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Large Hadron Collider

Limejuice said:
Fermilab is famous for a lot of science stuff, but best of all in the prairie above the Tevatron ring, they have a herd of buffalo. Cynics thought they were a sort of canary in the mine, to warn of radiation leaks.
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Fools. It's obvious they are the Higgs Bison.
 
nicksonic said:
bloody hell AS, you're not into theoretical physics as well...?
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As well as old school Dr Who you mean? I like and loathe all sorts of things.

I was just really happy yesterday to post what might have been my funniest ever science based joke.
 
nicksonic said:
indeed. i've just finished 'the search for schrodinger's cat' which has been on my bookshelf for a while, a great book on quantum mechanics.
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I'm not happy with the schrodinger's cat analogy at all. The cat is plainly dead or alive, you just don't know which. I realize there is more to it than all that but as a basic analogy it gets my goat. It's like that "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it did it make a sound?" Yes it did, it's just that nobody heard it.
 
Bluffers Guide To The Quantum Universe is all you need.

Anyone see this week's horizon BTW? IF you haven't, and you don't want to twat Alan Davies in the face, watch it, it's well good.
 
kyser_soze said:
Bluffers Guide To The Quantum Universe is all you need.

Anyone see this week's horizon BTW? IF you haven't, and you don't want to twat Alan Davies in the face, watch it, it's well good.
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Oh yeah I meant to watch that? Has it been on? Is it repeated do you know?
 
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
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:hmm:
 
ATOMIC SUPLEX said:
I'm not happy with the schrodinger's cat analogy at all. The cat is plainly dead or alive, you just don't know which. I realize there is more to it than all that but as a basic analogy it gets my goat. It's like that "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it did it make a sound?" Yes it did, it's just that nobody heard it.
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i'd tend to agree with this re the cat analogy but it's interesting how the theory builds up and you arrive at place that seeming makes no sense but is also logical.

it's the old tension between having one theory that explains the very small and another theory that explains the very large but with no middle ground. at what point does small become large?
 
nicksonic said:
it's the old tension between having one theory that explains the very small and another theory that explains the very large but with no middle ground. at what point does small become large?
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Well I am just assuming someone has done their maths wrong there. Who knows though (well not me for starters), maybe there is a quantum line that can be drawn. Maybe it does all change after atoms. Anyway isn't that what string theory is for? with all the difference being in the various dimensions and gravity being watered down (as it were) on various levels (and so many interchangeable elements that you just forget what you are doing and start to look out the window and nod blankly).
 
i need to finish brian greene's 'the fabric of the cosmos' before i start on the follow-up that deals with a unified theory. hugely interesting stuff :)
 
ATOMIC SUPLEX said:
I'm not happy with the schrodinger's cat analogy at all. The cat is plainly dead or alive, you just don't know which. I realize there is more to it than all that but as a basic analogy it gets my goat. It's like that "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it did it make a sound?" Yes it did, it's just that nobody heard it.
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The cat thing is supposed to illustrate the difference between stuff which happens at the macroscopic and quantum levels. Obviously the cat is alive or dead, and obviously no description of the cat's state which includes bits of deadness and bits of aliveness can possibly be accurate. But with something like an electron, sometimes the best description you can come up with for what it's up to does involve bits of two mutually exclusive states squished together. An electron doesn't make up it's mind until the box is opened, unlike the cat. The cat's death or otherwise while in the box may be dependant on a quantum-level event (ie. radioactive decay) but the cat itself, a macroscopic non-quantum object, observes this event one way or another and so removes the plurality of possible states.

It's supposed to fail as an analogy because it is a description of something which is analogous to precisely nothing that humans can ever experience or observe directly.
 
SpookyFrank said:
The cat thing is supposed to illustrate the difference between stuff which happens at the macroscopic and quantum levels. Obviously the cat is alive or dead, and obviously no description of the cat's state which includes bits of deadness and bits of aliveness can possibly be accurate. But with something like an electron, sometimes the best description you can come up with for what it's up to does involve bits of two mutually exclusive states squished together. An electron doesn't make up it's mind until the box is opened, unlike the cat. The cat's death or otherwise while in the box may be dependant on a quantum-level event (ie. radioactive decay) but the cat itself, a macroscopic non-quantum object, observes this event one way or another and so removes the plurality of possible states.

It's supposed to fail as an analogy because it is a description of something which is analogous to precisely nothing that humans can ever experience or observe directly.
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Did you read the bit where I said "I realize there is more to this than the basic analogy"? I just don't like it. I'm not sure it is supposed to fail as an analogy though is it? I suppose it's an ok starting point. (I can't think of a better one). I just don't like it for the reasons I explained before.
 
I think one of the main hurdles to really grasping the Schrodingers cat thing and extrapolating that to reality :))), is the use of the word 'observe' As the mad prof said on the show, it's not necessarily an act of a conscious being observing, it's something being in it's environment.
 
kyser_soze said:
I think one of the main hurdles to really grasping the Schrodingers cat thing and extrapolating that to reality :))), is the use of the word 'observe' As the mad prof said on the show, it's not necessarily an act of a conscious being observing, it's something being in it's environment.
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The trouble is that the observer problem has not been resolved and the term measurement is not really well defined. And the solution posited by the Copenhagen interpretation is to essentially ignore the problem. Schrodingers cat is meant to demonstrate the absurdity of applying things such as wavefunction collapse to a macroscopic scale.
 
I reckon they are going to discover that what we now think of as fundamental particles have an underlying structure after all.

Bono's ego.
 
Btw, does anyone know why they call it the Large Hadron Collider? Are there medium and small ones?
 
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