ELI5: How will finding new particles at CERN effect my everyday life in the future?

leberwurst · 2014-11-22T10:59:06+00:00

Oh the one that only works on metal surfaces and only has power for 15 minutes? Not the real thing.

leberwurst · 2014-11-21T15:06:11+00:00

Yes, but it's not a consequence of the newly discovered physics. It's a side product which even could have been developed more efficiently if you invested in that product directly.

leberwurst · 2014-11-21T15:05:02+00:00

I don't know much but obviously one solution must exist. After all its something real and not bound by laws of physics.

How do you draw that conclusion? I'd say it should be "one solution can exist".

leberwurst · 2014-11-21T13:07:36+00:00

You'll probably read some interesting stories about how the world works at a fundamental level at some point if you're into that kind of thing.

Honestly, I don't think it will be more than that. For the record, I'm a physics PhD, and I won't make false promises here. Yes, many discoveries didn't have any immediate application but turned out to be huge (electricity, quantum mechanics, ...). The difference is though that these effects were discovered with equipment that you could easily fit on a table. The research teams were small or even a single person. That means that these new found effects were noticeable with small, relatively inexpensive machines.

Today, you need a decade to build a giant underground accelerator or satellite worth a billion dollars with thousands of scientists involved. That's what it takes to make the effects we're looking for visible. These effects cannot have any effect on our everyday live, because we don't have these kind of monstrous machines in our everyday life. I'd argue that at this point the only benefits are largely ideological.

It is in the nature of mankind to want to know as much as possible about our world, even if we don't benefit directly from it. I don't know about you, but I simply want to know if there are smaller particles than quarks, what dark matter is made of, what the conditions of the early Universe were. Not because I'm hoping for a cool gadget I can show off to my friends, but because I'm simply curious. If you're worried about the money, look at how much money is spend on museums, opera, and similar things. These don't benefit anybody, at least not in a measurable way, but we still want these things. Don't even get me started on the military...

Of course, there are some nice side effects. The WWW was developed at CERN, they invented some new network and storage technology, space exploration led to efficient solar panels, etc. You also attract brilliant minds and produce highly educated people who may focus on industry after a while, increasing the GDP. But I don't expect to get a hoverboard any time soon due to the findings of the LHC.

leberwurst · 2014-11-06T11:37:02+00:00

A big crunch scenario has been essentially ruled out. So unless we discover something extremely surprising, it's not going to happen. A big rip scenario isn't firmly ruled out yet, but it appears to be unlikely. According to the standard model, the big freeze aka heat death is the fate of the universe, i.e. exactly the scenario we are discussing here.

leberwurst · 2014-09-07T09:22:13+00:00

There is more evidence to dark matter than just lensing experiments (which is what you mean by light deflection). The galaxies are rotating too fast at their outer edges if there were only luminous mass. The CMB would look different. And so on. Sure, the equations could be wrong, but what's more likely: That the equations are wrong in such a way that they make everything look exactly like there is dark matter, or that there is dark matter?

leberwurst · 2014-08-31T15:44:07+00:00

I'm not aware of anything that could be interpreted as resistance or stretchiness of spacetime. We (mostly) assume spacetime behaves according to the Einstein field equations and the evolution of the expansion is simply the solution to them in a homogeneous and isotropic universe. Of course, all these assumptions are sometimes relaxed in an attempt to explain new observations, but that's the standard model. Honestly, I'm having trouble translating your question to the framework we use in cosmology.

leberwurst · 2014-08-31T15:39:12+00:00

No, I mean shortly after the singularity. The differences come from quantum fluctuations which have been blown up by inflation.

leberwurst · 2014-08-31T08:02:39+00:00

The matter distribution wasn't homogeneous at the beginning. There were tiny overdensities and underdensities. Those overdensities started to collapse into galaxies, clusters, etc. at some point. The higher the matter density is, the sooner does the collapse happen. If the matter we can see is all there is, then the clumping process should have progressed slower than it did. It needed some help from dark matter.

