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Author Topic: SCIENCE, Gravitational waves, and the whole LIGO OST!  (Read 512876 times)

Starver

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #45 on: July 05, 2012, 02:58:43 pm »

For enthusiasts: http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_t2#/video/bestoftv/2012/07/04/nr-intv-michio-kaku-higgs-boson.cnn
I got something about Fukushima.  That what you were after, or did it change?  Anyway, followed a CNN link at the bottom to a regular news broadcast, without that guy that the following comment was about...

[edit: Actually, wrong.  This clip is of the guy, and what I should have gotten to first time, it seems.  You know, he missed the one simple thing he could have said, in response to the reporter's 'concerns': These collisions are happening all the time, and the reason we're doing it with this thing is that we can make them happen where we are consistently looking for them!  Because, as it was talked about, all he might have been interpreted as saying was that there was no point in doing this thing with so much money thrown behind it, because it's happening anyway.  Also, he didn't explain "What's the 'Higgs' about, and what's the 'Boson' about.  Other than that, I think it was as good an explanation as the know-little/professional-audience-surrogate interviewer was going to allow.  And I hope that mobile phone company pays a lot for me being bombarded with their adds for the five or so seconds before each and every auto-loading article that has occurred while I've been re-editing this...  Right, just going to finish watching the thing about The Shard, and then I'm closing that tab down.]
« Last Edit: July 05, 2012, 03:11:43 pm by Starver »
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RedKing

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #46 on: July 05, 2012, 03:02:59 pm »

I'm also wondering...since matter has constant mass, but the Higgs boson has an infinitesmally small life before decaying, does that mean a never-ending waterfall of Higgs bosons being generated in the background of the universe? How are they generated and from what source? And at such a smoothly constant level that you don't detect minute fluctuations in mass from everything?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle
Virtual particles are pretty much the reason for any sort of 'force' enacted from a distance. Even a perfect vacuum is a sea of virtual particles.

Balancing the equations of uncertainty. :)
O.o

o.O

x.x

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Remember, knowledge is power. The power to make other people feel stupid.
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RedKing

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #47 on: July 05, 2012, 03:24:35 pm »

Along with the problem that (if I remember the math properly), changing mass (by acceleration, at least) is an asymptotic curve. You would have to completely remove all energy from the system to achieve zero mass, and add an infinite amount of energy to achieve c (and thus, infinite mass).
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alway

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #48 on: July 05, 2012, 03:28:08 pm »

This is why I recommend everyone watches the Feynman lectures on quantum electrodynamics you can find online. All sorts of fun stuff can happen at that level.
Quote from: From that wiki page
It is sometimes said that all photons are virtual photons.[6] This is because the world-lines of photons always resemble the dotted line in the above Feynman diagram: The photon was emitted somewhere (say, a distant star), and then is absorbed somewhere else (say a photoreceptor cell in the eyeball). Furthermore, in a vacuum, a photon experiences no passage of (proper) time between emission and absorption. This statement illustrates the difficulty of trying to distinguish between "real" and "virtual" particles, because, in mathematical terms, they are the same objects and it is only our definition of "reality" that is weak here.

Essentially everything is a vast probability field. Things act a bit 'like a wave' and a bit 'like a particle' but are actually a sort of fuzzy bunch of probability without any real borders or boundaries, just an asymptotic approach towards 0.
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Il Palazzo

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #49 on: July 05, 2012, 04:13:54 pm »

Also, unlikely but (I hope) possible, what if we would, with some sort of technology, be able to manipulate the Higgs field, and create objects with no mass?

