be something at an energy of 126GeV. Because of all the statistical analysis necessary to come to this result, this is very much not an announcement that the Higgs has been found. But it is a definite sign that this energy should be probed much more next year. (The 126GeV measurement has an excess of 3.6 sigma)

CMS has excluded energies from 129-238GeV and has seen a small excess at around 125GeV, with a lower confidence of 2.6 sigma. The fact that the two detectors are seeing the same small bulge in their graphs is obviously very exciting, and it is becoming much more likely with these results that the Higgs exists. It seems very likely that more definite results will confirm these preliminary findings next year.


yeah?YEAH
I SAW ON TV?/?
that they did find the GOd particle?
which is fine i guess ?/? IF U believe in Particle in the First Place { i'V  A Doubt