Monday, November 18, 2013

Placebos For the Very, Very Smart

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland has announced that they have found something consistent with the Higgs boson. Parties will be held. Nobel Prizes will be won. A NYT article talks about some anxiety over the potential of this particle; if it becomes unstable and drops its energy level, the energy released would obliterate the universe.

That's worrisome in a vague, theoretical way but there are more practical concerns. The LHC uses 1% of all of Europe's computing power. The UK spends 75 million dollars for their part of the "subscription" to keep the LHC running. Over 100 million dollars has been spent on the project over the last 20 years. Quo vadas?

The unified theory, the Standard Model, states that all hadrons, including the proton and the neutron, are made up of three sub-particles known as quarks. Quarks are held together by what is called the "color force." That force is carried by the "gluon" (as in glue.) So the building blocks of the hadrons, the quarks, are held together by the color force mediated by gluons, the color field's "gauge boson." (The gauge boson--the mediator of energy--in a electromagnetic field is the photon.) The color force also holds protons and neutrons together in the atomic nucleus. The color force that was broken when the protons and neutron were separated in the bomb at Hiroshima is quite weak compared to the strength of the color force among the quarks. Unlike most forces, the color force increases as the distance between the color charges increases. Like a spring. To separate a single quark from its proton would take energy the strength of the sun's.

So that is not gonna happen. We are never going to see a quark. Nor will we see evidence of the color force--we hope. In a way this sounds a bit like string theory or multiple universes, mathematical constructs that explain complex and obscure scientific findings but will never, ever, be verified in the physical world.

Like angels on pinheads--from days gone by.

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