It'd get past one of the problems of FTL travel. We'd just need to deal with the problem of once you have reached light speed, an infinity of time going by every instant.
Along with the problem that (if I remember the math properly), changing mass (by acceleration, at least) is an asymptotic curve. You would have to completely remove all energy from the system to achieve zero mass, and add an infinite amount of energy to achieve c (and thus, infinite mass).
Relativistic mass is a product of rest mass in particular, and not of energy in general. Having a zero-rest mass particle would remove the problem of infinite mass at c.(as it is with photons)
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Heron TSG

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #50 on: July 05, 2012, 07:24:24 pm »

There are many problems with that idea, guys. First of all, E=MC2. Energy is mass times the speed of light squared. More to the point, energy is mass. You can't have energy without mass, except for apparently photons. If this were possible, anyway, the items in question would be useless. With no inertia, simply touching one would send it off at literally infinite speeds. Acceleration is equal to force divided by mass... which is zero in this case. If it took up volume and not space, it wouldn't be effected by gravity, and you'd have a hell of a time trying to keep it in one place. Low mass might be cool, but no mass brings a whole world of problems.
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Lagslayer

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #51 on: July 05, 2012, 08:32:02 pm »

There are many problems with that idea, guys. First of all, E=MC2. Energy is mass times the speed of light squared. More to the point, energy is mass. You can't have energy without mass, except for apparently photons. If this were possible, anyway, the items in question would be useless. With no inertia, simply touching one would send it off at literally infinite speeds. Acceleration is equal to force divided by mass... which is zero in this case. If it took up volume and not space, it wouldn't be effected by gravity, and you'd have a hell of a time trying to keep it in one place. Low mass might be cool, but no mass brings a whole world of problems.
+1.

The only reason they are saying light has no mass because of some theories on time travel/4th dimension of some kind. On the other hand, we have solid proof that particles of light have inertia and the speed of natural light is finite. It behaves like normal matter in every conceivable way (albeit rather extremely) until they tried to add a 4th dimension or time travel to the mix, neither of which has hard proof. Given this, I see no reason why faster than light travel is not possible. Granted, that would take massive amounts of energy, but possible nonetheless. Also, infinity cannot be treated like a number, so string theory is also bull shit. There is no evidence of black holes being infinitely small (in fact, they actually grow as they absorb more stuff). And our measurements are not nearly, even remotely accurate enough to trace all observable matter in the universe, let alone the stuff beyond what our telescopes can see, back to an Infinitesimally small point. A relatively small area, I could buy, but this is just stupid.

Ok, I'm done ranting. For now.

Leafsnail

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #52 on: July 05, 2012, 08:34:45 pm »

Granted, that would take massive amounts of energy, but possible nonetheless.
An infinite amount of energy, in fact.  Hence it's impossible.
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Lagslayer

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #53 on: July 05, 2012, 08:40:45 pm »

Granted, that would take massive amounts of energy, but possible nonetheless.
An infinite amount of energy, in fact.  Hence it's impossible.
You are either assuming that light has no mass or that light is infinitely fast. I was specifically challenging both of those points. Your argument is invalid because your assumption is the heart of the dispute. It would be more logical to talk about why your assumption is right and mine is wrong, not what each would entail if it were true. It's like saying "God exists because the bible says he does!".

cause > effect, not the other way around.
« Last Edit: July 05, 2012, 08:43:24 pm by Lagslayer »
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Osmosis Jones

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #54 on: July 05, 2012, 09:23:37 pm »

Okay...let me start with the disclaimer that I've never taken a physics course in my life. Not even high school. That said...if I understand the conception of the Higgs boson as the particle mediator of the Higgs field, which in turn imbues particles with the property of mass, isn't that analogous to electrons acting as the mechanism of an electric field? Which would suggest that there would be ways to manipulate the Higgs field in a given region to increase or decrease mass, just as an electric field can be externally manipulated.

I guess what I'm asking is, is this going to make Mass Effect look really, really prescient or is there some key component I'm missing here that would essentially make it impossible to manipulate the Higgs field?

Alright, so, let's address this. To your first question mark; sort of. The mediator for the electromagnetic field is the photon, not the electron (think light/x-rays/microwaves/radiowaves/gamma radiation).

