Hadron Collider back online

Yes - call some back from home when the machine booted and ran like it should and skipped pages of checkout and get working pages.

Looks good and >

OK, we're back in business. Now, who's holding the bets on the Higgs boson? I'm saying "no way."

as I understand it higgs bosin may be that which gives matter mass . I'm an avid sci-fi reader, one series of books THE LENSMEN by EE Doc Smith had as its space drive , inertia less drive . when activated your craft had zero mass so could attain translight speeds with ridiculously tiny amounts of thrust . if there's anything to gain from the colossal amounts of moneys applied to this venture I hope its something like this . or maybe like star trek where your manufacturing processes are computer model spec the metal or what ever and hahah shazam there's your part .

Well, I don't know about sci-fi. I just read _The Trouble With Physics_, by Lee Smolin, so I'm just being a wiseguy because what I learned from Smolin is that I have no clue at all. d8-)

The lack of knowledge about the nature of the Higgs boson (or its very existence, for that matter) is something that has more or less stalled the progress of physics for 30 years. This is going to be a very big deal, one way or the other.

Oh, and it's not really one way or the other. It can be one of several hundred ways, many of which have names that I couldn't possibly remember.

It may be a bumpy ride.

here's a web-cam feed!

I think the trouble with physics is that every student is taught about the Michelson/Morley experiment. This is where in 1887 these physicists performed an experiment where they could not measure the relative motion in ether, hence disproving the idea. Well once you teach this paradigm lock to every student, you prevent any ideas moving forward. If you read anything about this idea historically it's used to describe light propagating through the "vacuum" of space. And all other "solid" matter would move through space as if this ether was "water" and flow around. The missing link in my thinking is EVERYTHING propagates through this ether. With the idea, you can explain the speed of light as a limitation, and gravity. Now they are trying to explain "dark matter". I think they are lost, and have to create a particle for every unexplained phenomenon that is observed, hence a graviton. ignator I'm not a theoretical physicist, but sure would like it if everything made logical and intuitive sense.

1Om.258650$ snipped-for-privacy@en-nntp-02.dc.easynews.com...

Hey, thats metaphysics Ed - or may as well be for most of us. ......I shall go back to trying to figure out how to become competent in using manually operated machine tools - just came across a design for a cavity amplifier for 23cm that I "should" be able to machine up...... (depends on what the scrapyard has in stock...)

A General Question to the group - its said that Stephen Hawkings books hold the record for the most bought but unread books of all time - is there anyone here who can understand them, and give a A4 sized summary?

Andrew VK3BFA.

Ignator:

Coincidentally, the December issue of Scientific American touches on the "hypothesis" of dark matter.

The article is titled "Splitting Time from Space", some excerpts follow:

==================================================================

Buzz about a quantum gravity theory that sends space and time back to their Newtonian roots

Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity.

Try and work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton, however, and you quickly run into trouble?the answer to every calculation is infinity. But now Petr HoYava, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks he understands the problem. It?s all, he says, a matter of time.

The solution, HoYava says, is to snip threads that bind time to space at very high energies, such as those found in the early universe where quantum gravity rules. ?I?m going back to Newton?s idea that time and space are not equivalent,? HoYava says. At low energies, general relativity emerges from this underlying framework, and the fabric of spacetime restitches, he explains.

HoYava?s theory has been generating excitement since he proposed it in January, and physicists met to discuss it at a meeting in November at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. In particular, physicists have been checking if the model correctly describes the universe we see today. ==================================================================

I think you may be disappointed there. The quantum world seems to be full of NON-intuitive processes. Wave/particle duality, Quantum tunneling, entangled particles, creation of matter from vacuum (Zero Point Energy), and other "jewels" found in Schrödinger?s Catbox.

Einstein didn't believe in quantum mechanics, [God] doesn't play dice with the Universe.

jsw

I'll be watching for a response to your question, Andrew. This ought to be rich. d8-)

So you should be able to find them pretty easy.

I can't give a good capsule summary, but "A Brief History of Time" was a good read -- no math (except for E = mc^2), all the descriptions in English with pretty pictures for the reading-impaired.

Don't buy any of his works for fellow physicists -- I think you'll find more math in there, and more opaque math at that.

Then do not study string theory.

I've read a lot of Hawkins books and find them quite comprehensible but do not ask for a short summary, that is impossible. Stephens books, like Dawkins, require chapters of preparation so that the reader has some basic knowledge before introducing increasingly heavy topics.

Why? Hawkins is quite readable. Or are you alluding to the one page summary?

The summary.

It's like the old MAD magazine attempt at ever-more-compressed Reader's Digest versions of _Gone With the Wind_. The final condensation boiled it down to one word:

"BANG!"

Is the last half blank?

I'll take a small bet at even money. There are better brains than you or I postulating the existence. Granted we don't have a viable TOE yet but the Higgs Boson fits the KISS theory.

Andrew:

A summary, eh? Sure thing. I think Wheeler coined this phrase: "Black Holes Have No Hair".

It may have been Richard Feynman. At least I read the phrase in one of his books, but don't recall if he in turn credited Wheeler.

Joe Gwinn