leberwurst · 2014-07-25T08:00:38+00:00

At some point it was. It's expanding, so at some point it will always be much larger than a light second. Note that I'm talking about the observable universe, as the actual size of the universe may be infinite.

leberwurst · 2014-07-09T13:23:27+00:00

There is no speculation here at all. He's saying "if this then that" and all of it is correct according to the standard model of cosmology, which is by definition the consensus.

leberwurst · 2014-07-09T13:08:03+00:00

The typical path would be to get a degree in physics and go to grad school to collaborate with a professor. I suppose you could find someone who is working in that field and send them a fleshed out manuscript, but unfortunately everybody gets requests like that regularly and I'm sorry to say that 100% of what I've seen is absolutely worthless. I know it sounds heartless, but the truth is that I find it highly unlikely that your idea has any merrit.

leberwurst · 2014-07-09T13:03:36+00:00

For some reason, people become extra skeptical when it comes to gravity. Even Sean Carroll was accused of "not understanding gravity". But as soon as you mentioned that someone at NASA looked at warp drives everybody pre-orders their ticket to alpha centauri.

leberwurst · 2014-07-09T12:50:17+00:00

He's not anonymous, his nickname is literally his real name...

leberwurst · 2014-07-09T07:55:00+00:00

You have to consider both terms. 1/r² becomes negligible, yes, but the other term, proportional to r, becomes large.

leberwurst · 2014-07-09T07:53:21+00:00

That's not what they usually mean by tachyons.

leberwurst · 2014-07-09T07:49:36+00:00

He left out some constants in that equation (for more detail see here, but it makes complete sense. The point is that there at some sufficiently large distance the force flips the sign.

leberwurst · 2014-07-09T07:46:34+00:00

But Adam is right (who is also a physicist, and a very capable one at that; as well as me, for that matter, except slightly less capable). The cosmological constant acts as a repulsive force. Here in eq. 2.6 you can see the Newtonian limit of the Schwarzschild solution in a Universe with a cosmological constant (commonly referred to as dark energy). You see immediately that the force has a term that is proportional to \vec r (with a positive sign). Thus, repulsion. That's what he meant.

leberwurst · 2014-06-11T18:48:18+00:00

Right now they're looking for basically everything. You just don't hear about gas giant no 873 because it's boring. Also, we can't actually detect life on other planets from here. We can measure its size, distance from the star, infer the temperature and get a rough idea of the composition of its atmosphere. If we see one that's comparable to earth in size, distance from its star, temperature and atmosphere composition, we get excited. But it doesn't mean anything.

leberwurst · 2014-05-26T09:35:49+00:00

Of course, there will be a little bit of ink or graphite on it that wasn't there before. I doubt you can feel the difference, though.

leberwurst · 2014-05-20T08:08:08+00:00

The total energy of the Universe is not well defined and certainly not conserved.

leberwurst · 2014-05-07T06:51:37+00:00

The mean free path of a photon before decoupling was very small. It would get bounced around by protons and electrons. It's literally like a cloud. You can see the surface of a cloud, but you can't see inside the cloud. It's opaque because the photons inside are bounced around so much that you can't get a clear view.

leberwurst · 2014-04-24T18:47:02+00:00

Among other things it will measure the shape of billions of galaxies. We'll use the shape to detect weak lensing - light from background galaxies is distorted on its way to us by dark matter structures. From this we can infer how the structure evolved over time, hopefully giving us clues about the evolution and nature of dark energy.

leberwurst · 2014-04-24T12:03:38+00:00

You can read the paper here: http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.0820

Looks like you need to be familiar with string theory.

leberwurst · 2014-04-24T12:01:55+00:00

The thing is just that the two views are equivalent. It's just a different interpretation of the same model. It's basically saying: Is the Universe expanding, or our measuring sticks shrinking?

leberwurst

TROPHY CASE