First, a little crash course in photons (I did quantum physics 301 and 401 as part of my undergrad degree in nanotech, but that was a few years back, so I'm a touch rusty). You can think of a photon as a little bunch of waves in the electric and magnetic field; it's sort of a wave, because it's made up of lots of waves that constructively and destructively interfere. But it's also sort of a particle, because most of those waves will cancel out except at one spot, so it has a discrete location. Because they have an energy then from e=mc^2 they have a mass and, with their velocity, a momentum.

Now, you can observe real photons; discrete wave-packets of light, that for example get sent from a lightbulb or a laser. They have actually been emitted, and can be intercepted in between targets for example, they exist for a long time.
However, there are also virtual photons, photons which exist on timescales so short that we can't specifically say they have existed at all. All we can see is that some interaction has taken place (for example, between two atoms bumping into each other), but we can't look close enough or fast enough to actually see what happened, we can only look at the aftermath. You can see the atoms have each changed energy and direction by the discrete amount, let's say that one atom has lost momentum k and energy e, while the other has gained that much.
So, if you wanted to write this out, you could explain what happened in terms of one atom emitting a photon of momentum k and energy e, that then was absorbed by the other atom. In that sense, a photon has mediated the interaction. Wiki has a good article on it, scroll down to the bit about Feynmann diagrams for probably the clearest visual.

(Now, that example was pretty much the simplest case, you can get all sorts of weird things like particles emitting virtual photons that interact with themselves, or particles appearing from nowhere. Annnyway...)

Now, photons and the Higg's aren't exactly the same. Photons can have any range of energy above the Planck energy, and have no rest energy as such. The Higg's is a little heftier; it actually has a rest energy/mass (thanks to e=mc^2, they're pretty well interchangeable in QM), so we have that value of 125 odd GeV (one eV = energy gained by an electron accelerating across 1 Volt of potential or ~ 1.6*10^-19 J. Thus, even 125 GeV isn't much energy on our macrosopic scale).
However, just as with photons, there are still interactions which are mediated by the Higg's, that happen very very fast. So fast, the particle may not actually have come into existence, but can still have an effect. Because quantum. These interactions are what give us mass. They are ripples in the Higg's field (which, since that is everywhere, is basically saying the the fabric of the universe). These interactions happen constantly.

Now, if we have a discrete boson, you could in theory produce an identical boson, which is shifted by exactly half a wavelength. Much as with destructive interference in sound, this would cancel out the original Higg's. HOWEVER, the problem is, we aren't dealing with real Higg's in everyday mass.
They flicker in and out (and don't, at the same time; like I said, quantum) constantly.
There is no way we could produce our own bosons to cancel them; we can't measure them, so we don't know their direction.
We can't produce them fast enough, or with enough control over the energies.
Even if we could (which we can't!), the apparatus that would do so would be generating it's own virtual Higg's constantly.

Basically, you'd need sensors and accelerators for every subatomic particle with mass.


Re; the light discussion. Light has no rest mass. It has got a momentum. However, if you calculate backwards using their known speed, and their momentum, you end up with zero mass if you use the correct equations. You can't go faster than light, as that would violate causality, irrespective of the energy required.

Not sure (not my field of expertise), but from what I've heard, the general consensus is if some other particle has no mass, it will automatically be travelling at light speed. Fine. Great. It will also be completely frozen in time from it's own perspective. As far as a photon is concerned, even if it travelled the entire length of the universe, no time has passed since it's creation. Zip. Nada.

Re: Blackholes, no-one says the whole hole is infintely small (the event horizon is the bit that grows, and is the limit of the observable universe). They refer instead to the singularity. Which actually still has some dimension, if the black hole has charge/spins.


Anyway, ninjas. Blargh. Will be back later.
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Sirus

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #55 on: July 05, 2012, 09:30:59 pm »

Posting to say that I love science.

To be honest, I'm not clear on what exactly the Higgs Boson is, or what sort of ramifications or applications it has (if any), but I know that physicists have been looking for it for a while and I am happy for them.
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Karlito

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #56 on: July 05, 2012, 09:40:45 pm »

Given this, I see no reason why faster than light travel is not possible. Granted, that would take massive amounts of energy, but possible nonetheless.

