Billions invested, a cast of thousands waits for colossal collisions…
No, not Nascar but fans of CERN’s particle-smasher, expecting suicide crashes of proton-on-proton by 2008. (Nice article in the NYT by Dennis Overbye, plus lots of pictures.) Frank and I head to Switzerland May 30 for some tours that I hope will create less controversy than Robert Scoble’s!
I bugged Frank at dinner for a plain explanation of what these new experiments–higher energies than all previous ones–are going to show. Translating his words into my own simplified words–we’re smashing a giant metaphorical goose-egg to find out which of three kinds of stuff might lurk inside.
- Possibility #1: Evidence for supersymmetry(golden goose egg!) A bunch of new particles whose behavior strongly suggests we’ve discovered a matching set to the ones seen before–squarks, gluinos, and similar strange etc.
- Possibility #2: New totally weird stuff (metaphorically–I dunno–mermaids swimming in eggyolk?). Stuff nobody predicted, so we have to go back to zero and re-tool our theories to fit the new mess–maybe with a suspicion that CERN’s detectors weren’t working properly.
- Possibility #3: Just what we’ve seen before (awww, egg yolk and egg white). The same exact particles we already know about, doing the stuff that we already understand.
Bonus links!!!
- I stuck the particle-smashing image from the NYT next to the rose window of the Cathedral of Chartres (a high-minded collaboration on a massive scale that predates CERN by just a bit less than 1000 years) because Frank says that particle colliders are the Gothic cathedrals of our era.
- The very first image on the World Wide Web was those amazing singers Les Horribles Cernettes! (Thanks to Lubos Motl for this info.)
- Cernettes singing “You Only Love Your Collider” in RealMedia video.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Betsy Devine // May 17, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Frank, who was asleep when I wrote this post, asked me, “Where did that come from, about the detectors at CERN having some kind of problem?”
I said that was my translation of something he so often quotes from our friend Sam Treiman–that “Impossible things usually don’t happen.”
2 LHC // May 17, 2007 at 10:55 pm
[…] que danken thank-you schoens to Betsy Devine for pointing to the high energy rocking doo wop group, Les Horribles […]
3 Space Cadets // May 18, 2007 at 10:21 pm
[…] to think it was just last night that I went to sleep trembling with fear that the physicists of CERN are going to cut loose a black hole that will rip the felt right off our terrestrial pool […]
4 Betsy Devine // May 20, 2007 at 3:03 pm
There’s international zillions of people at CERN–if they were risking some universal whoops, it would soon be the world’s least well-kept secret.
Interesting email from an experimentalist friend, who is much less excited about confirming some theories thought up by theorists than in finding new mermaids in that egg yolk.
Can’t wait for that goose-egg lottery to get started!