Have you studied special relativity at all? Objects that travel at near-light speeds gain mass, and thus require every increasing amounts of energy to go faster and faster. Things with mass cannot travel at light speed.
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MaximumZero

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #57 on: July 05, 2012, 09:50:30 pm »

So, if there is a Higgs-Boson field spread out through the entire universe, are they spread evenly, or at random, or some other third option that I didn't think of?
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Hanslanda

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #58 on: July 05, 2012, 09:53:03 pm »

Oh god, you had to ask. My brain is already melting a bit trying to understand all this.
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Starver

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Re: SCIENCE and the Higgs!
« Reply #59 on: July 05, 2012, 09:54:29 pm »

[Edit: To make it clear, this is in response to Lagslayer... And Karlito said something in one sentence, in the mean-time, that I'm alluding to in the first two full paragraphs...  As such, you might want to consider this a TL;DR; and skip on...]

Ignoring light, for the moment, something else that wishes to approach 'The Speed Of Light' must at each point in its curve of acceleration be given energy, which makes it go faster.  Because of the way that the (currently understood) laws of physics applies to such relativistic speed, more energy creates less additional speed.  Such that inconceivable (yet finite) amounts are needed to move it up from just below the speed of light to just-a-bit-more-but-still-below the speed of light.  It thus takes an infinite amount of energy (and I know you can't use it as a number, per se, but you can use it as a top/bottom-end limit to your numbers, in a meaningful way) to get to 'c' itself.

Add to that the fact there are other quirks that the (accepted) equations throw up when considering something travelling at/beyond 'c'.  If we do not understand things well enough, maybe there's an exception, or refinement, to this situation, whereby perfectly 'normal' things happen to >=c speed.  However, there's some thought that for such strange particles (traditionally, tachyons) that do go at speeds >c, that they are similarly prevented from being slowed down to c, and it would be equally impossible for them to travel slower...  But I think that's way off the whole Higgs-related model of the way the Universe ticks.


String theory being bullshit?  Well, maybe, but not for your antipathy against the concept of infinity[1].  String theory might indeed be a correct description of the universe (or will be, with some minor modification), and continue to be so even when the Standard Model is shown to be Not Quite Right in some aspect or other...  Think of it as Geocentric and Heliocentric models of the solar-system.  My favourite thought about that (though from what source, I'm afraid I forget) is that "People thought the Sun went round the Earth because it looked like the Sun went round the Earth.  But...  what would it have looked like in order that it looked like the Earth went round the Sun?".

Of course, we now incontrovertibly know that (insofar as the solar-system) it's Heliocentric.  But that it's not a Heliocentric Universe, which was a common interpretation of this rebellious (and possibly 'blasphemous') theory, back in the day.  Bringing the analogy up to today's period, either the Standard Model or String Theory might well be just a Helicentric-equivalent, being technically more right than... well, everything else we've so far thought of to explain the universe...  But it/they could quite easily be lacking in accuracy when it comes to something exotic.

But right now you can't throw either of these (and a few other variants) away.  Even if they're not perfect.  (And, incidentally, not finding the Higgs would probably have been more scientifically exciting than finding it... as it would mean an immediate rush to join the "How else might the Universe work?"-brigade as soon as it was generally considered that it had been ruled out.)


Not that we necessarily can ever understand the full depth of the Universe we're in.  Not only for reasons that Goedel might be best explaining, but also by an analogy I sometimes roll out.  Imagine that there's a creature living in a giant Conway's Game Of Life grid-space.  It's conscious (or, at least, considers itself to be so, although observers from outside its grid-space can clearly see it is a deterministic pattern) and perceives itself as being curious about its environment.  How much information might this hypothetical creature be able to derive about the substrate of its world?  Nothing at all about the silicon (or other technological hardware) that 'runs' the world it lives in, much less any information about the programmers and designers behind the automations that propel its world.  (Perhaps if an external operator were to poke around with the grid-data, it could pass a "divine" change into being upon the world, but frankly I think that an observer such as I would be as unable to comprehend the Conway-being as being a self-assumed conscious entity, for whom a meaninful intervention of some form could be written into the grid...)

But... even ignoring all that grossly metaphysical set of ideas...  Would a Conway-being have any way of determining a pixel-level observation?  i.e., the on or off nature of one grid-square's area?  This square would undoubtedly effect the tip of any 'tool' that the Conway-being would 'wield', but it would only be understandable if one understood how this tool was already affected.

What they might be able to understand is that there is a bi-orthagonal nature to their world.  That certain things happen in N-S directions and E-W directions that don't happen in the NW-SE and NE-SW ones.  Or, perhaps, they envisage the primary axes as being NW-SE and NE-SW, and certain things do not happen on the 'diagonals' of N-S and E-W.  (Rotation of any kind, BTW, would not be properly possible.  At least for any macro-scale object, although 'blinker' oscillators do nothing but rotate, at the lowest levels...)


Taking my analogy further...  A valid Conway game-grid that can support 'life' may require that it be filled with a whole host of 'virtual particle' automata...  Spontaneously (albeit deterministically) arising from a background level of oscillators and static patterns as glider-like travellers are perturbed by 'particles' that resemble gliders and space-ships travelling through the grid.  The 'edge'-patterns of anything more macroscopic in nature (i.e. our Conway-guy, living his life on the grid) must have both a resilience against these patterns interfering with it (with, perhaps a general 'sense' being passed internally, that something has brushed against the surface) and may, as the slow, lumbering mass traverses the non-void, leave static and oscillating forms in its wake (and spew glider-like and spaceship-like forms from all sides, perhaps?) in order to keep the world as uniformly 'interesting' to be in...  Or else some other minor, automated process messily spills out these forms...

I must admit that I may be taking the anthropocentric view a but far, by suggesting that our 'intelligent' being cannot work in a total 'vacuum' (grid-space wiped of all detritus), and my error may be exactly that...  Is there a PacMan-like 'gobbling' going on, leaving nothing in the wake?  OTOH, given that Conway-land does not have (in any way that we would understand, a "conservation of matter" (or of anything approaching energy, momentum, etc),... well, it's probably just a bit more exotic than that.  And, as I'm trying to say, in a way that the Conway-guy would be unable to understand fully.  But I'm betting he(/she/it/whatever) could build up a number of theories.  Especially if there's some... conwayesque... method of communication to be had with other Conway-beings, an ability to make permanent record of thoughts, a way to remotely communicate (long-distance glider-based information passing, perhaps, as if radio waves or laser-flashes) so as to make collaboration and development of these theories more real, of course...


If that's not a whole massive derail, that is.  And intervened by three (plus another two... plus any more that are coming along while I'm adding this further caveat?) messages, of a doubtless more relevant nature.



[1] Back in my Junior School, I remember being laughed at when my classmates did not believe that "negative numbers" existed, because you couldn't count them.  I don't recall if some years after that (when those same people would have understood that "negative something" does have a meaning) I tried to pass on the idea of 'imaginary' (and, by extension, 'complex') numbers, but I'd bet that they'd have had trouble with those, at least the ones that had sprinted past me already in understanding that kind of thing.  I'm fairly sure that I never said anything about the Aleph-Null, Aleph-Prime, etc, series of infinite numbers, or the nature of Hilbert's Hotel with its (Countably) infinite rooms able to take any finite number of new guests, an infinite number of new guests, or even an infinite number of infinitely-large guest-groups!  Just as you can't count -5 sheep in a field (well, not so that you can see them... unless you wish to count the sheep now found in another field as a negative to those originally in the first), and generally sheep never occur in imaginary numbers (not counting the entirely different imaginary sheep involved in any attempt at sleep-inducing in oneself), an infinite amount of sheep is also not something you'd expect...  But just as negatives exist on balance sheets, and imaginaries in some equations, infinities do find their uses in some equations.  Albeit erroneously in the "1==2" 'proof'-spoof equations...
« Last Edit: July 05, 2012, 09:59:55 pm by Starver »
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